Interesting, Kixeye finally has taken a stance on this.
http://forums.kixeye.com/showthread.php?t=293028&page=19
19 pages, but ghosting fleets is a bannable offense on a case by case basis.
Back on September 1, something like 3 or 4 raids ago I found out how to ghost a fleet. As they have now fixed it I feel I can post how it was done.
(There are programs to do something similar to this also, this was with just fast clicking and a slow computer)
I was forced to use my old laptop (5+ years old) for the morning of the raid as my family was all using the normal desktops in the house. I fired up the laptop, grabbed my first fleet and hit launch. Looking at what was in the fleet I thought, oops, I don't want that ship in there. Without thinking I went up and clicked remove. Now being on a really slow laptop it takes awhile between hitting launch and the fleet actually launching! I clicked remove on 2 ships, the fleet launched, and low and behold, the launched fleet had all 5 ships in it, and I had my 2 most powerful ships still sitting in my dock waiting to be put in another fleet.
Thinking it a one off glitch I decided to try again. This time though with some decent fleets for the raid. I dropped my only 2 BC's into the fleet with 3 SW's. I launched fleet 1, moved my mouse around and fast as possible and was able to remove 3 of the 5 ships. Put them in fleet 2, 3, 4 and 5 in the end and started hitting the raid fleets with fleets 1-4. They all died and I sent fleet 5 back in. My 2 BC's which were in all 5 fleets came out unscathed.
One funny piece in this, was if you clicked on fleet 1 in the dock, while it was out, at sea, any "ghost" ships were blank. So Fleet 1 had the first 3 slots as blank and only 2 ships in #4 and #5 slots. Made the screen shots much more useful!
After proving I could do it, I reported the issue to kixeye and they of course wanted more info as this was a new glitch to them. I supplied screenshots and was told thanks and watch the forums for a fix. I understand they don't want to follow back up with everyone, but watch the forums? Have they really ever watched their forums from a users perspective.
My suggested fix was since every ship has a unique ID for the player, when you hit launch, just check to see if that ID is already on the map, and if so throw an error about fleet creation. This would take more programming on their part than I think they were willing to do and so the problem was still there in the next raid and the next. Today though it is fixed and in a little different way than I would have thought.
Their fix. When you click the launch button, if the remove button is clicked, the launch process stops. A fairly efficient fix! My concern though is, I'm pretty sure I could write a program to launch a fleet over and over in a different manner than what I found here and based on forum posts, there must have been other ghosting options as ppl are saying they still work.
One thing I am bummed about is that when I asked for a reward on this, as it is now fixed, and according to what I was told at the time, it wasn't one they were aware of, I was told this isn't something they can compensate for. It really defeats the purpose of me going out of my way to report a glitch to them that can be greatly abused, if their is no incentive at all to me.
Oh well, so is life. Nice to see they fixed it, but I was hoping to use it to win that new ship this weekend! :)
I did try this glitch on a fast computer and it didn't work, it only worked on my ancient laptop due to the slowness in which the game launched a fleet and the time it stayed on that screen before going to their loading screen.
With that said, and the number of ghosting issues, there has to be quite a few other known ways to do this also!
Whats funny is this is the most searched for term to get people to my blog. You can still get this "glitch" to work from time to time, did it again on accident the other day when it was laggy as it could get. But not easy like it was when I first found this one.
ReplyDeletelol, you where tip toeing there buddy. i found out that if i clicked the launch fleet button mutliple times, it would launch like 3 fleets. wanting more i downloaded an application called "autoclicker" and set it to click 1 per millisecond. needless to say, i had like 30-40 ghost ships hiding under my base XD. Each time i did that, there was a main fleet, and the rest where copies. you could not pilot the copies or use the fleet tab to control them. but by manually clicking on the fleet you could tell it to auto pilot bases. My friend did this with his 5 battlecruisers. in one hour, he got more cargo than he could handle and got to the max level in the raid. even with just my 2 battlebarges and 3 levis, i got to like tier 4/5 on the first day.but yeah, they have fixed this glitch now (trust me, i tried it like 100 times when they did the update).
ReplyDeleteI never tried multiple clicks on the launch button like that! Interesting trick, glad they fixed it. Wish they paid for glitch info as then I may be more likely to look for it and report it.
DeleteDon't worry bro, It wasn't fixed until recently ..Like 3 days ago. I have cloned since I started and they have never banned me. Won like 5 raids doing it. I have a feeling their average daily users are going to go down now, as at least 40% of the player base does this. While not openly discussed, believe me when something like this is found it is shared. Sad half of it wouldn't happen if Kixeye made repairs and build times reasonable. Reasonable enough for the middle income people to coin a little bit. I am not spending $100 on a new fleet every time they spit out a new hull. Nor am I spending 20 dollars a night in repairs fleet for 20 minutes of fun. Trust me you were not tip toeing like the above poster said. I have been reported and have reported people for doing it and they were not banned. In a few months when player numbers get low Kixeye will include a failed patch that will allow the "glitch" once again to gain back what they lost. This has happened 2 times now since I have been playing./ Give it a month or 2 and try again.
ReplyDeleteI've recently been informed of another way to clone fleets and I think it has to do with the changes they made to fix this one in some way. It is a bit different and worked as of last week when I watched it happen. It is harder to detect, but I think I found a way.
ReplyDeleteAs for being banned for stuff, even most of what I publish ahead of time is all ban-able offenses based on the TOS. They'll work on and fix the stuff they deem worth fixing and leave the rest until whenever.