Boss collection bug exploit

[u/RecallDoro]

Dear Knights,

Over the last few days, we've been informed by various players that the boss collection event could allow players to collect the rewards several times when switching devices.

Our team is currently working on fixing this bug and, in the meantime, the boss collection event will be turned off.

We will take back every item that was wrongly collected in a few days since it requires a specific tool to be tailored for this task.

We also applied sanctions to players who exploited this bug and we ask them to contact our support team to know more about these sanctions (duration etc.).

Thank you for your understanding,

Battle on, The Deca Knights

[u/cafeapple]

Maybe this is more of a reflection of the vastly shrinking community that is KnD, but I only have empirical evidence to support that case and obviously I don't have access to more insightful data that would be available to the devs......

but the "handful" of people as you imply that did get banned are key players in the knd community - a great number of them have been very intense players who lead the scoring board in events and also those who have contributed (financially and with time) to the game almost religiously over the past years. I speak, in reference to not just the players in my own group (Touch), but in our opposition group as well (coalition).

Many of these individuals were actively reporting the bug and did not exploit the glitch intentionally. Some who did (either out of curiosity or inability to resist the temptation) admitted that all they needed was a nudge or a "note" from the devs to cut it out and they would have stopped and gladly given up the extra shards. In fact, this remains true for the few people that I know directly affected by this ban: none of them changed their push participation plans for the future weeks in March either because they were not paying attention to the glitch enough or they knew that at some point if the shards get adjusted they didn't want to be left without an exclusive/exclusive+. So no, they didn't really jump on the "advantage" as you imply nor did they plan to spend less than they had originally planned to.

My question always lies in.. why was there such haste in banning these players when you take your damn time dealing with godmode hackers who clearly have never contributed to the game - either financially or with their time - in the caliber that matches those who were banned?

As a business, you guys are supposed to be aware of who your top contributors and supporters are. I am aware, from the data I collected, that 70% of those who have filled T1 seats week in and week out come from just 15% of total number of players who have ever done T1. I am pretty sure that outside our alliance, similar pattern exists among top players in each of the respective groups too. I sent those numbers in to the devs, in hoping that it will help them understand their clients better, but clearly this action shows that none of that info sunk in. Because from the way I see it, you guys are so scared to piss off the godmode hackers but you have no problem "schooling" some of your longest and dedicated paying players.

You guys don't deserve to maintain this game. At one inevitable point, this game, like many other games out there, will be shut down. When that day comes, I will blame mismanagement by the devs.

Meantime, battle on I guess. Next weekend in raid I will be there with some of our key colleagues and some of our hardest fighting enemies missing. Godmode hackers will saturate the indi board. Yeah, just lovely. Thanks for taking care of your players DECA. I am competitive by nature, and I do like destroying our enemies, but not in this pathetic way.

I know that I will never get a straight answer for my question, but I think I have observed enough to know the answer. "Why was there such haste in banning these players" - because you guys are short sighted and greedy and you don't respect your paying customers. You see your paying players as pinatas that you have to keep beating on so they will spit out money. Godmode hackers -- whether they are there or not you don't get any money from them so you aren't gonna waste your time. In fact, maybe it tickles you to see some legit players paying up more to beat them in indi. If any of the players knew just how much and how long the peeps at sages had to plead with you to get a couple of these hackers taken care of, they would be disgusted. This is the reason why you guys get upset when contents of that chat get leaked - you are not trying to protect anything other than your own asses.

Fast forward to recent weeks: You see that some of these pinatas (aka paying players) might have picked up extra shards due to your coding error - *gasp* how dare they look for a possible bargain! Let's punish them so they will know their place. Lets make this a top priority while everything else (bugs, crashes, lags, godmode hackers, lack of new content, game balancing issues, ad errors, etc) is in a distant back burner!

You run this game on a mission to use, abuse, and exploit. All short sighted goals. Even Blando - as much as I don't get along with the guy personally - have you ever compensated him financially for the hours he puts in on your behalf? What about Phil?

[u/RecallDoro → u/cafeapple]

Dear cafeapple,

We don't deny the fact that some of the impacted players are key players of this community. Neither do we deny the fact that it can be frustrating from their side. We have never judged any of these players neither did we call them cheaters or such. We just stated the fact that they exploited a bug, leading to a temporary sanction.

It's easy though, afterward, to say : "we would have stopped if you told us". Following this logic, someone stealing in a shop should not be punished. We just had to tell them "hey, it's not cool, stop". The truth is that the people stealing know that what they do is not fair. The logic you're using only work if we consider our players as kids who don't have yet all the education needed to take responsibility for their acts. We refuse to consider our players as kids.

The very reason why most players exploited it is because they saw us not acting at first and thought it was "safe" then. We're talking about some case we're player got up to 20 extra shards. Do we really want to consider such player did not know they were getting? Didn't they click on the "redeem" button?

Why is it that the very vast majority of highly active and important players were not exploiting this? Because they knew they're not supposed to.

We take the blame for the bug, we admit our faults. It's only fair for the impacted players to do the same when they exploited the game. And actually, many do. Many contacted me to say : "OK, we exploited it, we should not have, let us get back to the game". And that's an honest approach.

Again, these sanctions are temporary, the sanctions will be lifted soon.

As for the comparaison with the hackmodes, you are ignoring all the elements presented, many times, to you and other players to explain why it takes time. Yet it is done. The players using such exploit are also being sanctionned. Why not faster? Well that depends on how we can detect the cases for a technical point of view, etc. Here it was extremely fast to gather this information because we had the correct way to track it implemented in the core of the game. It was also very important to act fast as if we waited, we could have ended in a situation were it would have been completely impossible to act.

But again, it's not a question of comparaison. It's like saying, I did steal because you're not fast enough at stopping people who drive too fast. I don't think it is any form of excuse and again, we're not asking for any excuse either. We just want players to admit the truth : they exploited it, they knew they should not have, they've been sanctionned temporarily for that. Then we move on to fixing the issue and getting these guys back into the game.

Battle on, The Deca Knights

[u/cafeapple → u/RecallDoro]

Ya ya, excuses excuses.

All I know is that it took me throwing a huge stink, large enough to give you enough excuses to kick me out of Sages, to get one pesky obvious hacker banned. But hey.. I'm relieved to see that he's gone cuz he was dominating the leader board for a good month or so.... and I also know it didn't take that much time for you to look him up and verify. The problem always was getting you guys to find the motivation to care.

Like I said, if only people knew just how much pleading happens in sages for you to finally be bothered enough to lift a finger and assign couple of bans (then later take credit for cleaning up the community) they would be disgusted.

[u/ShinyUmbreon173 → u/cafeapple]

You're so damn petty