Thoughts on the last exploit update / patch

they should give back your progress except whatever you guys earned in the raffle remove that and just dish out an sum of token to every non exploiter and remove all the guild token debt.



This is Exactly correect.

Every raffle board won was thru computer code.

And would have been easy to take away all items won from it.

In this all non farmers and farmers agree.

Why does the punishment need to be further developers?

Please respond and explain levels of punishment and why the need to go further than taking what was won thru raffle board and tokens?

 

Hey man include my next pt too the balance is key and all.

 

My only thought about this in terms of economy is that there's already that mechanism in place with Guilds. The only thing that happened is that the loophole accelerated the process. Which means if a successful guild can get Rivalry 1 spot several times over the next couple weeks, that's no different than equating to the output of tokens from the exploit. It's just more time, but that time is in weeks, not months or years. So if a couple weeks worth of getting good results in Guild Rivalries would essentially break the "economy" then there's a a huge discrepancy in value of items between the 2 systems in the first place. Personally I think Rovio also didn't look at how "beneficial" guild raffles are in comparison to the already established Shop and Crate system, the 2 systems are vastly different in terms of currency value in my point of view. Guild Tokens are far more valuable than Pearls, which is quite wrong in my opinion.

Honestly there isn't much that can be done. It's all Rovio beyond this point. We can discuss this as much as we want (unless they censor and shove us under the rug) I guess, but as players, that's all that we can do aside from doing what Rovio doesn't want us to do; argue/fight, tank or refund.

 

One additional point. No player should want to grant developers the power to rollback after the fact. Example. If it's found that using alt accounts helped for farming tokens....almost every guild would be guilty.

Or undershipping using 2 small of a ship for your infamy by 2 levels. So you can tank a game.

What if developers rollback your account
This is too harsh a step.

What we want is clear communication of what is fair. And not fair.

And for developers to code the game to match their moral standards. Not wait for players to complain over n over.

Ps the two examples I used above were also called Clever by Miika.

So....most every guild has benefited from abuse of fair play in guild tokens.

Whether alt accounts. Or undershipping.

This isn't a statement for throwing stones. This is a statement letting all know the authority you grant the powers above you is of your choosing.

While the crowd yells off with their heads.

What if that head is yours next time?

Leniency is a good thing here community.

Only getting rid of items gained thru raffle is a good thing.
Or a temporary ban. Not this sloppy rollback. Its excessive.

And next conflict that our community runs into.
Guess what those that applauded this the loudest. You can be next on the block.

Never cheer for power. It makes the next use of it easier.

 

see this calculation first
too its just not weeks of progress for good guild and more importantly the exploit done didn't put the players nowhere near 100% of the whales setup a 8- 9% maybe at the top of exploitation which is hugeand secondly there many other factors too for you guys the raffle board didn't change that means you got advantage in drawing too
let me explain by an example you ar familiar with the concept that the rarity of raffle rewards changes after drawing an item.
so let see my case currently i have many epic perks on my board right now due rarity change but i can't get them because the amount of raffle i had are finished and i cannot draw them further and as the reward cycle will change all my perks and items will set too uncommon or rare again but for you guys the limit was pushed way back as you have a large amount of raffle pts so you guys easily got those epic perks and items. understand my pt
and thirdly no matter good of a guild you are you will not always come first because of various factor like usage of weapons in quest that are not used by many people in ur guild will lead to slow progress and moreover rivals change too so ur competition to reach the top will sometimes very tough sometimes
now to conclude all of this are guild system giving us benefits which were only available with money earlier yes it is.
will i progress in few months to whale level no
they certainly made getting good items a little easier but its not groundbreaking it will still take you an year and half or two years to be frank to reach anywhere near a whale level which is fair progress

 

I really wish it worked this way.

When we got rolled back. Our raffle board was rest to October 2

 

Too much assumptions based on Guild name. Numerically didn't mean that each player was able to do all of them, that would mean that the every player did each number from Zero. So no, I don't think that was the reality, people would be giving up a lot of their lives on doing something like that constantly for days. Realistically, I believe people took shifts and kept the ball rolling. So in response, no I still truly believe that majority of the top exploiters could be matched is equivalent to several more rounds of Guild quest boards in that could achieved legitimately in a few weeks.

Well anyone smart enough should be banking their guild tokens to max and using them all at once (see Bittersteel's 200k video) and when to stop. Because the whole point is to turnover all the raffle item square on the board at least 3 times along with the Bonus rounds several times to receive maximum output of the raffle.

And this puts in a valid question, is the Guild Quest scale better than the Shop & Crate system scale? I think we all know the answer.

