'Grandfathered' Iso Exploit *Updated (08/31/16)

Warbringa

Extremely disappointed in the decision as it was a lazy and telling choice as you would rather have this impact 96% + of your user population vs. the small number it would have impacted if you had decided to fix it. It has also ruined my view of the new feature of xp and where I was once excited about the direction of the game, this mess and your decisions killed that pretty darn quickly. I was almost actually going to lay down some money on buying big bunch of hero points for the first time since Xmas with the new features but now I am not going to do so. I will also no longer be renewing VIP going forward. The idea that some players get several months of iso advantage is insulting.

dsds

Warbringa wrote:

Extremely disappointed in the decision as it was a lazy and telling choice as you would rather have this impact 96% + of your user population vs. the small number it would have impacted if you had decided to fix it. It has also ruined my view of the new feature of xp and where I was once excited about the direction of the game, this mess and your decisions killed that pretty darn quickly. I was almost actually going to lay down some money on buying big bunch of hero points for the first time since Xmas with the new features but now I am not going to do so. I will also no longer be renewing VIP going forward. The idea that some players get several months of iso advantage is insulting.

It's actually 99.6% of the population being affect compared with the measly 0.4% according to their announcement.

Warbringa

dsds wrote:

Warbringa wrote:

Extremely disappointed in the decision as it was a lazy and telling choice as you would rather have this impact 96% + of your user population vs. the small number it would have impacted if you had decided to fix it. It has also ruined my view of the new feature of xp and where I was once excited about the direction of the game, this mess and your decisions killed that pretty darn quickly. I was almost actually going to lay down some money on buying big bunch of hero points for the first time since Xmas with the new features but now I am not going to do so. I will also no longer be renewing VIP going forward. The idea that some players get several months of iso advantage is insulting.

It's actually 99.6% of the population being affect compared with the measly 0.4% according to their announcement.

As mentioned earlier, I am assuming the real amount who received an advantage of this is actually much higher since they were going off of total user base, not active user base, hence I arbitrarily multiplied by 10 to come up with probably closer to 4% of the active user base received it. My calculation method is at least as valid as the MPQ decision makers math.

I encourage everyone in an alliance to let everyone else in their alliance know what just happened as well since most probably don't come to the forums.

udonomefoo

Not going to lie, I logged into my ipad after seeing that there would be no punishment. It didn't give me the reward again.

JVReal

dsds wrote:

JVReal wrote:

dsds wrote:

4.) The people who didn't get the extra iso. We are all being punished for what happened. First we don't get the ISO. Secondly we are fighting group number 3 with their boosted characters for placement. Even if group 3 is rolled back to before the update, we may end up losing the reward that we should have deserved on a certain rank because group 3 used ISO they didn't deserve to do better. Whether it was by accident or on purpose, we are punished for it. Even if the developed do nothing and just leave it as it is. Group 4 will be at the most disadvantage.

I don't blame groups 2,3, and 4 for what happened, the blame lays clearly on the game/update itself. But this is the reality of the situation. By doing nothing group 4 will be harmed a lot and that is where the majority of the player base is.

*Perceived* harm. Nobody is getting harmed. You are gauging harm based on what you theoretically may have achieved if you too had taken advantage of the bug or based on that person's theoretical performance (since you cannot confirm that they were in your bracket, slice or within your MMR realm, or that they even participated in the same events you did, to the extent that you did).

On a different note... If they can track that you've claimed it multiple times, how are they not able to restrict the popup based on already having claimed it? If it keeps the iso, but not the claimed indicator... how is that a good idea? Why is it keeping iso, but not progress? Why are they tracked or synced separately?

Syncing needs to be overhauled. Facebook syncing doesn't work too well, especially when the patches shut if off. iOS logs you out of Facebook syncing every time you shut off the app. You need a D3 login that registers the device, then can see if you are trying to contact the server from a different device than was last logged in, then throw up a message "This account is already logged in on device ... please close the app on the other device and reopen this one." The game should have a "logout" or "close app" option that syncs, then closes the app.

It is indirect harm. It is harm that you cannot see. In PVP and in the shield pvp, I am going to have fight a lot harder since I didn't have the extra iso to level my characters up. To be honest, I don't think that much iso would have helped to level up the characters. I still have a big chunk of the iso from the grandfathered shield rank even though I claimed it only once. However if one was smart about it, they could use a big chunk of the iso on standard tokens and take their chances of getting up to a 4* or many many 3* that eventually champing would lead to 4*.

