Leaving it be probably will not help at all either. But i believe the devs can and should try to address it.
Or it means that this is certainly quite serious to a point that they chose to hide/delete the previous thread until Sirrian, the head developer, is here to properly address our concerns. If thatās so, it would be nice to know about it @Saltypatra, @Andrew or anyone that may be monitoring the forums.
We are investigating the issue and will put out a fix for it as soon as we have one.
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Hey everyone,
Iām not quite back in the office yet (still a few days vacation left), but I just wanted to jump in and give you a quick updateā¦ well as much of an update as Iām able to give.
Iām still not 100% up to speed on what the issue is here - as I havenāt had an opportunity to meet with the team about it, but Iāve been following along on our in-house chat channels. Iāll be looking into it in more depth when Iām back next week to try and understand exactly what was happening. For now Iām going to assume that the +1 defense wins are related to the video collecting all the rewards, as that seems to be the consensus.
I actually deleted that previous thread with a video, as I was concerned there may have been information in there which someone could use to reproduce an exploit. Sorry if that seemed an overreactionā¦ perhaps it even wasā¦ but given the timing, and my limited access to the internet, I felt that it was the safest thing to do.
We had most of our team chasing this issue all day yesterday to try and understand it. Some code was deployed to the server yesterday to track it happening, and then some more code was deployed to the server at the end of the day, which will hopefully fix the problem.
Was it an exploit? A bug? Or just an unintended side-effect? Iām not certain yet, and Iāll need to understand more next week before I can figure that out. From what I understand though, it may have been a result of the way we handle Revenge/Rival lists.
Fingers crossed that we have a fix, and my apologies that we misunderstood the issue when it was first reported - weād been hunting for it in the wrong place.
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Hi Sirrian! Thank you for acknowledging this.
Iām still not 100% convinced of this; I think the conversation naturally spilled over here because it was another open exploit thread. Something fishy is definitely going on in both cases whether related or not.
The main difference that stands out to me is that in the excessive defense wins case, the invader does not seem to have any invade losses recorded (which is at odds with my understanding of the other issue). I still donāt understand how people can invade the same player repeatedly in short periods of time.
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An unintended side-effect or bug being constantly and intentionally reproduced to amass rewards of any sort is an exploit.
People arguing that using one troop defenses is an exploit to get more glory with revenges, as well as supposedly reducing the amount of oobnoxious/strong teams is also correct, but in theory this would be counter-balanced by losing points on each defeat, IF, defeats in GoWās pvp wouldnāt be so meaningless. Aside from that both practices will never be on the same realm of magnitude.
It could be discussed if pvp losses should matter again, but considering that fielding (weak) teams to help others on events or just for breaking the monotony of the Meta weighs much more positively in the general experince (without generating absurds amounts of resources for doing nothing) then i would assume this is not something needing intervention.
We, generally speaking, sort of assumed that others would be monitoring the forums in your absence, but as you had to make an intervention, while on your vacation, and with all restrictions considered itās all fine. Thanks for taking the time for this.
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Approaching the issue from a pure math perspective.
We operate under the assumption that for every PVP invade we launch someone will get a PVP defend. If we win, they lose. If we lose, they win. Makes good sense.
If everybody played the same amount, and it were equally distributed, everybody would have just as many defends as they have invades. But it doesnāt quite work that way. A quick look at the leaderboards show that in the top 100 everybody has a lot more invades than defends, generally at least twice as many. Which means either there are others with a lot more defends than invades, or some arenāt getting tracked.
If the goal is to maximize resource gains (assuming you know youāre not going to be high enough to win arcanes) youāre going to want to be in the second group. So how do you increase your number of defends (which are free resources), and ideally win more defends than you lose (for 3 glory instead of 1)?
That is the question this bug, side-effect, exploit answers. People found a way to increase their share of defends. But if more people do it though, it will dilute the defend pool anyway. Imagine there are 5000 invades happening, and 10 clever folks figured out how to get them. So 5000 split 10 ways, each get 500. Nice! But if 200 people do it, it is reduced to 25.
