***Massive Erepublik Hack and the Admins Response***
Uncle Sam
Today, some people will log onto their citizens accounts. They will look around and see that not much has changed. Then maybe they will try to exchange some money or make a donation. This is when they find out that something is wrong with erepublik, so they start freaking out. Let me assure you, monetary market and donation issues are not the problem.
Hack of Epic Proportions
Discovered by Bolonia, this glitch or hack gave citizens massive amounts of gold, some amounting to over 55,000. Now many questions are going on at these moments. Here’s information gathered from various places and the speculation going around.
Who: It is said that a lot of the fake gold came from Spain, and Romania. Other countries have also used it including PEACE countries.
When: There are rumors still yet to be verified that this glitch has been going on since August. These claims can easily be disputed by the fact that when V1 was released, coding changes. If this is true, it is the first time it’s shown up in massive amounts.
How: This is done by transactions through donations and the monetary market. First an organization can donate a sum of gold to a citizen. While it's loading that page, in another tab, the organization buys a monetary market offer. When that is accomplished, the money donated to the citizen is there, however the gold is not removed from the organization, thus duplicating gold.
Why: This was done for many reasons, the wealth, but it appears that the main reason was for military purposes with all of the Resistance Wars that were started around the world.
Admin Action
The site was closed down for a while in order to halt further gold generation. With the erepublik sites down, the Admins had only one way to communicate with the people of erepublik. This was through all the external sites, namely the IRC chat rooms for various countries. Here’s the message that was sent on these chats.
(Belea200😎
This is the Admin message to the citizens of erepublik.
(Belea200😎
1.The eRepublik site will be unavailable for 2 hours.
(Belea200😎
2.The Donations and Monetary Market modules will be disabled by the team for 24 hours.
(Belea200😎
3.The team already started removing illegal Gold from accounts.
(Belea200😎
We kindly ask you to announce this information on all eRepublik related IRC channels and we thank you all for your support.
Their Solution and What it Does and Does Not Fix
Judging by their plan f action, they fix a lot of what has been done. They are giving themselves time to fix the coding so that this hack won’t happen again while getting rid of the gold already laundered. The parties responsible will be permanently banned from the game, however there may be other innocent bystanders of these events.
Now this plan of action so far does not resolve quite a few issues. First, what is to happen with all of the resistance wars that broke out due to the hack? If nothing is done for this problem, then the effects of this hack will still remain, something that will not go over well with the people. Furthermore, there are many things that can go wrong with this plan of action. They can easily end up removing legit gold from citizens, or banning the innocent.
Most Importantly, as a global community, we must remember that once this issues is resolved, it’s done. We must not linger in the past, once it’s over, we must not clog media with these issues.
Together, The population of the world demand justice for this inconvenience!
Vote to reach International News
Save Erepublik!
-Uncle Sam-
Comments
PERTAMAXX
Great article
Great summary, Uncle Sam.
I'm worried because I sold my Q4 Housing Company to an organisation with 800 Gold last night, which now has 300 Gold. I hope my gold isn't fake gold. However, I take consolation in the fact that 800 Gold is measly compared to the 54K Gold transactions that we've seen, so hopefully that wasn't fake gold.
Great article
Damn. That explains why I can't get some ZAR 😛
I bet they wont delete all the gold from romanian accounts 😉
Thanks, Sam for some clarity!
Good Article Sam 😃
Great article!
In a few minutes we'll come up with a new eRepublik Insider article
PERSMATAFAX on admin response!
This solves really nothing, they may remove those 54k gold transactions but they won't remove those smaller ones and as for cheaters, most of them wont be discovered. The only solution at this point form - reset the game, sad but true, as there ware also mass amount of smaller cheats, like accounts generating 100 gold or so :/
Banach did not discover it.
Hell, I told Banach.
Ò_Ó
(oh and of course I also voted the article)
I also heared some rumors about donating being bugged (seeing donation lists 😉 )
Great Article...I hope this isn't the end of erepublik.
They have to shut down the game for a week and go through it, and undo many wars. Or they could just reset.
So, how am I supposed to gift myself through my org tomorrow if donations are down? Thanks a lot, hackers.
Cards > Eagles
did they took ale the gold from them? I dont think so.
they MUST repair it, the bug is so simple to use... omg, but still - i dont think they will repair it, or definetly not in 24hrs 🙂
how can they ban people who find a glitch and exploit it?
It's not their fault.
It is good to understand that if certain people have gold that they will - provably - start wars. This seems a reasonable argument for the rest of us to avoid their product and companies.
Cover-up the situation by removing articles complaining about the incident, temporary ban few obvious cheaters, tell everything is fine now, divert the attention to new kewl improvements and new countries like Somalia.
This is beyond repair.
A bit too smooth article for my taste and experience.
Who will decide when this issue is resolved? It is impossible to resolve, I'm afraid.
Some Spaniards discovered it a few days ago, and the bug was reported. This is the bug that peace has been using a long time ago. All Indonesian tanks used it and many other peace tanks.
Today many other Spaniards have known it, it has been published, and many people has used it, starting RW,...
