About fixing battles

Hello everyone,

several people asked me yesterday, how does one “fix” random battles when the matchmaking takes the players from the entire server. It shouldn’t be possible to do, right?

So just a quick description how this works. Next time there is some competition (you know, like the one for 0.8.5 – top XP gainers from each class etc.), check on how many of the victors are clanners and how many of representatives of those clans are present.

Of course, it could mean such clans are simply that great… or it could mean something else entirely.

How to do it

Here’s an example of a fixed battle (thanks to Rasan and his clanmate):

lolvut

Link to replay (version 0.8.2): http://wotreplays.com/site/225264#ensk-guest-amx_13_90

Here you can see a typical (albeit lowtier) example of fixing battles. Several friends (this time from different clans, although Suicide Division (S-D) and Valkyria (VLK) are present on both sides) decided to allow the T1 Cunningham to get an insane XP gain.

Basically, what the culprits do is they abuse the MM mechanism for matching platoons. This works best around 4-5AM, when there are very very few players on the server. Few players means few platoons. In other words: if you suddenly create two 3 man platoons (those are rarer) and click on “battle” at the same time, you have a really high chance of ending against each other, because there will be no more 3 man platoons online at that point and the matchmaker will have no other choice than to compensate by putting your friends’ platoon against you.

This is how the jokers from the picture did it. As you can see, it’s two platoons (of different size, so I assume this was done in the early morning to ensure they would be matched against each other) and the Cunningham has 3 kills, corresponding to the first platoon – all 5 of them probably simply met somewhere and let the Cunningham kill them. Funny and harmless? Well, yes, sure, unless you are fixing a competition that way.

There are of course more sophisticated ways how to do this, leading to even “better” results (for example two clans choosing two players for the rewards, then swamping the random with various platoons at 4 AM, this way, a random player can rack up even 15 kills if both teams end up being filled with people from those two clans – hell, this is possible even in ONE clan, if it is big enough).

This phenomenon is not limited to EU server of course (remember the Russian “superplayer” in FV215b 183, who destroyed 15 tanks with 13 shots or so?) and is well known for ages, yet Wargaming does nothing against it, unless the competition winners are directly accused of cheating (I believe this has happened only once, few patches back, can’t remember the circumstances though).

Either way, I believe that the replay examination of the top winners of the “Type 59″ type competitions should be mandatory to prevent this shit from happening…

32 thoughts on “About fixing battles

  1. This is just great…. not. So all those contests for XP and such are full of abusers who won a price by fixing the battle, and nobody can do anything with this? I hope you guy will make a lot of noise about this, so maybe they will finaly fix this exploit.

  2. AFAIR some of them got banned and that result was removed from competition.
    OTOH – who players are, when developers say they don’t care about that?

    I think it’s a matter of time, when civilized standards will come to WoT.
    Recent changes in aiming mechanisms from 1.3 (while on wiki were 3) sigmas to 2 sigmas and thus reducing number of shots landing on the circle’s edge, changes in tracks eating shells (one of beta testers claims that for a long time center of tracks is a no damage hit zone to avoid too many detracks, and this seems valid with battle experience) show that direct competition to WoT may change things, that were buried, hidden and by any means not changeable.
    I expect following changes when competition will introduce real skill based matchmaker.

    • Actually developers said, tracks have 3x times the hit points in the center and fewer hitpoints on the leading wheels… It even makes sense. Losing one wheel from the center probably still won’t detrack you, losing a leading wheel will definately.

      • Actually.
        After hitting Leopard (currently 440 HP) with T34 120mm 400 avg dmg in a wheel and doing nothing theory of no damage zone seems quite plausible. Now WG changes that.

        Other examples of WG missing the real – exp on vehicles, they claimed that various types of vehicles are receiving same amount of XP, which was somehow strange to anyone who had real good battle on TD or arty. Now it “leaked” that it is not true, and vehicles will receive same amount of XP.

        Long time ago it was said that gun accuracy is constant.
        Till a yube appeared that shown that aiming circle was a little bigger for poorly trained crew than for 100% trained.
        And it turned out that accuracy is a degressive stat.

        There are still possible reports for team damage.
        While support answers, that team damage is being handled by a machine.
        While you can still be banned for team damage by support.

        Each time that WG is being caught redhanded affects players, and because of that – WG income, when players get frustrated and quit.

        Same is with competition and setting up battles. Personally I wouldn’t mind that literally all of winning places would be achieved in set up battles.
        Such situation would force WG to react and to develop some kind of policy of handling such contests.

        After all WG filled a patent for matchmaking that MAY (of course, only may) put player to various battles according to his performance, so why not to hit few birds with one stone and not to screw matchmaker and contest at once? Or even a lolplatoons made by tiers I and X.

        When WG will apply server side replays (of course not to fight mods that are ripping off poorly written game but for users convenience), such exp verification checks will be much easier.

  3. If the winning result has extreme XP score, they will check it and if it’s something like this it will be removed from the top score list.

