(I am slowly getting the nagging suspicion, that the “compensation” will be something like a one week 5% shop and flash offer discount for affected players or so… )
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Not entirely correct. Economies exist even in the single player context – notably, whichever game mode is the most efficient at farming resource X will be the mode that a player preferentially engages with. The network of conversions between any resource A and B is another element of the economy. Gold can be traded for Gems/Ingots/etc. (via Guild Tasks), Gems can be traded for Event Sigils/Weapons/Troops (via Event Shop) or Dragonite, and so on.
Kafka is absolutely correct to note that Gems are used as a premium currency for many, many things and players who are willing to spend Gems on rotating Events will typically rank much higher on the event leaderboards (which reward the top players, notably with Orbs of Chaos).
1 Like
Nailed it. As Kafka pointed out that my loss of 18M gold could not be converted to gems in a fair way (since I would not buy gold with gems), no one going to leaderboards is doing it for the prize. It is just for prestige, personal reasons, whatever, but the prize compared to what you need to pay for it.
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Now that I think more about it, what devs mean by “break economy” is breaking “their” economy. If they give up 60K gems, these people won’t buy gems with real money for a while. I can assure you that.
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I just wish they’d put vault on an actual schedule rather than doling it out to us at random.
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Previously was scheduled to happen Jan 13-15, 2023 - that would’ve marked “6 weeks” between Vault events, which would’ve been in the recent “normal” timeframe we had since about a year now.
Since we don’t have anything scheduled in gamefiles until at least Feb 03-05, 2023 we would at least land on 9 (!) weeks between last and next Vault events, that is, if devs would even schedule a Vault event on said “weekend” which there’s no guarantee whatsoever.
You can take a look at the previous dates for Vault events:
?weeks
Vault Friday, Dec 02, 2022 Sunday, Dec 04, 2022
6weeks
Vault Friday, Oct 21, 2022 Sunday, Oct 23, 2022
7weeks
Vault Friday, Sep 02, 2022 Sunday, Sep 04, 2022
5weeks
Vault Friday, Jul 29, 2022 Sunday, Jul 31, 2022
7weeks
Vault Friday, Jun 10, 2022 Sunday, Jun 12, 2022
6weeks
Vault Friday, Apr 29, 2022 Sunday, May 01, 2022
4weeks
Vault Friday, Apr 01, 2022 Sunday, Apr 03, 2022
3weeks
Vault Monday, Mar 14, 2022 Sunday, Mar 20, 2022
~4weeks (because weeklong)
Vault Friday, Feb 11, 2022 Sunday, Feb 13, 2022
4weeks
Vault Friday, Jan 14, 2022 Sunday, Jan 16, 2022
3weeks
Vault Friday, Dec 24, 2021 Sunday, Dec 26, 2021
[…]
Vault Tuesday, Dec 14, 2021 Thursday, Dec 16, 2021
Vault Friday, Nov 05, 2021 Sunday, Nov 07, 2021
Vault Friday, Sep 24, 2021 Sunday, Sep 26, 2021
Vault Friday, Aug 13, 2021 Sunday, Aug 15, 2021
Vault Thursday, Jul 15, 2021 Sunday, Jul 18, 2021
Vault Friday, Jun 25, 2021 Sunday, Jun 27, 2021
Vault Friday, May 14, 2021 Sunday, May 16, 2021
Vault Friday, Mar 19, 2021 Sunday, Mar 21, 2021
Vault Friday, Feb 19, 2021 Sunday, Feb 21, 2021
Vault Friday, Dec 25, 2020 Sunday, Dec 27, 2020
Vault Friday, Nov 27, 2020 Sunday, Nov 29, 2020
Vault Friday, Oct 16, 2020 Sunday, Oct 18, 2020
Vault Friday, Sep 11, 2020 Sunday, Sep 13, 2020
Vault Friday, Aug 14, 2020 Sunday, Aug 16, 2020
Vault Friday, Aug 07, 2020 Sunday, Aug 09, 2020
Vault Friday, Jul 17, 2020 Sunday, Jul 19, 2020
Vault Friday, Jun 19, 2020 Sunday, Jun 21, 2020
Vault Friday, May 15, 2020 Sunday, May 17, 2020
Vault Friday, Apr 10, 2020 Sunday, Apr 12, 2020
Vault Friday, Mar 06, 2020 Sunday, Mar 08, 2020
Vault Friday, Jan 31, 2020 Sunday, Feb 02, 2020
Vault Friday, Dec 27, 2019 Sunday, Dec 29, 2019
Vault Friday, Nov 22, 2019 Sunday, Nov 24, 2019
Vault Friday, Oct 18, 2019 Sunday, Oct 20, 2019
Vault Friday, Sep 13, 2019 Sunday, Sep 15, 2019
Vault Friday, Aug 09, 2019 Sunday, Aug 11, 2019
Vault Friday, Jul 19, 2019 Sunday, Jul 21, 2019
Vault Friday, Jun 21, 2019 Sunday, Jun 23, 2019
Vault Friday, May 31, 2019 Sunday, Jun 02, 2019
Vault Friday, Apr 26, 2019 Sunday, Apr 28, 2019
Vault Friday, Mar 22, 2019 Sunday, Mar 24, 2019
Vault Friday, Feb 15, 2019 Sunday, Feb 17, 2019
Vault Friday, Jan 18, 2019 Sunday, Jan 20, 2019
Vault Friday, Dec 14, 2018 Sunday, Dec 16, 2018
Vault Friday, Nov 09, 2018 Sunday, Nov 11, 2018
Vault Friday, Oct 12, 2018 Sunday, Oct 14, 2018
Vault Friday, Sep 07, 2018 Sunday, Sep 09, 2018
Vault Friday, Aug 03, 2018 Sunday, Aug 05, 2018
Vault Friday, Jun 22, 2018 Sunday, Jun 24, 2018
Vault Friday, May 25, 2018 Sunday, May 27, 2018
Vault Friday, Apr 27, 2018 Sunday, Apr 29, 2018
Vault Friday, Mar 30, 2018 Sunday, Apr 01, 2018
Vault Friday, Mar 02, 2018 Sunday, Mar 04, 2018
For everyone not noticing, there’s a clear pattern to stretch out the timeframe between Vault events further and further.
