I think this is precisely the problem, especially with Agent's confirmation that this supposedly has nothing to do with unlimited battle/rank exploits, and nothing to do with robots.
I don't trust Inno to actually understand their own game, and I am sure I'm not alone, after some frankly ridiculous changes in the past years, things like the Flying Noob Trap GB coming up, even thinking that the Space Carrier should exist - essentially a himeji with the exact same rewards but higher FP cost and a daily cost to actually do the negotiations. Ohhh let me count the ways that Inno has made it clear that their game designers do not understand how the game is played. I mean I was actually called out by support a couple weeks ago for doing more than 1 fight a second and had to send them back a video showing how it's possible to accomplish that in GVG? But I know support people play, and may just not be experienced in GVG.
Assuming I haven't lost you... yes, I agree, Inno was probably sitting around in their HQ and seeing all the aborts, and coming to the conclusion that "some players are becoming bored and have to do all of these quests because of that"
I reject the accuracy of the conclusion though.
Instead, I assert that they failed to realize the cause of the uptick, and projected the cause across the game as a whole.
The cause of the uptick is because people started seeing people raise in rank super quick, and realized they were doing unlimited fights in SAAB, and wanted to do the same. Then apparently (as I found out a couple days ago) guilds started threads where they put up trades of 500 for 500 goods to swap with each other, so that those fights turn in to unlimited RQs, and they get unlimited SAAB goods, which is much more useful than unlimited supplies and coins. Honestly any unlimited supply/coin exploit is only a threat due to the ability to turn those coins in to FP, and most people don't have the time/energy to clickclickclack the super-slow buy FP button and just leave those coins sitting around. My event buildings give me something crazy like 1 billion coins per day, it would take forever to get that from this infinite RQ exploit. It has nothing to do with coins.
A problem is that regardless of someone's CF level, they can now play an 'infinite RQ' strategy in SAAB (and soon Venus).
Mods say that Inno has determined that infinite quests is a problem, and at the same time, mods now say that the fight quests aren't the problem, however, that's why you suddenly have 100 people per server doing it rather than the 1-3 infinite CFs you had before this caught on. These two statements are in conflict with each other.
Plinker suggests that the uptick represents boredom to developers. However, infinite RQs are a play style that takes a lot of work to build up to being able to do.
Until now, you had to stay in tomorrow era or earlier to do it - but a year ago Inno released an age that suddenly made the playstyle viable to anyone who reached the highest age, and it doesn't even require them to invest 10000k FP in to their CF - you can do this infinite RQ exploit without a CF! That is CERTAINLY broken. All those people who moved to FE+ before realizing they'd never be able to be "infinite" are now given that option for free.
Some people enjoy the playstyle and have worked for literally years to be able to do it
Personally, nothing relaxes me more than spending an evening on the couch doing FP RQs or laying in bed in the morning doing the same.
But again, for me, the limit as is isn't too bad. I regret that it affects people who've worked for YEARS to be infinite in TE and earlier ages. I do not regret that it's stopped the outrageous SAAB+ fight farming. Our guild has had probably 5x+ more attacks against us since this change in GVG because people are now hungry to get their fights elsewhere - thank goodness, I was getting bored these past couple of months.
My desired solution, either:
1) Get rid of the fight quests and the limit. Ban anyone doing an inhuman level of RQs or doing them inhumanely fast. Track mouse movement as others have suggested and ban people who aren't adequately moving their mouse when they do RQs.
OR 2) Make the limit a per-quest limit, around the same level or slightly higher, but no higher for SAAB/Venus unless you get rid of the fight quests. Frankly, and selfishly, I'd prefer to see the limit as-is or reduced if the infinite goods exploit in SAAB/Venus isn't solved since I just found out that that's completely destroyed the economy (though it's not like those goods were good for anything anyways!)
Summary/TLDR/Final thought: I think it takes mods like you guys, who actually understand the game, to bring issues like this up to Inno in a way that doesn't capitulate to their lack of understanding of how the game and its players operate. I'm sure that like someone else said, there must be many mods "whistling in the dark" (I had to look that up, it means "trying to remain brave and convince themselves that the situation is not as bad as it seems"). You guys (mods) know damn well that the problem is actually either the fight quests, or the bots, and not FP RQs and UBQs in general, and I assert that you have a responsibility as the bridge between us players and the developers, to help Inno learn their game and make good decisions. This is not an insult to Inno. No developers know or understand their product other than the founders, and we all know the original developers of this game are gone; the rumour is the main one is literally not alive anymore. Game developers don't play their own game enough to understand the synergies they've created, and there's a serious disconnect even between game devs and the game designers who actually make the calls, and this has nothing to do with Inno, it's just the industry.
I'm not intending to freak you mods out, definitely I would not want to be on your bad side... especially if you guys are going to go around randomly calling things exploits that you know have been around in the game for years. What's next - are you going to call multiple point landings in GVG an exploit even though when I first saw someone do it and tried to report it, the support ticket replied saying it's been a part of GVG for years and not a bug? Are you guys going to call my amazing coin boost % an exploit because it gives me 20% more FP per day to have all my event buildings pumping out huge amounts of coins? We don't know, and that's what scares us the most.
