There was quite a bit of lively discussion yesterday in in-game chat about the issue where some players would intentionally lose a bunch of games at the start of a week to gain defense wins during the week.
So, to set the situation straight… here is what we knew.
This issue was reported a few months ago. Firstly on the forums, where we immediately removed a post, because it was phrased in a way that made it look like steps to reproduce an exploit. We take those down immediately for obvious reasons & then investigate.
At the time, we attempted to reproduce the issue for a couple of hours but had no luck. It got shifted down the priority list because - if it existed - it was obviously difficult to do (please bear in mind, we make decisions like this because we’re a small team, and there’s always a lot of action here with server migrations, Unity Ports, Guild Wars, etc…)
Twice since then, players have been in contact with us to try and help us find the issue, but we’ve never been able to reproduce it. Once again, we only have so much bandwidth, and with difficult-to-spot issues like this, we give them a few hours and then move on to more pressing matters.
Yesterday it got brought to our attention again, so once again we decided to investigate… I actually sat here in the office until 5am trying various combinations of things to reproduce the issue, and… I finally did.
So today I’ve been working through & testing a solution to stop this happening, and I can share the basic info about what was going on:
Basically we have 3 matchmaking tables in PvP, and players get added into lists in each table based on various stats about their hero & their weekly record. Each table focuses (not exclusively though) on a different aspect of the week’s play. One of them focuses on PvP Points.
It turns out that a certain combination of data combined with a low pvp point score (somewhat under 500) could place a player into a part of the table that did not get updated very often. There was between 8%-15% of this happening based on the exact player’s data. So… a tricky one to make happen, for sure.
Anyway, I’ve been working today - modifying the formulae for matchmaking - to make sure that ALL parts of the offending table have a good steady churn of players. Hopefully we’ll now see an end to this issue - the fix seems to be working so far, but we’ll keep an eye on it.
The funny thing was that if more than 20 people (out of the hundreds of thousands of Gems players each month) had been doing it, it wouldn’t have worked - they’d have caused that part of the table to churn naturally.
There is a problem with team power score that needs fixing a lot of my 5800 power score 1 trophy teams are actually 4 level 20 mythic fully traited teams.
That’s a little bit of fallout from the one-troop-defense fix.
We’ll be working on a better solution for that tomorrow, but I REALLY wanted to get the above issue out of the way first, since it’s been hanging around for so long.
That stung me only once. After that, I didn’t rely on the team score to decide if a team is actually hard. You may wish to adopt such a strategy yourself.
“Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.”
I have free scouting but when I don’t want to do the Psion/Famine/Death/Famine team 3 trophy or 2 trophy that probably contains a Famine I do my 1 trophy but lately they have been either Psion/Famine/Death/Famine or Kerb/GS/FG/Kerb
Glad to hear that finally it got addressed. Thanks for that.
While we’re at it, also please check the +1 defense victory bug caused by doing casual PvP. Those defense victory is looks very similar with this defense bug. I personally would love to do casual sometimes as it’s cheap to refresh. It also good source to farm snotstones during event or as a place when I want to test a new team with higher stats opponent. I just can’t imagine how people would react when they saw my name show up on their battle log often and it count as defense victory to them.
This is the example stats of person who’s been doing casual PvP:
[quote=“Sirrian, post:1, topic:24859, full:true”]
Basically we have 3 matchmaking tables in PvP, and players get added into lists in each table based on various stats about their hero & their weekly record. Each table focuses (not exclusively though) on a different aspect of the week’s play. One of them focuses on PvP Points.
Anyway, I’ve been working today - modifying the formulae for matchmaking[/quote]
Not sure about this, but the modification may have somewhat broken PvP ranking up. I noticed today that after I had completed (and won) all 5 of my Guild War battles that my Tier points were lower than expected. The guild roster is correctly showing that I’ve won 15 trophies for my 5 battles, but my PvP xp points are only 619xp instead of what they ought to be from the summation in my Battle Log: 730xp. In other words, during my Gw fights I ranked up only once instead of twice (Tier 14 instead of Tier 13).
I did not level up in Tier nor receive PvP rewards for winning the GW battles. My Stats page is claiming that I’ve completed only 1 battle instead of 5 today.
Definitely have never experienced this issue in previous weeks.
[quote=“ZooKeeper, post:11, topic:24859”]
While we’re at it, also please check the +1 defense victory bug caused by doing casual PvP. . . . I just can’t imagine how people would react when they saw my name show up on their battle log often and it count as defense victory to them.
[/quote]Is that your gripe with casual PvP player stats? That they may see your name and think they’ve defeated you? Why is this a problem for you, particularly when you see the player pictured does not do ranked PvP? No revenge matches for casual players, so having defense losses constantly pop up with no recourse to avenge them feels like being ganked. Maybe that profile score card should be done away with for those who care not to be ranked so ranked players don’t have a cow.
It is NOT an exploit. Casual play is not even supposed to get tier rankings, so I have been told repeatedly by devs, Nimhain in particular when she used to answer my support tickets about this.
If I do casual PvP, without touching ranked PvP at all after reset, I’ll get stats like that. And not everyone here aware about this bug, so when they see someone with stats like 150-0 on defense, they would think that person is abusing defensive bug since it looks similar. That’s why I’ve always stay away from casual PvP even though I want to do it.
That’s exactly what I was trying to point out. They should fix it so it won’t raise any stupid suspicion and accusation when someone doing casual PvP. If I attack you on casual PvP, you’ll get defensive victory (even if I won the match) and counted towards your ranked stats which I believe should not happens.
Aha! I was seeing a bunch of repeated losses coming from a few members of a certain guild. This was probably what they were trying to do. Thanks for cracking down on it!
They were farming in casual the Elspeth teams exclusively on warlord iv with merchant teams to maximise their gain and lower their exposure by staying off the ranked leader board. And as stated above correctly, when you are attacked from casual you will net a PvP defensive win.
Did people actually think the purpose of this “abuse” was to get defend wins? xD defend wins are worthless imo, i was using this method for awhile because sub 400 pvp pts = sub 3000 pt teams on casual pvp ie 1 shottable with bomb bot
