Hey,
I love playing MMORPGs (Massively multilayer online role playing games). The only problem I have however is the firewall that prevents me from entering the fantasy worlds of warcraft or second life. That was the reason I jumped to the opportunity when I read about Duels.com on TechCrunch.
Poking a little more, I realized that I would be finally entering this world, given the fact that this was a plain HTML+JS application running on a simple browser. That would let me have some fun from a corporate network. So I went ahead and registered to start playing.
The objective of the game is simple. Challenge other players to a duel, gain gold and experience points, advance levels, and buy equipment. The challenges however was more like playing dice, with the player not really required to do anything. With a heavy dose of Diablo II background, I got into the world right away and spit out challenges to every player I could see online.
A few more minutes, and I realized that you are always in a win-win situation. Regardless of if you win or lose, you get experience points. Also, if u win, you get Gold to buy stuff, if you lose, you get tokens that can be redeemed to buy packs that have stuff in them. So, the entire idea of advancing in the games was to throw as many challenges as I could.
There goes the gaming spirit into the drain, an I started my Eclipse-Aptana editor to conjure some greasemonkey script to throw challenges to every player on the game. It was as simple as a form post to the URL - http:\\duels.com\challenge\challenges with parameters having a defenderID, a scrollID, and a couple of other things. The defenderID being sequential, a simple for-loop made me challenge every player in the fantasy world. A couple of hours, a hundred people accepting my challenges, and my experience levels was soaring high. I still kept minimum weapons (called loadouts) to give an impression that I was a dumb player at a higher level, hence making them comfortable to accept m challenge.
Another script to automatically accept my challenges, and my experience was accelerated. In a couple of hours, and I could even get to be the player with the maximum experience, and hence teh king of the world.
But no good deed goes unpunished, and the duels.com server crashed. due to the legendary digg effect. It is still down today, and I am waiting to see how much have I made, in this seemingly silly game. In the meanwhile, if you are curious about the script, ping me to get a copy.
Still waiting for the server to come alive. Till then, traversing other possible games that I could play, by writing scripts !!! :)
