Operation: Hostile Mergers Leaderboard Information

[Me.KayOh]

I see many people do not understand how abusing an exploit that was found in the game, is a violation of DE's Terms of Service, which every player agreed to upon installing the game and playing. It really is a simple thing and maybe the lot of you people who do not understand what attributes to an exploit and what the consequences of an exploit in the game is, should probably go re-read the terms of service. In a PVE environment, abusing an exploit is already considered bad. RE: youtubers who have found exploits in the PVE content of Warframe and who advertised said exploits have been banned. In a competitive environment, it's just worse. There is absolutely no reason for these exploiters to not be punished for violating the company's Terms of Service, especially in order to gain an advantage on a competitive leaderboard. Arguments against this are utter non-sense, illogical and lack any sort of reasonable understanding.

 

All I want to know is if they are done with searching for people who've abused the exploits in the game mode or if they're still looking. Because based on my experience in disruption, I still find it hard to believe, that the top scores I'm seeing, were obtained via non-exploitative methods. 

 

[HIGHDAMAGE]

@Maganar raids provided best co-op warframe ever had (never experienced the same feeling since then) crossing fingers for 2.0 hope it doesn't turn out into another sort of md  pls be good 

[Kyoresh]

22 minutes ago, --DSP--Jetstream said:

Remember the affinity exploit? ofc exploit wont harm anyone it just benefit the user, but exploit is exploit and any game devs must show theres consequence for it, or else everyone will just do it since theres no consequences.
and good job de for handling it fast, should make good example for future event.

ye, but a permanent ban is extreme. how about a week/month before you hit them with the permanent ban.

[taiiat]

1 hour ago, Gabbynaru said:

Stop doing leaderboards and competitive stuff.

so why not encourage more cooperative gameplay rather than competitive?

i don't think "stop making stuff for Players to do" is much of a solution.

 

in theory that would be nice, but can you think of any content that fits that mold? hmm, i think.... i would say Eidolon Hunting is the only content in the game that fits such a bar. Profit Taker gets an honorable mention (it's still slightly less restrictive than Eidolon Hunting but the actual objectives are less co-operative).
Disruption does allow for a bit of Co-Op, but realistically the 99% won't play it any different than they do everything else.

and then you have the entire rest of the PvE game, where there is no Co-Operativeness to the Gameplay, whatsoever. where for the 99% Multiplayer is Solo w/ an IRC box and some strange looking humanoid drones that sometimes Revive you if you die.

[Aerinx]

3 minutes ago, AvPCelticPredator said:

 

This thread is about the decision they made and you are free to give your opinion on it or leave if you don't want to participate. There were other places and times to discuss that, this is the aftermath where they inform us of their decision. Do you really think they should ask players before taking those decisions? In what kind of world you live in? Be free to leave feedback and tell them what you think on things, but they can not and should not ask us what to do like that. You are so self centered is not even funny, there was threads going on, I said at least a couple times that they should do what they have, did they took into account my feedback or did they reach that decision on their own? Doesn't matter, but your responses are amazingly nonsensical.

 

1 minute ago, AvPCelticPredator said:

So, if "I" create thread to "Blame" exploiters and make a "Jokes" about them then Moderators of this forum wont "Closed" my thread?

Are u sure???

Where u live, which galaxy!?

I did that exact same thing on reddit and commented on a relevant thread about that in here, both are there and not "Closed" whatever that is. On one hand, I want to explain things to you because you are wildly out of touch, on the other hand I don't even know if you are interested in hearing that or if you are worth my time, and on the third hand is late and I'm going to sleep, good night 🙂

[LSG501]

16 minutes ago, Vengeance_A said:

I understood very well what u wanted to say. I am working as QA and I know how these things works.

Not every single thing can be detail checked. It can, in smaller games, but not games like Warframe is. From what I understood, they don't even have hired QA team (many companies don't cuz extra $$) but several ppl who are willing to do it.

Regarding QA tool, actually QA gets same version as players do, just it's not published/live by the time they check it. There is no such a thing as ''having tools''.
Thats something admins/mods have. Or eventually dev build.
 

I can understand 'edge case' things being missed, for example the khora venari xp exploit, that's kind of understandable. 

But I just find it rather strange that they didn't test well known approaches to other 'bosses' in the new game mode or even just check a negative value on a riven wasn't having some weird outcome in game.

As I've said in another reply not all QC is done by 'players', or at least it shouldn't be, if you've watched DE Glens streams you'll see the dev's have all sorts of overlays and information at their disposal for testing.  If the Dev's aren't involved in QC and it's being left purely to the 'players' then that in itself raises questions over the processes being used for QC in the first place...

