Comatose reward (in General)

Tulkas is pleased with your victory and grants you a An Adamantite Cuirass [40] (+7). Use it well! I won it on a comatose page.

I will check the code again, but I don't know what will turn up differently. What I can do is change the CM to report the guy you beat.

That would be a nice addition.

grants you .... due to your victorious fight against ...! :)

That would been nice.

I thought I had the same thing yesterday, but I could have just been in a weird fight state or browser-cache state.

I suppose I can try to only fight comatose people and see if I ever win anything without my BA number going down. But if the CM has a clear loser named, then it must just be an interface quirk...

Confirmed this bug. I sat on NWO and kept fighting. Only burned 4-5 BA, but clicked enter probably around 200 times.

Got an enforcer's exbow, confirmed by CM, and it was a comatose result.

Looks like I could click on one target all day and win several rares. This is highly exploitable, could even be done with a bot since bot checks seem to be very rare when fighting comatose targets (I think I got one in 200 clicks or so?)

Let me know where I should send the exbow -- it is not something I should have since it was obtained with the exploit.

Furthermore, the CM denoting the drop was received and time-stamped today at 11:45 AM.

I have no won battles at 11:45 AM, the last win against NWO as I was pressing enter-enter-enter was 11:44. I suppose it is possible that on the microsecond scale I won (behind the scenes) and then the CM was sent just as 11:45 hit, but that seems unlikely.

i think you must have won it during a real fight against NWO. I just attacked Heroes 400 times (12 real BA spent) with no item drops

perhaps you won the battle at 11:44:29 and the CM was sent at 11:44:31 ?

I just clicked enter on dead opponents for about 10+ minutes, probably over 1000 clicks, no drops. I think Shade must be right.

Considering the number of people who still haven't had drops, and the number of BA that they've spent, it is statistically unlikely that either Shade's or Artemis' assertions are meaningful.

Sorry, I mean Rawr, not Shade.

Keep in mind that I've done 14,000 fights since this change started and haven't received a drop. Even giving a test run of as many as 1000 isn't proof. It's going to have to be proven with a drop clearly not coinciding with a spent BA...

But how are you guys not getting 1-hour bans for clicking "fight" that quickly? Does that penalty not apply to comatose opponents?

Correct. Not only did I get a comatose drop, I got lucky and got one in just a few hundred clicks. That does not conflict with the fact that I got a drop on a coma result.

The alternative is even MORE unbelievable if you are going to talk about luck -- if I DID beat NWO, then it just so happens that I got a drop in 5 battles. Because I know for a fact my BA only went from 48 down to 43. And this is after winning a rare yesterday, my third.

Either comatose results are dropping, or else ALL The following have to be true:

-- The drop shows even when the result appears to be coma.
-- Timestamps on CMs round instead of truncate (could be).
-- I got TWO of these types of drops, yesterday and today based on just being extremely lucky

I just don't believe it. I do firmly believe drops are dropping on coma battles, and I am going to go do it again right now.

Demigod, I can enter enter enter with maybe a half second between, still takes a while. No penalty or simultaneous battles to trigger a ban in that case.

Indeed demigod, with a decent internet connection (which most people here have) you can fight 2 - 3 times per second on comatose opponents.

I just hope that the system is as good designed at this moment as to prevent us from having rewards for fighting with 0 BA in case it gives items on comatose.

OK, I am recanting this some...

First off, zero-BA will always take you to the game page, so that works.

I just ran what had to be close to 3000 clicks with no drops. Now, as people have pointed out, that could happen even on 3000 real BA.

But what I DID see was my BA counter go down without seeing battle results -- it looked like a coma battle but BA went down. So, knowing that happens, it could be just a very weird coincidence that I got two drops in less than 24 hours (that does happen) and happened to have both look like comas. I can't imagine the program is that complicated, so I have to trust NS on the fact that drops can't happen on coma battles.

What I CAN say is that I am up to 4 drops now while several other folks have none. How that could possibly lead to player retention is still ver much beyond me. But that's a topic for other threads. *smile*

All you do is have to hold down the enter button while on the Standard list. If that person is comatose, you can fight non stop for hundreds of battles per minute.

Yeah, I figures I was averaging a little over 100 ENTERs per minute, and spent about half my lunch hour on it. But like I said, I am not convinced there is a problem anymore, am just more amazed at my luck...

