Splatterball

Splatterball Logo.

Splatterball (or "Reg" as it was often referred to, meaning "Regular" to denote its difference from it's provisional and eventual successor "Splatterball Plus") was a popular paintball-style online game provided by AOL (America Online) and GameStorm (Mythic Entertainment) services beginning in 1997. The game, developed by Mythic Entertainment, the creators of the popular MMORPG Dark Age of Camelot was one of the first successful massively multiplayer online shooters. Splatterball was a capture the flag format and was played in one of four virtual arenas: Splat Lake, Splat Park, Castle and Splat West. Players could score team flag points by keeping the flag on base, and could score personal points by shooting other players with various virtual paintball guns (the Pistol, the Burst Gun, the Balloon gun and the Rifle). The type of paintball gun utilized was a personal preference, though most highly ranked players preferred the Balloon gun. Splatterball later had a sequel known as Splatterball Plus on a separate proprietary gaming service run by Mythic Entertainment.

Originally Splatterball was available through America Online, using keyword "Splatterball". AOL users could log on and were charged by the amount of time they played, which was then directly billed to their AOL account. British residents did not pay for Splatterball in the same way, instead they payed roughly 1 pence sterling a minute and it came directly off their phone bill. At roughly 60 pence an hour the toll was GeneRally the same as their United States counterparts.

Splatterball became extremely popular for AbOUT three years and managed to generate a huge following. The Splatterball message boards on AOL were heavily frequented and ACTIVE, creating a feeling of community amongst the players, followers and fans. It was this Close-knit community which kept people coming back.

Splatterball was a modification of Mythic's "Magestorm" and initially contained identical code with several modifications. This development made possible by the suggestion of Mythics Mark Jacobs.

The splatterball client software was roughly 7mb big and on average took 25-30 minutes to download via dialup through AOL's service.

Weaponry

Splatterball offered 3 Primary weapon choices and 1 mandatory Secondary weapon.

Screenshot from Splatterballs first public BETA. Using the Splat Pistol in Splat Lake.

Characters

Splatterball offered four individual characters to choose to play as. Splatterballs four character types were chosen to represent different ethnicities and genders.

System Operators - SPLATS

System operators or "SPLATS" were an administrative character granted special privilages to police Splatterball. A system operator would be noticable by their bright pink highlighted name and prefix "SPLAT_". SPLATs would generally have a secret in game character that they used to play casually. In order to apply to be a SPLAT you had to be a United States resident over the age of 16, however generally no application would be accepted unless a player was aged over 18.

No character held an advantage over the other. A notable difference other than appearance was the different audio samples used when in game.

Arenas

Splatterball offered four arenas of play with various objectives and formats.

Ranks

Squads

A squad could be formed by any player. A denotion of which squad you were part of was initially represented by aquiring a character rename to attach a prefix or a suffix or both.

Examples (Squads chosen to represent different styles of tagging):

S_Name_X (A player belonging so Splat Xtreme) Name^IK (A player belonging to Immortal Killers) SF_Name (A Player belonging to Splat Force)

Initially the Prefix or Suffix was down to squad preference, however changes in Squad rules restricted players to only use either a Prefix or a Suffix, not both. Additional changes in squad naming rules required an updated Squad Roster to me emailed to the designated Squad Co-Ordinator or Renamer, eventually named "SPLAT_NAME". This rule was set in place to PReVENT fraudulent name changes and to deal with the volume of renaming requests a game op would receive whilst online.

Squads would generally follow a heirach. With the President or Co-Presidents being the Squad Leaders, and several other designated officials such as Vice Presidents, Captains and other ranks. Squads would often offer trials, or probation to new members before inducting them into their team.

A Squad would generally keep close contact through AOL's community message boards, Instant messenger and Email systems.

Boot Camp

Boot camp was a provisional message board area on AOL's community message boards. A new squad would have to apply to join boot camp and pass a months probation before being promoted to the Splat Barracks where they would also be inducted into the Official Splatterball Ladder.

To successfully pass Boot Camp a team would have to demonstrate sportsmanship, orderly conduct, adherance to in game Terms of Service, correct protocols when dealing with official Splatterball squad issues and good bookkeeping, essentially keeping up to date rosters.

Splat Barracks

Splat Barracks was essentially a community message board for fully inducted and official squads. Squads would have to adhere to the same terms of service as Boot Camp however under less scrutiny. A team was rarely removed from Barracks unless repeated Terms of Service violations occurred, the team disbanded or players were found to be Hexing/Cheating.

Ladders and Tournaments

Fierce competition due to the formation of Clans (Squads) led to the introduction of an official Splatterball Ladder. The ladder consisted of 20 or so teams who had proved their commitment to the game as a serious squad by demonstrating that they were active through AOL's community message boards. After graduating from "Boot Camp" a squad would then be inducted to the bottom of the ladder.

Throughout the lifespan of Splatterball teams SF (Splat Force), M (Malice) and FtP (Fi Theta Psi) were notably dominant. Towards the end of Splatterballs life, particularily after the closure announcement, the rules of the ladder were taken less seriously, and with members using aliases to play for other clans, the Ladder closed with SX (Splat Xtreme) finishing top dispite this squad being a consistent 7th place in the ladder over the past two years.

Splatteball's official Ladder was generally hosted on a Game Operator's AOL member webspace, this operator (known in game as a "SPLAT" denoted by their in-game prefix and bright pink colouring) would generally administrate the ladder and deal with all correspondence, disputes and updates. The site was generally of poor quality however contained adequate content.

