Dear Yoshi & Team: About Current TT Tournament Model

[Alberel]

Whilst I'm loving Triple Triad I have to chime in and admit how disheartening it was to see the tournament rankings yesterday and realize that it's basically impossible to win without paying players to deliberately lose to you. How the developers thought this was a good design I have no idea... First rule of MMO development is that if it CAN be abused it WILL be abused.

They must have seen that players could easily fix matches so why the hell didn't they put some counter measures in place?

[ChocoFeru]

I hope they listen to us ._.; I don't know if Japanese forums are talking about this, too. I hope so.

[Kiara]

I'm going to put it bluntly before I go into details: It's a broke system...

5. This one is uncertain until you guys come forward about whether Lightning is exclusive to tournament. Awarding an award that actually affects gameplay is flawed. There's a reason why every 'good' card game under the sun only awards special unique artwork of an already existing card to the winner, or winner creates a card, but card will still be available to all players. Winnings are always a currency amount, and/or card vanity. No affect on gameplay whatsoever. By having even just 1 card with exclusive gameplay affect that can only be obtained by getting top spots in tournament, you are essentially tipping the playing field in the winner's favor and causing an unbalance by making the playing field slightly uneven, as the winners now have a permanent advantage by having access to all the same cards everyone else does, plus the tournament prize card. This wouldn't be an issue if it was just artwork or something. This means the winners will always have more options now for deck customization and possible strategies. And releasing the card as an award in more than 1 tournament does not fix the issue, as it still requires winning top spots to get.

Totally agree. Great post.

I like the idea a few people suggested already about this as well:

* Give the Lightning Card to everyone who participates in the Tournament.
(OR, make it an Achievement Reward, like "Participate in X# of Tournament Matches" etc.)

* Give Nice / Big MGP Rewards Instead for the Tournament's Top 3 Winners (or some Vanity / Artwork, etc.).

Otherwise, players will always find ways to cheat the system (or Buy / Sell their way to Victory) for the chance at the Lightning Card.

And it unbalances the deck for 99% of the playerbase if you leave it as only the Top Winner gets an exclusive Card.

[h0tNstilettos]

Just wanted to chime in that I have been reading peoples' thoughts and solutions. Been keeping my eye on this, and hoping for an official response sometimes in the near future.

I hope they listen to us ._.; I don't know if Japanese forums are talking about this, too. I hope so.

I'm certain it has to of been mentioned there as well. Yesterday someone left a comment on a thread here in the English forum mentioning it has been brought up on the France forums.

Totally agree. Great post.

I like the idea a few people suggested already about this as well:

* Give the Lightning Card to everyone who participates in the Tournament.
(OR, make it an Achievement Reward, like "Participate in X# of Tournament Matches" etc.)

* Give Nice / Big MGP Rewards Instead for the Tournament's Top 3 Winners (or some Vanity / Artwork, etc.).

Otherwise, players will always find ways to cheat the system (or Buy / Sell their way to Victory) for the chance at the Lightning Card.

And it unbalances the deck for 99% of the playerbase if you leave it as only the Top Winner gets an exclusive Card.

Yes, all of those are great ideas, especially the artwork and MGP payout. I do understand that SE cannot make new artwork weekly to provide new art every week. The solution is to make tournaments less frequent, or have the same winning card in cycle for a while before introducing a new card, like what Wizards of the Coast does for Friday Night Magic in Magic: The Gathering. People still played even if they already won the tournament the week before and got the card. Plus we would get MGP in TT tourny.

[Grekumah]

Greetings,

We've been reading over all your feedback regarding Triple Triad tournaments and sharing all of it with the development team. They would like to look into adjusting future Triple Triad tournament rules based on suggestions and feedback.

[Archadius]

Greetings,

We've been reading over all your feedback regarding Triple Triad tournaments and sharing all of it with the development team. They would like to look into adjusting future Triple Triad tournament rules based on suggestions and feedback.

Excellent! Any clue as to when we will start to see this transition?