At the end of the day some of the responsibility for bugs which cause the exploits has to lay on DE's shoulders, you can't just give them a free pass because they're a 'small team' because it will just make things worse in the long run. 

[KelvinM6]

11 minutes ago, Julian_Skies said:

There was this one specific place in this particular pit that could do it because the place that is supposed to teleport players/enemies back to land when they fall wasn't there.

This is definitely making more sense to me now. This issue was presented to me as if any old pit on the tileset had this quirk. It seems unthinkable to me to go for that long without noticing the inconsistency if it's only one spot. I agree that, at that point, it's no longer as intuitive as neutralizing a threat by throwing it in a pit just as one could in reality itself.
Pretty sure I've changed my mind then, thx

[RhythmScript]

I’ll chime in to agree with what’s been said before: resetting or nulling scores is fine, but issuing suspensions is ridiculous.

For a player to jump out over a bottomless pit, target an enemy with Switch Teleport, hit it, and survive the fall while killing an enemy sounds to me like skillful use of a unique ability to overcome a challenging target. It doesn’t feel any different from, say, abusing the fact that slash procs ignore armor to kill heavily armor-scaled enemies in endgame conditions. The argument for suspension hinges entirely, ENTIRELY on the presupposition that a player doing this “should have known” that flinging an enemy into a bottomless pit was an unintended way of killing them (since the “exploit” relies on situations where teleport volumes didn’t work..?)

So how, HOW precisely was a player to know this? It’s not like flinging an enemy off a cliff with switch teleport to kill it is something that doesn’t normally work. Switch teleporting to death works on most enemies. If it wasn’t intended to work on Demolysts, how was a player supposed to know that? It feels like DE blaming the player base for their own failure to catch a bug. Look, bugs happen, it’s an unfortunate reality, but if you want to blame a player for using “exploits” it should be painfully, PAINFULLY clear to any observer that they knew perfectly goddamn well that they were abusing behavior that was obviously, definitely, and unimpeachably NOT INTENDED, and I don’t see that at all here. This isn’t the Venari exploit, there’s (as far as I can see, I haven’t bothered with the operation at all as a solo player) no earthly reason a person should assume teleporting an enemy off a ledge to kill it is “unintended” in the context of Warframe.

I challenge anyone here who is applauding these suspensions to explain to me how I would be expected to know intuitively that this was “wrong” behavior rather than just the sort of clever twisting of game mechanics that basically defines endgame Warframe as we know it.

[KelvinM6]

1 minute ago, RhythmScript said:

I’ll chime in to agree with what’s been said before: resetting or nulling scores is fine, but issuing suspensions is ridiculous.

For a player to jump out over a bottomless pit, target an enemy with Switch Teleport, hit it, and survive the fall while killing an enemy sounds to me like skillful use of a unique ability to overcome a challenging target. It doesn’t feel any different from, say, abusing the fact that slash procs ignore armor to kill heavily armor-scaled enemies in endgame conditions. The argument for suspension hinges entirely, ENTIRELY on the presupposition that a player doing this “should have known” that flinging an enemy into a bottomless pit was an unintended way of killing them (since the “exploit” relies on situations where teleport volumes didn’t work..?)

So how, HOW precisely was a player to know this? It’s not like flinging an enemy off a cliff with switch teleport to kill it is something that doesn’t normally work. Switch teleporting to death works on most enemies. If it wasn’t intended to work on Demolysts, how was a player supposed to know that? It feels like DE blaming the player base for their own failure to catch a bug. Look, bugs happen, it’s an unfortunate reality, but if you want to blame a player for using “exploits” it should be painfully, PAINFULLY clear to any observer that they knew perfectly goddamn well that they were abusing behavior that was obviously, definitely, and unimpeachably NOT INTENDED, and I don’t see that at all here. This isn’t the Venari exploit, there’s (as far as I can see, I haven’t bothered with the operation at all as a solo player) no earthly reason a person should assume teleporting an enemy off a ledge to kill it is “unintended” in the context of Warframe.

I challenge anyone here who is applauding these suspensions to explain to me how I would be expected to know intuitively that this was “wrong” behavior rather than just the sort of clever twisting of game mechanics that basically defines endgame Warframe as we know it.

I only read part of your comment and was in the same camp at first, but it seems it was only a very specific pit, in a long run this inconsistency should become apparent with the mobile nature of the gamemode.

[Eldirian]

2 minutes ago, RhythmScript said:

I’ll chime in to agree with what’s been said before: resetting or nulling scores is fine, but issuing suspensions is ridiculous.

