Without going into details, let’s assume there is an ongoing critical issue in Gems of War that is so delicate that it can’t be brought up in this forum or through official support channels. What would be the proper approach to make the powers in charge aware of this issue to get it addressed?
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I believe that they’re fully aware of what you’re referring to.
I have no idea, but after it’s fixed I hope someone shares the details. Not looking to bug abuse, just nosy.
Hey,
If this is about the Gold cap issue, the team were already investigating it before it was raised in the community forum.
If this is about a ban - we only discuss bans with the banned players, also my manager and the dev team are aware of the banned players who keep being discussed in the tickets and forums - especially the ones related to also having the gold cap issue.
These are 2 completely separate issues. One is a bug, one is cheating, as confirmed by CX and the programmers.
If it’s unrelated to either of these things and you’ve written a ticket about it and if it was a bug previously unknown to us in our bug tracking tools etc, then CX have made an internal bug report and pinged the team about it. If it’s an existing bug report - we update the bug report with new details. However, we don’t respond manually to bug reports in the ticketing system - we send an auto response or macro unless compensation is needed to be sent out, in which case we reply manually.
This saves CX time so that we can address other issues that need to be solved individually (such as account, technical and purchase issues).
This does not mean the bug reports are ignored - it’s just that we prioritise the internal communication of the bug and save the time replying to bug reports individually and privately by sending the auto reply to acknowledge we have received and read the bug report, are investigating it and if we do make a full reply, it will be here in the community forum where everyone can see it so we’re not manually writing individual responses to tickets about the same issue.
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Yes, they are two separate issues, but you are treating them like they are a single issue. I understand that bans aren’t discussed, however I also understand that banned accounts are labeled as banned. This is not the case here. While they might be currently banned players for other reasons, there is only one player that we know about who can’t play the game because of the gold cap - and that really should be all resources - issue.
Please, just be the adult in the room and actually look at the player’s account and don’t depend on your automated system - which we all know doesn’t work very well, using Kris Krinkle as an example - and just look. That’s all anyone is asking.
While you might not think a player being banned for doing nothing wrong except playing the game a lot isn’t important, most of your players don’t feel that way. What’s the incentive to play the game - without cheating - only to be banned?
I know I’m wasting my time trying to reason with you. Gee, I’m not playing GoW because of all the drama. Somehow the fun is seeping out of the game.
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Can you make it clear what is it that you consider as cheating?
Aka. can they give potential cheaters more tips how to avoid getting caught?
…yeah, that’s kinda the type of answer you’re requesting here…
As a default (speculative) rule of thumb: cheating should be based on things that should be literally impossible under normal gameplay. Given that the gem battle gameplay is handled completely by the game client, it sends a summary of the battle to the server and it’s the server’s job to see if that summary checks out as legit.
For example, say a player’s game client tells the server they played a Treasure Hunt for 120 moves and got 30 Gems and 3 Celestial Traitstones out of it – they’re (almost) guaranteed to have faked it (aka. cheated). Because although 120 moves justifies them claiming 8 Traitstones, Celestials have about a 1% drop rate so to get three out of just 8 is (while not technically impossible) an extremely rare probability. And that’s before you also consider the super suspicious Gem count (e.g. six money safes each dropping +5 Gems? and in only 120 moves?)…
Importantly, the server also has a certain allowance for the occasional “false positive”. Like the “tilt” detector on a physical pinball machine, it might look the other way for a one-time event but if there’s a pattern of repeatedly suspicious behavior over time, sooner or later there’ll be a ban with their name on it (remember Krinklegate?)…
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A major problem I’ve observed here is that gold cap threads have been shut down with the comment, “We don’t discuss bans on the forums”. Which leads people to think that those gold cap issues are being considered by the team as bans. And that idea rankles pretty hard because it’s just not reasonable. When things feel entirely unfair, emotions get involved and people get upset.
Obviously, that doesn’t encompass the entirety of what’s going on here, but I do think that some (probably) careless word choices have been adding a lot of fuel to the fire.
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Kelana mentioned the big issue here. It’s not just “oh well some people hitting the cap are cheating bans”. Reps have shut these discussions down because they “don’t discuss bans”. Guess what, that is an explicit and official statement that those players have been banned and an implication that they cheated. You can tiptoe around the wording all you want, that’s some pretty awful customer service unless you’re really going to tell us that it just so happens every person who posted on the forum about it is a cheater.
It’s bad enough that you’ve made updates that actively punish people for making progress in the game, not even talking about the gold cap problem, and that almost every update is nothing more than new gatekeeping behind paywalls, but to add this to it and then tell us “no no no you just don’t get it” is some BS
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I wish it were this easy. Unfortunately, none of these cases really applies. The issue isn’t about bugs, the issue is about people. The wise move would probably be to not get involved, that won’t improve the situation though.
