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[War Glitch] Trick to do more battles with less MAPs


Majima Goro
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There have been multiple reports of people doing more than the number of battles their wars would allow.
When first discovered, it was caused by each battle happening at a fixed time interval after you pressed the Battle button. This allowed you to use multiple devices or tabs to spam the Battle button to send multiple simultaneous requests, allowing you to do multiple hits for same amount of MAPs. This Glitch was fixed however by introducing a random delay between when you actually press the button and when the request reaches the servers. However, there have still been reports recently about multiple battles occurring despite the above glitch being fixed. I've tested to see if that glitch still can occur and I can confirm that isn't the case. However, this does happen in wars regardless.

Timeline:
https://politicsandwar.com/nation/id=256054

As you can see in this timeline, I was able to do 5 ground attacks one after another. This is usually impossible to do since at most you can have 12 MAPs which allow you to do 4 ground attacks at most. However, it is quiet clear from both the timeline and the resistance loss(58 resistance lost) that this did occur. While I cannot say for certain whether the resources looted in the hits actually were looted or not or whether units were lost on either side or not, I can confirm that the opponent did lose 50 resistance.

Now on to the circumstances of why I think the glitch occurs. @Dryad theorized that the glitch only occurs when you have 12 MAPs and don't do any attacks still, ie, you save MAPs past 12. While ingame, it doesn't look like you have 12 MAPs, it is possibly still being stacked past 12. This theory has ground since in most cases the glitch is reported, people are trying to do attacks with 12 MAPs back-to-back, possibly having wasted a few turns with 12 MAPs on them. For this war as well, I waited for 12 MAPs and wasted a few turns to build military before the hit. This somehow gave me extra MAPs to do more than 4 ground battles.

While Alex claims that no units or money is lost in these scenarios, it still costs resistance, which leads to unfair battle advantages, leading to possibly a different winner in some scenarios.

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1 hour ago, Mutedfaith said:

Similar to what happened in my war earlier today, where I did 4 airstrikes using 12 MAPS

 

https://politicsandwar.com/nation/war/timeline/war=941991

I am to assume you wasted MAPs as in had 12 and still didn't do attacks for some turns?

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12 hours ago, Majima Goro said:

Now on to the circumstances of why I think the glitch occurs. @Dryad theorized that the glitch only occurs when you have 12 MAPs and don't do any attacks still, ie, you save MAPs past 12. While ingame, it doesn't look like you have 12 MAPs, it is possibly still being stacked past 12. This theory has ground since in most cases the glitch is reported, people are trying to do attacks with 12 MAPs back-to-back, possibly having wasted a few turns with 12 MAPs on them. For this war as well, I waited for 12 MAPs and wasted a few turns to build military before the hit. This somehow gave me extra MAPs to do more than 4 ground battles.

It is a known issue, and unfortunately one we have not been able to debug.

I think you have a good theory here, but I can confirm that this is not the case. The raw value in the database of MAP count never exceeds 12, and that is the value that gets read by the script to determine how many MAPs you have.

What I'm saying is, it stops incrementing after 12 - the displayed number is the real number, e.g. if you had 50 MAPs it would say 50 (not limit the display to 12.) On the test server I frequently manually increase MAPs above 12 for testing purposes.

In theory, anytime someone does an attack it should lock the row in the database that corresponds to the war so that no one else can edit it at the same time (including yourself doing multiple requests.) If you try to do an attack while the row is locked, it should make you wait until whoever else just used it is finished before you can read the data. That should prevent all of these "duplicate" glitches, but unfortunately, it has not (though they are incredibly rare.)

What I think happens is actually some sort of hardware/software issue where things do not operate as they are supposed to (i.e. simultaneous reading and writing of the war records occurs.) I don't have an explanation for how this is possible, and therefore I also have not been able to find a way to fix the issue.

If someone could find a way to consistently duplicate the glitch, it would be easier to debug. The biggest problem is that each time I try a new coding change, I am not able to test and see if it fixed the issue or not. Because it is so random and infrequent, that also leads me to believe that it is literally some sort of physical issue or glitch in the software that I don't really know how to correct.

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7 hours ago, Alex said:

I think you have a good theory here, but I can confirm that this is not the case. The raw value in the database of MAP count never exceeds 12, and that is the value that gets read by the script to determine how many MAPs you have.

What I'm saying is, it stops incrementing after 12 - the displayed number is the real number, e.g. if you had 50 MAPs it would say 50 (not limit the display to 12.) On the test server I frequently manually increase MAPs above 12 for testing purposes.

