Make the "Draw Bug" a Bannable Offense

Am I gonna have to copy/paste a link to Brutus’ post on the subject for you Thomas?

Aging software has no relevance to the rating bug and is largely fake news as proven by the 14-year-old game that still works perfectly despite the fact you cannot modify its source code.

I think this topic has served its purpose and should be closed.

A work of art is never finished, merely abandoned

@giebmasse said in Make the "Draw Bug" a Bannable Offense:

Purposefully doing it definitely falls under our generic "do not abuse exploits/bugs/loopholes" rule.

E: For clarification, the bug/exploit being that in a draw situation the player who ctrl-k'd gets a "win" even though it should be a "draw".

Then it should be defined as an exploit on the exploit page because this is just an intuitive use of game mechanics, especially with vet existing.

I always ctrl+ for draw if I know I’m not leaving a push alive, why allow the risk of a vet. I’ll also play more aggressive with ACU against higher rated players that are disincentivized from trading with me. Does the sum of these two factors mean I’m intentionally bug abusing or is it incidental and regardless of the client report to the server I’d be doing it anyway?

Is this reportable now? Is it only reportable if I do it 5 games in a row? How about if I only do it during basically all my game draws even if I only draw like 1 game in 15? Problem is this falls into the same manipulation category as uneven team games being rated which didn't stop dudes that got 2.2k rating from 1v3's their friends in casual weekend games but it did stop all the high rated moaning about Sid and Suzuji.

This rule just seems like more shit added specifically with the intent of enforcing it at 1800+ without really caring about the exploit existing elsewhere simply because enforcing it is going to add hours of evidence searching by mods to see if it is a more pervasive problem or not in the replay vault of the accused. It only really results in a ban if it's a "known bug abuser" entity same as uneven teamgames, which I bet doesn't even exist right now and will instead be [insert ladder player] buttblasted that he lost 8 points in one game.

Also another thing, is this only considered an exploit based on the end result? Mainly, I can do the exact same behavior that would be considered bug abuse in ladder but it's OK in teamgames for me to intentionally draw Yudi in exactly an identical fashion because it doesn't impact the game results the client gives?

If so, then you're banning bad rating changes not "draw bug" behavior which makes no sense because it isn't the user's fault that bad rating changes exist.

Like really, if it’s a systemic rating problem that cannot be resolved your options are:

  1. Get rid of 5x5s from competitive games since they promote draws and therefore the exploit
  2. Petition balance team to change the game itself to lower draw chance
  3. Petition balance/game dev team to prohibit manual acu ctrl+k

Banning it is just incredibly flawed and lazy, doesn’t address any actual problem and instead puts the burden of faf’s own problems on the end user.

We can fix it - it is just a very time consuming bug to solve.

A work of art is never finished, merely abandoned

I mean I don’t mind if you take a year to fix it and the bug exists, but if people want a solution NOW then the only options are actual, systemic changes rather than banning behavior that may or may not lead to bad game results.

Could you parse the replay of every game with an automated replay parsing tool @Askaholic that looks for the ctrl-K command of acu followed by another acu getting killed and game ending. Can your tool do that?

if you could extract this information it would give you a fix provided you rewrote how games are reported...
This would at least give you an idea of how many games this occurs in even if that is not the case

I don’t think the game results are actually saved in the replay, so even if we had a bunch of replays where the bug occurred it wouldn’t help us. It’s also not that hard to reproduce the bugs with the game results. I have a pretty good understanding of what happens, but not why since that’s buried in the depths of the exe. I also wasn’t able to figure out a fool proof way of patching over it in the lua which is why there are certain edge cases like the draw bug that still happen.

@askaholic said in Make the "Draw Bug" a Bannable Offense:

I don’t think the game results are actually saved in the replay, so even if we had a bunch of replays where the bug occurred it wouldn’t help us. It’s also not that hard to reproduce the bugs with the game results. I have a pretty good understanding of what happens, but not why since that’s buried in the depths of the exe. I also wasn’t able to figure out a fool proof way of patching over it in the lua which is why there are certain edge cases like the draw bug that still happen.

Its because of how game see weapon death. The ACU isn’t seen as dead when you ctrl-k. Rather lack of hetter term in a state of dying. (Imagine ACU has 1 HP Left) The death weapon goes off, killing opponent ACU. Which is SEEN as having died in this scenerio sense it was killed by an opposing weapon.

Basically the game doesn’t realize ACU is dead until after its destruction is finished unless its destruction is triggered by an external event.

I’m a shitty 1k Global. Any balance or gameplay suggestions should be understood or taken as such.

Project Head and current Owner/Manager of SCTA Project

@thomashiatt said in Make the "Draw Bug" a Bannable Offense:

Aging software has no relevance to the rating bug and is largely fake news as proven by the 14-year-old game that still works perfectly despite the fact you cannot modify its source code.

The best example for FA being affected by aging software is the Nvidia driver issue. Without mod developers building a solution the game would be broken for all Nvidia users.

But yes, this particular bug might not have appeared if we hadn't touched anything. But the majority of people demands changes and improvements and accepts bugs for that.

You can still go play steam if you think raw FA was the best and doesn't need any changes.

"Nerds have a really complicated relationship with change: Change is awesome when WE'RE the ones doing it. As soon as change is coming from outside of us it becomes untrustworthy and it threatens what we think of is the familiar."
– Benno Rice

@swkoll that is not a rule but simple faf etiquette.