For a player to jump out over a bottomless pit, target an enemy with Switch Teleport, hit it, and survive the fall while killing an enemy sounds to me like skillful use of a unique ability to overcome a challenging target. It doesn’t feel any different from, say, abusing the fact that slash procs ignore armor to kill heavily armor-scaled enemies in endgame conditions. The argument for suspension hinges entirely, ENTIRELY on the presupposition that a player doing this “should have known” that flinging an enemy into a bottomless pit was an unintended way of killing them (since the “exploit” relies on situations where teleport volumes didn’t work..?)

So how, HOW precisely was a player to know this? It’s not like flinging an enemy off a cliff with switch teleport to kill it is something that doesn’t normally work. Switch teleporting to death works on most enemies. If it wasn’t intended to work on Demolysts, how was a player supposed to know that? It feels like DE blaming the player base for their own failure to catch a bug. Look, bugs happen, it’s an unfortunate reality, but if you want to blame a player for using “exploits” it should be painfully, PAINFULLY clear to any observer that they knew perfectly goddamn well that they were abusing behavior that was obviously, definitely, and unimpeachably NOT INTENDED, and I don’t see that at all here. This isn’t the Venari exploit, there’s (as far as I can see, I haven’t bothered with the operation at all as a solo player) no earthly reason a person should assume teleporting an enemy off a ledge to kill it is “unintended” in the context of Warframe.

I challenge anyone here who is applauding these suspensions to explain to me how I would be expected to know intuitively that this was “wrong” behavior rather than just the sort of clever twisting of game mechanics that basically defines endgame Warframe as we know it.

1. Players knew exactly what to do and where, it is not sth you do by random.
2. It was repeated over and over.
3. It used a bug.
4. People are not getting scores reset for nothing. They knowingly exploited a bug that should've been reported.
5. Slash procs giving bleed that bypasses armour is a game mechanic. Your argument is invalid.

[Gabbynaru]

11 minutes ago, taiiat said:

i don't think "stop making stuff for Players to do" is much of a solution.

 

in theory that would be nice, but can you think of any content that fits that mold? hmm, i think.... i would say Eidolon Hunting is the only content in the game that fits such a bar. Profit Taker gets an honorable mention (it's still slightly less restrictive than Eidolon Hunting but the actual objectives are less co-operative).
Disruption does allow for a bit of Co-Op, but realistically the 99% won't play it any different than they do everything else.

and then you have the entire rest of the PvE game, where there is no Co-Operativeness to the Gameplay, whatsoever. where for the 99% Multiplayer is Solo w/ an IRC box and some strange looking humanoid drones that sometimes Revive you if you die.

That's basically my point. Instead of wasting time combating cheaters and exploiters that will always crop up, because competition brings out the worst in people, focus on making actually cooperative game modes. I've played this game for more than 5 years now and not once felt the need to play co-op. I play solo, cause I can. But they can slowly change that by introducing new game modes that actually require cooperation in operations like this one. Instead of wasting  time combating low-life scum who would cheat for some worthless virtual points, waste that time more productively by combating the bugs that will arise in the new game modes, and by looking at the feedback that players give in order to improve these game modes. Cause I highly doubt anyone wants another "Defection" on our hands.

[Rhalick0]

6 minutes ago, RhythmScript said:

I’ll chime in to agree with what’s been said before: resetting or nulling scores is fine, but issuing suspensions is ridiculous.

For a player to jump out over a bottomless pit, target an enemy with Switch Teleport, hit it, and survive the fall while killing an enemy sounds to me like skillful use of a unique ability to overcome a challenging target. It doesn’t feel any different from, say, abusing the fact that slash procs ignore armor to kill heavily armor-scaled enemies in endgame conditions. The argument for suspension hinges entirely, ENTIRELY on the presupposition that a player doing this “should have known” that flinging an enemy into a bottomless pit was an unintended way of killing them (since the “exploit” relies on situations where teleport volumes didn’t work..?)

So how, HOW precisely was a player to know this? It’s not like flinging an enemy off a cliff with switch teleport to kill it is something that doesn’t normally work. Switch teleporting to death works on most enemies. If it wasn’t intended to work on Demolysts, how was a player supposed to know that? It feels like DE blaming the player base for their own failure to catch a bug. Look, bugs happen, it’s an unfortunate reality, but if you want to blame a player for using “exploits” it should be painfully, PAINFULLY clear to any observer that they knew perfectly goddamn well that they were abusing behavior that was obviously, definitely, and unimpeachably NOT INTENDED, and I don’t see that at all here. This isn’t the Venari exploit, there’s (as far as I can see, I haven’t bothered with the operation at all as a solo player) no earthly reason a person should assume teleporting an enemy off a ledge to kill it is “unintended” in the context of Warframe.

