tldr infinite money glitch happens, gets fixed the same day, g*mers mad. Skip the next if you dont care about context

For the context, the free to play game this drama centers around is legends of idleon, or just Idleon, a mix of resource gathering rpg and your typical "idle" mobile app. If you dont even know what cookie clicker is, idle games gameplay loop consists of micromanaging your stuff so you can get more resources, which in turn lets you upgrade your stuff and reach higher and higher goals. To be quite honest Idleon at least contains actual gameplay where you do control characters but at the end of the day, they are just extensions of resource gathering and who cares, im not here to sell you on the game.

In this game there are 3 skills per world you unlock, and the latest world contains the skill of sailing. It consists of buying boats and captains to make trips to islands and retrieve loot uniquely used in sailing.

Like a good neurodivergent micromanaging game there are like 7 different multipliers, modifiers and mechanics that are not worth to explain the drama. We just need to be aware of 1 specific mechanic that lets you trade loot you found on islands for gold bars, a general type of currency that lets you buy more boats/upgrade them. You can only trade 1 type of item, and it cycles a couple times a day. But what if, for whatever reason, the game decided to offer gold bars for more gold bars?

(ACTUAL INGAME INTERFACE)

The solo dev Lavaflame2, who I will now call Lava from now on, stated that this was the result of a float being something like 0.00000000000000 instead of 0.00000000000001, so it was extremely unlikely to happen, but it did. What this did was essentially offer you 0.3% of your total gold in exchange for 0.1% of your total gold or something like that. The game is made in a pseudocode program called Stencyl because the dev refuses to learn to program in an actual language lmao so I can see how this mightve happened. I swear he explained it in a groomercord message but the fricker already deleted every early messaged he made today. i never saved that

This is obviously gamebreaking. As there is a certain bonus that scales from the amount of gold bars you possess, letting you have infinite amounts of damage to the point of overflow. According to some that did this, this actually fricked you over because the game would register as negative damage. G*mers who did this had to have an autoclicker on because to overflow at that point you need to have been exchanging quadrillions of gold for hours on end to reach that high. And this was up for more than 6 hours, the hotfix patch only releasing around 3:30pm

Bonus context: the latest update contained a very anticipated feature and made the game peak in active players

So its safe to assume the time was right for the most amount of people to notice the exploit in the entirety of the game's lifespan until now.

CONTEXT OVER

People started asking if this was intentional, since the game sense of humor is sometimes reddit wacko tier (some bonuses are intentionally useless, for example), AND the next update is confirmed to contain an event, so some people legit thought there was a gold rush event of some sorts.

But no, Lava repeatedly stated that this was in fact an exploit.

It was 5 AM for me when this happened, of course nothing happened for a few hours.

And yes, accounts that exploited will be severely reset, it's quite literally "exploiting" the game even though it was a bug.

Whats that? Consequences for your actions? thats not something good. And so the cope and seethe started to pour in.

No Lava, it was not an "obvious exploit" and the Gold Rush Event shows perfectly why you need to be more consistent with your communication and lay off of the "trolling"

Wtf why are they so serious over correcting an exploit in an idle game? First of all, come on, its g*mers were talking about what did you expect, regular human behavior?

Second, to understand the root of the drama, understand that this game has been out since 2020, with major updates every now and then. This kind of game rewards people who have been playing the longest. Naturally, to reach todays 'endgame' one must have been playing for years, and the type of people who do also are keen on ultra efficiency maxxing. Even though Idleon markets itself as an MMO, you do 90% of everything alone, there is no competition other than guilds. And being higher level and stuff has virtually no impact in how well you perform in your guild, just how neurodivergent you are to complete every daily task every day. But I guess if you give a bunch of neurodivergents something that can be optimized and reward a bigger number, they WILL find a way to cry if the number they worked so hard to get is now gone. Which brings me to the cows where this dramamilk came from: Endg*mers

'endg*mers' HATE Lava. And I hate them. Ive personally seen them time and time again complain about how new content never appeals to them and how unbalanced/p2w it is. The fact that Lava is the only developer is perfect to scapegoat any issues onto 1 person. I wont pretend lava is the greatest dev ever, but its so funny watching endg*mers act miserable because of his badly coded game and half baked ideas fricking them over.

