Putting order to the chaos

I'm glad to see the excess money removed from my account in a timely manner. One question though, does that say I have -1087 points? lol
I don't know why my point total of around 800 was removed. I never merged anything so the bug didn't effect my points.

Keth, I have a lot of records on http://Stats.SpymasterZombie.com that show the advances of Puma and Thunder Cats right after there split up last week.

Clearly some of the cell directors were using this exploit for there own cells advancement.

this story broke last night when puma dumped a few billion in my lap on the site above and ucana and crew were spreading just a little of the wealth to Zone1.

when BlogSpy of the rival clan ThunderCats posted the secret thats when ucana Puma's leader decided to destroy the game by dumping hundreds of trillions on everyone.

I'd like to know what the changes are as well. I'm also wondering if this is connected to why my 400 odd points has increased to 1767 points and why my $3.3M in the bank has increased to $100M in the bank and $11M liquid.

Boss, I have -1,714 points ... and why am I penalised where I have done nothing?

Welp, I had faith that I would come out of this unscathed, because I was not affected at all by this money/point/multiplication glitch.

But now my stats are now 1/3 of what they were, and I suddenly have £54.4M in the bank (but doesnt cover what I worked hard to get), and -4,375 points.

Hoping I'm going to get back what I worked hard for....

Luckily I never buy points, but suddenly I have -867 of them.

Just sayin'.

Sorry,.. I am the worst,..you are not remembered for the rules that you followed,...?

So now I have $100M in my swiss and my stats are 734,503 Attack /498,843 Defense, which is a fraction of what I had before and the $100M will get me no where near what I had before.

Thanks Keith for acting so swiftly on this once it came to the surface. I see that the 40,000T has just been removed from my swiss bank account. I am guessing that the negative points are in place until everything gets sorted out on that end.

I know you are all putting out fires as fast as possible but an update from the field on the home page would go a long way to settling some folks down who have no idea as to what just happened.

I have spent over $200 on points over the last month, and once I reached Level 40 Elite V, I started to collect bounties to get my stats to where they were a few minutes ago. I agree completly with iThirdEye - this is a total cluster.

I had faith that I would come out of this unscathed, because I was not affected at all by this money/point/multiplication glitch, as I posted on the problem thread.

But now my stats are 1/3 of what they were (all of those weapons I bought over the last two weeks are gone), and I suddenly have 11.7M pounds liquid, where a few minutes ago, I had 40K, and -4,174 points.I want my money back for the 300 point or so balance I had (just bought $10 worth Saturday) - receipt available.

Hoping I'm going to get back what I worked hard for....otherwise, over and out.

A message that you sent could not be delivered to one or more of its
recipients. This is a permanent error. The following address(es) failed:

appeals@playmaster.com

What can i do?

I lost almost $9M and have -2185 points! What gives?

yesterday morning around 8, I merged to elite v with no assets in that account. my totals were then something like 200000900 attack and 260000000 defense, now my attack is around 450 k and defense 550 k, lol. Hope you're not done fixing things yet :(
I haven't had stats like that sense early june and just heard about the glich last night.
ryanrain

for me these changes worked out very well.
you took away a good part of my weapons but gave more than I had before the problem started. Three things though

1. There are still people who have trillions of dollars

2. now every one who had their account changed has around 100M which means that people like me who worked hard to have a lot of money now have about the same amount of money as everyone else.

3. my points are -886 I only had 8 points before so this is not a big problem but if I ever decide to buy points then I will have to spend at least $8 for me to have any points

... all my points have gone into the negatives. plus i had trillions in my swiss bank account and now just 73.6 million. i can understand making adjustments to the economy but really? I have now more less than 1/100 of what i used to have. please fix this!

What about points earned through leveling, unaffected by the bug?

As one of the middle class, I'm just wondering when the freeze on experience points will end, so that I can level up again!

There are many issues here, one is how to rebalance the game, another is how to address the complaints of those who claim unfair treatment.

I will go out on a limb and suggest some concrete changes to stop it happening again.

One very successful program at Netscape was the 'bugs bounty' where they offered some money to folk who reported security bugs. The amount was not very big ($2K which is like less than a days consulting for a security consultant). It would not require a very big incentive ($500 say) to make it worth people's while to report such bugs before they propagate widely enough to wreck the game.

Sweetness, I am back to sqare one,.who's with me,.?

I just noticed after checking my stats using the iPhone app that the ~$28M in my Swiss Bank account has somehow magically increased to $100M while my liquid balance has dropped from >$100K to ~$50K. In addition, I have droped from 208 special points (all earned through leveling up) to 108. My attack/defense sums appear to be unchanged, but they may be slightly higher. Should I be expecting this/what is the explanation, if any?

