W3C - Cheating does not help

A player discovered an error in Simcountry that was there for a very long time. Probably from the start.

The error makes it possible to increase your assets very quickly.

Using this exploit is only possible when you go for a very large scale.
small amounts do not work.

Unfortunately for those who use them, we see the results on our logs.
we always see values that go beyond what we consider possible.
This exploit is based on these max and min values and using it is always visible, including links to the country and user.

We have now made some repairs that included the removal of some countries,
Huge scale removal of assets that ended up deep negative.
and some warnings to the largest of the users.

We will fix this bug quickly and also make sure nobody ends up with resources that were accumulated by use of this exploit.

We are grateful to players who saw this too and alerted us.

Thanks Andy. Good work.
Rob

We think that the bug is now fixed.
we have installed a new upgrade today.
we are looking at several cases with field values that are way out of range.

some may be linked to known cases (2)
some may be linked to additional cases.
we will look into it and make all needed corrections today.

We have found another account with unexplained assets and are bringing it back to a reasonable size.

@Andy I don't know how practical it would be for you to do, but is there any chance that you would be able to go through that players enterprise on FB and manually reset the timers on them, making them eligible to be nationalized by their host countries or bid on by other CEOs? I'm not personally on that world, but I know many players had their military corporations hostile bid and taken out from their control by that player and while yes they were compensated with the bid amount, I would wager most if not all would rather have their weapon/ammo manufacturing back being as how it's the war world. Or possibly the impacted players could reach out to you with the names of the impacted corporations and you could verify and manually return the corporation to them and deduct the market value from their cash on hand. Just thinking out loud, taking action against the cheater is absolutely a great move, you just hate to see people directly harmed by the player's actions have to deal with it if there's a way to make it right to them.

I'd second the fact that many players had multiple corporations taken by the deleted player. The markets got screwed up and put into big deficits (again) too.

The player in question bid on 7 corps of mine that I no longer control.

This actually opens up an interesting discussion about hostile bidding. If a player hostile bids outside of FB, it's likely they can face basically 0 repercussion because of war levels.

I wish there was a means of retaliation of sorts. There's a player who is not out of war level protection on GR who regularly hostile bids on other players' corporations.

Another report for you Andy, same player continuing same actions.

New CEO account player name 'The TA Empire' registered enterprise 'Tiny Atlas Supply Co' yesterday on TA. 10T cash, chain building targon corps.

Same account registered 3 country empire on TA yesterday. One country in the empire, 'Tiny Atlas Empire' has 3000T assets.

New CEO account player name 'Deus' registered enterprise 'TDE Wind Farms' yesterday on GR. 124T cash, 104 corporations.

Hello i had also informed the game master about the random assets when i bought the countries. I have went and looked as to how this happened and it appears as tho that when a player quits TA the countries dont recycle correctly. All non owned countries on ta have roughly -2T but after looking at "the empire of arba" right next to my country Tiny Atlas Empire it has over 30T in Assets.

also after looking at what ROB has just posted over in TA about his debt i went and looked at his old country he let go and wouldn't you know it its able to be bought and still has NEGATIVE 25T in assets.

So like i said it appears that the game doesn't recycle TA countries correctly. I also told the gm that they Should wipe all assets from the country and told them i wont touch them till they do.

The Game Master Just Informed me that the country i bought with all the assets was taken from a cheater awhile ago so my assumption is that my country has all this stock from him. ive asked the GM to look into this.

I think the issue TA empire mentions is real, on KB too. I always register the same country when I return. Last I was here was ~2014. I came back about 1 week ago, and found my country and registered it. It still had the name I left for the capital, and I believe it still had the same country name. I'm pretty sure a lot of the settings were the same as when I left.

It had the below offensive army waiting on me. The the old slave next to me seems to have an even lager offensive army. None of this seems normal.

@James Folsom

I briefly checked out your country's publicly available information and what it has does look pretty standard for the game lately, your image confirms that's roughly the general startup military. They try to start everyone with enough offensive military to have a competitive chance at conquering a C3 at the first war level right away. The TA Empire unfortunately is a confirmed cheat, the countries and enterprise he had on that world as well as his CEO accounts on FB that were called out for getting GC awards despite confirmed cheating have all disappeared over the course of the last day. So take anything he says with a grain of salt.

If you're getting back into the game after an extended absence and want to talk shop on strategy or even ask questions on things that may have been changed, absolutely feel free to join up the discord server. Link is via the Chat button on the left side menu here.

Andy,

I sent an email to you.

Check your messsages.

Thanks.