How I Became a Jerk Hacker

[miko2]

"Dupin' rares" and "Gone to the Americans" are odd catch phrases in City of Heroes, at least on the message boards. This is because, not long after the game was originally released, someone who called himself Uniquedragon left an incoherent, rambling post on the message boards. Here is the entire post, quoted:

"this what happened in the last game i played hackers ruined it foreveryone dupin rares and gold and just anything to cheat there noextened maintenance there trying to catch the hacker andwe pay for it so unless people don't let GM'S know of wrong doing's inthe game it we ruin it and there we not be a COH IT WELL BE GONE TO THEAMERICANS!!!!!!!"

This has arguably become the most famous and talked-about post ever found on the City of Heroes message boards. (In fact I found it quite easily -- a Google search on "Uniquedragon" returns his thread as the first link.) Part of it was the strange incoherence and the equally strange phrase "gone to the Americans!" which was quite easy to quote in many other situations, and also the title of the post referred to "jerk hackin'" which became another goofy catch phrase. "Stop all that jerk hackin'!" someone would say. "If you're not careful you'll be gone to the Americans!"

But mostly it was that while people understood what gold farming and "dupin' rares" was, there was nothing in City of Heroes to duplicate, and virtually nothing to farm. At the time the game's currency, "Influence", was used only to buy enhancements for your powers, and these were easily found everywhere. The only "rare" enhancements were the ones referred to as "Hammi-O's" for Hamidon Single Origin Enhancements, which you only got by participating in an end-game Hamidon raid. There was no way to duplicate these, and certainly no easy way to farm them -- Hamidon raids usually included hundreds of heroes, and then it was many hours before Hamidon would spawn again.

As for influence, it was hard to come by at the low levels but at level 50 you could earn more influence in a single day than you had a use for. People gave away influence, held costume contests in the newbie zones, handed it down to all of their alts. You could farm influence if you wanted to, but it wasn't really worth much. Also, getting to level 50 in this game is easier than reaching the top levels in many other games.

So anyway, fast forward to April 2007. Issue 9 has been released. Among the new things this brings to the game: crafting. You can craft special enhancements that never expire (normal enhancements are for a specific level, and grow weaker as you go up in level until they're useless and need to be replaced). Like Hammi-O's, these new "IO's" (Invention Origin Enhancements) could have two or even three different ehancments to a power at once -- for example, one could enhance both your damage and your range. Also there were "sets", so that if you had all the different enhancements in the "Brutal Cleaver" set (I'm making that name up), then you'd get several other bonuses.

There were also special temporary powers you could get, and special costume pieces. Recipes and the salvage needed for the recipes were all random drops, so no camping of the X monster who drops the Sword of Xtreme Leetness. But naturally, some stuff was very rare and in demand, while other stuff was common and worthless.

Another new thing was the consignment house, where people could buy and sell the new salvage and recipe drops. You could also buy and sell enhancements and pretty much anything else that could be traded between two players.

All of the new costume items were rare. There were several new boots, with various special effects, and a variety of new wings -- tech, burned, little cherub wings, insect, fairy. The game already had angel and demon wings, but these were items that only veteran players were able to access. The wings all flap when you fly and they look very cool. Everyone wanted wings.

My second-highest charcter on Virtue Server where I now play is named Earthen Butterfly. There was no particular though process behind the name; she's an Earth Controller, and her first costume had a butterfly picture on the chest. I've since teamed with Obsidian Butterfly and Diamond Butterfly, but so far not Iron Butterfly. ^_^ Anyway one of my friends said that with a name like Earthen Butterfly, I needed the fairy wings, which look like butterfly wings. He said if he got them he'd give them to me.

At first I laughed at this, but the more I thought about it, the more it sounded like a good idea. Of course, all of the costume pieces were selling for ridiculous prices -- millions of influence, tens of millions. At level 50 you can earn well over a million influence in a few hours of play, but even so, I only had about 16 million or so on my main character Mouse Police. The fairy wings were, of course, the most popular of all the costume recipes, and were selling in excess of 30 million influence.

Eventually I put in a bid of 12 million influence. I figured I was willing to give up that much, and I didn't really have anything else to spend it on. But I soon realized that my bid was far too low. People were predicting that prices would come down, but it seemed like it'd be a very long time before the price of fairy wings came down that much.

