Anomalies Category: Tournaments
Tournament Anomalies
Something Smells Funny

The school receives tournament data from the game servers at regular intervals. This allows us to do some analysis on that data to identify players that might be cheating, or more likely have fallen prey to an unresolved bug in the game or with the tournament server itself. No matter the reason, here's what we look at.

The Anomalies page is accessed at the bottom of the main Tournament list page.

Clones

Clones are the same player appearing in multiple tournament brackets. People communicate and notice the same name in their brackets, and wonder how they got there.

Possible Clone Theories

  • A bug in the ECD system.
  • Multiple players having the same 'unique' Game ID (unlikely).
  • A form of cheating to switch brackets until finding a desirable one.

Does it Matter?

Really this only matters if the player is deliberately trying to change brackets to avoid playing with certain others. With the advent of having five different Leagues this is less of an issue. Some people ask if the person can get multiple rewards for being in more than one bracket, and that answer is no. When the prizes are awarded they will only get rewarded from the final bracket that they were in.

Speeders

Sometimes a player will seem to be going faster than they should. It is established that the maximum speed of advancement is 100m per minute if you have maxed out Ember Tipped Walkers and have sufficient DPS. This works out to 1.2 seconds per reptile kill. Using a Juggernaut Crab will advance you 30 meters within a few seconds, but that is available at most once every 10 minutes. Using a Burrower Crab will advance you 100 meters in a few seconds but that costs a lot of genes.

Game Update 3.4 (Feb 2019) introduced the Abysswyrm which advances you randomly from 20-200+ meters based on your Land of Reptiles Tier. Beginning with the March 9, 2019 tournament we receive Abyss data so we can weed out false positives in our ticketing system.

Possible Speeding Theories

  • An unknown bug is allowing more rapid advancement.
  • A flaw in the update timestamps for these users (unlikely).
  • A form of cheating to accelerate the game.

Does it Matter?

It matters unless you don't mind cheaters. Running a speed hack to do in an hour what it might take you ten hours to do is not fair, especially during a time-sensitive tournament.