Token Pull Exploit (3/27/17) *Updated (4/12/17)

MissChinch

OJSP said:

MissChinch said:

The tops of my (SCL8) brackets look generally the same as they have for a while in PvP, so I haven't landed in any thus far that have been over-run by what would look like mega whales, so its not been an impact to me, however its possible that all these cheating juggernauts are just queuing way before I am.  PvE scores have risen dramatically in the last 4-5 months, but the scores are up pretty uniformly and rosters don't look any different in the top 20, though I haven't been keeping close tabs.  I simply don't attribute that to abuse of this exploit.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think I saw you in one of my brackets recently, it means for PvP you would be in S2? For PvE you already said you play S4, so I know it's not there because I play in S3 and I don't think it was SHIELD Simulator or season. There are more players in the other slices. From our common knowledge, these 2 slices are actually the least populated of all the slices.

I take S4 and S5 in PvE, but I take the 12am and 1am ending times in PvP, you are totally right I flip flop on my PvP based on end time in my EST timezone...   sorry that was a stupid mistake.  I don't do particularly well in PvP, when I shield I can occasionally crack t25, but t50 is more likely...  sometimes I just hit 650 and float without shielding, I would drop off of anyplace you'd see me then...

MissChinch

OJSP said:

MissChinch said:

I take S4 and S5 in PvE, but I take the 12am and 1am ending times in PvP, you are totally right I flip flop on my PvP based on end time in my EST timezone...   sorry that was a stupid mistake.

I see. From those end times, that would be S2 and S4 for PvP. There are different circumstances that makes it less likely to spot exploiters in these 2 slices.  No need to be sorry, I was just trying to figure out why your posts keep suggesting that you didn't see any exploiters. I think it's a common opinion from a lot of players and perhaps it's due to a lot of people not realising that there are a lot of brackets in a particular slice. Looking at the last event's result (Cyclops), there were 11829 alliances participating in the event. Even if we assume a generous average of 15 players per alliance, that's around 175000-180000 players. That would make up around 350-360 brackets. Most likely, the majority of players are playing CL1-5, so we can estimate there are around 50-60 brackets for CL6-8, split in 5 time slices.

For example, I'm going to use S1 as it was the one I am most familiar with, having played in it for more than a year competitively: in S1 CL8, there are at least 8 brackets, each consisting of 500 players. So, if we only see the top 20 of our bracket, that's only less than 0.5% of the players for the whole CL8. Up to recently, there have been at least 10 CL7 brackets and many more other brackets. We sometimes see people with big rosters going as low as CL5 on purpose and I know of someone choosing CL2 by mistake..

The exploiter are out there, if not in your bracket, they would be in the other brackets in your slice. I think it's just a matter of knowing where to look and what to look for. Also, apparently some of them have explicitly said so in out of game communications.

So, this is why we keep bringing this topic up for discussion.

That makes complete sense, anything I see in PvP is totally anecdotal...  It would be nice to know what the gross number of exploiters is...  with 150-200k people the odds that you'd get one in your bracket of 500 and notice in PvP seems like you would need something else to bias the distribution it in order to see a cheater...

PvE seems more consistent in terms of who I see near the top, I'm more likely to notice new names, but I wouldn't know a cheater from someone that whaled unless they have extreme oddities in their 5* cover distribution (like 3 5*s deep into champ levels and the rest minimally covered)

I don't mean to troll people looking for justice in this thread, I am completely against cheating and I'm in complete agreement in principle.  I do believe D3/Demi's first responsibility is to the business side of things, if that means compromising on enforcing punishments, then that's what they should do, however that is not without implications in the business side, if they upset potential buyers enough they will loose out on those monies.

I think if the players are to appeal to D3/Demi for enforcement, the argument on principle is far stronger than the argument that its impacting play of non-cheaters.  It appears to me that the cases where cheaters are actually having an impact are rather extreme edge cases.  When I initially read this thread it appeared to me that people were rightfully upset and likely overstating the impact its had on non-cheaters, which undermined the whole plea for justice.

