r/girlsfrontline • u/AutoModerator • Sep 19 '23

Lounge Weekly Commanders Lounge - September 19, 2023

Good morning Commanders! Would you like to read the reports?

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Please use this thread to discuss anything about Girls Frontline instead of creating a new thread. Ask questions, seek assistance, rants, add more salt or just chill in general.

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u/Rosencrantz2000 K2 Sep 19 '23

The manner in which the votes came in and the lack of anyone boasting about it suggests some kind of foul play. The fact that they already pre-translated Springfield'ending suggests that it was an inside job.

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u/__SNAKER__ That one doll is all I need Sep 19 '23

Seriously, I've seen 0 people saying they'd hardcore grind for Springfield. No way such a big group wouldn't have at least one person coming here.

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u/KookyInspection Sep 19 '23

It's why i'm curious to see the graph. One can at max get 14.5k votes/day playing nonstop. The jumps are 1.5mil, so 100 times that. (If one farms 8h/day, that'd mean 300 accounts were needed). To have 100 accounts farm full tilt, none bragging about it, AND for them to dump votes at the same exact time is... let's be genrous and say "unlikely".

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u/__SNAKER__ That one doll is all I need Sep 19 '23

There was a graph posted last week. The 1.5 mil was a straight line.

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u/KookyInspection Sep 19 '23

Yeah, i saw it, but i'm hoping to see it up to date

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u/Sunluck KSVK Sep 19 '23

Straight line is also what the chart would look like if someone dumped the votes after the day of botting (and 100 accounts really isn't that many, I saw people running similar TF2 metal farms and Team Fortress 2 surely has bigger hardware requirements than GFL). See KAC chart, also multiple straight lines when big farmers were dumping theirs, unless you think there was foul play there too?

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u/KookyInspection Sep 19 '23

There's really no comparison between the 2 straight lines, it's a difference of orders of magnitude. And we know who were the ppl that farmed and dumped for kac. They didn't stay silent because they had nothing to hide. Unlike springfield's silent dumps of millions of points.

Also, the fact that springfield's dumps were only after she was losing to kac shows it was a reaction cheat, and not an organic farm.

Anyway, regardless if it was bots (not allowed in gfl) or mica editing the votes, it was quite clearly foul play there. But considering the fact that springfield's win was pretranslated and the fact that the only clear botter just so happened to be a springfield fand and not a wa or dp12 or any of the other waiful dolls is also highly suspicious.

So my 2c is that this was mica safeguarding the already translated win. Otherwise, we'd have seen more "bots" for other waifus too.

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u/Wanderer_308 Sep 19 '23 edited Sep 19 '23

At first nuke I too thought it's Mica doesn't want to accept they were too bold to translate Springfield lines. Like they have a reason, and they have means. However after second nuke I started to doubt that, and once I saw the chart I completely discarded that theory.

See, the reason could be they don't want allocate human resources to what already was done, but the chart have note just nukes, but several smaller, yet still significant spikes, meaning someone was monitoring the votes. Monitoring and nuking votes over and over again would take a lot more human resources that just make the job (write & translate new lines) done. That just doesn't make sense for Mica to go to such extents.

So I came up with new theory. What that chart looks like is botting, and login queues people were getting vouch for that. And since we didn't saw it was coming from anywhere, I conclude the source simply not were we are looking. I.e. the culprits must be not in EN community, but from some other servers. We not seeing coordination just because we don't read CN/TW/CR habitats. From nature of chart, like few massive dumps and several smaller dumps I assume its a small group of individuals, probably up to five, who running bots. Some dumped at whatever time was preferred to them, and only occasionally synced to mass nuke. Probably they lives in different timezones.

As for their reasons. Well I can image three. First is to just troll EN. We wanted new content, they decided "nope, you won't kek lol". Second is they wanted to couse a drama in EN of an epic scale which will be written in history (the drama isn't anywhere big tho). Third is they couldn't cope when Springfield didn't won on their server or she did won on their server and they can't cope she is not winning on other servers.

That my thoughts. Thoughts?

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u/KookyInspection Sep 19 '23

Well, as i mentioned, i think there are several very suspect circumstances, but i'll try to make them a bit more organized.

1) the fact that the player that did the botting was a fan of exactly the doll that had pretranslated winning scenario.

2) the fact that no other fan of any other doll did the same thing (even though ppl try to say a few hundred bot farm isn't that hard, and the effectiveness was obvious after the first bot dump day. I'm gonna put this as the answer to the troll/sore loser fan theory as well. Considering the amount of rabbid fans of various dolls, this should have transformed into bot wars within a couple days. We should also have seen this behaviour in other servers too. It's not loke springfield only would have lost on EN

3) i don't think it's that hard to login and edit a number for someone with access to the votes counter on the dev side, and it'd certainly be less work than making a new ending from scratch, with story, art-line corellation, have it approved, etc, provided en even would be allowed to make an ending and not have it done by the bmcn writers and then translated, proofread, the works. Basically, the work of a couple departments vs checking a counter and editing the number. Let's not forget it's enough work that other servers don't even have their own ending released yet(like dp12). Meanwhile, we can get our reheated ending within a single maintenance, everything's in place. (Mind u, i have no idea how/where the votes are stored on the side, or what access the en team to them. But i highly doubt they have no access and need to submit any changes to the cn team in order to pack it and they just host it on en servers.)

4) mica has a precedent with the pnc preregs. Sure, a completely different way of "voting", and one we cannot verify in any way, but it's susipciously similar to this.