    Oh, and so far, i couldn’t find any fishy results on the last contest…
    I remember that the lowest exp on Leo PTA was 1500… which isn’t that hard to get :)

    • I am not saying there WAS something fishy. Merely that there is a possibility that was and that there should be an automatic check of this stuff, ideally from replays. After all, the players aren’t idiots. Gazillion XP battles on tier 10 would obviously attract unwanted attention, so as a rule of thumb, sometimes the statistics and estimates about how much is needed for the first place are posted, all the players who want to cheat have to do is get slightly more XP, but not that much so it would warrant investigation. Possibly tricky, but considering the prize being the Type 59…

      • I think some guys were disqualified for a competition where you need to be shot as many times as possible – 2 platoons with maus and 2 t1c or t2light went into a battle and low tier machine guns unloaded hundreds of shells into the mauses.

        how WoT perception changes.
        Right after release started there was a 30 pages drama, when 2 platoons from my clan that were playing in one battle didn’t shoot at each other, just went pass each other.

        And now?

        • These cowardly PoS actually do this everyday. Do you notice smtyms when there’s members of so called “pro” clans on one side and the opposite side just gets steamrolled? most likely there’s at least one junk account/platoon planted on the opposing team that deliberately loses (akf,tk/td,miss shots deliberately,does not reset cap,gets off cap,etc…) the game. Its all BS and smhow WG themselves condone this.

          That’s why these stat whores are really pieces of shit pussy’s and you notice when it comes down to legit one on one there’s nothing special about them at all. Fakes. That’s one big reason why winrate is all BS. Skill is a myth they like to create and blame it all on MM, RNG hates you, bad luck or your a scrub.

          Play the game for FREE FOREVER so you’ll never regret wasting your hard earned money on a game dominated by fakes.

          • Hahahahaha, truly the comments of a terrible scrub.

            I’m not amazing at tanks, but I’m better than average. However, I’ve played with actual amazing players, and they ARE better than me – A LOT better, and since I’m better than average, you can guess how much better they are than that.

            Face facts scrub: you suck, I don’t, and there are plenty of players better than me. Skill is real, and win rate does on average reflect skill. Deal with it.

          • @ JCFalkenberg,

            you must be the weak scrub who gets baby cradled all the time by his corrupt “so called friends” coz believe me I don’t see anything special in your so called “pro” players because I can do those things they do as well and fyi my stats are better than average as well, almost all done solo without any kind of manipulation, stat padding or using OP tanks most of the time. You dealt with it alright coz your just a weakling who resigned to the fact that he reached his limit and if I suck at playing you must suck even more, even sucking dick and kissing these pro players asses all the time. Hahaha? one of the corrupt assholes replying? Deal with it and bend over asshole.

          • Oh and b4 I forget, I know what you and your corrupt kind are capable of so I won’t be surprised but time will come.

            Maybe you’d like me to cut your nose and stick it up your ass so that you will clearly smell the piece of shits that you and your kind are?

    • Check it how? Does the server keep a replay as well? Sometimes extreme battles happen, I’d not like to see someone legit get hosed just because they were out of the norm.

      If you win place or show as it were, you should be prepared to present a copy of the replay. They don’t take up that much space to turn on, nor are they hard to delete after a time.

  4. Permanent ban for this kind of cheating. No vechile should be able to participate in the competition outside its’ MM range.

  5. Like they dive a whack… Sure, if you have evidence of such “fixing” you can send replay to support. But it might be kinda tricky, when you get 15v15 of your friends and clanmates.

  6. If you think WG cares about anything other than money, you haven’t been paying attention.

    • And what should they care about? They are private company, seems perfectly legit for me.

  7. As the maker of that screenshot, I think I should point out some things
    1 – this battle took place around midnight, not at 4 AM, so this shit can be done by people that don’t wait all night long to do it
    2 – platoon 1 on both teams were involved only, platoon 2 on both teams were not. In fact, platoon 2 on my team actually won us the game and gave the cheaters some not so nice words in polish
    3 – how they did it – t1 from their team hidden in the upper right corner of the map, behind a house. 3 bat chats from my team went to him, turned their backs towards him and let him kill them one by one. They also teamkilled our chafee that tried to kill t1, and I assume they would have done the same to anyone else that tries
    and now comes the sad part
    4 – all of them were banned for 3 days only
    5 – all of them had 5000+ maximum experience on t1 and t2light, and last time I checked they still had it. Meaning they have been doing this for quite a while, and since my screenshot and replay are the only ones out there that show what they did, it pretty much shows nobody is reporting match fixers and they’re getting away with it…

  8. I guess one moral of the story is, if you see someone bringing a low tier to a higher tier fight at odd hours, there really might BE a reason to TK the T1 – they may be fixing.

    WG could fix some of the worst of this by disallowing matches where you’re out of your natural MM range from competition, but I’m really not sure how they could prevent it entirely.

    • I know better one, that everyone can enjoy: NO LOL PLATOONS.

      Like – tanks have to have at least one common battle tier. But WG doesn’t care neither for lolplatoons nor for foxed battles.

  9. Sadly, this happens on the NA server as well. I won’t name certain clans/alliances but I can confirm this happens in the particular clan I was in.

  10. Turns out this game is all just BS that can be manipulated by greedy, sadistic cowards… and these chicken shit fanbois always defended that WoT cannot be cheated, etc… that’s why they are trying to shut down a game called ProjectTank with all they got because people sick and tired of all this BS manipulation will go their instead. Cheats? RNG? MM? plus all the mafia manipulation? – YOU POS call that skill?!