From Rovio to Epic Fans: Cheaters and Leaderboards

[MVNLA2]

@rovionefuah @KerrAvon — Here are some of the more recent posts about players appearing in multiple leagues, listed most recent first. Someone at Rovio should really read this entire thread (Presence Among Multiple Leagues) from start to finish. I fell like Rovio is expecting us to do their job for them. We have told you what the problem is, and given you the link many times, I think.

Presence in multiple leagues

Presence in multiple leagues

Presence in multiple leagues

Presence in multiple leagues

Presence in multiple leagues

@KerrAvon — Of course I forgot that while I was AFK, you were asleep! Cheers!

[KerrAvon]

@mvnla2 I also have arena fatigue.

It is the job of people at Rovio to deal with this and they can look at the multiple leagues thread if they desire – it is not that long. But if they want new data, then they may just have to wait a few weeks for players to advance up the leagues. I think it will be hard to spot ghosts in the lower leagues because there are so many more players in the lower leagues.

[Immortal… Larry]

@rovionefuah, there’s a lot of info in the multiple leagues thread indeed and @mvnla2’s links are all good examples. We’ve been keeping track during the last season a lot and that was easy since we were also tracking cheaters a lot. This meant that we were able to spot these ghost players across the different leagues.

Since you’ve tackled most cheaters, people are less active with screenshots of leaderboards. This makes it less likely that we will be able to spot them again. At least not as much as with the last season.

I’ll revive the multiple leagues so you can find it easily.

For the rest, since it is a priority at Rovio now, I would urge you to spend some time reading through the entire multiple leagues thread.

[Immortal… Larry]

@rovionefuah,

I’d like to ask you about another topic as well. The cheaters have mostly disappeared, except for a few. I spent a lot of time during season 1 to get to the bottom of all cheat methods out there and also sent detailed reports through your support. However, I am currently not aware of any other obvious ways of cheating except for modding in-memory values on a local device (which I have successfully tested towards the end of season 1).

Many online p2p games incorporate a banning system. Rovio used to state somewhere that players may get banned when using mods, cheats, hacks or bots. Will Rovio eventually consider taking out the axe on some players? If so, are there ideas on a timeline and if no, what are the considerations not to do this?

I am curious whether you are currently even able to track individual players at all and to what extent. Could you elaborate on that?

If you’re willing to listen to suggestions, there have been some great ideas in this forum on banning or degrading cheaters including features like reporting players in leagues (where more than x reports on one player should warrant investigation).

I am hoping for an in-depth reply… :)

[MVNLA2]

@rovionefuah — Perhaps we’re all failing to look for data on ghosts in the best place. Seems to me Rovio should have the ideal resources to figure out what is happening, after all, you control the code that assigns people to multiple leaderboards, and I assume this code is on your servers, not in the app code on our devices.
I would also assume that you do not assign people to more than one board unless you can’t find enough people to populate a board. This implies that you first search for people who are not currently assigned to a board. Thus a decision must be made within your code to assign someone who is already on a board. If the code does not currently keep track of this decision and who was assigned, it should be fairly easy to change the code to keep track. I say this as someone who has written lots of computer code, and who also had the phrase “fairly easy” on a list things not to say to others when suggesting changes. : P
This raises the question in my mind of how many ghost players might be assigned to someone’s leaderboard? It used to be possible for someone to end up on a board by themselves. Would they now end up on a board with 14 ghosts? How is it possible for ghosts of people who are playing in a higher league to be assigned to a lower league?
What happens to the ghost at the end of the week?

[MVNLA2]

@rovionefuah @gloomy — Here’s some really recent evidence of a cheater: https://www.angrybirdsnest.com/forums/topic/cheaters/page/33/#post-94792

[Immortal… Larry]

@rovionefuah, you there? Any chance you can find the time to reply to our posts up here?

