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

DrStrange-616

itstime1234 wrote:

That's what my alliwance mate did. That's when they told him its a glitch and no additional rewards for you.

I would love if the move was due to sandboxing, that way we could properly identify who the cheats were. But I went from 67 to 55 which I could see 12 top people getting sandboxed. However that one person who went from 1300 to 1000 is suspect as I doubt cheats final scores would include people well outside the top 250. The consistent percentage move up seems suspect to me.

The %s are close, but not quite consistent. It could definitely be something other than sandboxing, which would be massive if that's what's occurring.

For the record, I went from 178 to 150. That crept back up to 151, now 152. I'm not sure if that lends credence to the sandboxing/unsandboxing theory or not.

Either way, the paranoia is a direct result of D3 losing our trust.

Bryan Lambert

aesthetocyst wrote:

Hayek wrote:

PvE is not a roster beauty contest. It's work.

PvP is not a roster beauty contest. It's work.

Can you teach me to play and work all hard and good like you do? Because in Earth's Mightiest, I'm facing a wall of L375 Hulkbusters with 20K HP that one-shot my boosted 3*'s with a single Repulsor Punch. Since it's not a roster beauty contest, I should be able to work my way to winning these matches, right?

Work will get you far. Work will get you farther with a better roster. To deny that rosters are part of it at all is madness. Nobody's ever claimed that a better roster was an instant win scenario, but better rosters help, and the deterrent factor of a well-covered 5*, levels or no levels, is an established thing.

itstime1234

DrStrange-616 wrote:

itstime1234 wrote:

That's what my alliwance mate did. That's when they told him its a glitch and no additional rewards for you.

I would love if the move was due to sandboxing, that way we could properly identify who the cheats were. But I went from 67 to 55 which I could see 12 top people getting sandboxed. However that one person who went from 1300 to 1000 is suspect as I doubt cheats final scores would include people well outside the top 250. The consistent percentage move up seems suspect to me.

The %s are close, but not quite consistent. It could definitely be something other than sandboxing, which would be massive if that's what's occurring.

For the record, I went from 178 to 150. That crept back up to 151, now 152. I'm not sure if that lends credence to the sandboxing/unsandboxing theory or not.

Either way, the paranoia is a direct result of D3 losing our trust.

Oh I agree. I would love to see how the placements would look if they were sandboxed. It may be the case that they are sandboxed for which I would say its pretty rampant when roughly 20% of the top guys are doing it.

_RiO_

Eddiemon wrote:

Polares wrote:

Again the best solution for these type of games is to do as many things as possible in the server, everything that is done in the sever is safe from normal player manipulations.

Well no, that's the most secure solution.

But it means when you want to look at your roster you need to connect to the server and bring it down. When you want to spend ISO or HP you need to do multiple transactions. The game gets slower and less responsive. That's the tradeoff. The odd 'waiting for server' at the end of a match is annoying, but if I were liable to get it on almost any screen I don't know if I could play the game.

Random reward drops can be deterministically pulled via a pre-seeded list of random numbers. (The nice part about RNGs is that a lot of them are predictably pseudo-random, if you know the seed.) This is not without precedent: some games, notably Nintendo's Fire Emblem series, use a long predetermined string of random numbers to influence outcome of hitrates etc. to prevent 'save-scumming'. MPQ could use a similar system to generate the same pseudo-random set of rewards on the connected client as they would on the server. This only requires two things be sent to the client: a seed number and the 'index' into the list of random numbers the seed would generate.

With deterministic outcomes established (even if they may not appear as such to the player), it becomes much easier to enforce sync between the client and server without requiring server-side intervention on each and every individual 'random' action.

The only unknowns remaining are where/when/how players spend their banked ISO and HP. However, that only requires processing a player's current roster and resource bank state against their last recorded server-side snapshot to figure out if something is up. Such a sync can easily run in the background while a player is in a match.

David [Hi-Fi] Moore

**Updated 12/15/15**

An update to the "Update" as questions are still being asked:

• We do not look the other way when it comes to exploiting & cheating. Never have, never will.
• We manually roll back exploiter's accounts - meaning they can lose months of progress, including anything they gained fairly.
• We only offer this as a one-time courtesy to players so they don't lose everything they have paid for.
• At no point is a player allowed to retain anything they have obtained through an exploit.

The integrity of the game remains intact. We've tried to make this clear and will say it again in the hopes that the reality of the situation is known. Cheaters are not allowed to keep anything gained from exploiting or cheating. Their accounts are either removed from the game completely or rolled back to a point before cheating occurred - which includes removal of any items gained by exploiting/cheating.

