An Update On Token Exploits *Updated (12/15/15)

Eddiemon

Bowgentle wrote:

Obviously the exploit is not easy to fix, so they're not going to.
If it _were_ easy to fix, they'd have given a timeframe for it.

They said they would roll out a fix. I think the exploit is easy to fix, it will just lower the application's responsiveness some, as facebook saves will need to be executed before displaying the cover to you.

I'd guess it wasn't implemented before because annoying all the userbase for the bad actions of a few who could be policed was seen as a less optimal move. But now that it is being abused people might wear less convenience to end the cheating.

And no they wouldn't have given a timeframe. They never have given a timeframe on anything, apart from maybe when their next status update will be. I don't know why you think that behaviour would suddenly have changed.

Magic

Non fixing the exploit is tinkykitty excrement of a male grass chewing mammal.

These players were depriving the general playerbase of awards for PVP, PVE, Season, LR standings. This is a big deal. They were beating lower lever players. This is a big deal.

Reality is - a lot of the heavy exploiters have to be paying customers buying iso to level the 5* to max. So they will get another pass. Shameless approach by Demiurge.

If you want to keep them in game they should not be allowed in the season brackets with "non-cheaters".

One other thing - publish in game names of the cheaters (a long list sticked to the general discussion forum could be a good start). So when they are rolled back we can all just express our feelings by double-triple-quadruple-etc. tapping them all.

Mawtful

Bowgentle wrote:

They probably hope that we'll all leave and be replaced with new whales, who are trying to catch up to people with 5* rosters.

This too shall pass.

They don't care about restoring the confidence of the veterans.
We paid our money, no harm if we move on.

I just had this same realisation myself. Remember that the game plan for year 3 is to get rid of veterans who know better and replace them with naive noobs who can be trained to spend more frequently and in greater amounts.

The timing of this announcement is impeccable. Just long enough after anniversary & Galactus, just after bonus Command Points for big purchases & a US holiday that culminates in one of the biggest spending weekends of the year. Players have spent their money, so this was the perfect week to manufacture outrage.

A few people leave, no questions asked, that's it - game over man, game over. It's OK, they come from that "older and wiser" group that are wary of all the changes. A whole bunch of people don't care, don't even realise. It's OK, ignorance is bliss. And then there's the group that say "I'm not spending again until-", well it doesn't matter how that ultimatum ends because of that "until". That means that the player still wants to spend again. Deep down, MPQ still has its claws deep in their pocket. This to shall pass. All D3 has to do is wait it out. One week, two weeks. Ah, we finally finished that new feature, see: isn't just great? And those ultimatums get forgotten, or its suddenly less black and white. "Well, they did The Bad Thing so I stopped spending money, but this is a Good Thing and I should encourage them to do more Good Things, so it's OK to spend money even though they never fixed the last Bad Thing (or the Bad Thing before that but... who's counting)".

You're not training Demiurge to make Good Things by spending money, they're training you.

thanos8587

"second chances for players who have supported the game financially and have been caught using an exploit are possible."

its ok if you cheat as long as you give us money. hahahahahahahahahaha

Lemminkäinen

Why can't the player profile include a queue of token pulls sent from the server? That way you will always get the same pull from the same Token no matter what sort of shenanigans you try to pull. Of course since there are a lot of tokens, the queue would have to be per token type but since it would just be a number, I don't think it would be all that much extra. Or you could do this only for the Legendary Tokens.

In other words, when you login, you are supplied your queue of 10 Legendary Token pulls (and 10 Heroic Token pulls and 10 Standard Token pulls and so on if you wish to extend this to all Token types). When you make a pull, you get it from your queue and when you update to the server, then you tell how many you pulled and so on and get another set of ten pulls. Or hundred pulls or whatever.

If this was implemented only for Legendaries, that 100 pulls would be entirely possible. You could just send a number and then the client side checks the pull odds of that token and compares the number to those (so that even adding new characters to a token type wouldn't reset your queue).

simonsez

All of this is like the husband who gets caught cheating with the maid, and the wife gives him a second chance because he gave her a piece of crazy expensive jewelry. Except in our analogy, the maid hasn't gotten fired and will always be in the house. Husband figures that the only reason he got caught the first time was because he was banging her every day. Won't make that mistake again. From now on, it'll be once a week, tops.

