After waking up from the floor 30 minutes later, I booted up my phone to see an email from Eirlys, asking me to detail how I killed those 15 players in a span of less than 5 minutes.
After answering it, I ordered Pho takeout with just an oversized shirt on and getting weird looks from the delivery guy, brush my teeth and put some water on my hair. Before laying back to sleep.
Can't overthrow the gaming giant without getting at least 2 hours of sleep every day, am I right lads?
I finally sat down once more and lay in my pod to sign in.
Welcome, CJS69Real
I reappeared beneath the swaying canopy of pine trees where I'd logged out, I inhaled in the dense air of a forest thick enough that light barely dripped through the leaves. I think… There's a really good Japanese term for it that I couldn't quite put my finger on.
I chose to log out here, because I knew that logging in would put in the same spot, and I wasn't about to get spawn-camped by salty guild remnants or some thirsty streamer setting up a cool bear trap right underneath my feet if I were to log off in the farming site where PvP was on.
Although… Now that I mentioned it, the early-access VR forum did mention how streaming [Darkmoon Adventure] would bring great revenue, considering how there was a built-in option that let you stream your POV without any lag or external downloads. I should look into that.
On that note, prostitution was a thing.
I experienced "intimacy" with my half-elf half-catgirl Shayla wife and it didn't feel especially good because you could not climax in game. But still, I heard that there was some players would love to record some action so they can rewatch in real life and enjoy themselves… Considering how realistic the graphics were. Or if they're really into freaky stuff, they enjoy "doing it" between players and players, too.
Basically, AOL all over again.
Maybe I could...…
Pfft, no, I'm low, but not that low. I've been building my brand as a cool dark lord for the last 20 years and if I ever want to livestream touching myself using a female avatar, it would be when I gamble away all my NEET bucks for the next 6 months or something.
Besides, it was a long day and I need to just sit down, relax, and stop thinking.
Fifteen kills in the first official VR patch, having my two-decade-old username stolen, and two white-haired girl with a blade dangling over my head?
"Phew…"
The forest greeted me with the lazy chirping of beautiful birds and a cool simulated breeze brushing through the leaves. I stretched my arms, cracked my neck, and sprinted a few meters forward before making a sequence of action that triggered one of the best exploits in the game.
The method I used to help kill all those people was called:
Rubberbanding
To quote the internet: "Rubberbanding in online games refers to the visual effect where a player's character or actions appear to snap back to a previous position or state due to network latency or connection issues."
But in Darkmoon Adventure VR, if your internet connection have issues… You wouldn't be able to connect, at all. There would be a black screen and a forever loading buffer, so I was not able to exploit the game on that end.
HOWEVER.
The game does have a different way for me to rubberband, and it had to do with the game's engine.
You see, the most prominent hacks and exploits in MMORPG like this one was autofarm (bots), economy exploit by either giving yourself money or duplicating your items, and finally, stats exploit.
To combat the last one, stat exploits, especially the speed stats, the developers made it so that if a player moved too fast, faster than humanly and mechanically possible, then they would be intentionally rubberband back, and potentially their username and max-velocity would be sent to a moderator of sorts.
So, the question was, how do we trick a game into thinking we moved too fast, despite us not really hacking? And how to avoid our datas being sent back to the mods?
Easy, we exploit how the engine interprets inertia buffers.
Darkmoon Adventure VR calculates movement speed not just by input, but by position delta per frame. Meaning, if your character's location jumps farther than it should in a single frame, the system panics and says, "STOP RIGHT THERE, CRIMINAL SCUM! NOBODY BREAKS THE LAW ON MY WATCH." and force-snaps you back.
(Did you get that reference, though?)
But there was a catch, mufwehehe.
A "safezone", so to speak? A tiny margin of error built to account for natural stutters. If you can repeatedly stack micro-movements, animation cancels, terrain clipping, or input queuing at just the right angles, the system thinks you've made an impossible move and rubberbands you.
Only, the thing is, you weren't moving fast! You just interrupted positional updates mid-transition, which triggers the rollback.
It's teleporting without a magic spell or an assassin skill! A two-second rewind to where you were just standing, like a boomer's DVD tape.
Albeit, I am not smart enough to really say this was a client-side or server-side issue, probably a latter?
And, compounded upon that is, guess what? You never broke max velocity limits, nothing gets reported to the mods.
So what does that give you?
A pseudo-teleport, a roughly one~five second time skip (the amount of seconds that I rubberband back can be controlled, but it's more of a feeling and practice thing than a theory thing) where you appear somewhere you aren't supposed to be anymore.
Why am I even explaining it to you guys, anyways?
Back to the present.
Time to test if that exploit was still here.
…
Did I teleported? Let's try again.
…
Nothing happened.
No blur, no backtrack, no flicker of that beautiful cheat-like teleportation I spent like 3 weeks in the early access version to mastered.
I tried again.
Still nothing.
"God damn it, I knew big-titties women are evil."
They patched the rubberbanding exploit less than three hours after I sent the bug report.
There was no official patch notes, which meant the game was auto-update even when there was still players in game. So if one day they change a mechanic or fix an exploit I need to use, it could happen mid-cast and I would be D-O-N-E fucked.
Thanks, heiress, really appreciate it.
Can't say I was surprised. After all, Eirlys said she needed my "skills." She's probably getting praised and eyed by a room full of sweaty Indian developers right now for patching such an exploit.
Well, jokes on her, that rubberbanding trick was just my favorite child! I still had two or three tucked away, and I'll buy a white van to write "Free candy" if I have to lure more! Oh, wait, did you think I actually only have 2 or 3? I meant two-ten and three-ten, which meant 20 and 30!
Okay, bad joke, I'll be in the timeout corner.
Still, I was feeling antsy fro, her patching it so fast.
I'm asking more than just a boob grab next time we meet.