That helped at most two countries. It gave the rest of us a date which we didn't know for sure since we were not in the know as those two were. MD also had the same date. Arsenal and some others have accused 20+ others of cheating. I was one of the many countries bigger than MD's biggest last set. I didn't even run that great of a country. I know for a fact that I didn't cheat and I also know for a fact that MD just had fluffty countries. Perhaps you guys should stop your fluffing witch hunt and focus on those who actually cheated unless you have ACTUAL evidence that others like myself cheated. And I can assure you, if I can have a country bigger than MD, then the people in Laf who are actually good at this game can definitely do so. This forum fluff is a joke and this is my last post on the matter.

Locket.

I'm ashamed of myself of never keeping the ops for it. But multiple times have run into LaF wallers who would get up to unexplainable amounts of military when we had a kill run on said country. Even FA + buy ups based on stock on market and on hands could not cover it.

So yes more then those 2 LaF countries have profitted from it. Sadly I've never saved any of those ops. Once again I'm ashamed I haven't. I honestly can't tell if Hanlong was part of those countries we ran into but I can for sure say we ran into more then 2 countries a set in which we were questioning our own calcs constantly.

no joking, at least two heads had the ability to change anything in the game and they did.

they could add turrets if they wanted.

they could subtract spies if they wanted.

they could change the game in oh so many little ways. add a couple 1000 troops when a laffer is being gsed or whatever.

they got caught cheating adding 10m troops. i think they got away with more.

how can you not see this helping laf as a whole?!?!

Your Don and all the information he needed to go to war, you guys followed him blindly, everyone in LaF benefited from that information, indirectly, it is not my fault that you all did, but you all did regardless, he lead you guys, he was the 1 who ran the show, I don't know how your chats ran against MD, but you had to of known something was up if he didn't need spy ops for countries, as her Pang's comments on this he could see everything about any country he wanted.

In conclusion, you all benefited greatly in some way. If you don't want to believe that, once again, go live in your delusional world, I couldn't give a rats behind, stop trying to play the victim card here.

It is easy to throw an accusation like that out without any proof Makinso, I would have to see evidence before I believe you that others profited off of all of this.

It is entirely possible that there were other people that knew about it and profited off it, I will not discount that possibility. But it definitely wasn't on any sort of mass because if it was then it would have got leaked to other laf leaders etc. a long time ago.

http://forums.earthempires.com/...ecurity-breaches-cheating

that technically qualifies as an announcement and doesn't actually contain any proof that the accusations made by the admins are true and verifiable.

No where do you hear me saying mass scale H4. I know what I saw and that I questioned myself. I can't for the life of me say if it was 5 or 7 countries I saw that happen to in 1 war. I can say I know for sure it was more then 2.

Does that make me say all LaF are the same? Not at all. But I'm sure more then 2 people knowingly or unknowingly(which would be truly sad for them) made profit of the exploit.



When it comes to the boxcar exploit I agree that as a leadership group you are in some way jointly responsible. If I look at Jiman or praetor they constantly question how or where I get my info. They want no part of shady deals or actions like hanlongs.

You on the other hand fully defended Hanlong at all times. While we've publicaly and privately told you there was NO WAY hanlong could get those logs in a legit form or way. To me that makes you just as bad as you never investigated or looked at the option of what we were saying to be true.


Maybe for LaF words have been more important then action. But for SOL actions still speak louder then words.

Your actions only show you to defend shady ways of information brokering and gains instead of proving the community wrong when you were challenged on your legitimacy.

H4 I am sure you can understand that there is a massive trust issue occuring right now. I think its right for us to point out these issues that we have noticed over time because of the current events. In no way we want Laf to burn for individual mistakes, but it can not be ignored that Laf as a whole acted based on information that has been provided through ill gotten means.

Now the level of that information being provided is still unknown, but we are not going to stop pointing out things we have noticed just because you dont agree with our prospective of the situation.

We are pissed. We have speculated this has been happening for a few resets now based on incidents that we have observered. We wont keep quiet on it now that the flood gates are opened.

Edit: Funny Maki about what you say that actions speak louder then words. That is what Laf as a whole has been telling me these past several months.

To clarify, you guys didn't get just a date. You got the exact hour we were planning on FS'ing. It was no coincidence that Hanlong chose 4PM CST for your FS.

Arsenal did not accuse 20+ people of cheating, he intimated that there was some cheating involved to get 20+ players bigger than MD's biggest country. No one is saying that the 20 players who owned those countries were individually cheating.