In theory, anytime someone does an attack it should lock the row in the database that corresponds to the war so that no one else can edit it at the same time (including yourself doing multiple requests.) If you try to do an attack while the row is locked, it should make you wait until whoever else just used it is finished before you can read the data. That should prevent all of these "duplicate" glitches, but unfortunately, it has not (though they are incredibly rare.)

^ Here you have mentioned a calibration script that calculates how many MAPs a war should have. My exact theory was that this calibration script misses it when people have sat on their 12 MAPs and incorrectly adds them back. I'm fairly certain that the bug can only occur to wars in which a player has wasted their MAPs as I have never seen it occur otherwise. If this is the case then the number of MAPs never actually surpasses 12 but the effect is the same.

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I know Alex has replied saying it is not this theory but he also asked for duplication of the bug. Well I got 5 ground attacks out of 12 MAPS just now in the exact same circumstances. I had 12 MAPS, waited a few turns just wasting MAPS, and then attacked when I had the clearance to beige. It seems that the first or the second attack was the one that didn't take MAPS away from my observation. I did not realize until I saw the beige that I had done more than 4 attacks. 

https://politicsandwar.com/nation/war/timeline/war=943489

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Just happened to me with https://politicsandwar.com/nation/war/timeline/war=944022

 

I launched attacks approx three/four minutes after the update (three open tabs in Firefox. Attacks fired off one after the other).

The game failed the attacks and gave a generic error about a redirect. The game was *crawling* when loading the page with just under 600 players logged in.

Trying them again worked and the attack went through but MAPS weren't removed (attacks went through slowly at 6, 7 and 8 mins after update)

I did sit on my MAPS for about 23 hours on this war

Edited by Matt2004

Untitled.png.a5280e76db3e7bedecea0a5e4d7b7daf.png

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This just happened to me, I think.  Maybe 

Anyway, look here: https://politicsandwar.com/nation/war/timeline/war=947958

I was off-line for a day so my MAPs were all at 12, which is consistent with the glitch, and it appears my first attack today cost me 1 MAP instead of 3.  Not a terrible thing; it means I'll beat some inactive 4 hours before I was supposed to.  But it lends credence to the theory that the total count is somehow 14 or 15 instead of 12 sometimes, especially if you haven't attacked in a day or so.   

Note: I only had one browser tab open and didn't even get the "Sir, this is a Dennys, you must wait 3 seconds!" warning.

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On 5/25/2021 at 10:38 PM, Alex said:

It is a known issue, and unfortunately one we have not been able to debug.

I think you have a good theory here, but I can confirm that this is not the case. The raw value in the database of MAP count never exceeds 12, and that is the value that gets read by the script to determine how many MAPs you have.

What I'm saying is, it stops incrementing after 12 - the displayed number is the real number, e.g. if you had 50 MAPs it would say 50 (not limit the display to 12.) On the test server I frequently manually increase MAPs above 12 for testing purposes.

In theory, anytime someone does an attack it should lock the row in the database that corresponds to the war so that no one else can edit it at the same time (including yourself doing multiple requests.) If you try to do an attack while the row is locked, it should make you wait until whoever else just used it is finished before you can read the data. That should prevent all of these "duplicate" glitches, but unfortunately, it has not (though they are incredibly rare.)

What I think happens is actually some sort of hardware/software issue where things do not operate as they are supposed to (i.e. simultaneous reading and writing of the war records occurs.) I don't have an explanation for how this is possible, and therefore I also have not been able to find a way to fix the issue.

If someone could find a way to consistently duplicate the glitch, it would be easier to debug. The biggest problem is that each time I try a new coding change, I am not able to test and see if it fixed the issue or not. Because it is so random and infrequent, that also leads me to believe that it is literally some sort of physical issue or glitch in the software that I don't really know how to correct.

https://politicsandwar.com/nation/war/timeline/war=949156

This just happened again
Did 6 Ground Attacks

I had wasted a lot of MAPs waiting for DC to buy units.

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I just got the glitch. I had 12 maps and wasted a few. I used the "attack again" button. 

On 5/28/2021 at 5:52 PM, hidude45454 said:

Used 14 MAPs, still have two left over. This was not at a turn or day change, and was done within a single tab.

Likewise. Hidude, did you use the "attack again" button?

Hey Krampus, the signature edit is under account settings. Actually, here's the link.

https://forum.politicsandwar.com/index.php?/settings/signature/

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2 hours ago, zigbigadorlou said:

I just got the glitch. I had 12 maps and wasted a few. I used the "attack again" button. 

Likewise. Hidude, did you use the "attack again" button?

