As most of you know, we value our players’ feedback and, in particular, have rewarded our players who report bugs and exploits to us. Those of you who have reported exploits to us in the past and received L$500 gift cards for doing so know this fact, and we thank you for helping balance our game.
We have known for a while that the farmer profession is imbalanced and needs to be reviewed. There have been some ideas thrown around on how to do that. However, there was one overpowered exploit reported to us by a community member, which we did not know about until now, and we had to stop it to prevent further abuse, which comes in two parts.
Due to this report, some quick changes have been implemented, discussed in this post.
The exploit we are posting about today is the compost bin.
To create fertilizer, one must be a ‘level 0’ farmer. Traditionally, all recipes we make as developers follow a pattern. Level 0 recipes give 10cxp, Level 1 20cxp, Level 3 30cxp. And recipes that take days, such as in the brewer profession, earn a little more CXP than that.
What has happened is that when creating the fertilizer recipe, an extra 0 was added to the CXP earning potential—making it so that you would earn 100cxp instead of 10cxp for adding two dung to a compost bin. Usually, this wouldn’t cause too much concern, except that the simplicity of making dung is that for every pig you own, you earn a dung every hour. You could have 20 pigs in a pen and have 20 dung per hour, giving the player ten fertilizers per hour, valued at 10,000 CXP, even before the crafting would complete. If you sat in the game for 2 hours, you could earn 20,000 CXP by starting a compost bin craft. You could make more than 20,000CXP per hour, every hour, with enough pigs.
The above led to discovery of a few other exploits, which resulted in more fixes.
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Players could not only gain CXP before completing a craft but other exploits were also revealed that are not in the scope of this discussion.
- We have since fixed these exploits by pushing a forced update to the Compost Bin. As a result, CXP is now earned at the ‘end’ of crafting. This update will be rolled out to all other stations shortly. Additionally, all current compost bins will require an update to work again.
- Those players who took advantage of this exploit and purchased more Compost Bins just for the CXP earning potential, we’ve decided to act kindly in our hammering process by allowing you to return any Compost Bins you no longer need. We will refund you with store credits to purchase anything else you desire. If you wish to take advantage of this option, please package all compost bins into a box, return them to Temujin Calidius in-game and let me know in DM’s through Discord.
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Players using this exploit to earn CXP could drastically increase their player stats to a point where the player mechanics are imbalanced. When it comes to PvP potential, monster hunting, and the likes, players have been able to overpower the system by creating characters with upwards of 60+ constitution or any other stat.
- This has led us to make more changes to the game to bring balance back. We’ve thought about how we want to balance player stats and put limits in place and how we would credit those players back that had taken advantage of the CXP-creating exploit. This is discussed in more detail in the post below: