A few weeks ago I was invited to a Whatsapp group called Unfair-Gamers, the name of an italian community website that I created back in 2009 while I still was in my teenage years and known online as D4.Ny (🤣). I was very happy and surprised to discover that many members of the community were able to stick together for this long after the website was closed. This is probably what prompted me to write this commemorative post, and also to serve as a point of reference for anyone that was involved.

I would define Unfair-Gamers as a gaming, modding and ethical game-hacking community. The main reason the community started was to learn and share the knowledge needed to create such tools, for us there was a more interesting game inside the game: a game made of learning, experimentation, reverse engineering and creativity. For me it was a very important part of my life as it defined the path that I would take later on.

I like to think that the community succeded in its mission, and although there were a lot of original releases accounting for millions of downloads, the main accomplishment was to produce knowledge in an expanding field where the information was still scarcely available on the web.

The community was the most active in the timespan from 2010 to 2013, peaking at about 2 million page views per month, more than 200k posts and 100k users (of which 3k+ I would define as active and more than 20k had at least one post, the remaining registrations were mainly made just to lurk or download and use our releases).

Peaks in the graph usually correspond to our major releases, Google Analytics was missing for a short period after a website redesign.

Game Hacking

While game hacking can be seen as a nuisance by many, Unfair-Gamers produced mainly hacks that wouldn’t be too much disruptive for the other players (like it frequently happens with FPS games), our “hacks” were aimed to lessen the grind on MMORPG games and provide a more enjoyable experience.

Game hacking consisted mainly in scouting for memory addresses or data structures and modifying their values, creating and injecting new code, changing the control flow of the game, scripting actions or directly calling game functions for automation.

The main tools of the trade were:

• Cheat Engine: a powerful memory scanner and debugger
• OllyDbg: probably the most iconic debugger ever created
• Programming and scripting languages
• Other minor tools such as disassemblers, DLL injectors, process explorers.

Example 1: Minimap replication

The game memory is being scanned for monsters and their attributes, a first small step in order to create a bot. The monsters position is then drawn on a canvas for demonstration purposes. (The game is Metin2)

Example 2: Long range monster puller

The function responsible for damaging a monster is being called directly, skipping the attack and thus bypassing security checks on weapon range. This would attract all nearby monsters “wirelessly”.

Although game hacking skills may look like a very specific topic at first sight, its concepts can be applied in many other situations and can often be very useful.

Everything has an end (or almost)

UG would have been nothing without its community, to whom I want to give a special thanks for all the content they created, the help they gave and for just being there every day to have a chat. A community that somehow still managed to survive until this day.

Unfair-Gamers was fully shut down on March 1st, 2014, along with its smaller sister community The Coders Bay. (After all these years, I have to say that I’m still proud of its minimal design)

The reasons were mainly due to a shift in interests and priorities of the staff members and content creators, and I had less free time to keep the website running while constantly releasing/updating game hacks.

It was also the end of an era of its kind, and as I said I like to think that in a way the community succeded in its intent, with all the information now being still available out there. It was a fun project and also an important phase of my life to which I will always look back with a smile.

Bonus content

• The top 15 members by post number were, in order: Ryukizashi, ThePILLI, GLyTCH, Zyrel, ionut_baluca, D4.Ny, xXStephXx, vezdebest, Sakawa, Kingblast, MrTiz, ActionMan95, Sky92, Zioborn, Madara Uchiha. (Top 100)
• The most viewed posts were Metin2 hacks and bots by D4.Ny, Metin2 private server guides by Kingblast and a Dark Orbit bot by SnFede.
• A style revamp was also in the works, but I never had the time to complete it.
• The green emoticons used on The Coders Bay can be donwloaded here.
• I was going to release one last bot for Metin2, but my testing account was banned in the process, after passing undetected for years. I was too tired to create a new one. 🪦

Meeting

In December 2019, a few of us were able to meet in person in Milan.