The Duping phenomenon only started to explode after the launch of Beta 5. Prior to this update duping was possible but there was little reason to dupe as everyone already had the best equipment for free and using mana to powergame your magic level was too easy to spot due to how difficult it was to buy and drink mana by non-cheating players. Yet with the elimination of easy rares and the rapidly increasing player base, duping became one of the fastest ways to gain advantage over others. The lack of oversight and design mechanics of duping reduced most of the risk of getting caught.
How you duped was simple in its mechanics, all you had to do was exploit the save difference between characters and servers in how they saved. Characters saved their state (inventory including equipment, skills, and levels) once they logged out, while the server would force logout characters once a day and then save the playerfree map state. Provided there was no map refresh which cleared an area back to its programed state, an item placed on the map would be saved in that spot when the server rebooted so if the server crashed, it would be reverted to the last state. If you placed items on the map prior to save and then logged back in to pick them up then logged off, the items would be saved to your character. If the server crashed, you could grab a second set of items from the map while keeping the first. You could also duplicate in reverse by dropping your items on the map and then crashing your character client which would revert you to your previously saved sate, now with a second set of items. This way was more difficult as you had to find a repeatable bug to exploit, but those would often get patched fast.
The HK group was probably the most well-known group to engage in duplication and they had it down to an artform. They would often hide a bag of goods on the map right before save so they would save to the map state. After the map reloaded, they would log in and grab their items and log off to save their character state. When the server crashed, either by deliberate exploits or naturally as it crashed often, they would log a junk char at the site they had stashed the items and pick up the duplicated items.
This tactic was effective but left the duplication up to chance. If there was no reset then they would have taken the risk for nothing and if the server crashed later while they weren't on, someone else might come across the loot. If something didn't work out, you would lose what you placed on the map forever so rares were more of a challenge to duplicate. Most dupers didn't duplicate rares but focused on mana and money which could be duplicated with greatly reduced risk. As the safe trade didn't exist, it was risky to trade with players, so you could easily eliminate any loss by duplicating cash. You didn't even need to be wealthy as small amounts compounded after each success. Many dupers choose to duplicate mana to fund new PK mages with above normal magic levels as they would use a macro to consume the mana and it would not have to go through the tough process of buying from the store. Gold was used to fund new characters and buy up rares to duplicate. There were rumors of lucky players finding forgotten duplicated rare sets hidden under trees.
When the Thais Hotel was up for rent, the HK group made it a point to buy all the units on the south side which faced the swamp. These units had a balcony which allowed roof access if you stacked parcels or crates on top of each other. Once you controlled the unintended roof access you were free to do anything in safety up there including stashing rares for duplication. This area worked to their advantage when the fishing duping bug was discovered.
The bug, according to Karl, involved your inventory and a fishing rod. "To dupe back then using the inventory method, you put a fishing rod on the ground and right clicked on it, then stepped on the rod and clicked it above your head. A single window would open like a backpack in the consol, the graphic looked like the old blond head, and it had the grey and red up and down arrows, a crosshair marking, red outline box as a target (the old targeting system), and a full red box like when you attacked something. Each of the inventory spots had an item in it, the items you had in your backpack. You just took the items out of the wierd inventory and put them on the ground, logged off and back on again and youd have your full inventory back plus your items on the ground." -Karl
Duping started out as a secret operation, creating only a few items to test the response, but eventually ballooned out of control as the knowledge spread and greed intensified. CIP was unable to do anything as they were busy with the constant server crashes, which forced them to spend their time analyzing the crash and then rebooting the server again. There was no real way to track items during this time, so it was not very clear what was being added to the game. The real damage would become very clear when the Ice Rapier and Power Bolt (arrow?) was added to the game. Ice Rapiers was a 450 attack weapon which could be found as a quest item. The outrageous attack had a significant drawback – it would only last a single hit. Similarly, the Power Bolt had a high attack but could only be found inside tough monsters and was rare loot. With duping this drawback was eliminated as players made tons of copies and killed anyone they could, often in just a single hit.
The Beta 5 update saw the elimination of easy rares but duping would see that rares would indeed be available, though not anywhere near as much as before. Galadriel had gone to the Demon treasure room to check for new items right after the server came back online after the update. He found a rare set in the chest but didn't realize this was the only rare set in game and had been an oversight as CIP had intended that no rares be found in game. Other then telling Karl, he kept this secret to himself but continued to wear the incredible gear.
This gear ended up in dupers hands, however. Karl recalls that one of the predominate dupers, KrAzY/Villux Batch, "was out on their newbie characters looking for high levels to kill with ice rapiers. Galadriel, holder of the only HoTs and Eplate in game, walked by at x roads. He killed her in a single shot and was surprised at what she droped. They had no idea that she had these spectacular items and promptly began duping them."