This has to be fixed.
Nice Reporting Uncle Sam. It's good to know you're looking at this worrying problem. Hope you come back to the eUSA soon.
Very nice article US!
Romania wasn`t involve .. why do you mention our name there when is no single Romanian [ after my knowledge ] involve . I see Spanish and Indonesian people involve and from other country.
I hope you have prove that support your testimony regarding Romanian implication [ at lest one name ] or your disinformation is very undiplomatic and show a low character.
well give us a little leniency at least... this is why the American people do not feel respected by ATLANTIS
Just wondering what will admins do about gold that's been already used. Just forget about it?
for the record... I'm trying to edit this article, but it's bugged and I can't.
Thank you Uncle Sam! v/s
please kick out politics from here, PEACE , ATLANTIS, or what else 🙁 .. vote for fairepublik !
please kick out politics from here, PEACE , ATLANTIS, or what else 🙁 .. vote for fairepublik !
Wow... you know, there was something similar to this in Kingdom of Loathing... Black Friday or something. Word got out that a negative amount of meat (the currency, for some reason), obtainable only by one item via a bug, actually changed into something like 10 to the 18th power's worth. What they did is implement a series of 'meat-sinks', where people could do stuff to essentially waste meat; i.e., they could buy a badge for 100,000,000 meat that said "[Name] is a lousy no-good owner of a [badge name; I forgot it]". That was it. Unfortunately, it's been a year or two (or three) and inflation is still pretty high, albeit no longer ludicrous. So maybe the admins should just roll it back a little.
This was a great article. Summed it up nicely.
Great article
A++++
Would read again.
Thank you so much for this well-covered, informative article, Uncle Sam. I appreciate your obvious research, and your fair reportage of the issue. I must disagree with your final statement, however: I would hardly say that the whole matter should be dropped and left in the past; just as with any such incident that affects a socioeconomic structure on a global scale, reports and investigative inquiries must emerge in the aftermath, as well as merely curious questions of human-interest, in order for the truth, and any other interesting or extraneous details concerned therewith, to come out. Let us continue to learn from history, and to support free deliberation amongst the people, as may be said of any free and rational civil society; but may we do so justly.
You lie .. NO SINGLE ROMANIAN HAVE EVER ABUSED THIS BUG. ???? PLEASE DELETE THE ACCUSATION without proof
World history is made up by a serious of mishappenings, no need to restart the game- it is history, further errors will be fixed, no worries!
Thanks for the article, and thanks admins 🙂
the resistance wars were stopped!
Yes, but in the progress of world history, no one can go in and bend the laws of physics and logic to ensure that every time they jump, they also simultaneously fall. The illegal generation of fiat gold, in the case cited, does not constitute a circumvention of laws within the game (e.g., robbing someone to get gold, thus breaking a law to acquire gold without having to work for it); but, rather, is a metagame abuse of a loophole in the game mechanics. In the same way that the physical constants governing our known universe cannot be altered, so, too, should the rules fixing the parameters for this game be unalterable - except, in this virtual world, the software engineers are not gods, and are prone to error, thus permitting loopholes which should, for all intents and purposes of fair and ethical gameplay, be considered nonexistent. Their exploitation should, therefore, be corrected to compensate for this shortcoming, no less.
It is absolutely impossible for the admins to undo everything that has been done by the gold exploit. Resistance wars, tanking battles, companies, company upgrades, export licenses, even MPP's and government purchases can all be called into question now.
If it has really been an issue since V1 launched, then they need to roll the game back to the Pre-V1, or Beta days. If there is even a doubt about how long it has been going on, then they absolutely MUST reset the game to day 1 of the new world.
Yes, some people will be very upset and leave the game, but if they do not reset or roll the game back then a whole lot of other people are going to leave the game anyways.
Unless they go back through every single transaction (which is probably in the millions) that has occurred in the last year, there is no way to know how wide spread this is.
This has been quite a couple days! 😃
I think that in the end, this whole incident contributes to eRepublik. If we compare eworld to ours, same kind of corruption is being undertaken in the RL.
Of course there are so called "meta game" issues, because nothing can be created out of nowhere, but we can simply explain it by illegal operations such as money laundering.
These things happen, we cant just reset eRepublik every time we face problems, even if they are as big as this one.
Thanks Uncle Sam! voted
ok, in response to the Romanian accusations, I've already confirmed that no one in Romania has done it, however this article is bugged and I am unable to edit it.
check the other three versions released and you will see what I mean.
Did the Hackers hack the server? Or did they hack the game system via the gui?
i actually think it funny that the gold was usd to start resistance wars and would love to finally fight in one of those if it means i get to fight finally
if this is the end of the game their should just be a big war like every one fighting each other that woud be cool
Getting sick of all the "open letters"???
http://www.erepublik.com/en/article/an-open-letter-to-everyone-writing-open-letters-enough--724259/1
My article is better than yours Sam 😃
http://www.erepublik.com/en/article/letter-from-a-concerned-president-to-admins-724405/1
Check it out and vote please