Yesterday, players brought to our attention a number of concerns about exploits and hacks in the game. So we are going to transparently address them here. This will let you know what is not an issue, what is, and how it is being addressed.
The team and coders fix bugs pretty much non-stop. The process is pretty straightforward. If you report a bug or issue in the game through the game or player support, it gets sent to the coders and they prioritize it. Testers reproduce the bug. It is pretty logical that you must be able to make the bug happen to understand why it happens and be able to fix it. The biggest and most important bugs are fixed first. Bug fixes are made, and they roll out with the next weekly release. This list contains a combination of known and new issues. Following the same process we just talked about, once we learn about a new bug, we prioritize it, fix it, and then release the fix.
False. Upon investigating we have not found any evidence of this, just rumors . Although, it is possible for devs to do this.
True. We investigated a claim that players were able to access some Alpha Items. We found a few players who did indeed have the items without having the badge required to get them. The shops had proper requirements on them, but using a work around hack they were able to accept quests to get the items. This was done about 6 months ago. It is possible this issue has already been fixed. The coders are reviewing the code and will release a hotfix today if the quests are not properly locked. Then the items will be removed from any players who should not have them.
This is just informative. So there are two parts to the game. One if the client. When you hear "client" it typically means the program and files that live on your computer. You use this to login and connect to our game world. It is sort of like a web browser. You load stuff and experience our game world. On the other hand, there is the server. Server is just a fancy word for one of our computers. Our game servers are a collection of programs, databases, and files that combine like Voltron to run the game world. The golden rule of any MMORPG is that the server must be secure. This includes actions like fighting monsters, crafting, completing a quest, or leveling up. All online games are made this way now. The client on the other hand... well, the server can never trust the client because it lives on someone else's computer and can be tampered with. This is true of literally every game ever made. This is why all players use their client to connect and talk to the server. And the server relays messages between all players. Clients never talk directly to each other-- ever. Everyone just talks to the server, and then the server tells everyone else what is going on. This is how you keep a game safe and secure. This is important to understand reading on.
Devs of the game have a ton of top secret commands like /restartserver and /ban. Anyone can type these in. Go ahead. But they will only work if you are a dev. This is because the server will only allow devs to use those commands. There are a lot of things that work in the game this way.
There are a huge number of client commands. Some are intended for you to use and some only exist for the game to do stuff. For example, there are commands to change your facial expression or to force a cutscene to load. A lot of the reported issues were the use of a hacked game client to use commands & functions when they were not supposed to be used. In fact, almost all of the things reported fall in this category. Needless to say, decompiling or editing game's code is against the game's Terms of Service agreement. But that is like posting a "no trespassing sign"... good guys will follow the rules, but bad guys will just break into your house anyway. This is why we said above, it is important that the game server is secure. Overall, our players have been good. But when hacks and exploits are abused, we need to add new rules to the server to kick/ban/disable those ruining the game for others. In our previous games we have added traps. Traps include things like shops that no one would ever be able to access through normal gameplay. If a hacker opens the shop their account is instantly banned. They say we never give warnings when we do things like this. Please consider this an official warning announcement.
The biggest potential issue is speed hacks and teleportations. A year ago the team added a speed monitor and bot score to the game. The server watches your movement and if you appear to be teleporting or speeding around the map it adds a score to your character. We can detect the hackers, but have not enabled the automatic banning of players... yet. We have been doing it manually however. If a player is reported, and they are reported for this, then they send it to the devs who look at their bot score and then they will be manually banned. It seems we need to turn this on so people using these exploits will be automatically banned. We met tonight on this and are pulling the data so we can carefully set the ban thresholds. Because some people have already asked, no... the bot scores will never be public.
An exploit was reported that would allow players to skip rooms all the way to the boss. This is true for a good number of our dungeons. Our newer dungeons have requirements per room that you must complete in order to access the next room. The painfully manual solution for this issue is to go back through all of the dungeons and add requirements to each room. The new map editor tool that has just finished being created will make this easier.
Another exploit that was reported requires a custom command to be send to the server to activate a "Shrade Spawner". We call it a Shrade Spawner because this type of map machine was first created way back on the very first Friday the 13th. It just randomly spawns a monster from time to time. Sometimes we use the same (or similar) machine to deliver rewards at the end of dungeons. It was discovered that a Shrade Spawner was configured incorrectly. This made it possible to activate the machine over and over instead of having to wait for its normal spawn event. We have to manually go back through the maps and fix them.
There was a misleading claim that our new Spawn and Map Editor tools could be used by anyone with a client hack. This is not true. Like the dev commands that we talked about above, only devs can actually use the spawn and map editor tools. The server will not allow anyone other than devs to actually spawn monsters or edit any maps.
Just for the record, any game you install on Steam is downloaded to your computer. All of the files required to make the game run are on your computer. It was weird getting ragged on for our files being in your Steam folder when literally every other game you have is there too.
There was a claim that you could instantly win PvP games. We are investigating. It is important to take every claim seriously. The PvP match history logs do not show any examples of this-- but we are doing a deeper dive.
We are investigating this issue. Will keep you posted once we can recreate the bug.
If you download and play the game properly from Steam, you are safe. Our servers are secure. When you load up the game, it is a private conversation between your game client and the official servers.
However.....
If you download a hacked/modified/modded client be warned. A hacked/modified game client can access your email, password, every message you type, and it can be programmed to do anything it wants. For example, it can steal your account, steal information from your computer, open a backdoor into your computer, or turn your computer into a zombie node for a DDOS service. Antivirus software will not detect it, because you will be putting the hacked files there yourself. For the record, I am not saying that anyone in our community is doing this. But as a result of the things that were posted, there are probably going to be malicious coders suddenly releasing hacked versions of the game which promise all sorts of things into the wild. You should avoid the danger.
I would like to thank everyone who helped bring these issues to our attention and who are helping to make the game better. We will keep you up to date on our progress on these fixes.
Meanwhile, Nulgath Part 3 is approaching. The new map editor tools are finally finished and we are now using them to build the Nulgath release. We have a working demo of the Sheathing feature. And it is March, so there is probably going to be some Dage stuff at some point.
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