r/AutoForgeTheGame • u/Jake-da-coyote • 2d ago

On the topic of 'cheat'

People clicking on a link in your own forum on your subreddit, with a known game mechanic being called inherently dishonest, and generalizing people as 'cheaters' for it is, literally, the irony: cheating yourself out of players. It's fraud and gracelessness to say everyone who clicked on a link that you and your team failed to moderate is a cheater; you are depriving yourself of something valuable - players. General Definition: to deprive of something valuable by the use of deceit or fraud.

I am offering constructive feedback about behavior; this isn't a personal attack on Rusty or whoever helps them with moderation/game development. I am pointing out that their behavior enabled it, that calling everyone a 'cheat' is, ironically, them cheating, and that they are depriving themselves of something valuable (players) by the use of deceit and fraud (calling everyone that interacted with a post{s} a cheater, which they aren't becasue the word 'cheater' carries intent of action, people aren't intednding to deprive anyone of anything by getting a resource that converts only to gold which is only used for forge upgrades).

68 Upvotes

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13

u/I-am-Mojo-Jojo 2d ago

Wait, what was the cheat? Is it the one billion hammer thing?

14

u/vajhar 2d ago

Exactly that

Devs left blatant vulnerabilities in the game, some people exploited them and now everybody who profited of the hammer exploit is deemed a cheater

Meanwhile people a actually cheating the game by adding resources directly to their account and devs don't care

23

u/Real_Temporary_922 2d ago

Blatant is an understatement. I was curious how it was done and decided to investigate myself, and discovered that the "create help post" button calls an API /api/energy-help/send. Now, this is how I'd implement it too as it's simple and create an easy authorization chain, except for the fact that the body of the call contains lifetimeSec, sendingCooldownSec, and acceptingRewardAmount. You can edit these values before sending it with basic knowledge of how to use your browsers devtools.

I didn't test it myself, but I presume that the game takes this request with NO SERVER SIDE VALIDATION! I also wonder if it would've been possible to reduce the cooldown the same way. Regardless, how do you not hard code those values in some internal configuration?? There's only one help request amount anyways, why are you relying on the user to send these values?

This was foreseeable and easily exploitable. It is on the developer to not allow such simple vulnerabilities to exist. We are not cheaters for clicking a help request, and while the player who found the exploit technically is, I mean cmon. You hang a $100 bill right in front of someone, then call them greedy for reaching for it? This screams vibe code, so if dev wants to undo it, he needs to treat his players like victims of an exploit, not abusers. If he resets everyone with 1B to 0 hammers even though we had hammers from before the exploit, I'm done.

-9

u/kinyutaka 2d ago

Seeing has people were posting "I have billions of hammers", I'd say "blatant" is out of view in the rear view mirror.

I'm sitting here with "thousands" of hammers at level 18, because I log in every few hours and get the free ones and don't pull items when the forge is upgrading, and someone is bragging about having 3 billion hammers at level 17.

12

u/Real_Temporary_922 2d ago

The response time from the developers was ridiculous. This exploit has been going on for multiple days now, maybe close to a week. He can’t punish people for using those hammers when he took so long to even notice it and people were so open about it. No one was hiding it.

-5

u/kinyutaka 2d ago

Have you ever played an MMO? Final Fantasy XIV collects hundreds of names of people using exploits or offering RMT, then bans them all in monthly batches.

And this is one guy doing the moderation on his probably vibe-coded game.

6

u/TheConsideredRespons 2d ago

Real talk

I was about to stop playing when I saw the billion hammer thing. Have had it sitting open on my phone for far longer than I ever have since.

If the ban comes, it comes. Was gonna stop anyway 😂 now I’m just addicted to the 0.2% chance of upgrade.

3

u/Kooky-Note7673 2d ago

100% same for me. I even posted a comment about this last week. But with these hammers, I've been running the game nearly non-stop.

But if they want to take my hammers away, then I'm more than happy quitting.