[HarleyM]

While I would prefer not having ghost players, I would like to point out that they don’t necessarily make things harder for players… It all depends on how they are selected. If everyone has an equal chance of being selected as a ghost, for every ghost in the top three of your league there are four in the bottom 12. So even though they may take up a third of the advancing slots they are also responsible for a third of the leagues (and thus advancing slots) that exist, for a net effect of….nothing. For every diamond player that gets ghosted down to wood there is a wood player that gets ghosted up to diamond (so in effect ghosts will, on average, hurt low leagues while helping high leagues).

The important question, therefore, is how are ghosts selected. Is it truly random? Or does someone who is active in the league have a higher chance of being selected as the ghost, whether directly or by some other variable that correlates positively with activity? The ghost selection process is what needs the transparency, and anecdotes won’t cut it, because we are far more likely to notice the ghost with a score of 1 million than the ghost with a score of 50.

[FreckledPig147]

@harleym You do have a point, but I have to point out that because more points are earnable on the prize wheel at the end of battles in higher leagues, and that ghosts always have the same amount of points as their real-player counterparts, so it would be very unlikely for someone’s ghost to reach the Diamond League while the real player still can’t move to Stone League in that time (the ghost would almost certainly fail to reach Platinum League with the point funding of Wood). Added with the cheaters and the glitches like freezing during battles (which ends of costing several lives), this puts more and more strain on the lower leagues, and thus minimizes the number of players that can successfully get to Diamond League. People in leaderboards with ghosts originated from players in much higher leagues (and cheaters that got there before that) are pretty much doomed to not advance as a result. What I think is really wrong with the ghosts is that they keep existing and moving week after week instead of being reset to the real player’s league after each week. Basically bad players should be ghosted more so more people can advance, but this seems to not be the case at all. I guess EVERYONE has their own ghosts in PvP, but there’s no telling ghost from player.

[HarleyM]

Do they keep existing and moving week to week? I was under the impression that the ghosts always matched a real player’s score exactly. Otherwise… who is it ghosting? I understand that a diamond player can have a ghost in gold… but who is to say a gold player doesn’t have a ghost in diamond? Though yes, like I said, on average this will hurt lower ranked players more than higher ranked players (due to the average ghosted player being in the average league with the average wheel).

[FreckledPig147]

@harleym The ghosts move up or down from their position in their ghosted leaderboard. So for some people, a Diamond League person could have a Gold ghost. Or a Stone League player could have a Silver League ghost. Chances are that an average Gold League player would not get enough points for their Platinum League ghost to reach to Diamond League WITHOUT being 3rd to 1st in Gold League (that is, advancing to Platinum by the end of the week.)

[HarleyM]

@Freckledpig147 As I understood it, that was just conjecture. If I’m mistaken and that has actually been established (how it would have been established I have no clue) then ghosts are much more problematic than I had imagined.

[MVNLA2]

@harleym @freckledpig147 — The idea that ghosts continue to live their own, somewhat separate lives from week to week is just conjecture (probably started by me). There are other possibilities. We have no idea how or how many ghosts are chosen for a given leaderboard, or what happens to them at the end of the week.

[MVNLA2]

The only things we know are what @Rovionefuah has told us:
1) They were deliberately created by Rovio to prevent people getting leaderboards with no one else on them.
2) The ghosts do not win awards.
@rovionefual — Can’t you at least tell us whether a ghost that ends up in the first 3 spots prevents the person in 4th from advancing? Without the ghost the person in 4th would be in 3rd and would advance.
It would also be nice to find out how someone in the silver league can be playing against a ghost of a player in the diamond league (or at least some higher league).
BTW — Isn’t it about time for you to pop in and acknowledge that you are in fact paying attention? Sorry to say that your absence makes it very easy to believe that you and the rest of Rovio aren’t really paying attention.

[HarleyM]

@mvnla2 Regarding “Without the ghost the person in 4th would be in 3rd and would advance.”, my entire point was that that’s not necessarily true. If the average ghost is the average player, that means that the average player that ends up in 4th behind a ghost would have ended up in 4th behind a real player even without ghosts, because there would be fewer total leaderboards. There is a psychological frustration involved that might not exist without ghosts, but on average it won’t actually harm anyone.