I was fortifying so there was no "attack again" button, but I've discovered at the very least a visual glitch when I fortify at 12 MAPs that doesn't tell me I'm at reduced MAPs until I exit the fortify page completely (when I fortify it still tells me I have 12 MAPs)

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1 hour ago, hidude45454 said:

I was fortifying so there was no "attack again" button, but I've discovered at the very least a visual glitch when I fortify at 12 MAPs that doesn't tell me I'm at reduced MAPs until I exit the fortify page completely (when I fortify it still tells me I have 12 MAPs)

That happens no matter what your MAPs. I think that's a separate issue. 

Update: I've started to test this with BSK on the test server. I think it might happen most of the time that you save up past 12 maps, because I've now had at least 2 wars where the attacks left me with extra maps. I have a few guesses, including the use of the "attack again" button.  

Update 2: For those thinking its to do with lag during turn change, I just performed the exploit at 48 minutes before turn change: I did 4 ground attacks in a row and had 2 maps left over so did a fifth after turn change. (The exploit wasn't necessary, and I'm doing my wars in such a way to figure out what the exploit is)

Edited by zigbigadorlou

Hey Krampus, the signature edit is under account settings. Actually, here's the link.

https://forum.politicsandwar.com/index.php?/settings/signature/

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Thanks for all of this information, everyone. This is all helpful in ultimately nailing this bug down.

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Guest Zephyr

I decided to check this out myself:

  1. I declared a raid war on an inactive nation.
  2. I allowed enough turns to pass that I would have 15 MAPs (despite being displayed in-game as 12).
  3. I proceeded to perform 5 ground battles in a row:
    1. The first using the military action drop-down menu to select ground battle.
    2. Thereafter I used the Attack Again button.
    3. After the 5th ground battle I was denied further ground battles due to not enough MAPs.
  4. War MAPs displayed as 0 (1 now that a turn passed).
  5. Timeline seems to reflect the results of each attack, including resistance loss.

Link to war timeline

 

I can try testing this again in 2 days but instead pay more attention to the apparent MAPs remaining between each attack, and instead of using the Attack Again button I will see if returning to the war page and using the military action drop-down menu changes anything.

Edited by Zephyr
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Some developments regarding this:

We had a member start at 4 MAPs, naval once, who did not use the "Attack Again" option but rather exited out, did another naval, exited out, and it still put him at 4 MAPs in the end.

So no waiting at 12 MAPs and no "Attack Again" and yet managed to use 12 MAPs in the space of 4.

https://politicsandwar.com/nation/war/timeline/war=955885

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https://politicsandwar.com/nation/war/timeline/war=956300

I had it happen here, had 3 MAP, did a GA, still have 3. By the time you read this update will have passed, I'll have remaxed tanks and used them because frankly for this guy it's a mercy speeding up the inevitable lol.

Curious to see if it actually does inflict losses or not too.

 

Edit: resources used and units killed. MAP not deducted I how have 4 thanks to turn change, and 3 grounds for 3 MAP, possibly more? Fam this gotta be something that can be fixed like what?

Edited by Zei-Sakura Alsainn
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https://politicsandwar.com/nation/war/timeline/war=956024

I just did 9 ground battles in a row lol.

This was immediately after update today, so about 10 minutes ago. Only 1 ground battle took away MAPs. I believe I still had 9 by the final ground attack. 

I'm on Microsoft Edge on a laptop with Windows 10. I kept pressing 'Attack Again'. 

 

Edited by Thalmor
I miscounted. I thought I did 10 when I actually did 9.
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Ok new post to ping @Alex.

 

in conjunction with my prior post, I was able to do a THIRD GA on the same 3 (now 4) MAP. Once again, units lost, resources used, STILL AT 4 MAP.

 

I'm tempted to keep going because my new theory is what the glitch does is it basically gives you 5 free hits, and it seems like that's where this is going. Your shits borked mate.

edit: hit again, same results, but this time 3 MAP were removed. 4 GAs for 3 MAP. Thalmors 9 and this disproved my theory.

Edited by Zei-Sakura Alsainn
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I dabble in computer programming.  I don't know what language your code is written in, but it's clear to me that some line has a typo on it.

Specifically, one of the lines used to subtract MAPs.  Because MAPS are used in so many different ways (seal, air, land, etc) then I'm guessing there's a subroutine or function or something where you have a line equivalent to "MAP = MAP - 3" written out a bunch of ways.  One of those ways has a typo in it.

Technically, everything else is working correctly; if MAPs were being subtracted properly, all other war bugs would vanish.  So in my opinion, start with whatever function is supposed to subtract MAPS, and see if there's a typo, a missing semicolon or whatever. 

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I don't think its the case that it can only happen at 12MAPs 
I've had this glitch happen when I had only 3 MAPs & 9 MAPs, especially during the Halloween War.
I almost never allow MAPs to go beyond 12 without reason, but have had this glitch occur on my attacks multiple times.  

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