Hello everyone,
I am one of the accounts that was banned and am writing this to explain what happened from my perspective. I am not upset that my account was banned and am not asking for it to be restored, as it was an extremely serious exploit, as you will see, and would have ruined the game for everyone if it had been made widespread before it was fixed. That is the reason I did not talk about the ban with anyone, including my guildmates, and I only made one reference to it on the Tyrant Unleashed forums when a similar exploit was made known there, in this thread:
https://www.kongregate.com/forums/2...d-reward-and-boss-cards?page=1#posts-13189928
The exploit is the same one reported around a month ago in this thread:
https://www.kongregate.com/forums/7...ch-message-me-mods-if-you-wanna-know-about-it. It was very simple and I was shocked that it existed and was not discovered immediately. To do the exploit, in the inventory menu you just used the arrows to preview the stats of a card when upgraded, and then if you clicked the upgrade button, it would upgrade the card to that level permanently, without needing to fuse extra copies of the card. So you just take a lvl 0 card, click the preview until it showed quad fusion, click upgrade, and it would upgrade into a quad, deducting 302 gigiwatts for an epic card and 498 gigiwatts for a legendary card.
I only started playing this game recently when Synapticon announced that development on Tyrant Unleashed was being discontinued. I accidentally discovered the exploit just about a month after I started, when I noticed I had a double-fused Bob's Burgers object card in my inventory. Then I figured out how I must have made the double fuse and then tested it to see if it was repeatable, which it was. I then saw in the forums that the bug had already been reported in the above thread, so I did not report it myself. I realized that this was an extremely serious exploit, needed to be fixed immediately, and would probably destroy the game if was made known and widespread. So I did not discuss the bug on any Kongregte forums except when it was linked to a Tyrant Unleashed bug. I made a few more quad fusions to figure out how the bug worked.
Even though I expected it to be fixed at any moment since it was such a simple bug, as the weeks continued, the bug continued to work. The bug was not acknowledged by any mod, and if I have any criticism of Synapticon, is that they should have fixed the bug immediately, or if they could not, at least acknowledge a bug exists and let players know to not exploit it. I thought of writing a reply in the report thread to get the devs to fix the bug faster, but I didn't dare to draw more attention to it as it appeared most people didn't know of it. But it was such a simple bug that its amazing that it did not become wide knowledge in all this time.
Anyway, when I tried to play an hour ago I got the message that my account was permanently banned. I knew this was always a possibility. Since I have only been playing this game for about two months, losing this account is not a big loss. I would like to know why it took Synapticon nearly a month to fix what was probably a simple error, and I think they owe the community an explanation for that. Although I will no longer continue to play Animation Throwdown, I had a lot of fun in these two months, and discovered the Bob's Burgers cartoon by playing it. I do not regret the choices I made as now this game and this community will continue on. Finally I would like to thank my guildmates for letting me be the hero and save the day in the last rumble, that was amazing.
Have fun and take care everyone!