Level Up! rolls back RF Online after discovering cheat

By Erwin Oliva INQUIRER.net LEVEL UP! took the painful route of rolling back a popular online game after they discovered a third-party cheat that allowed subscribers to create fake virtual wealth, an official told hackenslash. Mon Macutay, marketing manager of Level Up! Philippines, said in an interview that the local publisher first detected the game cheat in RF Online on May 23. This cheat enabled people to replicate their in-game currency and gold. RF Online is a free-to-play online game wherein subscribers could buy items and accumulate in-game currency. Macutay said the decision to roll back, a term that describes restarting a system to a certain date when the game was not yet compromised, affected about 70,000 subscribers of the online game. Level Up! Philippines tried fixing the problem by purging each account. But due to limited time and resources, the local publisher decided to just roll back the game. "People will be losing their XP [experience] and character level, including items. That's why we're compensating everyone with two weeks of premium subscription for free," the game executive said. The premium subscription will allow players to quickly level up their characters, and recover items lost, as they accumulate more in-game currency and gold. "It was a tough choice. But the decision will allow the virtual economy to stabilize and promote a level playing field," he said. Similar to an unstable economy in the real world, the unfair distribution of wealth would give "richer" players more advantage and would cause more harm to those who have less, he said. "People with excess cash will be able to buy expensive items which is unfair to those who don't have much," Macutay said, referring to the online game's economy. Level Up! Philippines said it was not yet sure about the source of the cheat. But they believe that the cheat came from a third party. "I don't think it is from the Philippines," he said. Macutay also wrote a lengthier explanation on his blog about the local publisher's decision. "At first we thought that this could be managed. But when we pulled out the numbers from the database, we were shocked -- the economy was bloated by as much as 500%. This means that if a server normally had 1Trillion cash, it now had 5 to 6 trillion! That's a lot of cash to trace, flush out and investigate. It would take our GMs maybe up to a year just to this job," he explained. Macutay said this is the first time RF Online suffered a major problem from a game cheat. RF (Rising Force) Online is a massively multiplayer online role-playing fantasy game that was developed by CCR Inc. Players can race or fight monsters to gain experience points. In-game credits can be purchased using real money to buy virtual items in the game.