Possible exploit related to new retaliations

Marvel Puzzle Quest MPQ General Discussion
1

The devs recently allowed retaliations for offensive losses - I’m not sure if it was deliberate or not (I assume it was); not sure why they’re doing it (my guess: anti-tanking); but it’s there. This may allow a really abusive mechanic, that could be related to some of the hyper-inflated scores we’ve seen lately.

Asuume 2 players: player A and Player B, part of the same alliance (or friends, or whatever)

Player A finds player B in their queue. Player A beats player B.

Player B now has Player A in their retaliation queue. Player B, through mutual arrangement, loses to Player A. A beats B again, and the cycle repeats itself, inflating A’s score the whole time.

Assuming Player B also continues to play and match their score to Player A, Player A’s score could inflate quickly with little work. Player B could be doing all the work for two players.

In and of itself, this isn’t hyper-abusive, and it’s generally pretty difficult to find a specific person in your queue.

However…

Factor in that we have linked alliances being run by the same person, you might only have to find one of a hundred different people. And you don’t have to risk your “real” account; you could have a sock puppet account looking for one of a hundred people, each of which also has a sock puppet account looking for one of a hundred different people. Each of these sock puppets could be a Player B looking for a Player A in the above scenario, and if a Player A has five Player Bs attached to him, scores could inflate very quickly.

The latest round of hyper-inflation started about the same time the retaliation for losses did. It wouldn’t explain everything - people report being hit twice in a minute and the like - but it would explain part of it. I don’t know if this is happening or not. Shields could exacerbate this, but aren’t really necessary for it to work (though they’d make the process work a lot faster once scores hit the ludicrous zone, since player As could presumably find each other at that point and shield hop off each other).

If this isn’t going on, I hope I didn’t give anyone a wrong idea. In any case, I think the devs need to reconsider the recent change allowing retaliations against people who lose to you. I don’t get the benefit of it; it only discourages risk-taking further in a game that harshly punishes risk-taking.

2

Is it confirmed in Webslinger btw?

3

I can confirm it has for me at least - I’ve done nothing but tank so far in this one.

4

if you’re shielded you don’t get retal nodes, win or lose.

5

I only brought up shielding for a different mechanic once scores hit the ludicrous zone - since there will be very few people you can find once you hit 1500 (for example) points, you could replace the mechanic above with timing shield hops off each other. The mechanic I described obviously wouldn’t work with shielding.

6

i can also confirm in webslinger.

marc

7

How did the retatiations points work at high levels?
I mean, at the 100 points level, assuming both opponents have 100 points, you have say +25 points per win and -5 per loss. So with one win and one loss, you still got 20 points.
Does the same rules apply (with other numbers) when both opponents have 1100+ points?

Because if the system “generate” points with each win/loss, it should be really easy to trick the system with these new “retatiate event if the opponent failed to beat you”.

Suppose you found a mate in one of your node (it happens at my mid-level, so I think it may happen whith the 1000+ players). It is really easy to change your team, and to retrat to this mate. 2 second game, you lose maybe 20 points, but he won 25 points. Then he do the same. And you go on as long as you have characters.

There is other things to think about (as: does the loss from the outside attacks can be easily overcome with this “trick”?), but I think it is possible.

8

The bigger issue isn’t losing on purpose. It’s that retaliations are easier to store than open nodes so if you’re coordinated you should quickly convert 2 open nodes with high value to 2 retaliation against an alliance member with high value by purposely losing to them. This allows you to retaliate when that guy is shielded, while you no longer have to worry about losing the node if you lost 3 games in a row between matches, which certainly happens all the time.

9

As usual the devs work hard to break the game even more instead of fixing even trivial stuff. icon_e_sad.gif

10

At the higher levels it is closer to zero gain. So if you are attacking someone with 1100+ points, what you gain from attacking them they lose most if not all of it.