Der_Lex

simonsez wrote:

All of this is like the husband who gets caught cheating with the maid, and the wife gives him a second chance because he gave her a piece of crazy expensive jewelry. Except in our analogy, the maid hasn't gotten fired and will always be in the house. Husband figures that the only reason he got caught the first time was because he was banging her every day. Won't make that mistake again. From now on, it'll be once a week, tops.

What does that make the rest of us players, though? Other maids who, depending on your level of cynicism, may or may not have been jealously waiting for their own turn with the husband?

puppychow

colwag wrote:

Which I guess is said transparency they were going for. admitting everything isn't always 100% peachy keen and fair.

No game is cheater free. The question is how much black to tolerate in your otherwise plain vanilla. Give the publisher credit for acknowledging this much.

The question now is how readily players will accept this response, which may be the last announcement on this matter.
We'll find out when we look at who's returning next season.

Lemminkäinen

Der_Lex wrote:

simonsez wrote:

All of this is like the husband who gets caught cheating with the maid, and the wife gives him a second chance because he gave her a piece of crazy expensive jewelry. Except in our analogy, the maid hasn't gotten fired and will always be in the house. Husband figures that the only reason he got caught the first time was because he was banging her every day. Won't make that mistake again. From now on, it'll be once a week, tops.

What does that make the rest of us players, though? Other maids who, depending on your level of cynicism, may or may not have been jealously waiting for their own turn with the husband?

No no, 99% of the forumites are husbands who would like to bang the maid but don't know how/whose maid is ugly/are afraid of getting caught. And are mostly jealous of the first guy. The 1% are people who are actually faithful.

Helen keller

I simply don't even feel like playing now, definitely don't feel like spending any $$$...

mrflopwelligan

They should just make it a feature - add a re-roll button. Problem solved! Community happy!

JamieMadrox

While I personally think that all of the cheaters should have been sandboxed regardless of how much they spent, I think it's important to note that those getting second chances are being rolled back to a point before they started cheating.

Assuming that they were legitimately buying HP, and in turn token packs, they are losing all of the money and resources that they spent in that time as well as all of their progress. D3 keeps their money and they ;ose X days of progress.

puppychow

Howzat wrote:

2) If there is an admission hidden somewhere in those posts that the exploit can't be permanently fixed in a timely manner (and your admission that it can't always be caught), then you need to pull Legendary tokens from the game. Next season return to fixed 4* covers for pvp/pve/ddq events and award 5* covers as season progression & personal/alliance placement. It's also been hinted that a pve season is on the cards, probably need to fast track that to make it fair to all at chance to obtain 5*. I know people don't like the rich getting richer aspect of 5* as high end rewards, but its a lot more tolerable than exploiters or the extremely lucky getting them.

I think it's kinda obvious that the fix for the exploit isn't going to be easy, or else they would have done it by now. Second, even if you pull LTs from the game, what about the tokens for new 4* releases? People are still going to use the exploit to reroll until they get all 3 colors for the new character. I'm sure the time exploiters spend to reroll will still be a lot less than the 3 hours per sub grind I put in to get my 3 colors (hopefully).

Magic

Jamie Madrox wrote:

While I personally think that all of the cheaters should have been sandboxed regardless of how much they spent, I think it's important to note that those getting second chances are being rolled back to a point before they started cheating.

Assuming that they were legitimately buying HP, and in turn token packs, they are losing all of the money and resources that they spent in that time as well as all of their progress. D3 keeps their money and they ;ose X days of progress.

Sorry mate - it's not enough. It can be fine as punishment if implemented with all force (when is the threshold for this? introduction of LT? introduction of 4* characters?). We don't know if all cheaters are fined and rolled to the first time they have cheated using an exploit that was open since the start of the game. If yes - roll back is fine as a punishment.

