MMO Network has been at a standstill for a while now.  Seems like a few other things have been sucking up my time, mostly work and the birth of my 3rd child.  However, it has not stopped me from still wanting to work on this project.  I know, dear reader, that you have been waiting, alone, for quite some time to see what new developments might arise in the start of the new year.  As the 1st quarter has closed, there has been officially NO WORK done whatsoever.  Do not despair, faithful one, for I have a plan.  All I need is a start date…stay tuned.

Regards,

Firedorn

Now that we are into the new year, what games are we looking at? Well, here is a list of games have our interest:

Stargate Worlds
Age Of Conan
Warhammer Online
Huxley
Star Trek Online
Dark Fall Online
The Agency

Although we try and keep up-to-date on as many MMO titles as possible, these are the games that will have our interest to start off the new year. We hope to keep you informed of the more interesting tid-bits of news as we read or hear them.

When you get your new online game, you really just want to install it and play. Some, actually look at the instructions and notice you are asked to open a slew of ports. Others just try to connect and find that it fails. Each may lead to the step of searching how you open these ports or why you need to.

The newer type of online games want to provide rich features to the user base. They like to push automatic updates to you, provide news through a game management client, in-game advertisement, monitor your PC while playing and report this information back, etc… Still, all of these should be outbound connections and shouldn’t require you to open a single port inbound (unless you are hosting a game or running a server).

I believe the following are possible problems when a game asks you to open up several inbound ports:

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Some of you may have heard of the book, Exploiting Online Games by Greg Hogluhd and Gary McGraw, which is a modern day look at the security of MMO’s.

If you haven’t been paying attention, you may not have noticed that the virtual items in online games are producing real currency. For some who realize this, they have taken an aggressive and efficient approach to obtaining the virtual items needed to make cash through the use of bots or other tools. Others use phishing attacks, malware, trojans, keyloggers, and more to obtain access to your account and then steal all of your items which you have worked so hard for.

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I have been working on setting up the (hopefully) final home of this blog, along with my MMO Network project. I have a couple of people helping me and we’ll get things rolled out pretty soon.

Unfortunately, since I’ll be providing the hardware and bandwidth, it has taken some time to set the whole thing up. I have pretty much decided on the platform to use, along with the necessary hardware. What remains is getting the server tweaked with all the necessary utilities and services. My somewhat limited experience with Linux has slowed me down, but I have been having a pretty easy time fiddling around with things. Once it’s all decided, clean install, configure and away we go. Until then, my singular audience, you’ll have to be patient.

Thanks and see you soon,

Firedorn