I too have seen my BA drop by 1 every so often, I guess it is when that opponent revives in the 30 sec interval you fight and kill it and then continue along the comatose fighting path.

Perhaps the drop you got was during that 1 active fight.

That's how I am seeing it now, I just was having a hard time believing two drops within a 24 hour period... But I guess it happens!

Sut,

Consider yourself a very lucky person, given all those who have yet to get even 1 drop.

Grats!!

BTW, what did you get as your drops?

-- 2 Enforcer xbows
-- A Pair of elven gloves
-- An AoJ

The AoJ sold for around 1.5 million, EGs went for 650K, and I have been holding onto the exbows (not worth much, but I am actually using one of them). Heck with as imbalanced as exbows are, I might spruce up the second one and throw it on another enchanter as I get more cash...

But I have already had a payday north of 2 million during this lottery. And I think that is a complete crock.

I so want to type something sarcastic as it is my nature.

However, all I can do is shake my head in utter disbelief at this crock of crap.

I'm right there with you.

By the way, sorry for calling Chicken Little about the whole comatose thing... Things seem to be working as designed, if one is of the opinion the drop system is "working"...

I haven't gotten a darn thing!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Definitely a bug.

I just won one, finally..

Mandos is pleased with your victory and grants you a A Steel Familiar lvl 20. Use it well!

I'm 10000 % sure all my opponents were comatose, no available targets, but i decided to click fight anyway, to see if any of them is available to fight again, and yet instead of comatose message, I got that message.

Compare fight log and CM from system? Are they off by more than a minute? Arg, I must have burned 2500 clicks over lunch, no drop... This is a tough one, but the code has to be straightforward. If you don't actually fight, you can't get to the drop routine...

This is something worth some hardcore testing no?
Can NS or jon run a controlled test?
ie, take a test char and make an opponent that can be "permanently" comatose. Then use a "bot-ish" kinda thing to fight it for a few thousand worth of clicks?

(i'm a coding / game making moron so this sounds like a good test to me though it may be utterly impossible)

Point.

With the drops coming from rares, is it possible no one got one earlier because I had already gotten one earlier? Then later in the day, TrueDevil runs across one.

All our clicks are counting, even the coma clicks.

I am back to Chicken Little. This is a return to camping, in my current opinion.

Let's just say I will be trying for a rare again tomorrow morning.

j'bob, there should be a backup environment where they could do what you say.

But the code for fighting shouldn't really need that. You can either get into the drop branch or not...

When you TKO an opponent, they're only out for 30 seconds, right? If you're the only one farming the victim for the test, then your fight screen will always show that you attacked within a minute of the drop. In other words, it's almost impossible to rule out human error that way. You would have to have already attacked twice within the same minute and show that the victim wasn't an active character (who might heal faster).

If you have four people all farming the same victim at the same time, you MIGHT be lucky enough to show that you never attacked within a couple of minutes of winning the drop... and good luck with that method. A permanently comatose victim is all but a must for accuracy.

Otherwise, we can just assume it's a bug until those of you torturing comatose minions end up with ten times as many prizes as the rest of us.

i think that it would be way cool to have a list of all the rare drops anyways, so how about the devs add a monthly drop list, with archives of past months as well, that shows the time of the fight as well as the outcome of the fight. it would also show the item and its stats.

perhaps this would also ease everyone's minds. ; )

Well we just likely need to obtain more information before concluding if this is a real finding.

Those who try this method of getting drops, please post when you get a drop you suspect was due to this feature.

Then, in a few weeks we can see if this is a trend, or just a temporal relationship and the real feature is winning that 1 fight you really get in every 30 seconds.

I also just got an award on a comatose page.

My third reward, and third lesser tattoo!
I'm just having great luck with these...

:( still waiting on my first reward, and I'm not going to resort to this method. Although I am tempted, I just think it is wrong.

Well if this is a bug, and people are using it to get rare drops, should they not be fined/reset for exploiting a bug?

I still highly doubt this is a true bug and likely you get that drop when you do actually fight that person.

I would like to see someone try this on a comatose opponent they cannot beat. Like Novice. Try fighting him when he is comatose and see.

However, I think we need to gather more information on this feature/bug before we come to any conclusion. I think another 6 months of information is needed to determine its true effect on the game.

