How are the cheaters cheating in this PVE?

Unknown

Hi guys,
I have read a few posts regarding cheating in this forum.
What do you mean by "cheating" here?
In the current PVE event, the guy at the top has a lvl 44 ironman35, lvl 37 modern black widow and a lvl 31 wolverine.

How did he cheat in this, if he ever cheat?

Just want to understand what and how is cheating being done in this game. Isn't the data stored at the server of D3? If that is the case, how can cheating or hacking still be done?

Unknown

It is believed players with weak rosters faces significantly weaker enemies.

Unknown

But he doesnt have a DD character so that would means many of his missions are locked.
But he has over 7k points and is top of the bracket.

The guy on 2nd has quite a few maxed out characters but yet he is on 2nd spot....

Unknown

cweiguan wrote:

But he doesnt have a DD character so that would means many of his missions are locked.
But he has over 7k points and is top of the bracket.

The guy on 2nd has quite a few maxed out characters but yet he is on 2nd spot....

I think only 2 of the missions are DD required. The other ones you get a loaned one? I have a DD so I can't tell the difference.

reckless442

It's not just that there are players with low levels doing well. There appear to be players in the top-10 on some boards who have only two characters on their rosters that are eligible for this PVE. Yet somehow they are scoring enough to get into the thousands. There were some pictures in the Oscorp thread of a few of those suspect rosters.

I'm not aware of any in my bracket, but it does have a player in 9th place with 2,926 points. His entire roster consists of lvl 37 Iron Man 35, lvl 28 Hawkeye classic, lvl 23 modern Storm, lvl 6 Venom, lvl 6 Juggernaut, lvl 15 Doctor Doom, lvl 8 Thor, lvl 9 classic Storm, and lvl 1 modern Black Widow. Not only does that mean he can't do the Daredevil or Wolverine quests, but the only team he can field on most missions is his 37th lvl IM, 9th lvl classic Storm (1/1/1), and lvl 1 modern Black Widow (with only 1 blue power). How do you get nearly 3,000 points with that team? His Storm has only 375 health and his modern Black Widow only has 175.

Unknown

Phantron wrote:

It is believed players with weak rosters faces significantly weaker enemies.

I can confirm this. Two of my friends are newer players and only have 7-9 roster slots, and no heroes above a 45 Modern storm.

Their last Ares/Daken/Yelena mission are all level 50s.

Unknown

There are 2 real kinds of cheaters. The ones with the modded game of the ones with a trainer that changes game values as the game is playing. The trainer program is able to compare changing values and lock down or change values into new values once the byte data has been tracked. Let's say you have 20000 iso and you spend 500, the game will track which data values changed from 20000 to 21500 and from then it will know which bits hold the data for declaring how much iso you have. The user can then manually change the values with the trainer and dictate how much iso they really have. Basically they can change all numbers in the game at will.

Unknown

You mean the current byte data is stored on the client (ie phone) and not on the server?

Unknown

reckless442 wrote:

It's not just that there are players with low levels doing well. There appear to be players in the top-10 on some boards who have only two characters on their rosters that are eligible for this PVE. Yet somehow they are scoring enough to get into the thousands. There were some pictures in the Oscorp thread of a few of those suspect rosters.

I'm not aware of any in my bracket, but it does have a player in 9th place with 2,926 points. His entire roster consists of lvl 37 Iron Man 35, lvl 28 Hawkeye classic, lvl 23 modern Storm, lvl 6 Venom, lvl 6 Juggernaut, lvl 15 Doctor Doom, lvl 8 Thor, lvl 9 classic Storm, and lvl 1 modern Black Widow. Not only does that mean he can't do the Daredevil or Wolverine quests, but the only team he can field on most missions is his 37th lvl IM, 9th lvl classic Storm (1/1/1), and lvl 1 modern Black Widow (with only 1 blue power). How do you get nearly 3,000 points with that team? His Storm has only 375 health and his modern Black Widow only has 175.

