Important Announcement: Legendary Tokens Exploit

Linkster79

Arctic_One wrote:

This MUST be a ban of 100% of the accounts who have used the exploit even once. Anything less is an admission by the devs to their paying customers that cheating is tolerated.

Refusing to fix an exploit that has been known to them for this long isn't that an admission that using said exploit will be tolerated as long as it isn't used too much and if you do try and keep it to yourself?

Like Stax said this is about damage control, either profits have been affected or will be potentially affected in the future. This is not about being pro active and fixing a known issue before it gets abused.

Dayv

puppychow wrote:

Arctic_One wrote:

This MUST be a ban of 100% of the accounts who have used the exploit even once. Anything less is an admission by the devs to their paying customers that cheating is tolerated.

To use my experience from Archeage w/ Trion. .. when players were found to exploit the duplication cheat, their accounts were merely suspended temporarily. Afterwards, the players were allowed to return to the game. It's not unusual for game developers to look the other way, because otherwise the paying customers will take their $$$ to another game.

I've never heard of anyone who's been sandboxed for legitimate causes getting reinstated. Of course, there have been cases of people appealing the decision because they were mistakenly believed to be cheating (in fact, this happened to me once).

DrStrange-616

D3 is complicit in all of this. They knew people were cheating to get an unfair advantage - for 2 years! - and did nothing. They let people acquire things through the exploit that the non-cheaters had to work for, even pay for. They knew a segment of the population had an unfair advantage and let it happen. They need to be sandboxed, too. And will be by me.

I don't like to be cheated, and that's what D3 did to every playing/paying customer for 2 years.

_Vitto

DrStrange-616 wrote:

D3 is complicit in all of this. They knew people were cheating to get an unfair advantage - for 2 years! - and did nothing. They let people acquire things through the exploit that the non-cheaters had to work for, even pay for. They knew a segment of the population had an unfair advantage and let it happen. They need to be sandboxed, too. And will be by me.

I don't like to be cheated, and that's what D3 did to every playing/paying customer for 2 years.

I know we should be mad at D3, but I feel like we know pretty much nothing about this whole exploit, included the precise time it has started and the amount of people who abused it.
I wish they could give us more information and they would be more fair in saying "we messed up", with some numbers down.

DrStrange-616

_Vitto wrote:

DrStrange-616 wrote:

D3 is complicit in all of this. They knew people were cheating to get an unfair advantage - for 2 years! - and did nothing. They let people acquire things through the exploit that the non-cheaters had to work for, even pay for. They knew a segment of the population had an unfair advantage and let it happen. They need to be sandboxed, too. And will be by me.

I don't like to be cheated, and that's what D3 did to every playing/paying customer for 2 years.

I know we should be mad at D3, but I feel like we know pretty much nothing about this whole exploit, included the precise time it has started and the amount of people who abused it.
I wish they could give us more information and they would be more fair in saying "we messed up", with some numbers down.

We know they were told about it in February of 2014. So, we know it started before that and they had knowledge of it at least by that date. No, we don't know the number of people who abused it and we likely never will. The numbers, while interesting, aren't the important part. It's the knowledge and lack of action by D3 that matters. In addition, of course, to the players who used it repeatedly.

scottee

Just because it hasn't been fixed for two years, doesn't mean they haven't been sandboxing people for it for two years.

DrStrange-616

scottee wrote:

Just because it hasn't been fixed for two years, doesn't mean they haven't been sandboxing people for it for two years.

That is possible, although it would require them to be proactive and show an attention to detail that I've not seen evidence of before. If they can close it now, they could have closed it then.

_Vitto

DrStrange-616 wrote:

_Vitto wrote:

DrStrange-616 wrote:

D3 is complicit in all of this. They knew people were cheating to get an unfair advantage - for 2 years! - and did nothing. They let people acquire things through the exploit that the non-cheaters had to work for, even pay for. They knew a segment of the population had an unfair advantage and let it happen. They need to be sandboxed, too. And will be by me.

I don't like to be cheated, and that's what D3 did to every playing/paying customer for 2 years.

I know we should be mad at D3, but I feel like we know pretty much nothing about this whole exploit, included the precise time it has started and the amount of people who abused it.
I wish they could give us more information and they would be more fair in saying "we messed up", with some numbers down.

