Forge Speedrun of our team. No more leaderboard as you wish.

[CrazyMoeMew]

Forge was a wonderful event to us even through it had a little flaw of anim canceling exploit. 

As the Forge end, the mods cheating arguments may still last to next DST event. 

 

Here are some video of our team. So that it may have some strategy & tactics for further comparisons. 

(these videos of Forge speedrun are WITHOUT taking any advantage of anim canceling exploit. NOT even by manually. 

 

Woodie view by GCC:

https://www.bilibili.com/video/av37091771

 

Wicker view by Twinblade: 

https://www.bilibili.com/video/av37114822

 

Maxwell view by 厨娘: 

https://www.bilibili.com/video/av37226817

 

Besides the videos, there are something more I wanna say. 

First, We did NOT think that using rapid-fire mods for assistance meant cheating. Cheating only happened when the teams have the same levels on competition and I haven't seen a lot of competition except for one team in our Chinese during the whole event. Btw, We didn't really care about the leaderboard even before Klei archived it. All we cared most was about how fast we can got. 

Klei knew this anim canceling for rapid-fire stuff since last years' Forge event. If this stuff means cheating, Klei should have fixed that exploit instead of just adding some server-side check to slow it down. If Klei didn't want to get mess up of underlying structure by fixing this exploit, why not just forbid all client side mods and check game completeness when a player was entering the event menu. 

People always got blind by staring at the surface of something. It was not because of the rapid-fire mods made the speed so fast, but the team work did it. The rapid-fire mods just made the speed reach to what it theoretically possible. You spent more time on team cooperation you got faster. The rapid-fire mods was just the icing on the cake. 

The Boarilla leaderboard. We did it all by manually. 

The Boarrior leaderboard. We just did the same thing the champion team of last year had done, using some simple scripts of repeat typing but no mod. 

The Rhinocebros leaderboard. We used multi-target mod developed by our own members. Because there were so many other teams had used mods with same functions. 

The Final leaderboard. Klei shut it down so we don't have chance to apply our new strategy. the offline record was 13:25 with too many faults and can barely called a run. The new strategy is picking 2 Webbers and no Willow. Wickerbottom hold the firestaff and leaving lifestaff not on damage outputing. If this works well the time can go under 13:00. 

Finally, Let's talk about competition fairness. As I said it long before, when the Gorge event tournament came. Any game would become unfair enough if it got a leaderboard in it. This rule also applied on DST events. If 2 teams have the same level on both strategy and cooperation. Then one team is using rapid-fire mods and another team is not which means cheating. But the truth is almost all the teams on Boarrior leaderboard and Rhinocebros leaderboard are using scripts or mods. The difference is just some teams used them extremely and some are not. 

After all DST is a casual game. To put a leaderboard on it to stimulate players' competition was not always a good idea. 

 

That's all.

Please stay cool and consider rapid-fire mods stuff objectively. 

[GCC.1st]

PS: time cost 14:54, no animation canceling.

[YouKnowWho]

I think the arguement “we did it because everybody else was doing it” is pretty flawed. Especially if you didn’t really care about the leaderboard as you claimed.

[ItsPizzaTime]

Your teamwork is impressive, but if we were going on that fact alone I have seen many more impressive displays of teamwork and micro management in other games that didn't involve people using shady methods to help achieve them.

To start off, when it became very apparent that you were using tools to assist you in speedrunning, it dismayed many including myself to even try to compete, so regardless of what else I say in this post know that your actions killed the motivation of many people to even want to compete because we knew we would have to stoop to your level to even qualify.

Regardless of whether you consider your methods of obtaining #1 cheating, also consider this: This prompted Klei to "Fix" the issue of animation cancelling. This not only distracted Klei from working on other cool things for the future of this game but it also screwed over the general playerbase that practiced and enjoyed the skill-gap that animation canceling provided.

So incase you don't understand what I'm saying: you and the actions of others competing for the top spot effected the community as a whole, in what I would consider a very negative way. I enjoyed the skill difference of animation canceling because I did more than just hold F, I felt more engaged and like the extra DPS that I was accumulating was earned due to my ability to not miss clicks or keystrokes. When they patched this, a lot of the fun was taken out of the game for me and probably others, although I cannot speak for anyone else.