LaF collected all the spy ops for our wars the proper way, we have a spy team and they collected the ops, I know cause I was there when it happened.

This incident paints LaF (specifically hanlong and TC, but LaF overall as well) in a bad light, obviously, but you shouldn't assume that hanlong and TC are stupid... because they are not.

Not having people collect spy ops and still having all the spyops magically appear would be monumentally stupid, because then other people in LaF would realize that something is up.

I imagine they only used it on a "as needed" basis, as that would be the best way to do it in order to minimize the likelihood of getting caught.

It seems to be the big blunder (from Hanlong/TC's perspective) was TC adding 10M troops to his country during a KR. Chances are, unfortunately, that if that didn't happen than we would still be in the dark about this security breach.

So to think that they were doing things like updating all of our enemies ops into the site etc. is just silly and incorrect. If they had been doing that then it would have been highly suspicious and everyone would be right in saying that other LaF members/leaders were stupid not to suspect something was wrong.

The reason why nobody suspected anything was wrong was because they didn't do those stupid kind of things that would have got them noticed

I never talked about spy ops H4. Unless that was a not a response to my post :P

h4, you seem to be talking in circles. you sound stupid now. are you still saying that you want proof that laf cheated or are you saying that the cheating didnt help?

It wasn't in response to your post Makinso it was in response to TGD's post.

But you've never mentioned anything to me in private about how the logs were obtained etc. Nobody in SOL has attempted to speak to me 1 on 1 since... well since before I stepped down as Don the most recent time.

I didn't question the logs because the story Hanlong told me was that the logs came from a current MD head, who had historical ties with laF, who didn't like what Arsenal was planning and as a result provided Hanlong with the logs. At the time that seemed like a reasonable explanation, and also seemed like the most plausible explanation at the time.

People publically cried about cheating etc. But people publically cry about cheating everytime something like this happens. Sometimes (like this time) it does turn out to be the case, but more often than not the accusations are unfounded. As such I didn't have any reason to believe, at that time, that all the accusations being thrown on the boards were anything more than typical spinning and trolling.

It's very possible that 10M was just a mistype but that they had been doing smaller increments for some time, for themselves and other countries that may not have been offline. Where would it even show up if you had been gifted troops during a killrun? Probably not anywhere for the user if they had even looked over the 200+ hits in their news when they logged in.

On a minor note, I'm also curious if these exploits were used to gather strategy ideas from other alliances. If they had access to all of boxcar and even the Evo site, all of the hard work by those alliances to innovate netting and war techniques would be gifted to LaF. I'm almost curious to see how similar some of your strats may be, though I doubt anyone would be sloppy enough to copy the same words/variables straight off another site.

I'm also curious if the access given to an EE admin would include the ability to see if anything has been changed. Just forum access really isn't enough, hanlong (or anyone) could easily just delete their tracks. It's even possible that all logs were immediately trashed as well. Even being as transparent as possible, it's really going to be impossible to prove zero culpability of the other leaders, and I think that will lead to a long period of distrust by other alliance leaders.

The one thing LaF has going for them is that their members are quite supportive (perhaps even too much so) and thus there will be a strong core to continue the name. I hope that this unfortunate event will lead to perhaps some general changes to LaF's politics as well with hanlong's removal, but I know other leaders have similar attitudes in that respect, so I guess we will have to wait and see.

I don't see how I'm talking in circles.

Nobody is denying that hanlong and TC were cheating, as the evidence for it is there. My point a couple posts ago was that I will not blindly accept statements that other people were involved as well until I see some kind of proof, however I do recognize that it is entirely possible that others were involved, and if that is the case hopefully it will come out in time.

Also I never argued that LaF didn't benefit from the cheating, in fact I've argued just the opposite. However, I believe LaF's gains from said cheating was primarily at the alliance planning level (aka through obtaining intellegence). We didn't didn't get a bunch of free ops loading into our site, and I find it hard to believe there was much in the way of any other sort of tangable gains like others on this thread are intimating.

You actually think laf needs to copy strats?

huh, what?

oh so its all good and individual players didnt benefit but laf did?

just sounds like youre minimizing lafs collective gain of all this intel and abuse of the game. like it really didnt help or something. makes me think more was involved.

People have benefited indirectly from cheating more times than can be counted in this game Mazooka, most of the time without knowledge that they were benefiting indirectly from cheating.

This principle could be applied to anyone who ever farmed a multi, ever received aid from a country that farmed a multi. etc. etc. Nobody that has played this game for any length of time could argue that they haven't benefited indirectly from the cheating of someone else in one way or another.

