A big "ban" is coming

[Apprentice]

Hello!

Today in Mighty Eagle Camp Mr. Bondarenko with flock power of 478 managed to score 145 million? To be honest I’m speechless. How is that possible?

[AngryBirdStar]

Amazing, a real angrybird’s prodigy… I felt like he was laughing at all of us…

[Crash Angerson]

Hellow Yue.I totaly agree wih your game state of mind.Play and let others play too.Whoever beats my scores earns my respects (that report button have done a lot of damage already).I also use that math formula (score/fp) to mesure a player skills,this is the only fair thing to do.I hope that you also use this math formula at the Arena scores,my personal best there is 100.113.200.Devided by my current fp of 749 gives a true score of 133.662.During all these years i fling birds i met few better true scores than this,but not from maxed players.So i can safely say that fp does Not give skills…I am waiting for your response if you agree with my theory.

With respects,Crash Angerson.

[Yue]

@ntns
Thanks for the reply.

Personally I will not apply the formula to arena match. Clan battle or bootcamp is the better place to know the skill difference- same scenario, no spells, no extra gems.

[ryan-kochie]

That report option has slowly helped make the game more fair. Someone could get that same ratio of 133 and played just as much but because they weren’t willing to use exploits to push their flock power up their score will be less. Lots of skilled players who aren’t maxed as well who aren’t able to fairly compete. You could have a skill of 130 and flock power of 400, and someone with a ratio of 105 and flock power 749 would surpass your score, which costs you coins in the bootcamp when they haven’t fairly earned their levels. It’s like any RPG really.

Skilled or not, if they exploited the game their score is an unfair advantage over others and Rovio should intervene, fixing the glitches used, and either resetting their flock power to pre-exploit levels or banning them. Who cares how skilled someone is, if they didn’t play fairly to get to the top they shouldn’t be at the top, if Rovio ever finishes cleaning up the top then we would see the truly skilled rise who don’t need to rely on exploits.

[jo-ha]

How in god’s name did the game get any fairer by the report button?
I don’t want to call out any names, but there are a lot of players leading the Boot Camp that were banned last season. How is it fair, that they apparently cloned their account and play on now? You think the report button will help? I seriously doubt it…
If anything, the report button is our chance to do Rovio’s homework and by accident we might report players, that DID pay a lot of money for this game. I am very sure those are out there.

The report button should not be in the game. Period. Fix the exploits, bring plausibility tests for gems, etc….

[ryan-kochie]

They are getting banned at least, hopefully Rovio finds a way to keep them banned soon. I do trust for the vast majority they look into it and only ban those who were severely exploiting the game. A reset as a warning or something would be nice, but the report button is our way of showing how much this is an issue. They don’t just ban for being reported or I’m sure the top 100 in the season rankings would keep getting removed, they have a procedure and look for proof in the account. If we do report a legit player Rovio will look into it and discard the report, move on. Yes it is wasting their time, but hopefully these players who keep getting banned get frustrated and move on as well.

The report button is a very important feature in the game, especially with more multiplayer modes in the game. I am sure they have or are working on scripts that detect these cheats at least, but nearly every multiplayer game I’ve played has also relied on players to report abuse.

[RIP Piggies]

While I appreciate there’s clearly some very high levels of skill for some getting great scores in ME bootcamp, you’re probably also looking – in many cases – at players who are gem-rich enough to just keep trying. I only ever play my free turn, and often that means I’ve decided to use the wrong bird to finish one room, given what shows up in the next. Comparing my score/FP with someone who’s had 5-10 goes to hone down the right sequencing isn’t that meaningful. The birdback function also moves faster for those with high FP, so with the same shot clearing room 1 they may get spells while an average FP player gets none. I do agree though that score/FP should determine your ranking in ME bootcamp because it would actually give those lower FP players a chance at decent rewards.

[DisAB.ed]

Hi Jeremy Wilson (who posted in this thread about 5 days ago): You’re not alone in your anger!