"If we didn't do it, someone else would have done it, as long as cancelling exists someone is going to abuse the system like we did". Well plenty of us didn't create scripts to help us enjoy the game, it's too bad you couldn't play like the rest and in turn ruined the fun for a lot of people. I know that cancelling had to be removed to reinforce the legitimacy of the leaderboards, but again a lot of the fun was taken out of the game because a certain group of individuals took the competition to a level that the average player cannot compete in.

So I really think the leaderboards shouldn't be in future events, it did nothing but inspire people to cheat and then cheat harder to be on top. If leaderboards must be in, there should be absolutely no incentive to place (rewards ect). As someone who doesn't even care about placing high on the leaderboards my gameplay was negatively impacted by people who wanted to compete to be #1 in any way possible.

Also your argument of "anyone could've done what we did" is hilariously flawed, imagine if that logic was used for the Olympics and people who used steriods to compete. The competition would be based on steroids and not actual skill and hard work, very comparable to how you competed for the majority of the event.

[TemporaryMan]

2 hours ago, ItsPizzaTime said:

Also your argument of "anyone could've done what we did" is hilariously flawed, imagine if that logic was used for the Olympics and people who used steriods to compete. The competition would be based on steroids and not actual skill and hard work, very comparable to how you competed for the majority of the event.

I'm pretty sure it's based on steroids and actual skill and hard work.  Also, whether your government can cause enough of a huff to get un-banned from participating despite systemic organized cheating.  Still sucks, though.

[Mr.Mulk]

13 hours ago, ItsPizzaTime said:

Regardless of whether you consider your methods of obtaining #1 cheating, also consider this: This prompted Klei to "Fix" the issue of animation cancelling. This not only distracted Klei from working on other cool things for the future of this game but it also screwed over the general playerbase that practiced and enjoyed the skill-gap that animation canceling provided.

Thanks, my thoughts exactly

[andluism]

On 12/4/2018 at 10:41 PM, ItsPizzaTime said:

You and the actions of others competing for the top spot effected the community as a whole, in what I would consider a very negative way. I enjoyed the skill difference of animation canceling because I did more than just hold F, I felt more engaged and like the extra DPS that I was accumulating was earned due to my ability to not miss clicks or keystrokes. When they patched this, a lot of the fun was taken out of the game for me and probably others, although I cannot speak for anyone else.

This is very on point! Before the patch I actually liked to do animation canceling, not because it gives more dps or for the sake of speed, but more engagement to the game thus making it more fun to play. After the patch.. Mehhh! If the cheating didn't affect other players, I won't care much about it, but it did and rather badly. The patch from Klei was rather abrupt and I bet they didn't think much about the domino effect. But hey if I'm the game devs, I will definitely do the same when people exploiting the game that I have put all effort in making.

The argument that Klei didn't do anything after the first season so this cheating is ok is nonsense. It's a form of victim blaming.

[maradyne]

Eh. The 'mechanic' itself was a design oversight that started producing abuse cases. Any gameplay element that measures how fast you can spam-click will be machine-dominated in a competitive setting, and unless you're recording and reviewing gameplay on limited setups (which would be a nope to public competition), it's inevitable. The method for doing it just happened to be seen publicly this time.

Bug got squashed. Heck to it.
If the mode needs more engaging gameplay, Klei could mess with item cooldowns and change enemy attack patterns to compensate.

[Mr.Mulk]

The problem is when you disproportionately damage the experience of normal players for the benefit of slightly slowing down cheaters. It's silly, and the patch did more harm than good overall, and should be reverted for next forge.

3 hours ago, lifetheuniverse said:

Bug got squashed. Heck to it.

It wasn't even a bug, it's technically an exploit. The game is working as intended, just not in the way the developers foresaw it. The only people I see actually happy it's gone don't really understand the validity of manual anim-cancelling as being fun and adding to the experience, whether from lack of an attempt or apathy I can't and won't say.

And sometimes (admittedly rarely) exploits can add depth to the game, especially when they require skill to pull off, such as in the case of manual anim cancelling (which I'll defend as requiring skill, how many people could single target manually?).

I've said it before I'll say it again:

Spoiler

 

[Bleksmits]

Cheater hacker scripter and these who aiding them!

 Now forge is over, y did great service to your beloved event in this year. Lol! It even not get extended who knows will even it come back in next year? I don't want forge-3 and y for me did great service no one could do better...

 

PS.  mmwwahahah!