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CHICAGO, IL — After finding and abusing a fault in the fabric of the universe, local engineer Kevin Brooks was kicked from the natural world by the Heavenly Admin after a vote in which 5.32 billion players agreed that he should be permanently banned.
In an interview conducted a week before being removed from existence, Brooks told reporters how he came upon the strange flaw. “Around 2:15 in the morning a couple months ago,” he explained, “I was frantically trying to finish up a project that I had to show to a client later that day. I was calculating the amount of battery power it would need when I discovered that the equation ‘1 + 1’ oddly came out to ‘3’. I repeated it over and over with multiple calculators and by hand, but I kept getting the same answer until 3 o’clock, when the answer reverted back to ‘2’.
“I soon realized that, between 2 and 3 o’clock every morning,” he continued, “the very foundation of mathematics became completely messed up, so I decided to make use of the phenomenon. It was quite easy to invent ways to get around our normal physical limitations, such as walking through walls and ignoring the effects of gravity.”
Soon enough, however, Brooks was taking advantage of his newfound abilities for personal gain. In a matter of days, the engineer built a car that could travel faster than the speed of light, with zero emissions and no apparent power source.
“This is totally unfair to other players,” complained Hexxon Mobil CEO Ray Millerson, worried about the future of his company if the car was mass-produced. “Only a total n00b would break so many rules while others play honestly.”
Brooks also claimed that his vehicle had such powerful brakes that it not only could stop on a dime without injuring the driver, but it could also travel backward in time to correct for any accidents that may have occurred.
Brooks might not have actually been the first to exploit this glitch.
“He's a blatant cheater,” Toyota CEO Katsuaki Watanabe told reporters. “My company has been a pioneer of the highest-quality braking technology on the market, and we are still barely able to make our cars stop reliably. I call shenanigans.”
To the world's scientists' annoyance, Brooks also hacked into the laws of physics, changing important values and equations such as Newton's gravitational constant and the inverse square law.
“Who does this haxxor think he is?” expressed a frustrated Steven Hawking. “Earth has completely lost its orbit with the sun, and worst of all, the sun is getting brighter as we drift farther away!”
As the earth drifted away, the sun became angry and started to attack innocent players.
After expelling Brooks to an eternity of floating through nothingness, the Heavenly Admin ramped up patrols of the Celestial Moderators to ensure that no one else attempts to exploit the glitch. Meanwhile, the HA's team of Divine Programmers are working on a patch that should be released by the end of the week.
“The faulty code has already been found,” said a CM in a rare interview between human and angel. “It will just take a few more days to go through the QA department. We apologize to our audience for any inconveniences this small hiccup caused and hope that everyone will continue playing in our universe.
“However, until the patch is ready to be distributed,” it added, “anyone caught abusing the glitch will be turned into a pillar of salt.”
Cheaters are some of the most annoying individuals online, always itching to ruin everyone else's good time just to get ahead. It is always fun to find bugs and glitches in games and have a laugh over them, but exploiting them in a serious competition is simply obnoxious. Do you view this as an important issue, or are developers doing enough now to crack down on this behavior?
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