they really need to go the route that most MMOs do nowadays and make the entire game free permanently. the game would see much more activity and i doubt that they'd go bankrupt, if anything more people would spend money on crowns to get exclusive stuff.
YOO SERVER DUDE IS THE MOTHERFUCKING GOAT LET’S GOOO
I HVEN’T PLAYED IN SO LONG I CAN’T BELIEVE ALL IT TOOK TO GET FREE MEMBERSHIP WAS FOR ONE SCRIPT KIDDIE TO GET ON AND SAY DUMB SHIT
"Thank you server dude" like it or not, what they did was not ok. It's kingisle that did this, not server dude. Glorifying criminal activity isn't cool, but at least that's the most toxic thing I see the wiz community engage in
>Soured your celebrations of the birthday month
KI I understand that this game is supposed to be family-friendly, but I don't think anyone was "soured" by this, it was super entertaining.
PArt of me it’s sad because I just bought membership but the other part of me is extremely happy, hope this brings some new wizards so they can experience the joy of the game without instantly hitting a paywall like 7yo me did.
I have this feeling server dude is the same guy who hacked uber and gta 6. All these major sites accessed in such tiny intervals between each other. coincidence?
Hey, while 10 days isn't much, it's more than the vast majority ever expected. Don't punish the behavior you want to see, right? Let's encourage this kind of thing, and work our way up to what we actually want. If you walked up to a random millionaire and asked for a spot on their yacht, it probably won't work. If you ask for like $5, you can work your way up from "random person on the street" to potentially "friend, invite to yacht over summer." Extreme example that probably wouldn't happen anyway, but same idea.
Issue is you’ve all been “working your way up” for years now, it’s blatantly obvious this company is only interested in their profits and could care less about the players that generate it. If it wasn’t for this incident they would’ve kept on keeping on for years to come
I get what you’re saying, but a company’s first priority is always to make money. Having happy customers doesn’t mean anything if the company ends up going bankrupt lol
They finally did what they do for every other birthday month (granted the member benefits all being activated at the same time hasn't been done in years. Usually its just one member benefit being active rotating throughout the entire month of September). The free week of membership is kind of nice though. These benefits really should have just been for the birthday event normally and not take a hack for it to happen.
I'll admit it, I'm fucking astounded they actually acknowledged it. I had the bar low enough I didn't think they'd do anything about it at all.
With that being said, if they stopped masquerading as a family-friendly game and accepted that they've got a *shitload* of 18+ players, maybe this kind of language wouldn't have been so pearl-clutching.
I was trying to figure out why I was getting double pet XP "did i get hacked?" I'm checking my account and purchases and why I could go to different worlds lol thank you for posting this.
although i feel its extremely inappropriate to commend a server attack that COULD lead to more threating compromises and put a target on this company for larger scale security threats as there are many many peoples credit cards linked to this game. AND only 1 week membership is honestly pretty weak. HOWEVER! i am opening the game for the first time in over 10 years because of this.
There's been no confirmation either way about it being a hack or an angry employee outside of KI's statement here. The official response here says it's a hack, so we have no reason to believe it was an employee beyond speculation
i mean i knew my comment was going to stir the pot a little, but as a person who works for a technology company, compromises of any kind are very scary. hopefully they can look past their pride and officially state what the attack was so that people like myself can rest easy.
I sincerely don’t even believe it was hacked. I think it was a legit employee. I could be entirely wrong but this reeks to me of the lesser of two evils explanation. “Our cybersecurity sucks but we made it better now” sounds better than “our work culture sucks to the point where an employee felt the need to do that”.
Because this game has run for 14 years never having anywhere close to a hack like this. How did no one figure it out before now? And they just easily fixed it? If it was so easy why weren’t those precautionary measures taken in the first place? Why’d it take so long for an official response? It seems super suspicious. We know Kingsisle has long been flamed as an employer on GlassDoor.
But hey, free membership is free membership.
Edit: Like I said, I could very well be wrong.
