Okay look. This is devolved into something it shouldn’t. I agree that the concerns of macro usage or whatever is legitimate. But I can assure you that in the case of the top this is not what happened. They have saved for months in preparation for little time on the top. There was no unfair advantage deployed. Unless you count sleep deprivation and large amounts of Mountain Dew and Jolly Ranchers an unfair advantage. They more than earned their time in the spotlight. And to be made to feel like they are gonna be burned at the stake for doing so. So please, let’s move on.
I just wanted to note that the way Skirmish Events function, no saving is required. You can enter the event with 10 chronitons and conceivably win because the chroniton rewards given out during the event exceed the chroniton expenditures required. Galaxy Events function the way you're describing, but not Skirmishes.
This seems to be true for a lot of players but not myself. I saved 5000 chrons going into the event. These lasted for the first phase when I then needed to open the 3600 chrons I had in mail. I did forget about one voyage during the event and so lost around 400 chrons. I have been playing for exactly 5 months today, and this stash of chrons to me was fairly substantial. I don't buy chrons. I did use 3 supply kits.
My rank was 121. I was really proud of this and although I used my entire back up of chrons for the rank, honor and achievement I got I was fairly happy.
This macro issue is really very sad, and its soured the entire event. I don't know if it would have affected my rank, and tbh its not my rank that's bothering me, its the fact I'm not sure I'm ever going to push that hard in the next skirmish because I don't know if I'll be pushed down by an automated robot. Much as I love Data, he's always going to beat me in a competitive environment, because he's a machine and I'm not. I really like skirmish and had been excited all week about it.
Thinking as I write this post, I'll probably still enjoy playing, I like the honor and holoemitters for our fleets. However I probably wont be spending my evening's playing skirmish like i did this event, I'll play during the day when my OH is at work, and as I've said before I don't think I'll be buying event packs for skirmish anymore either.
Wow, that's a lot of saving and a lot of work. Sincerely, congratulations on your achievement, and I'm sorry to see it pushed down by the robots.
Thanks 😊😊 i can't blame the robots for it all tho, took me 9(!!!) hours to work out the best crew and ship for epic. Very thankful I had a brainwave at 2am (if interested, I switched Duras Sisters for Killy during an elite battle and then wondered what effect they would have if I put them on the same ship together i shall also forever love the TOng at a level 7 it did an incredible job.
I started the event with 35,000 chronos. I finished with 30,000. I played consistently, though not all day and certainly not all night. I made approx, 300,000VP per day, ranked 157, final VP over 1,350,000. That's actually quite a lot of play, but nowhere near others. I can appreciate people putting in twice as much effort as me, even three times as much. Four times as much, ouch. You're pushing the limits of mental endurance here.
But not 6 or 7 times, overnight for 4 days straight. Without a break. That's absurd.
And then, we even had people admitting to using a bot and putting it online for others to see. Well, am I surprised? Hardly. Nice to have proof of what I already suspected.
My credulity is stretched when all of this is outright denied. I was mildly annoyed yesterday, today, after reading this thread, I'm getting angry. A game is a game. There are rules, and you abide by them. Otherwise there's no point. It stops being fun.
I don't think DB will sanction anyone, and frankly I don't care. What's done is done. What I do want to do is send a message.
Using a bot is cheating. This isn't cool. It's not funny. It's not clever. People think less of you for it. You are ruining the game, the sense of fairness and the possibility of someone legitimately challenging the first position. This is contemptible behaviour and it should stop. Immediately.
DB you should be aware that the player base, by and large, dislikes cheating. Star Trek fans have a deep sense of honor and respect, and we don't like disrespectful people. You should look into the use of bots very, very seriously and instead of outright denying every problem you should trust some of your long-term players and look at this very, very seriously.
It's for the benefit of your players, and it's for the benefit of you.
I really hope DB has a way to address this but one solution I do not want is yet another button to click. The skirmishes are already tedious.
If they want to add an additional button to click in between skirmishes, then give something to the players in return. Remove, or significantly shorten, the animations at the beginning and end of each battle. Do that and I won’t mind chasing a little button around the screen. But adding a button to just make these take even longer would be madness inducing.
To clarify, the button should only present at the start/end of a skirmish run - NOT between battles.
And yeah, dump the animation.
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You get enough folks doing it and everyone in the top 1000 will go scripted just to make the rank vs the other folks making top 1000. That then gatelocks the 5*.
And if it's not checked you will see more and more do it each event. That's just how these things happen.
Not my first rodeo in that respect.
See, as I said, I just don't think you'd have nearly that many people risking losing their accounts. Especially for such minimal return, relatively speaking. Because I think DB would (and should) permanently delete anyone's account who is found to be using such methods. Whether they would be able to catch many doing it isn't really the point, it's that the risk factor is too great. It's like pirating movies — if, instead of 3 warning letters from your ISP, you were instantly executed if caught illegally torrenting a copyrighted movie (it's a wild example, but just go with me here for the sake of argument), I'd bet the number of people willing to attempt it would drop off severely.
Also, to respond to Belle'Anna's reply to me above...