What you're doing makes no sense what-so-ever.

You have Disemboweled Icantseeyou to the point where he has nothing and he was a completely legit character. He had the max attack and defense and was Elite and now he elite with NOTHING and NO SAFE HOUSES.

How long will it be until points are returned?

Well the appeal might not get received anyways... Oh well...

Hi. This is the qmail-send program at smtpauth13.prod.mesa1.secureserver.net.
I'm afraid I wasn't able to deliver your message to the following addresses.
This is a permanent error; I've given up. Sorry it didn't work out.

<appeals@playmaster.com>:
85.17.236.42 does not like recipient.
Remote host said: 550
Giving up on 85.17.236.42.

--- Below this line is a copy of the message.

Oh and BTW the money received in the account was about 90% shy. Was it minus the 80% sale commission from my stuff??? WTH.

ATI_SDVOSB

I touched Elite when I was Elite I because merging was legal and because I would end up with the same exact things.

Now, because of the sudden change to the rules my Elite II is a nothing.

Thanks. Oh and by the way, if you think it was wrong to use Merge to get to higher Elites you need to delete about 10000 accounts.

Please tweet when you think the adjustments are complete.

I will attempt to exercise my patients
(a few laps around the hospital should do the trick)
and check stats when things have calmed down.

Mine were out of whack earlier but I am signing off for the night.

my points are gone and my bank account is changed.. some people play like real spies..

I hope you guys get a break soon... You've been going at it for over 10 hours... Thanks so much

I got a bounced message on my e-mail to Appeals, but I'm shy a few hundred points that I paid for now. I've never merged anything and not psyched on this at all.

Is the Death Penalty too severe? Put it to a vote amongst players. Or publicly expose the person(s) and we'll take care of them amongst the community.

Why is it that I'm wounding High Risk opponents, and I'm getting 0 money and 0 experience? What is the point?

I would like you to make Icantseeyou to where he was before this glitch. That's all.

Shall I suggest taking the site down for maintenance, so that those that are not aware are not wasting their time?

i don't understand why i suddenly have 200m

Yeah, this was a major cluster bang.

I've got WAY more money than I should (over a trillion...)

You guys are going about this WRONG - this is what you should do.

1) Revert everything to 36 hours ago.

2) Run a script to get rid of the cash that was in hiding and get rid of it.

3) Then decide what else to change.

Are we going back to level one? You've taken spymaster offline. But you were changing it beforehand with it still online. ... :(

Thanks for taking care of whatever the problem was, and thanks for taking the site offline now while you fix things. I think a of the chaos is from changes happening while it was live and people not having any idea what was going on. Getting things back in working order offline and then bringing it back up should move along much more smoothly

i never did anything but missions this sux but if it makes it even im down but hurry the F up

While I appreciate the efforts,
(it must have been a nasty shock to come into work, and find that mess), I'm not happy that my Elite V account lost 3/4 of money and stats, as I did not do a "dirty merge" , merely used some of the money gained from being hit by folks who did, and were attacking me,(with grossly inflated stats) to defend myself. If I had not, I would have been dead every 15 mins.
I tried every way I knew to get rid of the trillions-hitting directors and loosing, big time, buying and selling cars at a loss, you name it, I tried it!
I have heard from other players who were also very disappointed by the reset, as some suffered more, while innocent, than the "perps" did.

My stats went from 2 mil attack to 100k, my guns from over 900 to 15 of each.
If I've been punished, it seems unfair and very heavy handed.
I'll wait on filing, to see if you can fix it.
Thanks

Notice I've retracted my previous comment. I'd like to publicly apologize.

You're a great dev, I'm sure things will be back to normal in no time.

I've been playing the game. I use what exploits are available in order to keep up with the around me. I have no qualms with losing my gains from this exploited bug. My ID is austinpowers422.

Many people who play the game already have an advantage because they were able to use the tactic of merging accounts. The rest of us are now penalized for what a few have done. It is patently unfair to remove the merge/assets tactic at this point. In effect this divides the game into 2 factions: those who have benefited by merging assets and those who won't be able to advance by using this tactic.

Please fix the bugs and allow us the ability to merge assets!

I've still got too much money...

I think that it was a mistake to introduce the merge function in the way it was done. Some people knew about the merge, others didn't. By the time I found out about it, the merge had already been going on for weeks.

As it happens, I had not found out about the merge long enough to make use of it. But I would be a most unhappy bunny if I had.

