Rovio, please clarify: Are there NPCs in the Challenge Competitions?

[Pampeans]

Several irregularities in the game play during the challenge competition are causing players to question whether all the players in the respective competition groups are real. Please clarify: Are there NPC (non-player characters) in the competition groups?

@gradientturtle7

Topic

[Tomlad]

I would hope not as that would take some fun out of the comps. Also If you are playing on IOS devices (iPhones etc) is anyone getting an updating your progress bug?

[TriPolar]

@talmud I usually play on my Android tablet but I had the looping issue with the last update as many have. I was able to borrow a family members iPad which I had set up. Since they don’t play any AB games, I had previously installed all of the games that I know of that have any type of cloud back up.

There were no issues on the ipad at all, in terms of being able to play. Only problem is that I missed almost half of the event. So not many tokens for me.

Game play itself is much better on Android than on the ipad. There times the game camera zooms in so close you can’t see any of the falling pigs or even the buddy that you call in. So, I’m hoping to get my Android game working again soon. I didn’t want to loose any of the progress I had so I didn’t try anything yet. Also didn’t want to corrupt any of cloud files. These Rovio updates are at times so buggie that I didn’t want to add to the issue.

[Pampeans]

@tripolar

“There times the game camera zooms in so close you can’t see any of the falling pigs or even the buddy that you call in.”

I complained about this on this forum (to the attention of Rovio) right after the update that caused it. Not only can you not see the pigs when the camera zooms in, the buddy that’s off screen will not shoot at them (he can’t see them either, ha!) and then buddy times out in less than 5 secs (even when you watched a video for 15 — again, he can’t see anything, so why hang around); and my personal favorite, 3-4 of the flying pigs end up behind the Tf. Slow firing Tfs get slammed into (and loose hearts) because they can’t turn, shoot and turn back quick enough. This is my experience mostly in the beach nodes, but sometimes in the forest. In the desert, it just randomly zooms in with no flying pigs, but when it zooms out you have to fire behind the Tf to try and get this one box of 4 gold blocks way in the distance. Don’t get me started…

[Optimus_Pig]

I wouldn’t be surprised. There seem to be a lot of names on the leaderboard that don’t really move once the grouping’s been created. Only a few players ever seem to be truly competitive.

[TriPolar]

@pampeans I hear you bud! For me it was the first time I’ve ever played on an i-anything. Never had the experience before at all. Now that you mentioned it, I think I do remember reading your post but not having the issue on Android, I couldn’t relate or have anything of value to add.

I guess every platform has it’s own issues!! Is that why they dropped windows support?? I mean the real reason not just what we’ve been given. Too many issues with different platforms so drop one and decrease the amount of “fit it” request.

I like supporting things I find useful & enjoy. So I’ll pay for software, I’ll donate to freeware to keep it going. When on windows phone, Rovio did get some money out of me. Not ashamed to say it nor do I regret it. But when all of these buggie to the point of unplayable updates come out. I won’t pay. I don’t want to spend money on a game that is going to tell me I can’t play and my money is gone. It’s bad enough that I bought a tablet just to be able to Angry Birds… All of the games.. It sucks that they don’t all have backups and if you switch device’s or platforms you have to start all over again. The response I hated hearing from Rovio after reporting a problem was “sorry, your device isn’t supported”.

One of my first issues with ABT was the graphics would get messed up during a mission. I was guessing at what I was shooting at or if I should transform.
Now, I’m tech guy and if something isn’t working right I want to know why. In a mission the graphics are messed up but if I pause the game, the graphics were perfect. So I tried to get the tech requirements for the game and I’m pretty sure the person I was emailing didn’t know the answers. If it’s not a code problem then it’s a resource problem. Obviously wasn’t a compatibility issue since everything else was fine. If I’m able to fix it on my end it would be quicker than waiting for them. Probably save them a bit too…but they wouldn’t let me know what the game needed to be properly functional. Storage space, memory, nothing. I ended up not playing for a while but I kept the game installed and when ever an update came out, I’d apply it and hope that one day it would work. Until then I’m playing other games.I’m not hurting for storage space so it’s good. Eventually, I guess it was sometime after the thanksgiving update that it started to work almost perfectly. I just had to adjust to the new way the game worked with the energonicons and stuff.
So, I missed 2 purchase bots don’t know the else but was able to play and get shockwave. Now I’m not sure I would have paid for those bots after what happened and the now…forced to use someone else’s ipad to play the game… If I can’t bring it back to my Android tablet. I am definitely not spending money on anything. Last year they screwed up Epic majorly now it’s this one.