Generally people don't get blamed for indirectly benefiting, so I don't see why you feel this case would be any different.

And I never said it was "all good", and I have indicated on more than one thread on this issue that everyone in LaF fully expects us to take some lumps over this issue. Nobody in LaF expects LaF to get away scott free.

Why can't you just read what I actually say instead of reading what you want me to have said?

I would argue that I didn't think LaF would need to gift themselves troops and read others' private messages and leader forums, but here we are having this conversation.

Sometimes a strat is more than just crunching numbers, it can require out of the box thinking when compared to the previous "this is how it has always been done." I have no clue about LaF's strats so I can't really make any comments on whether they needed it or not, especially because who can say how long hanlong and TC had this access. I respect many of LaF's netters, but a lot of records have been broken only recently. I suspect a lot of that could have to do with knowing market conditions/depth (which is likely why the previous top finishs were deleted and removed) rather than better strats, but who knows? That's why I posed the question.

Hanlong didn't make our strats to my knowledge. It was always someone else like Enshula or SS doing that stuff. We are also pretty loose with netting sets. It is basically play what you want. And if you payed any attention you would realize why netting records are getting better and better. Look at the top Evo players. Are they cheating? Their ANW has gone up over time too. So has RD and every other clan. I remember when no one had broken 100mill ANW before. People are just figuring things out better, finding new tricks and ideas, and combining it into one thing.

I think my problem is I am reading what youre typing. You come across here like youre justifying it or at least excuseing the cheating. Son goku started well on this thread. You just dont seem to get it.

oops

@locket: I do pay attention, I was a strategy IA guy in Evo for a bit. I know that there are changes in the game that lead to higher NW. I understand there are new ideas and tricks. As LaF often likes to mention, ANW has a lot more to do with many players making solid NWs rather than a few with huge. LaF had some huge individual performances that were impressive, but were increasing disproportionately to general ANW and other alliances.

In some sense, I chalked it off to the "loan" system that LaF uses along with some pretty nice market play, but as I said before there was a reason those top finishs were removed entirely (ie due to illegitimate means and not just "better" strategy).

I respect Enshula and I imagine he probably makes some pretty good strats. If hanlong wasn't posting any strats or giving any ideas on the forums or irc then you're probably right that it didn't occur. I was just curious. As somewhat of an "academic" when it comes to playing EE, I am always curious about what ideas other alliances have. Though hanlong was probably more interested in the log info/politics of the matter, it would be simple enough to peruse a strat section for a comparison.

Yah I don't think he was ever interested in other peoples strategies. He did things his own way and only seemed to talk to those he considered top players like SS/Eugene etc for strategy of his own country.

I think the reason that the rest of the server doesn't improve is that almost all of them don't put much effort into their countries and the same group simply doesn't have the knowledge/skill. I don't play the market or anything and even what I consider a good set for me has gone up 30-45 million without putting in any more effort. Oh and those loan things aren't as common as you seem to think. I have only noticed them used when someone is hit by a suicider or similar reasons.

I am in no way trying to excuse the cheating mazooka, and I don't see how my posts insinuate that I am trying to do anything of the sort.

I 100% agree with Son Goku's statement, and even if I didn't agree with it 100% (which I do) I would still do so publicly because he is the don and that's how things work.

My point is simply that a vast majority of laf, whom had no idea this was happening, did not DIRECTLY benefit. I only point that out because I see trends occurring in this thread as well as others that would point public discourse into believing otherwise, and I want to flank that position before it picks up any steam.

That's it, that's all.

So to be clear: I am not denying that cheating occurred, I do not deny it was wrong, I agree that LaF as an entity did benefit from it, but I disagree that a bunch of individuals within LaF benefited on an individual basis (outside of Hanlong and TC, and possibly a couple others which would hopefully come to light in due course if it is the case).

I should also note that I stopped actively playing EE the day after the FS on SOL this reset, and I announced my retirement from the game to Hanlong days before any of this came to light. I did this because I fundamentally disagreed with the direction Hanlong was taking LaF (the constant warring and beatdowns) and I have been arguing with Hanlong about this for months now and recently decided that I'm not willing to partake in it anymore.

As such on a personal note (although I suppose everything I've stated in here is all personal notes given that I just said above about retirement) I feel this could end up being a blessing in disguise if the LaF leadership shuffle leads to a change in LaF's recent direction (which I believe it will). It may be enough to even get me to decide to play again after all.

bah my 6 top10s were legit!