11 Likes
Note: sarcasm incoming
Well, clearly, vault events are bad for and break the economy. So, the goal is probably to remove them or reduce them to the same frequency as the Tower of Dooms, e.g., every 3 months, right? Because otherwise, especially active players would get pretty much all they need by just playing the vault events and taking it slow/easy for the rest, right?
end of sarcasm.
3 Likes
That is not necessarily something to be sarcastic about. Since the gnome summoning, the ingame economy has indeed been turned on its head, with ascension orbs, cursed runes and other previously rare materials becoming a joke to high activity players and the gap to players, who don’t spend half their friday, saturday and sunday on the game, growing massively.
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It is something to be sarcastic about because players did not ask about GaPs. The developers introduced it; without analyzing its effect or even simulating a high-activity player to see how much further gap it would introduce.
Even worse, they had to already nerf it twice: first they realized that you can go into infinite-gap mode since music gnomes still spawn at GaPs so they almost completely prevented this. Then, they realized that heavy farmers get too much resources such that they have introduced a “feature” to reduce your gains during a GaP. Both times, without compensation or an apology.
Come to think of it, Kris and the whole mess we are talking about is not that much different. They introduced a troop solely for the purpose of farming treasure maps, however they did not even simulate what an active player could farm and also put so low auto ban thresholds that would go insane during holidays.
It is nice to come up with mechanics that work nice on paper but making them live without enough simulation? Only leads to Catastrophe.
12 Likes
It’s ok, Cursed Runes are a terrible system designed solely for the devs to create a problem that they can sell a solution for. Even they don’t care to follow up and expand on Cursed Runes.
Just like Dragonite.
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I’m guessing there’s always been a bot handling the bans and humans only interfere if someone starts complaining. They added treasure maps to the bots check list just recently because there will most likely be an update to treasure hunt on February making the maps worth something. They just adjusted the threshold too low for the bot.
6 Likes
Hey folks, Monday here, no further info yet sorry.
There’s been at least a couple of really good posts here, particularly by @Kezef who has done a great job of articulating part of the situation.
@Fourdottwoone and @Cronus were talking about new thresholds implemented for Treasure Maps causing these bans and asked for confirmation.
Treasure Hunt and Treasure Map detections are actually the oldest detection types and thresholds in the game - these have been in since before we worked on the newer cheat detection tool in the past few years. They’ve been in for over 5 years (because I started working here 5 years ago and these detections already existed).
From what I understand of the information, the issue occurred because the threshold specifically wasn’t updated successfully to account for Kris Kringle’s spell under all conditions. Kris gives guaranteed Treasure Maps and you can have more than one on a Team. If you blitz through Treasure Maps in a single battle - no problem - you blitz through every single one of let’s say 100 battles - you got banned. It was the literal definition of a bug, the system didn’t operate the way we all expected it to under a specific set of conditions, exacerbated by Kris.
Kris Kringle didn’t cause the issue - but he sped it up. I think the whole situation is a double edged sword. Kris Kringle sped the issue up meaning it hit enough players in a short amount of time that we all noticed - because it was a huge issue. But regardless, this probably would have become an issue at some point, albeit maybe a less noticeable one - which would have been far more insidious.
I’ve done a bunch of checks to make sure no one was banned before or after this incident for the same reason as the “Kris Kringle” Christmas bug. So far everything I’ve seen looks ok. I haven’t called it on my checks yet because well, I guess I’m a worry wort, I want to be 300% sure everything is ok before I call it done for myself. The devs have also done their checks obviously and they are satisfied it was fixed over Xmas except for the 3 players they found that had queued bans that we missed from 7 minutes outside the fix window. These players have now also been sorted out.