He's probably using Iron Man, and fighting 10-20 enemies. It's really not hard to believe: Sure I have DD, but he's not exactly helpful against the non-villain enemies.

My current Roster for this is a 35 C Storm, 25 BW, 22 Iron Man, 18 DD. Between those four I am just logging on and doing all the fights I can over 80 points 1-2 times a day. (main ones being Symbiote Showdown and Arrested - both of which are hard fights, but they're in the 30s-40s). I'm right at 4000 points.

There's a serious witch hunt going on about cheaters when it's got nothing to do with cheaters and everything to do with terrible scaling/coding. It's the same as Thick as Thieves.

windfallstar

Telicis wrote:

reckless442 wrote:

It's not just that there are players with low levels doing well. There appear to be players in the top-10 on some boards who have only two characters on their rosters that are eligible for this PVE. Yet somehow they are scoring enough to get into the thousands. There were some pictures in the Oscorp thread of a few of those suspect rosters.

I'm not aware of any in my bracket, but it does have a player in 9th place with 2,926 points. His entire roster consists of lvl 37 Iron Man 35, lvl 28 Hawkeye classic, lvl 23 modern Storm, lvl 6 Venom, lvl 6 Juggernaut, lvl 15 Doctor Doom, lvl 8 Thor, lvl 9 classic Storm, and lvl 1 modern Black Widow. Not only does that mean he can't do the Daredevil or Wolverine quests, but the only team he can field on most missions is his 37th lvl IM, 9th lvl classic Storm (1/1/1), and lvl 1 modern Black Widow (with only 1 blue power). How do you get nearly 3,000 points with that team? His Storm has only 375 health and his modern Black Widow only has 175.

He's probably using Iron Man, and fighting 10-20 enemies. It's really not hard to believe: Sure I have DD, but he's not exactly helpful against the non-villain enemies.

My current Roster for this is a 35 C Storm, 25 BW, 22 Iron Man, 18 DD. Between those four I am just logging on and doing all the fights I can over 80 points 1-2 times a day. (main ones being Symbiote Showdown and Arrested - both of which are hard fights, but they're in the 30s-40s). I'm right at 4000 points.

There's a serious witch hunt going on about cheaters when it's got nothing to do with cheaters and everything to do with terrible scaling/coding. It's the same as Thick as Thieves.

And they said that this was supposed to be a challenging event...

I've said it so many times, but seriously, everyone should be facing the same enemies in PvE. If that's too much to ask for, then the rewards should scale with difficulty. The devs said they wanted this event to be progression focused, well I certainly haven't progressed at all due to the impossible fights.

Unknown

windfallstar wrote:

Telicis wrote:

reckless442 wrote:

It's not just that there are players with low levels doing well. There appear to be players in the top-10 on some boards who have only two characters on their rosters that are eligible for this PVE. Yet somehow they are scoring enough to get into the thousands. There were some pictures in the Oscorp thread of a few of those suspect rosters.

I'm not aware of any in my bracket, but it does have a player in 9th place with 2,926 points. His entire roster consists of lvl 37 Iron Man 35, lvl 28 Hawkeye classic, lvl 23 modern Storm, lvl 6 Venom, lvl 6 Juggernaut, lvl 15 Doctor Doom, lvl 8 Thor, lvl 9 classic Storm, and lvl 1 modern Black Widow. Not only does that mean he can't do the Daredevil or Wolverine quests, but the only team he can field on most missions is his 37th lvl IM, 9th lvl classic Storm (1/1/1), and lvl 1 modern Black Widow (with only 1 blue power). How do you get nearly 3,000 points with that team? His Storm has only 375 health and his modern Black Widow only has 175.

He's probably using Iron Man, and fighting 10-20 enemies. It's really not hard to believe: Sure I have DD, but he's not exactly helpful against the non-villain enemies.

My current Roster for this is a 35 C Storm, 25 BW, 22 Iron Man, 18 DD. Between those four I am just logging on and doing all the fights I can over 80 points 1-2 times a day. (main ones being Symbiote Showdown and Arrested - both of which are hard fights, but they're in the 30s-40s). I'm right at 4000 points.

