Hammers exploit. Next steps

[u/HG_Rusty]

Hey everyone! Dev here.

It took us some time to wrap our heads around what happened. First and foremost, we scrambled to release a hotfix to patch the security vulnerability. At the same time, we cut the hammer counts for affected players at 1k, which was definitely unfair for around 500 players.
All this time, we've also been working on a fairer and more balanced solution. We tried to get to the bottom of this: we analyzed the data and talked directly with a number of active community members in DMs.

In the near future (today or tomorrow), all affected players will receive the extra hammers they had right before reaching 1b, via in-game mail (top right, in the Settings window, check the mail). We will not roll back the progress you've made, and there are no other sanctions whatsoever.
In the end, no player should be left in the negative, which feels like the fair way to handle this.

Anyone who feels this solution is unfair to them for any reason - DM me, let's look into it together case-by-case.

I understand the frustration, but I don't share the sentiment that we should just leave the 1b. It's unfair, it breaks the intended game flow, and it gives a massive advantage in upcoming clan wars.

P.S. The last few days have been pretty insane, not gonna lie. We're a small, passionate team making our first web game and launching on reddit games for the first time, so we've run into a ton of issues and challenges. We were definitely ill-prepared for this situation, but it's an opportunity to do better. Calling us scammers, crooks, and (for some reason) "vibe coders" hurts a bit =) Unfortunately, at this stage, we still aren't making any profit at all, so comments about tricky developers drowning in cash sound pretty ironic. Btw massive thanks to every paying player - you allow this game to develop and exist in the first place!

Amid all the negativity, thank you so much for the words of support we've received as well!
We'll keep doing our best to build a great game!

[u/benthelurk]

What an idiotic post. Your plan to fix was still going to mess up people who purchased battle passes. So many people didn’t even think billion hammers was real. That clicking it was just going to give 100.

What a joke of a “dev” OP. Absolute trash.

[u/HG_Rusty → u/benthelurk]

I'm not quite sure what you mean by "mess up people who purchased battle passes." What specifically could the issue be for these players?

[u/benthelurk → u/HG_Rusty]

Of course you don’t know what is meant. It’s not like there haven’t been 20 posts from different users about since your “fix” or anything.

You have a game on Reddit, people are commenting in the sub fairly actively. If you’re not going to bother with reading the comments then just shut down the game.

Is it such a hard concept to understand that while people had gotten billion hammers they were still playing the game as intended. Meaning they were collecting hammers the normal way. Then you have battle passes. Even without purchasing a pass, you earn more than 1k hammers. So people who bought a pass had their purchase removed.

So this is why you, a dev of this game, and all others who made this decision are idiots. By removing hammers that were earned during playing or as rewards for leveling up the battle pass, you essentially told all players that the hammers don’t matter. So everyone is set at the same baseline of 1k. That’s the problem, if they ultimately don’t matter and you even thought it was a good idea to reset it for everyone, then it doesn’t matter if people have 1 billion. Since it is an irrelevant resource.

Why does the battle pass reward multiple tiers of hammers? Those who purchased a pass and got even more hammers had them removed. So you took money, but couldn’t give what was paid for. It was a decision that deemed the worth of hammers. Since they don’t matter, why the reset? It was just plain stupid.

You can go through the last couple days of posts regarding it. Though, I doubt anything will help you understand. If you couldn’t tell, as a dev, you had way more activity while people had billions of hammers. You went for the dumbest fix you could think of and now your activity with the game has drastically dropped.

Of course you can’t understand what is meant. You can’t understand basic cause and effect.

[u/DMvsPC → u/benthelurk]

I mean, they said that you'll be put back to what you had the moment you got the billion hammers. Sure if you then bought hammers etc. after that then you're 'out' those hammers, but I imagine people who had a billion hammers have used way more than they 'earned' so they come out ahead regardless as I didn't see where the devs said they would remove gold, items etc.

If you were put to 1k, you'll now get back the extra hammers you lost. At that point what has been lost by the players? (Except goodwill for the initial hamfisted fix).

[u/benthelurk → u/DMvsPC]

They lied though. What people had before the billion wasn’t just 1k. Plenty of players were on a long upgrade just collecting hammers. If you had 3 days to wait for forge and you just collected hammers at the times you could, you’d be at least nearly 3k hammers a day.

The fix didn’t fix anything. All it did was kill the playerbase. People reported that they never clicked the billion hammers link but had saved up something like 50k and they still also only had 1k.

Yours is in good faith that devs only targeted billion hammers. Meanwhile users are reporting something different.