Wintrading

Kim|MindArk said:

Some players have been found to be using so called win-trading to level their pets in arena. This practice will disqualify the accounts involved from receiving beta competition prizes.

What is win trading you may ask? Its when you have one more more accounts that are set up to lose against a main account over and over again, thus feeding it experience, diamonds and PEDs.


I see everything

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Its Season IV and there is a player 'wintrading' his way at the top of the ranking.
Very obvious seeing as the account which looses against him has still a lvl2 village while he has a lvl5 village.

Nevertheless instead of saying this or that person is disqualified because of wintrading - wouldnt it make more sense to just fix the issue at its roots ?
There is no reason why players who only battle one another should continuously get rewards beyond their own bets value - put some security procedures in place which reduce additional rewards in form of gold/diamonds/experience towards zero the more often the same players fight one another and the larger their difference in residence level is.
Put a softcap on ranking points depending on your residence level - that will assure that at a certain point the fake accounts that are used for leveling will become useless.
Change Raids so you can only raid other players within a certain levelrange of your residence (+-2 recommended) - keep in mind that 'wintrading' can happen through 'raiding' your main account with an alternateaccount and 'failing' continueously - this gives the main accounts pet experience and diamonds while being invisible in your ranking and player charts.
It might be a good idea to disable raiding for a set timeperiod if a player fails 3 consecutive raids in a row and to increase the cost to raid a certain player each time he is raided regardless if its a success or not.
The fee to raid should be paid after choosing the raid target and all players should be able to see potential raid targets in their residence levelrange without having to pay for it.
Change auto battles to give considerably (20-40times) less points/experience/rewards then manual battles and scale manual battles to give better rewards depending on fightperformance (like winning a fight which would have been a sure loss had it been an autobattle should give a special reward even if your hitpoints are close to zero). Jackpot rewards should only be available on manual fights.
This will encourage to actually win hard fights instead of 'staging' repeated 'dull' fights.

'Giving up' in a manual fight should yield a greater loss in ranking points then if the fight had been finished properly and there should be a timer on the 'give up' option to assure its not used repeatedly.
Add another option 'autofight' during manual battles which allows players to let the pet finish the fight as if it were an autofight while you go and do something else - like doing another fight with another pet (practically allowing players to 'leave' a 'dull' fight without 'giving up').

John B Knight said:

Its Season IV and there is a player 'wintrading' his way at the top of the ranking.
Very obvious seeing as the account which looses against him has still a lvl2 village while he has a lvl5 village.

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I had a look at this new season briefly and noticed that the raid options were player after player with a very simply name of just one or two letters, so I assume whoever set them up wants to cancel the shield, then jump in and raid. Of course, the villages are open to others too, if they are lucky about when they look for a raid, but I was lucky enough to get about a dozen of them in about 15 mins, so I'm not sure what's going on there.....

On the arenas, I found no auto-battles but several who were willing to fight live. Only one of them gave up a fight immediately, which may also be a glitch ofc.

How do you know which account loses against another player? Do you mean you entered the arena and kept getting the same two opponents, so you can say with good probability that they are 'wintrading'?

jetsina said:

I had a look at this new season briefly and noticed that the raid options were player after player with a very simply name of just one or two letters, so I assume whoever set them up wants to cancel the shield, then jump in and raid. Of course, the villages are open to others too, if they are lucky about when they look for a raid, but I was lucky enough to get about a dozen of them in about 15 mins, so I'm not sure what's going on there.....

On the arenas, I found no auto-battles but several who were willing to fight live. Only one of them gave up a fight immediately, which may also be a glitch ofc.

How do you know which account loses against another player? Do you mean you entered the arena and kept getting the same two opponents, so you can say with good probability that they are 'wintrading'?

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Pet level is limited by stable level which is limited by residence level.
A player who has a lvl2 residence can only have a level8 pet at its max - a lvl 8 pet can only find fights up to lvl10 pets - the top player has a lvl14 pet as favourite which could never have reached level 14 in arena fight matches as long as there wasnt a lvl11 pet out there to match him on the way up - but there is none which makes it likely that he got the levels from getting himself attacked.
There is also several other accounts which have 'name similarities' with his main account and are set in a 'ladder' within the ranking points allowing someone to move up the ranking ladder quickly by matching those accounts in battle.
The ranking points are the other reason why its so obvious, as you can only fight other players within a devisionrange of +-1 of your own - so you need someone to move up with you to get higher.

people still play compet?

John B Knight said:

The ranking points are the other reason why its so obvious, as you can only fight other players within a devisionrange of +-1 of your own - so you need someone to move up with you to get higher.