This is the part where I clown on the endg*mers because holy fricking shit I cannot stand reading anything they puke out. These bitches have been in a state of perma "finishing" what the game has to offer, instantly consuming every new content that is released and speedrunning features that for anyone else would take some months to complete. I have to assume Lava balances the game by making shit up as he goes. Every update makes it easier to climb up for the people who havent unlocked everything, or in other words, anyone who started playing after the game fully released constantly has new things to progress. But endg*mers have to live through months of the only progress being "whos got the best number in the newest feature" (that will be completely broken when the next mechanic is added) and ridiculing others for having less numbers than them.

I guess they also dont like that their singleplayer game is pay to win, because theres a LOT of microtransactions that make progress faster. Tbh I dont really see it, its a solo dev game, so taking advantage of whales is always a win. Get that bag king

Lost way more than I gained today. I'm not mad, I'm sad.

So yeah, people who abused this didnt just lose today's progress, they lost stuff they gained months ago

Don't throw away loyal g*mers

They are not criminals. They are not hackers. They are loyal old players, they just log on as usual, click a few times, then they feel it's weird, but they can't be sure, so they keep clicking, and by the time it feels obvious, they've already been branded as abusers.

Reminder that the "few clicks" must have been in the millions for you to get tagged as an abuser

since the accounts will be reset, which game we gonn go next?

These people that "quit" will be back by next week. Or maybe not, now that i think about it they are the type to play 10 games of this type at the same time.

good guy lava "putting everyone in their place" when there is strong precedent of 0 punishment...

This guy is lying, the game has one of the funniest anti cheat punishments ive seen btw. If you hack resources in, you cannot possibly level up in time before the anti cheat gets you, and the anti cheat is teleporting you to a map in a world you dont have enough damage or defense to kill the mobs standing between you and the exit before they one shot you. The only thing to do is wait to respawn in the same map, leaving your characters effectively useless.

BUT they have a point, where in the past there have been multiple times where a feature released with unintended consequences, like a multiplier being multiplicative instead of the intended additive effect (50 times more instead of 50% more) and never has there been a "reset" of sorts to those who 'abused' it.

STEAM REVIEW CORNER

1K+ HOURS PLAYED NOT RECOMENDED

:

Although, to be fair, most of those hours they spent afk. The most efficient way to progress (what an endg*mer neurodivergent will do 100%) involves leaving the game running in the background.

Legit they made troll reviews but in every single one they admit to using an exploit llololololollolol what do they think they will accomplish. There are so many, just go to the most recent reviews page, its all from players with up to 10k hours played.

https://steamcommunity.com/app/1476970/reviews/

There are others creating more drama by making fun of those punished and arguing with them (based, i will always be happy when endg*mers suffer)

I don't care if I get hate for this but if you abused the exploit for gold bars you deserve to get your account reset. [0 points (36% upmarseyd)

The comments there are lots of malding about how justified they are exploiting an ingame bug like its their right lmao

Where's my refund for ACTUAL MONEY that I spent on sailing potions and chests?

In Lavas bank account - think of it as a fee for making him fix the spaghetti code.

Random groomercord seethe i found.

Believe me, there is way more. It all boiled down to: "I was able to exploit in the past and didnt get punished. Why do you punish now?"

At the end of the day, this was Lava's final response:

I actually managed to abuse it to buy the last 2 ships I needed to max out and didnt get reset, even got the gems lol. I only did it to get from 200m to 10billion.

And that part about resetting prints also annoyed the heck out of minmaxxing neurodivergents, as its a pain in the butt to setup your character to get the most efficient prints and then get it back to a regular preset.

Kinda passionate about this hobby of mine so hope you enjoyed this