A game is a game, and there are rules. If people are allowed to break the rules, then where do we stand? We all break the rules? What is the point of rules, or even the game, then?
As I stated in a previous post in this thread, I never said this was a non-issue. It's of course something that shouldn't be allowed. What I'm talking about is my opinion of the effect that something like this has in actual terms, not in alarmism about possibilities that will (again, in my opinion), probably never happen.
Could you please continue the petty bickering? I find it most intriguing. ~ Data, ST:TNG "Haven"
I think we're a fair distance from the sky falling due to macros in terms of top 1k.
I finished 664.
I saved no chrons, I earned my first intel about 4.5 hours after event started and I stopped playing 2.5 hours before event ended. I ran one supply kit starting about the 18th hour of the event (covered 3 8hr Voyages and Friday's Cadet chrons - no additional runs). I still had about 30k intel left when I stopped.
I reckon I did about 8 hours of grinding, but I'm sure someone could math it out if they cared (I'm pretty sure my Cube set up wasn't the most efficient as there were 2 ships that occasionally refused to die quickly - ran Locutus, Crell, T'Kuvma and Weyoun).
Anyway, what I'd like to see is DB enact one of those mythical communications with the player base in terms of how they're going to respond to this. I suspect there's more chance of me successfully ticketing CS for a unicorn though.
I'm going to start off by saying I don't know either of the top two players, but the third place finisher is in my fleet. I don't find the fact they playing the event consistently for close to 96 hours a reason to think its proven they used a macro, at best I think its inconclusive and its reckless to go throwing accusations around without more proof than they scored consistently for a long stretch of time.
It may seem like an extremely hard thing for someone to stay up for 96 hours straight and click at buttons, but how many of you would feel confident enough to bet someone say $10,000 as an even money bet that they couldn't do it. Put that sort of money in front of someone and I think they can find enough caffeine to do it. Now ask yourself if there are people here who have invested enough in this game that they would value an event win enough to put themselves through this.
Now maybe you feel confident enough to say that the one person will accidentally fall asleep accidentally at some point and want to take that even money bet at $10,000. What if they bet was there are 10 people going into the event with the intention to stay up all 96 hours and you have to have all 10 fail in order to win the bet. Would you still take that bet?
The fact is there are 4-5 people who put up remarkable scores in this event. While it may seem like a stretch for them to have been consistent enough to have done this, the fact remains we don't know how many people "tried" to this and failed.
I also don't think its as impossible as people are making it out to be to sit there and do this for 96 hours. While I'm not proud of it I've had stretches of being awake for 66/72 hours with the majority of it at a poker table making constant decisions for that stretch. Honestly playing a skirmish event would actually help keep me awake during one of those runs. Actually, if I ever don't have work obligations during thursday/friday of an event I may fly to vegas and do just that and play the skirmish the whole time at a poker table.
As to the "fact their scores are too consistent in each hourly period" to be real, have any of you ever looked at the splits of some marathon runners, I'm pretty sure there are plenty of people out there who run marathons with 26 mile splits within 10 seconds of each other (not just elite runners but people in the 7-9 minute mile range as well), toss that into a regression formula and let me know what the correlation factor is and how it compares to people in this event.
I'm going to start off by saying I don't know either of the top two players, but the third place finisher is in my fleet. I don't find the fact they playing the event consistently for close to 96 hours a reason to think its proven they used a macro, at best I think its inconclusive and its reckless to go throwing accusations around without more proof than they scored consistently for a long stretch of time.
It may seem like an extremely hard thing for someone to stay up for 96 hours straight and click at buttons, but how many of you would feel confident enough to bet someone say $10,000 as an even money bet that they couldn't do it. Put that sort of money in front of someone and I think they can find enough caffeine to do it. Now ask yourself if there are people here who have invested enough in this game that they would value an event win enough to put themselves through this.
Now maybe you feel confident enough to say that the one person will accidentally fall asleep accidentally at some point and want to take that even money bet at $10,000. What if they bet was there are 10 people going into the event with the intention to stay up all 96 hours and you have to have all 10 fail in order to win the bet. Would you still take that bet?
The fact is there are 4-5 people who put up remarkable scores in this event. While it may seem like a stretch for them to have been consistent enough to have done this, the fact remains we don't know how many people "tried" to this and failed.
I also don't think its as impossible as people are making it out to be to sit there and do this for 96 hours. While I'm not proud of it I've had stretches of being awake for 66/72 hours with the majority of it at a poker table making constant decisions for that stretch. Honestly playing a skirmish event would actually help keep me awake during one of those runs. Actually, if I ever don't have work obligations during thursday/friday of an event I may fly to vegas and do just that and play the skirmish the whole time at a poker table.
As to the "fact their scores are too consistent in each hourly period" to be real, have any of you ever looked at the splits of some marathon runners, I'm pretty sure there are plenty of people out there who run marathons with 26 mile splits within 10 seconds of each other (not just elite runners but people in the 7-9 minute mile range as well), toss that into a regression formula and let me know what the correlation factor is and how it compares to people in this event.
