From Rovio to Epic Fans: Cheaters and Leaderboards

[MVNLA2]

@rovionefuah — Met an opponent at level 50 in the arena. Will post pic later. While I’m leaving messages that you will probably never read, it seems that the opponents you meet in the arena are much stronger than you are.
In case you aren’t keeping track, it’s been 2 weeks and 5 days since you’ve posted. It will be 3 weeks before you’re even at work again.
Can’t believe how polite everyone is being, considering your and Rovio’s obvious contempt for you most dedicated fans.

[MVNLA2]

@rovionefuah — Here is pic

[HarleyM]

@tigerussell Because, if the system is really done randomly, you might have 4 more ghosts below you. Typically, 3/15 advance, or 20%. In this (possible) case, 2/10 players will advance, still 20%. As I described earlier, though perhaps not quite clearly enough, if the ghosts are selected at complete random from the entire player pools, they will help players in the top half of the ladder and hurt those in the bottom half, due to unbalanced wheels, but on average have no effect. The mere existence of ghosts creates additional slots for people to advance.

Imagine the most basic case: League one, 15 players. League 2, those 15 players and 15 near identical ghosts of those players, all jumbled up somehow. In league one, 3 people advance, as expected. In league two, six people advance, but on average three of them are ghosts (sometimes more, sometimes less). There will still be three humans advancing, on average. The problem with the system, assuming it is random, is that you don’t notice when you benefit, especially because nobody here has bothered to try to identify ghosts located at the bottom of their leagues.

If you don’t believe me, and would be interested, I can put together a simple excel simulation to confirm what I’ve said. The more important question, I maintain, is how are the ghosts chosen, because that’s what lets us determine if it really is fair. They should really limit ghosts to the same league if they actually want it to be fair for everyone on average, instead of fair for the players as a whole, on average.

[laura118b]

The problem is the ghosts never seem to stay in the same league as the real player. The point jumps have been too high, not cheating high, but higher than that league realistically supports. Not to mention the screen shots of ghosts of people from this board showing a copy in wood or stone when the person will say they are in gold or higher.

[t_russell]

@harleym — My problem with ghosts is that they are not really in your league so they are not reacting in a natural manner as real players would. Now I don’t have a problem with being in second place this week. I more or less allowed that to happen when I stopped playing two days ago. I also happen to know jorge would have been fine with third place in his own league. He is on my friends list and is always near the top of my first page as am I. I know for a fact what a good player he is.

He is obviously reacting to something going on in his league and has posted 20,000 points in the last 24 hours. So his reaction to something I am not entirely privy too has taken him from third place to first place in my league.

Now you see he will likely take a transfer spot in his own league and one in mine. Fine by me but what if there were two other real players along with myself trying to transfer up. One of them will be wrongly left behind. This is the thing that needs to be avoided. And for the sake of argument he has also been ghosted into three other leagues where the same thing has just occurred. Now you would have four people wrongly left behind.

I don’t believe I will be credited with first place but in a few minutes we shall see.

[KerrAvon]

@harleym I really think you must have made some incorrect assumptions if you believe there can be any benefit from players having ghosts on their leaderboard.

When you join a leaderboard, other players can still continue to be added to the leaderboard – until it fills up with 15 legitimate players. If, after a certain period of time, the leaderboard has not been filled, then the empty slots are filled by the so-called ghosts.

The ghost can either have no effect – if the ghosted player does not play and gains zero or a few points. If the ghosted player gains enough points to move above the bottom three positions of the leaderboard, then they will be pushing legitimate players on the leaderboard down. That’s a negative effect no matter how high or low on the leaderboard they climb.

If the ghosts were not added to the leaderboard, and the leaderboard only had 6 players, then so be it. So long as they play, the 6 players will be fighting it out for the top six positions and no-one will be demoted. As soon as you add a ghosted player, you are going to affect the top 6 players.

Players whose “ghosts” achieve a high position on the leaderboard do not gain anything. These ghosts only occupy positions on leaderboard that legitimate players should occupy.

[HarleyM]

Without ghosts they *wouldn’t* leave it at 6 players, though. They would just keep letting legitimate players fill it up.

[KerrAvon]

Exactly. They have a number of options available to them to fill the leaderboards. Although as far as I am concerned, they don’t need to (and should not) fill all of them.

They could fill each leaderboard sequentially. But that would leave an issue with the final leaderboard.

Or they could open up 100 leaderboards, fill them all up and then open another 100 leaderboards. And as the joining activity slows they can open fewer leaderboards.

I would have no issue if the final leaderboards had 8, 9 or 10 players (of course it would be better if that were 11, 12 or 13 players). That would mean people joining at the last minute would join an active leaderboard with people they would have to compete against. I don’t have any sympathy for players who join late and expect an easy win.

Instead they have an arbitrary time where they close a leaderboard and add ghosts – and apparently these ghosts can come from any league.

[Neomerlinmagic]

I don’t know why it’s necessary to have ghosts at all. Why can’t the leaderboards fill up naturally with players? Worse case scenario is that the very last leaderboard wouldn’t be full, but at least they’d be competing against other real players on an even playing field.

