So, on Kongregate, a user was bragging about having over 20,000 Idols. When we called said user out, they posted an image that seemed to prove his words:

http://i.imgur.com/bDthmN9.png
(Edited for anonymity for now.)

A fellow user and I have been working on how to maximize Idol gain. The MOST we've been able to get is about 15 every two hours. That's a slight exaggeration as well, and so far that's been the optimal gain for at least the first hundred.

The user who posted this is not a Kong Plus member, so they did not have access to the Kongregate Beta. By their own words, they'd only played for two days. But being as generous as possible, if they played from July 30th to this moment, they'd have 72 hours at MOST. 21,000 Idols over 72 hours is a gain of 291 per hour. Compared to what our standard max is at 7.5 per hour, that is absolutely insane.

The image is not fake, if it were, why fake the other elements? However, if certain data was hacked, this is very possible. If there was a way to skyrocket DPS, Gold, or chests, you could make your DPS unlimited and blast through area after area. I imagine certain glitches could cause this as well, but I think I we would have heard of something like this over the past couple days.

My money is on them being a hacker. Is there any way for me to report them? I do have their Kongregate name and the original image and chat log as proof, and I know the data is saved server-side... is there anything that can be done?

XP gives diminishing returns. You cannot get infinite DPS with XP alone.

The first one gives you +100%, so your DPS would go from 100 to 200 - a 100% gain.
With the second, it changes to a 200% gain, so you go from 200 to 300. Still a 100 DPS gain, but you've actually only gone up 50%.
When you get 11 XP, you go from 1000 to 1100 - only a 10% gain now, and still dropping.

Because XP is additive, not multiplicative, you're only adding your base number with each XP. Eventually, you'd get to the point that the XP bonus is negligible, and not boosting your DPS at all.

As proof, going up a full-party XP when I already had 18 only offered me a 1% DPS gain. My 20 XP Jim could still only push me to stage 110 when I had 40 Idols. From that stage, I reset with only 20 Idols. XP does not give you infinite DPS - slowly it becomes less important, especially after the 10th one. It wouldn't even speed up your reset speed, because most of the 2 hour time is just waiting for drops as you go through levels.

I assure you, XP had nothing to do with it. Maybe this user manipulated the time, if that's possible, and boosted his gold gains like that. But that should still be seen as cheating.

If this was an easy-to-do hack, and everyone did it, then the game would die in a matter of weeks. 21000 Idols in two days? They'd be able to max out the Idol shop instantly and probably max any other future patches. An idle game is meant to be played over a long period of time, but a hack like this would destroy that notion. I believe a developer has the right to know about someone exploiting something in their game, don't you?

I'm continuing to play, same as you. It doesn't really affect me, but I still think I should report it. If it doesn't bother you, fine, but don't come at me like that for just trying to alert the devs of a problem.

When you say you have mechanics to force players to refresh, are memory leaks/lag include in these mechanics ?