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You don't need to get ranking points with your main pet though. You can cheat more ranking points at whatever level you are by just using a brand new pet to defeat your own alt accounts. Or am I wrong?

Oleg said:

You don't need to get ranking points with your main pet though. You can cheat more ranking points at whatever level you are by just using a brand new pet to defeat your own alt accounts. Or am I wrong?

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Thats how you get around the pet level, but loosing with an alt account against your main account still drifts you apart in ranking and therefor in the devisionrange which leads to you not being able to fight against each other even with lowlevel pets - however regardless of the level and devisionrange you can still accumulate exp and gold/diamonds by raiding one another - which is what i pointed out in my opening post.

John B Knight said:

Thats how you get around the pet level, but loosing with an alt account against your main account still drifts you apart in ranking and therefor in the devisionrange which leads to you not being able to fight against each other even with lowlevel pets - however regardless of the level and devisionrange you can still accumulate exp and gold/diamonds by raiding one another - which is what i pointed out in my opening post.

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Hmm, so an alt account is also happy to lose again and again to other players too, as it will boost other players in the rankings at least and provide matched battles for the main account.
It's not even "you scratch my back and I'll scratch yours", but a new breed - I think I'll call it "alt-scratching" .

I guess we should note where lost battles start to lose you ranking points, even if that is actually a bug currently, it does stop intentional losers from progressing past a certain point..... which also has its benefits.

1 day to go till season IV ends and we get to know if Kim really 'sees everything' or if the current 'wintraders' get rewarded

John B Knight said:

1 day to go till season IV ends and we get to know if Kim really 'sees everything' or if the current 'wintraders' get rewarded

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So, was no disqualification, isn't it?

Devs, please, I strongly expect disqualifications in round 4 and just finished round 5!!!!

all these are alt accounts used by one of the winners:
kingxm, Hillary, sally, lordRyo, TheGod, and some others in lower ranking...


As mentioned in other thread I made a test with a new account "wintrading - demo". In about 1 hour I bring it to 1800 points, 1st position now. I used about 10 diff accounts (5-6 battles each) and only one alt remains visible in leaderboard - "helper wt main". Alt higher rank is needed to match arena when your main is over 1000 points. If you search in logs you'll see it is not so obvious... there were not so many fights to get attention.
Now you see above how many alt avatars are there: all higher ranking, no forest battles, only 30-40 won battles or so. Damn so easy to get the cheater....

I know MA is paying anyway 3x500 ped every season, no matter who's getting the price.
But it is frustrating to see you're not protecting us, fair players, against the cheaters.
How many will keep playing fair if they see win trading not penalized?

Yup!
In my opinion gotto43 deserves a winning reward for the open and transparent "testing" services provided to MA!

Also, we have a recent post by Princess, but it ignores whether the really good points by others (and hopefully myself) have even been read, let alone looked at seriously!
This is the way it always happens - communication gets to a certain level and then starts to ignore the better feedback we are able to give as we ourselves get better at digging deeper.

jetsina said:

Yup!
In my opinion gotto43 deserves a winning reward for the open and transparent "testing" services provided to MA!

Also, we have a recent post by Princess, but it ignores whether the really good points by others (and hopefully myself) have even been read, let alone looked at seriously!
This is the way it always happens - communication gets to a certain level and then starts to ignore the better feedback we are able to give as we ourselves get better at digging deeper.

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thanks - I should be one of the winners this week as 30 min before season end I was 3rd position, 1997 points. Almost sure there was no change in last 30 min.

But this is not the main point. I'm sick to see cheaters tolerated & encouraged. There is already second season with intensive wintrading activity and no reaction from devs. Just look leaderboard and check how many fights every player won (in 2 seasons!). I'm talking about top of leaderboard. The way to avoid losing points while winning is "never lose" and this is possible when fighting against your alt. Wanna identify alts from there? They never do the forest battles, they have also very few won fights, localization, name pattern...
I'm sick of this...

also MA still ignores the fact that the "closed" beta was pratically open to anyone, thus the many alts. They still say its only for deed holders depsite the facts that have been brought up that this is not true. hopefully this will end soon as in "open" beta there wont be any wipes anymore and i hope there wont be any more weekly season wins. so maybe this madness stops.

Meanwhile players like myself that put in countless hours testing got low rankings with no rewards. Why am I doing this? Like the game too much I guess lolol

What Mind Ark needs for this game is several thousand players or millions. Maybe in this way the battles will be sufficiently difficult to rig up if the battles are random. Also pets that are not the same ranking should not be fighting each other. This is how we got the wintrading in first place. Mind Ark puts you to battle with pets of higher levels and better gear.