Clearly the problem is not account sharing: it asks a too much good organization. In theory, it seems feasible but this game is quite personal (ie collect cards) and I don’t see how one player want to share with someone who you don’t really know.
If we are talking about that, it’s maybe because some players were saying that they were sharing account but in fact, they were using bots.
So yeah the real issue is botting and any suspicious activity should be shared with the community .
But it should be a detailed call out like this topic:
Devs don’t have so much time to update their automatic botting detection. And you should know that cheating is a race between devs and cheaters: as soon as devs improve their detection, cheaters improve their bot. And it’s looping like that.
So @Sirrian, @Saltypatra how can the community help you? Do you have a detailed guideline for reporting bots?
Last point about PVP, it asks a crzy amount of time to be in the top and I believe it’s totally out of what devs thought it would be. It’s maybe why devs don’t care that much about the PVP leaderboard and why they are focusing on a new leaderboard, the GW one.
Absolutely!!! Posted the exact same thing above, there is no logical way 20,000 different accounts playing Gems have people “sharing their profile” (or 10,000 x2 people). But that said discussing account sharing as a community makes sense because there are some grey areas and ideas to discuss. Including different view points and degrees of sharing to consider.
Unlike the actual deep leaderboard problem of bots and exploits where there is no grey area and very little to discuss (other than the obvious: detection needs to be improved).
@Jainus We don’t run any simulated users on the live servers.
@Turintuor The best thing to do in terms of reporting players is to get some information and tell us their name, level and guild. We will then open an internal investigation. We have specific proof that only we are capable of finding, so even if you send what you think is definitive proof we will still need to investigate the player to find what we are looking for.
We have been doing this for weeks. With no apparent effects for the moment.
Sirrian himself said higher in this thread that the staff is very busy currently and doesn’t have much time to investigate, which I can perfectly understand.
However one of our top players has decided today to quit the game because he doesn’t want to waste his time anymore trying to reach the top of the leaderboard when it is apparently not humanly possible.
And I am afraid that others will follow if nothing is done. And it doesn’t seem, from what Sirrian said, that anything is going to be done soon.
As an accountant, I understand that a game has to be economically viable, that the priority is to attract new players, and to maintain their interest by providing them with new interesting content. I also understand that a small staff can’t do everything they want to do and have to determine some priorities.
But as the GL of the #1 guild, I see the anger and the disillusionment of many of the top players, in our guild and in other guilds, growing, and I am feeling powerless, sad and angry.
Every player that is brought to our attention is added to our investigation list. As Sirrian said earlier we are exceedingly busy with the deployment of Guild Wars. I’m sorry to hear about how you are feeling, when we move the game for PC/Mobile over to Unity we will be able to add more features to prevent cheating and that will make our investigations easier.
I just wanted to clarify in my last post what players should do if they want to report cheating.
i’m sure dev is doing their work on their end. maybe the person checks out.
this is just speculation and suspicion based on pvp score. i am interested in actual proof that they are cheating/coordinated sharing. that is if account sharing is illegal. sharing itself is gray area. some say it’s ok to share casually with family members. where is the line between legal and illegal sharing? how much is too much?
but i’m more interested in how they are doing it legitly, if that is what they are doing. what team are they using. how are they playing. does it involve quitting long matches. which opponents to pick.
I hope that this will entail the detection of third-party software that I suspect is being used, namely the trainer programs. It’s the elephant in the room that has not been discussed yet, but from what I have witnessed; more and more people appear to be using them.
I fully understand that you have a small staff and are currently allocating most of your time to Guild Wars , but if the integrity of the game is compromised then what really do you have to build on?
This is good and bad.
The bad is that the suspicous one(s) will be able to cheat all the weeks until the Unity and the new anticheat tools has been invented. And yet, there is not 100% certainly that they will be caught after it has been invented either. What really hurting the game the most atm is all the insecurities. We do not know how long it gonna go on like this. We do not know much at all.
The good is that Unity and hopefully a new stronger anticheat tools is on its way. Will it be good? Time will tell.