I would honestly still respect Laf for all that they have done in the game IF they would just shut up and take their lumps.

Yet they STILL, when they got caught cheating, tried to play it off with their political BS in most of the other threads.

Just shut up, take your Lumps and move on.

i see all the hate. lol.

Good luck Goku, good luck LaF. (bonus. :P)

After reading several of the posts about how LaF countries were legit because uploads were monitored doesn't really prove anything. If these two had access to the databases then you cannot trust any data from any of those sets. They could have just as easily manipulated the market wih prices, amounts, when it hit, or adjusted other peoples prices so theirs were forced for sale.

They also unfortunately had free spy ops on any of their many targets they grabbed to get to their ~80k acres. Every turn counts :(

With all due respect, Son Goku, it's difficult to believe anything coming from LaF at this point in time. This isn't their first scandal regarding cheating. It seems that as soon as people forget about the rampant cheating in LaF's history, another incident goes viral.

It's hard not to remain skeptical, since it's difficult to believe that only 2 people in LaF had knowledge of this. I believe you will be handcuffed by LaF's history of cheating and coverups.

I'm not accusing you, or specifically accusing anybody in LaF. I know this is a hard situation for you to take over. But coming from an outsider, it's difficult to believe anything we hear about this matter or related matters.

Thomas come play in sof you f@g

So when hanlong publicly gave the script writing/googling explanation publicly on AT last set, did you not suspect something was up since he gave a different explanation to you? Also, I'm not sure which MD head had historical ties to Laf...

Potty mouth

highrock: it seemed to me at the time that Hanlong was making up that story about crawling the internet so as to not reveal that he had a source at the head level in MD. As such it wasn't a cause for me to suspect anything more sinister at all.

But if you check back you'll see that I personally never iterated that story (in fact I iterated the leak story).

haxor haxor haxor...

You don't get it and probably will never get it.

i laik.

Good post Goku.
wish you guys all the best.
Good to see a leader in LaF taking steps in the right direction.

nice post.

Don Son Goku sounds like something on the menu at the local chinese.

haha

On the flip side Mak, part of the reason SoL may be like that NOW, is because they got bit in the ass once by some shady dealings by someone in a leadership position. While I don't condone what anyone did, and think LaF need to take anything that comes on the chin; I *DO* think that in the future, they, just like SoL, will learn from this mistake and become smarter for it.

any consideration of LaF changing names?

Once again this paranoia about some great server-wide conspiracy to take you guys out. All we want is for Laf/Sof to quit the preemptive bullying and leave us the fluff alone. If this exact set of circumstances came out naming NEO or Sanct or Omega as the cheaters, nobody would give a fluff beyond a weeks worth of fluffing. Its a big deal because you used the power TC gave you to repeatedly kick the fluff out of everybody on the server over and over again. You wonder why people plot against you? Its because you cant be trusted with power.

What preemptive bullying? you guys FS SOF last set, not the other way around, ffs. Take it like a man and then move on...

I think it's important to stress that, this was something done by HLW and TC on a personal level, along with anyone else that may be involved, if there are any others.

This isn't something LaF has decided to do as a whole, again, I stress this.

HLW's actions were aimed to benefit LaF, but his actions were not a LaF directive.


Regarding Makinso's thoughts on mysterious walling. I believe that in theory it's possible that those two cheaters added military while the kill run was going on, but it would be VERY noticeable for that member if he hadn't came on to stonewall, and saw the DHs the next day.

I would suggest trying to gather those country numbers and send them to the admins, and maybe to Son Goku as well privately, so we can do an internal investigation. It is totally possible, and probable, that these two individuals have already planted multiple aliases within LaF, or other alliances as well. They both have the technical skills to do so.

LaF's remaining leadership and veterans are probably more eager than rest of the server to try and find out who else is involved, and to take corrective actions on those that are involved.

Those of us that are clean, the remaining 96+% of LaF's membership, will be stronger than ever.



In response to accusations of viewing online countries and such, actually, there is a quick way to check whether a country has came online, it's called networth change.

And as an addition to the response about walling, we have a manual phone bot, he's our IA. We also have a notification system that is done through a legit, legal, free service.

Anyways, I do not defend their actions, I don't excuse LaF's inability to recognize this before, but I just plead that people work together to find out those that are linked, instead of blindly pegging LaF down and want to run us from the game.

Because, seriously, you guys will be facing a tight knit family that now has something to play for, to rebuild our reputation, and motivated to do so.

all LaF members stop posting on this thread and any other. The only person posting should be the Don right now.