2015/12/15

The Wartune gem exploit

Lately, the Wartune developers make more and more critical mistakes, exploits are more common, sadly. While the average player is always happy when they find some small glitches, major exploits can be the death to any game if not corrected quickly.

I remember Everquest 2, a major mmorpg title. A guy found an exploit where he could duplicate and make unlimited of one specific item, and started generating unlimited platinum by selling it. He made a vendor on each server, and soon, he was selling the platinum for real money via game currency brokers. By the time the exploit was discovered, he made a million dollar and bought a sport car, and the game's economy was in ruins, nothing could be done about it. 


Wartune had some major exploits lately, but they were either not known widely and corrected quickly, or were not making big havoc. The shadow soul exploit was the first very heavy exploit. Players could get unlimited beast souls, and as such, could buy all mounts from the mount shop, worth several thousands dollars. Although the bug was corrected, the exploited mounts were never removed. So effectively, a guild (or several?) got balens worth like 3-5000 USD value for free. That problem was silenced, never mentioned again.

But the current exploit, the gem exploit is much worse, a true game-breaker. Players could make unlimited gems, including resist, resist reduce, eudaemon and divinity soul gems. I'm not sure how this worked, but someone on the forum said you just had to sort your treasure inventory, do a refresh and your gems duplicated. Just imagine, a player with all lvl 12 resist reduce crystals, all divinity souls lvl 12 (for multiple sylphs), etc. or a player making a truckload of extra gems and selling them for billons of gold. This is an advantage you can never catch up with. 

I don't like useless mourning, I rather try to come up with constructive ideas. I was thinking what would I do if  i were a developer.

1.) Players say only a complete rollback would solve the problem. Normally, this would be the best course, but now, 6 days has passed. The loss for all players would be tremendous. I can't imagine a compensation which would compensate for that (ok, I can, but we wont get it).

2.) They should check the logs and see who exploited. But I seriously doubt this is possible. They have some logs, but its quite poor, and if the exploit worked the above way, prolly they don't even see it.

Fortunately, there is a good solution,and relatively easy to implement.

Write a program routine which counts gem for a player. Each level one gem 1 point, level two 3-4 points, level three 9-16 points etc. Count ALL gems, in inventory, in guild vault, in mail, in sockets. After this routine is ready, compare this gem value for all players in the current database, and in the backup of the database made before the patch (they certainly made a patch at that point).
If a player has more than 20% gain in gem values in this 6 days (but at least 1000 points to exclude newbies starting this week), then do rollback for THAT character. So those who exploited, will lose everything they gained in the past 6 days, that would be sufficient punishment. Don't worry this will catch those too who made billions of gold, since they surely kept some of the gems. It will not catch those who just made a few gems, but 99% of the players are greedy, so it will be pretty accurate.

This is THE solution, possible to implement. I hope someone from Wartune developers read it.






6 comments:

  1. The game has changed so much. The battle use to be against other guilds. Now it seems the battle is constantly with the developers of the game. From guild chat to reading the forum, there is a lot of anger with the game. More than I can remember. It's too bad since I enjoy certain aspects of the game. But it's hard. They aren't even trying to hide the cashing aspect of the game anymore: $600 USD for merged sylphs, poker, adding a zillion things we need to build up on our toon to stay ahead. It's a real turn off. I really don't have much confidence things will turn around either.

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    1. Yes, I agree. Maybe they could still save the game, but the ignorance which got them to this point will prevent them to understand what they have to do :( It would be a grief because I liked this game very much.

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    2. Well they took it to a different level. They're banning players and taking away gems with no explanation & seems like they're including a lot of innocent players as well. I'm afraid to synthesize any gems in the Hot Event in case that triggers the ban matrix they have programmed (I assume the accounts aren't being individually monitored but they have some bot banning the accounts)

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    3. Yes, they are very, very bad at communication. I think the ban is just to lock players to examine, but this is unacceptable without explanation. And it seems they have no way to check who exploited and who didnt, and taking gems away on random :(

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  2. Why would you ever put countless balens into this game, when you can get so much more by finding the right bug? Balen market is going to crash. I wish I had gotten unlimited gold and gems for free. The game has it's fun points and challenges, but to try to compete to be the strongest seems senseless at this point.

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    Replies
    1. Yes, its the highest priority to be able to handle such situations quickly and efficiently by any company. I have seen a few bug problem in the past years in Doomlord too, but all were resolved professionally. I think the Chinese were just unprepared for this situation.

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