I challenge anyone here who is applauding these suspensions to explain to me how I would be expected to know intuitively that this was “wrong” behavior rather than just the sort of clever twisting of game mechanics that basically defines endgame Warframe as we know it.

Cause DE said so. Thats how things work in this game with the bans and stuff. Its time to move on from this BS.

[Dexodrill]

 

2 hours ago, Kurokoz said:

 

Let's keep the competitive leaderboards in the PvP side. And add some other elements to PvP then. I found multiple posts on Reddit with loads of upvotes and evidence that's it's the same clans and players exploiting different mechanics and events. I don't believe Reddit for everything but when they can show enough evidence it may be worth DE actually investigating. That's for them to decide. But I for one would rather not have anymore lame competitive crap added to a cooperative focused game for people to exploit. It only takes a few to ruin it for the many and we see it all the time in real life.

 

Ps couldn't find a way to delete the quote box on mobile. 

[--Blame--]

People asking for the end of the competition are not aware how important this is to the interaction of clan leaders and members.

There is no reason why the DE to revolt with them so much, I think it is correct to reset the scorecard of those who apply this type of bug and I believe that some staff should monitor the forums and the players looking for this type of bug, and correct the problem, and maybe restricting access to these players in the mission.

-

The big problem (in my opinion, you're free to disagree) is when ordinary players get angry (more than they should) for not being able to score or feel mad and end up making

Why do I see it as a problem? Leaderboard by itself is something that is not important to the game, clan or players. The event is healthy because of the trophies and (perhaps) the score that this trophy of gold brings with it for future updates.

I believe that in this particular case, the DE should have been more attentive, since it took a long time to correct problems such as the score of the event in the profile summary, reset who committed bugs, etc.

What's more, transgressors are important to the mission as they see it, they force themselves to discover bugs and this turns out to be very useful for DE to fix errors a lot early, that would take a long time to appear in the light of the community without a event to expose.

[ThatBlue]

Just be ahead of the curve 😊

[Moko]

Oh boy now all those people that were complaining on reddit that "glitches were a valid stategy" are as good as banned

 

[Short_Temper]

2 hours ago, [DE]Rebecca said:

Hello Tenno!

We've done our first Leaderboard Operation since 2017-05-04 with Ambulas Reborn. You read that right - it's been 2 years! And history certainly does repeat itself. As we debut new mission types with Operations, so do we find that exploits are discovered and abused.

Years ago, Operation Trophies and their method of acquisition were changed to allow every clan the chance to earn them, rather than just top clans. This was done because top clans tend to have illicit runs, which means tying rewards to them is questionable.

With all this in mind in the midst of another Operation, the question becomes how involved it is to wipe illicit runs. Each event has a different definition of illicit runs because the variety of Warframe abilities and content results in different edge cases. In the case of Operation: Hostile Mergers, let's first define ‘illicit' runs.

Operation: Hostile Mergers:

1) Using Loki's Ability to Switch Teleport a Demolyst to death on tiles with a bugged teleport volume resulting in insta-death is considered an illicit run.
2) Using negative damage exploits to compete is not permitted and is considered an illicit run.

We have been able to cleanly identify cohorts that used Items 1 and 2 for Leaderboard runs.

The following measures have been enforced against confirmed exploiters:

- Cases of extreme abuse have resulted in temporary suspensions until the Operation is over on June 3rd. Any suspended accounts now have a score of 0 for their clan.
- Illicit scores in general have been removed where applicable.
- If an exploiting account is a repeat offender of exploits or suspicious behaviour, permanent game ban.

Thanks to all Tenno who cleanly participate.

Cheers!

 

I'm just gonna be honest. Why bother? I know that people hate participation trophies, since it levels the playing field too much, but why even make events anymore? People cheat, use *illicit* tactics. I'd rather the team just give up on clan based crap. Its all the same story. Trophies are not earned, scored are impossibly hard for smaller clans, too small for clans of substantial size. Not till we are all made clear on one, teeny tiny detail...

DEFINE ILLICIT!!

I'm all ok about learning something is considered bad. Even being told it isn't supposed to happen. But why this far?! Its not like we had a set of rules on what abilities we were not supposed to use! You didn't make clear that demolysts were not supposed to be affected by warframe abilities at all!

So why bother having an event when perfectly *normal* and accepted actions are being cut and players banned for not being in the know? Just drop content and be done with it.

[KelvinM6]

25 minutes ago, LSG501 said:

I can understand 'edge case' things being missed, for example the khora venari xp exploit, that's kind of understandable. 

