Cheats and Exploits

A recent announcement about fixing cheats and exploits by General Dogsworth, a community manager on the official Zynga E&A forums:

Ten-HUT!

We've received a lot of contacts from our players lately involving cheats and exploits. While we obviously don't encourage players to talk about exploits on the forums—to prevent them from spreading—we do still receive emails and notifications from players about this, as well as doing our own research.

The most recent batch of exploits has allowed some unscrupulous players to obtain high level units without paying for them. This is bad enough on its own, but when these same players use them in World Domination it can make them very difficult opponents.

We want you guys to know exactly what we're doing to address these exploits.

First, as of last week the exploit no longer works. We tracked down and identified the problem that allowed players to get ahold of these units illicitly.

Second, this week we will be going through and removing all of the units which were generated through this exploit. It will likely take a few days before they get cleaned out, but we have a record of every single unit that was generated through this exploit and every single one will be removed from the cheater's Empire without a refund.

Since one of the variants of the exploits involves gifting, there may be some of you who received an unsolicited unit as a gift that was generated by an exploit. No action will be taken against your account, but the exploited unit will be removed.

We encourage you to continue to contact us via PM if you encounter evidence of another exploit in the wild. We're committed to making sure that our game is fun for EVERYbody, not just for the cheaters.

DISMISSED!

I may add commentary later.

Source:
Cheats & Exploits - General Dogsworth, Feb. 28, 2012