Ducky

"David wrote:

Moore"]**Updated 12/15/15**

An update to the "Update" as questions are still being asked:

• We do not look the other way when it comes to exploiting & cheating. Never have, never will.
• We manually roll back exploiter's accounts - meaning they can lose months of progress, including anything they gained fairly.
• We only offer this as a one-time courtesy to players so they don't lose everything they have paid for.
• At no point is a player allowed to retain anything they have obtained through an exploit.

The integrity of the game remains intact. We've tried to make this clear and will say it again in the hopes that the reality of the situation is known. Cheaters are not allowed to keep anything gained from exploiting or cheating. Their accounts are either removed from the game completely or rolled back to a point before cheating occurred - which includes removal of any items gained by exploiting/cheating.

The issue for most is that the cheaters are given another chance. They may not get to keep the things gained by exploits, but they cost players who play fair placement rewards while they were cheating. Add into that that there will be no compensation even and it makes matters worse. It's like we're being punished for playing fairly.

simonsez

"David wrote:

Moore"]Cheaters are not allowed to keep anything gained from exploiting or cheating

I think we all understand that. People are upset because:

1) They feel some people essentially bribed their way back into the game and ought to be sandboxed regardless.
2) They feel they lost out on rewards while these people were cheating their way to higher ranks.
3) They feel that cheating will continue, on a smaller, harder-to-detect scale, because you can't/won't fix this exploit.

#1 is a subjective matter of opinion, and #2 is a hazy and hard to quantify.
But #3 is the problem that's going to affect everyone going forward, and why statements such as "the integrity of this game is intact" will be met with skepticism. If you could comment on that, it may help.

Unknown

That... didn't really help, Mr. David.

Like people are worried they can get away with a LITTLE cheating (rerolling a Legendary so they get something other then a Star Lord, but only doing so once) and that does not address that.

That is what people are mostly worried about. Cheating little enough to get away with it, but not to be sandboxed. And no announcement was made about said exploit being fixed.

And, well, giving players a chance to not lose what they worked for and paid for does not help the non-playing player who does not get said chance to save their hard work.

That is what people are worried about.

tanis3303

simonsez wrote:

3) They feel that cheating will continue, on a smaller, harder-to-detect scale, because you can't/won't fix this exploit.

This is where I'm at. Everytime someone passes me on a leaderboard; everytime I take a hit in PvP; every time I see a 5* in my PvP que; everytime I see a new-ish 4* maxed out, boosted up and in my face in my PvP que, etc etc...I now have to ask "Is that legit, or did they cheat?" I don't want to have to ask that. I shouldn't have to ask that.

slidecage

How can you say this DID NOT EFFECT players my Season total WENT UP meaning i missed out on TOKEN so how is this far

1000+ now 998

XandorXerxes

simonsez wrote:

"David wrote:

Moore"] People are upset because:<br abp="783"><br abp="784">1) They feel some people essentially bribed their way back into the game and ought to be sandboxed regardless.<br abp="785">2) They feel they lost out on rewards while these people were cheating their way to higher ranks.<br abp="786">3) They feel that cheating will continue, on a smaller, harder-to-detect scale, because you can't/won't fix this exploit.<br abp="787"><br abp="788">#1 is a subjective matter of opinion, and #2 is a hazy and hard to quantify. <br abp="789">But #3 is the problem that's going to affect everyone going forward, and why statements such as "the integrity of this game is intact" will be met with skepticism. If you could comment on that, it may help.

I disagree with #1. Reinstatement of accounts, with accounts rolled back before the account cheated, is likely somewhat time-intensive. Someone has to look through the logs to find when the cheating started, etc. That costs resources. If you haven't ever dropped money and you cheated, what incentive does demiurge / d3 have to reinstate you? If you've dropped a few hundred dollars on the game before, sure - it's cost effective for them to reinstate you, because you've already spent money and will likely spend more.

Should just charge people to get their accounts back (in a rolled back state), and make the charge a bit more expensive than the cost to recover the account and give it to anyone.

As for #2, essentially no one got the rewards the cheaters originally claimed, because the accounts were rolled back, which really just creates an even more scarce resource economy. Everyone knows economy scarcity is a central theme to the developers of this game, so...

#3 was going to happen anyways. Not perhaps by these specific people, but it will always happen.

JVReal

"David wrote:

Moore"]Hello everyone,

We are aware of an increase in players using an exploit involving Legendary tokens. We're updating Marvel Puzzle Quest to address this issue as quickly as we can.

viewtopic.php?f=7&t=36524

In the announcement where they told you about the exploit the very first paragraph says they are working on the fix so people can STOP saying they have refused to fix it... my goodness people, your rage has made you blind.

Unknown

Well, David's no longer browsing the forums here.

So he's said all he's planning to say today. And since this is after a day of deliberation and reading up on the subject, that's probably all he's going to say on the matter.

Only thing left to do now is Deal With It.