[LondoJowo]

I noticed that yesterday I played the same 6 players over and over with pretty much the same results. The 3 that defeated me were different from these six and one had birds at level 36 vs my level 45. The team was using the chrono crest and some birds got as many as 3 attacks per round. The final round the other team got 7 attacks.

[LondoJowo]

Now the person (QUASH) is showing as level 45 and had many attacks per round again. When I use the Chrono Crest I may get one extra attack per round if I’m lucky. His bomb got 6 attacks in one round this last game.

Quash was also a cheater during the last PvP campaign, the week he was in my league he had over 450k points for the week.

Edited to add:
I just played Larry and he got 3 time jumps the entire match.

I just got matched with Quash again and I shutdown the game. I’ll go back in a few minutes.

[LondoJowo]

@larry In the past two days I’ve played you 8 times, 5 times today. Is this really you or your ghost?

[laura118b]

I don’t think I’ve ever played someone on my board. The player pool is different than the leaderboard issue I think.

[HarleyM]

@londojowo You never play against an actual human. Notice that the enemy birds always play immediately after you begin your turn, and you never sit around for 10 minutes for them to move. No matter if it is a “player” or a computer-generated opponent, you are playing against a computer controlled set of birds.

[burbman]

@londojowo – I too have noticed that it seems like my opponents are being drawn from a very small pool, with the same opponent sometimes coming up two or three times in a row. I am curious what is causing this. Surely there are more than 20 or so level 45 teams in Platinum league. One of the teams I keep running across is level 50, and has a power ranking of nearly 1,000. I kind of like the challenge every once in a while.

I actually failed to meet my 3,000 point objective, as I could not find enough suitable opponents to satisfy the target class. This with over 4,000 battle points earned for the day plus the 2,500 I got for the other two objectives. Very frustrating.

[Bubbley]

@burbman I am also playing the same small pool of opponents. Apart from running across you yesterday, I lost. I am playing in Gold league so in theory I should not have met you. What I find frustrating is that 6 of the players in my league still have scores of zero which I don’t believe, one is an ex diamond player. This is the second week when I have no way of deciding how to play. Does anyone else have this situation?

[Bubbley]

@londojowo I have played you five times in the past two days. Twice out of three games this morning.

[Neomerlinmagic]

@bubbley my board is also filled with 13 players with 0 scores still. Just me and 1 other player with any points. I thought maybe the scores weren’t updated yet, but still the same today. I wonder if I’ve been matched with people who quit playing arena.

[Angry Johnny]

@neomerlinmagic Exactly the same in my League; me and 1 more player with scores, the other 13 have names but no score.

[Bubbley]

@neomerlinmagic I don’t think so. Last week my board remained empty until Friday when it filled with competitive players. Since Rovio are not running a parallel event I don’t understand the reason for all this mucking about with leaderboards. It didn’t happen in the previous season. I would be interested to know if half my board are ghosts. Try as I do I fail to attach a photo this post but perhaps we should start looking for ghosts more seriously again.

[Neomerlinmagic]

@bubbley Last week on the first day it was me and a full board of 0 scores, but a few hours later everyone else disappeared and I was alone until Thursday. At that time my board refilled. I was fortunate to have continued to do my objectives every day and found myself still in first place.

[t_russell]

It would appear that all the active players this week are on my board.

@rovionefuah Do you think you can spot the cheater? I understand that a lot of work has gone into preventing cheating in the arena and things are a lot better than at the beginning but seriously. You need to find a way to stop the leaderboard hacking. These people are stealing from you. Not to mention driving away other potential business.

I thinks it’s time to bring out the BAN HAMMER. Any other gaming server admin would have done this weeks ago. There is absolutely no reason these players can not be banned and the scores removed or zeroed.

It’s time to grow a spine, loosen the grip on the “friendly mobile gaming image” and put these people in their place.

[Jamairoqui]

My league (gold) also has 6 active players and 6 players with names but scores of 0. The total score of one active player is 25, so referring to him as “active” is kind of a stretch. Maybe this is like last week, where everyone was alone until Thursday, and then they populated the leagues for real, and it was like a car race when the green flag goes up after a yellow.

[MVNLA2]

@roviorefuah — Please note that the thread you created is no longer sticky, so it will rapidly sink into oblivion unless users, especially you, keep it active.

[KillerKea]

@mvnla2 The person from Rovio like me probably has message notifications turned off so unless he logs in to this site he is not getting anyone’s messages. You may think people are being polite, but if I was support I would find these barrage of messages to be quite annoying and some of the messages seem to bash Rovio so I might find them a little insulting too.

You may not like ghosts, but I understand why they created them. They created them to try and prevent people who login late in the week from having a free ride to the next league. I don’t think logging in minutes before the league ends and fighting one battle so you’ll be the only one on your leaderboard, automatically earn 1400 snoutlings with the number 1 spot and advance to the next league is fair either. Without the threat of ghosts a lot of people would abuse this technique which I consider cheating because you didn’t truly earn or deserve the advancement.

They could certainly implement other methods like a minimum score to advance to the next league, but that is not how they choose to tackle this problem.