In addition to a regular ladder, events were held however reletively infrequent. Notable events include:

July 4th independence day Tournament where players would face off against in game OPS (SPLAT's) mimicing British vs American conflict during the American war of Independence. This event was often critisized by the British community for generally trivial issues such as not being able to play as the British, in addition was deemed as nationally insensitive.

Splat West Tournament - This tournament was a traditional team vs team conflict in a less popular map named "Splat West". Splat West's lack of popularity was possibly due to the size of the map and odd layout.

Elite Status

Elite Status was essentially a title given to Splatterball Squads who had demonstrated notable success, dedication to the game and very good in game etiquette both on AOL community message boards and in the game itself.

Elite Status squads would be gifted an AOL Keyword and official AOL area for their squad. Elite status was notoriously difficult to achieve. After the closure of Splattball it became apparent that "Elite" squads often had Game Operators as members, suggesting that there was some sort of fix, although this was never proven.

Memorable "Elite" Squads include:

- SOLO (SOLO) - Fi Theta Psi (FtP) - Splat Force (SF) - Splat Bombers (SB) - Degeneration X (DX) - Splat Warriors (SW)

Hexing / Hacking / Exploits

The term "Hexing" referred to a player using third party software to edit hexadecimal values within their Splatterball game client to grant them abilities within the game to perform actions which gave them an advantage.

Initially the term hexing was coined to denote that a user wasn't smart enough to actually "hack" the game but to simply alter hexadecimal code using a program.

In the beginning, with the lack of sophistication within the Splatterball game client, files could be simply altered within the game directory offline, for example a player could edit Splatterball Sprite files with paint and they would then appear with their edited colors in-game. A hexing "squad" known as "The Smokeys" became notorious as a constant neusance in Splatterball during this era, however disappearing during the next update.

Additionally, several major security issues arose when it became apparent that a Game-Op (SPLAT's) administration privilages were granted by an additional file being installed in the splatterball directory as opposed to server-side authorization. This means a user could simply obtain a copy of this file.

Hexing notoriety

After Mythic had successfully addressed these software issues, users would still be able to search hexidecimal values often using "Gamehack 2.0" or "The Big Cheese", two third party programs available to alter hexidecimal values in real time. The hexing team "The Smokeys" once again appeared in larger profile than previously, notably, "Smokey 4", a player who eventually adopted the alias "Beanz" and whos data stream editing techniques using winsock packet editors and dissasembling the game clients plagued the Splatterball Plus and Magestorm Millennium communities, corrupting scoreboards on Magestorm and spoofing game operator "Cabin"'s account in order to rename, ban, kick and cause General Mayhem in Splatterball Plus. Many of which activities were accredited to in-game player "Idal" whos actual activies included only minor fraud (Using stolen credit cards to create Mythic Gaming Accounts) and hexing using programs coded by other people. "Idal"'s role in the latter exploit was generally down to his friendship with "Beanz" rather than actual coding or hexing technique.

SB HEX

Based on the concept of a hexidecimal "poke", a program named "SBHEX" emerged which allowed a user to use hotkeys, such as the "F" or "Function" keys which were not used in game by default, to toggle cheats on and off. The SBHEX utility contained the following features:

SB HEX highlighted a new problem as it was more difficult to tell who was and wasn't hexing. This meant that ladder matches could be cheated in, despite a game op's presence. It also caused several problems with flags being roofed.

Bugged Update

Mythic's next update eliminated SBHEX compatability and new techniques were saught by would-be hexers. However it became apparent that the hexadecimal values used to define game parameters such as Jumping, Running etc had simply been double and then divided by two in an attempt to conceal the actual value. ( a = (b x 2) / 2 )

In addition to this, the update contained an exploit which allowed certain characters using the Pistol weaponry to get 1 shot eliminations. This caused a lot of problems in ladder matches.

Effect on Service

No other "toggle" style program became popular on Splatterball however the problem of hexing remained and arguibly contributed to the closure of Splatterball as a gaming service.

Other known in-game exploits without using third party software became evident, with the introduction of "Pentium 3" and higher speed processors, a player would be able to use the games in-build system of screen minimization to run faster and jump higher, this gave a player a small advantage over other players and allowed them to reach places that were not intended by the developers. A common technique was to take the flag and place it in an unreachable place, thus ruining the game.

In-Game Terminology

In-Game terminology helped contribute the the culture and community of Splatterball gamers. Generally these terms would be coined from common-sensical in game general references.

In addition, many other terms could be used such as "pwned" or "owned", however not necessarily unique to Splatterball.

The End of Splatterball

In 2000 Splatterball players were notified that the game was to be removed from service. Later that year Splatterball was removed as an AOL game and the entire AOL gaming area outsourced to EA (Electronic Arts) much to the dispair of the 400+ membered Splatterball community.

An attempt was made by several enthusiasts to purchase the rights to use Splatterball and run it themselves, however Mythic would neglect to let go of this game as it contained code used in some of their other developments.

Late in Splatterball's lifespan, the game suffered serious playability issues due to both its aging interface with the AOL servers and its exploitable bugs. Mythic Entertainment, likely desiring to diminish its reliance on AOL, neglected to properly address the major issues and eventually suspended support.

With evident inadequecies surfacing, such as the transatlantic latency rates, billing issues, fraud and hexing, Splatterball on AOL was disbanded and Splatterball Plus, the games immediate successor, came to life through the Mythic Entertainment website. On Mythic's site, players could enjoy unlimited play for a flat fee of around 10 dollars a month. Splatterball Plus, however, had a palpable lagged pace, diminished playability and lack of AOL marketing support. As a result, Splatterball Plus never enjoyed anywhere near the popularity or notability of the original classic game.