Don’t think you understand what “consistently” means in this context. We are not talking about staying up, we are talking about the kind of consistency only a machine can produce.
In the 96 hours they have to go the BATHROOM. If they were humans we would see a variation in the hours were a bathroom break was taken. Except we don’t see that. Even the quickest bathroom break would show up in the numbers. The lenght of the bathroom breaks would also vary so even if you scheduled them for let’s say once per hour (also not believable), you would be able to tell a human from a machine. If you told me that you sat at poker table for 96 hours without using the bathroom I would tell you that you are lying.
In marathon, you don’t take bathroom breaks. Also as someone who trained for a marathon I was aware of maintaining consistence splits because that’s what the “how to run a marathon” books and smatwatches told me to do. 3-4 hours of consistency is far cry from 96.
Yes, I will take any money bet that these results were not natural.
I'm going to start off by saying I don't know either of the top two players, but the third place finisher is in my fleet. I don't find the fact they playing the event consistently for close to 96 hours a reason to think its proven they used a macro, at best I think its inconclusive and its reckless to go throwing accusations around without more proof than they scored consistently for a long stretch of time.
It may seem like an extremely hard thing for someone to stay up for 96 hours straight and click at buttons, but how many of you would feel confident enough to bet someone say $10,000 as an even money bet that they couldn't do it. Put that sort of money in front of someone and I think they can find enough caffeine to do it. Now ask yourself if there are people here who have invested enough in this game that they would value an event win enough to put themselves through this.
Now maybe you feel confident enough to say that the one person will accidentally fall asleep accidentally at some point and want to take that even money bet at $10,000. What if they bet was there are 10 people going into the event with the intention to stay up all 96 hours and you have to have all 10 fail in order to win the bet. Would you still take that bet?
The fact is there are 4-5 people who put up remarkable scores in this event. While it may seem like a stretch for them to have been consistent enough to have done this, the fact remains we don't know how many people "tried" to this and failed.
I also don't think its as impossible as people are making it out to be to sit there and do this for 96 hours. While I'm not proud of it I've had stretches of being awake for 66/72 hours with the majority of it at a poker table making constant decisions for that stretch. Honestly playing a skirmish event would actually help keep me awake during one of those runs. Actually, if I ever don't have work obligations during thursday/friday of an event I may fly to vegas and do just that and play the skirmish the whole time at a poker table.
As to the "fact their scores are too consistent in each hourly period" to be real, have any of you ever looked at the splits of some marathon runners, I'm pretty sure there are plenty of people out there who run marathons with 26 mile splits within 10 seconds of each other (not just elite runners but people in the 7-9 minute mile range as well), toss that into a regression formula and let me know what the correlation factor is and how it compares to people in this event.
I would assume your legit crew member is remarkably pissed that other people in the event have admitted to using macros when he stayed up all night for 4 days straight to get his result?
I really hope DB has a way to address this but one solution I do not want is yet another button to click. The skirmishes are already tedious.
If they want to add an additional button to click in between skirmishes, then give something to the players in return. Remove, or significantly shorten, the animations at the beginning and end of each battle. Do that and I won’t mind chasing a little button around the screen. But adding a button to just make these take even longer would be madness inducing.
I'm going to start off by saying I don't know either of the top two players, but the third place finisher is in my fleet. I don't find the fact they playing the event consistently for close to 96 hours a reason to think its proven they used a macro, at best I think its inconclusive and its reckless to go throwing accusations around without more proof than they scored consistently for a long stretch of time.
It may seem like an extremely hard thing for someone to stay up for 96 hours straight and click at buttons, but how many of you would feel confident enough to bet someone say $10,000 as an even money bet that they couldn't do it. Put that sort of money in front of someone and I think they can find enough caffeine to do it. Now ask yourself if there are people here who have invested enough in this game that they would value an event win enough to put themselves through this.
Now maybe you feel confident enough to say that the one person will accidentally fall asleep accidentally at some point and want to take that even money bet at $10,000. What if they bet was there are 10 people going into the event with the intention to stay up all 96 hours and you have to have all 10 fail in order to win the bet. Would you still take that bet?
The fact is there are 4-5 people who put up remarkable scores in this event. While it may seem like a stretch for them to have been consistent enough to have done this, the fact remains we don't know how many people "tried" to this and failed.
I also don't think its as impossible as people are making it out to be to sit there and do this for 96 hours. While I'm not proud of it I've had stretches of being awake for 66/72 hours with the majority of it at a poker table making constant decisions for that stretch. Honestly playing a skirmish event would actually help keep me awake during one of those runs. Actually, if I ever don't have work obligations during thursday/friday of an event I may fly to vegas and do just that and play the skirmish the whole time at a poker table.
As to the "fact their scores are too consistent in each hourly period" to be real, have any of you ever looked at the splits of some marathon runners, I'm pretty sure there are plenty of people out there who run marathons with 26 mile splits within 10 seconds of each other (not just elite runners but people in the 7-9 minute mile range as well), toss that into a regression formula and let me know what the correlation factor is and how it compares to people in this event.