We know they were told about it in February of 2014. So, we know it started before that and they had knowledge of it at least by that date. No, we don't know the number of people who abused it and we likely never will. The numbers, while interesting, aren't the important part. It's the knowledge and lack of action by D3 that matters. In addition, of course, to the players who used it repeatedly.

I like to think they had some interest in not taking action (or little action).
If it's for the health of the game or for their health (read $$$), this is something only numbers can tell.

Konman

There is a huge credibility problem for MPQ right now, and I am not sure they can overcome it. They've known about the exploit, and claim it was easy to detect the accounts that were doing the exploiting. And yet, only now, when there have been public remarks and call outs, do we see any action, part of that action was to delete the associated threads and admonish some of the posters who were shining light on the situation.

And the problem is for both the players and the devs. Right now, any time I see a massive roster, I'll be a little bit suspicious. Won't be able to help myself, because this has been an ongoing problem, that was allowed to exist, because....who knows? Greed? Apathy? Malice? Incompetence? Whatever. At this point the damage is done, and everything from here on out will be filtered through this incident, tainted by doubt. Don't know how we solve that.

GothicKratos

I think some people are being a little superfluous.

The initial premise is that the developers knew about an exploit because there was a singular post about it two years ago. Come on, let's be reasonable folks.

But presuming they did know that this was possible, it's very likely it wasn't be used often prior to LTokens coming out, because who the Hell is going to go this to reroll for a small chance of forty different 3*s? It's "reasonable", from the exploiter's eyes, now because LTokens are only 4*s and 5*s.

Previously, it probably wasn't considered worth investing time into because it wasn't impactful to the game's economy and/or not widespread enough that they felt the need to address it - this is of course presuming, again, they read that single post two years ago - and that's not uncommon in the business world (if it's not breaking anything, is it really worth investing into fixing it?).

tl;dr it's been brought to their attention now that people are using this exploit now to great affect and they're taking action.

DrStrange-616

GothicKratos wrote:

I think some people are being a little superfluous.

The initial premise is that the developers knew about an exploit because there was a singular post about it two years ago. Come on, let's be reasonable folks.

But presuming they did know that this was possible, it's very likely it wasn't be used often prior to LTokens coming out, because who the Hell is going to go this to reroll for a small chance of forty different 3*s? It's "reasonable", from the exploiter's eyes, now because LTokens are only 4*s and 5*s.

Previously, it probably wasn't considered worth investing time into because it wasn't impactful to the game's economy and/or not widespread enough that they felt the need to address it - this is of course presuming, again, they read that single post two years ago - and that's not uncommon in the business world (if it's not breaking anything, is it really worth investing into fixing it?).

tl;dr it's been brought to their attention now that people are using this exploit now to great affect and they're taking action.

No.

scottee

DrStrange-616 wrote:

scottee wrote:

Just because it hasn't been fixed for two years, doesn't mean they haven't been sandboxing people for it for two years.

That is possible, although it would require them to be proactive and show an attention to detail that I've not seen evidence of before. If they can close it now, they could have closed it then.

I don't think they plan to close it. It would require completely redoing the system of how token pulls are reported and add a significant amount of web traffic to their servers and to people's data plans.

I think they're plan is to keep banning people (sandboxing) and telling everyone not to use it.

fmftint

GothicKratos wrote:

I think some people are being a little superfluous.

The initial premise is that the developers knew about an exploit because there was a singular post about it two years ago. Come on, let's be reasonable folks.

But presuming they did know that this was possible, it's very likely it wasn't be used often prior to LTokens coming out, because who the Hell is going to go this to reroll for a small chance of forty different 3*s? It's "reasonable", from the exploiter's eyes, now because LTokens are only 4*s and 5*s.

Previously, it probably wasn't considered worth investing time into because it wasn't impactful to the game's economy and/or not widespread enough that they felt the need to address it - this is of course presuming, again, they read that single post two years ago - and that's not uncommon in the business world (if it's not breaking anything, is it really worth investing into fixing it?).

tl;dr it's been brought to their attention now that people are using this exploit now to great affect and they're taking action.

The fact that Dave said, they've noticed an INCREASE of this exploit, suggests they've known about it for some time. Please stop making apologies on their behalf

GothicKratos

fmftint wrote:

GothicKratos wrote:

I think some people are being a little superfluous.