But I just find it rather strange that they didn't test well known approaches to other 'bosses' in the new game mode or even just check a negative value on a riven wasn't having some weird outcome in game.

As I've said in another reply not all QC is done by 'players', or at least it shouldn't be, if you've watched DE Glens streams you'll see the dev's have all sorts of overlays and information at their disposal for testing.  If the Dev's aren't involved in QC and it's being left purely to the 'players' then that in itself raises questions over the processes being used for QC in the first place...

At the end of the day some of the responsibility for bugs which cause the exploits has to lay on DE's shoulders, you can't just give them a free pass because they're a 'small team' because it will just make things worse in the long run. 

It can be a little perplexing how some things get through haha, like if they just shot the Staticor once back when the uncharged shots had the full aoe.. haha. I assume it somehow was working on their build though, after which they maybe changed something else and didn't go back to test that part of the patch again, something like that.

[taiiat]

14 minutes ago, Gabbynaru said:

focus on making actually cooperative game modes.

i don't disagree in principle but the game itself is anti-social and anti-coop in the first place, so we'd have to go back to the drawing board, basically, in order to reach such a place.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[MagicBoiMan]

I'm a bit confused about this but how is the loki switch teleporting considered cheating? They're just using the most efficient method to complete the game mode right? If Demolysts didn't have ability disrupting powers then wouldn't Limbo be also considered cheating? Is it cheating to use Chroma in Tridelons because Chroma is one of the frames that's more effective against bosses? I'd appreciate it if someone could clarify to me because that's how I see it. Didn't even know it was a thing.

[diaversai]

I'm also in the camp of suspensions aren't warranted for the switch teleport thing. I'm fine with the -riven damage. That's what Loki does. Resetting scores and saying that wasn't intended behavior is totally fine, but I think a suspension is overmuch without saying first that it's unintended. You can always switch teleport a mob to it's death. I've had infested simaris targets being carried by mutalist ospreys dropped off cliffs and die forever, and I didn't ask for them to be suspended. 

[KelvinM6]

2 minutes ago, Short_Temper said:

I'm just gonna be honest. Why bother? I know that people hate participation trophies, since it levels the playing field too much, but why even make events anymore? People cheat, use *illicit* tactics. I'd rather the team just give up on clan based crap. Its all the same story. Trophies are not earned, scored are impossibly hard for smaller clans, too small for clans of substantial size. Not till we are all made clear on one, teeny tiny detail...

DEFINE ILLICIT!!

I'm all ok about learning something is considered bad. Even being told it isn't supposed to happen. But why this far?! Its not like we had a set of rules on what abilities we were not supposed to use! You didn't make clear that demolysts were not supposed to be affected by warframe abilities at all!

So why bother having an event when perfectly *normal* and accepted actions are being cut and players banned for not being in the know? Just drop content and be done with it.

Turns out it was only a specific place that would glitch and kill the demolyst, and this ability was used to put them there. If this was just how the game was supposed to work, or it acted like this consistently across many pits making it seem as if it's part of the game, I'd heavily disagree as well. You're free to use Switch Teleport to your advantage, seems like a nice ability coupled with your invis and team support from 4.

[Feltal]

On 2019-05-29 at 4:20 PM, Voltage said:

What determines an illicit score? I was in a run for 33,000 that used Valkyr, Valkyr, Nova, and Banshee and I had no Loki, no Rivens (to my knowledge since I don't see other's inventories), and no Hydroid. My best friend is now at 0 and this is seriously aggravating.

.

[KelvinM6]

1 minute ago, dragonslayer2240 said:

I'm a bit confused about this but how is the loki switch teleporting considered cheating? They're just using the most efficient method to complete the game mode right? If Demolysts didn't have ability disrupting powers then wouldn't Limbo be also considered cheating? Is it cheating to use Chroma in Tridelons because Chroma is one of the frames that's more effective against bosses? I'd appreciate it if someone could clarify to me because that's how I see it. Didn't even know it was a thing.

Read my last reply, I was confused at first too but if what I said is true, it makes sense

[BirdOfSong]

So that's it then? The competitive community spends hours of their lives on remaining competitive for the community to lynch mob it and call for bans? To no surprise DE delivers.
What is even left for the competitive community? We lost Dark Sectors, PVP is a fiery train wreck, and now events are going to persist in a state of decay.
Its a real shame that players are continually penalized for the failures of the studio as a whole, a lack of a competent QA department, and a lack of foresight from the coders who work on the game. Yes, I am calling it out. Stop recycling code through the entire game. It continues to degrade any progress and only continues to hinder the community as well as everything released onward from here. Its a systemic issue that has plagued the game for more then I would like to consider.