I handle all the cheating ban appeals myself and I haven’t seen anyone come through ban appeals prior to this for the reasons that caused the bug - definitely especially keeping a closer eye out for this moving forward for awhile. But I’m 99.9999999% sure no one has appealed a ban relating to this prior to Christmas time.
I also checked the currently banned list for players who are banned for reasons relating to Treasure Maps and who haven’t writeen ban appeals and haven’t spotted anything unexpected yet - but I’m still going through it to be as sure as possible.
I plan to talk to the programmers again on Wednesday (when I have my next call with them) to ask for more info to assist me with my checks, although again, everything should be fine by this stage, I’m just continuining to dig into it for my own sanity.
Someone also asked why the autobans weren’t turned off as soon as Nimhain replied on the forums here - it was because she noticed it at midnight - 1am on Christmas morning and turning the autoban off required a senior engineer, as soon as a senior engineer was reached they began working on shutting it down.
Basically we planned the holiday weekend in a way to minimise any potential issues popping up - nothing new or spicy was deployed close to Christmas. Unfortunately, despite that, this one got by us and we weren’t expecting Christmas morning to go like that, we had no reason to suspect anything could happen that day, we wrapped Christmas weekend up in bubblewrap and made the thing fool proof- jokes on us, Murphy’s Law and all that.
I should probably also personally apologise although there’s nothing I could have really done about it, I was the CX Agent down for holiday coverage and emergencies that week, but I ended up being out of action for the whole week as I caught covid (I had a good run, almost 3 years without catching it), so it took me a long time to realise things were blowing up in Gems of War and then I only managed to work for 3.5 hours that week due to being laid out in bed with the rona. I’m very grateful Nimhain was so on the ball despite her being on vacation herself and able to get in contact with the senior engineers on call. The team worked really hard, long and odd hours to get this resolved as quickly as they could. We are sorry it happened and that we couldn’t fix it faster than we did. I will be incredibly surprised if this happened again - we’re all on high alert now after having that bonfire lit under us.
30 Likes
Like I said elsewhere, maybe the best way to compensate for this debacle would not be by ressources or an event, but by giving every affected player a cosmetic custom armour, avatar, pet and title.
From the player side, a handful of gems, be it 50 or 5000, won’t matter after a while, and events are turning into a form of punishment for many anyhow. Unique goodies remain what they are.
From the development side, it is the difference between enabling a standard option and paying money to order additional custom graphics. That’s something, they will actually feel and remember.
Kris Kringle? Come on don’t be like these guys messing up his name, put some r’spect on his name… It’s Kris Krinkle. You should know better 
I’m honestly making fun of you, just taking the opportunity to do so, all in the name of fun.
3 Likes
There was more going on there. Players who didn’t own Kris or didn’t use him also got banned. It’s quite unlikely those all suddenly decided to go on their first treasure maps farming spree, the hard way. They got hit for playing like they always did.
Not trying to be controversial here, just poking the black box from an outside point of view. This wasn’t a threshold that failed to get updated to accommodate for Kris, this was a threshold that was set at a much more aggressive level. It just happened to pick those who used Kris faster, due to extra maps, but it didn’t stop there. My guess would be that it also hit players using some Cedric/Egg Thief/Skeleton Key variant for gold farming, because that also generates maps. And there might have been other thresholds involved that were also set much lower than usual.
I’m not having too much hopes of hearing the full story. If I had been the person causing whatever the detection tool was doing I’d also not go bragging about the details. 
10 Likes
This comment tho’ 
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Barring the chance to get hyper-flagged (is that even possible), I can confirm this 100%. I got banned and I did not own Kris, neither I have done ANY battle that encountered him. I do the majority of my farming on explore and did not do any PvP that week, so I am quite sure about this. As 4.21 mentioned, I also did not drastically change my game style in terms of gold/trophies / the number of hours that I put into the game, compared to what I had in the last weeks/months.
Even worse (can that happen?) it is not just me. I know at least two more people (won’t call them to keep them anonymous) that got banned under similar/same conditions.
So I appreciate the attempt to further clarify and tone down the whole incident @Kafka but even the latest explanation does not fit at least three instances that I am aware personally.
5 Likes
Sometimes a “hard to detect technical failure within one of our load balanced machines caused a small number of request to get handled incorrectly” sounds better than “some idjit plugged a test machine into live balancing”. If you string enough tech terms together people usually don’t ask any further questions. 
6 Likes
This is so true 
I’m sure, because it would be problematic having to get another 200gems out if this happens similar or again next week. Would ruin the whole economy and all… 
Something unsarcastic compared to above, hope you recovered from covid fully. @Kafka
And also thanks for jumping in relatively quickly during the holiday-banwave. @Nimhain
So much truth in here.
Tricky situation, you won’t throw your coworker or whoever failed under the bus, but at the same time you’ve got players (customers) that have some tech knowledge themselves, players even that are “heavily invested” (not (just) in terms of previously spent money) and they actually communicate with each other and/or are able to #seethroughthebslikeaxray - I mean think resonable about how a situation may have happened.
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