There's a serious witch hunt going on about cheaters when it's got nothing to do with cheaters and everything to do with terrible scaling/coding. It's the same as Thick as Thieves.

And they said that this was supposed to be a challenging event...

I've said it so many times, but seriously, everyone should be facing the same enemies in PvE. If that's too much to ask for, then the rewards should scale with difficulty. The devs said they wanted this event to be progression focused, well I certainly haven't progressed at all due to the impossible fights.

I'm with you. If your roster is on the low side, your progress will ideally slow you down to the heroic token, 2* reward slot in your bracket. If you're more established you can fight your way through tougher "end boss" fights to get the 3* stuff. Whatever this scaling they implemented was meant to do, it was misguided, overly complicated and totally unnecessary.

windfallstar

RockMonster wrote:

I'm with you. If your roster is on the low side, your progress will ideally slow you down to the heroic token, 2* reward slot in your bracket. If you're more established you can fight your way through tougher "end boss" fights to get the 3* stuff. Whatever this scaling they implemented was meant to do, it was misguided, overly complicated and totally unnecessary.

There was one suggestion that I really liked when I read it. Enemy scaling isn't inherently a bad thing, but make the scaling static. Like have the first run of the missions be low level, then with each clear increase the level. Early missions can have a lower enemy cap and then the end missions can keep the current 230 cap for challenge. This way everyone gets to run through the events at least once. Each tier of player will hit their own appropriate wall. Everyone will be playing the same event and start off on even ground. Newer players will be able to see how far they can get and then as they level up with each event, they should be able to progress further in each subsequent event. That's actual progression and something that I think many people can agree on.

I think that the leader board prizes as are pretty good at encouraging progression. The top are 3* and then the next level is 2* and then finally a bunch of tokens. If everyone is playing the same event, then naturally higher level, or even just more dedicated, players will place higher in the leader boards under an equal system.

Unknown

windfallstar wrote:

RockMonster wrote:

I'm with you. If your roster is on the low side, your progress will ideally slow you down to the heroic token, 2* reward slot in your bracket. If you're more established you can fight your way through tougher "end boss" fights to get the 3* stuff. Whatever this scaling they implemented was meant to do, it was misguided, overly complicated and totally unnecessary.

There was one suggestion that I really liked when I read it. Enemy scaling isn't inherently a bad thing, but make the scaling static. Like have the first run of the missions be low level, then with each clear increase the level. Early missions can have a lower enemy cap and then the end missions can keep the current 230 cap for challenge. This way everyone gets to run through the events at least once. Each tier of player will hit their own appropriate wall. Everyone will be playing the same event and start off on even ground. Newer players will be able to see how far they can get and then as they level up with each event, they should be able to progress further in each subsequent event. That's actual progression and something that I think many people can agree on.

I think that the leader board prizes as are pretty good at encouraging progression. The top are 3* and then the next level is 2* and then finally a bunch of tokens. If everyone is playing the same event, then naturally higher level, or even just more dedicated, players will place higher in the leader boards under an equal system.

I think I might've found that for you.

RockMonster wrote:

I like the idea of scaling, kinda. Obviously not the way it's been implemented in these last 2 trainwreck events.

In a sub that lasts a day, if each individual mission got a little harder every time you beat, that would be a great way of soft-capping the available points from that mission, as opposed to just locking it after one go. It would also let people play their way - if I want to play for 5 hours in one sitting and beat every mission 4 times I can, instead of having to keep a log of when I beat which mission and when they'll reset.

In a main event or something like Heroic Oscorp the difficulty could scale up on an individual mission until it hits 230, and then both the enemy level and point value could scale down. I think you'd see a wider range in scores, and effort, rosters and skills would be rewarded. Positively rewarded I mean. You know, what I'm going for is if you're good and your roster is solid, you can do better. You guys...you did the opposite, and it isn't all that great.

Any scaling should be tied to an individual mission though. This stuff where if I beat mission 1, mission 2, 3 etc get harder doesn't work.

