We have fixed an exploit in Explore. In the past, if you were playing Explore and lost a fight you would still receive the difficulty dependent gold multipliers at the end of the battle. This led to people playing at higher difficulty levels with troops that boost gold but cannot win so they could purposefully lose fights. This isn’t what we intended, and doesn’t fit the spirit of the game. There shouldn’t be a time where losing is more attractive to a player than winning.
Now players will still receive the gold they have earned in an explore battle if they lose, but it won’t include the gold multiplier associated with the level of difficulty.
Noticed this from the start, but the lack of progression never made it appealing.
I guess for newer and mid level players it was a way to farm gold. But hopefully folks were only doing this on alt accounts and not teaching new players to perform Exploits.
Happy to see an ACTUAL Exploit get resolved though.
That seems like a colossally bad exploit to uh, well, exploit. You have to wait for all your troops to die, while you intentionally collect gold, with the entire purpose being to a) max gold as fast as possible and b) lose as fast as possible, all the while never getting any medals or gnome rewards.
If it was end gamers doing it. Then it’s hard to call it an Exploit because it’s actually a dumb way to go about it unless they are seriously missing troops. But if they are an end gamer… Then they shouldn’t be missing that many troops.
But I can definitely see how those who literally can’t beat difficulty 12 bosses yet… Could gain an Exploit like an advantage by losing.
When I saw the title of this thread. I assumed it was going to have to do with massive amounts of Trophies. Lol
I have a theory on how they’re getting farmed so rapidly and I don’t see it as an Exploit.
But half the exploits that get fixed I never knew about it in the first place. So you never know.
So I just tested with Greed, 3x Cedric team. Let’s time this! Going to Sin of Maraj, hopefully they devour all my troops. Alright, it took me ~15 seconds to cast Greed twice and max out my 400 Gold, but then it took me another ~75 seconds for the AI to kill me. I had to purposefully not match skulls, but then the AI would do the same thing. Total fight took 92.3 seconds. I earned 1028 gold.
I would expect to get 1323 gold: (119+400)*(2.55). Not sure why I only got 1028, unless the base gold changes when you lose. Otherwise, “losing” that fight under the old exploit would have given 9,659 gold (actually probably less if the base gold is less than 119 if you lose).
I set the base gold to 3 for my formula and it comes out to $1028. So when you lose a battle in explore, the formula for gold is:
(3+Gold Collected in Game) x (Gold Bonuses + 1)
Which means under this old exploit, losing with 3x Cedric (400 Gold) would get you 7,502 gold. However, not only would you miss out on medals and gnomes, you’d also get no experience (no hero). If you get rid of 1 of the Cedrics and keep Greed and your Hero, then max drops to $5,640.
However, I don’t know if the old base gold of 3 for losing was in place before this exploit was fixed or if they added that too.
If you win a battle it’s:
(119+Gold Collected in Game) x (Gold Bonuses + 1) x Difficulty (7.3 for D12)
Phoenica team to one shot enemies at Difficulty I think 5 or 6, netting 2 trophies per win. 15-25k trophies per week, depending on how much you play One match 20 seconds, that’s 360 trophies per hour, which will get you 20k trophies if you play 8 hours a day.
I don’t know of a faster team., but naturally, you sacrifice gold and medals for it.
I figured this was the case so I never actually made a team to try and get pure trophies as fast as possible.
Only fast gold and tokens.
I’ll take my gold and medals over trophies thank you very much.
I would’ve just ninja changed this
100 changes people bring up , this one no one cared or knew
This just looks to me like a “Hey everyone!! See we’re doing stuff!!! Look over here!!!”
It might seem minor compared to some of the things that weren’t announced, but to be fair, those should have been announced as well.
I feel like this was appropriate, even if it might seem trivial on the surface. Skeleton Key teams (both 2x and 1x cedric), teams you legitimately run while farming, does lose sometimes, so people would have noticed a massive reduction in rewards in this instance (without exploiting, ie., taking a random loss after trying rather than constant intentional losses) saw a reduction in rewards, assumed the worse, and brought it up on the forums. Then they’d have to say something anyway, but be put on the defensive for “hiding” this change because it went beyond the scope of just fixing an exploit and have people complaining this was just “another gold nerf”. Also, if any part of the change backfires and there is a static reduction in rewards outside the parameters stated, we’ll know it is a result of this change, know it was not intended because the full intent and scope of the change was explained already, and know it is a bug that will be fixed and can be brought up rather than assume “this was the plan all along”. Little things like this have a habit of turning into big things that end up being a huge source of negative image problems for nothing, when taking five minute to tell us about it (as has been done here) severely reduces the chances of that happening.
So yes, please, always announce changes like this. It is better for everyone.
People are right, this is a very small change that could have been a ninja fix. But we are doing our best to be transparent, and the community has expressed that they would rather know than not.
This is a very reasonable change, and I’m glad it was publicly announced.
I’m a little concerned about the use of the term exploit here; people will always find dumb ways to min-max multiplayer games, and it seems like ‘exploits’ like this fit into a gray area (while others are obviously cheating). Playing the game in an unintended and strange way isn’t automatically against the rules. For example, you can farm the “Kill X red troops” task very quickly by spamming dragon’s eye during a single match.
The casual PVP exploit from a couple months ago might be another example, but I don’t know what it actually was, other than players “manipulating the game” in some way.
I guess as long as the policy is not to do sweeping bans for gray areas like this, it’s fine. I also totally support harsh bans for real cheating, and I think most players would agree. Anyway, this situation was handled well.
@Saltypatra kudos for being transparent and explaining the nature of the exploit this is the kind of info we look for when you say you fixed (insert game exploit here) while yes there are some people that will try to figure how to exploit games for their own advantage saying what the exploit is and how to cause it can also help devs by asking people purposefully cause it for the sake of getting good amount of info to help fix any other holes that might be over-looked when dealing with the big one
One match 20 seconds, that’s 360 trophies per hour, which will get you 20k trophies if you play 8 hours a day.