SangFroid

MissChinch said:

I think I'm in agreement on the main issue that cheating is reprehensible and I'm all for them being banned without warning, but I'm just not buying into the argument that it was an impact to those that didn't cheat... it sounds like whining because someone else got something you wanted and didn't pay for it (which I can also get behind, I'm selfish and that's no fair, but... lifes not fair sometimes).  I still think asking D3/Demi to jeopardize their revenue by taking a stance on it should be a business decision, and one that takes into account forum outcry only at it applies to their investors risk.  (ex: immoral to put their investors/owners at risk, not immoral to let us non-cheaters hanging in a video game) 

I think you are missing some of the intent behind the arguments here.  Nobody is whining because someone else got something they wanted and didn't pay for.  People are arguing for D# to take a firm stance on dealing with cheaters.  People are arguing that D# needs to respect its own policies and deal with the cheaters.  People are arguing that the cheaters should not be able to benefit (and continue on in the future to benefit) from the spoils of their cheating.

Nobody is looking for compensation etc.. people just want to see the cheaters stopped and have the effects of their cheating rolled back.  If that comes off as whining and lowers your opinion of the posters in this thread I am not sure what to say.

The rockett

The bottom line is simple.  Read D3/Demi stance on cheaters.  It is in the help topics. All we are asking for is for them to inforce their own ploicy. They have not reacted to this yet, and yes we do know some of these players.  When you see 2 Classic 5* characters go up 20+ levels each on somebody's roster, you know something happened and they are still in game and on an ally. 
It is funny that Brigby has been tagged in this a few times, and didn't responded but he did edit @AlexxKats post. So he had been on here and reading this just not commenting. Oh well. Guess the next exploit that come see up everybody will have a free for all. 

AlexxKats

The rockett said:

...It is funny that Brigby has been tagged in this a few times, and didn't responded but he did edit @AlexxKats post. So he had been on here and reading this just not commenting. Oh well... 

A clarification here, I edited my post to add the @Brigby tag.
The official input is pretty much needed in this post. I would call for a sandbox for all cheaters regardless to be honest. 

As for the rest of give and go regarding if/how those cheaters impact the game, as someone who gets repeatedly hit in pvp by *at least* a couple of them, I can tell you thatt it does matter. No whining here, i still play this game for my own reasons. Yet, If I am asked to support either financially or by suggesting to a friend, I will suggest a game that all players are equal to rules and terms, not a game that is partial to some people.

Daiches

There's hope yet

JVReal

Rollin' Rollin' Rollin'
Keep those rosters rollin'
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ri83v76PXdE
 

jamesh

MissChinch said:

My understanding of the exploit was that it was not an unlimited number of 5* pulls, but it was the ability to selectively pull only 5*s from your queue and pass on the 4*s.  This assumption could absolutely be incorrect, but it would amount to only CP/LTs on hand during the exploit.

Hopefully it is okay to speculate on what the exploit was now that the devs say it has been fixed.  From what others have said, it sounds like it was a way to effectively increase the chance of getting a bonus hero for a particular token to 100%.

Not only would  this give the cheater double the number of 5*'s, if they had only selected a single favourite 5*, half of the covers received would be for that single hero.  So this would also have given the cheater a way to cheaply cover and champion one of the older 5* characters. This would also give them access to characters that are virtually unobtainable for other players.

Bowgentle

jamesh said:

MissChinch said:

My understanding of the exploit was that it was not an unlimited number of 5* pulls, but it was the ability to selectively pull only 5*s from your queue and pass on the 4*s.  This assumption could absolutely be incorrect, but it would amount to only CP/LTs on hand during the exploit.

Hopefully it is okay to speculate on what the exploit was now that the devs say it has been fixed.  From what others have said, it sounds like it was a way to effectively increase the chance of getting a bonus hero for a particular token to 100%.

Not only would  this give the cheater double the number of 5*'s, if they had only selected a single favourite 5*, half of the covers received would be for that single hero.  So this would also have given the cheater a way to cheaply cover and champion one of the older 5* characters. This would also give them access to characters that are virtually unobtainable for other players.

Nobody cares about covering older characters.
Cheaters were using this to give themselves 500+ Thanos.

tiomono

This doesn't directly relate to the exploit but I felt like sharing.