We need a thread of forum, where we can all just go and complain and tell our stories with these games. Maybe Rovio would take a peek there at some point because most of these things, when we report it to them nothing happens. Fake appoloigies. No attempt at support and the likes just build up our frustrations. Which always makes me question, why am I addicted to Angry Birds… I have no idea any other company or game, I would have just cut them off my play list and move on.

To anybody who reads this my apologies for the rant. Sometimes we just need to put things out there and vent!!!

[sheepybach]

There has to be NPC’s in the buddy system also as Epic O Prime is popping up a lot of late from level 1 to level 15 with different accessories on

[gradientturtle7]

@pampeans

No. I can confirm unreservedly that every leaderboard entry you see relates to a real player, showing the name they entered and the score they’ve accumulated.

I’ve gone into some detail in another post here about how we’d like to improve leaderboards in future, hopefully leading to a clearer competition experience and making changes in position more understandable.

[Pampeans]

@gradientturtle7

Thank you for the clarification. It’s curious how there’s only about 6 people playing in each group with the person in the #1 position seemingly playing a lot more than the other six. I have managed to win, but I always come from behind in the end, I’ve never been in the #1 position during the competition. Conspiracy theories abound when there’s been an obvious downgrade at the same time a contest occurs and there’s no explanation or instructions for either. I love to see the analytics for this game. There has to be a better way forward than constantly taking things from the players.

I appreciate the response.

[Pampeans]

@tripolar

I’m glad for the validation about the gameplay. I feel like iOS is the step-child.

[Jackie Jackson]

I had the experience in the gold block competition where I was in 2nd place with 2 minutes to go and dropped to 20th. I was 150 blocks ahead of last place. If you remember there were no levels that contained mega blocks for this to happen unlike the hay bale competition. I contacted customer service and got the standard leader board in not in real time answer. However in my case I was well ahead of everyone except 1st place and that person was only a few blocks ahead of me. It was impossible for me to fall to last place. I finished in the top 3 of every other competition. I know I am not the only person this happened to and I started the game once I was fully charged and spent gems only to be rewarded with last place.

[TriPolar]

Sometimes it feels like they move us into different groups at random… Usually, when we are doing really well. There have been a time or two that it worked in my favor. It was from around 5th place to 2nd (200 points better)… But going from 1st to 4th really hurts (1000 to 300 points) even 3rd or 2nd is bad…we loose half our tokens. I ddon’t mind too much if they have computer generated players, like in Epic, where you see a high score at the start but it doesn’t change on you. It’s almost like motivation and when you pass them you don’t have to worry them coming back. Also, mix some real players in there, so that there is real condition that you can track their real time progress. Hopefully the next one is better!!

[TriPolar]

@pampeans just an observation that I made a day or two ago… The ipad that I borrowed wasn’t in true widescreen scale while the Android tablet was. Thinking back to the other devices that I’ve used to play Rovio games on (mostly Windows phone’s & an Android phone) they were all true widescreen displays. That might actually be what is affecting the i-experience. I noticed it from either the 1st or 2nd game that I played on the ipad. At first, I was expressed with the graphics. Then, part of me started to think if the screen protector (on the Android) or if newness of the ipad had anything to do with it. It was afterwards that I realized that it was WAYYY zoomed way in so I could see graphic detail better but there are thing off of the screen shooting at me. I couldn’t see the balloon pigs until after they were on top of me or behind me, either way too late to kill and more life lost. Then Ialso rrealized that I couldn’t find my buddy that I had called in… Started trying to pinch the screen and stuff to manually zoom out, then my transformer died and it stayed zoomed in. I’m not even sure if I ever saw zoom back out unless it switched sceens. Like when you’re running along the beach shooting towards the sea then you go to the forest type of place. That is the only time it would go back to the regular view. I’m thinking that it is either something in the code but more likely the ios or video display adapter that is doing something strange. Usually, I’m quick to put the blame on Rovio for things going wrong but because of the differences in screen dimension scales and the fact that other than when a transformer dies there’s no zooming on any other platform… I would like to know if I’m wrong about this but I remember way back when I wasn’t able to play and would just look in the forums to see what I was missing that only a certain part of the population complained about off sceen enemy’s that were shooting & killing them with no way to shoot back. If there is a connection there, then it is the ipad that has the issue. At least, that’s what I believe it to be.

