Public Admissions of Cheating

Magic: The Gathering - Puzzle Quest MtGPQ General Discussion
1

@hibernum_will @hibernum_jc now we have players brazenly admitting to using hacked APK versions of MTGPQ in Slack about cheating in Quick Battle and events. Are you planning on addressing this or banning these accounts? What’s the status here. This situation is damaging the credibility of participation.

2

It’s better to private message Brigby or someone else, if you are looking for an actually response, but this is good to get the attention of the community at large

3

Every complaint of “The top player in quick battle has over double the points of the next guy” was always met with “he is using Nahiri Zoo”. I kinda believed it, I guess I don’t know any better.

If there is actual cheating then, well, just another disappointment. Collect the data, figure out how to detect it, then wipe the accounts. Lesson learned.

Then again, what about players who were locked out of the top spot? Award them stuff retroactively?

4

Well back then it was mostly true. This cheat allows people to quickly add points to snipe a win at the last few hours. There’s really no need to have double the score.

5

Thank god I stopped playing QB altogether.

Anyone thinking a 2 min win average(1200 ribbons per hour)could be kept for several for several hours was totally naive.

The sad part is that preventing this requires more stuff to be handled server side that could lead to more problems.

Thank god event objectives make those cheat less effective I think.

6

This cheat affects events too. You’re not safe from this.

7

I was reminded that LeafHyren posted about this a month ago and promptly got his post banned. Why isn’t this being addressed? I have paid money to play this game. Allowing cheaters to rule destroys the credibility of the leaderboards, events, and Quick Battle. Since there is no new story that’s the game. Fix it! No excuses this time.

8

@Morphis @Steeme

120 pts/hour, even for an extended period of time is really possible to achieve, what’s impossible is their insane short burst, like 300 pts/hour. Also, while Nahiri Zoo, or other top QB decks can be really fast, it’s already reaching about the top speed normally achievable in a normal game. There’s no way any of these decks can compete with cheaters going at about 300 pts/hour, no matter how lucky or fast you are.

Careful about the witch hunt, though, it’s not because someone is going at twice your speed that he’s cheating, your deck might just not be fully optimized, yet. It’s when there’s a few people that goes at twice the speed of the regular “speed demons” that we have a problem.

After playing Quick Battles for a while, you’ll recognize the regulars Quick Battles grinders, they put alot of effort to build their card collection and tune their decks, they deserve to be there. Also, they have a reputation to preserve. From what I’ve noticed, the alleged cheaters are unknown players that no one knew about that all of sudden are topping the charts. It takes time to build a collection, and people would have heard about them. Those unknown players shouldn’t have the necessary collection and experience in deckbuilding to compete for the top rankings. Also, they don’t have anything to lose since their card collection is likely really new.

One thing for sure though, is the D3Go and Hibernum should do their absolute best to stop these cheaters or at least stop anyone to be able to abuse the system like that. Because otherwise, it cheapens everything, why spend money, invest time and effort, when anyone could just cheat and beat you no matter what you did? Worse yet, is that there are events with a really limited number of exclusive mythics as rewards like Inventor’s Fair or Saheeli’s Challenge. These cheaters are robbing us, legit players, from those rewards. The way these events are made, it’s giving the cheaters even more incentives to cheat.

9

Can there be a rest mode if you get more than say 150pts an hour your account goes into rest mode and you can’t play the game for 3 hours.

10

fully agree with You DuskPaladin, after a while you recognise similar nicknames and when you face their decks you know that they are focused on very quick win.
It should be fairly easy for d3 to built in a flagging mechanism to deal with cheaters who can achieve over 200-300pts per hour which is just impossible.

11

The function for points per hour can be described like this:

f(x,y)=(3600/x) × y
X = game time in seconds.
Y = Planeswalker level divided by 10 rounded down, minimum 1.

So for a level 60 Planeswalker:

  • 180 second games, 120 points per hour
  • 120 sec/game, 180 pph
  • 90 sec/game, 240 pph
  • 60 sec/game, 300 pph

Link to graphsketch.com for more visualisation.

Obviously the total game times include loading times and menu navigation time. Actual game duration will less than stated values.

12

It’s better to identify the problem and fix it than to use a band aid approach like you described.

Using band aid fixes is basically the reason for the number of bugs we see every update. They fix one bug and 2 previous band aids fall out.

13

@Ohboy

I think you misunderstood me, or maybe I wasn’t clear enough. Obviously we need to get rid of the problem at the root, and for that we would need to identify it. The devs already know about it, I’ll try to stay vague though, since we shouldn’t give more information to would be cheaters. But someone post some time ago about a way how cheating could be achieved, and I have faith that the devs are working on a way to counter that.

But meanwhile, what can we do as players to help them? Will you develop a program or code for them to counter it?

We can at least confirm to them that foul play is at work, that the numbers we are seeing are too high for any players. We can also send a message to would-be cheaters that while the devs are working on a solution, we’ll be keeping an eye on them and we’ll report them. We can also remind the devs that they need to do something fast because it’s affecting everyone and the integrity of their game.

14

I wasn’t really replying to you, but yeah I agree.

I just don’t want the devs to implement some weird solution like “no wins below 90 seconds”, and then call it a day. Not only is it possible some day for legitimate decks to actually go below that hard limit, this hack actually hits events as well, so it’s not really a great solution.

15

How ???
its so easy to say lets just ban all hacked apks and ban all cheaters but did anyone even consider how this could be achieved??
Yes ofcourse it would be best to disable all “hacked” accounts but its not how it works!
And while we fixing it can we alse solve world hunger and have peace ? not sure how but lets just make it happen!!!

I dont believe its possible to go over 220 pts per hour and I accounted very lucky cascades with double strike nahiri’s 3rd ability runs.
Once account is flagged they should be prompted to install neccessary update with some debug code which would send qucik battle game data back to d3 servers for them to analyse wheter the account is legit or not as we all know consisten 1-2 turn wins are impossible

btw above is not an ideal solution either, bulletproof solution would require always active internet connection even during battles so the stats for each creature can be verified

16

You could do it like bank apps and make it only work on non rooted phones. That usually stops the phone from using side loaded apks

17

Not a good solution, for a multitude of reasons:

  • There are tools for hiding whether a phone is rooted or not.
  • Not all game cheats/exploits require root.
  • There are legitimate reasons for people to have rooted phones with no intention of ever cheating in games.

Niantic tried this approach recently with Pokémon Go. The cheaters were able to work around it and continue on botting and emulating. While the vast majority of players shut out of the game by the change were legitimate players who had rooted phones for various understandable reasons.

18

Given the current state of the game, do you really think that they have any technical skills to stop this? As long as they’re making money and keeping the spaghetti code strapped together with rubber bands, this will continue.

19

This actually directly threatens the entire system on which they make the money, so yes.

20

Good. I for one will not be spending anymore real cash in this game till the developers publicly state that cheating had been curtailed.

So far, I have spent about 440sgd since Sep2016 on this game.