Guild Tokens are worth probably 1 to 1000 pearl. Probably more, which is weird.
Let's put this in perspective, with 100k Guild Tokens, it's almost guaranteed that you get an Epic Perk of some kind(actually, more like 3-5 depending on the board!). In the shop, you go for maybe 2 weeks and / or about 50 refreshes to see just one Epic Perk, that costs 1.5million Gold / 3500 Pearls. If we dive further, the shop will never give Legendary pieces aside from buying an Epic Crate(x10), whereas Guild raffles does. It's way less RNG too, you can pretty much guarantee which item you want most and "raffle" all your tokens to get them off the board.

See where I'm getting at? Anyway, this is not part of the justice / fair punishment aspect, just more food for thought as to Rovio's thought process and whether they realize that their currency system is already distraught. The only saving grace here is that you can't convert pearl to tokens directly. But this puts it into question whether crates are worth buying anymore, or is Super Boosts more worth it in the end? You be the judge.

 

Ok the cal are not just mere assumption let's do a little calculation here the post is of 9th October and the exploitation started let's say the day to which devs rolled back.
So it's 7 days 56 guilds all easy quest.
8 easy quest per day.
it took me and 4 other players total 5 players in my guild to knockout the easy quest in 4-5 hours and we are low infamy people with very low damaging weapons and don't have most of the weapons.
But with decent and extremely good people in a guild and easy quest can be swept in 45 - 30mins.
That's makes playtime anywhere b/w 4-6 hrs.
And if I know this is a exploit and the devs will plug it soon I will dish out these many hrs and moreover there were two weekends too.
Second these guilds are only significant amount of the total there too many other guilds as u must be aware a lot of them even had troll name as Thier names.
I did save upto 160k before rolling the dice on raffle these are my prizes 9-10 epics parts some 3-4 epic/rare perk and 1900 pearls.
Remember this is what I earned after 2 quests.thats 11 days.
And you guys earned if we go by cal 1.3 mil let's tone it down and say 1 mil than too it's much significant.
So my pt stands corrected about the rarity lvl changes.
It's just a simple case of probability of u think about it more no of chances you get to draw more you get.
And now to third point( frankly I didn't read whole because it's long and it's late up here like 3:30 am I have to sleep)
Yes shop system sucks if any new game mechanism is introduced it should be and will be better than the first.
Did it broke the game no not even in the slightest.
Do check out the challenges rolled out by clash royale in the game when they first came out there were few people who thought so too and no it didn't break the game there it will not break the game here and by the way the prizes u get from winning a challenge in royale are better than what you get here.
And moreover if you want to discuss more on this topic pm this topic is irrelevant to the thread you posted and is killing your own thread.
And I may have blown the 8-9% figure out of proportion it was just an assumption but it still is significant amount.
If u don't think u got that much maybe u didnt do exploit action to that extent.

 

Please do stay on topic. As I clearly expressed when they did rollback all raffles were reset to beginning. So no one has achieved a raffle board advantage.

To the topic on hand. Do u have ideas how the developers could render punishment more effectively?

Or to not target items gained thru money or game play?

Clearly been expressed on this thread the devs could have chosen to only target perks and rewards given by raffle. Would have sufficed and be precise. They chose a lazier way.

Also cearly stated in this board the tiered punishment system they made.

Yet developers haven't disclosed the numbers to those tiers. How biggest exploiters is defined.

And they haven't yet made an arbitration process for fixes to overly aggressive punishments.

If u think support tickets are key....its been since the rollback and support still hasn't answered my ticket.


This thread is about how developers should handle situations. And to allow for greater transparency in decisions that affect our gaming community.

Trust me. Players leaving over this is bad for the game. Lost revenue. Lost ads. Lost spenders. It hurts us all. We are one gaming community now. With a power that is non communicative

 

"Oh woe is me, my ill-gotten gains were lost! Next time it could be you!"

Sure, but it could've been me this time, if I'd made a conscious decision to cheat the system. It was clearly and obviously unintended, and it provided massively unbalanced rewards. There was no way farming rewards wouldn't have been removed. Does it suck that you guys lost gold/sugar/pearls from battles and other rewards from the course of normal gameplay as well? Sure, but it's hard to have a lot of sympathy when it was all lost as a direct result of farmers gaming the system to gain an unfair advantage over legit players. The only real issue is a few fringe cases, like people combining items gained completely separate of quest board abuse and lost those. But, again, support ticket. Is it going to take a little while to go through? Probably, because I'd imagine the support team is drowning in tickets right now, both valid and otherwise, so it's going to take time to work through all of them. Patience is key. If your claim is legitimate (which, IIRC, yours was. Big torp, right?), they should get to you in due time.