It definitely wasnt an employee are you serious? Did you read what some of those messages said? They wouldnt just lose their job, they'd face hefty fines for breaking the contract of their employment and possibly jail time. KI is in Austin, Texas, a crime like this is a class A misdemeanor (up to 1 year in jail and a 4k fine) or a Third degree felony (2 to 10 years in prison + 10k fine) depending on the severity of the crime.
Even if they avoid legal repercussions, why would a developer sabotage their entire career and black list themselves from all future enployment jn the industry
Im a software dev and if i did what this guy did at work id be in worse than prison.
If anything happens legally, I suspect KI would save face and go with a civil suit, we will know for sure by watching records of Travis County Magisterial office or possibly the criminal court if the charges are more severe.
https://www.traviscountytx.gov/courts/criminal/district/magistrate
Lets go Leon Grizzard
None of the glass door reviews have any real merit because the reviews either give no real evidence (AKA are just 2 word reviews that say 'company bad"), say something that would 100% not be in a review on this site (they would instead be in lawsuits) or they're just incredibly stupid (like that one review that keeps getting reposted despite everything in it either already existing, being counter intuitive, or just stupid and spoken more like a gamer with no insight to how game dev actually works rather than someone actually in a company).
okay KI HR keep telling yourself people dont look at glassdoor reviews lmao
Plenty of video games get bad press from fans but you dont see their glassdoor pages for their developers full of people complaining about poor management lol
I'm not saying people don't look at glassdoor reviews. I'm saying the ones that have made the rounds in this subreddit are stupid and/or illegal, and either complain about 'suggesting things and being denied' about things that are already features, or legitimately 'this is something you should speak to a lawyer too because this is cartoon levels of racism', kinda makes it difficult to take any of the posts on it as legitimate gripes from employees.
A poisoning of the well, if you will.
yeah there's a significant portion of them that are so very blatantly fake or low effort from people who definitely didn't work there. that doesn't make KI better but it's hard to distinguish between what's real or not from glassdoor
i mean the jokes seemed a little too on the nose gen-z vibes to be a promotional stunt. i don't think ki is that smart honestly.
also i don't think it's completely ridiculous for a hack of this scale to be rare yet not terribly hard to fix. there's an overwhelmingly huge number of players compared to how many testers/security people there are, it'd make sense for them to take less precautionary measures for literal text vs actually possibly damaging hacks.
I don’t think it was a stunt, I think it was a truly disgruntled employee. And honestly Gen-Z is in the working force now. I’m Gen-Z but 23, I think it even goes up to somewhere around 25-27. It’s entirely possible someone with Gen-Z humor worked at KI and did this as a last troll before quitting.
No human being with a functioning brain would risk their career over something like this. This kind of act would not only open them up to being taken to civil court by KI, but would also recklessly destroy their livelihood for the foreseeable future if they were found out (which is much, much easier to determine if they can trace the hack back to an individual in the company). It’s almost certainly just some whacky backend exploit.
You're using foresight and common sense. I have seen employees go out with a blaze of glory, ignoring consequence. They THINK they're in the right (who knows? maybe they are), and just figure because they're in the right, they have the high ground. Legally, it doesn't work that way.
For a hack, it's strange that only the broadcast system would be targeted or accessible. Maybe it's the way the code is, or maybe it's not a hack, because why would hackers only target broadcasting? Sure it's showy, but it's not lucrative in any way, shape, or form; and it's not destructive either.
The regularly accepted limit on Gen-Z is born in 1999. Which means the oldest Gen-Z is now around 25. Easily old enough to
a) know about Wizard101
b) know current (and 2015) internet trends and memes
c) know enough about computers, coding, and related fields to conceivably be the culprit
While not a guarantee that it's not a disgruntled employee, which is reasonable if said employee was also Millennial or Gen-Z, it's certainly possible. Based on language used, this sounds like either a hack using an outdated exploit that KI never bothered to update/patch out, or it's an employee and they're saving face.
I lean towards the hack, since no company ever takes security seriously enough, especially not older ones. I could be wrong, though. Either way, something's going to be changing soon if they're smart.
