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door
Firefly1 jaar geleden
I encourage everyone to hunt for exploits and bugs in Angeldust, and to report them to me. In the past, players have notified me of physics bugs, meta-level coin exploits, and even sent me cool hacks that circumvented some game limitations. I've always been happy to learn about shortcomings in Angeldust, and I have never penalized anyone for exploring the game and sharing information about perceived problems. In fact, I think listening to this feedback makes for a much better and battle-hardened product. A very obvious example of this is me creating the Bulldozer item, inspired by one player's network-level hack. Closely related to the above is the _abuse_ of exploits and bugs. I do not condone that, and I penalize players abusing issues to their advantage. At the very least I will take away ill-gotten gains. A public example of this is players using the old account referral system to generate coins on their main accounts. In that case I took away the cheated coins, and publicized the names of the most egregious offenders. (I will not link the topic here to give those players peace for past mistakes.) The main takeaway is that there is an invisible, but thick line between hunting for exploits and abusing exploits. The first crosses into the other seamlessly, but there is a definite turning point. A judge once said: "I know it when I see it." And that's something I want to make everybody aware of in light of a recent event. My addition of spawning coins near the village gates to lure new players outside had a bug. I had placed these coins in-between the lanterns near the gate so that you couldn't automatically scoop 'em all up by walking in a straight line past all village gates. Except… due to a logic error you could. Several players explored and identified this issue and recognized this was a coin farming exploit. To various degrees these players shared various degrees of information with me after various timeframes. In this specific case a reasonable approach for "security testing" would mean to farm coins for a few minutes to confirm the issue and then send me a private message or e-mail stating: "By walking in a straight line past the village gate lanterns you can infinitely farm coins. I picked up 900 coins to confirm." I will publicly thank you for your valuable research and information. On the other end of the spectrum is "exploit abuse" where players farmed coins for hours and only vaguely informed me after I had to forcefully restart the game server to stop their continuing exploit abuse. My reaction was to reset their coin totals to the amounts I had on file from a day before. I hope this event and subsequent hijinks can serve as a guideline what to do in case you find an exploit. Explore and test, but don't actively abuse bugs. Instead, report them after confirming your suspicions. Everybody will thank you for it. And we will all gain something this way. Thanks in advance!
door
Firefly1 jaar geleden
@Hummm and @obi- independently discovered and reported the coin farming exploit. Both did this in a unique way, showing that there is no single 'best' way of reporting bugs. Still, if we can sort of stick to the concept I outlined above it will save everyone a bit of time and frustration in the future. As for the bug itself: I didn't have time to fix it today, but I will try to have a better version available soon. I think it's paramount to improve the new player experience, and what better way than to sprinkle around a few coins in strategic places?
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