Don’t think you understand what “consistently” means in this context. We are not talking about staying up, we are talking about the kind of consistency only a machine can produce.
In the 96 hours they have to go the BATHROOM. If they were humans we would see a variation in the hours were a bathroom break was taken. Except we don’t see that. Even the quickest bathroom break would show up in the numbers. The lenght of the bathroom breaks would also vary so even if you scheduled them for let’s say once per hour (also not believable), you would be able to tell a human from a machine. If you told me that you sat at poker table for 96 hours without using the bathroom I would tell you that you are lying.
In marathon, you don’t take bathroom breaks. Also as someone who trained for a marathon I was aware of maintaining consistence splits because that’s what the “how to run a marathon” books and smatwatches told me to do. 3-4 hours of consistency is far cry from 96.
Yes, I will take any money bet that these results were not natural.
On a serious note, regarding the data compiled, Is the frequency of the sampling hourly, or was something more frequent done? I would be curious what the high and low VP was per hour, rather than graphical charts.
I'm not sure if the bathroom comment was serious or not about that being a major issue, but newsflash, people use smartphones on the toilet. In fact it may be the activity I can think of in a busy workday where playing a skirmish would be the least disruptive.
At points this last weekend I was time crunched enough where I literally was playing skirmishes while I was cooking a meal (not a very complicated meal), but playing a skirmish involves only one hand if you put the phone down on a counter and you have periods of 5-10 seconds every battle you don't do anything).
If i had no other obligations, stayed at home, and was able to stay awake for the 96 hours, I can't imagine what I would need to do that would stop me from playing for more than 1-2 minutes at a time, other than wanting to take a shower, and that would mainly be to help stay awake and not be a necessity.
Using a bot is cheating. This isn't cool. It's not funny. It's not clever. People think less of you for it. You are ruining the game, the sense of fairness and the possibility of someone legitimately challenging the first position. This is contemptible behaviour and it should stop. Immediately.
I'm going to start off by saying I don't know either of the top two players, but the third place finisher is in my fleet. I don't find the fact they playing the event consistently for close to 96 hours a reason to think its proven they used a macro, at best I think its inconclusive and its reckless to go throwing accusations around without more proof than they scored consistently for a long stretch of time.
It may seem like an extremely hard thing for someone to stay up for 96 hours straight and click at buttons, but how many of you would feel confident enough to bet someone say $10,000 as an even money bet that they couldn't do it. Put that sort of money in front of someone and I think they can find enough caffeine to do it. Now ask yourself if there are people here who have invested enough in this game that they would value an event win enough to put themselves through this.
Now maybe you feel confident enough to say that the one person will accidentally fall asleep accidentally at some point and want to take that even money bet at $10,000. What if they bet was there are 10 people going into the event with the intention to stay up all 96 hours and you have to have all 10 fail in order to win the bet. Would you still take that bet?
The fact is there are 4-5 people who put up remarkable scores in this event. While it may seem like a stretch for them to have been consistent enough to have done this, the fact remains we don't know how many people "tried" to this and failed.
I also don't think its as impossible as people are making it out to be to sit there and do this for 96 hours. While I'm not proud of it I've had stretches of being awake for 66/72 hours with the majority of it at a poker table making constant decisions for that stretch. Honestly playing a skirmish event would actually help keep me awake during one of those runs. Actually, if I ever don't have work obligations during thursday/friday of an event I may fly to vegas and do just that and play the skirmish the whole time at a poker table.
As to the "fact their scores are too consistent in each hourly period" to be real, have any of you ever looked at the splits of some marathon runners, I'm pretty sure there are plenty of people out there who run marathons with 26 mile splits within 10 seconds of each other (not just elite runners but people in the 7-9 minute mile range as well), toss that into a regression formula and let me know what the correlation factor is and how it compares to people in this event.
Don’t think you understand what “consistently” means in this context. We are not talking about staying up, we are talking about the kind of consistency only a machine can produce.
In the 96 hours they have to go the BATHROOM. If they were humans we would see a variation in the hours were a bathroom break was taken. Except we don’t see that. Even the quickest bathroom break would show up in the numbers. The lenght of the bathroom breaks would also vary so even if you scheduled them for let’s say once per hour (also not believable), you would be able to tell a human from a machine. If you told me that you sat at poker table for 96 hours without using the bathroom I would tell you that you are lying.
In marathon, you don’t take bathroom breaks. Also as someone who trained for a marathon I was aware of maintaining consistence splits because that’s what the “how to run a marathon” books and smatwatches told me to do. 3-4 hours of consistency is far cry from 96.
Yes, I will take any money bet that these results were not natural.
On a serious note, regarding the data compiled, Is the frequency of the sampling hourly, or was something more frequent done? I would be curious what the high and low VP was per hour, rather than graphical charts.
I'm not sure if the bathroom comment was serious or not about that being a major issue, but newsflash, people use smartphones on the toilet. In fact it may be the activity I can think of in a busy workday where playing a skirmish would be the least disruptive.
At points this last weekend I was time crunched enough where I literally was playing skirmishes while I was cooking a meal (not a very complicated meal), but playing a skirmish involves only one hand if you put the phone down on a counter and you have periods of 5-10 seconds every battle you don't do anything).
