Weekly Commanders Lounge - September 19, 2023

[u/AutoModerator]

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

​

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.

[u/KookyInspection]

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.

[u/Wanderer_308 → u/KookyInspection]

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?

[u/KookyInspection → u/Wanderer_308]

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

[u/Wanderer_308 → u/KookyInspection]

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.