Like you, I have made substantial payments to Rovio in the past (and spent hundreds of hours in playing this game) and, like you, I have been ‚permanently banned‘ by Rovio (at the very end of the first MEBC season) on the grounds of having used a ‚cheat‘, although I never did or applied anything in my gameplay, which – also in the opinion of a befriended legal specialist, who took a close look at the way this app is programmed  – could be clearly qualified as a cheat (or exploit, or hack, or mod, …  or whatever else is listed as a breach in Rovio’s EULA) in legal terms.

It’s not only this (unfounded) ban of my account on it’s own, that makes me angry, but also other – highly irritating – consequences and implications of the ban:

(1) Rovio does not offer/provide any useful customer support in this respect (because they on principle refuse to „reveal details of specific cases“).

(2) With the ban resp. it’s programming Rovio prevent their customers from accessing online playmodes (Clan + MEBC) any longer, but do not prevent them from spending their (real) money for further online purchases (of gems). In other words: With the ban the end user’s licence is not terminated‚ but is simply being replaced by another licence: Instead of ‚PAY + PLAY‘ online it’s now ‚PAY, but  NOT PLAY‘ online!

(3) I founded an open clan some time ago and appointed only a co-leader (instead of a second – fully fledged – clan leader). With Rovio‘s blocking of my account all other (49) clan members got compromised and the whole clan is doomed, since Rovio seems not to be able and/or willing to offer any solution for them to get rid of their banned leader. Thus, with this ‚out of the blue‘ banning of my account (whether justified or not on it’s own) Rovio not only ‚punishes‘ me personally, but also all their other (49) customers who happen to be in the same clan (‚clan liability‘!).

There is no denying that Rovio is under heavy pressure caused by ongoing hacks of their software, which may explain ‚overreactions‘ by Rovio in the case of a supposedly detected cheat. BUT: If Rovio want to keep (at least some of) their credibility in terms of customer-friendliness, they need to be willing and prepared to review their own countermeasures and appropriated remedies (at least when required by an affected customer) in terms of both substance and equitability and to (immediately) take back such measures and remedies if these do not turn out to be indisputably justified and/or equitable in the case at hand.

I have not yet given up the hope that Rovio will either lift the ban of my account (this seemed to have happened frequently in the past) or at least resort to dealing seriously with my respective complaint within the next days. Otherwise I consider handing my ‚case‘ over to a friend working with a consumer protection association, and let those guys figure out whether this is something worth of being further pursued (under my home country’s jurisdiction, consumer protection standards are generally very high; EULA terms are only deemed to be valid and binding for a customer, if they have been brought to the customer’s attention prior to his purchase, which in practice never is the case).

[Crash Angerson]

Thx for responding @Yue.I might have some different thoughts about that.Let me write these down and analyse them.
While flinging at a clan or a bootcamp event a person who have many gems to spend (i don’t ask how,never cared about it) automatically have the upper hand from a perrson who only play the free ones.To play the same motive 100 times gives you more chances to have a great score rather than play only once,don’t you agree?And videos and tips from the clanmates (as for the clan events) makes the task even more easier i think.
On the other hand,the Arena battle is an 1 and out thing.Unique and “live” as possible.You have 7 birds,lol and some spells,to try to make the most of it.If you make a bad move there you cannot take it back or restart the event,you are at your own.And because the battles are “live” there is no hacking issue at the Arena.I cannot say the same for the bootcamp (iam sure that you noticed a 145M score made by an fp of 500 something a couple days ago)…

*Btw,i made that score of 100M by using 4 spells and NO gems.And that because my opponent only scored 24M (i had post the screenshot at the Arena topic for proof).

[Crash Angerson]

