It's Me or the Exploit, D3 (A New Poll)

lukewin

Nice that the No option got added, since it seems to be the most popular. That is what I voted for. Glad I didn't buy stock in pitchforks.

puppychow

GothicKratos wrote:

I just wanna say I find it amusing there's double the amount of "no" as there is combined "bye Felicia" votes.

It's a small sample size, so take it w/ a grain of salt. Second, people may have rage quitted (forum included) already since Miles' update on D3's position re: LT exploit. If the poll was posted a day or two earlier, you may be seeing a VERY different result.

But that being said, we'll find out in a few weeks if ppl can forgive and continue playing or not.

Dauthi

GothicKratos wrote:

I just wanna say I find it amusing there's double the amount of "no" as there is combined "bye Felicia" votes.

You thought that half the forum would quit?

I think that 15 leavers, and 22 thinking about leaving is a pretty big number from this issue. Leaving is a lot harder to do even when you feel the game is tanking.

XandorXerxes wrote:

If Activision/Blizzard can't get their security and game exploitation under control (including modern games), I'm not really going to expect Demiurge to be perfect.

I don't believe this for a second. Any competitive game, lets say League of Legends or Starcraft 2 for example, would eliminate exploits that were this game changing expediently. These kind of exploits completely break any kind of competitive play, and MPQ is nearly all competitive play. You could argue they are a smaller company, and that is why they can't be on top of these things, but it has been around for 2 years, then broke the game for months when legendaries came out. They didn't even react until it was advertised all over the forums by players.

GrumpySmurf1002 wrote:

I understand the sentiment here, but I voted no.

I wrote not long ago that there is no 'winning' in this game. PvP results are a product of collaboration, PvE results are dictated as much by bracketing as they are performance. The end game here is your own progression. I don't feel like I missed out on rewards because of it. Did I get maybe a T-50 instead of a T-25 because of it in a few PvPs? Probably, but I'm not losing sleep over an extra cover worth 500iso.

I'm also coming from a perspective where I knew the exploit existed, but didn't use it. So it's not like this has changed my entire world. I'm glad they said they'll fix it, but if they didn't, it would be like current state now or two months ago, and I didn't quit then.

I'll also add that I loaded my Steam account with the intent to buy a few covers once the next sale comes around. This isn't deterring me from doing so, because again, it's not like this announcement is a new development. The development (to me) is that they're actually fixing it, which is a positive in my book.

You are coming from a non-competitive view of the game, one that can ignore something this big and just focus inward on your personal progression. I can understand how that would work, but unfortunately I see the game as a competition, and one that I apparently have been losing for a long time.

I used to think it was just luck/whales that were outpacing me even when I did every PVE, did 1K on every PVP, and got the best rewards every alliance based event. Now that work feels trivialized, and I can never honestly know if this player or that one are legitimate, and I definitely don't want to join a new meta where you have to use the exploit 30% of the time (or whatever amount it ends up at) to stay competitive. I heard rumors that it doesn't work on certain OS's too, which would mean certain players wouldn't even be able to use it? (Correct me if i'm wrong).

JVReal wrote:

Considering they said from the get-go that they were working on fixing this exploit, this poll is null and void.

"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

The problem is they haven't given a time table. How many other problems have they been "considering" forever? Here is a good example of them being ambiguous about removing the exploit.

"David wrote:

Moore"]
Demiurge are continually looking at ways to fix exploits and are actively investigating the best way to fix this particular exploit. It is an ongoing, challenging task. By its very nature (again, "online game") it's difficult to fix everything in an absolute manner. And we've always been able to catch and remove offenders. This continues - and will continue.

Think about it this way, instead of dedicating a team to fixing the problem over 2 years, they have a team for 2 years putting out band-aids (allegedly). How long will you wait for the fix? How long will it take until you forget about it?

morph3us

Dauthi, how would you propose Demi fix the problem? The issue seems to arise from the fact that they've offloaded a reasonable amount of functionality to the client side to save on bandwidth costs (for both the players and the company), as well as battery life on mobile devices. Should they lock all accounts to a single device? Or should they require you have a constant data connection to their servers (which would necessitate increased gameplay halts due to loss of connectivity, increased data usage, and worse battery life)?

It seems to me that unfortunately, given the nature of the problem, enforcement, even post-hoc, is probably only the reasonable solution, since any fix is going require significant trade-offs.

Dauthi

morph3us wrote:

Dauthi, how would you propose Demi fix the problem? The issue seems to arise from the fact that they've offloaded a reasonable amount of functionality to the client side to save on bandwidth costs (for both the players and the company), as well as battery life on mobile devices. Should they lock all accounts to a single device? Or should they require you have a constant data connection to their servers (which would necessitate increased gameplay halts due to loss of connectivity, increased data usage, and worse battery life)?

It seems to me that unfortunately, given the nature of the problem, enforcement, even post-hoc, is probably only the reasonable solution, since any fix is going require significant trade-offs.

I'm not a game developer, and more importantly we have no information regarding how their game works involving the exploit. I would say that when you click on any token, it should instantly ask for the request from the server(roll for the cover). At that point it would be saved on their servers which could verify client side tokens used.

I find it pointless to theorize all this however. I could throw out all kinds of solutions but most wouldn't matter because we don't know what D3 is working with. What I do understand though is that any exploit is fixable, and considering how huge this one is, it should be dealt with quickly before it compromises the competitiveness of the game (well... again).

I would like to throw in the whole trust thing that many other users were debating, because it is a pretty big issue. Fixing the exploit or at least giving us some kind of time-table would repair some of the trust that has been broken. I want to trust that I wont wake up 6 months or a year from now to find out that (X) players were using the current exploit in (X) way with a new feature MPQ had added.