If i had no other obligations, stayed at home, and was able to stay awake for the 96 hours, I can't imagine what I would need to do that would stop me from playing for more than 1-2 minutes at a time, other than wanting to take a shower, and that would mainly be to help stay awake and not be a necessity.
I'd like to know what drugs they took and whether they need counselling for staying up for 96 hours straight without sleep. I've heard it can send you truly doolally. Especially when doing repetitive tasks. I know from driving long distances without sleep that hallucinations can set in, and microsleeps are a real danger. Dropping the phone or pad is yet another. I'm simply not of the belief that someone can do that. To my way of thinking, if someone has achieved the absurd its up to them to prove it, not for me to simply accept it as fact.
I'd like to know what drugs they took and whether they need counselling for staying up for 96 hours straight without sleep. I've heard it can send you truly doolally. Especially when doing repetitive tasks. I know from driving long distances without sleep that hallucinations can set in, and microsleeps are a real danger. Dropping the phone or pad is yet another. I'm simply not of the belief that someone can do that. To my way of thinking, if someone has achieved the absurd its up to them to prove it, not for me to simply accept it as fact.
I've done it a few times, and yes, it's CRAZYCAKES. At least it was for me. I remember one time in particular: in the final 24 hours, I didn't have any visual hallucinations, but I had wild auditory hallucinations. I also had lost a lot of hand-eye coordination, and my brain wasn't able to translate some of my visual signals to other parts of my brain — for example, I tried giving my phone number to a delivery guy (this was in the days when caller ID was a rarity), and I had to look at the numbers on the phone, since I couldn't remember it (!) ... but then, reading the numbers, I had to REALLY concentrate on each one, as I read it out aloud to him, and even then I think I made about 3 mistakes and had to go back and start again. Fun times. So, it would be an insane challenge to keep at anything for that length of time.
But is it humanly possible? Sure. And that's where I have to dissent from the last statement you made above... I think when you look at something like this, it needs to come from the point of view of an accusation being made (to use a courtroom term, the "prosecution"), and not from the perhaps difficult-to-believe declaration by the one being accused (the "defense") — in which case, the onus is on the accuser (or DB, which may seek to discover the truth, as well) to prove their assertion, not on the one who is simply defending themselves. Now, please understand that I'm not taking anyone's side here. But this goes right along with the very thin tightrope that DB must of course balance themselves on, in that before they take action against any player for violating their TOS by employing a macro during an event, they most probably would need to legally have incontrovertible proof — because, while the "I stayed up 96 hours and played without any unfair assistance" claim may seem to be within the realm of fantasy for some people, it is in fact within the realm of possibility, and that's where accusations can be very slippery slopes.
Could you please continue the petty bickering? I find it most intriguing. ~ Data, ST:TNG "Haven"
Am I to understand that in an event whose narrative was about ships being controlled remotely that some players cheated by using bots to play their ship battles for them? That's...pretty meta.
This is not an attempt to cause this thread to continue, the entry of Macros should be resisted tho, personally seen two other games (Lords Online (Naval) cancelled, Kingdom of Camelot (Feudal Mediaeval)severely diminished) after Macros impacted, in both it led to more sophiscated hacks of the game code itself.
Lords Online tried to block the Macros, failed. Kingdoms of Camelot blocked and banned most of them but legitimised a couple to run. Their tactic backfired, the players left in droves even entire alliances.
Ive no solution on how to stop the Macros but wish DB well in curbing their advance. The hope that many have that persistent growth of their crew, bonuses, and array of ships will yield a higher reward if lost can be catastrophic to a game.
This is not an attempt to cause this thread to continue, the entry of Macros should be resisted tho, personally seen two other games (Lords Online (Naval) cancelled, Kingdom of Camelot (Feudal Mediaeval)severely diminished) after Macros impacted, in both it led to more sophiscated hacks of the game code itself.
Lords Online tried to block the Macros, failed. Kingdoms of Camelot blocked and banned most of them but legitimised a couple to run. Their tactic backfired, the players left in droves even entire alliances.
Ive no solution on how to stop the Macros but wish DB well in curbing their advance. The hope that many have that persistent growth of their crew, bonuses, and array of ships will yield a higher reward if lost can be catastrophic to a game.
The solution is clear. Build events that require human thought to play. Don't build repetitive events. If DB turns this into a technical battle with bot writers, DB will lose. It's happened in other games, and it's happened in copyright infringement. Do you really want DB to have to spend all their resources fighting a losing battle to detect and block bots? I'd rather they focus on building a better game.
This is not an attempt to cause this thread to continue, the entry of Macros should be resisted tho, personally seen two other games (Lords Online (Naval) cancelled, Kingdom of Camelot (Feudal Mediaeval)severely diminished) after Macros impacted, in both it led to more sophiscated hacks of the game code itself.
Lords Online tried to block the Macros, failed. Kingdoms of Camelot blocked and banned most of them but legitimised a couple to run. Their tactic backfired, the players left in droves even entire alliances.
