IMPORTANT: possible game exploit

[P1noyboypj]

I wanted to inform the admins and public that there may be a possible exploit in the system. I normally get more points from winning vs higher rated players than lower, regardless of league sometimes. However, I noticed in several games that if the person loses after being inactive, they lose LESS points than they lose via give up or actual kill. I'm a rank 1 super Titan so my rating changes slowly.
This needs to be fixed. Tko and cover, resignation, and base kills should both give equal points if they don't already, and losing by auto-forfeit timer should be MORE points since theoretically they are keeping me from playing more games and winning them by taking up a slot.
I understand this post will probably make more people try to exploit, but maybe it'll get things fixed faster.

Then again I could be wrong...

[Glorishears]

Remember that a lower-skilled player is considered less likely to beat you and thus loses fewer points for each loss. And in my experience, the lower-skilled players are the ones more likely to abandon their games. So unless you've seen the SAME player lose fewer point for a abandon than a loss, that's likely all that's going on.

[PallaZ]

First post after thread opener

Full quote

[P1noyboypj]

Yes. I've seen some same players lose MUCH less after timing out vs losing regularly. Granted thy are lower at this point. I've also seen higher ranked players lose less than rank 80+ people by using this method.
The only true way to test this is challenge the same person twice. Then time out on one and lose the other. Maybe time out first so it'll be at a higher rank initially.

[Glorishears]

Save up your replay links until you have a pair showing the problem, then email the devs with the bug report. Remember the replays show the number of points gained/lost.

[Kamikaze28]

(07-21-2012 02:04 AM)Glorishears Wrote:  Save up your replay links until you have a pair showing the problem, then email the devs with the bug report. Remember the replays show the number of points gained/lost.

Won't work. Since your supposedly exploiting opponent could have finished any number of games between the time out and the 'true loss', your results are meaningless.
Since you can't arrange league games this will probably end up a conspiracy theory.

To look at this from a different perspective: say you have 10 games running and for whatever reason can not do a turn for a week - you will lose all those games to the timeout - one after the other. And that's my point: by losing, the system will decrease your points and your skill ranking and each new loss will yield fewer points for the victor than the one before - and also the point loss to the inactive player will decrease with every loss.

My opinion is this: distinguishing between a manual resignation, an automatic resignation and a 'true loss' would require additional work for Alex compared to the simpler approach: everything is treated the same. Ockham's razor, anyone?

[Eijolend]

(07-21-2012 02:13 AM)Kamikaze28 Wrote:  say you have 10 games running and for whatever reason can not do a turn for a week - you will lose all those games to the timeout - one after the other. And that's my point: by losing, the system will decrease your points and your skill ranking and each new loss will yield fewer points for the victor than the one before - and also the point loss to the inactive player will decrease with every loss.

Do we know whether the points are calculated from your rating when the game ends or the rating you had when you started the game? That would be interesting to know since similar systems (like SCII) don't have the problem of multiple ongoing games at once.

[Syvan]

(07-21-2012 03:42 AM)Eijolend Wrote:  Do we know whether the points are calculated from your rating when the game ends or the rating you had when you started the game? That would be interesting to know since similar systems (like SCII) don't have the problem of multiple ongoing games at once.

From a developer post, it would appear that it is calculated at game end, rather than beginning