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Nation Information Exploit


Isjaki
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To my knowledge, there is no bug or exploit, just a bot that has been able to aggregate public information (trades, bank records, estimated turn revenue, etc.) and use it to predict with a high degree of accuracy any given nation's money or resources on hand.

Where are you getting these numbers from? It will be trivial to test it and see if it's an estimation or an actual value because I can just modify anyone's money or resource value temporarily through direct database edits.

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There are a lot of stuff like baseball, spy ops, spy recruitment that are not visible through any interface. I've recruited spies today. I have 28,563,409.66. That data shows 28,563,410.

This is an exploit. Not just simulating mechanics.

*PROOF*:
What I have: image.png.db2aa953ef50666d94a6cb3e385f407d.png

What it says I have: image.png.1f0f4580d2b0ffe42f7de3f8e1ccb743.png

Huh it can simulate that?: image.png.bfe14b0cf728948ba1d88f115a8a8362.png
 

Edited by NastyGamer
proof
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I'm making some manual database edits to multiple nations, and so far it is not tracking the changes.

Does anyone know who created this? @Isjaki

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1 hour ago, Alex said:

To my knowledge, there is no bug or exploit, just a bot that has been able to aggregate public information (trades, bank records, estimated turn revenue, etc.) and use it to predict with a high degree of accuracy any given nation's money or resources on hand.

Where are you getting these numbers from? It will be trivial to test it and see if it's an estimation or an actual value because I can just modify anyone's money or resource value temporarily through direct database edits.

Which would be the most convoluted explanation possible: a bot capable of tracking hidden transactions (e.g. spy ops / purchases) / infra + land levels over time / domestic policies used when buying infra + projects / military replenished over time (with adjustments to price of said military units in line with changelog updates) / daily login bonuses / etc. etc.

Orrrrr.....

Occam's razor. The most simplest solution:

 

There is an exploit.

 

Now considering it's 100% accurate as of each turn change imma go out on a limb here and suggest it might just be the most obvious explanation.

2 minutes ago, Alex said:

I'm making some manual database edits to multiple nations, and so far it is not tracking the changes.

Does anyone know who created this? @Isjaki

It updates each turn change.

Edited by Swedge
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I'm working on identifying if they are pulling data from somewhere. My best theory so far is that they were taking raw data from the "money in nations histogram" chart and using that. How they were matching it to specific nations, I'm not sure yet, but in the mean time I have disabled that graph. I'll continue to investigate.

Just now, Alex said:

I'm working on identifying if they are pulling data from somewhere. My best theory so far is that they were taking raw data from the "money in nations histogram" chart and using that. How they were matching it to specific nations, I'm not sure yet, but in the mean time I have disabled that graph. I'll continue to investigate.

This seems to be the best theory so far, as the exact money amounts match (rounded values, not to 2 decimals) and there do not seem to be any Vacation Mode nations included in the dump (VM nations were excluded from that graph.)

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42 minutes ago, Alex said:

I'm making some manual database edits to multiple nations, and so far it is not tracking the changes.

Does anyone know who created this? @Isjaki

@Alex this database was created by Vulcha (Vulcha#1574 on discord). He did tell me that this could be created in two ways, the first is by tracking all transactions, like you said and the second is by using the bug. I am not aware regarding the exact nature of the bug, but I believe having a conversation with him would clear it up.

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Just now, Isjaki said:

@Alex this database was created by Vulcha (Vulcha#1574 on discord). He did tell me that this could be created in two ways, the first is by tracking all transactions, like you said and the second is by using the bug. I am not aware regarding the exact nature of the bug, but I believe having a conversation with him would clear it up.

I've reached out to him, but he hasn't responded.

You said, "I was aware of this exploit for the past few weeks." How did you find out about this "exploit" and who told you?

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To everyone else - I believe we have this resolved now. I chatted with @Borg who was able to point me in the right direction as to how someone may have been able to use the raw data in the "Money in Nations Histogram" chart on the data visualization page to get every nation's cash-on-hand value.

That chart simply returned every nation's cash-on-hand amounts for the purposes of constructing a histogram (the page has now been disabled) but with no identifying information. It seems that this data happened to be sorted by a nation's score (ascending) by default, as no ordering was specified in the code.

Still, there are many duplicate score values and just comparing this to a list of nations sorted by score would create some inconsistencies. Borg suggested that one of the API pages may also be sorted by score, and sure enough the v1 "Nations" API endpoint is sorted by score descending.

So: a user would have simply needed to scrape the data from the graph page, and pull in data from the v1 API and reverse it to match nation IDs to cash-on-hand values.

With the graph page now disabled, that ought to render this whole process impossible, and we shall see shortly whether or not this page is able to update with correct values or not.

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7 minutes ago, Alex said:

I've reached out to him, but he hasn't responded.

You said, "I was aware of this exploit for the past few weeks." How did you find out about this "exploit" and who told you?

He himself. He is active in the main politicsandwar discord server, and occasionally estimates (accurately), the amount of money in any given nation. After he estimated mine currently, I hit him up in DMs.

 

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