I'm going to assume you all know what Warbook is.

So this is the story of a game played by hundreds of thousands of people every day. A game of simplicity, elegance, and addiction that has a typical activity rate that ranges from 20% to 35% on any given day. Numbers to die for.

As with any good piece of software, it is constantly iterating on itself, growing and changing over time. New features added, old features tweaked. Bugs resolved and checked off the list.

But this weekend someone found a clever loop-hole in the Facebook/Warbook interface. Someone figured out how to take the link from the 'reset your kingdom' page and stick it into a 'tinyurl', letting you reset your kingdom just by clicking the link.

Then, like any good internet prankster, they promptly posted the link on the Warbook forum with the caption "YouTube Warbook Infinite Gold Cheat". Naturally, thousands have clicked the link, and thousands have found themselves without their kingdoms. The url has spread like the viral plague, not exposing a flaw in the game mechanic but exposing a flaw in certain methodologies used by the developer.

The community, thankfully, largely self moderates and every time the killer link pops up it is taken down pretty fast. Most people are not terribly upset, though a lot of people have been seriously burned. Compensation has yet to be discussed, solutions are still on the table, and the developer is... largely silent at the moment.

It being the weekend.

Now, I like Warbook, so I'm having a hard time being critical of their team. They do a pretty good job for a few guys building a Facebook application as a marketing vehicle for another company. I see amazing ways to monetize the application that are being missed, but that is a whole separate issue. What I am going to be really critical about is the very poor response time the developers are showing.

If anything, this event should be a panic button push. You have a situation where someone has, from the users perspective, created a hack that has deleted their account. You have a community up in arms, and divisions forming. You have the innocent newbies getting burned and grumpy. You have the dedicated who were simply curious now toasted. You have the clickers forming up on one side, and the non-clickers tossing insults and jokes on the other.

You have, in short, a very volatile community that is not seeing any guidance or explanation from the developer. You have rumor city and anger, and I'm unhappy, but not surprised, that the developers of Warbook are miss handling their community.

Will this be as bad as the Eve:Online scandals? Hardly. Does this point out that game developers need to hire community managers that know how to handle these sorts of nightmare events? You bet.

UPDATE:

You can now buy the T-Shirt: http://www.cafepress.com/themarcusshop