Quite the exploit

[SassySusie]

So I happened to come across this in the casino today, and then happened to see they spent 300K of the earnings at my shop. This is not the first time I have seen this, the last time I had seen it I turned it into an admin and nothing was done, then weeks later it is a different name doing the same thing. Whatever exploit this is it should be stopped in my opinion.


https://i.imgur.com/JSoYPgZ.png


https://i.imgur.com/27E0Zue.png

[Citan]

I think you're wrong that we haven't acted on your cheating reports in the past. But if you know of someone who has definitely cheated at the match-3 game and who is still playing a week later, please let me know who. (For privacy best to send in a new ticket in-game with their character name.)

It's possible to cheat in the match-3 game by using 3rd-party software. We easily detect this (since it doesn't send the correct mid-game metadata to the server), and we routinely perma-ban for it. It usually takes a few days for the ban to happen, since I manually double-check the logs before actually doing the banning. We don't bother to clean up the scoreboards -- their scores roll off the list after a week anyway. There isn't an exploit per se: it's cheat apps. I could do more to block this type of cheating, but it's so easy to detect that it hasn't been a priority. Plus, it acts as a honeypot for cheaters, letting us detect and ban them.

That said, the person in this screenshot claimed to use a different exploit method -- one that doesn't involve third-party software (although it registered in our logs as cheating anyway). Given the bug report, some other details, and lack of prior cheating attempts, we're investigating before taking action.

I would normally not discuss matters regarding banning on the forum, but given that their name is plastered on the high-score lists in game, I guess it's unavoidable.

[AgentBbrian]

There was a bloke in my guild on ArcheAge back at the launch when they had that real money currency dupe exploit, he bought a 2nd account and duped about $30,000 worth of it.
He moved his exploited loot over to his main account, his alt account got banned but the main account with all the loot did not.

~Food for thought.