So deal with it however you choose.

simonsez

XandorXerxes wrote:

#3 was going to happen anyways. Not perhaps by these specific people, but it will always happen.

Just because you live in a bad neighborhood and will probably get ripped off, doesn't mean you need to leave your door open and post a sign that says "come steal my ****"

franckynight

With people reporting big rosters like crazies, im sure every high end players have been checked manually by d3.. So either those players have been deemed legit (and i dont see why i should question that) either they have been boxed or rolled back.. As it seems to be a manual process i suppose all cheaters have not been yet detected.. It should mean we have to be a little patient to see the field cleaned up.. As for the permanent cheating everyone freaked out upon, if cheating consists only on some ppl having one more try than me to pull à 5* every 20-30 tokens, i can live with that.. (That came from someone who suffered having 5 5* on 140+ LT.. With this cheat it would have been 3-5 more tries.. 3-5 more opportunities to have a iw)..

Punisher5784

I FOUND A VIDEO ON HOW TO DO THE EXPLOIT ON YOUTUBE!

Check it out if you're curious how to do it. Don't worry this is not Rick Astley! Hurry before the Mod remove the post!!

:twisted: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MwPb7g_BlXQ

Stax the Foyer

"David wrote:

Moore"]• We manually roll back exploiter's accounts - meaning they can lose months of progress, including anything they gained fairly.

If so, this means that they were allowed to play with exploited rosters for months.

RWTDBurn

DrStrange-616 wrote:

itstime1234 wrote:

That's what my alliwance mate did. That's when they told him its a glitch and no additional rewards for you.

I would love if the move was due to sandboxing, that way we could properly identify who the cheats were. But I went from 67 to 55 which I could see 12 top people getting sandboxed. However that one person who went from 1300 to 1000 is suspect as I doubt cheats final scores would include people well outside the top 250. The consistent percentage move up seems suspect to me.

The %s are close, but not quite consistent. It could definitely be something other than sandboxing, which would be massive if that's what's occurring.

For the record, I went from 178 to 150. That crept back up to 151, now 152. I'm not sure if that lends credence to the sandboxing/unsandboxing theory or not.

Either way, the paranoia is a direct result of D3 losing our trust.

I have a habit of looking back at my ranking multiple times at the end of a season at both my final ranking and also my alliance ranking and I've never seen it change before until now. I moved from 27th to 25th for season rankings and my alliance ranking moved from 36th to 35th. I have to believe this is due to players getting Sandboxed. Now if I was one to feel that compensation was in order, I would have a fairly valid complaint considering 25th would have been worth an addition 10 pack for me but I am far more concerned with cheaters getting properly removed from the game.

"David wrote:

Moore"]**Updated 12/15/15**

An update to the "Update" as questions are still being asked:

• We do not look the other way when it comes to exploiting & cheating. Never have, never will.

Sorry, but it's hard for us to believe this when this exploit has been known about and in the wild for 2 years now and you haven't fixed it. Ignoring an exploit for 2 years is the very definition of looking the other way.

"David wrote:

Moore"]**Updated 12/15/15**

The integrity of the game remains intact. We've tried to make this clear and will say it again in the hopes that the reality of the situation is known. Cheaters are not allowed to keep anything gained from exploiting or cheating.

You've left an exploit alone for 2 years now, the integrity of the game was never intact. The reality of the situation is you still don't have it fixed and as dedicated gamers you've lost our trust even more. Even worse is you've put us in a position where we can't trust our fellow gamers. For example (and I will not include any names), there is an alliance that fell out of the top 10 for the season likely due to a member or two being sandboxed or rolled back. On their current roster there is a member that appears to have a slightly different name that has 6 fully covered 5*s (4 are fully maxed) with at least one of each of the 2 others that he/she is working on. In the past I would have thought he was just one of those ultra rare whales as most games have a few of them. Now my first instinct is that he's cheating. You have lost my trust because the integrity of the games is not intact. So this person is either cheating and still in the game or even worse, has spent ton of real world money that has helped keep this game alive and well but will likely be viewed and accused of cheating by most of the player base because of how poorly you've handled the exploit and the cheaters caught using it. That is the reality of the situation.

simonsez

Stax the Foyer wrote:

If so, this means that they were allowed to play with exploited rosters for months.

Yeah... that pretty much blows holes in the assertion, "our routine efforts to monitor and sandbox accounts was enough to deal with the few players taking advantage of this exploit before"

XandorXerxes

simonsez wrote:

XandorXerxes wrote:

#3 was going to happen anyways. Not perhaps by these specific people, but it will always happen.

Just because you live in a bad neighborhood and will probably get ripped off, doesn't mean you need to leave your door open and post a sign that says "come steal my tinykitty"

Just because someone steals your stuff doesn't mean you lock them in jail forever.