Ahoy, adventurers. We are in the process of pushing a fix for the unintended drop off in gold occuring in the 3rd (easiest) PVP fight that happened as a result of a fixing an exploit.
We had planned to reduce the gold in the 3rd (easy) battle, because it had jumped up a few months ago, but never intended to reduce it this much, and not at this time.
Now, if a team is more than 2000 points below you in terms of team score, the amount of gold you receive will be less. However, the reduction in gold scales down more gently than in the previous version.
As such, the gold will still be a little lower than 4.6.5, but it won’t be as stark a reduction and drop off for these fights in casual and ranked PVP.
Hi @Saltypatra thanks to the team for the quick fixing!
I notice you are careful to specify the 1T (left easy fight) but what about the 2T and 3T fights that are also <2K below the player? As those gold rewards were impacted quite a bit as well.
(For me 80% of 3T fights are <2k from me and all 2T fights)
Edit 2: looks like the fix took care of both t1 and t2. Still a nerf, but i can at least accept this. Thank you and thank you to all of the community members who faught hard for this fix.
Edit: I do appreciate the effort from the developer team both before and after this update. They have had a lot of comments thrown there way and damage control has been at high levels. Just know we only provide feedback this passionate because we love your game, and we want to continue to love it going forward.
First off, I’d like to thank the team who spent their time and effort into trying to come up with a fix and indeed making the right steps in correcting the problem.
However, this fix doesn’t seem to completely solve the problem. I’m still getting hit if play scores are lower, a 6k power team is still only 487 gold (casual) which is about 55-65% of the original gold. I’m running under the assumption that fighting low ranked teams weren’t bad in general without the exploit, so can we not find solutions to stop the exploit rather than a decrease in resources from fighting them? This experiment still doesn’t include how most of the player base will lose player power from not completing epic tasks next week. Which is why I’m veering towards a hypersensitive bias here.
The fix also doesn’t stop the dropoff problem specifically, if i get a T2 or T3 team at 11-12k there are no details saying that I will get rewarded for fighting a not T1 team and will still get punished if the luck of the draw is not friendly in finding a worthy opponent.
Again, I’d like to thank the team for taking meaningful steps toward helping the player base but I personally feel that this as a long-term solution is still inadequate and hope that work will continue on this topic.
The lowest payout cap has been doubled, my middle fight went from 433 to 866.
My middle fights always used to be worth more than 1000 gold, so this still is a 20% gold nerf, not just an adjustment to the easy battle.
Rightmost fight is weird, somehow the power score has increased significantly. Maybe an artificial boost to the rightmost fight to make it get hit less by the nerf? Or possibly a whole set of statue bonuses unlocking all at once?
At least we are getting closer to calling the planned intentional nerf a planned intentional nerf. The supposed exploit never got “fixed”, just “addressed” by lowering all gold gained from PvP.
Questions remaining:
Now that most of the nerf has been reverted, will the exploit be worth exploiting again?
Will players now exploiting this exploit get banned? There have been reasonable concerns that what is seen as “exploit” is actually something that will happen automatically while playing Casual PvP throughout the week.
This is the part of the story that eats me up. Everything else about your post makes me happy but this part pushes me right back to agitated.
These parts of the statement make sense, some of them implied:
We planned to reduce this (to address the exploit)
[Implied: “We expected it to reduce gold rewards by a certain amount, that was unavoidable as the exploit involved getting disproportionate rewards.”]
So what I’d expect out of even novice developers is that as they made the change, they had in mind how new rewards would compare to old rewards. Then I’d expect that after making the change, they’d compare some baseline scenarios. All of these are really obvious:
Left team, super low score: (probably not a big change)
Left team, super high score: (probably not a big change)
Middle team, super low score: (probably not a big change)
Middle team, super high score: (probably not a big change)
Right team, super low score: (expecting a large change)
3-5 tests of scores in the “low” range to avoid outliers.
Right team, super high score: (some change acceptable)
Right team, 3-5 scores “in between”: (some change acceptable)
That is maybe 2-3 hours of work to write, then it can test any version of the algorithm you throw at it. The test cases focus hardest on the right team, which you intended to change, but do token testing of the other teams to ensure they aren’t impacted.
If the devs scoff that this cannot be done, challenge them to schedule a screen sharing session with me. Training teams to do this is one of my Actual Jobs. I would normally expect a lot of monetary compensation for the 3-4 hour session but I am happy to be paid in in-game currency and I’m not even thinking of a lot. It would make my life better if the devs followed processes that didn’t lead to surprises.
