Some changes to detect it would need to be implemented besides what was scheduled.
…
If the Defense teams of 24 unique troops go out - it will be impossible to track. You will be forced to set weaker defenses against certain guilds.
If devs want to erase truce among guilds - they need to make sure you don’t know who are you setting the defenses against, and lock the defend teams on day 1.
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The system can probably be automated to flag out suspicious cases based on combined GW scores. However the determination if collusion has occurred has to be manual since it would not be possible for an algorithm to determine this. Fortunately there is only incentive for collusion at the bracket 1 to 3 levels so the amount of monitoring is fairly small.
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Is there any chance that these changes could be made public, to be reviewed by the community? Early enough to iron out the more obvious kinks, should any be discovered? I believe this would favor far better within the community than the recent habit of half-baked surprise updates. I mean, everybody loves surprises, until they develop a habit of reliably exploding in your face. 
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that is not what i mean.
simple blocking gw defense for entire weak (prevention) and/or giving gw points for defense wins (punishment) would solve this in an “automated” way
@Saltypatra nobody believes anything you say anymore without a huge grain of salt. You certainly use evasiveness and obfuscation like a ninja when it comes to answering questions.
Collusion is very easy to detect and is a bannable offence in every other competition. If this was on Xbox it would have violated MS tos too.
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More difficult and less effective than hiding your opponents.
… If troops are reworked in the future and become stronger, they would have to rewrite the “rules” all over again.
Also - if they are forced to ban certain defenses… It would show how their troop development failed at keeping cards on track with the stat-spikes and new troops. Banning teams is not a good option. Especially if there are thousands of combinations of “free win” teams.
… Which reminds the 24 troop defense schedule. They confirmed defenses are about to grant points for every unique troop used (goodbye meta). Not sure how would they want to address banning certain teams.
But if you have no idea who your opponent is - none would be able to cooperate that way.
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@UKresistance I won’t lie, this hurt my feelings a bit. I’m passing on what was decided by the team. We will have more information when we have decided on a firm solution regarding how to stop this moving forward through changes to GWs. That seems to be best way to move forward to prevent this happening in the future, as it will be more a more permanent solution.
In regards to detecting collusion, what @Lyya said much earlier is very true. We have access to more data and must be careful when moving forward as we do not want to get anything wrong. The data players frequently provide to us via player reports, or even guild reports, are only a very small fraction of the information we require. In order to ban a player for cheating we have ways of investigating them, and we are currently going through the information available to us concerning Guild Wars.
However, as we did not have a firm stance before this time, the guilds in question will not be punished now. Moving forward, as I said earlier, this will change.
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I don’t mean to hurt feelings, but sometimes a definitive ‘Yes, No, or I don’t know’ is better than a ninja answer.
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Zookeeper touched the most important point in all of this.
Salty and the rest of the devs,
You are acting like Trump after the Charlestonsville events, all we wanted as a firm and strong public condemnation of this type of behaviour.
Why is it so hard to show it? It makes us wonder if you are friends with them.
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We have said that from here on out we will be punishing guilds accordingly, we have come out with a strong stance. In the meantime we are working on ways to discourage this behaviour in the future through changes to GWs. These fixes will be more effective long term solution than only punishing guilds when they are found colluding.
As we had not had a strong opinion in the past we didn’t feel it appropriate to punish the guilds found doing so this time. It would go against what we said previously. Now we have come out with a much firmer policy that will be enforced.
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Just to be clear what you are saying is collusion wasn’t against the rules when these guilds did it so they won’t be punished but it is now against the rules and any guilds proven to be colluding now will be punished?
Looks like you already answered this.
Yes, I was clarifying for @JuaitoR as they felt we hadn’t come out with a firm stance. We now have.
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This seems like it would be relatively difficult. I’m trying to imagine how to decide what combination of four troops constitutes ‘cheating’ and which look legitimate, or to distinguish either of those options from just ‘playing badly’.
In this case, cheating is measured in outcome and intent - not sure how GoW alone is supposed to track intent. Nevertheless, we can appreciate the stance being taken.
Thank you.
The original picture posted by OP is from september 4th, this has been happening for at least that time and will continue until the next patch is released.
If you won’t punish people retroactively, I suggest issuing some sort of warning to any players that appear to be cheating. That would at least discourage this behaviour in the meantime.
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Ya know… We are probably both wrong about this but i had that thought as well and it is unfortunate to say the least. It wouls be interesting tho that if the guilds in question (i now know what guilds were in the uncensored pic) didnt have probably at least a combined vip level of 600 would we have seen a different decision by the devs about punishing the guilty.
My second point is this…
Why have the GLs of the guilds involved not made a public statement to at least apologize for this? Maybe i am wrong but that kind of mature reaction might go a long way to restoring the good will towards them.
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Name and shame these guilds too.
So others can make a choice whether to join such a bunch of people.
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I actually feel a little bit sorry for the guilds involved. Imagine if the only way you could feel good about yourself, the only way that you could convince everyone you are really super cool, was to get away with manipulating a Match 3 game.
I agree that @Saltypatra and the devs should take their time and get this right, so that the guilty people suffer the punishment and no innocent people get swept up in the action. And if in the meantime, the guilds participating in this get a few extra gems, just remember that seems to be the basis of their self worth, sad as it is.
I like John Doe’s idea of locking defense teams on Monday and showing opponents on Tuesday, though not being tech savvy, I have no idea what that would take.
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I know we’ve chosen to fight in the spirit of Guild Wars, putting up our best defense teams. We were considering a couple protest weeks when the new scoring system came out, but we wanted everyone in the bracket included, or it wouldn’t have meaning.
I do get frustrated hoping as development of GWs goes forward, there will be more thought into how to make it more fun, if not competitive, for all. I think almost all of us saw that guilds could collude, and just hoped that everyone would stay honorable. Too bad we can’t send them all to the sandbox!
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The fact that this was a top guild and not a lower bracket guild in no way swayed our decision making process. We would have taken the same stance no matter the guild or bracket.
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Yep and the whale effect for ever increasing legendary rewards is also irrelevant, as is the unfortunate gift of the solely craftable mythic.
Toss in the ever decreasing rewards for free players, and why wouldn’t we believe that the games biggest payers are treated exactly like those that don’t.
You made the game the way it is, top whale guilds do what they like because you have encouraged them, and it is not going to stop for any reason now.
We have had linked guilds, shared players, and loads of dodgy arrangements for years, including trolling and bullying , its all fine with you, so why would it sway your decision making process now.
Really don’t understand the fuss at all, because the community guidelines on this site are only to do with this site, not the game itself.
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