After an exploit was found over the weekend that first let players send images in the chat box, kick other players unknowingly and duplicate gold, Amazon has stepped in and taken some drastic action.
While the images and kicking was dealt with through an update, efforts to bring the game’s economy back under control have convinced Amazon to go a little further and disable “all forms of wealth transfers”.
Posting on the game’s forums, a community manager writes:
Hi all,
We are aware of a possible gold duplication exploit that has been circling and we are temporarily disabling all forms of wealth transfer between players (ie. sending currency, guild treasury, trading post, player to player trading).
Any player that has engaged in the use of this exploit will be actioned against.
Once the gold duplication exploit has been investigated and we are ready to turn on wealth transfer again, we will update this post.
Thank you for your understanding.
That’s certainly one way to get your economy back on track. And good luck with the whole “Any player that has engaged in the use of this exploit will be actioned against” part, since I’m going to assume that with the exploit open and public for so long that a lot of people took advantage of it.
The exploit was first discovered over the weekend, when players found they could use HTML in the game’s chat boxes to run some code. While initially amusing themselves by spamming images of stuff like sausages, people soon found that they could take more malicious actions using the exploit, like kicking other players.
It was then discovered that, by tricking the game into thinking they had just obtained an item that would trigger a quest completion state, players could gain gold just by dumping some HTML code, and do it over and over and over again. Which is fun for the individual player, but can utterly derail the managed economy of an online video game, hence the intervention.