Again, this assumes that the average ghost is the average player (which might not be accurate at all). It also disregards the fact that on average the top half of players will benefit while the bottom half of players will be harmed due to wheel imbalance.

[MVNLA2]

@harleym — In several of the not many case nesters documented, the ghost obviously was ghosting someone in a higher league, and ended up first or in the top 3. Whether it would be the same person who was in 4th with the ghost present, or someone else, there would be 3 legitimate players who would have advanced without the ghost, while only 2 of them advanced with the ghost present.
I suppose that most of us aren’t comforted by the idea that “on average” the ghosts don’t harm anyone. We are complaining about the fact that Rovio intentionally introduced a “fallback method” that in some cases creates unfair competition between legitimate players in a lower league and the ghost of a player in a higher league (with higher payout for each battle).

[MatasL]

new red helmet (april-7) in tournament battle. His stats was buggy, i can’t check details
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B9rBVNtveiMFbUpGS3pRQ1pMQ3M/view?usp=sharing

[FreckledPig147]

@rovionefuah @harleym @mvnla2 It might be only conjecture, but it sounds like a very plausible theory for me (or maybe they’d be reset and somehow put to a lower or higher league than normal, there’s no telling which ghost was which–there could be more than 1 ghost per real player). The only other alternative theories I could come up with would be:

1) Ghosts are put into leaderboards completely randomly, ignoring leagues.
(I don’t even understand why this would make sense)
2) The ghost placement is even more complicated than this! (Like somehow some hidden variable sets the ghost’s position right away (this is probably not true, but i.e. the characters in the current leaderboard occupants’ names)?)
(Why would this be so complicated anyways? It’s just a waste of memory space or something like that…)

But anyways, for one player, if a ghost (whose real player counterpart is from a higher league) in the leaderboard was placed in the top 3, that would clog up the advancements. Plus less rewards would be given to real players. Even if the real player was in a lower league, it will still affect the flow of real players that can advance. Correction: It could affect the leaderboard flow no matter what because some people would be bumped down from that person’s efforts to advance, also creating an inverse effect that pushes people down the leagues. But I don’t consider this as large a concern as with the limited advancements to upper leagues.

[laura118b]

@rovionefuah, any word on when the update will go live for ALL users? On day 2 here and still nothing for us Amazon users. I know that there’s not as many of us as Google Play, but Amazon isn’t some tiny company either. We must have a bigish chunk of your business, why are we routinely ignored?

Edit: it’s finally updated as of 4 pm central time.

[MVNLA2]

@BirdLeader @rovionefuah — Rovionefuah hasn’t posted in >2 wks. Perhaps it is time to undo the sticky thread and let this die a quiet death. It isn’t helping Rovio to have this as a sticky thread if they aren’t going to show any indication that they are paying attention. I mean, there was just an update to Epic, and there is no comment by Rovionefuah about whether the new update addresses any of our concerns.

[t_russell]

No one in leaderboard

If anyone cares to look. Fresh evidence of a GHOST.

[Bird Leader]

@mvnla2 I can 100% see your point. With that said, I am confident they are watching this topic eeven though they are not actively participating in it now. It may not have produced tangible changes yet, but the sheer fact that it exists is a good sign.

I will leave it sticky for a few more days then remove it.

[Bird Leader]

Thanks for taking the time to share that @tigerussell

[Sir Falcon]

Hey there,

I understand your intention is good @rovionefuah, but Rovio Support is ACTUALLY USING THIS THREAD AS AN EXCUSE NOT TO ANSWER OUR COMPLAINTS ABOUT THIS ISSUE. I hope that I get this clear: This thread does not account for all our whims.

Sorry if I offended anyone in this post.

Yours always,

@flying-falcon

[t_russell]

Now second place to a known ghost. I realize it won’t affect the outcome of his week, but it will certainly affect the outcome of mine correct? I fail to see in this instance how this action does “not affect the leagues”. I can’t imagine I was the only person in the whole world to start twelve hours late. This system needs to be retired.