The initial premise is that the developers knew about an exploit because there was a singular post about it two years ago. Come on, let's be reasonable folks.

But presuming they did know that this was possible, it's very likely it wasn't be used often prior to LTokens coming out, because who the Hell is going to go this to reroll for a small chance of forty different 3*s? It's "reasonable", from the exploiter's eyes, now because LTokens are only 4*s and 5*s.

Previously, it probably wasn't considered worth investing time into because it wasn't impactful to the game's economy and/or not widespread enough that they felt the need to address it - this is of course presuming, again, they read that single post two years ago - and that's not uncommon in the business world (if it's not breaking anything, is it really worth investing into fixing it?).

tl;dr it's been brought to their attention now that people are using this exploit now to great affect and they're taking action.

The fact that Dave said, they've noticed an INCREASE of this exploit, suggests they've known about it for some time. Please stop making apologies on their behalf

Here, let me remove the one sentence that may discredit and requote myself;

GothicKratos wrote:

I think some people are being a little superfluous.

But presuming they did know that this was possible, it's very likely it wasn't be used often prior to LTokens coming out, because who the Hell is going to go this to reroll for a small chance of forty different 3*s? It's "reasonable", from the exploiter's eyes, now because LTokens are only 4*s and 5*s.

Previously, it probably wasn't considered worth investing time into because it wasn't impactful to the game's economy and/or not widespread enough that they felt the need to address it - this is of course presuming, again, they read that single post two years ago - and that's not uncommon in the business world (if it's not breaking anything, is it really worth investing into fixing it?).

tl;dr it's been brought to their attention now that people are using this exploit now to great affect and they're taking action.

The point is, previously, I feel like, it was a complete non-issue. We people seriously re-roll Heroic Tokens? Event Tokens? Give me a break. If it were me in their position, I wouldn't have drew attention to the issue by making a public statement on it then and I certainly wouldn't have spent money on fixing it.

DrStrange-616

Why do you assume people weren't using it to game the system before legendaries? If I understand it correctly, it wasn't hard to do and you could easily just fish for 3s or 4s you needed, again and again.

GothicKratos

DrStrange-616 wrote:

Why do you assume people weren't using it to game the system before legendaries? If I understand it correctly, it wasn't hard to do and you could easily just fish for 3s or 4s you needed, again and again.

It is really easy, but getting a desirable pull is umpteenth times harder because the pull pool is much larger. People use exploits because they are lazy; they want a quick fix. They don't want to spend seven hours rerolling Torchs, Yelenas, IMs, and Things to try and pull something useful. This is exponentially so since cheating otherwise is insanely easy.

The only upside is it "wasn't detectable", and if you're lucky, twelve hours later, you'll have a few good 3*s partially covered.

DrStrange-616

GothicKratos wrote:

DrStrange-616 wrote:

Why do you assume people weren't using it to game the system before legendaries? If I understand it correctly, it wasn't hard to do and you could easily just fish for 3s or 4s you needed, again and again.

It is really easy, but getting a desirable pull is umpteenth times harder because the pull pool is much larger. People use exploits because they are lazy; they want a quick fix. They don't want to spend seven hours rerolling Torchs, Yelenas, IMs, and Things to try and pull something useful. This is exponentially so since cheating otherwise is insanely easy.

The only upside is it "wasn't detectable", and if you're lucky, twelve hours later, you'll have a few good 3*s partially covered.

Think of how many times people will do a node for one lousy command point. I think you are vastly underestimating the lure of the "possibility" of getting what you want need. It was easy enough to do, so people did it. They could watch tv and do it. It's time consuming, but people sink oodles of time into this game for less.

My tinfoil-hatted head says this was used moderately and gave some an unfair advantage. D3 knew but these shills/rabbits didn't hurt their bottom line because players had to try to keep up with them, but spending actual ducats. Once the cheaters started exploiting the expensive 5*s, they cared and it became obvious to casual observers because it's so hard to get them legitimately.

Mod Edit: Apparently i have a reputation to uphold!

