PC NA que exploit bans for major guilds coming?

f047ys3v3n · February 2018

It has come to my attention that the patch note in the 3.3.5 (dragon bones) update referred to a queuing glitch that some PVP guilds, specifically PCNA DC and EP guilds, had been using to que in against AD's player number instead of their own.

ZOS_GinaBruno wrote: »

Cross-alliance groups can no longer group queue for Cyrodiil. When queuing in this situation, you will now be entered into your respective alliance solo queue.

Apparently, the way it worked is that they would form a group que of DC players with an AD toon as the leader. When they then entered the campaign it would count all of them against the AD pop cap. So, for raid of 24 players they would offset their alliance + 23 players and AD -23 players giving themselves a 46 person advantage. This did offer some explanation to us AD folks as to why we often found ourselves battling 100+ faction stacked blue groups (yes, I have plenty of screenshots of 100+ players tagged) with only the 25 or less AD players in our group while at the same time DC also seemed to be attacking somewhere else. This last week has been very strange as my PVP guild has often seen other AD players, even pugs, showing up when we cap things or present when we come to a defense. This had basically not been the case at around 1:30EST when purple would do their daily map wipe. We had thought that much of it was the 2 on 1 dynamic but had still wondered where all the AD players were. You really could not find any significant amount of AD no matter where you went. We used to joke that they had all gone fishing. Apparently, the big purple guilds had actually found a way to do better than 2 on 1 and make it very close to three on none by queuing in as AD.

This was in no way an usual fight of our 25 vs apparently 105 that I tagged at around 2am EST during the que exploitation.

What I want to know is when we will see the banns and other punishments handed out for the gross exploitation of this glitch? Basically, AD on PCNA spent many months with no conceivable way to win while also having to contend with a much longer que (since blue and red were also in it.) What are you going to do about that ZOS? Are you going to ignore it because big name guys that lead guilds and stream are involved? This certainly seams much more serious than the few folks who were insta-leveling toons in IC but really did not impact the rest of us at all. You banned them for a bit. These guys *** on our PVP experience for months and have yet to even get a slap when they deserve to be drawn and quartered.

What are you going to do about it?

Vaoh · February 2018

I mean it sounds pretty serious, but who gets banned? Anyone playing on AD? I don’t think ZOS can really figure out players that used this bug vs players that queued normally. If the bug is fixed then honestly just let it go.

Unfortunately the proper punishment can’t be handed out in this situation. ZOS either bans no one and moves on, or they ban a ridiculous amount of people with the majority being innocent. There’s no way to properly judge who did what.

imredneckson · February 2018

They fixed it so I'm going to call it good and enjoy the smaller queues.

Crispen_Longbow · February 2018

f047ys3v3n wrote: »

Apparently, the way it worked is that they would form a group que of DC players with an AD toon as the leader. When they then entered the campaign it would count all of them against the AD pop cap. So, for raid of 24 players they would offset their alliance + 23 players and AD -23 players giving themselves a 46 person advantage.

This is just speculation on your part though.

ZOS as never said if it counted towards the opposing alliance queue or not. What we do know is that the bug allowed you to bypass the queue line for your own faction. We don't know if it counted towards the opposing alliance population score.

f047ys3v3n · February 2018

Vaoh wrote: »

I mean it sounds pretty serious, but who gets banned? Anyone playing on AD? I don’t think ZOS can really figure out players that used this bug vs players that queued normally. If the bug is fixed then honestly just let it go.

Unfortunately the proper punishment can’t be handed out in this situation. ZOS either bans no one and moves on, or they ban a ridiculous amount of people with the majority being innocent. There’s no way to properly judge who did what.

I really don't know what they can and cannot ascertain from their logs. Evidently they can discover who was gaining XP where and how much as they punished ~300 XP exploiters in what was an offense that does not even register when compared to illegitimately dominating Cyr for months. I know it was pretty clear at ~1:30 am EST every night that we would stop seeing any AD pugs and start fighting 100+ person mega faction stacks while at the same time blue was holding or advancing elsewhere and this made little sense. I know that I and many others just started to log off at that time because there was really no point in fighting sometimes 5 to 1 odds. In other words, I know the effect and the scale of the abuse.

