After cheaters broke Steam's most popular roguelike's leaderboards, its dev issued a fix and a warning: 'Cheaters you better watch your ass or I'm clapping your cheeks back to the shadow realm where you belong'
Megabonk's explosive success has unfortunately attracted the kind of people who love to ruin the fun. Over the weekend, its leaderboards were taken over by players with high scores that could only be possible using cheats.
As a temporary solution, lead developer Vedinad nuked the leaderboards on Sunday in preparation for the fix that just arrived today. The new patch has refreshed the leaderboards and has some tweaks that should prevent them from being broken again. Vedinad says known cheaters have been banned: "Cheaters you better watch your ass or I'm clapping your cheeks back to the shadow realm where you belong."
"Yo sorry about the leaderboards being broken the last few days," Vedinad wrote in the patch notes. "I took some time off over the weekend, and of course some mfers decided to break the leaderboard for everyone. But technically it's my fault for not securing the leaderboards enough, i just never expected this many people to play fucking Megabonk lol. Anyway should be fixed now!"
It's been less than a month since the $10 roguelike was released and shot up into the top five most played games on Steam. Its retro 3D graphics and utterly bizarre characters, like a skateboarding skeleton named Calcium, convinced over a million people to buy it within the first two weeks.
As run-based roguelikes go, there are tons of players vying for the highest scores by puzzling out the most powerful builds. A meta has formed around stacking experience buffs and screen-clearing attacks in order to survive the endless onslaught of ghosts after you've defeated the final boss. Without cheating or bugs, you'll be overwhelmed after about an hour when the invulnerable ghosts spawn.
Before the patch, it was also possible for your game to just crash before you even reached that point. The number of effects happening would tank the FPS into the single digits. "This was never intended, and I don't think anyone actually enjoyed that, so I've stirred up some shit," Vedinad wrote in the notes. "The final swarm is harder to survive, and your executes and black holes won't really save you anymore… probably."
The update also includes a number of balance changes, two of which specifically target the most popular builds when chasing high scores. Joe's Dagger, which is a weapon that has a chance to instantly kill enemies, has a damage cap per minute now.
"This means it's unchanged early- and mid-game, but very late-game it's not gonna be the only viable option anymore," Vedinad says.
Additionally, the XP tome that everyone used to level up as fast as possible has been nerfed from a 9% bonus to 7%.
"The majority wanted this nerf, but some people really don't like it," Vedinad says. "At least give it a try, and If everyone ends up hating it, I can just revert it back to 9% next week. please go easy on me."
At the bottom of the patch notes, Vedinad teased some future updates, including an opacity setting for attacks, a full-sized map, improved tooltips, a way to track quests, multiplayer, and new maps, items, and characters.