How two bugs led to the "most notorious American MMO hack" menace

American MMOs have seen some truly amazing hacks, bugs, and exploits over the years. However, in all my time, I don’t think I’ve seen something as truly ridiculous as what Damion Schubert, former developer of Star Wars: The Old Republic, recalled from his time on Shadowbane. The popular early 2000s PVP MMO was home to some memorable moments, but perhaps few of them can match this one.

Sure, players have been bullied in MMOs before — a popular incident in the earlier days of World of Warcraft saw players lead powerful bosses back to town to slaughter players, and so much more. However, Shadowbane players had to deal with a group of hackers that did far worse.

Damion Schubert recalled this story on BlueSky, and explained it in greater detail, talking about the specific bugs and what took place. In these posts, he called it the "most notorious American MMO hack".

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A pair of relatively small bugs led to a fascinating American MMO hack

A pair of bugs in American PVP MMO Shadowbane led to a group of hackers going wild in the game, and alone, they were relatively innocuous. According to Damion Schubert, who was a producer on the game at the time, the first bug involved the “teleport object” command:

“Some enterprising player found he could spoof that command to the server and it would move any object anywhere. But what was REALLY impressive was the sheer myriad of ways they found to cause chaos. They teleported newbies to the hardest zone. They’d teleport guild cities to the bottom of the ocean. They teleported boss monsters to city centers. They really found EVERY way to use a teleport command to make it seem like they had total control over the server.”

From stealing gold or weapons to teleporting whole cities, there was nothing they couldn’t do. There were no permissions on this command, meaning technically, any player could do it if they could spoof the command onto the server. However, every instance of using it was logged. This makes it incredibly simple to find out who was doing the deed.

Unfortunately for the American MMO Shadowbane, there was a bug that players could combine with this to never be punished. Schubert laid the blame for this one on “some web programmer who worked for our publisher.”

Any player who knew Javascript could go into the web client and just comment out the “AM I BANNED” query, and log in anytime they wanted. For a time, these players simply could not be punished and had the power to do anything they wanted. Hacking and cheating in MMOs isn’t terribly common, but it does happen in Shadowbane, and even in modern games like Path of Exile 2.

For a time, these hackers had complete dominion over the players of Shadowbane in a truly unique way. Through two simple enough bugs, those players could exploit the system, just do whatever they wanted, and log back in without fear of reprieve — for a time, at least.

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Not everyone was mad at what happened though — some players found it pretty funny. Ultimately, everything was set right again, but what a fascinating time this must have been to live through. I’ve seen some amazing things in online games, but never anything quite like this.