I pull classics trying to build my 4*s. I have all the 5*s rostered except starlord. I have 1 5* out of all of them with one color at 5. So today I pulled a black for my 0-1-5 silver surfer. In classics if I luck in to a 5* I have a 1 in 36 chance of pulling that specific cover. Now I have a dupe surfer because that seems more valuable than 2000 iso.

It's **** like this that push people to exploit.

Daiches

OJSP said:

I noticed some people's roster have been rolled back. Thank you.

This has been undone and apparently had nothing to do with cheating. So no punishments yet.

Pongie

Daiches said:

OJSP said:

I noticed some people's roster have been rolled back. Thank you.

This has been undone and apparently had nothing to do with cheating. So no punishments yet.

Pure coincidence that these rosters were the ones that were suspects? (by the way I have no idea who OJSP were referring to) Conspiracy theories... 

SkadenFrudee

That makes me sad, even if we were going to be ignored moving forward, it was nice to think that at least some of the cheaters got their game rolled back. 

Helen keller

Wow, I'm glad this post is dated because it's history repeating itself, this token exploit is what led to most people in my alliance, including myself, quitting, over a freaking year ago when people were abusing this expolit and had multiple fully covered silver surfer, yeah that's how long they have known about this and they have never fixed it, the devs are incompetent, they have been aware of this for years.

jamesh

Helen keller said:

Wow, I'm glad this post is dated because it's history repeating itself, this token exploit is what led to most people in my alliance, including myself, quitting, over a freaking year ago when people were abusing this expolit and had multiple fully covered silver surfer, yeah that's how long they have known about this and they have never fixed it, the devs are incompetent, they have been aware of this for years.

From what I can tell, this is a similar but different exploit.

The old one was that the result of opening tokens was non-deterministic, so being able to open a token a second time by changing device gave you a benefit.  They fixed that by making tokens deterministic (probably by maintaining one or more pseudo-random number generators per user).

I suspect in this case the problem was that they didn't make the decision to award a bonus hero deterministic, which could be exploited in the same way.  Presumably the fix was again to remove the non-deterministic behaviour.

MissChinch

Helen keller said:

Wow, I'm glad this post is dated because it's history repeating itself, this token exploit is what led to most people in my alliance, including myself, quitting, over a freaking year ago when people were abusing this expolit and had multiple fully covered silver surfer, yeah that's how long they have known about this and they have never fixed it, the devs are incompetent, they have been aware of this for years.

Its awful, but theres a difference between devs being incompetent and devs being given the prioritization of tasks we want.

Helen keller

MissChinch said:

Helen keller said:

Wow, I'm glad this post is dated because it's history repeating itself, this token exploit is what led to most people in my alliance, including myself, quitting, over a freaking year ago when people were abusing this expolit and had multiple fully covered silver surfer, yeah that's how long they have known about this and they have never fixed it, the devs are incompetent, they have been aware of this for years.

Its awful, but theres a difference between devs being incompetent and devs being given the prioritization of tasks we want.

Again, they have known about it for years, they lost the confidence of the consumer by allowing it to stay in place, yes they rolled back the roster of those that abused it (over a year ago with the last "outbreak of exploiting) but spent money, they weren't banned, they weren't sandboxed, the only accounts that have been banned or sandboxed are those that "stole" HP.  I could take it a step further, the devs intentionally left the exploit stay as is, because those that discover it buy more packs with the intent to exploit, they collect the money, then roll back the roster later, not that I feel sorry for those that have their rosters rolled back

The rockett

It has been almost 2 months since this thread first was posted, FYI this exploit was live as soon as BH started March 1st. Just curious if anybody will ever update anything on this. 
Will the cheaters that did this ever be punished, rolled back or banned from the game. 
If not, will D3/Demi please update YOUR rules in the help section. 

i don't think any of us are asking for something outrageous, just to know we are all playing by the same standards set forth by D3/Demi. 

Zappa

They will never answer, this thread will get locked by Brigby or moved into the abyss of another subforum. Do you honestly think D3 would sandbox a whale account? Or for that matter, do you honestly think D3/Brigby would post a non-evasive answer regarding any of this?

AlexxKats

If that's their course of action, it does count as a reply on their official standing on how they deal with cheaters.

But I, being a romantic still hope we will get a proper reply from @Brigby regarding this subject