Ive no solution on how to stop the Macros but wish DB well in curbing their advance. The hope that many have that persistent growth of their crew, bonuses, and array of ships will yield a higher reward if lost can be catastrophic to a game.
The solution is clear. Build events that require human thought to play. Don't build repetitive events. If DB turns this into a technical battle with bot writers, DB will lose. It's happened in other games, and it's happened in copyright infringement. Do you really want DB to have to spend all their resources fighting a losing battle to detect and block bots? I'd rather they focus on building a better game.
Which could have the benefit of potentially more entertaining gameplay.
Based on the hourly data recorded and being used for the discussion - from Saturday at noon DB time (phase 2 kickoff) to event end on Monday at noon DB time -
Would I put up $10,000 of my money to sit and watch a human play this game for 96 hours, along side another member of the same fleet - and watch them consistently produce high-level VP at the same rate of accumulation over the span of 48 straight hourly increments without a decline or deterioration in the rate of their scoring? No.
This is not an attempt to cause this thread to continue, the entry of Macros should be resisted tho, personally seen two other games (Lords Online (Naval) cancelled, Kingdom of Camelot (Feudal Mediaeval)severely diminished) after Macros impacted, in both it led to more sophiscated hacks of the game code itself.
Lords Online tried to block the Macros, failed. Kingdoms of Camelot blocked and banned most of them but legitimised a couple to run. Their tactic backfired, the players left in droves even entire alliances.
Ive no solution on how to stop the Macros but wish DB well in curbing their advance. The hope that many have that persistent growth of their crew, bonuses, and array of ships will yield a higher reward if lost can be catastrophic to a game.
The solution is clear. Build events that require human thought to play. Don't build repetitive events. If DB turns this into a technical battle with bot writers, DB will lose. It's happened in other games, and it's happened in copyright infringement. Do you really want DB to have to spend all their resources fighting a losing battle to detect and block bots? I'd rather they focus on building a better game.
Which could have the benefit of potentially more entertaining gameplay.
For me, the simple solution is to reduce the grind - break the chron-intel nexus. This can be easily done by increasing the intel cost for running missions beyond 1200; something like 6000 or even 10,000. If this is done, the constraint will no longer be time but chrons. And the benefits from a macro will fall dramatically. For this very reason, I don't personally see the use of macros in galaxy events as such a big problem. The constraint there is mostly chrons (though some in my fleet say its time as well).
Other option, slightly harder for DB, is to make the battles longer and more difficult - so it is not over in one cycle and you have to actually think depending on how it goes and whether rng favors you. It will also create more differentiation on the leaderboards depending on crew/ship you have.
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Tone is hard to convey in text...it happens to all of us!
My last 2 have been above average then, as even taking Voyages into account, I've ended with more chrons than I put it.
Gotta love RNG when it loves you I guess.
well, it's a pretty strong feedback loop. 10000 chronos return 6200, return 3844, returns 2383, returns 1477, returns 916, returns 568.....
so for 10k chrono you are getting 25k+ with average RNG. I certainly saw runs where I got back more than I put in for that round though.
As a quick caveat, this is assuming you use a Supply Kit. Returns are significantly lower w/o one.
This seems to be true for a lot of players but not myself. I saved 5000 chrons going into the event. These lasted for the first phase when I then needed to open the 3600 chrons I had in mail. I did forget about one voyage during the event and so lost around 400 chrons. I have been playing for exactly 5 months today, and this stash of chrons to me was fairly substantial. I don't buy chrons. I did use 3 supply kits.
My rank was 121. I was really proud of this and although I used my entire back up of chrons for the rank, honor and achievement I got I was fairly happy.
This macro issue is really very sad, and its soured the entire event. I don't know if it would have affected my rank, and tbh its not my rank that's bothering me, its the fact I'm not sure I'm ever going to push that hard in the next skirmish because I don't know if I'll be pushed down by an automated robot. Much as I love Data, he's always going to beat me in a competitive environment, because he's a machine and I'm not. I really like skirmish and had been excited all week about it.
Thinking as I write this post, I'll probably still enjoy playing, I like the honor and holoemitters for our fleets. However I probably wont be spending my evening's playing skirmish like i did this event, I'll play during the day when my OH is at work, and as I've said before I don't think I'll be buying event packs for skirmish anymore either.
Edited to add I did use supply kits
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Wow, that's a lot of saving and a lot of work. Sincerely, congratulations on your achievement, and I'm sorry to see it pushed down by the robots.
Thanks 😊😊 i can't blame the robots for it all tho, took me 9(!!!) hours to work out the best crew and ship for epic. Very thankful I had a brainwave at 2am (if interested, I switched Duras Sisters for Killy during an elite battle and then wondered what effect they would have if I put them on the same ship together i shall also forever love the TOng
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But not 6 or 7 times, overnight for 4 days straight. Without a break. That's absurd.
And then, we even had people admitting to using a bot and putting it online for others to see. Well, am I surprised? Hardly. Nice to have proof of what I already suspected.