Wow, does it mean that it will take at least “few months” to prevent cheating?
Is your “specific proof” automatically acquired or “manual” investigation is possible?
If one player reported that another player X did Y trophies in a day with exactly Z seconds for each fight, can you investigate this player X’s data on this specific day or you are going to investigate player X after the report from scratch?
Look, all of us know that cheating, botting, trainers, hacks, account sharing, all of it is being used by a myriad of players, not just one guy or gal. It is ruining the game. All of us know it but, like Tom Petty says, “You believe want you want to believe.” Folks can deny, deny, deny, and read me the company line, but there’s still a 9000-pound elephant sitting in your living room.
So aside from that very distasteful reality, here are a few ideas, see what you think:
Hire on an experienced, high-level endgamer with knowledge to advise and consult. We do not think the dev staff has the time to play this game like some do, and frankly do not even understand their game as well as some do, especially at the advanced levels.
Eliminate PvP as it is now, or just make it casual. It is PvAI anyway, and the AI is a poor/dumb opponent in most cases. I understand it may be designed that way to be more fun, but I’m thinking live head-to-head competition is far MORE fun. Also if it is eliminated as it stands, along with leaderboard “prizes,” at least one motivation to cheat will be also eliminated. If it is to be kept, it’s time to tighten the code and make it impossible for someone to go 400-0 against 3-trophy opponents in one day’s play at 98 seconds a game as was demonstrated last week. Let the casual players enjoy the limited challenge that the current AI offers.
Here’s my favorite idea: Write some code that will actually record Guild War (or all) battles, and employ it randomly. Let everyone know that any people suspected of botting or the use of trainers, cheaters, hacks, etc., are subject to review. If they are found wanting, out the door they go, sacrificing their precious VIP monies, etc.
In addition to Guild Wars, which I sincerely hope can avoid the cheaters, create tournaments where players can enter, say sixteen at a time, and battle it out in 2-out-of-3 matches, in real time. Real-time games are really what gamers really crave and the excitement is hard to match. You’ll make a mint if you can work that one out.
Now I know all of this requires time and money and talent, etc., but very conservatively, if only 15% of the 20,000 players that play regularly put up the VIP 5 $130 that I have, that’s almost $400,000 right there. I think you guys will still get fat and I hope you do…
No, all of us don’t, some of us may suspect, and some of us might even know, in which case they are most probably cheaters themselves, or in a guild with them else how would they know?
There are always supposed legit players up there with the alleged cheaters, so achieving these numbers is not humanly impossible, and no-lifers never fail to amaze what can be done in a game when you make it the center of your existence.
Don’t know how that is supposed to help with fighting cheaters in any way, but the good old Devs know shit about their own game, let us tell you what to do argument is a fit for all discussions i guess.
Hell no. The reasons why realtime pvp in this kind of game could be terrible have been discussion at length before, i personally don’t need a game mode that is decided by who gets the first turn exclusively. Anyways an extra mode for real time pvp like the one you proposed under 4) is great, just don’t make it the main mode of the game.
@Saltypatra@Sirrian anyone going to explain what the hell is going on with te pvp points? Getting 35 points for 3 trophy fights more then ever.
I know you guys are busy with guild war but i can’t believe you can’t take a 5 min to explain whats is going on, stop ignoring it there is a problem
You guys took a week to test if the ai was cheating and take time to vote for miss krystana but can’t get any answer about the damn pvp points and i asked several time what happen with this and never got an answer this is really frustrating
You get more PVP points when you defeat armies that are of a significantly higher level than you. This means that higher level players, unfortunately, have a harder time gaining larger amount of PVP points for three trophy battles, even with the multiplier they exclusively get. Once Guild Wars has been released and everything is running smoothly with 3.0 we will be revisiting how PVP points and gold are determined.
We never intentionally set out to penalise end game players, which is why there is a multiplier for high level armies.
There will no point to removing the bonus you receive as we will be reviewing the way PVP points and gold are determined in the future once Guild Wars has been released.
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