Sorry I missed it lol.
If it sounds to good to be true, then it must be.
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Yeah but it’s microsoft fault imo
There is no mention about limit x1
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I don’t think it really matters whose fault it is. Only that it was an obvious mistake now the devs need to decide what to do. Imo it’s a much bigger exploit than Zuul in forge.
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Should be easy to track anyway who bought multiple times
I think at this point it’s becoming clear that the majority of the community disagrees with the OP about demanding an apology from the dev, and feels that those who took part in the bug should be punished/fixed one way or the other.
Bottom line:
- An unintentional mistake was made.
- An exploit was abused.
- The developers warned the players of the consequence.
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Master sirrian is typing, we will know what happen 
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The game is their livelihood they have to protect it
Hey everyone,
Just filling you in on where we’re at with this and what happened.
THE SITUATION
We had partnered with Microsoft to offer some free Rain of Keys giveaways on Xbox via an in-game code.
This was great, and it’s brought 10’s thousands of new players into Gems of War, however, it came with a small issue: every player who redeemed the code registered as a $20 purchase in our system… we weren’t receiving any money (obviously) but the redemption was messing up our stats & reports!
As the Rain of Keys had been removed from the store, we dropped the price in the system to zero, so it wouldn’t mess with out reporting & analytics
WHAT WENT WRONG?
Somewhere between us & the players, the Rain of Keys got accidentally turned on in the store (at $0.00)… I’m pretty sure it wasn’t done by us… possibly a glitch in the store somewhere?.. we’re still investigating that.
WHEN DID WE NOTICE?
Nobody seemed to notice at first, it may have been there a few days, but our system warned us of a possible abuse on Friday morning (our time), which we were investigating, initially as a key or gem hack (very unusual on consoles).
At this stage, a small Guild of 6 players had all been using it, and I think a few others had found out - I don’t have the exact number on me, but I believe it was around 10-20 players.
We found the players were repeatedly gaining Rain of Keys packs, and a quick check of the store showed that it had indeed been incorrectly listed. So we began on a fix.
WHAT HAPPENED NEXT?
As we were partway through a fix, one of our support ninjas noticed a person sharing the exploit on Xbox chat. They jumped in, explained it was an exploit, and warned that anybody using it could be banned. That’s an entirely appropriate response, with a fix only an hour away, limiting the use of the exploit is going to be doing everyone a favor… as players, you’re not going to be looking at 100’s of exploiters on your platform over the weekend, and as dev’s we’re not going to spending all weekend tracking down and squashing 100’s of exploiters.
THE FIX
Nevertheless, with the info out there, we knew a few extra folks would try it out, so we quickly deployed an emergency fix to give 1 Gold during the redemption process.
The full fix (of only being able to redeem it once) went out about one hour later, after testing.
WRAP UP
My thanks to the guys & gals in support & engineering who tested, spotted & deployed a fix so quickly for this. The support agents in question were not “threatening” players in Xbox chat… “threatening” has connotations of violence, disruption, and anger. I think it’s more accurate to say they were warning players that exploits can lead to bans, which is an entirely appropriate piece of information to convey, given the circumstances.
TO BAN OR NOT TO BAN?
We’ll go and round up the handful of people who exploited the issue on Monday… we’ll likely set a threshold of what is an exploit (e.g. more than 5 times), and remove resources from those accounts. There is at least one account that did it over 100 times… I think it’s quite clear that person knew it was an exploit. As for bans, we’ll likely not need any, as it was dealt with nice and quickly.
Edit: Our awesome stats guy ran some numbers… looks like the issue was present for less than a day, and may have started when a server timecode somewhere (probably UTC) ticked from May 31 to June 1.
I’ll give you folks credit… when something happens, you spot it FAST!
We’re looking at about 70 accounts that abused the issue… so all-in-all, we should be able to clean them up on Monday.
Have a great weekend everyone!
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I love this guy
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More than 100 times… wow. Almost impressive. Almost.
There’s usually a nice clear line between people who discover things and do it once or twice, and a person who will sit there exploiting over and over and over and over and over… It’s fascinating.
I haven’t looked at the data, but I bet we will find a bunch of people who used this 2-3 times, and then a handful in the 50-200 range, with very little in between It’s like finding free cookies, some people just can’t stop!
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@Sirrian i admit i did it twice but only got 1 gold each time.
Feel free to take it back
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Haha! I think receiving 2x 1 Gold is punishment enough!
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I enjoyed the xbox chat and kafkas cat herding attempt while the exploit was going on.
More time spent clicking than it’s even worth!
Like getting two minor traitstones from a gnome
Oops how do I erase stuff
@Sirrian what will happen to people who already spent all their keys and catched mythic cards? Are you also going to remove it?
Definitely much bigger. I believe they should take what was gotten from the keys away. I just don’t care for the whole pool of players being mistreated by employees
Omg, stop your whining. I was there the whole time on xbox channel one watching.
People were openly begging for and sending the store link to people while dev was telling them not to exploit it.
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I can’t find it has it been removed?