[Pterois]

Greetings,

We've been reading over all your feedback regarding Triple Triad tournaments and sharing all of it with the development team. They would like to look into adjusting future Triple Triad tournament rules based on suggestions and feedback.

this is why y'all are shooting straight to the top... its been a week and your already all over this WITH reply's informing the general public. You guys are spoiling us lol.

[Alberel]

Greetings,

We've been reading over all your feedback regarding Triple Triad tournaments and sharing all of it with the development team. They would like to look into adjusting future Triple Triad tournament rules based on suggestions and feedback.

This isn't just feedback though, it's also a report of rampant cheating as a result of an exploitable system. When a widespread exploit like this is found in any other MMO it's treated with a little more urgency than just 'feedback'. The current tournament needs to be cancelled as anyone winning prizes from it has used the exploit to get there...

[JayCommon]

The current tournament needs to be cancelled as anyone winning prizes from it has used the exploit to get there...

This is a little short-sighted don't you think? Do you know for a fact that all 60+ servers have cheating involved? I'm at work, so I haven't been able to view the standings on Goblin today, but yesterday I had 1540pts with 8/15 wins, 6 draws and 1 loss and was in 3rd place. The 2 guys above me only had a few points more and both had losses.

In fact, in the entire top 20 of Goblin (as of yesterday) there wasn't a single person on the board who had 15 matches and 15 wins. One guy had 14 wins, but didn't even have as many points as I did. Wouldn't it be counter-intuitive to purposely lose if you're win trading? Maybe the guy who had 14/15 wins traded but he must have done something wrong to not end up with more points than others. I'm fairly certain the way the tournament is set-up that you can't just farm the same person and get enough points to win against legit players.

Maybe if the win traders created a network of people, so certain people could stack wins and then purposely lose to others? But I know anyone I beat yesterday offered me far less points for a repeat win, as opposed to just playing someone else. And it also seemed you needed to have a really high win ratio to offer more than playing against someone who hadn't done a tourney match yet. First-time tourney players with a match always offer 100pts. A good friend of mine and I were trying to see if we could figure out how it all worked, and when he had 8 wins out of 13 matches, the tourney points he offered me initially was 98 points....which is still less than the 100 it shows for playing against someone who JUST registered.


Just for the record, I absolutely do not like the way they rolled out this tournament system. But I don't think every server should be punished for this. If even 1 server had no win-trading involved the tournament should not just be forfeited... You are taking a card out of someone's hands that legit earned it. I say this with the knowledge that between now and next Tuesday it is extremely possible for win-traders to take over our rankings, if they can find out a way to do it that will actually top legit players. It seems like you would really need a lot of people purposely losing after getting a ton of wins to jump one person above legit players.

Or maybe I am wrong with how win trading for this works? Idk, I also don't really care because I play the game for the fun/challenge, but from what I've read about people's reports doesn't mesh with what I've seen. I beat 1 guy and had 8 cards to his 2 at the end. It said I was going to get 100 points. I actually got 128 points. I told my friend what happened and he said you get a bonus modifier for good cards in your opponents deck.

My opponent had nothing higher than 1* in his deck. I kind of felt bad ;-; but it also didn't lend much to his theory about rare cards adding points.

That guy wanted a rematch, the screen showed I would get 61 points for replaying him, so I declined. Even though it was most likely a guaranteed win for me, I turned that down. Mostly because of the payout decrease, but also partially in the spirit of competition. My only loss came to the guy who was holding 1st place in the tourney last night before I logged off ^^

It definitely didn't pride me in any way beating a player's deck that just didn't hold a candle to mine...

[Noahlimits]

This isn't just feedback though, it's also a report of rampant cheating as a result of an exploitable system. When a widespread exploit like this is found in any other MMO it's treated with a little more urgency than just 'feedback'. The current tournament needs to be cancelled as anyone winning prizes from it has used the exploit to get there...

Way to stereotype all people. Before people did start cheating and going 15/15 with 1800+ points, I was actually in top three with 1500 points and only 8 wins (5 draws, 2 losses). I didn't cheat and got there legit. I'm still top 20, so don't label people who are in the top 20 as a cheater.