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By: hamtastic, Erik Friborg
Oct 24 2008 3:46am
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Table of Contents
Editorial Section
MTGO Discussion Items
Card Prices
Conclusion

Editorial Section

Malware, malfeasance and me...

So I've been spending some time thinking about this crazy turn of events surrounding the CBS bots, stolen accounts, password stealing and all that.  I mostly was wondering two things.  One: why would someone do this?  And two: why choose this particular time to do it.  Certainly this is one of the types of things that one wants to have the most people running before pulling the trigger on, in case you get caught.  But here's the thing... to do this it has to be worth more short term gain than the potential long term gain of actually running the business.  The business in question is one that interviewed a few weeks about after a number of complaint threads had sprung up regarding some of the services.  In retrospect, it almost feels as if things were getting hotter for the business and he felt the need to go big or go home.  But before I get too far into this section I should cover what I'm talking about.

The complaint threads are here:
http://forums.gleemax.com/showthread.php?t=1088632
http://forums.gleemax.com/showthread.php?t=1068389

The interview is here:
http://www.puremtgo.com/articledisplay.asp?AID=1223#es

The WotC statement is here:
MALWARE ALERT

and finally, the user created thread is here:
Running this bot can steal your account!

Okay, with that out of the way, let's take a look at the situation from 5000 feet.

The business had a recurring fee.  It also had a crazy 'trust' system that required users to leave cards with the promise that they'll get the credits when they sell.  This pricing setup is a pretty decent way to go about this, however, I always have had reservations about the 'Sell4Me' setup, which is the one where you trust that the person you've left the cards with will hold up their end of the bargain.

As we drill further down into the service provided, more and more concerning things appear.  Items such as how it handles pricing.  How it handles passing information, start to become worrisome. 

Drilling down to the bottom level, we see quite a few users that have had numerous issues with certain aspects of this service.  Enough so that the business owner had to refund and refute the concerns.

But all this time, the big whammy was yet to come.  Accounts were cleaned out of cards by one of many back doors in the code.

So what happened to cause this slow and steady amount of problems to change into a full blown malware?  I think it was the attention being called to the program in the threads linked above, followed up by my interviewing him regarding the problems.  It almost seems that the small time stuff was getting out of hand and he had to decide if it was worth going all out or trying to continue the small time stuff.  Apparently, the decision was made to go big. 

Of course, this is only if what WotC said is correct, and the owner of CBS bots actually did this.

The bot owner refutes these claims, as can be seen here: http://www.cardboostershop.com/wizardresponse.html.  As of this moment, I have no reason to doubt what was posted by WotC.  Applying Occam's Razor to this whole ordeal doesn't help as there is no easy explanation to all the pieces of information.  Usually Occam's Razor helps simplify weird situations such as these, but there's no easy solution.

We have WotC saying the following:

  • The owner admitted cleaning out accounts
  • The problems exist in multiple versions of the client
  • They verified the problems.

Then we have the owner saying the following:

  • The hacked people weren't running 'official' versions of the bot program.
  • WotC didn't verify the actual issue correctly.

Now, the Razor would make it seem that the Owner is correct and that the impacted users were running some non-official CBS bot.  But then again, you've got a very simple statement by WotC of admittance of guilt.  I don't really know what to believe.  They both can't be right.  I want to believe that WotC is right.  After all, if they're wrong this is a huge black eye to the company. 

Why this pisses me off

This isn't the time for "I told you so's".  It doesn't really matter to me who did what or why right now.

What matters is that the game I love just got sucker-punched by *someone*.  *Someone* just made this game an awful experience for others.  We don't need this.  It wasn't just the people who paid for this bot software that got hurt by this.  Part of the fallout from these events is that all the CBS accounts have been shut down... including the one that held the cards 'in trust'.  Again.  We just don't need this crap.  If the owner of CBS bot is innocent then he just got his accounts shut down, and he too, is an innocent victim of this.

It's just such a mess, and it just sucks all around.  And as always, decide for yourself what to believe and what is worth the risks.

 

Author's Pre Publishing UPDATE:

In the time between writing this and posting this the CBS owner removed the links from his main page.  But your wily hamtastic a) saved the direct link, and b) took a screenshot of the page.  The link is: www.cardboostershop.com/wizardresponse.html.  And after that's removed you can see the image here.


Discussion Items


The first part of this section will be the compilation of updates for the week, be it WotC updates, generic game updates, etc. 

Announcement Details Date
4 Man Constructed Queues The following formats now have smaller queue options: Extended, LWR-SHM Block Constructed, Classic, Prismatic, 100 Card Singleton  9/25/2008
World Champs Qualifier: MTGO Keep an eye out for qualifier tournaments that feed into bigger and more competitive events!

 10/03/2008

CBS Bot WARNING
If you've been running the "CBS" bots you really need to read this announcement.  There's a lot of he said/she said going on right now. 

Shards of Alara Release Events
Some new changes, including the start of 16 person queues


Dual Land Price Discussion:
The dual lands appear to have stabilized, although they have stabilized at a much higher price than I expected.

Dual land Meta Price tracking:
Another user is looking to track the prices of the dual lands and is going to do it by compiling a compilation of many site's data. 