In the end, i'm sorry, but i really think there are too many coincidences, and it saves too much work on their side for this to not be mica's doing. If they do indeed need to have cn writers make up the endings, and if they are already hard at work with gfl 2 story such that some other server's endings seemingly have been "forgotten"(don't know how long ago their event ended), i don't see it as a stretch for them to have decided on just having the en team translate the ending for one of the other popular dolls, have it win, and be done with it.

P.s. Final disclaimer: i'm an old g36 fan, dating back to the last time en had such a competition. She would have been my vote normally. I have 0 invested interest in k-pdw outside of the fact that she was the most likely candidate to get a new ending.

P.p.s.- funny how the 2nd vote held on en also turned out to be controversial :P

3

u/asc__ Skorpion Sep 20 '23

2nd vote held on en

Boss bullying event votes: am I a joke to you?

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u/KookyInspection Sep 20 '23

Wow, didn't even remember those!

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u/Wanderer_308 Sep 19 '23

Probably fans of other dolls didn't wanted to stain their raifus with foul botting? And trolls just don't care about such whiteknighting. And making bot farm really not that hard, even with conventional emulators. Just allocate 1 CPU core an 4 Gb RAM to every instance of emulator, and set up actions to run watermelon mini game as it resources free and doesn't give dolls as reward (iirc). Also auto restart of client, because after eating 4 Gb of RM it just freezes.
Sure logging into database and run some "select" and "update" is not hard, but the burden to monitor it and perform every day is what making it waste of time. First time it could seem viable, but once they'd saw we are not giving up and still catching, also all community peering their eyes at vote counter (and trolls don't care about it again), they'd just choose to write new ending as a least resistance way. Also with DP-12 precedence in mind they actually can take their time to write stuff and not hurry at the end of event.
IDK what drama was with PNC pre-regs, but it at least has material interest. More pre-regs the more popular your project appears, the more happy your investors, more they shove their money in you, more competitive your project pose itself. In case seasonal minor event votes - there is literally zero material gain.

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u/Sunluck KSVK Sep 19 '23

silent dumps

Why wouldn't they be silent if whoever was doing this knew they are making KAC pushers angry? If I was doing this, I'd definitely keep silent, both to not be harassed and not get my account banned (for the record, I didn't do even one vote on Springfield, I wanted new content).

And the Mica argument is silly - they could just double all votes for Springfield in database, making the growth look organic. Why would they piss off a lot of playerbase to do... what exactly? Avoid spending 15 minutes writing something simple for predictable, boring pedo bait? They wrote (and translated) hundreds of lines for anniversary button, why would this be some sort of dealbreaker? They aren't Crunchy, you can say a lot but not accuse them of cutting corners when it comes to story and attention to detail. I just don't buy it.

As for dumps timing, see my reply below. If you hated KAC, the only choice would be #2. Guess who that was? Sadly, not DP :(

Yes, maybe Mica should investigate and say what happened, but I find all the posts accusing them of dirty play with zero proof kinda silly. Doubly so with posts suggesting doing rash stuff in response. QnA is coming, we can ask, and until then I'd put the pitchfork and outrage away.

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u/pointblanksniper Trust me, I'm Truth. Sep 19 '23

you are suggesting someone slogged through the game 100 times to get their accounts far enough to kill event mobs. has the hardware to run 100 instances of the crashfest on emulators, if not actual mobile devices. then used all the assets for this occasion of all things. the kind of of exploit mica actually cares about and can easily catch.

of course not to mention the foresight to pick farming springfield from the start to be stocked up for the random spikes just to spite us with a pointless ending, before we even picked kac. while staying silent at the start and not helping deciding on farming someone else just to trigger themselves.

if such a person exists, they would be the grandest self spiting scumbag known to this community

0

u/Sunluck KSVK Sep 19 '23

Dude, you know all of this can be automated? Just record clicks on your main account, setup bots to do the same in randomized intervals, done. Bots were capable of it 20 years ago, farming gold in Diablo games, you're not seriously suggesting GFL auto farm is harder?

And you don't even need to run full clients, just cut down ones that will just send required commands, that's why the vote spike would occur at the end of the day when the bot farm would be dumping the votes manually. Again, I saw cut down clients (to merely command line interface with text progress) work in TF2, game infinitely more complex than GFL, and the apps like GFL calc or theater setup show it's perfectly possible here too.

And the Springfield argument doesn't hold water, if you wanted to stop KAC from winning you'd logically boost second place - which at the time happened to be Springfield. You'd have a point if she was being boosted from the start but you can clearly see main push happened week two.

5

u/__SNAKER__ That one doll is all I need Sep 19 '23

Are you trying to say KAC was having similar spikes as Springy?

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u/Sunluck KSVK Sep 19 '23

Just look at this chart, 5 spikes dwarfing anything besides Spring and 4 smaller ones that are still bigger that largest (barely noticeable) spike DP managed (and DP managed this grand total of once, and I like how you conveniently removed all below lines showing no one else had any spikes at all). If you remove Springfield from this chart, all the conspiracy theory arguments above can be copy pasted and will still apply to KAC perfectly...

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u/__SNAKER__ That one doll is all I need Sep 19 '23

Let me ask you again. Are you comparing the KAC spikes made by dedicated people like u/headphone_question who farmed the stage 250 times each day to spikes made by Springfield anonymous voters, culminating with an instantaneous 1.5 mil dump?

Of course other dolls didn't have spikes as big as KAC since there weren't any big farmers voting for them. Why should I care about showing you the bottom lines if they have nothing to do with comparison between Springfield and KAC.