That RockMonster guy has some good ideas.

But yeah, I like the idea behind individual missions scaling up, creating a soft cap on point progression before you run in to the hard one.

That said, there was nothing inherently wrong with the way the Hunt or Hulk events worked. I wasn't grabbing top spot by a long shot in any of those, but I felt like I had a fair shot based on my roster and time invested. I don't know why they felt the need to try fixing what wasn't broken, but now that it IS broken I'd be just as happy to go back to how things were.

windfallstar

RockMonster wrote:

That RockMonster guy has some good ideas.

But yeah, I like the idea behind individual missions scaling up, creating a soft cap on point progression before you run in to the hard one.

That said, there was nothing inherently wrong with the way the Hunt or Hulk events worked. I wasn't grabbing top spot by a long shot in any of those, but I felt like I had a fair shot based on my roster and time invested. I don't know why they felt the need to try fixing what wasn't broken, but now that it IS broken I'd be just as happy to go back to how things were.

You, I like!

Totally agree about the hulk event. Especially because they ran the event twice. The second time I was able to play higher than the first which really felt like I made progress. Granted it was a bit on the long side of things, but I don't think anyone was really all that unhappy about the outcome. But yeah, just re run that event, change up the enemies a bit, swap out hulk for new characters and bam, lots of fun for everyone.

Nemek

RockMonster wrote:

That said, there was nothing inherently wrong with the way the Hunt or Hulk events worked. I wasn't grabbing top spot by a long shot in any of those, but I felt like I had a fair shot based on my roster and time invested. I don't know why they felt the need to try fixing what wasn't broken, but now that it IS broken I'd be just as happy to go back to how things were.

I guess I'll bite on this one. While I don't have all of the data that the devs have, what was likely 'wrong' with the Hunt and Hulk events was that massive amounts of players couldn't beat them. The VAST majority of players could not make it even close to the end of the PvE events. Just judging by postings on this forum, the forumites (who are the absolute hardcore players) are having tons and tons of issues beating the lvl 230 enemies right now (granted, much of that is because of roster limitations). Developing content that was actually important to the story for a very small percent of your player base is a waste of time.

The average player probably has something like two low to mid-level 2* characters, and that's it. Go find whoever is rank 250 in your PvP event, and that's probably what the average team looks like (it's technically not the average, but it's close). It's bad. They probably have 100 PvP points and are struggling to get up that high. They aren't going to make it to the end of the PvE events when they have to go up against these 230 teams or even just the 100+ teams (which make up like a quarter of the PvE event.)

It's probably something like 1% of players can beat lvl230 teams (I obviously made up this number, but I don't think it's too low...if anything, it's high). So that means that 1% of all players will be able to make it to the end of The Hulk and The Hunt. THAT is a problem...and it's what the level scaling is trying to solve. So now when the majority of players see that there is a new PvE event going on, it's no longer "Well, that event is meant for the top players, I can only beat 5 missions before needing to stop." The players who have just finished up the prologue with their 1* all-star team of IM35, Modern Storm, Black Widow and who don't want to deal with the stress of PvP can go right on along to the next PvE episode without fearing that they won't be able to get further than one mission in.

I'd go as far as to say that for the majority of the player base...the players who aren't on this forum, the ones running teams that are just barely good enough to beat the prologue, these last two events have been the best so far. They can finally know what it's like to reach the end of an event. And THAT is who the devs are catering to, and it's probably the people they should be catering to (they have the stats on which section of the playerbase is responsible for the most transactions, so they'd know much better than anybody on which players they'd rather keep around.)

Do I think that the level scaling implemented is correct for the top 10% of players? (People with mid to high-level characters) No, not really - it's been a crummy experience, but once all of the data is available for the event, things will likely change, as they always tend to do.
Do I think this particular way of level scaling is the only answer? No, other decent ideas have been tossed around about scaling levels only after the first pass of play, which would likely satisfy both low and high level players to some extent.

