Yes, they are a disease and they are contagious. The 9D German server from Games Campus now has a sizable number of them at fairly high levels, for that server anyway.

The problem with this disease is that the Vietnamese players don't view 9Dragons as a game. For them it's a business. It's a chance to make some real world money by selling their gold and precious drops to the gold sellers who also infest almost every MMO out there. First of course, they have to get that gold and those drops.

Low level maps don't have much of a drop rate for gold and goodies on any version of 9Dragons, even if it's particularly bad on 9D Germany. The Vietnamese solution is to level hack, by repeating every quest they possibly can. It's a lot faster than grinding and they have identified quite an interesting array of quests that can be repeated. I personally watched a guy repeating a quest from the Bisha tavern yesterday, and the same guy was repeating The Disturbance of Shimei I very early this morning.

The in-game items that are easily sellable are the drops from the important bosses in the Cave of the Conqueror. The Defense trink, the HP trink, Blood Beads, Karma Plates, high damage wrist bands, etcetera. The Vietnamese have no problem with hacking the game any way they can in order to out-damage anyone else who might want those items too. These are mostly memory hacks using small, precise applets to repeatedly reset memory locations to allow faster recast, or higher damage while their characters are on the attack.

So far GameGuard isn't able to stop these applets from altering specific memory addresses during game play.

This became a problem over night, at least for me, because I couldn't sleep again last night. My AxtTreiber character was EC2 so at 4:30 this morning I decided to take a run at the def trink boss in the Cave of the Conqueror. Well, I would at least go camping for a while. When I got there I found a group of well known Viet players camping too. I had a pretty good idea what would come next but I stuck around anyway. I think I got called a lot of dirty names too.

A couple more known Viet players came and went, and after an hour or so the boss spawned. We were all over it immediately of course but the boss was dead as fast as it spawned. I think I got in 4 hits, and that's just not normal. The nuker behind me seemed to be on auto-cast, and the others around me had to be doing 10 times the damage I was doing.

I've done a lot of boss hunting in the last few days. I know how long it takes to kill one, even the easy ones. This was just unreal. I didn't get any external wounds from the boss because she wasn't alive long enough to hand it out. I've never seen anything like it. Fortunately there was no drop or I would have been really upset.

Games Campus would like to keep the gold sellers out of their game. Who can blame them, and that's why our drop rate is so miserable to begin with. Campus can go after the gold sellers themselves, and cut off their IP access to the game, and eventually all proxies too, but I would suggest Campus is going to have to do the same with the foot soldiers who are willing to sell their gold and precious items for cash. Fortunately they are easy to identify.

It's your move Games Campus.

- AxtTreiber