But what about the non-cheaters who were punished with lower placements due to this (including the pre LT times when they would roll heroics to have 4* better covered)? Not taking care of this aspect is a big, fat middle finger to the community.

puppychow

Mawtful wrote:

Bowgentle wrote:

They probably hope that we'll all leave and be replaced with new whales, who are trying to catch up to people with 5* rosters.

This too shall pass.

They don't care about restoring the confidence of the veterans.
We paid our money, no harm if we move on.

I just had this same realisation myself. Remember that the game plan for year 3 is to get rid of veterans who know better and replace them with naive noobs who can be trained to spend more frequently and in greater amounts.

The timing of this announcement is impeccable. Just long enough after anniversary & Galactus, just after bonus Command Points for big purchases & a US holiday that culminates in one of the biggest spending weekends of the year. Players have spent their money, so this was the perfect week to manufacture outrage.

Agreed. Why do you think the publisher spent so much time & resources to attend conventions this year? They know it's the newbies looking to play catch up who will spend the most money going forward, not veteran players with mature rosters. This is just following the script, as I see it.

THE PLAN IS WORKING. If you're getting guys like Malcrof (come on in and color me yellow! ) who is a relative newcomer to the game (joining this year I believe) and then spend his way (buying 40 packs as he admitted himself) to max covering his roster, then everything is going according to THE PLAN.

JamieMadrox

puppychow wrote:

People are still going to use the exploit to reroll until they get all 3 colors for the new character. I'm sure the time exploiters spend to reroll will still be a lot less than the 3 hours per sub grind I put in to get my 3 colors (hopefully).

And those people using the exploit will be sandboxed. I imagine that the detection for this has been tweaked to make it a quicker process until such time as they can get the patch/fix in game.

Magic wrote:

Jamie Madrox wrote:

While I personally think that all of the cheaters should have been sandboxed regardless of how much they spent, I think it's important to note that those getting second chances are being rolled back to a point before they started cheating.

Assuming that they were legitimately buying HP, and in turn token packs, they are losing all of the money and resources that they spent in that time as well as all of their progress. D3 keeps their money and they ;ose X days of progress.

Sorry mate - it's not enough. It can be fine as punishment if implemented with all force (when is the threshold for this? introduction of LT? introduction of 4* characters?). We don't know if all cheaters are fined and rolled to the first time they have cheated using an exploit that was open since the start of the game. If yes - roll back is fine as a punishment.

But what about the non-cheaters who were punished with lower placements due to this (including the pre LT times when they would roll heroics to have 4* better covered)? Not taking care of this aspect is a big, fat middle finger to the community.

I didn't say it was enough. I'm all for sandboxing the lot of them, paying customers or not, but it's good to know that there will be fairly significant consequences for this. I read it as they will be rolled back to the point where they started cheating which for that punishment seems fair. Rolling them back to before they started cheating would seem excessive.

That said I don't think there should bea roll back; they should all just be boxed.

orionpeace

I'm still stuck on this quote:

second chances for players who have supported the game financially and have been caught using an exploit are possible

It tells me a lot about this company and how it feels about its players.

We're just a bunch of hotdog stands to them.

carlito666

thanos8587 wrote:

"second chances for players who have supported the game financially and have been caught using an exploit are possible."

its ok if you cheat as long as you give us money. hahahahahahahahahaha

I would like to sent Hulk to their studios right now

orionpeace

I am posting this here, as Jamie Madrox, locked the other thread.

It is not cool to say your piece regarding a topic and then lock it so no one gets to respond to you and you get the last word. Mod or post. Don't co-mingle.

Your example analogy of stealing a car is not even comparable to this situation. I'm not saying we should get compensation, but that is just a very bad analogy.

Players that didn't cheat were effected by cheaters. Have you ever placed 11th, 21st, 101st in an event, just outside the rewards you wanted? I'm not saying all instances of missing out can be laid at the feet of a cheater. But it has happened. More than once to players in this game.

There is an exploit that has be in live for 2 years. No doubt they have sandboxed people for it. Their game allows constant cheating. Obviously, the recent announcement is an indication that the cheating has gotten so bad they had no choice but to acknowledge it.

Then, of course, they follow that up with a clear indication that they care more about making more money than they do the integrity of the game or their company.

So, outrage is to be expected.

simonsez