The War Z – Hackers, Exploiters & Crooked Developers
It’s no secret that the post-apocalyptic MMO, The War Z, has had a hard time during Alpha but even more issues arose over the weekend. Dozens of players complained about the lack of professionalism from developers across the official forums, but this exploded over the weekend as it was discovered that a developer had spawned a number of items that eventually ended up in the hands of a group of players.
A forum thread popped up where a player was thanking the developers for providing an awesome game experience during an intense firefight on one of the servers. The developers had spawned a number of powerful weapons and items before holding up in one of the stores in-game. A clan happened to stumble upon the makeshift stronghold and proceeded to fight for control. It ended badly for the developers with their entire force being wiped out, leaving a large array of rare items to be looted by the victors. Usually this wouldn’t cause many problems but the developers have already said they will not wipe characters before release, raising a lot of concerns about the ability of the developers and whether they’re able to produce a fair, balanced product.
As if that wasn’t bad enough, a number of hacks have also made it into general circulation after someone that created the program provided a free download link on his personal blog. Nobody likes hackers but I can’t help but think the developers kinda brought this on themselves. A detailed thread on the forums has the lead developer, Sergey Titov, discussing the companies techniques to stop hacking and cheats, even as going as far to say:
And it worked ! We basically emilinated all major game ruining hacks.
Yes, the developers don’t use a spell checker. So The War Z has barely been in Alpha for a week, the closed beta is meant to start on October 31st and we’ve got developers swearing in posts, spawning items into an MMO economy and boasting about hacking prevention techniques that obviously don’t work. It seems the apocalypse for the player base isn’t far off.
the developers for the WarZ aren’t that professional when talking to their customers, but they are very laid back and casual about it, and whilst things are going on in the game, the developers are in the background working on a load of features that WE the War Z community have suggested
Professional? definitely not, but yes, the game is extremely involving because of the huge amount of contact with the developers on a daily basis
Like Sergey has said himself “we don’t want to give you a product, we want to give you a service”