Stom/Kensu, knew the fishing duplication bug, having found it accidently with Aureus. He got ahold of a set and made 30-50 of the sets and gave them away to friends. His friends died often so rares spread throughout the community as people looted their bodies. He was careful with duping at first, creating new characters to do the duplication, but got slopy and used his main to dupe which eventually led to his deletion.
"Aureus of course reported the duping bug and it was eventualy repaired (though the damage had already been done). The duping phenominon of the 99's and 00's did not end with this glitches' removal as other people where secretly abusing duping bugs at the time."-Karl
With so much duplication occurring, you would think we would have returned to the era of rares thrown around as worthless but though many rare sets were created it was not anywhere near enough to meet the needs of the fast growing game. CIP estimates that around 120 HotS existed in the game at the end of the duping bug though the number which exist today is likely much less. Though the Eplate, HotS, and later SoV was duplicated on mass, many other of our iconic unique items were not duplicated. Very few Herms and Horned Helmets were duplicated as they were inferior to the HotS.
Most unique rare holders were reluctant to loan or risk their item to dupers and many outright refused as an ethics problem. There was a risk of losing the rare and you also had to trust other people with an item which was very valuable. Duplicating your item would also lower the value of what you already had so it didn't make sense. The dupers did use duped gold to buy any rare they could get their hands on. That we have any iconic old unique rares is only because of those who refused to cheat. By maintaining these unique items from the past we have been able to enjoy the dream of owning an iconic piece of history.
If CIP had been unaware of the increasing amount of rares, they would at least have become aware of the massive complaints by players getting one shot PKed while they walked through town. The community was very vocal and angry on the boards at being one hit by low-level junk chars. CIP knew that the deaths were the result of Ice Rapiers and Powerbolts, so took steps to reduce the game breaking weapons attack power. It is not known what attack power the Powerbolt had, but it was similarly reduced as the Ice Rapier which dropped from 450 attack to 100 attack. These weapons were deadly but no longer a one-shot PK.
It seems likely that CIP became fully aware of the duplication issue, or at least began actively developing tools to try to get ahead of it sometime after the launch of Fibula. They realized that they needed to be able to track rare items to spot anomalous amounts of items suddenly appearing to preserve the balance of the game. The fishing duplication bug was fixed, and the practitioners deleted, ending one of the easiest methods for duping to be closed.
Despite the development of tools to track rares duplication abuse continued to damage the game with the cheated Demon Powered Shield. This shield was cheated out of a locked treasure room and then duplicated. It had a defense of 50 and strangely an attack power of 5 which was bugged. By this point CIP had some ability to track rares so Guido personally tracked down each of these shields and removed them from the game. Many players were deleted along with their shield with the famous Flamehead only escaping deletion by chance when he died in PoH the previous day, losing the shield. GM Ender Speaker of the Dead only avoided deletion by paying a huge amount of items and gold, and was severely chastised for not reporting the shield, instead selling it to Lightbringer who himself had to plead himself out of a deletion.
It is also rumored that around this time a Warlord Sword was auctioned off, a gift from CIP to the organizers of the first Tibian convention. This weapon was won by a player who paid in many stacks of diamond, and likely had plans to duplicate the sword too. CIP discovered that the gems had entered the game illegally and destroyed the weapon along with the buyers depot. There was even rumor that the Cyclopsemania Sword had been duplicated, leading to Guido deleting Arieswar's depot.
All of this created a massive headache for CIP as the game moved further out of balance with each item duplicated. CIP would adjust monsters or spells only to have their work ruined because players were gaining unintended boons. CIPs previous promise to not roll back the game again after the angry response from players after The Great Wipe had to be walked back to allowing some lost progress if the server crashed. Though it is not clear, I believe they also scrapped the character reset in favor of a total reset for a crash, which eliminated some of the major sources of duplication.
With the general item count tracking and patches CIP was able to gain control over the duping to eliminate it almost entirely. Behaviors of players would take a long time to change as they continued to try to find exploits. Many players had been conditioned to check for duping stashes under trees and even to this day I still check behind random trees in hopes of finding rares. Though I never have found a rare set, I have found plenty of other loot to compensate my trouble. You would think this was the end of duping, becoming an interesting foot note in Tibia's long history but duping would again return to Tibia in a big way.
CIP had run out of room on Antica, formally just called Tibia and had created a new game world, the first, called Nova. A character there by the name of Messiah discovered an exploit during one of the first great Nova wars. He found that during server save, if you waited just a mere moment before you were kicked out of the game, you could drop items on the ground and create duplicates. "On Nova, server save at the time was at 3:00:00 AM EST (GMT +5), so you would have to wait until approximately 2:59:30 AM EST. If the dupe was successful, you'd find the item both in your inventory and on the ground of your house after server save."