I would be very curios what ZOS has to say about this. So far it looks like they would rather not even mention what was actually happening. If ZOS is having trouble finding abusers in it's logs and is is curious I'm sure we can help them identify at least the ring leaders so that they could make a statement without banning a bunch of people who did not exploit.

Crispen_Longbow wrote: »

This is just speculation on your part though.

ZOS as never said if it counted towards the opposing alliance queue or not. What we do know is that the bug allowed you to bypass the queue line for your own faction. We don't know if it counted towards the opposing alliance population score.

I did not hear it from ZOS. I heard if from a guild lead. I have no idea what ZOS actually said or not. All I saw from ZOS was the little patch note that certainly did not sound like they had fixed an exploit that for months had resulted in wildly unequal faction populations that had been abused to the point that campaign conclusions were forgone. Did you here more somewhere else from them that actually admitted that alliances were using the bug to bypass their alliances pop cap?

Given how few AD could be found at those hours though I think it is pretty obvious that DC was counting against AD's numbers. I would be curious to know just how many they managed to stack. I should also note that it explained the huge influx of DC that you would see came all at one time. You could basically mark the minute. I always found this strange. Though groups certainly do group que, and even PvP raids sometimes have a start time, I have never found it common for that start time to be definite. Typically, half the group will be early and already running in group in campaign before any scheduled raid time. This was not the case for these DC groups though. I guess it could not be since they all had to be in an exploit que together, at one time, to count as AD. I always found it strange. Now it makes sense.

Suffice it to say, I am not really satisfied to let bygones be bygones. We are talking about an exploit that basically wrecked PVP for AD for months and was so effective and so demoralizing that it caused many, many, alliance defections, broken relationships, and players to quit. This was a really major thing. If ZOS is trying to send some sort of message with it's time outs of a few folks power leveling for a few hours in IC it really needs to send a much stronger one to folks who wrecked others PVP experience for months in Cyr. Especially since it was in an organized, guild coordinated, way involving the most important guilds in the faction. If ZOS wants to make PVP something beyond the DDOS attack using, Cheat Engine running, functionally immortal you know which guild (and I am glad they are gone) of not that long ago this is an important statement to make.

usmcjdking · February 2018

You've drawn no definitive correlation between said bug (because no one has said what it's actual impact is) and ADs poor performance in Vivec.

Ranger209 · February 2018

Every faction believes this to be true of the other two factions.....and they are assuredly all right.

TimeDazzler · February 2018

Even if this was true would you ban the entire group or just the leader? Surely, there are people who are just trying to play with their friends and join a group to queue together.

VaranisArano · February 2018

1. As an EP player, I'v both seen a fellow EP player ask for someone to help him do this (and I reported him for it) and can promise you that EP is dead certain that AD and DC do it to the EP queues. That whole thing with "I noticed so much more AD out and fighting since ZOS fixed it!" Yeah, we on EP saw that for EP too. So either we ALL got hit with the queue thing, or we are all seeing our little portion of Cyrodiil that's right in front of our faces.

2. I'm hands down delighted that ZOS fixed this. It needed to be fixed a long time ago.

3. Be honest. People on every faction did this. Ebonheart Pact, Daggerfall Covenant AND Aldmeri Dominion.

f047ys3v3n · February 2018

Ranger209 wrote: »

Every faction believes this to be true of the other two factions.....and they are assuredly all right.

The PVP guild that I am in in PCNA AD did not know of this. Since the guild leaders are pretty well connected around AD I would be utterly surprised if any primarily PCNA AD guilds did as I expect there would have been some sharing of information like that. Certainly EP and DC seem to have done a pretty good job of sharing it (though they do have to work together every night to make the purple thing work and many are the same folks.)

