History of Presearing Exploits?

Spike · February 18, 2021 at 12:14 AM

Hello,

I really enjoy presearing and learning about its history. I was wondering if anyone could detail the history of exploits in presearing, where people were able to bring in items from postsearing to presearing. I am aware of one where people were able to observe guild battles on presearing characters and when they left they would be transported to their postsearing guild hall. However, thats really all I know about it. I'd love to learn more about this exploit and others with all the details available (how, when, how long was it available, what was brought in, etc) - any info would be appreciated. Thanks!

Ostona · October 23, 2021 at 11:55 PM

I don't know if you will read this some day since it's a thread fom February, but anyway, for other people.

First of all, if anyone knows exactly how it was done, please correct me, this is just an info compilation. I can't talk by own experience because I was not there or aware in its day, like many other things that I have missed by being on the wrong server before 2011, but I've been searching recently about it in GW Guru and PreSearing.com (old and new) forums and this is a summary of what I've found.

In the past some outposts and hidden outposts were not server-side locked, allowing you to enter if you knew how to force the entrance using bugs, glitches or exploits.

Prior to January 2008, due a bug you could visit outposts that you did not have unlocked. This was fixed in the "Sunday, December 30, 2007" update, and explained in the "[Dev Update] Exploits and Bans – 10 January 2008", which states:

Fixed an exploit which allowed players to access outposts they had not previously unlocked.
An exploit was recently discovered in Guild Wars that allowed client-hackers to travel to a hidden outpost. Only by hacking the client, or partying with someone who had done so, could a player access that outpost.

One of those hidden outposts is the famous "The Ebony Citadel of Mallyx" but with the skin map of the Gate of Torment. Pictures can be found in the discussion thread of the page, here. Basically, you were able to teleport there even if you didn't have that hidden outpost unlocked because in that moment the outposts were not server-side protected (and like this one, many others) if someone had already been there, clicking the "Leave Guild Hall" button and dragging the team members with you. In this case, according to Gaile's official post, it's stated that who started all this for first time, hacked the game's client, so it was not a glitch found by mistake.

With this update, ArenaNet started searching for all outposts that should not be accessible by normal methods without having /developer powers, and they blocked them all. The outposts were not removed from the Live Build, only locked. Today if you try to access forcibly those hidden or disabled outposts without /developer powers, which is having your account in a white list in ArenaNet's servers (for example with GWToolbox and the /tp command which allows you to teleport inside any map if you know the ID), after a brief loading screen appears, the server kicks you to Ascalon instantly. I tried this will all the instances, outposts and hidden outposts (until the ID 2000) and only 6 are still accessible (and useless), 16 have this brief loading screen that kicks you, and the rest are totally locked in the sense that Toolbox simply shows you a message saying that you can't access the place because you don't have it unlocked in your account (the only good thing about this is that every time when you write an ID number, Toolbox shows you the real name of the map and its translation in other languages in case it has one, and some of the DEV Test Areas maps were translated, which is curious).

Back to the topic, items were transferred to Pre-Searing in two ways: during the glitch and after the glitch.

After the glitch is easy to understand, people parked their characters in the Guild Hall when the bug was available, they logged off, and they returned days, weeks and months after the glitch was fixed, so they took the opportunity to transfer items to Pre-Searing again for last time. Today you can't travel to the Guild Hall in Pre-Searing not even using GWToolbox, because as I explained above is server-side locked, so after the loading screen appears, the server kicks you to Pre-Ascalon again.

Now, regarding during the glitch, what I've found is that there were 2 different Guild Hall glitches.

The first Guild Hall glitch, as I've read in Reddit (source), consisted of the person who was going to act as a crawler (the Party Formation leader) first must visit the target outpost. Then, he travels to the Guild Hall, creates a team adding people, then goes to the "Guild Halls" NPC that shows you the different available halls, and once everyone was inside (because it's an explorable area) they /resign and the server kicks them all to the team leader's latest visited outpost.

The second Guild Hall glitch, as I've read in GW Guru (source 1 and 2, messages #135 and #146) consisted in a day where, for some reason, a bug allowed people who joined a guild in Pre-Searing being able to see the "Guild Hall" button in the G panel, or at least that's what I understand in the conversation. It's not clear, though, if the requirement also consisted of having to create a new character during that moment or if only joining a new guild was enough to activate the bug.

Dee Leau · December 6, 2021 at 8:19 PM

Man, I got perma banned for the famous Ebony Citadel of Mallyx town glitch, along with a bunch of my guild/alliance haha, good times.

Neutral_CH · January 10, 2022 at 2:18 PM

Quote from Dee Leau

Man, I got perma banned for the famous Ebony Citadel of Mallyx town glitch, along with a bunch of my guild/alliance haha, good times.

Quote from Ostona

An exploit was recently discovered in Guild Wars that allowed client-hackers to travel to a hidden outpost. Only by hacking the client, or partying with someone who had done so, could a player access that outpost.

Hi, so you must (maybe) understand better than anyone else here, why the exploit description in the update is wrong.

There could be 2 or more ways to do it without hacking (search: Pablo24 in the Guru archives about this). But Anet, as usual, instead of correcting or seeing the problem from their side preferred to cut through. In short, they were unable to reproduce the hacking-free techniques put forward by Pablo24 to Gaile.. (GJ Anet )

I would add that Outposts hidden front posts could not be removed from the game, they are an integral part of it.

So at a time when they were already annoyed for the duplica of items (reminds me of a sequel to MMORPG, Gui... W.. 2, something like that..) they had the choice between:

- Our GW code on NF and the way to access some zones are problematic because of the different system compared to Prophecies and Factions (to hear by there, talk to pnj for access, and so on). This creates "holes" that allow people to find themselves on these maps by mistake.

Or

- You are hackers, we lock everything and those who had access, all, ban.

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