Jump to content

7/7/2015 - Exploit Situation


Alex
 Share

Recommended Posts

...and I had just started planning for the reset.

A good response. I hope whatever the exploit may be is resolved soon, but given these actions the community should have the strength to keep moving.

o/ Sheepy

o/ Judge Malone

As you sow, so shall you reap

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Big shoutout to Last187, dont let the door of justice hit you in the ass on your way out!

  • Upvote 5

 

 

Peace will never be accomplished without war, but war cannot happen without peace.... or something like that idk

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Congrats to Malone for his new position, and Sheepy for his effort to be a good developer and stop exploits.

indonesia.jpg

King Bilal the Great Mediocre

The Average monarch of Billonesia

Wikia page (if you're into roleplay things).

We Tvtropes now. (down the rabbit hole!)

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Unfortunately by the sound of it there are still people who can profit from this. The exploit has not been found. Until such time as it is found and patched, people are literally wasting time playing the game with any seriousness. And even if it is eventually found, the exploited cash/resources will continue to benefit some players above others. 

I'm going to have to agree with Bubblegum here.

 

As long as there are people who are cheating, it just isn't worth me playing the game. I'll most likely be going inactive until all the exploiting business is fixed and then we'll see. Seeing how they've most likely pushed some alliances above others, the politics are going to be really unbalanced. I'd have no problem with a reset with the game in it's current state to be perfectly honest here.

 

It's unfair to the other players when you have alliance a lot bigger then they should be, due to people in them exploiting. Whoever is running this mob is not stupid at all, he or she has most likely pumped cash all over the game, catching it all would be almost impossible at this point. We have no idea how long this crap has been going on and how many people have benefited from it.

Edited by Eru Iluvatar
Link to comment
Share on other sites

I'm going to have to agree with Bubblegum here.

 

As long as there are people who are cheating, it just isn't worth me playing the game. I'll most likely be going inactive until all the exploiting business is fixed and then we'll see. Seeing how they've most likely pushed some alliances above others, the politics are going to be really unbalanced. I'd have no problem with a reset with the game in it's current state to be perfectly honest here.

 

It's unfair to the other players when you have alliance a lot bigger then they should be, due to people in them exploiting. Whoever is running this mob is not stupid at all, he or she has most likely pumped cash all over the game, catching it all would be almost impossible at this point. We have no idea how long this crap has been going on and how many people have benefited from it.

 

Sorry to go off topic, but how did you jump over 1000 ns in two weeks?

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Sorry to go off topic, but how did you jump over 1000 ns in two weeks?

I was inactive for a while and found myself with a large stockpile of resources which I sold and cash which I used to jump.

 

Sheepy can check my nation out if he wants to, no cheating here. Lmfao.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I was inactive for a while and found myself with a large stockpile of resources which I sold and cash which I used to jump.

 

Sheepy can check my nation out if he wants to, no cheating here. Lmfao.

 

I hope he does 'cause that kind of growth is just not possible.

  • Upvote 5
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Eru Iluvatar selling food for 1700+ plus PPU helped his growth anyway. 

You have some sort of deal with VE where you buy and sell things for wacky prices?

  • Upvote 1

IpHGyGc.png

Link to comment
Share on other sites

VE until just now has been unaware of the selling our resources at ridiculous prices to Eru Iluvatar.

 

I havw looked down the trade history and noted odd trades with this nation and we will look into it.

  • Upvote 2
Link to comment
Share on other sites

I'm pleased with the announcement of Malone entering in as a second Admin, he will do a good job.

 

Malone will you still be playing the game as normal? I enjoyed watching your whole roleplay interact with the other nations ingame.

  • Upvote 1

☾☆


High Priest of Dio

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Good to see you're on the case.

 

Also, no wonder my credits sold! $$$

 

Really hope you catch them all.  Exploits must be the biggest threat to the future of the game, especially with a small admin team to deal with it.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

For example, I had heard rumors that it involved the Trade system, so I rebuilt the trade page. I told you all that it was simply to improve the experience (which was a bonus, clearly) but truly it was to double check and scour for any sort of bug that could've been abused to spawn money into the game. I've made a number of other smaller, not obvious changes to the code, and scoured page after page looking for potential exploitable code, making improvements everywhere I could.

 

I'm a very active trader. If I get to know of some problem in the trade system, then I'll let you two know.

 

Good luck guys, hope you can find it soon !

 

 

That said, (in theory) the next time they attempt to use the exploit we should be obvious and we should be able to catch it almost immediately. I was actually very optimistic about finding and fixing the exploit myself within the next few days, but there was suddenly a drop in activity from the cheaters. It was a waiting game until the post alerting the community was made.

 

Does this mean you already know who is cheating?

Edited by Aerys Targaryen
Link to comment
Share on other sites

I've already said this to you in private many days ago, but those who knew about the figures exploiting and did not report it should get punished as well. 

