Result of Tournament Exploit Investigation

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Bloodmoon
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Joined: 6 Apr 2020, 12:59
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Result of Tournament Exploit Investigation

Post by Bloodmoon »

Tibians, we have now concluded our Tournament Exploit Investigation and want to share the outcome with you.
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As you know, one of the core features of Tournaments is the limited playtime to score points. In TRIUMPH, getting points was only possible with a battle sign which lasts 60 seconds unless you step into a protection zone. There are various reasons to enter a protection zone with an active battle sign. Moreover, there are places in Tibia with creatures basically right outside of a protection zone. Therefore, simply walking into a protection zone with a battle sign was not considered exploitive behaviour per se on Tournament worlds. However, shortening the normal duration of a battle sign like that also enabled players to extend the time they had available to score points beyond the limit of 14 hours: Instead of losing at least 60 seconds of playtime when attacking or killing a creature, entering a protection zone could reduce this amount of time significantly, to less than one second at the extreme. This behaviour of frequently leaving a protection zone for a second to kill creatures and then hopping back in right away to keep the clock from ticking down is referred to as "PZ-jumping".

Unfortunately, we underestimated the potential room for abuse this mechanic brought along. We apologise for this oversight on our part and for not being clear enough about this earlier. Nevertheless, this does not mean that the excessive exploitation of this mechanic to complete bestiary entries is tolerated or condoned by us. Thus, we had put the reward distribution on hold and started a thorough and extensive data analysis on April 27. We first had to get a better idea and overview of the extent to which "PZ-jumping" had been used massively. Then we had to dig deep to find out by whom it was used and to which degree.

Eventually, we could clearly identify 40 characters that excessively and repeatedly used PZ-jumping to complete bestiary entries, mainly those requiring 250 kills or even more. They also did this significantly more often than other characters. Thereby, they were able to score many points in only a fraction of the time it would have taken them had they killed these creatures normally.

This clearly goes against a key fundamental of the Tournament, the playtime limit. Therefore, we have decided to remove these characters from the leaderboards. This also means they have not received any of the Tournament rewards.
Subsequent characters have moved up in ranks. Tibia Coin and Tournament Coin rewards for TRIUMPH have been assigned automatically. To redeem special and unique rewards, log in with the regular character on which you want to receive the reward and open the character section in the Tournament interface to claim it. At the next server start, the reward will be sent to the inbox of that character.

We would like to apologise again for the issues that happened during this Tournament. Thank you for your participation and your interest, your patience and your support. We do not take it for granted and we appreciate the feedback you provided us with. Of course, we will evaluate your suggestions to further improve Tournaments, and we will review playtime in particular to avoid similar problems in future Tournaments.

See you in Tibia!
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