I'm not saying AD woldn't have done it. Damn sure we would have. The whole XP ban is the first ZOS police action ZOS has done in a very long time. And their last one before that, the brief CE ban with reinstatement of almost everybody, was more of an invitation to cheat than a deterrence. Lots of AD run CE just like lots of blue and reds do to get an advantage. Certainly the nascar "if you ain't cheating you ain't trying" mentality is dominant and ZOS has reinforced it many times. What I am saying is if they don't want that sort of thinking to be the way it is and they actually wanted their little IC XP ban to mean something this is far more important than that. Also, I would love to see it as it was less than fun to get rolled by what turned out to be impossibly large DC numbers every night at 1:30 for months. Ain't no sore looser like sore looser who just found out the game was rigged the whole time and nobody told him.

Ackwalan · February 2018

I notice my queue times for my EP characters are now under 20 if there was one at all. They used to be 75+.

VaranisArano · February 2018

f047ys3v3n wrote: »

Ranger209 wrote: »

Every faction believes this to be true of the other two factions.....and they are assuredly all right.

The PVP guild that I am in in PCNA AD did not know of this. Since the guild leaders are pretty well connected around AD I would be utterly surprised if any primarily PCNA AD guilds did as I expect there would have been some sharing of information like that. Certainly EP and DC seem to have done a pretty good job of sharing it (though they do have to work together every night to make the purple thing work and many are the same folks.)

I'm not saying AD woldn't have done it. Damn sure we would have. The whole XP ban is the first ZOS police action ZOS has done in a very long time. And their last one before that, the brief CE ban with reinstatement of almost everybody, was more of an invitation to cheat than a deterrence. Lots of AD run CE just like lots of blue and reds do to get an advantage. Certainly the nascar "if you ain't cheating you ain't trying" mentality is dominant and ZOS has reinforced it many times. What I am saying is if they don't want that sort of thinking to be the way it is and they actually wanted their little IC XP ban to mean something this is far more important than that. Also, I would love to see it as it was less than fun to get rolled by what turned out to be impossibly large DC numbers every night at 1:30 for months. Ain't no sore looser like sore looser who just found out the game was rigged the whole time and nobody told him.

I can assure you that I among other EP players have been complaining about this for months now. Forum threads, in-game bug reports...I even had a decent conversation with a service rep that boiled down to "So you say this happens, have you tried it" - "No, I haven't tried it because that would obviously be an exploit if I had..." that went nowhere. Just because you are only finding out about it now and therefore assuming that AD as a whole is ignorantly innocent, does not make it so.

Also, the Team Purple is pretty funny to me, because I guarantee you that EP thinks Team Green is a constant thing, and there's a current forum thread about Team Orange from the DC side of things.

Its almost like in a AvAvA fight, everyone thinks the other two factions are ganging up on them.

antihero727 · March 2018

VaranisArano wrote: »

1. As an EP player, I'v both seen a fellow EP player ask for someone to help him do this (and I reported him for it) and can promise you that EP is dead certain that AD and DC do it to the EP queues. That whole thing with "I noticed so much more AD out and fighting since ZOS fixed it!" Yeah, we on EP saw that for EP too. So either we ALL got hit with the queue thing, or we are all seeing our little portion of Cyrodiil that's right in front of our faces.

2. I'm hands down delighted that ZOS fixed this. It needed to be fixed a long time ago.

3. Be honest. People on every faction did this. Ebonheart Pact, Daggerfall Covenant AND Aldmeri Dominion.

Why would AD Q into a 100+ when they always had the lower Q? I have seen DC and EP personally ask me for this but never an AD. We would have but never had the population to make it worth it. I have all faction toons and during this bug I solo q’ed for each faction just to see for myself. It was always the same thing, AD had the lowest q that’s why we were targeted. Not because of some purple conspiracy.

Grampa_Smurf · March 2018

Just a note, even though you recorded 105+ doesn't mean you hit 105 separate players, it just counts the total separate hits. You are still hitting a large group but you may only have hit 52 players twice with separate attacks before you died.

VaranisArano · March 2018

Grampa_Smurf wrote: »

Just a note, even though you recorded 105+ doesn't mean you hit 105 separate players, it just counts the total separate hits. You are still hitting a large group but you may only have hit 52 players twice with separate attacks before you died.

