Background

For many years Hello Games have run community rewards. The most prominent being the Quicksilver rewards. They work by linking your efforts towards the community goal to their server. This makes the missions available, monitors our completion of any missions and adds to a global counter.

As a pacing mechanism, the speed at which things progress is set by HG manually, to make more desirable items slower or make single items in a set faster. They either do this by setting the number of required contributions or by using a contribution modifier. (I am not sure which but they would be functionally the same.)

They sometimes adjust the contribution during the progress. Usually when they have other plans, like a specific update that includes themed items. The most notorious time was during the first expedition that used a community reward, which had to have a cut-off to approximately meet a specific deadline when an interview would be published. Unfortunately this may have led to the perception we have today, where some assume this is always the case.

They will also change the overall count occasionally. If the servers get overloaded and no contributions are registered for a period then they extrapolate the progress and adjust things. If they have an update ready to roll on a specific date and the current item hasn’t quite reached the goal they will either increase the multiplier or just set it to done. They occasionally do this when they just want to speed the progress of individual parts of grouped items. This may be timer related but it has never been egregious. Just the last few percentage points to better pace when the new rewards arrive. We have also seen them just give up when things are badly bugged, and make the item available as part of a patch.

Leviathan

The second expedition to use a community counter was Leviathan, and it serves as a clear example of how it works and what happens when things go awry.

Leviathan had a four part goal. We started the expedition with C-Class modules and each goal increased these, B through S then X.

HG capped individual contributions without making that information public, this gets into data mining territory which is not really appropriate in this sub but it stands to reason HG would take action against manipulation by players to break their counters. At the time some players complained that it was obviously fake but we know exactly what happened because it was tracked and recorded.

Things began OK but something went wrong with the B-Class counter. It even began to drop. HG fixed this and just gave us the Bs and set the A counter going.

That counter went without a hitch quickly reaching the goal. As did S. This probably surprised HG because a great many users were saying they didn’t want to do that expedition. And yet it was very successful and the counters went fast.

HG clearly decided that they needed to pace out the X-Class reward they seemed to set it far too slow. We can see some evidence of a form of intervention, but notably not based on a timer artificially increasing the numbers. It was either manual or algorithmic.

In summary, first it was bugged, then it was OK for two stages, then it was obviously manipulated for the last stage.

Singularity

HG had a specific date in mind for Singularity. It was timed to coincide with the Apple developer’s conference. They needed to switch their community server over to the expedition but the QS cloak wasn’t quite finished naturally. So they appeared to increase the multiplier dramatically or reduce the number of contributions required, giving it a huge boost on the last day.

They were then free to set the counter for the expedition. If the count was fake they wouldn’t have bothered. They could just have left the cloak to finish naturally and put the next quicksilver item up. Leaving the expedition pretending to act like a second counter. This is perhaps the most compelling reason to not believe the rumours about a counter. Fake counters don’t need this much effort and wouldn’t need manipulating.

Now, perhaps predictably, given the slower pace of updates this year, the Singularity expedition has proved popular, but unfortunately it has also confused a lot of players who didn’t grasp how it worked. The upshot of this is some thought it was bugged and wondered why they couldn’t finish the expedition and some wanted to test the system and hand in several hundred seeds (even thousands) by duplication and presumably a macro.

As we learned in Leviathan, that experiment was doomed. HG know some players will try this. A thousand contributions wouldn’t move the counter significantly enough to be visible because they know it isn’t feasible and have stopped that happening. I will include the graphs from that time. It is technically a form of data mining but it is not spoiling anything so I hope it is seen as appropriate.

Leviathan Misson Progress

Conclusion

Overall this isn’t fakery, this is pragmatism and a sense of fairness. And, in the unlikely event that progress slows down enough that we look like failing the last goal, HG may aid the speed of progress. Yes, that is manipulation, but that isn’t the same as a fake timer.

Now, I can already tell by the cry of cheating by many on social media, that the received wisdom that there is a timer will probably stick for a while. It has stuck before. Any “evidence” that supports this received wisdom will be probably believed by those predisposed to. If the counter needs adjusting or we have more bugs, then it will only add to this perception.

Eventually, when the community that monitors the counters switch their systems to allow monitoring of this expedition, we will hopefully be able to see real time progress information. Then we will be able to judge what really happened. But that data is best left to the areas of the internet where it is appropriate to discuss data mining in more detail.

Suffice to say, if you are worried or concerned that HG are only pretending there is a community counter for the goals the actual evidence doesn’t support this. They have haver used timers to directly manipulate the numbers in that way, or to pretend our efforts are meaningful when they are not. They have sometime changed things for good reason but never in a way that seeks to pull the wool over our eyes. The counters are real and we are watching closely.