I see a lot of things I personally view as blown out of proportion on these forums, and I’m sure the devs/mods feel that a lot more. Regardless, for as long as I’ve been here, the forums has been an invaluable place for really good information, important bug reports, vital community concerns for existing and upcoming content, and more. It would really, really do a lot for the game if there was stronger communication between the community and IP2 staff. I’m NOT saying IP2 should always do what the comments wants. I remember back when Salty interacted a lot with the community - that was great. Even just the live streams she would do where the community could directly bring up bugs or other concerns were really good.
My favorite thing, though, is hearing from the developers themselves on live streams, bug reports, feature previews, etc. Absolutely loved the feature preview for 7.2 irregardless of the features themselves. It was great communication with reasoning for the changes (like them or not).
This is really good to hear. I hope you’ll forgive the skepticism some of us forum-dwellers may feel - both staff and the community love this game and want it to succeed, but I think there are some long-standing communication issues which make the community relationship somewhat strained. Improved communication can go a long way to rebuild that, and I hope we see more communication such as feature previews and some of the excellent ideas mentioned above!
In a previous post (probably in one of the locked threads) someone mentioned that a player had hit the 2.1B cap last year and that gold was deducted from his/her account so he/she could resume playing the game. According to what you just said, anyone with 2.1B gold, or even close to it, is cheating and will be banned. Why wasn’t this player banned? Not that I want him/her to be banned. I’m just wondering why that situation was handled different than this one.
I doubt I’m ever going to get to even 1B gold before I stop playing, but I’ll be honest here: I have no idea how to cheat in this or any other game. I play games for fun and distraction. If I get a high score or accumulate a lot of resources, then I’m happy about that. I’m sure there are 10 year olds playing the game who could probably hack anywhere they wanted to and they probably do cheat in the game just because that’s what they do. I’m 73 years old, once programmed in Basic and C++ about a 1000 years ago. Even when I was programming, I wouldn’t have had the skill or knowledge to cheat at a game. Now you’re saying that if I accumulate too many resources, I’m a cheater.
I’m insulted. I’m offended.
I consider that profiling and I don’t like it. If you want to ban me for this, go ahead. I’m still going to be insulted and offended about what you’ve said about me.
That’s not what’s been reported by players (the very few) who have hit the cap. The cap causes a fatal error that the game or server or whatever can’t resolve and the player is locked out of the game. Once you hit the gold cap, the server, game, whatever, can no longer understand the integer being passed to it and game refuses to work.
I’m probably not explaining this as well as a current programmer could, but I understand the basics. The gold cap is an integer value and it has a limit. When that limit is EXCEEDED, it’s game over.
The time for the error message is well BEFORE a player hits the limit. After the limit is hit, the player won’t be able to receive any more messages from the game because the game won’t load.
I understand the basic concept, but I’m sure someone can explain it a lot better than I can.
the idea is this player probably did something that is considered cheating in order to reach the gold cap in the first place, they arent being punished for hitting the cap, but probably for HOW they hit the cap. We wont know for sure because actual bans dont get discussed.
If you play fast (I don’t) or have a good team that generates a lot of gold per hour (that I’m guilty of), the consensus is that you’re doing something illegal to make that happen.
You can’t just be a good player. You can’t just play fast.
You know, now I’m actually afraid to use some of the speed teams that I have because I might be considered cheating when I’m using the troops the game supplied. Actually, that’s been a fear I hadn’t realized I had. Do I play battles during the vault weekend as fast as I can to get as many gnomes as I can? Or do I slow down, because if I play too fast I might be considered a cheater.
No to both. If I even tried to modify files, I’d be more likely to crash my computer than help with the game.
The point is how do they tell the difference. As an example: One vault weekend, I’m normal play, a lot of RL going on, don’t do many battles. The next vault weekend, I’m playing if not 24/7 close to it for whatever reason in my life. That’s unusual play. Is that going to be flagged as cheating because my number of battles increased so much? I don’t know. It could be. They could think I’d discovered the ultimate speed demon something or other. I couldn’t prove that all I did was play a lot more than usual.
Playing all weekend isn’t unusual, it’s hardcore - or possibly someone with a bad case of insomnia and a lot of energy drinks on their hands
I can’t go into details about how we detect tools being used but we have checks in place for all sorts of things just to ensure the smooth running of the game, some of those checks allow us to tell if files have been modified or tools are being used.
This one is a bit odd and could use a bit more details.
Where does a Xbox Elite Controller fall under this? Official Xbox product, but features back paddle buttons that are otherwise not found on standard controllers.
My bumpers are usually the first to lose functionality/break (thanks Gems of War!) and the back paddles extend the life of an otherwise dead controller by adding special controller buttons that can be customized to whatever people need (on a normal controller).
Hmmm, I’ve not encountered issues with the Xbox Elite Controller and hack detection.
I’ll ask the team how that fits into the picture and if there’s a risk there I’ll prod for it to be addressed.
I’m not sure I’ll be able to provide more info than that about it.
Bit of a - this is a genuine concern but have to think about how my answer could assist cheat creaters.
Steam Deck is a similar concern; my standard buttons are still alive and well, but if need be, there are extra buttons at the bottom that can be programmed to take over, if any of the buttons start to fail. It would be nice if you could take that into your considerations as well, not just Xbox.
all the re-mapping on the elite controllers can only go to things that the controllers can do in the first place. For example if you could program one button to do multiple inputs in a row (like a macro) that would be something to worry about, simply remapping buttons should never throw up any flags. (I use one as well in exactly the same way, its got some really flimsy bumpers for such an expensive controller)
Yeah, I’d hope so. What you said is the logical answer to the controller. However, with everything going on, better safe than sorry I guess. Rather not trigger any false positives.
@TheIdleOne your concern about controller mapping is exactly why ban appeals exist.
As long as a player is playing within the guidelines of the game there is nothing to worry about. Even some PC players use a mouse and controller at the same time for maximum speed. To the best of my knowledge no one has been banned for it.
Kafka, this doesn’t work at all in this particular situation. Which quite ironically is part of the situation.
With your permission we can put this to a test. I’ll write up and post a detailed technical analysis of the situation in question, showing where things went wrong, why this continues to be an issue and how it could possibly be solved. It will contain information possibly not considered appropriate here, yet needed to understand the big picture, so it can’t be left out. My expectation would be that you remove the forum ban within a day that I’ll likely receive for this, along with any associated account flags that may cause issues in the future. Okay to proceed this way?
So just to be clear we can use a wireless xbox controller on steam with a PC connected to a TV sitting in our recliners relaxing? I guess I’m just not tech savvy enough.
I have no actual knowledge of the tools or parameters GoW uses. However, there will always be an actual limit to what can be accomplished in a game, per day. As in there is a minimum amount of time per battle and a maximum amount of reward per battle and finally, there is a finite amount of seconds in a day.
Again, I do not know how this game manages it. But I’m pretty sure that things that are not physically possible, are easy to spot.