My credulity is stretched when all of this is outright denied. I was mildly annoyed yesterday, today, after reading this thread, I'm getting angry. A game is a game. There are rules, and you abide by them. Otherwise there's no point. It stops being fun.
I don't think DB will sanction anyone, and frankly I don't care. What's done is done. What I do want to do is send a message.
Using a bot is cheating. This isn't cool. It's not funny. It's not clever. People think less of you for it. You are ruining the game, the sense of fairness and the possibility of someone legitimately challenging the first position. This is contemptible behaviour and it should stop. Immediately.
DB you should be aware that the player base, by and large, dislikes cheating. Star Trek fans have a deep sense of honor and respect, and we don't like disrespectful people. You should look into the use of bots very, very seriously and instead of outright denying every problem you should trust some of your long-term players and look at this very, very seriously.
It's for the benefit of your players, and it's for the benefit of you.
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If they want to add an additional button to click in between skirmishes, then give something to the players in return. Remove, or significantly shorten, the animations at the beginning and end of each battle. Do that and I won’t mind chasing a little button around the screen. But adding a button to just make these take even longer would be madness inducing.
And yeah, dump the animation.
https://forum.disruptorbeam.com/stt/discussion/5023/qh-the-oldest-fleet-in-timelines-l91-starbase-daily-targets-met
See, as I said, I just don't think you'd have nearly that many people risking losing their accounts. Especially for such minimal return, relatively speaking. Because I think DB would (and should) permanently delete anyone's account who is found to be using such methods. Whether they would be able to catch many doing it isn't really the point, it's that the risk factor is too great. It's like pirating movies — if, instead of 3 warning letters from your ISP, you were instantly executed if caught illegally torrenting a copyrighted movie (it's a wild example, but just go with me here for the sake of argument), I'd bet the number of people willing to attempt it would drop off severely.
Also, to respond to Belle'Anna's reply to me above...
As I stated in a previous post in this thread, I never said this was a non-issue. It's of course something that shouldn't be allowed. What I'm talking about is my opinion of the effect that something like this has in actual terms, not in alarmism about possibilities that will (again, in my opinion), probably never happen.
Could you please continue the petty bickering? I find it most intriguing.
~ Data, ST:TNG "Haven"
I finished 664.
I saved no chrons, I earned my first intel about 4.5 hours after event started and I stopped playing 2.5 hours before event ended. I ran one supply kit starting about the 18th hour of the event (covered 3 8hr Voyages and Friday's Cadet chrons - no additional runs). I still had about 30k intel left when I stopped.
I reckon I did about 8 hours of grinding, but I'm sure someone could math it out if they cared (I'm pretty sure my Cube set up wasn't the most efficient as there were 2 ships that occasionally refused to die quickly - ran Locutus, Crell, T'Kuvma and Weyoun).
Anyway, what I'd like to see is DB enact one of those mythical communications with the player base in terms of how they're going to respond to this. I suspect there's more chance of me successfully ticketing CS for a unicorn though.
It may seem like an extremely hard thing for someone to stay up for 96 hours straight and click at buttons, but how many of you would feel confident enough to bet someone say $10,000 as an even money bet that they couldn't do it. Put that sort of money in front of someone and I think they can find enough caffeine to do it. Now ask yourself if there are people here who have invested enough in this game that they would value an event win enough to put themselves through this.
Now maybe you feel confident enough to say that the one person will accidentally fall asleep accidentally at some point and want to take that even money bet at $10,000. What if they bet was there are 10 people going into the event with the intention to stay up all 96 hours and you have to have all 10 fail in order to win the bet. Would you still take that bet?
The fact is there are 4-5 people who put up remarkable scores in this event. While it may seem like a stretch for them to have been consistent enough to have done this, the fact remains we don't know how many people "tried" to this and failed.
I also don't think its as impossible as people are making it out to be to sit there and do this for 96 hours. While I'm not proud of it I've had stretches of being awake for 66/72 hours with the majority of it at a poker table making constant decisions for that stretch. Honestly playing a skirmish event would actually help keep me awake during one of those runs. Actually, if I ever don't have work obligations during thursday/friday of an event I may fly to vegas and do just that and play the skirmish the whole time at a poker table.
As to the "fact their scores are too consistent in each hourly period" to be real, have any of you ever looked at the splits of some marathon runners, I'm pretty sure there are plenty of people out there who run marathons with 26 mile splits within 10 seconds of each other (not just elite runners but people in the 7-9 minute mile range as well), toss that into a regression formula and let me know what the correlation factor is and how it compares to people in this event.
Don’t think you understand what “consistently” means in this context. We are not talking about staying up, we are talking about the kind of consistency only a machine can produce.
In the 96 hours they have to go the BATHROOM. If they were humans we would see a variation in the hours were a bathroom break was taken. Except we don’t see that. Even the quickest bathroom break would show up in the numbers. The lenght of the bathroom breaks would also vary so even if you scheduled them for let’s say once per hour (also not believable), you would be able to tell a human from a machine. If you told me that you sat at poker table for 96 hours without using the bathroom I would tell you that you are lying.