The reason for this was because characters saved prior to the server shut off, then the map would save. There was a moment in between these two states were the character would not be saved, but the delay allowed for duplication. Using this exploit he was able to gain many Amulets of Life and mana fluids, which he used to gain the highest magic level at the time which was magic level 76. His nickname was "The Human Mana Cask".
It is unknown if he was punished for abusing the exploit but once the rumor spread CIP adjusted the save to happen after action from the customer side of the client was no longer possible. This prevented any further possibility to dupe using this method. Thought another client exploit had been patched another massively destructive one was just around the corner.
Green Claw Swamp was already a fixture of the game, the home of the well-known Black Knight, which was created in Beta 6.1. The villa was sunken into the swamp so you would enter the second floor of the property and make your way down into the second floor and caves below. Tibia doesn't do surrounded by swamp very well, so the first floor looked just like it would if it was on the map surface with swamp surrounding it. The swamp tiles are of course unwalkable as are water and most lava, which means that if you suddenly found yourself on these tiles the game would be unable to process what happened next and crash.
After the huge update to Version 7 which occurred on August 2nd, 2002 the front door of the Black Knight property which had always been permanently locked, was suddenly unlocked, allowing you to open and close it. One of the mechanics of Tibia is that if you stand in a doorway and close it, you are pushed outside the door, in a southern direction in this case. This means that you would be pushed into the swamp causing the client to crash. It was a critical error so your progress would not be saved which meant you would spawn where you last logged out at with all your items intact. Those who found this bug found out right away that if you dropped your loot on the ground, they would have a second copy when you logged back in and could immediately go and do it again.
CIP had decent tracking software by this point, but they discovered it was utterly useless if players only duplicated benign items like gold and mana. Those who abused this bug, and there were many, stuck to these benign items and were only caught because some players choose to duplicate trackable items after word of it started to spread.
Ironically some GMs had uncovered the bug as the rumor of it had begun to spread rapidly but Guido didn't read the reports which were sent to him so he was unaware of it until it become a major problem. One well-known GM, Deathwalker, even abused the bug himself, telling others, and was deleted for doing so. I recall being online when Guido found out about the bug and he was very furious in the GM chat that we all knew about the bug but didn't say anything. I angered him further by asking if he had read any of our reports :p.
I had been mostly playing Premia and was in the process of returning to Antica at the time when I found out about the bug. Someone I knew showed me a massive bag of platinum coins which totaled over 2.5billion. CIP was unable to detect this massive increase in gold which was so much money that it could have purchased every single rare in game at the time if there had been world transfers (HotS was worth 500k to 1mil each). Alex remarked that someone contacted him from Premia about selling an endless supply of gold for cheap so he could resell, but he reported it instead hoping for a reward (he never even got a response back).
On September 14th, 2002 CIP broke with protocol and reset the game worlds back an unprecedented amount of time. Premia was reset back the longest to September 1st, 2002, then Antica which was reset to September 8th, 2002, and finally Nova which was set back the least to September 12th, 2002. Fortunately, your skills and levels were able to be kept but all items including the map was reverted to those dates.
However, though the investigation lead to Premia getting punished the hardest (2.5 billion being flaunted around was easy to investigate), it was actually Antica that was abusing the bug first but those that knew about it stuck to untraceable items like gold and mana and didn't massively exploit the bug until closer to when it was "discovered". It is ironic Antica wasn't discovered sooner because not only were massive amounts of cash and mana being duplicated, but the mana was going directly towards funding new mages. The cheaters would exploit the Undead Legion skill to raise Skeletons, improving their magic level and then promptly kill them again use GFB, gaining the experience. They were able to spend all day doing this with zero risk.
Those I talked to largely believed the discover was because some of their friends had moved on to duplicating unique items and rares over platinum and consumables. Thought many junk chars were used, many also had used their mains. CIP was able to use the logout logs to find those that found the door by accident and didn't abuse it and those which used it to an excessive degree.
The list of who was deleted is quite lengthy as there was around 20 people duping, but these are all the ones I know: Precise, Brakiss, Kubik, Jenus, Juggalo Monoxide, Omega Guardian, Knightess Michaela, Adam and Gram Du'Vark and others.
Antica had been at war, with the Hokuten against Satori/The Rising Phoenix, but the massive exploit and subsequent deletion of most of Hokuten forced the war to end. Many of those deleted players would go to play Amera when it launched on October 7th, 2002.
Tibia has had a long and interesting path with cheating, bug abuse, and exploitation.