Yes I cannot see them and confirm that one of them is in my bracket. However 0.4% of total player base is a lot. Let me do the calculations for you so you can see how likely they are to be in my bracket.

On the google play store alone, it says that this game has been downloaded 5-10 million times. This is only on android. I am not sure what the iphones download is. But I think it's safe to assume that it is either very close or more than for androids.So let's take the middle number 7.5million and x that by 2 (android and iphone right). That is 15million users. Let's say that 20% use multiple devices so they must have downloaded it twice (the 0.4% of player base would mean not that many people use 2 devices frequently). So 15million - 20% = 12 million users. This is the playerbase they are likely talking about. Let's face it announcement always paint a positive note.

So 0.4% of those would be 12 million x 0.004 = 48000 people who played recently and are active. Let's look at the active player base. Let's derive that from a post about an earlier civil war or the rocket and groot test event (sorry I can't remember that far back only the number sort of). They said about a total 500,000 players participated in the event. So what is 48000 divided by 500,000? That is 9.6% of the active player base. I will admit the active playerbase may be bigger since some people purely just to ddq. But those people also wouldn't be in pvp and pve brackets, so you really can just ignore the people who only play ddq as they would'n't affect the odds of the 0.4% that would be in my pvp/pve bracket.

Even if you sort the 48000 player into brackets. They take up a total of 48 brackets. So please tell me the chances of a few of these players being in my bracket is going to be very slim.

Edit: I don't have the numbers and if the developers don't want to release them, that is fine. This is my guess and my opinion only. And I welcome anyone to correct me on the numbers. I edit them to reflect the new numbers if I also agree with them. Again this is my opinion, I don't want to get in trouble with the moderators.

Downloaded and actually playing NOT the same thing.

Let's give you an extra 0.4% of your score and iso, since it is a significant number to you.

simonsez

JVReal wrote:

Downloaded and actually playing NOT the same thing.

You're right, but Dave said ".4% of the total game population". No mention at all about actually playing. If my goal were to avoid torches and pitchforks, I'd want to make that number look as small as possible, so it wouldn't shock me at all if their definition of "total game population" isn't anywhere close to what we would consider to be a legit depiction of how many people are actually playing.

Just based on this thread, I can't believe that the ratio of people who got double iso was only 1 in 250.

dsds

JVReal wrote:

dsds wrote:

JVReal wrote:

dsds wrote:

4.) The people who didn't get the extra iso. We are all being punished for what happened. First we don't get the ISO. Secondly we are fighting group number 3 with their boosted characters for placement. Even if group 3 is rolled back to before the update, we may end up losing the reward that we should have deserved on a certain rank because group 3 used ISO they didn't deserve to do better. Whether it was by accident or on purpose, we are punished for it. Even if the developed do nothing and just leave it as it is. Group 4 will be at the most disadvantage.

I don't blame groups 2,3, and 4 for what happened, the blame lays clearly on the game/update itself. But this is the reality of the situation. By doing nothing group 4 will be harmed a lot and that is where the majority of the player base is.

*Perceived* harm. Nobody is getting harmed. You are gauging harm based on what you theoretically may have achieved if you too had taken advantage of the bug or based on that person's theoretical performance (since you cannot confirm that they were in your bracket, slice or within your MMR realm, or that they even participated in the same events you did, to the extent that you did).

On a different note... If they can track that you've claimed it multiple times, how are they not able to restrict the popup based on already having claimed it? If it keeps the iso, but not the claimed indicator... how is that a good idea? Why is it keeping iso, but not progress? Why are they tracked or synced separately?

Syncing needs to be overhauled. Facebook syncing doesn't work too well, especially when the patches shut if off. iOS logs you out of Facebook syncing every time you shut off the app. You need a D3 login that registers the device, then can see if you are trying to contact the server from a different device than was last logged in, then throw up a message "This account is already logged in on device ... please close the app on the other device and reopen this one." The game should have a "logout" or "close app" option that syncs, then closes the app.

It is indirect harm. It is harm that you cannot see. In PVP and in the shield pvp, I am going to have fight a lot harder since I didn't have the extra iso to level my characters up. To be honest, I don't think that much iso would have helped to level up the characters. I still have a big chunk of the iso from the grandfathered shield rank even though I claimed it only once. However if one was smart about it, they could use a big chunk of the iso on standard tokens and take their chances of getting up to a 4* or many many 3* that eventually champing would lead to 4*.