Instead of accusing other people of cheating i will write some (as i concider them) facts about AB2.I believe that this will clear things out about who is the real cheater here.
First of all let me refresh your memory.Or give you an idea about how this game was formed at the beginning.An action/puzzle game,kind of old school but still fine by me.A map and an Arena challenge wich you had only 3 tries during the day (similar to the bootcamp and not to the Arena at the present form).A common chest every 12 hours and that was it!Nothing else!The game EULA never mentioned anything about uninstalling/reinstalling or playing to more than 1 device.Actually by still advertising their over 50 million downloads of the game i believe that Rovio left this “door” open for a reason all this time (50 million downloads sounds a lot better than 500.000,who At Most are the active players, when it’s time to sell the product at the stockmarket,don’t you think so?
Then,slowly at first,things become to change.Gems that you can buy them,NOT earn them by your skills,common chests every half an hour (or every 15 minutes if you accept an offer they throwed back then,just to have you hooked).They changed the Arena too.First with 1 and 1 battle (with a not so “free” video,advertisement does pays).Again,if you had more gems,NOT skills,you could win.A 7strike Arena with opponents with much higher flock power from you (especially at the beginning it was a nightmare) full of spells.Sure,why not?Just have the spells to continue and you will be fine.
At that point a huge change factor came.A Daily challenge with black pearls on it to buy hats?!Sure,why not?The more gems to consume,the better.The victims of the early “free” game took the bait and they are now hooked for good.They even increased the number of rooms to 6 or even 7,with a Boss included before throwing the King Ping Panic mode!More challenges,more gems spending,more profit for them.And after only a short period they increased the amound of black pearls from 1.000 up to 25.000…For just 1 hat!Since you cannot have them elsewhere you have to play AND win the Daily challenge AND the King Pig Panic AND the Arena tournament Every week to get about 1.200 black pearls.Do the math and you will find out how much time you need to gather 25.000.But,don’t forget,you had the opportunity to buy gems.So keep buying and keep playing my friend…
But Rovio is too kind to have you standing helpless there.What did they do?Legendary chests wich with Only 900 gems you could buy some “great” stuff (lol,they even had a 4.000 gems chest for a while,anyone remembers that?!).And let’s not forget the Tower of Fortune.What do you mean there are NO skills required for opening cards?To find the right card is trully an art,is it not?!But you don’t have to worry about that.Just get something betweeen 20.000 up to 60.000 gems and if/when you reach the top of the Tower you will get a Legendary hat!Or 500 black pearls if you already have this particular hat!Not 25.000,not 5.000.Just 500…Hey don’t be ungreatful,there used to be only 3 cards to choose from and now they are increased to 4,that’s very generous of them (btw to get 20.000 gems will cost about 200 dollars,isn’t so?!).And you can only have 55 free gems per day now they stopped giving them through the chests!Lol,that’s exactly a “med” dealer’s way to do business…
And of course there comes the clans.What better way to increase the gems spending than 50 adicts trying to get a goal or win some other 50 adicts?To pay,free at start and then up to 60 gems (200 for a clan war) is a relatively good deal…For them.
The bootcamp maybe looks like the cherry on top (Only 300 gems to play an extra and with all these “great prices” after the end of it?!just hilarious).Actually it is not so funny because it’s Rovio’s only tool for detecting cheaters and ban them.I don’t concider the report button as a tool because it is not.It is just their way to make other people do all the dirty work for them.Report,then banned with no specific explanation.Job well done.Oh,meanwhile some hackers still have some great scores there (like 145M something).Job not so well done Rovio.
Bottom line for me is this.With all the game fails(no video for a free bird,no 60 gems continue at times) and lots of crashes (during map/dc/kpp/clan/bootcamp,actually Everywhere) i still love to fling there.I play this game right from the start and i am not willing to throw away all these thousands of hours just for a greedy company’s stupid policy.They have made their terms and i have made mine…

*I challenge Anyone to play legit there and max one bird.Just only ONE!Except the 120.000 black pearls for all the hats also more than 1.000.000 feathers will be needed.And Rovio keep raising the bar!So do the math first before you continue to live in this utopia.From where i come from there is an old saying and it goes like this “the fish starts to smell bad FIRST from the head”…

[ccanis]

@ntns Arena is definitely not a live battle with opponent. It’s a fixed score  that you have to beat. This score has been ‘scored’ 5 minutes to hours before (new day, new rooms, new scores) and has been asigned to you by the algorithm. And the algorithm chooses for you the opponent with score or ratio (mentioned by @yue-zhang) rising each fight in streak.

