Exploit investigations and sanctions

Dear Players,

Over the last few months, we have been running an extensive investigation about a possible purchase exploit in the game. Today, based on its results, we have temporarily banned a certain number of Players suspected of exploiting the game by faking purchases.

We are going to be further investigating this case and there might be more Players sanctioned in the near future.

If you believe that your account was wrongly banned, please contact our support team with proofs of your purchases.

Thank you for your understanding.

Your Deca team

Dear players,

Last week a big number of players were banned until further notice due to the use of fake purchases referred as a “gold hack”.
We would like to share with you some new findings and decisions as our investigations go on.

Most importantly we added yesterday an extra layer of protection preventing this specific type of exploits to be used again.

Banned players willing to return to the game will have to contact support. From tomorrow on and until the end of next week, support will analyze all the payment proofs that players have shared and, from the 1st of April, banned players might be allowed back under certain conditions :

- The banning history of the player has been checked by our team.
- All the leaderboard rewards earned in weekend events since the gold hack introduction have been taken out of the account.
- Any element purchased with the “stolen gold” has been paid back to Deca or was taken out of the account.
- Players who are allowed back in the game will be banned for weekend events until potential faction sanctions have been rolled out and their personal situation was fully cleared.

Faction sanctions were also requested and questioned. After deeper analysis, we decided that factions who had more than 10% of cheaters in their team members will see all of the faction rewards earned since they started cheating taken back. This includes all players who joined or left these factions during their cheating period and thus benefiting directly or indirectly from this exploit.

We know that many of you might question the return of banned players and we have to clarify the reasoning here : not all banned players cheated in the same proportion and the punishment for all these players is overall clearly bigger than what they benefited from.
We also want to add that each of the cases is specific, therefore it will be dealt with on an individual basis.

Thank you for your understanding,

Your Deca team

Dear players,

As a follow up on our investigations regarding the "gold hack" exploit, we made a sanity check with all of our partners (from DataCenters to payment providers, etc.)
and identified one specific rare occurrence where our tracking could generate false positive results.

If an OS upgrade started on a primary hardware instance where the player data resides and before the fallback became the primary source of information for the game, and if a purchase was triggered during that small window- it could possibly have generate a duplicated receipt which our tracking would then identify as a hacking attempt.
We started checking the duplication timestamps for all banned players to verify if these could be false positives.

In the very few identified cases, if the player can provide us with one of the two increminated receipt duplicates to fully clear out the situation, we will delete the content of the duplicated purchase and unban them immediately.

For all the other banned players, the process and sanctions described previously remain unchanged.

We also want to mention that we will give out 1 FL point as a login reward next week to thank all of the community for their patience and understanding.

Thank you again,

Your Deca team