Season 9 known Cheaters

[ThinkBui]

@bubbley
Haven’t been in the ABN forums a ton, but just saw that you guys flagged me as a cheater. What did I do to make you think I’ve been cheating?

[RedYoshi45]

@thinkbui
I’ve looked on your behalf and I think you’ve been flagged mistakenly. Your score was on a screenshot in the Season 8 topic (week 11/12) but your score seems totally fine to me.

@bubbley Please remove Think Bui from the cheat list, there is no evidence that this guy ever cheated.

[DD]

@thinkbui
I should say that I’m the one who flagged you, or someone with your user name. If a mistake is made here, then I bear the sole responsibility and I apologies to you. The other forum members are quite cautious over the matter and @bubbley simply updated the list on good faith. Perhaps in this case, her faith in me has been sorely misplaced.

Why did I make the accusation? There was nothing suspicious about the score on its own. Indeed, some players including myself have managed much higher scores without cheating. At the time, I was absolutely convinced that it was the case because that score had jumped by about 40,000 in between a few battles, and I have been watching the table fairly closely while grinding like mad as there were definite cheaters. Suppose what I remember is correct, could I still be wrong? Absolutely! It’s not an open system and there is no fool proof audit.

I think I’ve made a fool of myself and reflect badly on other members, so allow me to also apologies to everyone on this forum. In light of this, it’s best that I don’t report or flag anyone as a cheater going forward.

Again, I apologies to everyone here for not acting with due care.

[Bubbley]

@thinkbui I am sorry that you are on the list mistakenly. I will remove you.

Apologies to everyone for not updating this week. Family emergency. Will do it as soon as I can.

[Suzy]

@toolow

I want to say that you haven’t made a fool of yourself. Im sure if I, and other members had seen what you saw, we would have done the same thing.

The problem is that there are a huge amount of cheaters around at the moment so if we see a large score appear over a short period of time it’s bound to set the alarm bells off and get reported.

I know we have a few heavy duty grinders on this forum who can get very high scores quickly. If they weren’t forum members, and on our board, I’m sure we would wrongly accuse them of cheating, even though they aren’t, so honest mistakes will happen :)

[angryde]

@toolow Don’t be so hard on yourself, DD! I am in complete agreement with @suzyq… you made a perfectly reasonable judgement, given the circumstances. I’m sure @thinkbui detests cheaters and understands that this is a “no harm, no foul” kinda situation. XD

I’m really sorry to hear about your current dramas, @bubbley. I really hope it’s not overly horrible… in any case, we’re all with you. And forget the damn cheaters list – at least for the time being! Good God, woman, we’ll muddle-through somehow!

(and bombard you with updates the MOMENT you return to the cheaters thread in force!)

R O F L XD

[Suzy]

@bubbley

Sorry to hear you are having a bad time. Hope you managing alright and that it gets sorted out soon.

[ThinkBui]

@toolow, don’t worry about it. I’ve had to contend with cheaters myself getting so upset that I’ve barked at Rovio’s support team on more than one occasion and I’d be lying if I said that being falsely accused of cheating for playing a little too well that one week didn’t amuse me on some level.

I’m trying to remember what might have happened back then that would have led you to think I was cheating. IIRC that was when whatever selects the PvP opponent in the Arena had gotten screwed up and kept providing significantly inferior opponents. Since I tend to play as long as I can until I either get 3 strikes for the day or have to go do something else, I was getting higher scores than I normally do. I don’t recall if it was week 11 specifically, but one week I did start out averaging 30k per day or something like that out of an abundance of concern that other players I was grouped with would be doing the same and only slowed down when it became clear that no one else was. I can’t answer why you might have seen my score suddenly jump between battles, but if it was that I was already approaching 100k before the week was half over, this might have been what you were seeing.

[;)]

Here is the latest cheater from earlier this week. I notified Rovio and got this response

Hello there,

Thanks for contacting us and sorry to hear that you have run into a cheater in Epic.

We have been working on this issue for some time and we made some good progress with the cheating issue during fall 2015 and spring 2016 especially. The number of cheaters in the game has decreased significantly since then.

Of course, that doesn’t help you much if there is now a cheater who takes over your leaderboard or battles in a team against you. Unfortunately there are still some cheaters who can circumvent our anti-cheat methods. However, we work on the situation continuously and with the update 1.5.2 we added a new cheater detection system that will automatically flag players who go over set score limits. We continue working on this and will do our best to make the game as fair as possible for everyone.

We sincerely apologize for any negative effect these dishonest players are having on your gaming experience. We understand very well that they take the fun out of the game very quickly.

Thanks for your patience!

Kind regards,

Paweł
Rovio Support Team

I responded that this is what you have said before – why can’t you just remove the ones we send screenshot documentation of! Oh, well….

[Pointless]

Set score limits? That’s the best they can do? No wonder some of us are/were flagged. What to take from this is, as many have already figured out, do not try very hard.

[DD]

Yup, that score limits is what they’ve told me. Anybody can see that this is an ugly hack that is bound to be problematic. I tried to get them to be more open about it as some of us will have a much better solution. Still waiting for their reply after almost two weeks now.

