[Tales of Tribute] Automatic Defeat

sayswhoto · July 23

It is that time again to complain about ToT.

Auromatic Defeat Bugs
For a few years now, competitive players have been struggling with scenarios that cause an automatic defeat and deserter penalty. This can cause large drops in rank. To put it in perspective, there are times I need a 100% win rate just to move up the ladder. Even one loss can send somone to the depths of rank becuase we often match with oponents that give a few points for a win but around a 50-100 point reducion for a loss.

Some of these events have been fixed. I believed it is no longer a danger to accidentally accept a queue while swimming or jumping, although I still avoid doing that. However, here are the most recent events that can cause auto defeat and deserter penalty:

Being in your mailnbx while accepting a queue.
Taking an attachment from your mailbox while loading into a ToT game.

I submitted in-game tickets for both. Again, we've been dealing with these bugs for qhuite a while now with no compensation to lost rank.

RNG Seeding
It's been long suspected there is an RNG seeding issue with ToT. See video below for a pattern of: card > Customs Seizure > card > Customs Seizures > card > Custom Seizures:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uUidqR3YXRo

By the way this is also how you can easily lose a game against Crow (or Pelin) because the game will fall into a pattern of:
Crow card > card > Crow card > card > Crow card (your opponent gets to buy all the Crow cards)

Something Not Quite Right
I've always felt ToT had a component of psychological exploitation similar to an online casino or slot machine. It would be difficult for me to run large data sets but, from a glance, the patterns and the outcomes don't seem to add up. And not only do they not add up, they appear to be intentionally moving towards favoritism or baiting people to reclaim lost rank. I've felt there is a background system either intentionally (like described) or unintentioanlly (RNG seeding issue).

@ZOS_Kevin

sayswhoto · July 24

I can't seem to edit my original post for spelling mistakes.

Personofsecrets · July 24

sayswhoto wrote: »

I can't seem to edit my original post for spelling mistakes.

You can edit the post by connecting on mobile.

Regarding the casino point that you made, I have alot of clusters of losses. Maybe this is all statistically okay and I don't believe that the game was made to cause such a thing at all, but I find it strange how I can have a 88.4% win rate going first, 72.6% win rate going second, and still end up with clusters of back to back losses followed by long winning streaks.

If anything, that may be related to clusters of going second. A team member did confirm to me that they checked the games 1st / 2nd player choosing mechanism and it didn't appear to be broken to them. They said it is a simple coin flip. Up to the point of my asking them to evaluate the system, I had found that I was going 2nd more often than I was going 1st a statistically signifigant amount of the time at the 95% confidence level. The disparity of me going second more than first developed consistently over the course of several months. After I received word back that a team member evaluated the system, my disparity has not changed since then and I've been going 1st or 2nd what seems to be an equal number of times. Well, it is an equal amount of time since the disparity hasn't changed!

A caveat that I will add is that there are players who are favored to go first against me a statistically signifigant amount of the time. There are players that I go first against much more often. I don't want to doubt what I was told about the coin flip, but this does make me wonder more about how the coin flip works.

sayswhoto · July 24

Thanks for letting me know about the edit abiity in mobile.

I almost think something is meddling with the system and trying to hide it in aggregate data.

For example (1 = goes first, 2 = goes second), there can be two scenarios:

1 1 1 1 1 2 2 2 2 2

and

1 2 1 2 1 2 1 2 1 2

In both cases, someone can claim the statisitics are working out becasue there was a 50% chance of going first out of ten times. However, one distribution is quite a bit more unusual than the other. I used a small number like 10, but you can imagine how biased/unfair events can be hidden in larger data sets like thousands or hundreds of thousands.

maravana · July 25

Thank you for posting about the mail/defeat bug.

I also posted about this bug, but my post was removed for spamming (apparently because I posted it in game systems first, then remembered there was another area for bug reports and posted it there).

I report the bug in game every time it happens, which is every time I am unfortunate enough to have mail open when the queue pops.

The devs had time to add new penalties to players who never abused the decline game option, but not to fix this often-reported and fully repeatable bug.

Personofsecrets · July 25

maravana wrote: »

Thank you for posting about the mail/defeat bug.

I also posted about this bug, but my post was removed for spamming (apparently because I posted it in game systems first, then remembered there was another area for bug reports and posted it there).

I report the bug in game every time it happens, which is every time I am unfortunate enough to have mail open when the queue pops.

The devs had time to add new penalties to players who never abused the decline game option, but not to fix this often-reported and fully repeatable bug.

It turns out that there are people who defend the design team not fixing issues because they can't possibly fix all issues. In doing so, they outright ignore this hypocrisy of stuff that nobody cared about being focussed on and presumably at the cost of changes that people would really care about not happening.

sayswhoto · July 27

It looks like I need to retreat from ToT and back to lag/desync-ridden Cyrodiil. Everytime I get up in rank or start complainiing on the fourms, I get punished with unusual RNG or constantly going second (granted I do make mistakes in-game that cause me a match). This time I tried video recording to capture some of these unfair events, but every game I started to record (3 times now) all the sudden I won, wow what a coincidence. Perhaps, this is startig to verge into conspiracy theory, but, again, I have felt something isn't right about ToT.

Back on topic. Being mid-air still causes an automatic defeat and deserter panalty. Just found that out today.