The other way is if everybody triggered more invades (more players wonāt change things since new player adds invades, they also consume defends, so it averages out). Even if they were intentional losses, it would increase the number of defends in the pool. For example, imagine there were only 100 players and each did 10 intentional losses a day (like going in w/ empowered Elspeth and sacrificing on turn 1 to lose). In that case each of the 100 should (on average) get 10 defense wins. Simple on small scale, unwieldy on a large scale.
I think what we are seeing, partially, is a combination. People are intentionally losing to lower score, which matches them against others with lower score, who are also intentionally losing. So they are effectively feeding each other defend wins for 3 glory each. Is it easier than doing it the right way, probably. Is it faster, probably not. With guild, event, invade, rival, and revenge glory generating as much as 16 glory for a single win it adds up pretty fast.
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Unlikely scenario i would say. Itās not always that you get someone with Rival+Glory+Event week for bonus glory. And even if it happens quite often you still take some time doing the battles that sometimes will take longer than expected. With this exploit itās up to all the others attacking your setup and pilling up the rewards for wins and losses.
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Did you miss the video? He pulled 200k gold, 5k glory, 1k gold keys, and 200 gems from 1866 defends (1607 wins - an 86% win rate, which is also unheard of). It takes me weeks to hit that many defends.
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First, we donāt know how long he waited to collect that, it could be 5-6 days worth. Second, as I said the more people that do it the fewer each will get.
I decided to test it out as I donāt like not knowing. I topped out around 10 defends / hour with a win rate of about 75%, roughly 25 glory / hour. And to maintain it I needed to force lose a lot, and then lose more to counteract any gains from the occasional win to keep me in the pvp pool.
It is profitable, more so for people that leave it alone all day (i.e. canāt play at work/break/lunch). But it isnāt effortless either. Now that I know, it simply isnāt worth it for me to maintain.
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Taking into account the math behind it, just as Rasper shared, people can hardly realize the dimension of all resourceās gainsā¦
Assuming that this whole thing wouldnāt be judged as an exploit by the devs, hence allowing it as something legit, it would be resumed to people replicating it over and over until everything is balanced out and PVP would be dead as a feature as there is no longer a need to play it if everyone is generating points automatically with those defenses.
With the glory gains alone, assuming itās the whole week results of exploit, a player wouldnāt ever need to join a guild or play pvp ever again, unless to āreactivateā his participation to keep things going on.
I canāt see how it would be on the devsās interest to allow something that makes someone play less and less while generating much more resources than anyone would with normal gameplayā¦
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Sorry, this is demonstrably false. I understand if youāre trying to play devilās advocate, but come on. Heās on the leaderboard right now, this week - 4 days in - with 1602 defends (1317-285). Again, it takes weeks to reach those numbers through normal play. No other player in top 100 is even approaching this volume of defends. This is not someone who came back after vacation - it is occurring in very short term, week after week.
He also supposedly quit playing, so this is possibly fewer than 4 days. Iām not sure I believe that, though, since heās been guild hopping and seemingly changed his account name.
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I think itās safe to assume that there will be always more people not knowing/doing it than the other way around, right now if our forum represent 10% (Far from it i believeā¦) of the total playerbase, and everyone here would know how to do it properly and shared it with their own guilds if we even extrapolate the reach of information to a solid 40% of the playerbase this 40% would still get more at the expenses of the other 60% and the whole PVP system that is supposed to be improved and not disruptedā¦
The effort and time it takes to lose X battles will never be the same as winning X battles, and if you win the battles youāll hardly collect as much as you will collect from losing then to setup this exploit for a week (maybe?).
By the way, i think it would be best to not further discuss those details of the setup, as much as they are sort of vague we must be carefull.
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Hmm, in that case what he is doing is something more than what I know, because it was my understanding the only way to get those numbers was to stay very low in score, which would rule out approaching the leaderboard.