[ryan-kochie]

Games change, features come and go, you either like it and stick with it or move on to another game. For me it’s not about being max or trying to get max, it’s about having fun and enjoying the game. I’m happy pushing myself to do my best and be a mid-level player. Some people have this “need” to be maxed out, top dog, so they find ways to play the game not as intended to get that.

Rovio may not have realized how much exploits were being abused, so kept increasing the levels to match, but people kept gobbling them up as well because they “had” to be max. It’s perfectly fine not maxing all of your cards, or any of them. Play the game how you want, but when it comes to the multi-player aspect those kinds of people make it harder for those who want to play the game within intended gameplay and not cheat to get ahead. Pushing them down in bootcamp, making clan battles ridiculous when you are up against a clan that heavily clones.

If you want the old game you are fine to ignore the new features, stick to the arena and the maps. But I find clans and bootcamp some of the most fun added to this game since I started playing, and good for Rovio for trying to slowly make the multiplayer aspect more honest.

[RIP Piggies]

@Disab.ed

It’s nice that your legal friend thinks there’s a way to argue – Perry Mason style – that you didn’t “cheat” or breach the terms of use. I don’t buy it. You cheated, and you KNEW you were cheating. Suck it up. You thought you were smarter than those who were playing the game fairly? Warm glow of smug satisfaction as you maxed out by being “clever”? It’s all everyone else’s fault, now that you’re banned, isn’t it?

 

[DisAB.ed]

RIP Piggies, you seem to be well informed about Rovio‘s terms of use and their banning policy:

(1) Was Rovio‘s recent ban actually only intended to take out  ‚maxed out‘ players? ( I was far away from being ‚maxed out‘, when I got banned)

(2) Can you be a bit more explicit as regards the ‚terms of use‘: What exactly is to be considered as a ‚cheat‘ under Rovio‘s terms of use?

 

[RIP Piggies]

@DisAb.ed – I have no idea about their banning policy. In fact, I find it silly and quite poorly targeted. Obviously, a lot of cheaters have not been banned – and perhaps many of those have committed more “severe” offences than you think you did. I also set out on another thread that I think the “bans” approach is dumb; much better to just strip players of all BPs, gems and hats as a first consequence than simply ban. As for your second point, the “help” item under “why was I banned” can provide you some clues: “We expect our players to play fairly, honestly, and respectfully. To that end, we have a zero tolerance policy towards cheating…”

Some examples are provided such as “taking advantage of game exploits”, and there is a link to the EULA that you can read.

But none of that matters, actually, and your post above indicates you’re more focused on finding legal wiggle room so you can be suitably outraged at being banned, rather than being honest with yourself. Whatever the legalese says doesn’t actually matter to me. You cheated, and you knew you were cheating. Now you’re banned.

[jo-ha]

AB2 is Rovio’s sandbox and there are some rules set by Rovio, that we have to follow, whether we like it or not. You piss in their sandbox, you get kicked out.

I used the known exploits a lot, to this day I haven’t been banned – but, starting with the first “ban wave” I stopped using those exploits, because I don’t want to start over OR clone an account. The Flock I created is my flock, even the cheating was “fun”. When those 25.000 hats came out I thought about quitting, because they seemed unachievable for me.
Yes, there is absolutely no need to be max, but I wanted to be max because I was able to with those exploit and I liked it.

Now I am grateful, that I wasn’t banned and play without any exploits. But honestly, I don’t see ANY reason to spend money on this game anymore, because now the progress in this game is so unbelievable slow (50.000 feathers for one level, 45 days waiting to see if I can buy another samurai hat, etc.). It doesn’t feel rewarding any more. I started playing with 3 accounts to feel some kind of achievement, but it consumed too much time…

I think it is wrong to ban players immidiately. There should be fair warnings – ignore them, keep pissing in the sandbox and you’re out, play legit and you can stay. And I am still convinced, that banning cheaters is the cheapest way out of Rovio’s faulty programming. There are so many issues with this game right now, but I feel they focus on the wrong ones first. If they had introduced e.g. a scaling for feather rewards (and not give 100 feathers after completing level 1300…), there would not have been such a need to cheat (at least for me).