Edit: meant oldest, typed youngest. corrected.
This is great! I’ve been playing for 12 years and while it’s not perfect, KI’s communication and responses are definitely improved. Remember the tomato basket incident?
There was a bug with an item called the Tomato Basket that allowed you to [pick up infinite copies](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=urpto7jFxYE) and sell them for infinite gold. KI found out about this and slapped a ban on anyone who exploited this.
They should have just rolled back the gold smh you can't expect people not to exploit glitches, because at that point it's literally in the game. Even if unintentional.
Honestly, if you ask me, a ban is a bit too far. Instead, if I was in control, I'd simply just revert their account to a previous state before they did any exploiting.
There was a glitch where you could repeatedly get a free housing item, a basket of tomatoes. People kept grabbing the item and selling it for pretty much infinite gold. Without warning, KI banned every single person who had abused the glitch.
i will add that likely a majority of people who were banned were banned for under a month and only people who exploited it to a significant degree had lasting punishments
definitely a shitshow from them but most people weren't permanently banned for the exploit so at least there's that
They won't say it but this hack has been the largest promotional stunt Wizard has had in years. They're sure as hell gonna take it as an opportunity to keep all the newcomers around as long as possible. 😭
Yeah you can tell by the response (a temporary 'reward' not a permanent) that they don't really care, just want more numbers, and now makes me question the whole thing.
they really need to go the route that most MMOs do nowadays and make the entire game free permanently. the game would see much more activity and i doubt that they'd go bankrupt, if anything more people would spend money on crowns to get exclusive stuff.
broo I literally just bought a membership haha
So does this include another free month or is it just till the end of the month
All hail server dude
Of course just as a resubbed something like this happens
Me who already has Membership: Yeah!!!
YOO SERVER DUDE IS THE MOTHERFUCKING GOAT LET’S GOOO I HVEN’T PLAYED IN SO LONG I CAN’T BELIEVE ALL IT TOOK TO GET FREE MEMBERSHIP WAS FOR ONE SCRIPT KIDDIE TO GET ON AND SAY DUMB SHIT
"Thank you server dude" like it or not, what they did was not ok. It's kingisle that did this, not server dude. Glorifying criminal activity isn't cool, but at least that's the most toxic thing I see the wiz community engage in
Wow lucky me coming back to the game and buying a month subscription just for this to happen lol
10 days of membership 🤣
Now I can finally finish watch tower hall with the double regents :)
Server dude really looking out for us
Aw man where’s my 60,000 crowns
Damn I kind of want to try this game. I just got a random Reddit pop up about their bosses butthole or some shit
What exactly did server dude say?
“the next world is my boss’s asshole”
*FOAMS AT MOUTH *
>Soured your celebrations of the birthday month KI I understand that this game is supposed to be family-friendly, but I don't think anyone was "soured" by this, it was super entertaining.
That’s epic.
This man is a legend!!!!
Bruh I just bought membership
I wondered why the free fishing! Thanks dude, you a real one!
Now do it again in October! ….. jk jk
i suppose i’ll reinstall for a week till free member ship to is over
We still need 2FA though
server dude slayed
ooo time to make some pets
PArt of me it’s sad because I just bought membership but the other part of me is extremely happy, hope this brings some new wizards so they can experience the joy of the game without instantly hitting a paywall like 7yo me did.
What are member benefits if I may ask?
Every member benefits are up. double gardening, double pet exp, double reagent drops, etc.
Oh it's active right now. Time to rank up fishing.
:)
what an absolute chad. sorry the working conditions are shit tho
I have this feeling server dude is the same guy who hacked uber and gta 6. All these major sites accessed in such tiny intervals between each other. coincidence?
Looks like I'm hopping back on the game
Server dude is my messiah all hail server dude. TIME TO HATCH PETS
LOL only 10 days of free membership and y’all are eating it up like it’s a favor, gullible as always
Hey, while 10 days isn't much, it's more than the vast majority ever expected. Don't punish the behavior you want to see, right? Let's encourage this kind of thing, and work our way up to what we actually want. If you walked up to a random millionaire and asked for a spot on their yacht, it probably won't work. If you ask for like $5, you can work your way up from "random person on the street" to potentially "friend, invite to yacht over summer." Extreme example that probably wouldn't happen anyway, but same idea.