You claim leniency is a 'good' thing, but it isn't when said leniency would've left an absolute flood of overly powerful items in the system. Farming broke player progression in a very serious way, and by extension that broke the whole game's economy. Players all up and down the ladder had stacks of legendaries, T3/4 epics, etc etc etc, all gained from farming. There was no way to leave that much power in circulation without effectively ruining the game long-term so a few people could have fun short term. Transparency, explaining exactly what 'the worst offenders' is defined as, now that would be a good thing. Hard numbers for people to look at would be a good thing. Hell, posting the average amount of tokens farmed by exploiters would even help, on Rovio's part, just so that the community at large can see it, clear as day, and know how badly the game would've been damaged were it not for these rollbacks. People were collecting literally months' worth of tokens in a matter of hours. In no world does that leave an option for a lenient fix which would still be meaningful.

 

Sorry @TheCrisco, again, read the thread. I do not want to even talk about "right" or "wrong" or the whole morale issue in it's entirety. The discussion here is the justice, and how fair and how the exploit was dealt with.

None of your comments above actually even touch on that issue. Infact, it's not about the ill-gotten gains, it's beyond that where users were stripped of more than simply the tokens and it's rewards. Which is what's been raised here and that's what's being discussed about. The 3 tier standard etc...

I get you want to uphold your justice so here: read what I responded to Kitterini:

 

Just a few imputs, although I can sense that they probably wont be too popular

1. We are not taking about "a few weeks" of accelerated progress - In the worst cases we are closer to at least 1 year.
2. @*JAWS* If you want to be taken serious then you should probably stop pretending that using low level alts for the kill quests is even remotely related to the abusive behaviour that got penalized. Neither in terms of gains or the amount of abusive behaviour do they compare. You decided you were ok with cheating, you got caught, time to stand up for your actions rather than this pointless derailing.
3. They have said repeatably that all accounts facing a rollback will get a full refund of any $$$ spend, so why are you pretending that they stole your money? You know thats not true.

On topic of the penalties - Yes they were pretty strict, but abuse to this level would have gotten you permabanned in mmos 10years ago. The amount of ressource gain and the clearly unintended mechanic required to farm doesnt leave any doubt as to whether it was working as intended or not. Sure a few players might leave because their Ill-gotten-gains got removed, quantifying whether that number is higher than the number of legitimate players that would have left if the devs has ignored it is pretty hard though.

 

Clearly you don't 'get' anything. It's not even a matter of justice. You must've stopped after reading one line. It's a matter of balance. Token farming threw the whole game's economy on its head. P2W is one thing, and we all hate it (except the ones that do it, but hey, they keep the game alive, so whatever I guess), but when ships at 500 infamy are 3 deep with legendary equips, it's not really a level playing field any more. Justice is irrelevant in that scenario. Legendary gear is the incentive for whales to pay and support the game, while simultaneously being the shiny carrot on a stick for F2Pers to aspire to. Allowing farming hurts both groups in the long run. Sure, farmers loved the game while they could do it, but being able to piece together a legendary (or more) a week is going to mean the game gets old fairly quickly. People would completely cap out on legendaries in a month or two, maybe a little longer if they're unfortunate, but then what's there to keep playing for? You're already at the peak. The exploit was harmful to the game as a whole, even completely disregarding 'justice,' which you'll notice I completely left out of the discussion. It's not a matter of justice, morality, or anything else. It's a simple matter of progression. Right or wrong was just a tangential item there. Players who didn't exploit received no punishment, and instead were rewarded for not exploiting a system which broke the standard progression. Players who did were set back in various ways, based on the severity of their abuse. It seems like a perfectly reasonable way to implement it.

As a developer, Rovio hits a lot of key points with this action:
1) Undo the damage caused by massive exploitation throwing the economy out of whack.
2) Send a message to players exploiting that it won't be tolerated, and ideally discourage such abuses in the future.
3) Send a message to players who didn't go out of their way to break the system that their adherence to common sense would be rewarded, encouraging them to continue following the spirit of the game, whether or not an exploit people discover is explicitly against the rules (protip: it was already, but people love to make the argument that it wasn't. Either way, whether it was or wasn't is a moot point for this specific issue, the point stands on its own merits).

There was absolutely some collateral damage though, and that's the real unfortunate bit, which I'm honestly hoping that Rovio does continue to sort out via support tickets. I want to be very clear: legitimate claims should never go un-addressed, regardless of surrounding behavior.

 

Kitterini,
The alt account are only mentioned because of an original Miika. Message he wrote to many on the forum talking about clever abuses. Alt accounts are one of them mentioned.

Only reason I have even added it to the discussion.