Yes I cannot see them and confirm that one of them is in my bracket. However 0.4% of total player base is a lot. Let me do the calculations for you so you can see how likely they are to be in my bracket.

On the google play store alone, it says that this game has been downloaded 5-10 million times. This is only on android. I am not sure what the iphones download is. But I think it's safe to assume that it is either very close or more than for androids.So let's take the middle number 7.5million and x that by 2 (android and iphone right). That is 15million users. Let's say that 20% use multiple devices so they must have downloaded it twice (the 0.4% of player base would mean not that many people use 2 devices frequently). So 15million - 20% = 12 million users. This is the playerbase they are likely talking about. Let's face it announcement always paint a positive note.

So 0.4% of those would be 12 million x 0.004 = 48000 people who played recently and are active. Let's look at the active player base. Let's derive that from a post about an earlier civil war or the rocket and groot test event (sorry I can't remember that far back only the number sort of). They said about a total 500,000 players participated in the event. So what is 48000 divided by 500,000? That is 9.6% of the active player base. I will admit the active playerbase may be bigger since some people purely just to ddq. But those people also wouldn't be in pvp and pve brackets, so you really can just ignore the people who only play ddq as they would'n't affect the odds of the 0.4% that would be in my pvp/pve bracket.

Even if you sort the 48000 player into brackets. They take up a total of 48 brackets. So please tell me the chances of a few of these players being in my bracket is going to be very slim.

Edit: I don't have the numbers and if the developers don't want to release them, that is fine. This is my guess and my opinion only. And I welcome anyone to correct me on the numbers. I edit them to reflect the new numbers if I also agree with them. Again this is my opinion, I don't want to get in trouble with the moderators.

Downloaded and actually playing NOT the same thing.

Let's give you an extra 0.4% of your score and iso, since it is a significant number to you.

I know the difference, you don't have to state the obvious, just read my post and you can see that I differentiate between downloaded and playing.

Just give up already, I thoroughly thought the numbers through before posting it. Since you have trouble reading the whole post, I will summarize my prediction that there's about 10% out of the active player base that got the double iso.

The game has a history of leaving out bad information such as increase in progression points to get the 25 cp rewards, Champion update leaving out the 3* nerf. It's happened before, why wouldn't it happen again?

scottee

The advantage is not what posters think it is. If you read the thread on how people spent their bonus, 90% of the players spent it on useless characters to fill out their roster that will give a very minimal advantage in PVE and PVP performance.

Really, that other thread showed me there's really not an iso deficit. People were doing stuff like champing Squirrel Girl and Invisible Woman. Oh no, I'm so scared.

Vhailorx

scottee wrote:

The advantage is not what posters think it is. If you read the thread on how people spent their bonus, 90% of the players spent it on useless characters to fill out their roster that will give a very minimal advantage in PVE and PVP performance.

Really, that other thread showed me there's really not an iso deficit. People were doing stuff like champing Squirrel Girl and Invisible Woman. Oh no, I'm so scared.

It's not that people will directly become more powerful because they got extra iso. Everyone with a brain has already used their existing iso stores to level up their best characters. It's that some people got a massive (by demi's standards) amount of extra disposable iso. If I had more disposable iso, I would gladly champ some third tier characters. that gets me on the champ reward band wagon. And even 3* champ rewards eventually get very good.

I don't care if some people get 50,000 iso by mistake. But it's a little irksome when some people get extra 800,000+ iso for no reason and demi's solution is to shrug and say it's not a big deal.

fmftint

I said it before and I'll say it again now, an extra 860k iso does very little against a 6-7 MILLION iso debt.
"This too shall pass"

Crowl

Vhailorx wrote:

I don't care if some people get 50,000 iso by mistake. But it's a little irksome when some people get extra 800,000+ iso for no reason and demi's solution is to shrug and say it's not a big deal.

It is that seeming indifference that is most irksome each time these bugs that can be exploited show up, also if they don't think it is a big deal for some people to get double rewards then give them out to everyone and restore the positive feelings about this new feature that have been diminished by the bug.

Vhailorx

fmftint wrote:

I said it before and I'll say it again now, an extra 860k iso does very little against a 6-7 MILLION iso debt.
"This too shall pass"

I agree that even 800k is fairly small relative to the total iso needs in the game. But that is several months worth of iso for most players. Unless they have some more normal iso events (instead of all this half-iso **** we have been getting lately ), I won't gather 800k iso until sometime in november or december. but if I happened to have a second android device and a facebook account, I could have gotten that extra iso on monday. I think that's a significant enough variance that just shrugging and saying "it'll come out in the wash" is not sufficient.