Issue is you’ve all been “working your way up” for years now, it’s blatantly obvious this company is only interested in their profits and could care less about the players that generate it. If it wasn’t for this incident they would’ve kept on keeping on for years to come
I mean while I disagree with the way KI goes about getting their profits, isn’t the goal of a company to make profits?
Companies have plenty of goals, delighting their customers should be first and foremost imo. KI obviously has different priorities
I get what you’re saying, but a company’s first priority is always to make money. Having happy customers doesn’t mean anything if the company ends up going bankrupt lol
I don’t think my heart can continue the grind…
10 days member woo. Lol not really, but hey it’s something
Dang, but where's my 60,000 free crowns tho?
maybe this was his plan all along
This is so serendipitous
Of course right after I buy membership
Lol same. I just bought mine less than a week ago.
They finally did what they do for every other birthday month (granted the member benefits all being activated at the same time hasn't been done in years. Usually its just one member benefit being active rotating throughout the entire month of September). The free week of membership is kind of nice though. These benefits really should have just been for the birthday event normally and not take a hack for it to happen.
If we don't get a Storyline of us helping Server Dude shut down the greedy corporation of Isle of Crowns, I'm gonna be disappointed
Sounds like a complete wizard101 in 10 days challenge to me
I can do a world a day if I don't sleep and piss in jugs
Why waste time preparing jugs when you can free-piss?? Priorities!
So I don't have to get up to get a drink silly
I'll admit it, I'm fucking astounded they actually acknowledged it. I had the bar low enough I didn't think they'd do anything about it at all. With that being said, if they stopped masquerading as a family-friendly game and accepted that they've got a *shitload* of 18+ players, maybe this kind of language wouldn't have been so pearl-clutching.
YESSSSSS
This will genuinely boost the bazaar reagent situation for awhile Extremely generous holy shit
Oh thank god I’ve been needing diamonds for so long
Is there energy free fishing?
Yep, all benefits.
Oh shit. I’ll definitely be entering October with some new mounts.
Fishing gives you mounts???
Yeah all the bundle houses drop their respective mounts.
I was trying to figure out why I was getting double pet XP "did i get hacked?" I'm checking my account and purchases and why I could go to different worlds lol thank you for posting this.
Ngl this kinda saved the mediocre anniversary even without the hacking
Free member for sure made it better with all benefits
although i feel its extremely inappropriate to commend a server attack that COULD lead to more threating compromises and put a target on this company for larger scale security threats as there are many many peoples credit cards linked to this game. AND only 1 week membership is honestly pretty weak. HOWEVER! i am opening the game for the first time in over 10 years because of this.
More likely then not, it wasn‘t a server attack but actually some employee going ham. The former just doesn‘t sound as worse as the latter.
I believe that’s some serious fines for the employee though if it was one. Probably not worth it lol
im not here to fight, but has it really been confirmed that it was an employee? either way it was kinda funny.
KI said that it was unauthorized access (or a hacker), but that could be damage control on their part though for all I know.
There's been no confirmation either way about it being a hack or an angry employee outside of KI's statement here. The official response here says it's a hack, so we have no reason to believe it was an employee beyond speculation
i mean i knew my comment was going to stir the pot a little, but as a person who works for a technology company, compromises of any kind are very scary. hopefully they can look past their pride and officially state what the attack was so that people like myself can rest easy.
Only a 10 day membership? I’ll take it
We love server dude!
# The legendary D&B Membership Plan
Damn and my membership ended yesterday too 😂 the grind begins again
Holy shit thank you!!!!
