Reporting Hacks + Exploits

[Sir Fairnore]

Please report any hacks or exploits via email to support (at) codehatch.com

- If you are reporting an exploit please make the header "Exploit Report".
- If you are reporting a hack, hacker, or hacking behavior, please make the header "Hacking Report"

Any threads on these forums about exploits or hacks will be deleted as to not further spread them.

We read through every email and cross reference them. We do not respond back via email unless we have more questions that our internal QA team cannot reproduce.

Please try an include as much info as possible. As we find that the majority of reports simply say their base was deleted and cried foul of hackers. While this may indeed be exploit usage or hacking, it may also be normal gameplay, or perhaps a naughty community server admin. As our game systems allow someone to siege your base, destroy your crest, and place there own crest and delete your entire base. Or, if your crest runs out of fuel, it will destroy itself, giving someone the opportunity to enter your base or remove it. Hence why we need details, and in the case of exploits, reproducible steps are even better.

We appreciate any and all reports. A big thanks to all the community members who already sent us detailed reports, and helped us fix a number of past exploits. We've always worked our hardest to deal with things as soon as we can, and we desire a solid game experience as much as everyone else.


FAQ:

What is a rough estimate of your reports showing?

In the first few months after release, the majority of reports we received were about hacking. Very few people used or reported exploits at this time. Since then, we've implemented countless measures in-game, and a big anti-hack layer on top (EAC) that has stopped the majority of hacking, and any new hacks become banned soon after. Thousands of hackers had their game perma-banned as well.

It now seems, since the last couple months, the mass majority of reports are about exploits and not hacking. And while most exploits may look like hacking, or are reported to us or the forums under the title of "hacking", we understand the difference between them and can say the mass majority were/are indeed exploits. It seems a large portion of the playerbase is now scrubbing through every inch of the game trying to craftily work around our systems. This is why we are really targeting exploits now.

Why was there content added before X exploit was fixed?

We internally target fixing all previous exploits found before an update, and we definitely focus on them before content, infact, that's part of the reason the shield update took so long was that the person in charge of programming shields had to spend a couple weeks helping fixing known exploits in-between. If an update comes out with new content, and then a new exploit surfaces, it is not fixed before the update as we did not know about it before the update. We then proceed to fixing the exploit. There is also rare circumstance where an exploit fix is taking much longer than expected and does not make it in-time for an update and has to be patched in or is ready in time for the next update. Sometimes we also think we fixed an exploit only to find there is another way to do the same exploit.

How many exploits have you fixed as of August 2015?

We have fixed at least 20 really bad ones up until now (most recent being floating beds and invisible spawn points), and about 30 minor ones.

Why don't you discuss exploits your working on? It feels like you are ignoring them?

We can't do that, as it would further spread the exploit making it much more common. We understand this makes it feel like we may be ignoring your frustration and just re-directing you to this thread which mentions to email us details on the exploit, but in reality, we look into and read every email, and list everything on our back end database to help us track, reproduce, and fix the exploits.

Why did an update just come out, and people are still glitching into my base?

New exploits are found by dedicated players all the time due to the dynamic nature of the game, and although we too look for them, it would be impossible for our small dev team to find most of these exploits before the playerbase does which numbers in the tens of thousands. Exploits we find, or are reliably reproduced that the players find after release, are generally fixed before the next release.

What is the timeline on fixing an exploit?

When a new exploit is found, we read through our emails and cross reference them, then we then internally reproduce, then put them into our back-end bug database tracker, then we have to find where it is in code, then we need to think of a solution, usually it takes about 3-4 solutions on our end before we find the best one as some exploit fixes really mess with design not just code, and then when it's complete we test it, and then we push it out in hotfix or update. We work as fast as we can, as we understand everyone's frustration when a new exploit spreads (it frustrates us just as much, we just want a solid game).