FrontLine MMOG (FL MMOG)

StarForce is the proven expert in the world of intellectual property protection technologies presents:
Unique Massive Multiplayer Online Games Protection

It’s not a secret that nowadays the MMOG sector is constantly becoming more and more of first-priority for the whole PC Gaming industry. Incredible success of World of Warcraft has forced developers and publishers to furnish more and more attention precisely to this field. MMOGs are announced pretty frequently and right holders anticipate for projects commercial success. However, there are several negative aspects that may reduce consumer’s interest and are capable bring the revenue down.

Depending on the MMOG business model, copyright owners run risks to lose considerable part of subscribers or revenue generated by in-game goods sales.

Business models and threats:

Subscription
Such aspects as cheating, dishonest schemes, and obtaining advantages using game code bugs result in the forming of a black market of in-game items and characters. Most players may stop their game participation, as they aren’t able to afford black market prices. Moreover, hackers will release special utilities for public usage if they get access to the game code study. Such utilities provide various advantages that not correspond with user’s in-game level. This also downgrades users interest, provokes subscribers outflow and reducing project gain.

Free-2-play
The project revenue comes from official sales of in-game goods. Malefactors are able for fast gathering in-game items, characters and establish illegal trade places, using hacking and cheating tools. Thus, official sales and whole project income can be negatively affected by such competition.

Obviously, the reliable protection of the game code and traffic against reverse engineering and cracking is the key to solid guarding of game universe, balance and maintaining high players involvement. In addition, it is vitally important to reveal and blockade malware applications like bots in proper time. The necessity of hide MMOG internal design, algorithms and prevent cheating utilities activity, is dictated by project recoupment and profitability.

Summarizing, it`s easy to sort out the following basic threats:

Bots
Cheating tools
Farming
Unauthorized servers

What does MMOG right holder need in this case?

Ensure constant game interests, subscribers amount to grow
Provide virtual heroes and their belongings security
Control micropayments in free-2-play model
Prevent unauthorized servers appearance
Ensure fair competition among players

Analyzing threats and taking right holders needs into consideration, StarForce announces the unique product - FrontLine MMOG.

Unlike other for MMOG sector, the product offer complex set directed against the whole range of threats.

FrontLine MMOG is the pioneer solution in this field. It is a new word in the intellectual property safety ensuring, that is caused by market trends.

It is a unique, all-inclusive product, comprised of patented and licensed technologies in the field of program code obfuscation, data protection and application behaviour analysis. The methods, that significantly complicating MMOG analyzing and cracking have been developed long before the first MMOG had been released. They have been improving and perfecting by StarForce during usage on PC games worldwide and have gained the honor of the most reliable and perfect. Safe’n’Sec^® Application behaviour analyzer, that is used to reveal and barring activity of unwanted programs, has been licensed from S.N.Safe&Software^® Company, which is known for it proactive computer protection.

The well-known “Nival Online” company has happened to be the very first one to implement FrontLine MMOG into their Russian large scale award winning “Allods Online” MMO game, which currently is entering its final development stage.

FrontLine MMOG comprise of following elements:

Game code protection from being analyzed and cracked
Bots and cheating programs launch and performance prevention
Protection of the game traffic between MMOG server and client
Game servers protection from analyzing, modifying and unauthorized facilities launch

FrontLine MMOG is:

Integrity control
MMOG files and data integrity control, ability to receive updates from the server.
Launch control
Executable modules must be launched only by authorized processes.
MMOG code protection against analysis and modification
Game code obfuscation for considerable complication of its analysis. Usinf of control sums to protect against modification.
MMOG data protection against analysis and modification
Game variables encryption using StarForce SDK.
RAM protection
Protection against direct memory access, protection against new memory thread creation etc.¹
Traffic control
Securing traffic modification impossibility between server and client.
Server authenticity check
Protection against server substitution via constant authentication between server and client.

With that, StarForce offers right holders possibility to realize various MMOG distribution schemas:

Online distribution with powerful DRM system support for sales tracking
Optical disc distribution with disc binding
Universal distribution for disc sales as well as online sales

Together we will continue to keep the integrity level up to the highest while preserving the uniqueness of your virtual universe. It’s our main goal to make sure that gameplay is at its maximum interest and fascination!

¹ Using Safe’n’Sec^® behaviour analyser technology from S.N.Safe&Software^® company.