Exhibitions Report

The 21th exhibition "Rainbow" has ended. 154 Beastlords have applied their pets to compete for the prize.

Now it is time to announce the winners!

1. Dreamss (#9437) - 1000 points
2. birdlove (#1485) - 991 points
3. VitteBitte (#10691) - 976 points
4. Siliandra (#10376) - 966 points
5. Selune (#21914) - 964 points

Association of Breeders is taking a pause for two weeks to let the Beastlords focus on the egg hunt.

My disapproval of this last exhibition has already been voiced, but I'll take this as an oppurtunity to say this again. I was initially thrilled when I saw the custom skin exhibition, but after looking at the rules I realized that cheating would be all too easy. Soon after others noticed this as well and took advantage of the system, ruining the integrity of the exhibition as the top entries began to be filled with the same exact skins - Duh, the first place holder, was having their roster copied by others. What's upsetting me now is that VitteBitte had been one of the users who had initially been found copying some of Duh's entries and now here they are taking third place while Duh was knocked out of the rankings. How is that fair?

Angel, I do understand what the difficulty of the situation must have been, but I personally believe that it could have been handled better. I can't speak for others but I honestly would have preferred for the exhibition to have been cancelled rather than changed as it was. I would have liked for the cheaters to have been disqualified, and then for the top 5 after that to receive a consolation prize as an apology while other users were refunded their entry fees.

Unfortunately, cancellation wasn't possible. There's no way to find out if Rainbow Jar was used before or after the exhibition start and if it's intention was to apply a certain skin the exhibition, and no way to find out how many pets were changed before the current roster was formed. So it's not possible to make a refund and withdraw the skins only from pets who got them only to participate in exhibition. Besides this, this exhibition was a full copy of our 7th exhibition which ran smoothly, and we weren't expecting any problems with it. The situation was complicated by the fact that I was on a way to another city when this happened and had to grasp the problem and find a solution over the phone with our second team member. We had only two ways out: leaving it as is thus turning it into the exhibition for better stats among GP3 pets (and it already started to work this way befor the fix was implemented), or adding a slight alteration to rules that would prevent the use of the same skin for 10+ times. With the rules alteration and the behavior of other exhibition participants, Duh's roster would have a prized place at the end of the exhibition if she didn't withdrew it, and she would get the same reward as she would get if the exhibition ended directly on the day 2. But that roster wouldn't have any prized place leaving the top to all GP3 level 50 pets fed with magic fruits if we left the rules as they were.

VitteBitte has a different winning roster, there are only 2 pets from the old one. Another player, birdlove, who takes the second place, had the first place with a copy of Duh's roster before the change, but now she has a completely different roster compiled of black dragons. The user on the fourth place, Siliandra, uses one of the skins from that roster too, but other four pets are different. What exactly is unfair here? These players were playing by the changed rules, and they got result according to them.

http://beastkeeper.com/exhibition-winners

The rules change didn't ban those five skins from use, and didn't get an automatic boost to all others. It turned the exhibition to the sphere of skins again instead of stats. Probably it would be better to leave that exhibition as it was. I mistakenly thought that fixing the exploit and adding one day to the exhibition to compensate the lost day and letting the players to remove 1-2 overused skins from rosters to get the same result would be better for the game than to leave it exploited. I apologize for the wrong decision, and in case of future exploits I will use this lesson as guide. So I can promise that this situation will never be repeated.

I wasn't online during the time that birdlove had an exact copy of Duh's roster up, but the fact that that happened sort of helps to drive home my belief that those who had cheated during the time when the original rules had still been in place should have been disqualified when the rules were changed. In the case of Silandra I would go to say that the use of just 1 of the skins could have by all means have been just a coincidence, but using more than that to rank high would have been a deliberate attempt to cheat. And I use the term cheat here loosely, because technically there was nothing in the rules against this, but it was in all ways morally wrong and should not have been done.

I think the part of all of this that seems the most unfair to me is that they were given the chance to play by the new rules. I believe in second chances but only in certain situations, and I would not have considered this a time for them. The old rules were exploited, demanding a change, and the people who exploited them to begin with got out unscathed leaving them capable of ranking in the new exhibition that emerged after the changes were made. Does that make any sense? I know it does to me but I'm not always capable of putting my thoughts into coherant words.

I'd also like to add that while I wasn't very fond of the decision you made, I wouldn't exactly say it was the wrong decision. As I said I can understand the difficulty you must have faced, or to a certain extent I can, when this occurred and now knowing that you were limited to fixing the problem quickly over a phone just helps to support that. I said in the other thread that I knew a fix to this wouldn't be as easy as removing Kamis like from Blue Bloods due to the nature of custom skins. There was a problem that needed fixed and you made the deicison you thought would be for the best; I don't condemn you for that. It was a complicated situation and any choice made would have left someone unhappy as not everyone can be pleased.

damn such a long wait till the next exhibition! I love them! realy hope next exhibition is about color again :) like red or orange or yellow ♥

Thank you for your opinion :) Anyway I'm very glad that you voiced over your concerns here because we need feedback from our community to know how to act in such situation in future.

Although I can't agree with the concept of "cheating" in this exhibition. Using an oversight isn't cheating. Cheating supposes that players intentionally bypass the rules, i.e. with the help of scripts and security holes. A good example of cheating on the exhibition would be overriding the skin value on the client side and getting the false rank. This exhibition didn't have a rule "don't copy rosters", and if it had, it should have been realized on the script level like all other rules. Those players just used the opportunity which wasn't prohibited by rules. It's a logic oversight and only our dev team can be blamed here. This mostly happens because we're missing in our team a couple of other heads with different thinking patterns. A team of only a coder and an artist fails sometimes. We're trying hard to take into account all the factors including human ones when designing any game feature, but still blunders like this happen sometimes. Good side is that we're learning, and exploits that we had once won't repeat.

i would like it to be noted because of all the controversy that even though i won iv  did not cheet nor copied any persons skins that they used, nor did i even have the same breed of animals   .... thank you