"However, I think we need to gather more information on this feature/bug before we come to any conclusion. I think another 6 months of information is needed to determine its true effect on the game."

is the diplomatic ranger gone so soon? ; )

No,

I am saying we have now a propensity to sit and wait for things.

So why not gather more information before we jump to any conclusions about something beind real or not, bad or good etc...

If we can sit and wait for 6 months while this drop system gets evaluated, why not see how this "feature" is before jumping to quick conclusions?

Or is something so obviously wrong/broken that it needs to be fixed as soon as possible?

or we could just mock those we disagree with and attempt to use sarcasm as a coping mechanism for not getting our way. if we get really frustrated, we could threaten to quit as well! ; )

We certainly can.

Especially since people wish to gather information on a broken unliked system for 6+ months before deciding it is not or is fair.

This new system sucks, plain and simple. Is very unfair and wrong with how CB tried to be.

There, I typed it.

This system SUCKS BADLY.

People have went 3 weeks without 1 drop while others are 3-4M ahead.

How is that fair, when all we type about is trying to make the game fair for everyone. Mages = tanks. This skill vs that skill.

This system is the antithesis of that entire concept and is stupid.

6 months of this garbage will do nothing but make things more unequal that they are now.

I really feel bad for people who have gotten nothing as they get to see all those who won the lottery selling their corns or AoJs for millions.

I've not been vocal on this subject, I don't think I really can, not having spent a single BA since it was introduced, but I back Ranger 100% on this.

No debate on this from me, no arguements.

/me gets his bat and stats behind Ranger.

Oh dear, Ranger, Sutekh, AND GL all agreeing?

I can hear the steeds already...

Unfair? You know what I think is unfair... the mob mentality bashing endlessly on a perfectly reasonable attempt at spicing things up.
If I were Jon or NS I'd shut this place down so fast you wouldn't have time to shut that gaping endlessly gibbering maw of yours.

And that novice is why you do not run the game.

So we are not allowed to disagree with a change, one that to a lot of people is bad for the game? Are we supposed to be lemming with a pencil stuck in our brains thanking Jon and NS for anything different. Knowing it is a horrible change to gameplay?

This perfectly good attempt is the opposite of what CB is. And not all changes are a home run. Some are a pop out, which this is.

In a strategy game randomness should have a very small occurrence. But this randomness is already being seen.

Some people have gotten 0 CB while others have gotten over 4M worth of drops. That alone is unfair and contrary to keeping thing equal.

Which is what I see people posting all the time. Was not the evasion debale an attempt to keep things fair and equal? We waited over a year to get that fixed, all the time the game was broken and most people hated it. That is not what I want to occur here. Something that is effecting everyone, not just a few like the exbow.

This change is an attempt to increase our numbers. With around 1/2 the people really hating it, how is that going to happen? Please let me know.

disagreeing is different than taking the signal to noise ratio of the forums into theoretical numbers territory


Assuming there isn't a horrifying bug (which I haven't seen proved yet) it seems that we're seeing exactly what you might expect to see in a system like this. It's random, and the sampling we've taken is tiny. At some point it will all be quasi-equal, but that hasn't happened yet. Yelling and frothing at the mouth (as much as I'm a fan of it) isn't doing anything but making us as a community look insane.

Go back and look at the outpouring of happy responses initially at the change... it almost looked then like we were out of the doldrums that have plagued us recently. Sadly that was not the case. The only thing that I find really stagnant around here is the attitude of entitlement.

We have had over 1.5M battles with this new system. Not exactly a small sample size.

And people let me know how random is good for CB. Will a drop every month make someone stay? I highly, no very highly doubt it.

Will not getting a drop in a month while you see others get 3+M worth of items make someone leave? Likely not, but likely more than keeping someone with a drop a month.

I see no positives in this system for player retention which I hear is the primary goal.

If you play CB to get that blue message that you were blessed, than you may be waiting months based upon the current statistics we have. Based on 3 weeks and over 1.5 million battles fought.

But for a strategy game where there is a finite amount of fighting, and where we all try to make things equal, this is just counter to that thinking.

It adds nothing to the playablity of the game, and makes things very uneven for all the players to compete.

fine, you've said that... we get it
others disagree, and even more don't really care

beating your opinion into the heads of everyone isn't helping

"Half of all rares will now be granted as rewards in battle, in addition to cash and XP.

