Wuthering Waves players have been testing an unreleased character by changing the date on their devices
Thankfully we've not seen anything super dire yet, like currency duplication, but it's still a wild bug.
Wuthering Waves is out and about, and loads of players are diving in and messing around with the open world action gacha. But, while many are out and about pumping up their union level or hunting down echoes, others are pushing the game's limits to see if they can break anything. It turns out, they can. By adjusting your device's clock, you can access a five-star character trail before its intended release.
The Wuthering Waves character in question is Yinlin, a five star who isn't available in game at the moment via normal means. Through changing the device date to a point in the future when the Yinlin character trail is active and playable, cheeky players have been able to hop in and check her out early as shown in this bilibili video.
Thankfully, it doesn't appear that you can use this technique to access other content, such as limited events or future dailies, but this sort of thing appearing to work client-side has many curious as to what further exploits are possible. For those who don't know, client-side refers to things the game determines on the player's end, whereas server-side refers to bits of the game the devs handle from their servers and the like. That's a very simplified explainer but for the purposes of this story it'll do!
Now the Kuro Games team has already pledged to fix a variety of bugs and technical issues with the game since its rocky launch, so you've got to imagine this is relatively high up on its list of things to fix. for what it's worth, if you're worried about getting banned I personally wouldn't try this out for yourself. It would be relatively easy to determine who tested this out by completion stats on the Yinlin character trail. Best to watch and giggle from a distance.
Whether or not this is a canary in the coalmine for future exploits and nastiness remains to be seen. For now, we can enjoy some early gameplay of an upcoming five star character, and hope people don't start ruining the in-game economy or anything like that. Or maybe you'd love that - bring down the establishment etc. To each their own.