Huh? He's talking about the number of players in the queue for Vivec.

f047ys3v3n · March 2018

Grampa_Smurf wrote: »

Just a note, even though you recorded 105+ doesn't mean you hit 105 separate players, it just counts the total separate hits. You are still hitting a large group but you may only have hit 52 players twice with separate attacks before you died.

That is not the case. The 105 is a count of separate targets. It could include NPC's as well as players and both other alliances but it is separate targets. In the case of this particular report, it was a keep defense so there were no hostile NPC's and only one other alliance was present. This was not uncommon.

Since the que fix the highest count I have had is 52 though a friend did have a 64 and that was in a sort of failed (took keep but then were stomped by arriving mega zerg) attack where NPC's would have been counted. We have never been near 100+ numbers we had before though. Indeed we were being quite thoroughly taken for several months there.

Anazasi · March 2018

usmcjdking wrote: »

You've drawn no definitive correlation between said bug (because no one has said what it's actual impact is) and ADs poor performance in Vivec.

attrition will always win. please review the last 6 months of vivec campaign score to find your correlation. amazingly enough patch fix and the scores are similar to over a year ago before the group q bug.

Vilestride · March 2018

Score change has nothing to do with que bug and everything to do with the only 2 relevant oceanic guilds playing for AD now. Don't kid yourself.
The queue bug was fixed last campaign and even after getting out to a massive lead due to it bugging in your favour on the opening night of campaign AD still came dead last. So the logic you have drawn your conclusion on is flawed. Now you have an uncontested oceanic period and the score swings your way. Makes a lot more sense.

pzschrek · March 2018

^ I main AD atm and @Vilestride is spot on in regards to score. This is precisely how my guild diagnosed the more durable AD lead this campaign. Whoever has the biggest presence outside of NA prime time has always decided the campaign victor.

I would not go so far as to state that the queue change had zero effect on AD to be honest. I'd anecdotally state that my queue times dropped by about 30% right after they instituted that change, and AD did slightly but noticeably hold it's own better in primetime.

Rickter · March 2018

I actually would like to see a screenshot of “100 plus people tagged” - id just really like to see what that looks like

Rohamad_Ali · March 2018

It's fixed so maybe just move on ? I know I have .

f047ys3v3n · March 2018

Rickter wrote: »

I actually would like to see a screenshot of “100 plus people tagged” - id just really like to see what that looks like

There is a 105 in the first post but that one kind of sucks because it was taken after rez so you don't see the hordes around my corpse. Here is a 103 (sorry about the small text, I run 4k) that is a bit nicer since you see the swarm of exploiting blues. This was a keep defense so no NPC's in the parse. There also weren't any reds for whatever reason. While parses over 100 were not the most common thing, they were also not that rare and ones in the 80's were quite common. Since the fix I haven't seen much over 50. Blue was really cashing in for a long time. While the campaign may have ended the same way post exploit (the only thing that really matters score wise is who is winning in off peak hours) I can assure you that things have felt a lot different from the AD point of view in peak hours not having to fight more than 2 on 1 odds against us.

maxjapank · March 2018

Vilestride wrote: »

Score change has nothing to do with que bug and everything to do with the only 2 relevant oceanic guilds playing for AD now. Don't kid yourself.

The AD score lead is actually a result of another guild moving from DC to AD before Oceanic timezone. It was this time period where AD was usually pushed to the gates before Oceanic logged on. But now with their help, AD is able to cover this time period. You might also acknowledge that EP tends to log on the minute that AD Oceanic guilds log off. And they proceed to push hard down south. One EP regularly logs on an AD toon and asks in zone when AD Oceanic guilds are going to log off. It's kinda funny to be honest. But the Oceanic time period covers many timezones and no one really has control over anyone's real life commitments vs. gaming time.

