World of Warcraft’s Corrupted Blood epidemic. Fansy the Famous Bard’s invincible assault on Everquest. The (in-game) Assassination of Ultima Online developer Lord British. If nothing else, MMORPGs have proven to be tantalizing petri dishes for player-wrought disasters of the most befuddling and most amusing kind. The most famous incidents – like those above – are known for throwing entire servers, or even the entire game, into utter chaos. Though unfortunate at the time, these incidents etch themselves into the annals of gaming history, and act as a kind of rite of passage for high-caliber MMORPGs.

A recent exploit in IMC’s Tree of Savior may not be enough to catapult the game into the MMO genre’s highest drama echelons, but it certainly did upset many of its players. Yesterday, a user on Tree of Savior’s subreddit named reimur found that players could completely disband a guild upon joining, regardless of whether or not that player was a guild leader.

All you had to do was type the phrase “/destroyguild” in guild chat, after which the guild would be completely disbanded.

Nothing more, nothing less.

As expected of anything that ruins other peoples’ playing experiences, the exploit was quickly picked up by trolls and griefers, who asked to join guilds, then promptly vaporized them with the command.

Countless guild leaders and their guild members, meanwhile, were left distraught and without a guild. Mind you, disbanding a guild effectively nullifies all of the time, effort, and in-game gold used to build up the guild over time.

The exploit was allegedly found when players were experimenting with LUA command scripts to create in-game add-ons. Fortunately for the affected guilds, Tree of Savior also stores its guild data server-side, meaning the guilds could be recovered from the abyss.

As for how such an easy exploit could have been overlooked? Some players speculate that the command was left over from the game’s testing stage, and could have been overlooked on the final release.

To the relief of many, IMC responded to the chaos with the following message:

Greetings, Saviors.

It was brought to out attention that some players were abusing a bug in the game to disband guilds without becoming a guild master.

We would like to announce that this issue was fixed during today’s temporary maintenance and regular guild members are no longer able to delete their guilds at will.

We are currently looking into further measures regarding disbanded guilds and users who abused this feature.

Thank you to those who reported this problem to us; your contribution is always appreciated.

Sincerely,
IMC Staff

While this response doesn’t mean gamebreaking exploits have been stamped out in their entirety in Tree of Savior, it should provide players with a little reassurance that IMC is willing to quickly respond to anything that might disrupt the playing experience of their MMO.

In any case, I’ll be sure to mention your name the next time someone tells me about Corrupted Blood, Tree of Savior.