The Sacred Gold Tree

I was thinking about writing yet another analysis about opening or exchanging the current chests. But in the past months, the exact same events repeat, the chests are exactly the same, only the name of the cloth set and the mount changes, nothing else. So the analysis I wrote here applies as long as the chests contents don't change. My advice is the same, open only if there is NOTHING useful at all in the exchange options. You can go even further - try to calculate how many chests you will need, and do only enough events to get that amount. Some events you can do only a limited time - for example, you can't make a limited number of mount refines, or sylph equipment enchants. So when you don't need all the chests, save your resources for the next event. For example, last week I got exactly 810 free chests. Far from enough for the mount, but it was enough for the cloth set, and 3 x 100 compliment of god. I could have gotten some more by doing more sylph equipment enchant, but I didn't need the extra chests, and I rather saved my attempts.

But as I said, this is not what I want to write about, but the Sacred Gold Tree hack. I could say "exploit", but this wasn't an exploit, like the treasure inventory. To take advantage of this, people had to use a simple hack program to modify game data. 

Back in the early times of Wartune, the thing which impressed me most was the low number of bugs, and the security of the game: there were no cheats, hacks, the game was checking everything thoroughly server-side. In other words, my account was safe, I knew whatever I achieve by spending time and money, will not be outdone by people who can use simple hacks which add them millions of balens or other goodies. The game is now bugged beyond belief, so I'm afraid there are now more vulnerablities as well. Hackers either discovered these or will discover. Of course, no program can be bug-free, and this is especially true for a game which is developed in so big steps. In the Gold Tree, the game was checking if you have the balens or not for the draw - but it did not do the same check when counting attempts used and giving awards for them. This way, people who used the hack could get 700+ golden want each time the Gold Tree popped.

Things like this can happen in every game, the question is, how the problem gets handled. You remember the treasure inventory exploit, I gave a pretty simple and efficient way which would have affected only who consciously and massively exploited, and would have undone all the harm +whould have given even a decree of punishment. Instead of that, the devs did some kind of totally nobrainer system full of mistakes. These 2 crisises, plus the shadow soul exploit show they have no clue how to handle these situations. They removed gold tree only 2 weeks after the hack became public, and their solution is to remove some merged sylph from anyone who win it from Sacred Gold Tree.

Some people get punished unjust, and some can get away with what they got. This gives a very insecure feeling to players. The solution would be to have logs of everything, I'm still astonished that they log only a few things. Also they shouldn't do all this manually (which they do now), they should run scripts, which check logs, list results, they verify if they correct, and also a program would make corrections.

If an exploit / hack is too widespread, you can't ban people - because if you ban 1/3 of your customers, you can close down your business. You have to remove all exploited items, and punish the exploiters. In the Doomlord online game's 5 year history, there were a few smaller exploits as well, but in those cases, the problem was fixed in 24 hours, and because they keep log of everything, all harm was undone. Actually, handling these problems should be part of the package, like customer support or forum mods....

The Sacred Gold Tree was one of the darkest pits of Wartune anyway: a money-sucking hoax, where you could win nothing useful, despite a long list of drooling items, you always win sepulcrum only. Yes there was 1:1000 chance for something valuable, but it was only an illusion to lure away the balen of the small spender, and now it seems, a lure for the hacker.