(And just to stay somewhat on topic of this whole thread - I highly doubt there are even close to as many cheaters as people are trying to point out. If you actually looked at the steam client hack/trainer website, there were 77 downloads for the previous patch. While it's probably higher now for this patch since the link has been passed around more, it's still such a stupidly small number of people.)

Unknown

If a very small percentage of people beating those high levels in the Hunt is seen as a problem by the designers, why did they put Invisible Woman as a requirement for some levels? And that was the 2nd go around of the event, after they had all the data from the first. Only a very few people have her at all, let alone with enough covers and levels to hold her own against 3 230 villains. After all, she's only available to the top .5% of the player base. Making her required was an artificial roadblock specifically in order to prevent most of the players in the game from seeing certain stages. On top of that, every event has at least one stage that requires the hero rewarded by the previous event, gating participation to about 1% of the game's population. So your estimate is right on, but it isn't a problem the devs are trying to overcome. It's a design feature they specifically program in.

Twysta

Well I think it goes to say we were all new to the game once and I know that at least during my first event I didn't expect to win anything or get to the end.
Most people don't expect to be able to reach the end game straight away when they start out and well... that should be okay?

Although I can absolutely understand what Nemek is trying to say it seems to be causing a lot more issues than solving them.
If they really want people to reach and play a lot of this content - as previously mentioned in a few threads - that if they want people to continue on with and reach the end and see the story arc they could put old completed event/episodes into a new permanent PvE section (which is what people want more of anyway). Maybe they are planning on doing this a few months down the line? I don't know, but it would definitely add to the longevity of the game for many.

That way people can get through the story in their own time and aren't "fighting the clock" just to go through episodes which the devs have spent their precious time on.

Nemek

RockMonster wrote:

If a very small percentage of people beating those high levels in the Hunt is seen as a problem by the designers, why did they put Invisible Woman as a requirement for some levels? And that was the 2nd go around of the event, after they had all the data from the first. Only a very few people have her at all, let alone with enough covers and levels to hold her own against 3 230 villains. After all, she's only available to the top .5% of the player base. Making her required was an artificial roadblock specifically in order to prevent most of the players in the game from seeing certain stages. On top of that, every event has at least one stage that requires the hero rewarded by the previous event, gating participation to about 1% of the game's population. So your estimate is right on, but it isn't a problem the devs are trying to overcome. It's a design feature they specifically program in.

Well, that is so they can sell those 5 and 10-packs with guaranteed whoevers. Now, everybody is faced with the decision on whether to get a pack to get daredevil, because everybody can beat that level with scaling. Before, only those who could take on lvl230 opponents would need to make that decision, so they were trying to sell IW covers to a very tiny portion of the players.

Unknown

Nemek wrote:

RockMonster wrote:

If a very small percentage of people beating those high levels in the Hunt is seen as a problem by the designers, why did they put Invisible Woman as a requirement for some levels? And that was the 2nd go around of the event, after they had all the data from the first. Only a very few people have her at all, let alone with enough covers and levels to hold her own against 3 230 villains. After all, she's only available to the top .5% of the player base. Making her required was an artificial roadblock specifically in order to prevent most of the players in the game from seeing certain stages. On top of that, every event has at least one stage that requires the hero rewarded by the previous event, gating participation to about 1% of the game's population. So your estimate is right on, but it isn't a problem the devs are trying to overcome. It's a design feature they specifically program in.

Well, that is so they can sell those 5 and 10-packs with guaranteed whoevers. Now, everybody is faced with the decision on whether to get a pack to get daredevil, because everybody can beat that level with scaling. Before, only those who could take on lvl230 opponents would need to make that decision, so they were trying to sell IW covers to a very tiny portion of the players.

I guess. That's a $40 pack though. It seems to me more people would be willing to buy the ISO to get their levels up to par, but their pricing model makes less sense to me than the event scaling right now.

Twysta

AT least the pricing is consistent though!

Unknown

Twysta wrote:

AT least the pricing is consistent though!

Ha!

Can't argue that.