(That is why cash rewards have been decreased a little.)

To start things off I've put 20 amulets of junction into the reward pool."

that is actually all that jon said regarding the change. everything else is an assumption at this point. we don't know if he did it for player retention or if he was wanting to reduce liquid assets in the game.

he definitely did not state he was doing it in the sake of fairness though.

i tend to be a glass half full type, so i surmised that this was a change to retain players rather than decrease liquid assets. if that is the case it will likely take a few months to tell if it worked, due to the fact that we have seasonal swings at the beginning and end of summer anyways and it would be hard to get a good picture until we watch it a bit.

reducing my wait and see approach to the absurd assumption that i would counsel that regarding bugs in addition to game mechanics changes is just silly though.

just as you said something to the affect of do we all have to just agree with devs and go on ranger, i would also ask that of you. do we all have to agree with you for peace on the forums?

Certainly not.

However, you do not have to read and reply on the forums. Do you?

"So we are not allowed to disagree with a change, one that to a lot of people is bad for the game? Are we supposed to be lemming with a pencil stuck in our brains thanking Jon and NS for anything different. Knowing it is a horrible change to gameplay?"

"Certainly not.

However, you do not have to read and reply on the forums. Do you?"
you don't really need me in this monologue do you? ; )

Cutting and pasting 2 different posts to make a point is?

How about we cut and paste single words out of past posts to make people type things they never mean?

But insisting that we see how a change is for 6 months before we come to any conclusions is very bad for the overall health of a game built upon equality and fairness. Especially this change which is the opposite of that.

Or should we try and get things fixed that are bad for the game and its overall health?

This change, unlike almost any other, introduced a large random element in the game. And I, as well as many others, would like to see this random element be gone as it gives nothing positive to gameplay and actually makes things much more difficult. Unless you are one of the lucky few that are benefitting from this change.

Take the real lottery. In time, if everyone plays, given random statistical variation, everyone should win. However, it will take decades for that to happen.

We have 3 weeks of data already and some people are 2+ million ahead while most of CB is far behind. So every 3-4 weeks we get 2 or 3 people gaining money while the rest of CB is losing money in this system.

Again, how is that good for the long term viablity of CB?

Will people stick around for that 1 great drop every month? Doubtful.

Will it make people envious of those that get that great drop? Certainly.

Well dude, I'm for one am getting tired of waiting for a drop.

Been 3 weeks now, and still nada, while quite a few are on 5+ hmmmm seems very fair. When will the seasons change to my favor? I am behind now several million cb2 compared to those that have drops.

Also if you note, there were a few against it when it first came out, I was one of them. I can dig the lowered rewards if reducing liquid assets is the goal, but I have played a ton of games before I and I am also a programmer so I know that Random is not really Random in this game, it is just a matter of time to finding the trick to it.

I even did a good job of pointing it out in the original thread and it is just now getting tested and exploited.

If we're going with randomness can we have that FoD thing back so I have as much a shot at beating anyone as I do of getting a drop?

mikel, i feel for ya bud. i do hope your luck turns around soon.

ranger, my point was that you asked if we all had to agree with jon and ns.

i asked if we all had to agree with you, to which you replied that i could just not read the forums or reply.

how would you have reacted had jon replied to your question about agreeing with the devs with a response that basically says shut the hell up?

my post was merely meant to show you how childish that would sound had jon said it and how it really doesn't accomplish much.

i merely thought it was humorous! ; )

Jon has plenty of time told me and others, including NS in the past to shut the hell up.

Even used words that caused him to get a fine, ah the good ole days.

However, I have yet to see really anyone state what positives this change is doing. Other than a possible maybe perhaps increase in players in a few months time.

While there are many good, logic counter statements as to why this change sucks.

IE, now I received a IF as a drop. Of course I cannot use it, so I have to spend my time to try and sell it. Wondering if I can get maximum value for an item I really do not need.

All to see that blue bar on the top 1 battle every 10k. What a rush that was for me, not.

Want to keep players? Fix broken things like the tutorial, or the freaking exbow (which will stay broken for another year most likely), or plenty of other great ideas us players have come up with to make CB better.

j'bob likely had the best line of everyone in this entire set of threads:

"If we're going with randomness can we have that FoD thing back so I have as much a shot at beating anyone as I do of getting a drop? "

Too much randomness bad, very bad.