If, as fmftint says, 800k is trivial, then demi should just give everyone double iso and keep the players the happy.

Crowl

fmftint wrote:

I said it before and I'll say it again now, an extra 860k iso does very little against a 6-7 MILLION iso debt.
"This too shall pass"

Putting it up against massive iso debts might make it seem like nothing much, but other contexts show it in a more relevant light, as it is $1000 worth of iso and enough for 2-3 more 4* champions, assuming you keep yours at a comfortable level to get past their DDQ, so a clear and real benefit to your roster.

DeNappa

Wow, the negativity .

While there were a few that profited from the mistake, and yes that is unfair to other players.. what were they to do otherwise? This was a bug in the wild on production/live servers. It's not like they could just have thrown a switch that would magically reset all mistakenly claimed ISO for everyone it affected.

If anything, maybe you should be glad it was not so widespread or severely abused that they'd have to resort to restoring some 2 day old database backup for the whole game.

Vhailorx

DeNappa wrote:

Wow, the negativity .

While there were a few that profited from the mistake, and yes that is unfair to other players.. what were they to do otherwise? This was a bug in the wild on production/live servers. It's not like they could just have thrown a switch that would magically reset all mistakenly claimed ISO for everyone it affected.

If anything, maybe you should be glad it was not so widespread or severely abused that they'd have to resort to restoring some 2 day old database backup for the whole game.

If they don't have the means to remove excess iso, and they know that some players received a significant, unfair advantage, then they should just give everyone else the same advantage. Instead, they have just decided to sandbox the "bad faith" actors (however they define that) and ignore everything else. It's not an ideal solution.

DeNappa

I agree it's not ideal. But looking at it from a their perspective I can totally understand they chose this approach:

• Subtracting the ISO from the affected accounts may be possible, but if they already spent it I doubt the game technically allows for a negative ISO balance. So I guess this is a no-go.
• Attempting to manually inspect and restore all affected accounts is probably not realistic in terms of the amount of time it would require
• Rewarding the whole player base with a double ISO gain from SHIELD rank would be a nice gesture, agreed. I could really use that ISO myself . But the number of people that benefitted from the bug was relatively small, and I can understand if they rather not freely give away that many ISO to ALL players in order not to hurt their business model too much.

dsds

DeNappa wrote:

Wow, the negativity .

While there were a few that profited from the mistake, and yes that is unfair to other players.. what were they to do otherwise? This was a bug in the wild on production/live servers. It's not like they could just have thrown a switch that would magically reset all mistakenly claimed ISO for everyone it affected.

If anything, maybe you should be glad it was not so widespread or severely abused that they'd have to resort to restoring some 2 day old database backup for the whole game.

I know that not much can be done about it right now as the decision is made already. I almost wish that it was more wide spread like it was 50 percent because at least we would get a fair solution even though we may not like it but it will be applied fairly to everyone. heck they are probably more likely to award everyone double iso if the percentage was 50%. At 0.4% of total player population (active or inactive), they would have to grant 99% of the player population double iso and of course management would not have that due to massive revenue loss. However we can react to it negatively to ensure that this does not happen again.

If we shrug it off and pat them on the back for screwing up, it will mean we condone the bugs and the lack of quality control and will encourage more of these events in the future.
Indifference and shrugging off things is what caused terrible companies to spring up such as comcast, ea sports, etc. because if the playerbase takes no action towards bad treatment, they will continue to do so. You could argue that they will build good will among the 0.4%, but they do that at the cost of angering 99.6% (more like 91.4% since we shouldn't count the inactives)

DrStrange-616

I've learned not to expect them to do the right thing when the expedient thing is available. They don't care if you care.

fmftint

DrStrange-616 wrote:

I've learned not to expect them to do the right thing when the expedient thing is available. They don't care if you care.

Why worry while people are still rushing to buy clubs?

brisashi

.4% sounds like a small number indeed, but I imagine the percentage of competetive players that took advantage of the bug accidentally or otherwise is far higher.

The ability to champ an extra 2-3 characters at the 4* is a significant advantage over other players. The fact that this is simply being ignored leaves a very bitter taste in my mouth.