@Mithran you’ve been at this for nearly an hour?
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It’s quite nerve wrecking 
THE SUSPENSE IS KILLING ME
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Even if they weren’t ready to disclose what the exploit was yet, it was a good idea to disclose that there was a change being made. The number of times they haven’t done this has come back to bite them. I applaud the initiative and hope this continues. Like others, though, I’d like to hear more about the whole situation.
I’m okay with whatever the change was as long as the fix doesn’t break or reduce mythstones for non-exploiters. Cursory testing shows payouts at difficulty 12 continue to work as expected.
This is the correct way to do an exploit fix:
- Announce it is going to happen
- Fix goes live, and nobody that wasn’t exploiting even notices it.
So far so good on this one 
As to the impact, if the exploit was just mythstones, I think people might be over estimating the impact a bit. Always having 100+ mythstones just means you always get a boss at the end of an explore run. You still have to do a whole explore run to get a boss chest. Low difficulty explore runs get poor rewards on the token side as both amount of tokens dropped and rarity distribution favor doing high difficulty runs. For optimized explore runs, even if you had “infinite” mytstones, the fastest way to gain high rarity tokens is still explore difficulty 12. Assuming the exploit had zero time set up, this would have allowed them the same tokens with roughly 10-25% less effort. Traitstones is another matter of course, but I don’t think anyone is collectively thinking about that too much. Still isn’t right, but not exactly game-breaking either. I don’t see why bans would be issues over this unless I’m misunderstanding what the exploit was. (A boss chest every battle would be far, far more severe, for example).
I think what people are curious here isn’t “bug” versus “exploit” but rather “hard exploit” versus “soft exploit”. The “hardness” of an exploit is a more nebulous thing depending on the severity and obviousness of a bug, going all the way down to “unintended player behavior caused by intended mechanics”. Sitting and clicking a button 100 times to get free stuff - a la the mail exploit - is a definite hard exploit. Noticing how the game works and using this to your advantage but in a way that the developers did not originally intend - a la the “casual PvP exploit” - is a definite soft exploit (we were led to believe, at first, that this was a much “harder” exploit, but after the full explanation came it, it turned out it wasn’t). It can get confusing when the word “exploit” with no modifiers is point blank used to describe both things, even when the word can be used to describe both, because they definitely aren’t equal.
So when people are arguing “bug” versus “exploit”, what they are more than likely asking is “was a bug being exploited here or did someone notice a hole in how your intended behavior worked (like partial mythstones for losing a mini-boss) being used in a way that you didn’t like and decided to patch”.
So, not looking for detailed instructions here… but which was it? Was this people sitting and clicking a button 100 times outside of gameplay to gain rewards (well, not “rewards” in this case, since you can’t “spend” mythstones and have to do a full run regardless to see a boss and boss chest) or people using a gameplay sequence to get more than intended mythstones resulting in them always having more than 100 at a boss or always getting a boss (if it involved losing to the boss, as is my guess, but somehow being able to repeat this, it would still likely be slower than just doing normal runs and I laugh at the people attempting this). If I wanted to be pedantic, I could point out that I, too, get “infinite” mythstones… but usually in quantities of 85-90 at a time.
Basically, people see stuff like this, think back to recent events, and then get worried that something severe is going to happen or something that is going to impact the way they play the game when they never intentionally sat on some screen and clicked 100 times for free rewards. From the looks of it so far, it looks like “if you didn’t intentionally sit and click 100 times on something you knew was wrong, you won’t even notice this change was made”, which is good. Some assurances would be nice, though.
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I for one do appreciate announcements of changes made to the game - the whole pvp gold kerfuffle would’ve been mitigated if we’d gotten such a heads-up.
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I would call this a “hard” exploit - definitely nowhere near as bad as the global mail exploit (may we never have such a problem again knocks on wood), but it’s in the same vein. You couldn’t accidentally do it and if you were doing it you were definitely doing it on purpose and doing the maniacal laugh I mentioned earlier
It’s nothing like the Casual PVP issue.
EDIT: Correction - you could accidentally do it but not 100 times accidentally ofc (just like you could have used the global mail exploit accidentally, but NOT 100 times).
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So just to be clear I can do as much explore 12 as I want and that would not trigger this exploit even though I’m getting 85 plus mythstones upon completion of each run. Mind you I move to a 20% bonus kingdom after each run is complete.
The only reason I ask is I want know if this is considered to be allowed or considered exploitative.
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Correct you’re fine Ghaleon
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I wondered if it was this as well, initially, but can confirm it’s not (and you’re right, it’s not infinite):
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That is the clarification I was looking for Jonathan. I often will leave a mythic battle ready and go to other kingdoms to continue farming mythstones…and then knock out a few mythic battles at once. It doesn’t seem like an exploit, but with the little details provided earlier you often wonder. I love that we get feedback from the team on what is going on, and I’m happy to hear they are actively closing potential exploits. In this case I think a little more clarification would have been useful, without obviously giving out detailed instructions on how to reproduce it.
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OK, I will leak the exploit. First you have to unlock the secret dev-use-only Debug Gnome, Miley Kinog. Miley is easily recognizable from her third trait, which does +4 smoke and +4 fire damage to all troops on both teams each turn. Should Miley die on combat, all of that player’s guild statues have their gold contributions reset to zero, and she gets to keep the kitty, up to a limit of 15M per advert, oops I mean battle.
Clicking on various parts of Miley’s anatomy will give players an assortment of stat boosts, inventory boosts and random troop or weapon unlocks. Should Miley unlock something not previously owned by the player, she will play her combat theme song, “Lucky Lucky Lucky”.
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Because the Explore was an actual Exploit where as PvP was just a nerf.
Agreed.
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+1 & Thank you.
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what do you mean by the intended amount was it giving more myth-stones per myth stone battle or is there an ultimate cap on how may myth stones you can have were not asking for instructions on how to replicate the exploit were asking what you’re talking about when you say more myth stones than intended
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I’m glad that what is considered an exploit or even an “exploit” has been clarified by the devs now,
So, if we are doing stuff that should normally happen is fine 
but if we are deliberately/knowingly doing stuff that gives extra stuff/an advantage when it shouldn’t then this is actually an exploit.
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Well whatever the fix was it broke something else. Now, sometimes when I back out of explore my game freezes up completely. I’ve had to restart about 4 times today.
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That unfortunately is a known issue from before the exploit fix 
Game sometimes soft crashes after exiting explore mode
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That was happening before the fix. The solution is switch account then back was much easier than restarting game. In settings I mean on game. You don’t have to actually switch accounts either. This will take you back to start screen and save about 3 min over starting the Xbox at least.
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Then press the button to open gold chests to get guardians hundreds of times accidentally?
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DISCLAIMER START: things, described below, are just a result of my imagination and any correspondence with actual events, in past or present, is purely coincidental and unintentional.
On Friday 13 it was privately brought to our attention that there existed an exploit in explore system that, in essence, allowed players to get more mythstones per min-boss fight than the stated rates.
Our team investigated the issue; a fix was released and the exploit is now closed. Just as a precaution to really be sure that things are working as intended here is a summary of how many mythstones a player should receive
[insert table with the following columns:
Explore level/Number of mythstones/Number of mythstones with 20% bonus]
We are still investigating players, who abused the exploit, and taking appropriate measures.
This is all we can disclose for now and more information might follow, if deemed necessary.
DISCLAIMER END
Wouldn’t something like this be received with more positive attitude than just announcing that “there were rather obscure broken things that are now fixed and you (general public) don’t even know what they are” ?
But, as Bob Wiley has taught us, baby steps…baby steps…baby steps…
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