So I don’t buy it. If a developer makes a change, they have an expectation for how it works. They’re on the hook for proving it works the way they say it does. If it affects already-existing code, they’re on the hook for proving they didn’t break what’s already there. This isn’t architecture astronomy for NASA-level projects. It’s middle-school level software process that has been widely accepted since the 1970s. For you to use this excuse is like claiming, “Sorry, Sirrian can’t speak English so he wasn’t able to respond to your feedback.”
I would also like to point out:
What behaviors were the beta testers not allowed to test?
What behaviors were immediately reported as defects?
How much time have you spent this week addressing defects instead of doing your planned work?
There’s a reason these three things seem to correlate strongly. I don’t think the dev team is so incompetent as to not have seen it. You also just proved something: this change to gold rewards is releasable as a data patch and doesn’t require a client update. So, “We didn’t have time to do full testing before 4.7” is not a good excuse: you could have just as easily announced and released the exploit fix today after letting it cook a little longer.
All of these things seriously damage your credibility and are why our trust is eroded.
I’m still waiting to hear what this “Exploit was that you supposedly fixed”.
You made the community believe that anyone Farming gold in cPvP was Exploiting the game due to your general vague description.
I’m on the belief that you changed absolutely nothing but the amount that cPvP offers in gold…twice now in a week.
Also this would have been a good way to handle this scenario, but it requires, “The team can reliably get information into the patch notes.” (See my previous information on how you can accomplish that.)
“There is a gold reward exploit we had to fix hastily so our economic adjustments related to Epic Tasks are not threatened. We did not get to test it thoroughly, so we need you to pay attention to your gold rewards. If they seem far outside your expectations, please report those expectations here. We have what we want in mind, and if you help us find the places where rewards are way off base we promise we will fix it Soon™️. If you find the exploit and report it then I’m sorry but we’re not fixing that.”
What it does that didn’t happen:
Announce there is a problem that has been solved.
Admit that the solution didn’t receive the QA you might like it to have.
Set player expectations that gold rewards might have been reduced, and that the dev team wants to fix it as soon as they can.
I think the only bickering that would’ve happened in that thread would be:
Players bickering with each other about if this or that practice is an exploit.
Players bickering with each other about if the rewards for this or that method are actually appropriate.
Players bickering because someone whined about the nerf when it’s VERY clear from the post the devs know it’s a bad situation and want to fix it.
The natural state of players is we fight amongst ourselves. It’s when we get a common enemy things get out of hand.
I’m afraid there has been another bug created with this fix…
I’m playing the same 4 teams at T3 ranked pvp over and over again…
I’ll produce some screen shots below; I didn’t start to capture them until I kept fighting the same team. I know what the next team will be before I finish this fight. In this past hour I have had 2 other battles than these and one of those has also has occurred 4 times. I want to skip it because it’s a double lust and L&D team which causes me to get annoyed with the passive trait bs and I generally refuse to PvP battle those that insist on using them, and the game going on for ages etc.
Which is actually the biggest issue in PvP. The match making has been broken for years.
But hey… Let’s spend our time fixing fabled exploits instead.
I had actually put in a support case about the matchmaking issue a year ago and was told it is working as intended.
Edited to remove image, i was informed it is against community guidelines to share information from support tickets in the form of screen shots as they are considered PM’s. Thanks @Jonathan for the heads up.
I actually since this post, have had another team add to the loop, so in 75 minutes and 28 battles (in between other stuff ofc) I’ve fought 6 different opponents and the Rope Dart team is again my next battle…
I think it needs re-looking at, it’s never been the same 4-5 teams as often as this, I’m looping 4 teams, get 1 different about every 3rd run, then back through the same 4 teams.
I put that support case in after they made the change so fireball teams didn’t show up as much, I let it go but I still get a group of teams to battle against and it changes if i stop for a few hours but always seems to end up back to cycling through a group of teams.
(As a heads-up – I’ve flagged your post since it’s against Community Guidelines to share Support responses – if you edit your post it should become unhidden again, I think.
In a time when we’re being very critical of Devs, I think it’s important to make sure we’re still being respectful of the rules, etc. – not that you weren’t! My guess is you weren’t aware – to ensure communication and negotiation keeps flowing.)
