Originally Posted by xero

Honestly I wouldn't be surprised if there's scripting and automation at play here as well. Which would make all of the difficulty of doing that just a matter of having enough systems at hand to do it.

Hmm, that could be done.
With what I learned when trying to find out how the chance/gacha worked, it wouldn't be that hard to build some MitM software to automate the self-attacking really. And there might be other options for that.
But I don't think that might be the case here...

Well if you were going to poke under the covers and do it via manufacturing the protocol you wouldn't need much in terms of resources in order to accomplish it... though I think that's a bit more technical than a handful of users out of ~10000 would do, I would suspect you'd need far more people playing for that to become an issue. I was thinking of it more from a userland automation point of view, people using things to simulate human interaction like autohotkey, selenium, and such.

That kind of automation would be impossible here, as you'd need the software to recognize that the correct name has appeared in the screen, and then go click at the right listing.

Manufacturing the protocolo is actually very easy. You just need to do a simple soft that would intercept the first call to refresh the opponent listing, and then keep sending calls to refresh until the returning package has your main account in the list. All the data is passed as unencrypted JSON, so that's waaaay to easy to do.
And that's just for a simple code that would just make sure that if you click the refresh, the program would auto-refresh until you get the account you're looking for.

Doing something that would automatically start the process, and then even send the request for the click itself wouldn't be too far behind that.

As I said in the Chance thread, I could actually do it, but I hate cheating like that
That would, however, take a bit more than just a couple hours. That's why I discarded it as a valid option for what the top5 were doing.

Well the game has been around for a while now, there were some definite signs of automation in the previous event too, there was a person in the set of people I could share my elite guards with that very likely was automated to attack one focus at a time until the guard died (including spending pudding), it is possible that they were just extremely ravenous, but it seemed too mechanical, their rate of attacking was incredibly consistent, and time of day had no impact on whether or not they would start attacking. I stopped calling them in to attack because it basically just turned in to giving them another guard to kill.

p.s. apologizing for derailing the discussion a bit