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Cheating is things like using third party tools to play the game or modifying game files. The only info we give about this is here: https://gemsofwar.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/360000348076-Hacking-or-cheating-in-Gems-of-War
The reason we don’t get any more specific than that is so that we don’t assist people who come up with tools and cheats for the game to bypass our hack detection. But all of these are based on modifying the game or using third party tools.
These things are being treated as separate issues, I understand it may look like they’re not because the problem is every time the gold cap issue is reported on the forum, a specific game account that is banned keeps coming up and we can’t discuss it. It’s already happened again in this thread. But if we can just not talk about that at all here the thread can stay open.
I mentioned in another thread the reason this gold cap issue exists - the cap is based on the way numbers are stored and is not a Gems of War specific issue per se, as in if you had to store a number in any piece of software there would be a cap imposed by the way the data was stored. Originally the current number was an acceptable threshold and even though it’s highly unlikely anyone not cheating would reach this threshold currently we are going to raise it because we don’t want to risk it being possible for anyone playing legitimately.
Hopefully this helps clear things up?
@Fourdottwoone if you’re saying it’s not about a bug or a ban but you want to make a complaint about staff you can write a support ticket and it will be handled by the person who supervises the staff member you have an issue with.
We would leave the gold cap bug report threads open as long as it doesn’t discuss a player’s ban - we did explain this already. I’ve just repeated myself here but I know a lot gets posted on the forum so it’s easy to miss things and this thread was more bug related than the others so happy to leave it open as long as it doesn’t switch again from being about the bug to being about a ban.
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@Kafka because reply didn’t work
The gold cap uses signed numbers for some reason. Therefore, the game should be able to handle a negative amount of gold. This makes no sense in the game’s context. Why not use unsigned to double the number whilst using the same amount of memory?
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honestly, if we had received a reply like this 2 weeks ago, all the drama could have been avoided. Its good to know the issue is being looked into, its just that the only info we as players were getting lead us to believe one thing. i get not discussing bans on the forum, but this could have been smoothed over WAY earlier.
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I’ll go back and look over the original threads so we can improve on communication in future.
Here’s the first reply I made on the forum about the issue 9 days ago, I think I may have worded it better this time though?
It’s hard when these threads get busy for dev answers to standout. Maybe we can see at some point if there’s an easier way to make official answers easier to spot.
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So, what you want to say that this
is actually a ban for cheating despite there being no evidence available to players that the account is banned?
It might seem that you’re reaching far and wide…
Out of curiosity, so all tickets go through your supervisor first and they distribute who handles which ticket?
Otherwise, if I were - hypothetically speaking - to complain about you what’s stopping you - or anybody else, for that matter - from simply deleting that ticket before supervisor sees it?
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In this fine example - what if the person a complaint were about actually is the supervisor? 
Surely this wouldn’t be “problematic”. 
Just asking, since we don’t know who it may be.
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Having gone through that process on a couple of occasions, my experience is that the “supervisors” do not care for (or, in one instance, even bother to read) the facts presented (and I trust you can count on me having presented all relevant facts, links, and screenshots), and just side with their staff.
And then they stop responding when further facts are presented that demonstrate the staff actions may have been biased/unfounded.
The closure of the megathread about Dev Actions/Inactions because it suddenly became
(the thread can still be browsed to seek these nonexistent “more often than not” breach of guidelines over the years), coupled with the countless “callout” bans that many of us have gone through since, demonstrated that they are no longer willing to even pretend to act objectively.
And while I support Kafka’s advice that mods should be reported when there are Actions/Inactions that require adjustment, the current reporting method has proven to be of little assistance to improve how mods ‘use’ their authority in the forum.
PS: here’s to hoping my words aren’t once again selectively picked on for a ban 
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If you get a forum suspension/ban for those words, then may as well (again) hand me one too. been there, done that. But I second every word you wrote here…
Especially with “a small team”, you’ll know everyone in and out from “the office” (hours), possibly since years, you may have built up friendships at work and such, I suspect, there’s a possibility to be more inclined to side with a coworker compared to siding with a complete stranger - about anything honestly - even if (maybe somewhat slightly) in the wrong. You also always have to think about not setting precedent. Good thing, most things can be a matter of interpretation.
Any negative things would have to be presented with 100% certainty and undeniable proof and things would have to be so awfully bad that they simply can’t be denied in any way if they were to go “public”. But depending on severity of what happened in such a case it would be more likely to cut that person loose from the company.
Just to be clear, I’m not questioning the integrity of anyone here.
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@Kafka : Can you please give us an ETA for this gold cap issue fixed?
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I’ll ask the team tomorrow but such a tiny amount of accounts have come near the cap and they’ve all been checked so this shouldn’t be a concern for most people.
If you’re personally nearing 2.1 billion gold on your account and need help before a fix is released, reach out and we’ll adjust your account balance, although spending it would probably be the more beneficial way to handle it 
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