[WeeNaoise]

The reason I don’t believe in the players in the group is that whenever you finish your first contest there are already 19 players on the leaderboard. Unless you always join a group 20th, you would expect to see some positions vacant because even players joining at just the same time as you would not all have finished their first round before you.

[SnTrooper]

I’ve had many times where there was not a full roster. Once I was completely by myself after one round.

[sheepybach]

I’ve had the same 400+ ahead with a few mins to go and then its was over and the parcel appeared when I selected it I got 200 tokens it was nuts as a few in that last 2mins had to get near a 1000 to overtake me. Crazy

[Pampeans]

@tripolar

Thank you for all the thought you have put into this. I started a thread to specifically address this issue.

@everyoneelse

Regarding NPC’s I have been sort of researching the AB franchise by reading the forums and using search engines. I now realize that Rovio has a big problem with fraud. So much so, in some of the games there’s probably more people cheating than playing by the rules. Just do a simple search on “cheating in angry birds” — I was stunned. This is just on the internet, I can only imagine what’s on darknet. I’m not a big gamer, so clearly I’m naive about what’s going. However, I am an application developer — not games, but boring enterprise P/Saas apps — and I can’t imagine a scenario where the majority of the users are successfully subverting the code, which being in the volume business like Rovio, directly impacts the ability to generate income and therefore stay in business. That said, it does happen albeit a smaller scale. But the level of sophistication with the cheating that’s going on in the AB franchise is probably more sophisticated than the actual game code (jmho).

I know in client/server apps there’s a tendency not to trust what comes from the client because of fraud and I always thought that was the reason for the “Updating Your Progress” code — people rooting/jail braking the device and manipulating the save files. I also know it’s very difficult to stay ahead of cheaters because at the very least you have to keep implementing new technology after the fact and most of the time you’re forced to innovate when you don’t have the resources to do so. It’s very easy for fraud prevention to overtake progress. It doesn’t matter how fast, sleek and sophisticated your new plane is, if it’s leaking all the gas, it won’t stay in the air.

That being said, @gradientturtle7 I believe you that there are no NPCs in the challenge contests and we are probably just complaining about cheating. Thank you, for taking the time to monitor this forum and respond to requests that are harshly worded and do not give Rovio the benefit of the doubt. I’m guilty of this and I apologize. Your attention and consideration is greatly appreciated. Please continue to try and help us (you and all of the other Rovio peeps on this forum), the honest users of this game, you are doing a wonderful job. I promise, the number of pigs/coins/gems, etc. that I have accumulated are from playing the game the way it’s designed to be played.

[Optimus_Pig]

This is kind of interesting. Someone in the ABT facebook group posted a pic showing that six out of the top ten competitors in his group are all named “Player”, lol.

https://www.facebook.com/groups/abtdp/permalink/980064322074201/

[Pampeans]

That is interesting, you’d think there would be some sort of check that would keep players from using the same name. I hope that’s not evidence of cheating…

[Pampeans]

I actually have 3 out of 10 players named “player” in my group.

[omp180]

Also there are players in the fan challenge that seem to leap ahead with 21 fans in 1 round. Hmmmm, seems legit.

I doubt many people will get this new OP.

[The Dark Knight]

Hello there! I am getting trouble with the new Prime Target Competition, how is this possible, i am 3413 points ahead and the 4rd one with 2204 points in few minutes has over passed me 3738 points? how is possible? how many gems must be used or how many lucky targets with extra points must be done so can over pass me in 20 minutes? There is a cheating i can’t understand how but it must be there something!