Official WotC reskinning
Some of the first views of what our new UI designer has been working on can be seen in this thread.  But to temper your expectations, it's only skinning, not a new UI by any stretch of the imagination.  However, things are certainly much cleaner in the new UI and I think that's a good sign that we can expect future changes to follow suit.

Nifty MTG Tournament -
Who says we don't get to have some fun around here?  Check out this tournament that takes part on a cruise ship.  You can qualify the for it via some special tournaments on MTGO as well.  Best of luck to everyone!

Farewell Time Spiral, Planar Chaos, Future Sight and Coldsnap -
And good riddance to the largest Standard pool in the history of the game.  Hopefully things will mellow out a bit now that we're down to a more reasonable number of cards.

Farewell IPA & OTJ -
The first ever Extended rotation that impacts MTGO card sets is now past.  Taking with it IPA, OTJ and 7th Edition out of the Extended pool.  *sniff*

 

Top

Card Prices

 

With all the hubbub surrounding the dual lands I figured I could take a few minutes and start the charts for them.  I'll update them for a while and keep them on the back burner as we move forward.

As Duke Nukem says: Hail to the king, baby.  Classic finally assumes the mantle of "Most Valuable Subset of Cards".  It's been a long time coming, and it's less to do with the growth of Classic as it does with the death of Extended IPA cards.  Regardless of that fact, it is a monumental week for the format.

The same information, but different:

 

Well what do we have here... Infest wen't from .04 to three for a ticket.  Nice.  Glimpse of Nature continues to climb (it climbed two weeks ago as well).  Probably on the back of some combo deck that's brewing.  Spinerock knoll.. the card we love to hate and hate to love climbs back out of junk territory and back into jank territory.  Regal Force.  Um.  What?  You and Glimpse are making me nervous.  Hopefully some tournament player comes along to tell me what I'm missing here.  But being out of the MTGO loop for a week and a half seems to have made everything moldy.  (heh, get it?  Green growing stuff... mold?  HA!)

Card name: Last Week This week Percentage Changed
Infest 0.04 0.34 750.00%
Glimpse of Nature 0.48 0.97 102.08%
Stillmoon Cavalier 4 7.5 87.50%
Spinerock Knoll 0.15 0.25 66.67%
Gaddock Teeg 0.8 1.3 62.50%
Reflecting Pool 8.5 13.75 61.76%
Weird Harvest 0.12 0.19 58.33%
Jace Beleren 1.3 2 53.85%
Fulminator Mage 1.3 2 53.85%
Fetid Heath 3.25 5 53.85%
Regal Force 0.2 0.3 50.00%
Wren's Run Packmaster 0.2 0.3 50.00%
Deathrender 0.2 0.3 50.00%
Caller of the Claw 0.86 1.26 46.51%
Riptide Laboratory 0.67 0.97 44.78%
       
Card name: Last Week This week Percentage Changed
Underground Sea 42 38 -9.52%
Badlands 26 23 -11.54%
Tundra 38 35 -7.89%
Fact or Fiction 11.63 9.31 -19.95%
Savannah 22 20 -9.09%
Pernicious Deed 35.64 33.66 -5.56%
Taiga 26 25 -3.85%
Meddling Mage 34.65 33.66 -2.86%
Haunting Echoes 16.83 15.84 -5.88%
Goblin Piledriver 4.9 3.92 -20.00%
Grim Lavamancer 5.88 4.9 -16.67%
Magus of the Moon 4.75 4 -15.79%
Armadillo Cloak 2.43 1.7 -30.04%
Counterspell 1.46 0.86 -41.10%
Extirpate 2.75 2.25 -18.18%

Some more Classic dropping which only makes sense I guess since the demand for some of these cards should be lower now than previously. 

Conclusion

A rollercoaster couple of weeks for MTGO.  Scandal, intrigue, fiscal shake-ups!  Who knows how all this will wind up in the end, but I think it's safe to say that it will be interesting to find out.

3 Comments

Incredible article, per your norm. by MechtaK at Fri, 10/24/2008 - 09:51
MechtaK's picture

Just reading about the CBS bot thing was amazing.  Whenever there is money involved, there are always those who think they have a right to it and take it from you.  Difficult to know who is at fault though, ethics & the internet are never on friendly terms unfortunately.

by Anonymous(Unregistered) 12.53.114.66 (not verified) at Fri, 10/24/2008 - 11:08
Anonymous(Unregistered) 12.53.114.66's picture

Glimpse of Nature and Regal Force are in an elfball deck that's running around extended right now.

Card Price Order? by DragonoidUcarn(Unregistered) 68.59.245.154 (not verified) at Fri, 10/24/2008 - 09:24
DragonoidUcarn(Unregistered) 68.59.245.154's picture

Hey Hammy! Great job on the state of the program articles each week!

 

Being a big numbers guy, I usually go right to the card prices section and see what's hot and what's not. I've noticed for a few weeks that some of your specific card listings aren't sorted by anything except maybe a personal bias toward how you list the cards. You seem to have the "moving up" cards listed by greatest percentage change. Maybe you could do that for your "moving down" list?

 

It's a GREAT set of articles as it is. No major complaint. Just a bit of a pet peeve of wanting better order in things. Keep up the great work!