As for pearls given back for cash spent. I have clearly and proven on other threads in forums. They don't equal what was lost.

This thread to me isn't about my legendary torpedo that was taken. Trust me when saying simply that 36k of pearls doesn't equal what I had taken.

Many threads have been written on the subject of how much it cost to get the legendary weapon of your choosing. The lowest number suggested in forums was $2000 if lucky.

 

But Kitterini you make a valid point about banning. And owing from Battle Bays history with cheating players on infamy boosing. They should have chosen the ban. Yes it is subjective how long. But history for battle bay says it should have been 10 days.

Also it's not wrong to think only perks and items gained thru raffle should have been seized. No issue there.

And it's not wrong to want developers to explain their punishment tiers. The numbers. And explain how 4 hours of farming equals 8 days. When I think of biggest exploiters. Time is a factor. Amount of games plaid etc.

So all see me say here. I accept punishment of taken tokens and perks. Zero issue with it.

Only talking on behalf of guys and gals who lost real items with money they used. And in my case and in multiple players I know. The pearls didn't equal the legendary weapon taken.

And I agree with my community that sugar and gold shouldn't have been taken from their progress.

I hope we all can come up with ways the developers can handle things better. Kitterini. If u have suggestions on what u would like to see for the future. Please post

 

Guild system is far more generous anyway, I think in many ways the P2W don't know it yet, but this definitely takes a lot of value away from what the P2W whales paid regardless.

Please don't use the term "farmers" there are literally thousands of legitimate players that are Free-to-Play or Pay-to-progress and use this term to refer to themselves as farming the game. Please use either; Exploiter or Abuser, the ladder being the more extreme case.

No doubt, there's no denying that the items where damaging the the ecosystem of players. Nobody is challenging that fact here in this thread, nor are we saying that punishments should be lifted. Many players here think that the severity of the punishments were maybe too heavy, and that's what's discussed here. But the problem I pointed out was the multi-fauceted standards that existed with the Fix, and that I think is the bigger problem. Because of the nature of the outcome of some players; ie Mid-level Exploiter got the better of the deal here than even the players that didn't exploit. Don't you agree? Do you think that's fair?

All this is moot. Don't think anyone disagrees with any of these points.

Collateral damage due to poor implementation is the problem. hundreds of accounts rolled-back, unaccounted number of players quitting, thousands disgruntled and probably never going to spend again on a Rovio product. I'm glad you agree that there is, because some players aren't going to simply contact Rovio; but simply going to the better mediator: Apple and Google. This throws the whole justice system out the window, because like it or not, those people will end up getting their money back and their account will remain the same. Which goes back to the beginning of the thread, what would have caused the least amount of collateral damage amongst the community, was basically my question and why I typed out that 3000 character post.

 

@D3X I think it's best to just ignore this Crisco guy now. He is already known for his derailing of threads. The more you respond to him, the more he will continue to derail your thread even further. If you have a different opinion than that guy... Well... Be prepared to get insulted eventually. (Been there)

 

@Wishaal You and I have had disagreements, and I stay civil pretty much from beginning to end. So knowing that I will state my case when legitimate issues that stick to the thread are raised. Crisco has so far stayed in that realm, until otherwise I think no additional action is needed...yet.

 

@D3X I actually think the tiered approach to the issue was pretty spot on, conceptually. I don't agree with their declination to disclose qualifiers for each level, though. They said what the minimum was for a token debt in the announcement, but never what the minimum for a rollback was, which makes a lot of discussion around the issue problematic. That being said, referencing your first post specifically, I have to disagree about the 42k tokens throwing anything meaningful off. Even if they gave literally every player 42k, it would still likely be a drop in the bucket as compared to the amount gained by players exploiting. People were getting that same 42k in groups of 25 in a matter of hours, and that's if they were going at a relatively slow pace. Giving enough tokens for one bonus roll isn't going to have anywhere near the impact on player progress that concentrating those gains into a handful of players would, regardless.

Either way, I can appreciate your civil discourse on the matter, as opposed to the constant stream of mud slinging (on both sides) that was the other thread.

Finally, @Wishaal I don't recall ever personally insulting anyone on this forum who didn't attack me first, but sure, I'm totally all about derailing threads. Yup, that's me. If you don't like what I have to say about something, that's one thing, but to make a claim like "he's known for derailing threads" just because I may have an unpopular opinion is disingenuous at best, borderline libelous at worst. Now, if you don't mind, this thread has been civil, I'd appreciate keeping the unprovoked attacks to a minimum, thanks.

 

wow D3X, very impressive response.

i did not expect this from you and i am very much happy you wrote this.

devs wont listen nor care, thats why i have pulled the refund pin on purchasing during rollback.