FBI raids Lineage II rogue op

By Rob Fahey Published 21 November, 2006

But did they get epix or phat lewt?

Agents from the FBI have raided and shut down the L2Extreme website and servers, which operated an unauthorised server for NCsoft's Lineage II massively multiplayer game, and claimed to have half a million registered users.

Working with NCsoft, the FBI carried out raids in multiple cities across the United States - presumably after a few false starts when their main tank had bad lag or their healers had a strop over loot allocation - and while its estimate of L2Extreme's popularity is rather lower, at 50,000 active users, it does agree that the operation was costing NCsoft millions of dollars a year. The owners of the site are being questioned and the website itself has been replaced with an FBI holding page which is impressively nasty both in terms of web design and content.

NCsoft, for its part, is obviously glad to see the back of the rogue operation, which it reckons was defrauding the company's paying customers by "stealing" from the firm, a wanton misuse of the English language which makes us wonder if IP lawyers actually understand why nobody talks to them at parties (which they'd probably describe as "stealing" from their social lives).

"In the end those losses impact our customer support, product development, operational areas and ultimately they impact our player communities, most of which are trying to play games legitimately," NCsoft's North America general counsel continued, which is much more reasonable than the "stealing" nonsense. He went on to praise the FBI, and pledged to continue to fight future operations in the future, before riding off into some form of legal sunset.

This isn't the first time that there's been a legal wrangle over the provision of a "rogue" multiplayer service, of course - Blizzard fans may recall the protracted case of BNETD, a piece of software designed to clone the operations of Blizzard's Battle.net multiplayer service. However, the L2Extreme case seems to be altogether more clear cut, since unlike BNETD (which was a project to develop a compatible server that could run Battle.net games, which is a tough one to call on a legal basis), these guys were actually just running ripped off server code for Lineage II - which certainly falls under the naughty heading.

Picture of Rob.

About Rob Fahey

Rob Fahey is a former editor of GamesIndustry.biz who spent several years living in Japan and probably still has a mint condition Dreamcast Samba de Amigo set.

Read more articles from Rob by visiting the Rob Fahey archive page.

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Comments (10) Latest comment 5 years ago

Comments threads automatically close after 30 days, but please feel free to continue chatting on the forum!

  • mezzomorto #1 5 years ago

    ...and meanwhile Osama is still roaming free (unless he did indeed die of typhus)

  • ZuluHero #2 5 years ago

    Personally, I think Ncsoft were right to do this as people shouldn't be allowed to run private servers of an mmo, it’s the same as piracy in my eyes. The dev’s and publishers had this game developed to make money, and even though it might seem a trifle half a mil subs when you look at the size of the paying community, its still NCSoft's cash at the end of the day, and I would rather see it go to them to make me other great games and additions to their current ones. After all, what starts as half a mil soon becomes a million, then 2 million, and paying subscribers will start to question why are they paying for the privilege to play when they could be playing for free.

    -Zuluhero (formerly RinoaMW)


  • President_Weasel #3 5 years ago

    The FBI anti-piracy logo is a bit low-res. Unless it's jaggy because it's a representation of a cap badge?

  • Roamer #4 5 years ago

    ...to continue to fight future operations in the future...

    er....

  • kangarootoo #5 5 years ago

    "Weren't these servers set up in response to unresolved player issues in the first place"

    Thats hardly an excuse though is it? if you don't like the game, you stop playing it. Saying "they weren't listening to me as a customer, so I nicked it" is not the strongest defence in law.

  • Kostabi #6 5 years ago

    Working with NCsoft, the FBI carried out raids in multiple cities across the United States - presumably after a few false starts when their main tank had bad lag or their healers had a strop over loot allocation

    Genuine lol.
    Edited by 1 at 21/11/06 @ 12:49

  • ZuluHero #7 5 years ago

    ManicMiner, Yes, the "L2Extreme" servers were set up for people who did not want to play the game as it was intended and make it easier to play and get rewarded upwards of 10 times the amount that you would in the official world, which is kinda ironic given the name :)

    The game is designed to make people put the effort in and get rewarded as a result.

    -Zuluhero (formerly RinoaMW)
    Edited by 1 at 21/11/06 @ 13:21

  • vane101 #8 5 years ago

    It's funny how things change. I remember reading the book '@large' which was the story of how the FBI tracked down a hacker in the early 1990s. Back then they were so desperate for qualified staff that any agent with a computer degree of some sort was dragged into the cybercrime unit. I think they only found about 4 nationwide and I think none of them were planning a career in computing.

    There must now be huge numbers of FBI cybercrime geeks on the look out for computer villains, who are trying to undermine the free world.

  • Xerx3s #9 5 years ago

    One would think that the FBI actually had the funds to hire someone with some design certifications in his pocket.

  • orcane #10 5 years ago

    it's not like these people would have played the original servers had L2x not existed - I understand the issues with bandwith (back when I tried the server you had to hunt down old client installers to install, then they started to link to the official download which I always thought was a terribly stupid idea) and partially with using the leaked server software (although that one's so horribly outdated I cannot accept it as a main reason for this action) but they certainly didn't "steal" any users from NC's unbelievably horrible official version, or at least only very few of them

    anyway, I'm somewhat surprised this didn't happen sooner - the L2J team put a lot of work into not giving NC any reason to go after them, while the L2x team never appeared to bother with thinking about facing legal issues