In marathon, you don’t take bathroom breaks. Also as someone who trained for a marathon I was aware of maintaining consistence splits because that’s what the “how to run a marathon” books and smatwatches told me to do. 3-4 hours of consistency is far cry from 96.
Yes, I will take any money bet that these results were not natural.
I would assume your legit crew member is remarkably pissed that other people in the event have admitted to using macros when he stayed up all night for 4 days straight to get his result?
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Amen
On a serious note, regarding the data compiled, Is the frequency of the sampling hourly, or was something more frequent done? I would be curious what the high and low VP was per hour, rather than graphical charts.
I'm not sure if the bathroom comment was serious or not about that being a major issue, but newsflash, people use smartphones on the toilet. In fact it may be the activity I can think of in a busy workday where playing a skirmish would be the least disruptive.
At points this last weekend I was time crunched enough where I literally was playing skirmishes while I was cooking a meal (not a very complicated meal), but playing a skirmish involves only one hand if you put the phone down on a counter and you have periods of 5-10 seconds every battle you don't do anything).
If i had no other obligations, stayed at home, and was able to stay awake for the 96 hours, I can't imagine what I would need to do that would stop me from playing for more than 1-2 minutes at a time, other than wanting to take a shower, and that would mainly be to help stay awake and not be a necessity.
^THIS^
Ive heard so many reports of full refunds from this blunder. DB got to figure stuffs out
Timelines Crew Cost Viewer
I'd like to know what drugs they took and whether they need counselling for staying up for 96 hours straight without sleep. I've heard it can send you truly doolally. Especially when doing repetitive tasks. I know from driving long distances without sleep that hallucinations can set in, and microsleeps are a real danger. Dropping the phone or pad is yet another. I'm simply not of the belief that someone can do that. To my way of thinking, if someone has achieved the absurd its up to them to prove it, not for me to simply accept it as fact.
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I've done it a few times, and yes, it's CRAZYCAKES. At least it was for me. I remember one time in particular: in the final 24 hours, I didn't have any visual hallucinations, but I had wild auditory hallucinations. I also had lost a lot of hand-eye coordination, and my brain wasn't able to translate some of my visual signals to other parts of my brain — for example, I tried giving my phone number to a delivery guy (this was in the days when caller ID was a rarity), and I had to look at the numbers on the phone, since I couldn't remember it (!) ... but then, reading the numbers, I had to REALLY concentrate on each one, as I read it out aloud to him, and even then I think I made about 3 mistakes and had to go back and start again. Fun times.
But is it humanly possible? Sure. And that's where I have to dissent from the last statement you made above... I think when you look at something like this, it needs to come from the point of view of an accusation being made (to use a courtroom term, the "prosecution"), and not from the perhaps difficult-to-believe declaration by the one being accused (the "defense") — in which case, the onus is on the accuser (or DB, which may seek to discover the truth, as well) to prove their assertion, not on the one who is simply defending themselves. Now, please understand that I'm not taking anyone's side here. But this goes right along with the very thin tightrope that DB must of course balance themselves on, in that before they take action against any player for violating their TOS by employing a macro during an event, they most probably would need to legally have incontrovertible proof — because, while the "I stayed up 96 hours and played without any unfair assistance" claim may seem to be within the realm of fantasy for some people, it is in fact within the realm of possibility, and that's where accusations can be very slippery slopes.
Could you please continue the petty bickering? I find it most intriguing.
~ Data, ST:TNG "Haven"
Lords Online tried to block the Macros, failed. Kingdoms of Camelot blocked and banned most of them but legitimised a couple to run. Their tactic backfired, the players left in droves even entire alliances.
Ive no solution on how to stop the Macros but wish DB well in curbing their advance. The hope that many have that persistent growth of their crew, bonuses, and array of ships will yield a higher reward if lost can be catastrophic to a game.
The solution is clear. Build events that require human thought to play. Don't build repetitive events. If DB turns this into a technical battle with bot writers, DB will lose. It's happened in other games, and it's happened in copyright infringement. Do you really want DB to have to spend all their resources fighting a losing battle to detect and block bots? I'd rather they focus on building a better game.
Which could have the benefit of potentially more entertaining gameplay.
Would I put up $10,000 of my money to sit and watch a human play this game for 96 hours, along side another member of the same fleet - and watch them consistently produce high-level VP at the same rate of accumulation over the span of 48 straight hourly increments without a decline or deterioration in the rate of their scoring? No.
I'd put up $20,000.
Because I'd win that bet every. single. time.
For me, the simple solution is to reduce the grind - break the chron-intel nexus. This can be easily done by increasing the intel cost for running missions beyond 1200; something like 6000 or even 10,000. If this is done, the constraint will no longer be time but chrons. And the benefits from a macro will fall dramatically. For this very reason, I don't personally see the use of macros in galaxy events as such a big problem. The constraint there is mostly chrons (though some in my fleet say its time as well).
Other option, slightly harder for DB, is to make the battles longer and more difficult - so it is not over in one cycle and you have to actually think depending on how it goes and whether rng favors you. It will also create more differentiation on the leaderboards depending on crew/ship you have.