[DisAB.ed]

@jo-ha

What makes you feel so sure, that you won’t get banned by Rovio any moment … for something you did already long ago?! There are no rules in this respect and Rovio don’t loose a word about this. Apart from merely technical aspects (which I am not able to judge), there is nothing that could keep Rovio from extending their search for potential ‘cheaters’ to earlier periods … and ban customers, who have been so unwise (or wise) to stop making further payments to Rovio (this, at least, seems to be a very plausible explanation for what happened at the recent ban-wave: Some players that ended up in top ranks of the MEBC season were banned, others escaped the ban).

[ryan-kochie]

I think before Rovio was never quite clear on this being allowed or not, like you said they knew about it for years without action, almost like endorsing it, not even a statement saying it won’t happen. I’ve played other games with much more customer interaction, on forums and social media, saying “This glitch has been fixed, this isn’t allowed”, etc. They’d come out and say what updates they are working on, more behind the scenes info, what they do to counter cheaters (as vague as necessary). I don’t think I’ve seen their social media comment on it once, only fluff pieces. Customer service will give some answers, but it would be nice for their page or site to say “10,000 people were banned for massively intentionally abusing glitches”. Give us random stats “they opened over 2,354,456 legendary chests without paying any gems. Or even fun stats “With the rainbow feathers 60% of the feathers went to the J brothers”. Be interactive.

Now that it is clear that they view it as cheating, I would hope they would commend anyone who stopped at the first ban wave and leave them alone without a ban. Reset stats maybe, but that’s it.

[Yue]

Remember the first ban? Someone in this forum said something and then Hank replied “sorry, a mistake and your account has been recovered”. That’s right. a mistake.

If this person didn’t know this forum and hadn’t tag hank, what would it be?
Ban for no reason!!!! that’s the first impression when I asked myself above question.

As far as I know, paid to Rovio is the protection umbrella. Glitcher or not, all depend on rovio’s “secret” judgement. You paid, well, leave you there though rovio said
“zero tolerance”. Rovio just lied and lied again.

I personally love the game but, to rovio, one of my finger is up.

[jo-ha]

@schmock: nothing makes me sure, I won’t get banned in the future. I just hope that I am off their radar since I stopped using exploits when the first bans occured and didn’t use them since then. Oh, and like you said, I still pay for the gem letter ;-)… but we also learned that paying some money won’t help you when you cheat heavily.

[Crash Angerson]

Thank you for your response @ccanis.Yes,of course i know that the Arena battles are not live,that’s why i used the ” ” for the word (lol,iam about to get my 97th Gold there,i would be clueless if i haven’t figure that out by now).
Nevertheless,i think that my theory still stands.The algorithm is there to match the opponents by their scores.Btw,now they are doing a better job because at the early days the matches there were just a massacre.But the tournament opponents algorithm still needs more work to be challenging (star rank of 7 and flockpower of 19 for the Legendary League,really Rovio?!).New day,new Arena rooms that u cannot replay them (so there for u cannot practice them) and scores that still,i think, cannot be hacked.Your try against another’s,what better way to judge who is the best?
Since the clans and the bootcamp started a have seen lots of scores above 100M.Lol,there was even a 145M (greatest flinger ever?!).But i have never seen this score at the Arena.Until now.I guess that proves my point…
Anyway this is not an Arena topic,propably its my mistake to write so much about it here.As for the reporting and the banning i agree 100% with @yue-zhang (I also post my thesis 2 days ago).

[007]

An obvious cheat. At the end of last season only the top 5 would have been able to buy 3 samurai hats, this player has 6! Reported.

 

[Yue]

@nas76

to call it smart or stupid?

[Juan Luis Valenciaga Parma]

The team of rovio is young and has a total adoration for money, they show the desire to become wealthy in the shortest period of time, but unfortunately their methods are not honest andnot clean either.
Now, I don’t understand how having this love for money and more than 2 million players and in which there must be at least 5% cheaters, it doesn’t occur to them to penalize cheats with a fine, with an equivalent to one or two purchases of the maximum package in the shop, plus a downgrade to calculate, and thus allowing them to stay. Surely many would pay and Rovio would bring in a good amount of those euros and dollars that they love so much.