The consignment house is not an auction house. Things are place for consignment, and sell immediately if anyone bids that high. If you look at an item and it says 10 people bidding and 10 selling, it means that the lowest offered for sale price is still higher than any of the bids to buy. If you have an item to sell, and 50 people are bidding for it, you can place it for 1 influence and it will automatically sell to the highest bidder, which might net you thousands or hundreds of thousands of influence, depending on how high that bid is.

There were never more than 8 or so of the fairy wings for sale, and there were hundreds of bidders -- usually more than 500. The winning bids were rarely less than 30 million influence, and sometimes as high as 50 million. It seemed like I'd never be able to afford them, or at least not without a lot of serious grinding on my level 50 character first, which I didn't really want to do.

Then I read about a trick on the message boards. The consignment house, you see, is cross-server. I might be buying from someone on the Freedom server or selling to someone on the Guardian server -- there's no way of knowing for sure. But some people had used this as a way to transfer influence from one server to another. It was risky, and sometimes all your money went to someone else, but I decided to try it.

I had a character on Virtue place a level 23 disorient dual origin enhancement up for sale for 14 million influence. There weren't any of these for sale before I put mine up, and it's not the sort of thing most people would have. The kind you buy at the store are either level 20 or level 25 -- always the level is a multiple of 5, and in-between level enhancements are random drops. Plus a disorient enhancement is not a common one.

Seconds after I placed it for sale, my level 50 tank on Pinnacle bought it -- for 14 million influence.

The consignment house took 5% as a commission, but I didn't care. I had managed to transfer 13.3 million influence from Pinnacle to Virtue. I don't play on Pinnacle anymore, so it wasn't doing me any good there.

I now had just over 30 million influence -- enough to put in a bid that was actually competetive.

I was pretty excited about this. The bid didn't succeed immediately, but I went off and played knowing that it would be a winning bid sooner or later, and I'd have my wings.

After an evening of gaming I'd earned another million or so influence, so I took down my bid and put in a new one for even more money -- 33 million influence. I'd seen winning bids of 30 million influence within the last day, so this was a very competetive bid. But after selling some of my other salvage and reciepes, I found that I'd hit the jackpot on a couple of them. One sold for 1.85 million influence, and several others sold well. I took down my bid again and put in a new one of 36 million.

The next morning I wanted to see if my bid had worked. I tried to log on, but it was patch day -- so there was a long patch to download first. I waited impatiently. When I finally logged on, I discovered that there was a problem with the consignment house, and it was currently offline. Well, that meant that I probably hadn't won my bid yet anyway. I went to work a little disappointed.

When I got home, I logged in immediately, but something was wrong. My bid was missing. So were a lot of the items I'd placed for sale. Nor were the missing items and influence on my character.

I went to the message boards to find out what had happened. It turned out that, because of their consignment house bug, they'd been forced to roll back everything to an earlier save. Everything that had happened between 10 pm and 10 am had vanished into thin air.

This only affected the consignment house itself, and not players. Those that had placed something for sale before the rollback and had sold it after and collected their money found that they not only still had that money, they had their item back for sale again. But for people like me, all of my influence and items that had been at the consignment house were gone.

I was disappointed of course, but after all, I'd earn it back eventually. I was mostly disappointed that I wouldn't see my wings any time soon.

They promised that they would restore people's lost items. A week went by. Then we heard that on Thursday morning all the lost items would be restored. You were told to make sure your enhancment and salvage slots were open so that items could be returned to you.

So I logged in Thursday morning hoping to see my lost 36 million influence. As it transpired, not everyone got their stuff back (of course) but I wasn't disappointed. My items were there, and my influence was back. And more -- I not only recieved my 36 million influence bid back, but also my previous 33 million influence bid. I'd gained an extra 33 million!

It was better than that though. Most of my bidding had been done using my main character on my second account Shinobu Valentine. But I later discovered that Mouse Police's original 12 million influence bid was still up at the consignment house. It had been restored when the rollback happened. That brought my total to 45 million extra influence that had been "duped" out of thin air -- more than I'd had previously, and in combination with the money restored I had something over 82 million influence.

Other people had similar experiences, and more than one person pointed out that Uniquedragon had been right all along -- people were dupin' rares and gold. ^_^