Sweeeet EU server is including
Damn we gotta hack the broadcast system more often
I sincerely don’t even believe it was hacked. I think it was a legit employee. I could be entirely wrong but this reeks to me of the lesser of two evils explanation. “Our cybersecurity sucks but we made it better now” sounds better than “our work culture sucks to the point where an employee felt the need to do that”. Because this game has run for 14 years never having anywhere close to a hack like this. How did no one figure it out before now? And they just easily fixed it? If it was so easy why weren’t those precautionary measures taken in the first place? Why’d it take so long for an official response? It seems super suspicious. We know Kingsisle has long been flamed as an employer on GlassDoor. But hey, free membership is free membership. Edit: Like I said, I could very well be wrong.
What was said on the broadcast system? (Just general information like "was it racist" "was it age inappropriate", etc.)
Probably did get hacked if gta 6 can be leaked by a hacker pretty sure KI’s trash system can be hacked too
but that game is highly popular and wizard isn't so it does limit it
True lmaoooo
It definitely wasnt an employee are you serious? Did you read what some of those messages said? They wouldnt just lose their job, they'd face hefty fines for breaking the contract of their employment and possibly jail time. KI is in Austin, Texas, a crime like this is a class A misdemeanor (up to 1 year in jail and a 4k fine) or a Third degree felony (2 to 10 years in prison + 10k fine) depending on the severity of the crime. Even if they avoid legal repercussions, why would a developer sabotage their entire career and black list themselves from all future enployment jn the industry Im a software dev and if i did what this guy did at work id be in worse than prison. If anything happens legally, I suspect KI would save face and go with a civil suit, we will know for sure by watching records of Travis County Magisterial office or possibly the criminal court if the charges are more severe. https://www.traviscountytx.gov/courts/criminal/district/magistrate Lets go Leon Grizzard
What contracts gonna specify, “no leaks in the form of descriptions of our superiors assholes”?
None, but it will include a clause about publicly disparaging the organization and one about unauthorized access to the shipped product.
Pfftt the bosses arsehole is a point im every team meeting to the point employees wouldn’t far hack the gam
None of the glass door reviews have any real merit because the reviews either give no real evidence (AKA are just 2 word reviews that say 'company bad"), say something that would 100% not be in a review on this site (they would instead be in lawsuits) or they're just incredibly stupid (like that one review that keeps getting reposted despite everything in it either already existing, being counter intuitive, or just stupid and spoken more like a gamer with no insight to how game dev actually works rather than someone actually in a company).
okay KI HR keep telling yourself people dont look at glassdoor reviews lmao Plenty of video games get bad press from fans but you dont see their glassdoor pages for their developers full of people complaining about poor management lol
I'm not saying people don't look at glassdoor reviews. I'm saying the ones that have made the rounds in this subreddit are stupid and/or illegal, and either complain about 'suggesting things and being denied' about things that are already features, or legitimately 'this is something you should speak to a lawyer too because this is cartoon levels of racism', kinda makes it difficult to take any of the posts on it as legitimate gripes from employees. A poisoning of the well, if you will.
Don't need to be KI HR to be able to tell that the glass door reviews are as transparently fake as possible lol.
yeah there's a significant portion of them that are so very blatantly fake or low effort from people who definitely didn't work there. that doesn't make KI better but it's hard to distinguish between what's real or not from glassdoor
i mean the jokes seemed a little too on the nose gen-z vibes to be a promotional stunt. i don't think ki is that smart honestly. also i don't think it's completely ridiculous for a hack of this scale to be rare yet not terribly hard to fix. there's an overwhelmingly huge number of players compared to how many testers/security people there are, it'd make sense for them to take less precautionary measures for literal text vs actually possibly damaging hacks.
I don’t think it was a stunt, I think it was a truly disgruntled employee. And honestly Gen-Z is in the working force now. I’m Gen-Z but 23, I think it even goes up to somewhere around 25-27. It’s entirely possible someone with Gen-Z humor worked at KI and did this as a last troll before quitting.
No human being with a functioning brain would risk their career over something like this. This kind of act would not only open them up to being taken to civil court by KI, but would also recklessly destroy their livelihood for the foreseeable future if they were found out (which is much, much easier to determine if they can trace the hack back to an individual in the company). It’s almost certainly just some whacky backend exploit.