[Suzy]

@pointless

The trouble is if you are trying to progress to a higher league it’s very difficult not to try too hard if the top 3 places are taken by people who are. It’s a problem knowing what to do for the best and spoiling the game as we don’t know what the limit is :(

@toolow

I would think it’s been pushed up to a higher level, but still it’s very rude of them not to acknowledge your message.

[DD]

@suzyq
It’s conceivable they are knee deep dealing with problems, meeting deadlines and under resourced, although you could argue that part of it is of their own making. So perhaps they just couldn’t get to acknowledge most of the issues. What I would have problems with are the tone and nature of the responses, and seeming lack of interest from management/developers/support.

[Pointless]

@suzyq it is quite the conundrum. I used to feel the same, as battling for top three is obviously the essence of the Arena game, but where does that ultimately get you? Rovio has admitted, plain as day, that you will be “rewarded” for all your efforts by being placed in a cheaters league. So, once again, it is up to us to circumvent this by our own actions, as the “anti-cheating system” is a pure farce. There are ways to avoid being placed with cheaters (at least so far this season for myself), yet this does come at a cost by being far behind from the get go.

[Suzy]

@pointless

Sad to say, but you are right :( I think I will concentrate on getting my birds to a higher level and play it safe in the Arena.

[;)]

If they cannot block cheaters on their own, the least they could do is take out the ones we have provided documentation through screenshots for. My asian named cheater ended up being rewarded with first place…

[DD]

@suzyq @bubbley @shapokomanbeast @smwforever45 @pointless
Okay, after almost 2 months when I first complained about cheaters, I have

a) been removed from cheater leagues (which took about a month to do),
b) my player ID to remove myself from cheater leagues in the future,
c) compensation of… 60 LCs (which does not cover the arena resets I made),
d) been refused the score limits to be labeled as cheats (to protect their system),
e) been told there is no possibility to communicate with the developers directly.

A bit of a mixed result but somewhat positive overall. While I get some redress, we’re still saddled with a flawed anti-cheat system. No doubt that some honest players will end up with a rude awakening, and we’ll continue to see cheaters getting no obvious/real penalty. But the developers appear to be unable or unwilling to hear users’ complaints and suggestions about the system.

@datguygamer Apparently Rovio support had a larger than normal volume of issues that it could not respond to me earlier which is what I suspected.

EDIT- Guess Rovio account is off my menu for now.

[Suzy]

@toolow

Thanks for the update. Glad to hear you have been removed the cheaters league at last:) :)

[ShapokoManbeast]

@toolow

That’s actually pretty good for Rovio. There’s been times when they haven’t even addressed my ticket for a month so that’s pretty productive actually.

[DD]

@suzyq …and straight into grinders league XD

@shapokomanbeast Well, when you put it that way :) Nevertheless, RESULTS!

Now I’ll just have to follow up on why my tickets on Tinker Titan score wrongly calculated been silently closed without any compensation and comments…

[Suzy]

@toolow

I finally broke away from the pack this morning as I did a couple of hours of serious grinding last night and this morning and they didn’t.

Hope I don’t get put in the cheaters league again for grinding.

[Pointless]

@suzyq @bubbley @toolow I am really interested in your experiences, having (nominally at least) been removed from the cheater’s league. Is there any noticeable difference? I am playing Arena very little this Season (still in Silver) and have not encountered cheaters, even though my request to Rovio to be removed from such a league has not, to date, been answered. I wonder if my success in the matter is due to my lackluster play, whilst being removed from these leagues is merely lip-service.

[DD]

@suzyq Let’s hope. And I thought my board is competitive :S Well, top score on my board is less than 50K at the moment, but most players were board leader at some point. There was definitely a cool down after the double points event that offer some respite. BTW, all the other players on your screenshot look really familiar…

@pointless Since the claim was made for my game, I have seen no cheaters yet. You may have avoided cheaters who are more likely to be in Diamond/Platinum league by now. If you start encountering more cheaters at the higher leagues, then it may be a sign that you’re still in the cheater leagues. The fact that you’ve seen none so far could simply be because the other players are in the same boat as you, so to speak. Anyway, it’s hard to tell because the system is not open.

[Suzy]

@pointless @bubbley @toolow

Two weeks ago I was told I’d been taken out of the Cheaters league. unfortunately, it appeared that I hadn’t because I had 2 cheaters on my board. I did write to Rovio and complained but haven’t had a reply yet. Last week I just had some heavy duty grinders on my board and came 6th.

This week I seem to have several heavy duty grinders on my board. Maybe they, like me, were doing so much grinding because there was double points up for grabs.

I hope I will manage to stay in the top three as they are already catching me up. If I can get to Diamond this week I won’t even be trying to get higher than 7th place for the rest of the Season.

[DD]

Second day, and I have

1. yuan – who scored 3500 in 20 min and moved from the lower table to top,
2. EMI – who scored 100,000 in 3 hours or less.

Super grinders?! I’m checking if I’m back in cheater league again :(