Hello Tricksters! I just wanted to give everyone an update and a general timeline on the duplication incident that occurred between 5/10/2020-5/14/2020.
I first received a report of a possible galder duplication bug from someone on the 10th. I took a quick glance at the logs, and they didn’t really show anything too suspicious.
Fast forward 4 days, and I receive about 5 more reports, one saying that it was a Korean player named ALLTOP who was duplicating items and galders, with a Kakao Chat screenshot that was sent around in the Korean community.
Yesterday, I managed to possibly reproduce the bug based on unclear and hidden logs. Originally, I hadn’t checked them as they were not output to the server’s console. As of right now, the exploited duplication bug should be patched. I am not sure how ALLTOP did it, but I’m hoping it’s fairly similar in execution. Obviously, there are more duplication bugs that exist, but they are likely not currently being exploited. We don’t know of those bugs, and as such, are not able to attempt to patch them.
As a result of the patch, the server may freeze for ~ 0.5s when someone does a very specific action based on a few NPCs in the game as the server is checking if the bug is being exploited. We will not reveal the specific vulnerable action, as other servers (including rTO) likely do not have this bug patched.
We will not be taking any action against the players who have received and/or spent duplicated currency, or those who have received duplicated items. We believe this duplication bug to have been exploited without underlying malicious intent as well. We believe that the duplicated items and galders will not cause a large disturbance to the economy.
ALLTOP’s character has been moved from his account, so it and its items should hopefully not be accessible. He said that he will no longer exploit LifeTO.
Finally, we, the LifeTO staff, apologize for the disturbance. We’re hoping to not see any more bugs like this exploited, but that may be too optimistic of a look. Also, we’ll be releasing a new MyShop patch in the coming week (likely mid-week) with some new content updates hopefully coming in the summer.
Thanks for sticking with us after all these years.