POMMCheat – Private WoW Server Map Hack

A while back I decided to try World of Warcraft, but I felt like paying monthly to play a game may suck me in too deep, to “get my money’s worth”.

I quickly learned of an open source WoW client compatible MMORPG server called MaNGOS, and that the majority of so-called “private” servers run on it.

The particular server I played on featured a ‘players online’ map, where a world map was shown with markers placed for each player, with a color (red or blue) representing their faction.

This is awesome!  A cool feature that can’t be had by the paying customers of Blizzard.

I viewed the source of the page and saw that the map was making an AJAX call to another page with _run appended to it.  A quick visit to that page revealed a javascript function return with some malformed JSON containing all the player data for the map!

Since one of my character’s professions was Herbalism, I was making use of an addon that placed icons on the in-game map to mark known herb locations.  My initial thought was create a WoW addon that could place markers on the map using data from the “Players Online Map” that my server was running.

Unfortunately, Blizzard was smart in designing their addon system, and provided no way for getting outside data on the fly.  It *was* possible to overwrite files in the addon’s directory, but the addon would not have access to the updated on-disk files until it was reloaded, which required a reset of the entire UI.  In short: it wasn’t going to happen this way.

I played around with ideas on how to have a dummy character in the game that constantly barraged me with player data in private messages, but ultimately abandoned it.

I then encountered another challenge: to make this worthwhile, I would have to be able to convert the coordinates from the server (which were for the world map) down to the individual “zones” of the WoW universe.  How would I go about gathering the conversions?  Certainly visiting every zone in the game and recording my position was not the right (or remotely easy) approach.

Remembering that WoW addons are written in LUA and I could view their source, I looked at the code of the herb-locating addon.  It was using a library called Astrolabe that provided World -> Continent -> Zone coordinate offsets!  With this data, I would be able to precisely locate players in zones by just receiving their world map position!

I set out to understand how zone and continent coordinates related to world coordinates…

…and above shows my Eureka! moment.  I was excited to be working on the map, and could not wait to avoid unnecessary PvP in Stranglethorn Vale.

For ease of development, I decided to make little changes to the web map itself, but rather replace the player data source with a CGI Python script (I just wanted an excuse to try out Python really).

My first version was hackish at best, and looked more like Java in Python clothing (read: disgusting).   All that was left to do was refine the interface, and correct the coordinates by <10 pixels or so – when the server went down.

It turns out there is a ton of rivalry in the Private WoW Server Hosting world, since there is apparently a lot of money to be made selling levels and gear.  A rival server had gotten into our database and well, DROPed it.  Of course there was no backup.  I was bummed about losing my level 38 Warrior, but considered it a chance to try a new class.  At least I still had the map to work on.

I was wrong.  With the server being down, the admins decided to overhaul the website while they were at restoring it, and left out the Players Online Map in the redesign.  My motivation to play again and work on the map died right there.

It wasn’t until writing this project page about a year later that I revisted, and ultimately decided to rewrite, the code at the heart of my map hack.  It is still not perfect but I replaced a lot of ugly code with a smaller amount of ugly code.  A giant list of dictionaries containing all the coordinate offset data was replace by an sqlite database.  The malformed JSON is now corrected and parsed using the json module.  The crazy nested loops are now list comprehensions or lambdas.

I had a lot of fun initially designing and writing this, and thouroghly enjoyed revisiting it.  If you want to, you can check out the last revision of the map hack here: POMMCheat.  Be warned, it is buggy, and the target private WoW server may no longer be around.  Try clicking a player without unicode characters in their name (I know, I’m terrible).

If you wish to view the source, check it out on github.

UPDATE: looks like the new version of POMM is made with Flash, and has all the functionality of my hack!  Check out a running copy on bc.uz.