I am not quite sure why folk from Zone consider this to be an exclusively Puma problem. If you look at the Zone section on Spymaster Fans you will find instructions on how to merge and speculation about using it to set up a pyramid scheme. So the complaints from that quarter seem to be that the discovery of the multiple-merge bug led to consequences for their earlier exploit of a different use of merge.

I still think that you need to give everyone who has lost assets here a special badge. Call it the haircut badge.

Sab, that's full of it. POD took a long time to get to E5, and every bit of money he got was legit.

You know how he got it - by attacking low level PUMA who were holding tons of it. That's what everyone was doing because you guys were hiding it all over the place.

If blame is to be put on anyone here it's not POD it's you and PUMA.

Holley hell, I went from like 14 million in my bank account to 1.4 billion?!?!? Talk about bank error in my favor!

Note - I've never merged, been part of a cell, or any such nonsense...

I lost 3000 award points all earnt through leveling up. I don't know why it'd be called hording when points are earned legitimately.

same here freman, never did any nonsense but i only have 320m :(

Some people get Billions, others get Millions. Who does your accounting?

Can you let us know when you're done? I'd personally like to know if this is how it will stay and if I should start playing.

I still have stats, points and kills I certainly shouldn't have. I can see assets that I've used with the dirty money, use up the points but I can't get rid of the kills. If it's going to roll back then I'll do nothing. Otherwise I just did it as an experiment + to keep up with the top players. I've put in hours/days/weeks/months into this game - I'm not really interested in taking 'dirty' short cuts into the leader board.

Should I be suspended then all I can say is that it's been a fun game while it lasted. However the book I'm writing is really behind deadlines at the moment so leaving might be a good thing!

There is only one way to fix this problem once and for all - reset the game and give the players who paid for points a refund or credit the points to their newly reset accounts. Some of you may not like this but this is the cold, hard truth.

Last night I deleted my spymaster and twitter accounts. I have played in what I consider to be a fair and honest manner. I did not even know about this merge thing until I got several thousand trillion dollars dumped on me.

It appears that the Directorate has been aware of this problem for quite some time (weeks?) yet did not respond. Now, the integrity of the game is in question. Even if I started over again with a new player, there would always be legacy accounts in existence at Elite V Level 40 that I would never be able to compete with. The ONLY WAY to fix this is to reset everyone back to the start. I sincerely doubt that the Directorate will do this on their own. That is why I deleted my accounts.

btw - multiple accounts are NOT a violation of the TOS. This is a loophole that is still going to be available for exploitation. Personally I feel that if you are working with other spymasters (you own the accounts or others own them) it is a healthy element to the game. To transfer assets, either through bank accounts or planned attacks, requires strategy, timing and coordination.

I think the ONLY way that we will see the game reset is if we (the players) send the message to the Directorate by deleting our accounts. For those of you who paid for points, I believe you have grounds for a refund as the points you purchased (with REAL money) became worthless. You can pursue that refund request through your credit card company or Paypal if necessary (which I hope it is not).

So, who will join me? Anyone care enough about the integrity of the game to make this bold move?

Two final thoughts before I sign off - perhaps for the last time.

@ucana422, I feel sorry for you. Your perspective of this game and the way in which you have bullied your way through without any regard for others in an atrocity. Your twisted, distorted and disrespectful attitude is downright scary. I truly feel sorry for the real people who cross your path in real life. I believe you owe a lot of people an apology but never expect to see it from you and even if you did, I would not take it seriously.

Last thought - during the past 24 hours you have all experienced first-hand what happens when tons of money is dumped into the system. The net result is everyone basically quit playing for the most part because it had no "value" or meaning any more. If there is one real life lesson to learn from this it is that the same thing is happening in the real world too. While it may not be as evident as waking up one morning to find trillions of dollars in your personal account, it is still happening. In my opinion, the real world result will not be unlike what just happened in spymaster - everyone will stop playing. What then?

A few screen shots for your viewing "pleasure".

This is when I found out something was going on yesterday morning. At first I thought I just got lucky!



Then, when I logged back in about an hour later, I saw this:



Where is ucana422 now? Did he leave on his own? Was he kicked out? What is to keep him from coming back and infecting the game again? How many other players will try to ruin the game like him? How is the Directorate going to effectively keep this game honorable and fun?

Again, this is messing up my retirement here. Over the past six years I had been working with various law enforcement and other agencies to track real criminal gangs on the Internet. Playing spymaster seemed like a nice piece of irony.

A few weeks back, I started to realize that the game had some real security issues. In particular, I was starting to become concerned that some players might well take matters 'offline' as has happened in other games. The business with the dossiers and impersonation was a real concern in particular.

