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The new Rails-based board game llor.nu opened a few days ago. If you’ve hopped on recently, you’ve probably noticed that the game is dominated by a steep curve of players who’ve crossed the $5,000,000 mark. One of these players (alias: c3, ranked: no. 3) has been accused of hacking the site by the gamemaster Michael Buffington, likely by scrounging through the source browser for holes (err, no, the hack started before the code came out…) in the API. And, since the site is driven by Ajax calls, the browser becomes a terminal for poking the exposed nerves.

The really fun part of this is that when c3 was called on it, he responded by posting the following Ruby code in the forums:

 @agent = Agent.new( :direction => :wide, :building_preference => :super_insane )
 @agent.run

 @agent2 = Agent.new( :direction => :high, :building_preference => :crappy )
 @agent2.run

So what is this? Code from the exploit? Browing the llor.nu code, I’m not finding any Agent model class. Regardless, the idea of flashing a Ruby snip like a flick of the switchblade is pretty radical! In all, it makes me wonder if multiplayer games can open-source like this. If it’ll always suffer due to the intense scrutiny of the players.

I think the killer advantage here is that if the saturation of llor.nu bugs you, it’s actually pretty simple to erect your own, you know? ‘Cause I mean that street is becoming a pretty long and daunting ride for a newb.

Update! Turns out the code is from c3’s bot. And a peace accord was struck! It works for the masses now. See the comments.