Phaserhawk

Wow, is all I can say. You know I had wondered the other day how so many top alliance members had multiple OML's, SS' maxed. It blew my mind. If if one opened 100 LT's that would only amount to 10 5* covers. I knew something was a miss, I had reported a few players to D3 cheating because I couldn't figure out how I was possible. My final straw was when I saw a player with a maxed Ghost Rider on day 2. Day 2!!! Slice one wasn't done, there was no possible way to do this unless one won the luck lottery or dropped about $10,000. Since neither of those seemed possible I knew there was something else I just didn't know what until now.

So what now?

Is this cheating? Do people deserved sandboxing? Is D3 going to assure us of game integrity?

As for cheating or theft, as much as people want to deny it, yes it is. This is like when you feed birds in your backyard. You decide you want to leave seed out to attract cardinals, but a few of the cardinals come and starting taking the better seed from the others, but you don't care because it's not worth your time. Then some of the cardinals friends, like the bluejays, orioles start to show up and take all the good seeds to, leaving just the rest for everyone else, you only have 2 choices at that point. Get rid of the birdfood, or start shooting the problem birds. Since too many birds game to feed, D3 only has one option, and that's to shoot the birds causing the problems.

The biggest problem with all of this was the snowball effect it was causing. You have top alliances with top scores getting top rewards, but instead of random were picking, which further gave them the advantage to where they would completely warp the game. Not to mention one could start to create multiple accounts and sell those accounts to people. Yes this was long overdue, but there is much blame to go around, from the abusers to the enablers.

I hope something good comes out of this, because I'm really disappointed in this game right now.

Stax the Foyer

GothicKratos wrote:

The point is, previously, I feel like, it was a complete non-issue. We people seriously re-roll Heroic Tokens? Event Tokens? Give me a break. If it were me in their position, I wouldn't have drew attention to the issue by making a public statement on it then and I certainly wouldn't have spent money on fixing it.

Well, new release PvP tokens, especially for 4*s, would be a compelling target due to the fairly high pull rates and the fact that all colors would be usable at that stage. Especially with the new character buffs.

You're absolutely right though that the problem is possibly being overblown, and we don't have the data on our end to prove it. The developers do. If thats the case, it makes sense that we'll get an explanation to that effect when things settle down. If we don't get such an explanation, we're free to draw whatever inference we'd like from the silence.

The thing is, it doesn't take too many exploiters for this to have had a significant impact on the game. Due to the massive power disparity, having a maxed roster allows someone to play in a very disruptive manner, if they choose to do so. If there have even been a handful of people doing that for the better part of the three months since 5* release, that's a big quality of life issue for a lot of people putting time and money into the game.

lukewin

Not sure why Salgy's link won't direct you to it, but here's the info. Searching thru the user Microtom's posts, you find some interesting foreshadowing. Screenshot this post for posterity folks, because it might get sandboxed soon. The fact that some people are referencing the exploit as rerolling, means people have known about it. I for one, did not, since this info was before I came to the forums, and I was still playing like a noob.

link to post dated Thu Jul 10, 2014 8:47 pm EST

Microtom wrote:

gobstopper wrote:

Microtom wrote:

If anyone want it, I have a bot that earns about 7000 iso per hour and is undetectable. I stopped playing a while ago and don't use it anymore.

It's amazing that you've admitted to botting several times and still you were never sandboxed. Demiurge Anti-Cheat #1

You think that's what's amazing? I told them several times there was an easy way to reset tokens and get any heroes. Tracking botters is an impossible task, it's understandable that they can't do anything about it. However, a bug this big should have been fixed as a priority. It's still not fixed.

When a new hero was released, the event tokens used to give a 15% chance to get the featured hero. So, you'd reset your token about 10 times and get one. If you didn't have a token, you could spend 200 hp and it was a great price for a featured hero. It took 5 minutes and you had it.

Now, when a new hero is released, the chances to get the featured hero is 2.4 percent. So you could spend an hour resetting your tokens and not get one. I believe they made this change to discourage people from resetting their tokens and get the latest hero quickly. So, instead of fixing their game, they punished everyone.

link to post dated Fri Jun 20, 2014 1:31 pm EST

Microtom wrote:

Those cheats need to be made public. If they're not, then they won't be a "big enough problems" for d3 and demiurge to solve. They make their money on casual, non-cheaters mobile players and could care less about the more frequent players who come here and play by the rules.

Making the cheats public puts pressure on them. They either fix the bugs and create better tools to ban the cheaters, or see the game become unplayable and unenjoyable.