Rickter · March 2018

f047ys3v3n wrote: »

Rickter wrote: »

I actually would like to see a screenshot of “100 plus people tagged” - id just really like to see what that looks like

There is a 105 in the first post but that one kind of sucks because it was taken after rez so you don't see the hordes around my corpse. Here is a 103 (sorry about the small text, I run 4k) that is a bit nicer since you see the swarm of exploiting blues. This was a keep defense so no NPC's in the parse. There also weren't any reds for whatever reason. While parses over 100 were not the most common thing, they were also not that rare and ones in the 80's were quite common. Since the fix I haven't seen much over 50. Blue was really cashing in for a long time. While the campaign may have ended the same way post exploit (the only thing that really matters score wise is who is winning in off peak hours) I can assure you that things have felt a lot different from the AD point of view in peak hours not having to fight more than 2 on 1 odds against us.

I see 20 players. I thought you meant like you had Miat's player counter. . .

DHale · March 2018

As an AD on NA PC. If they didn’t have a number advantage they would get @^$&£&*”’.

f047ys3v3n · March 2018

Rickter wrote: »

I see 20 players. I thought you meant like you had Miat's player counter. . .

Nope, just combat metrics. I never did the whole Miats thing.

f047ys3v3n · March 2018

DHale wrote: »

As an AD on NA PC. If they didn’t have a number advantage they would get @^$&£&*”’.

I don't know about that. There are strong and week guilds in all three alliances. It is true that one of the AD PCNA guilds I run with wipes most if not all DC and EP (there is maybe one of these we are pretty even with) guilds with equal numbers but it is also true that a couple of the other guilds I run with are frequently wiped by smaller DC and EP guild groups. It all depends on what guilds and what players in those guilds are on. I agree that DC and EP tend to run larger groups even after the que fix but a lot of this perception does seem to have been because of how they were allowed to use our que to more than double our numbers for months.

AD does seem to be the last to figure out about the important exploits such as this que one and the block and walk super stam regen one in the past though. I have always suspected that somebody in the dev team used to play for that you know who red guild in the past, now plays blue, and gives the tip off on some of these things. It always seems that the same few players start out knowing about a really strong exploit and use it for quite a number of months before it leaks out. Even the very strong AD guild I run with often finds out about these things in patch notes. It usually explains some things we have not been able to figure out for 6 months and there is never any punishment.

As for the way campaigns end. That seems to have little to nothing to do with what alliances are strong in prime time. Being strong in prime time you gain a few points for a few hours. Having folks log in for the 4am EST to 10am EST dead time means you get all, or almost all, of the points for 6 straight hours.

Vilestride · March 2018

maxjapank wrote: »

Vilestride wrote: »

Score change has nothing to do with que bug and everything to do with the only 2 relevant oceanic guilds playing for AD now. Don't kid yourself.

The AD score lead is actually a result of another guild moving from DC to AD before Oceanic timezone.

That's what I am saying. The only 2 relevant oceanic guilds being TKG and Knights of Ni who just moved over.

Agrippa_Invisus · April 2018

Vilestride wrote: »

maxjapank wrote: »

Vilestride wrote: »

Score change has nothing to do with que bug and everything to do with the only 2 relevant oceanic guilds playing for AD now. Don't kid yourself.

The AD score lead is actually a result of another guild moving from DC to AD before Oceanic timezone.

That's what I am saying. The only 2 relevant oceanic guilds being TKG and Knights of Ni who just moved over.

I would love it if EP had a better oceanic presence. We have some very good players in that time period, but they are very much outnumbered.

Vilestride · April 2018

Agrippa_Invisus wrote: »

Vilestride wrote: »

maxjapank wrote: »

Vilestride wrote: »

Score change has nothing to do with que bug and everything to do with the only 2 relevant oceanic guilds playing for AD now. Don't kid yourself.

The AD score lead is actually a result of another guild moving from DC to AD before Oceanic timezone.

That's what I am saying. The only 2 relevant oceanic guilds being TKG and Knights of Ni who just moved over.

I would love it if EP had a better oceanic presence. We have some very good players in that time period, but they are very much outnumbered.

Good players without a doubt. But as indicated by many competent smallscalers posting all over these forums just being a good player doesn't equate even closely to the strength of a good raid. Especially when the players in said raid are also competent which is true for both TKG and Ni.