I already feel I have wasted a lot of time competing against players who always had a huge edge over me. It's like playing Smash Bros (or whatever game) with your friend and he secretly ups your handicap. You can never figure out why you are getting destroyed, but it isn't fun, just frustrating. You then realize what he has been doing and you feel like you wasted your time since you could never really win (in MPQ winning would be equivocal to your roster progressing as fast or faster than your peers).

G25

Dauthi, In addition to you many tips on this forum (which I am grateful for), I agree with you. But sadly I think what makes this game addicting is not only the gameplay (which D3 does very well in), but it's controversies. From Ultron to Galactus (which D3 customer service still won't give my alliance a red Cyclops for), to nerfing characters people paid for, to now this. It's thriving because of controversy. It's what makes the Kardashians relevant and it's what at times gets this game going. I hope the upcoming changes overshadow this as when the introduction of command points overshadowed the Galactus controversy. Now is a good time D3 to introduce the new features to get people's minds off this topic.

Cypr3ss

morph3us wrote:

Should they lock all accounts to a single device?

That would work.

morph3us wrote:

Or should they require you have a constant data connection to their servers (which would necessitate increased gameplay halts due to loss of connectivity, increased data usage, and worse battery life)?

This would also work, and the listed items 'of bad' are only bad if you're on a mobile platform (I play via steam... but this platform isn't affected by 'the bug'). So yeah, any/all of the listed suggestions would fix the problem afaic

Course, they could also have the token result generate on the server, not the client, which would also fix the issue.

Regards,
Cypr3ss.

Eddiemon

Cypr3ss wrote:

Course, they could also have the token result generate on the server, not the client, which would also fix the issue.

This is nowhere near as simple as it sounds.

For example the server tells me I won moonstone, so use the exploit. Does the server remember it is supposed to tell me Moonstone again?

How about if I open 3 tokens in a row then use the exploit? Does the server remember my history and know which results it should pass me again? Or does it give me newly generated ones?

Is it simply remembering a list of numbers to give me in a specific order in which case using the exploit and then opening different token types would give me different results?

If the server reward list changes, eg adding more legendaries or 4 stars, or rotating characters, does it remember it gave me Star Lord or does it just remember my numbers was 76853 which now points to Superior Spiderman?

I have seen plenty of posts by people claiming D3 would have fixed it if they could or if it were easy. The truth isn't that simple, as a previous poster pointed out tradeoffs were made to make the game attractive on a mobile platform, and the exploit is a byproduct of those trade offs.

Giving a better end user experience and manual policing was deemed a better end product for all than the impact of constant connectivity. The volume of exploiting and the effect on the community seems to be altering the equation, but that doesn't mean the decisions weren't correct for 2 years.

Cypr3ss

Eddiemon wrote:

Cypr3ss wrote:

Course, they could also have the token result generate on the server, not the client, which would also fix the issue.

This is nowhere near as simple as it sounds.

For example the server tells me I won moonstone, so use the exploit. Does the server remember it is supposed to tell me Moonstone again?

It is, because once the token result is generated (the token drawn, if you will) you can't use the exploit, the token is gone from the client and the server is 'aware' of whatever cover was drawn because it is added to your roster (queue).
Edit:

Eddiemon wrote:

How about if I open 3 tokens in a row then use the exploit?

This wouldn't work now as I understand it, its a 'one at a time bug' due to how/when syncs occur and the ability to avoid this (the synch). If this is providing too much detail on the exploit, apologies in advance.

Regards,
Cypr3ss.

Eddiemon

Cypr3ss wrote:

It is, because once the token result is generated (the token drawn, if you will) you can't use the exploit, the token is gone from the client and the server is 'aware' of whatever cover was drawn because it is added to your roster (queue

Except the exploit involved restoring the token to the client. So you can't just wave your hands and say the token is gone from the client. The server generates a result and I make the token reappear. You need to actually deal with that situation.

The server tells me I got StarLord. I exploit and go again. How does the server know it's the same token and not a different one? It queued me a StarLord, the client said it got a StarLord, then the client seemingly asked for a new Legendary.

So now you need to assign a token a unique identifier or something like that. But once you go to that trouble you can just use the unique id as the seed for generating a cover from that token and it will roll the same on every client so getting the server involved is a waste.

Basically when you implement the changes required to make server generated covers work properly, you've pretty much solved the problem without actually needing the server to generate the covers.

Cypr3ss

Eddiemon wrote:

So you can't just wave your hands and say the token is gone from the client.

That was never the intent, the 'click on token' action (that sends the 'generate cover' request to the server) removes it from the client, not the "here's your cover" that results from the click. I don't know how its done currently, but that to me seems like it would work, without the need to id tokens/etc etc. Alternatively, keep it all server side (token counter) and on the 'click on token' action depreciate that counter for specific token type as/while your adding the result to the queue.

But that's enough of how i'd make a match-3 game, I'm gonna wait and see if/when we get a fix.

Regards,
Cypr3ss.

Dauthi

G25 wrote:

Dauthi, In addition to you many tips on this forum (which I am grateful for), I agree with you. But sadly I think what makes this game addicting is not only the gameplay (which D3 does very well in), but it's controversies. From Ultron to Galactus (which D3 customer service still won't give my alliance a red Cyclops for), to nerfing characters people paid for, to now this. It's thriving because of controversy. It's what makes the Kardashians relevant and it's what at times gets this game going. I hope the upcoming changes overshadow this as when the introduction of command points overshadowed the Galactus controversy. Now is a good time D3 to introduce the new features to get people's minds off this topic.

Thanks! I truly enjoyed the game and like to help others progress.

Unfortunately the exploit probably set them back a lot on whatever features they were planning to roll out. When it does come, it might be enough to snatch a few players back, who knows.