After the changes I now have ten times more money than I ever did before, 750 billion. And I am not the only person with that much money.

I was given a log of the chat yesterday in AITS. To paraphrase:

P1: I lost everything
P1: They should kick (X) out of the game for cheating
P1: I want my trillion dollars and supercars back

P2: Puma were cheating by using the merge bug
P2: Now they have broken merging for everyone
P2: I just want to merge my accounts to go E5!

There are a lot of people who are understandably and justifiably upset. There are also some very loud people who are clearly being less than honest in their claims. Are we to believe that a certain individual got a million kills purely by accident? That they really hit the merge button over a thousand times to arrive at that number and did not attempt to repeat the circumstances?

Plenty of folk knew about the bug, nobody reported it. Which is perhaps understandable when the leaderboard made it obvious that there was a bug.

It appears that there are several problems with the game here. But ultimately, the responsibility has to go to the game developers, not the players. The game is after all designed to attract a certain type of individual.

The events of the past few days strongly suggest that there are no backup snapshots of the game status to revert to.

The inability to detect the bug in the first place also suggests that the platform lacks certain features.

Here is what I suggest:

1) Time Out

The last fix did not fix the problem of a busted game economy. The developers are clearly burned out, and so are many of the players.

Don't try another hot fix. That will only make matters worse. Instead tell folk that the game will be in 'hyper-inflation' mode for a few days and that there will be a reset. Let everyone buy their million supercars and work out for themselves why it does not work, then we go back to normal again.

2) Use the Web Luke.

I was part of the original Web development team at CERN. We built the Web because we had a particular belief in the way people should be included in decisions that affect their use of computers.

You have all these customers playing the game. You have to include them in finding a solution here. I propose having a tinychat with people from across the game. The cell leaders, people active on SM fans and so on.

Yes this will take time out from coding. But this is a communication problem, not a coding problem. You always have time to communicate.

3) Engage the research community

As I said earlier, there are real security issues in this game and I do not mean cheating.

The ilist site mentions a geo-location game platform in development. That makes me very very uncomfortable. To be frank, I think we will end up with real stalking incidents and quite possibly worse.

You do not want the first time you think about these issues being a report of a child being raped on the front page of the New York Times.

There are safe ways to do this stuff and unsafe ways. I know some folk that can maybe help work out which is which.

4) Turn lemons into lemonade

It seems to me that from a certain distance these events would appear to be amusing. There is an opportunity for earned media here if you take it: The biggest bank heist in history ($1000 Trillion). Colbert and Stewart would both go for that story.

I agree wholeheartedly.

Thanks to all the SpyMaster Directors fr their time and labor making all these corrections.

This has got to stop!

KEYSERS0ZE422 killed you.
You were killed in action. You lost assets totaling £5.88. Strike back?
22 minutes ago
KEYSERS0ZE422 killed you.
You were killed in action. You lost assets totaling £23.55. Strike back?
about 1 hour ago
KEYSERS0ZE422 killed you.
You were killed in action. You lost assets totaling £7.36. Strike back?

Much thanks to restoring my stats. But apparently some people still have absurd amounts of points and have been suicide killing people lately. I'm work as an admin for a living and am good friend's with Brent. If you need any help dealing with these people I will be glad to help out.

Thanks,

John P. Madden

http://getsatisfaction.com/spymaster/...

Ucana's ALTS and Puma trying to destroy spymaster and ruin the fun for others
There are a few Ucana alt accounts running around with STOLEN points using the merge exploit killing everyone using suicide.

there's no doubt KEYSERS0ZE422 exploited the system since his stats are

Spymasters * 3,749 and he only has 2,210 twitter followers
Attack * 7,914,740
Defense * 11,271,056

He has used the STOLEN points to kill me 5 times in 1 hour

Why are you so sure that it was ucana?

Why are you so sure the points were stolen?

Would you like us to invade Iraq again?

Just reset the game and be done with it. Any other efforts will be futile. I know it is not pleasant but this is not a flesh wound. Serious problems require serious solutions.

vertago - I know you don't like it, neither do I. And believe me, I did think about it, long and hard. And while it may appear to be stupid because you don't like it, the fact of the matter is that resetting the game is the only real solution.

There are tens of thousands of players. There are a few that are gaming the system. Those handful are ruining it for the remaining 99.9%. You can sift through the data all day long for the next month and never make this right. As long as there are Elite V Level 40's that got there by gaming the system you will have a situation where new players can NEVER compete.

If you look at the responses from Keith, he is basically saying that players need to self-report or fix their accounts themselves by buying and selling super cars. Do you not see what that is saying? The Directorate does not have the capacity to fix this problem on their own.