Well, not exactly. Defense wins are worth 5-7 points. Multiply that by 1600 (8000-11200) and youāre pretty close on that alone. He also seems to have engaged in legitimate pvp since his invade record is significantly winning now. Also, who knows how much of this carries over from week to week. He could be getting residual defends left over from people whose pool he entered in previous weeks.
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But we can safely assume something from that: We get much more points from each victory than we will ever lose on defeats. And with a 70% win ratio you can safely assume with math that he is always increasing his gains. The issue that allows the exploit might be the fact that the system only registers score gain on Invasions, and not from points gained from Defenses. Thatās one of my theories.
Yeah, lots and lots of unknowns. All I can say for certain is, for me, from my experiences, it isnāt worth the trouble. There may be a more effective way of doing it, there could be something else entirely. Short of removing all gains from defense wins and all point losses for invade fails, Iām not sure how to address it.
What if I tell you, that I am doing the leaderboard, being in chat often, so that people know that thereās something that you can exploit? So you can submit tickets with more PROOF. You wouldnāt notice if I am not doing both, right? I did this in last 1 month, the exploit itself already told has been around in last 4-5 months as Tacet mentioned in the deleted thread. I also noticed some people already doing it before me. Well, you wouldnāt even notice as they are more likely trying to hide or just not playing much as me as you mentioned in your comment. This kind of exploit will not be a something for developers if I am not doing it, and hanging around, and getting into leaderboard so you CAN SEE this kind of exploit.
Do I really taking advantage of it? A bit. But I am kinda maxed in everything. The video meant to show the developers of how much you can gain with that glitch. I meant, why would I MADE A PUBLIC VIDEO about it when I really taking advantage of it? Can you accept this logic?
ALSO, those defense wins only gives me +1 +2 and -6 -7. If you saw the video, I got around 3K pvp points. Not 8000++. You donāt have a proof about that. Stop assuming.
I will not say anything more for my defense and let developers fix this glitch as Andrew told here.
I believe people in forum are more wise than I can think of.
Thank you.
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Edit- Psydotogist chose to pm me, and we had a conversation there.
This isnāt about 1 person doing it, lots have done it. We all reply to you because youāre the only one that we KNOW has done it, and are available in these threads. This isnāt personal like I said, and I want the thread to remain open. Whatās done is done, and itās in the Devs hand now.
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Itās a very convenient excuse someone could use once he/she is caught āred handedā.
Also convenient as the video was removed either to hide your activity or to really prevent more people from exploiting it. I will give you the benefit of the doubt, not that my approval means something, but since you saidā¦
ā¦ then i believe that you want some validation of yourā¦ altruistic actā¦ as you regard and defend it.
For everything that matters, if the devs have their attention on this issue there are many ways to deal with it depending of whatās inside the realm of possibility:
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If they can detect whoās been exploiting this setup from the acclaimed five previous months or more they might issue temporary bans based on the time these people been exploiting the game. Even on your case as you got some fair amount of resources, that wouldnāt be possible for this short amount of time during normal gameplay, you will just get some vacation barely losing any resources you would gain during this time. Seems fair ASSUMING that you have been taking advantage from it for ājust a bitā.
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If they canāt detect it they might as well forcefully forgive everyoneā¦ No one could hold it against them if there is no way to detect this, might as well move forward just as if nothing happened because even making a compensation to all players would benefit even more the exploiters, and i donāt want that. But the devs would make a serious compromise and an statement of never letting it happens again in the sense that itās now clear that anyone exploiting ANY possible flaw/bug on this magnitude would be permabanned. (Details of this statement/compromise are up to the devs, since this is just my conjectures ASSUMING that people really got the strange idea about something that is not clearly forbid is somehow permittedā¦)
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Also to solve the problem in a easy fashion the devs could limit the rewards for defensive fights (victories or losses) to five or ten each day, you can still be attacked thousands of time, but will only be rewarded for the first five/ten battles of each day. I said easy because i donāt meddle with sorcery (programming), but i can assume that this would have a lesser impact as would be a quick fix to implement and prevent further exploits in this sense. Iāll poke you @Andrew in the hope that you would want to consider this with the team.
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