As some of you might know, prior to its fix in the 2.9 build, there was an exploit that allowed players to utilize Legacy cards in their decks during Standard events. When we became aware of this method, the team quickly set out to determine how this was occurring, and begin implementing a fix for it.
Many of you were extremely helpful, and privately provided us information on how to reproduce this exploit, which both aided in the fix and limited the negative effect it had on other players. We’re certainly grateful, and want to thank those of you that reached out to assist.
Now that the fix has been implemented in the 2.9 build, we will be taking action against players that purposefully used the exploit to gain an unfair advantage over their competitors. In addition, we’ll be rewarding those who played honestly, and whose ranks were affected by these exploiters.
We understand that a fair playing field is integral to maintaining a healthy, competitive environment, so we thank you for being so patient as we work towards resolving this issue!
I’m going to go out on a limb here, and assume that if you were playing the events as intended, you wouldn’t be able to readily exploit them. I don’t even know how the loophole was found, nor do I really care what it was, and I never once found myself in a position to use legacy cards in standard events. I’m willing to assume the majority of players doing this were doing so knowingly rather than accidentally, especially when most if not all of us know what cards in our collection are standard legal and which are not.
The exploit did take several steps to make happen. I don’t see how it could have been done intentionally. As far as how they can tell, I would guess that they have access to our battle logs – I make this guess because I have had tickets where support has accessed my battle logs to discuss bugs or interactions.
Of course this is all just speculation.
Anyway, great job to all of the people who set in tickets because playing a fair game matters.
It was a 2 step process (not sure if I’m allowed to go into more detail about a fixed loophole)
I mean, it was discovered completely by accident, and isn’t unreasonable that it could have happened by mistake again (say by someone playing story mode or something while an event was going on)
I fail to see the “oops, I played the legacy decks in my events by mistake” as a genuine excuse.
Two steps sure, but it did involve intended tampering of the decks registered in the event and it doesn’t take a genius to figure if they were supposed to go ahead with those or not. The concept of “legacy” and “standard” is not that complex.
Never knew or experienced this exploit or how long it was going on for, but I think Oktagon has more pressing issues , especially, after that last update. Sphynx’s Decree needs immediate attention, the card freeze was never attended to, and numerous bugs were brought back or created with 2.9 . For some reason Forrest Gump’s quote came to mind," This game is like a box of chocolates, you never know what you’ll get after an update"
I’ll admit that I was curious and wanted to try it, but never did get around to actually do it in any AIx or such.
I’m not sure how they are planning to try to identify those who used in it competitive ranked events, but getting something for free here would be nice if they do scrape through old logs or something.
From a technical perspective: as a developer I’d implement an option to track usage of cards in events in the beginning - at least to have information to nerf / buff specific one. So I think identify of abusers in that area should be simple. Hmm. It would be great to see statistics of mythica/masterpieces - how often each card is used.
I don’t know how this exploit works and I didn’t see a lot of legacy cards in standard events.
But maybe it’s like making a eleven card deck (accidently happen to me once). I wonder how this happen. But if it possible to make 11-card deck a 1- or 2-card-deck should be possible two. That would be a really annoying exploit.
I think there are a lot of bug around after every update.
Back when they nerfed Kiora one of their justifications was the number of players that would start a match against a Kiora and eventually quit - not just lose, but outright ragequit.
They have the ability to track this type of information (industry term is “telemetry data”). Just because we can’t see it doesn’t mean it’s not being tracked.
I know this is kind of sad, and I have been playing this game for almost 2 years, but I am confused as to what a Legacy card is and what a Standard event is. Are the standard events like Oath of the Gatewatch? Ones that don’t involve your coalition and ones that don’t record your score?
“Standard” is a collection of sets that can be used in certain events to restrict which cards can be used. So far, it’s always been defined as Origins plus the most recent four - right now that’s M19, DOM, RIX, and XLN.
“Legacy” is “all cards from any set”. Legacy events, decks, and vault items are displayed with a blue ribbon on them to set them apart from Standard items.