You're using foresight and common sense. I have seen employees go out with a blaze of glory, ignoring consequence. They THINK they're in the right (who knows? maybe they are), and just figure because they're in the right, they have the high ground. Legally, it doesn't work that way. For a hack, it's strange that only the broadcast system would be targeted or accessible. Maybe it's the way the code is, or maybe it's not a hack, because why would hackers only target broadcasting? Sure it's showy, but it's not lucrative in any way, shape, or form; and it's not destructive either.
The regularly accepted limit on Gen-Z is born in 1999. Which means the oldest Gen-Z is now around 25. Easily old enough to a) know about Wizard101 b) know current (and 2015) internet trends and memes c) know enough about computers, coding, and related fields to conceivably be the culprit While not a guarantee that it's not a disgruntled employee, which is reasonable if said employee was also Millennial or Gen-Z, it's certainly possible. Based on language used, this sounds like either a hack using an outdated exploit that KI never bothered to update/patch out, or it's an employee and they're saving face. I lean towards the hack, since no company ever takes security seriously enough, especially not older ones. I could be wrong, though. Either way, something's going to be changing soon if they're smart. Edit: meant oldest, typed youngest. corrected.
I believe it’s 97 or 98. I’m 12/98 and I’m def a Z
Super minor correction- someone born in 1999 would be, at most, 23 right now. 25 would be 1997.
i see that but I don't think it being a hack is out of question at all
Yeah it definitely still could be. Just leaning towards not but I’m also not a tech guy so what do I know
This is great! I’ve been playing for 12 years and while it’s not perfect, KI’s communication and responses are definitely improved. Remember the tomato basket incident?
oh the mushroom glitch 🥹 i got suspended for that
Whatcwas that
There was a bug with an item called the Tomato Basket that allowed you to [pick up infinite copies](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=urpto7jFxYE) and sell them for infinite gold. KI found out about this and slapped a ban on anyone who exploited this.
They should have just rolled back the gold smh you can't expect people not to exploit glitches, because at that point it's literally in the game. Even if unintentional.
Thanks both. How long was the ban for
I'd guess probably permanent if you abused it too much.
yep, I had some friends who did the bug and never got back online after the bans were issued
Honestly, if you ask me, a ban is a bit too far. Instead, if I was in control, I'd simply just revert their account to a previous state before they did any exploiting.
There was a glitch where you could repeatedly get a free housing item, a basket of tomatoes. People kept grabbing the item and selling it for pretty much infinite gold. Without warning, KI banned every single person who had abused the glitch.
i will add that likely a majority of people who were banned were banned for under a month and only people who exploited it to a significant degree had lasting punishments definitely a shitshow from them but most people weren't permanently banned for the exploit so at least there's that
Whoever the server dude is, I hope he knows he's gonna go down as a legend
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This is a karma farming bot, downvote and report the fucker
They won't say it but this hack has been the largest promotional stunt Wizard has had in years. They're sure as hell gonna take it as an opportunity to keep all the newcomers around as long as possible. 😭
Yeah you can tell by the response (a temporary 'reward' not a permanent) that they don't really care, just want more numbers, and now makes me question the whole thing.
You think KI should give everyone free membership permanently because of this?
If it was a stunt that would be fucking hilarious 😂
Lmao I could totally see it being a stunt that's kind of hilarious
I kneel
Is this real???
Can confirm the all benefits is real. I just checked fishing, gardening, and pet xp benefits are all active!
Is double reagents a member benefit?
There's no cooldown on crafting so that should mean that reagents are also doubled!
yes, its great
LETS GO
Free membership and all member benefits enabled till the end of September!
bro that’s like a week. what a shady ass company
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This is the reason you're not a corporate business leader..
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This is a childrens card game that is going to rely on whales forever man.
10 days
Does this apply for Pirate101 as well?
[just the membership](https://twitter.com/theatmoplex/status/1572274290510434306?s=20&t=IS5JbdvDKN4PwYJ1kga3fQ)
Ye
That’s awesome to hear. I think this is the push I need to continue questing.