Unfortunately, whoever is behind all of this has infected the game with a virus where there is no cure. I don't like it any more than you do. I worked hard on my accounts (yes, I had multiple accounts) but I never exploited this merge thing. In spite of comments made by others that "everyone" was doing this merge thing, the fact is that only a few dozen players even knew how to make that work and I didn't even know it existed until everything blew up a few days ago.

I have focused on tasking and conducting hits to level up. I have never paid for points and have no idea how some player can seem to have an infinite number of points to perform suicide after suicide all day long. There are ONLY two ways they could have that many points. They either paid a stinking fortune of real money to buy them OR they are gaming the system. If they are paying real money that may explain why they have not been banned and the Directorate has gone virtually silent for the past 15 hours on getsatisfaction. Has anyone done the math as to the actual cost to make as many kills as have been documented in these threads? How many other kills have these (alt) players done that we don't even know about?

Sorry, vert, but with a staff of three and the data that the Directorate has, I honestly think that there is only one real solution that will restore the credibility of this game and that is to reset it. I quit playing and deleted my accounts. I even deleted my twitter accounts because I don't want to read the vile comments that these nasty players spew out incessantly.

It wasn't easy for me to face the fact that I was trashing months worth of hard work. I have to remind myself that this is still just a game and is purely for entertainment purposes. I have enjoyed getting to know many of the players and making new friends and adversaries where we had mutual respect for one another. I have sent money (that I earned the hard way) to players when they needed it, often when they didn't even ask.

Here is the bottom line - I really enjoyed the whole spymaster concept but will have no part of playing a game that has such huge holes that can be exploited.

At this point, the Directorate is going to have to win back my trust on two counts.

First, after reading many of these posts, it is apparent to me that this problem was evident more than three weeks ago yet nothing was done by the Directorate until all of the (worthless) money got dumped into the system. Why is that?

Second, I want to be assured that there are no more hacked players around. Until then, I will not be a player of the game and in my opinion a majority of the existing players will get frustrated and eventually leave.

If the Directorate is looking to Spymaster to be a source of revenue, they have much more to lose than you or I do. I hope for their sake that they see what needs to be done and that is why I say - reset the game!

I hope you understand vertago that my intentions are not selfish but rather for the sake of the core concept of the game itself and the 99.99% of the players that are the victims of this exploit.

I posted on the other thread, and am doing the same here.

mariankelly replied less than a minute ago What annoys me the worse is people referring to 'Puma' breaking the game, or 'Puma' ruining it.

You guys need to realise that there are more people in Puma than just those who you are blaming.

I have never merged, I don't have alts, I worked at my stats. If I did any of those things, I think I would have better stats that what I actually have!

I'm just a player who is in the Puma cell.

I support MK. I hate the blanket statements being tossed around that "PUMA" or "Thundercats" ____ as though all members are engaging in the same behavior. It is simply not true. Could we please limit the speculation and accusations to the evidence we have and not lump all members together? It's so unfair and hurtful.

PUMA i agree about the lump statement about puma and if you haven't been using this exploit by pushing the merge button 20 times REAL FAST I'm sorry to have included you in ucana's plot to ruin the game for the rest of us.

BUT UCANA was or still is your LEADER and his rain of hate and boredom must end.

WHO owns PUMA_422 http://playspymaster.com/profiles/92077
is Ucana still a director of puma?

KEITH AND BEN, there's a EASY cleanup yall can do to fix a lot of the stats.

Hire Mercenaries and insurance and ARE STUCK and permanent on many merged accounts, this is whats causing KEYSERS0ZE422 to have more spymasters than he should.

Please SEE
http://getsatisfaction.com/spymaster/...

for details on his spymasters.

I thought a suicide was supposed to kill both attacker and defender. How can a single spymaster (KEYSERS0ZE422) go on such a rampage of killing so many people in a span of minutes?

I don't know what merging is; so I'd be happy to get rid of it and just create Elite Level VI, so that everybody is encouraged to go elite one more time "and start from scratch"

Not everyone in Puma is trying to ruin the game Pod. And that being said, Ucana isn't trying to ruin the game. Placing all the blame on him is utterly ridiculous. It seems to many people have forgotten that this was just a game. A game that I'm really starting to become indifferent to because of all the drama.

All the backtracking in the world won't shift the blame from Ucana. The evidence is there. If people really felt it was just a game they wouldn't have put so much effort into trying to exploit it.

Lousy spies, the lot of you. Your observation skills are either lacking or you aren't paying attention.