Money Glitch: What it was, why it happened.

[RR] Foxx

Recently in Rivals we discovered a hole in our game logic that allowed a user through a specific set of steps to duplicate money. This involved two users racing for money and having one of them leave the game quickly during a specific part of the betting sequence. This allowed Racer A to win the money from the race and Racer B to not lose any money, essentially "duplicating" money.

We tracked these specific parameters, down to a small amount of our user base, we then tracked how many times these users had "exploited" this hole in our logic. Once we established who had used this exploit and how often it became about how to deal with the problem. After plugging the hole in our logic we still had massive amounts of "duplicated" money in our economy. Since Rivals is a game about betting and buying things in game for this currency something had to be done. The economy was inflated and this was causing in game trading to get to astronomical amounts and farther away from reaching a large subset of our users. This lead to unfair advantages in game.

We did not want to ban anyone as this was technically our fault for the hole in our logic. Yet we had to remove some of this money. This resulted in a sweep of these users that "exploited" our logic, bringing their total cash down to a reasonable amount.