200px-UPN.svg.png

Second in Command of UPN

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Tiggera was on the receiving end of a lot of that stuff, but surely you knew that :P I happen to agree with this decision, and I hope we can get everyone. I'm pretty dang sure some alliance leaders that will remained unnamed very much did have a part in this, and so I would really recommend going after alliances that benefited from this a lot. 

 

 

Also, people who know Last well seem to think Pol Pot may have been his multi... And considering the people who he helped, I wouldn't be surprised.

 

Except when Pol Pot "helped" UPN, we reported it straight away, and then had the exploited money erased. Whereas in this case, many people were in the know -- yet didn't speak up. That's nearly as bad as doing the act yourself imo. Especially since it allowed for this to go on for so long, and there's a significant amount of exploited money in the system.

 

Also Sheepy you told me that you managed to setup something to track the exploit, and find out where the vulnerability. Why the hell was a topic posted before you tracked down the bug then? Use some common sense...

 

On another note, since you seem to ignore pretty much everything we speak about in query, let me raise this point publicly. You make enough from this game to hire an ethical hacker.  Just do it.

Edited by Saru
  • Upvote 5

200px-UPN.svg.png

Second in Command of UPN

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Until we are confident that the exploit has been fixed, all Credit Purchases have been disabled. I don't want anyone spending their hard earned money on in-game benefits when someone else could be getting those same benefits for free.

 

OK, so how am I supposed to turn off ads now that I can't buy credits to get VIP?  Couldn't you just disable trading of credits, or something?  Then if someone "creates" credits without donating, you'll have it logged and know what happened and be able to ban them.

Do you want your possessions identified?

Link to comment
Share on other sites

OK, so how am I supposed to turn off ads now that I can't buy credits to get VIP?  Couldn't you just disable trading of credits, or something?  Then if someone "creates" credits without donating, you'll have it logged and know what happened and be able to ban them.

It's probably more of an "I don't want people paying for a broken product" type of thing.

  • Upvote 4

Sieg Kaiser Reinhard!

Signature_zpsa64bf97d.jpg

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Why the hell was a topic posted before you tracked down the bug then? Use some common sense...

 

Because you missed the other thread (which was not posted by sheepy) where the whole thing got brought to light and then subsequently deleted several hours later.

Edited by Judge Dredd
  • Upvote 1

scSqPGJ.gif

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Because you missed the other thread (which was not posted by sheepy) where the whole thing got brought to light and then subsequently deleted several hours later.

 

That's the thread that I was referring to... Why did someone blow their load this early when it was a waiting game? (Wasn't it the new admin that posted it too?)

Edited by Saru
  • Upvote 1

200px-UPN.svg.png

Second in Command of UPN

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I think Sheepy has found a way to track it now. 

 

So no money spawned in directly? That's a big deal :P

 

Correct. From what we understand, they, supposedly, were buying up our trade offers without our knowledge. Like Sheepy said though, take a lot of this with a grain of salt, as our estimations don't really see how it had a real measurable impact on us or anyone else, since goods were being exchanged. The big issue was that the bug exists.  

 

If anyone read the logs of the Ghost conversation, the guy is clearly delusional about the impact he thinks he had politically and otherwise, so much so that it is literally comical. He saw himself as some sort of ~illuminati~, and I can tell people for a fact that a lot of his political commentaries and supposed deeds were pretty much the opposite of the truth.

 

So yea, the important part is that the bug is being hunted and fixed, not so much what that clown did or wanted to do.

Edited by Impero
  • Upvote 1

Lord of the Viridian Entente


imperosig.png

Link to comment
Share on other sites

It sucks that there is an exploit, but I'm grateful to see we at least have an active admin trying to handle it. I'm also glad to see Malone promoted, his website is extremely useful and he seems like a cool dude. I'm sure he'll be extremely useful for the game going forward.

  • Upvote 1

I will take responsibility for what I have done, if I must fall, I will rise each time a better man.

 

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Shouldn't it be possible track down where the variances are? Maybe what you need is a forensic accountant, not an ethical hacker :-P I don't know what records the game keeps, but you ought to be able to use income, expenses and trades to discover at what point cash or resources were spawned out of nothing. Even if you just had a variance tracker that compared the total amount of resources in the game to the expected amount at each turn change, you should catch any change in overall resources that isn't the result of production or consumption. 

 

And I'd like to see some attempt at evaluating and mitigating the benefit the exploit had on any alliance. I'm sure VE wouldn't want anyone to suspect or believe that it owes its top position to the fact that it has been the unwitting long-term beneficiary of cheating. 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Guest
This topic is now closed to further replies.
 Share

  • Recently Browsing   0 members

    • No registered users viewing this page.
×
×
  • Create New...

Important Information

By using this site, you agree to our Terms of Use and the Guidelines of the game and community.