Just becaue you have an answer doesn't mean it's right. What you fail to see is that this is shady, and you think its completly fine, with no reguard for the community. Calling you a moron is hardly flaming, poor taste maybe but I certainly wouldn't consider it flaming.



The intentions of ghost acres were to help produce more land from landgrabbing, not land trading. There is a very significant difference here. Again you fail to see the connection here or choose to ignore it. If you don't beleive me just ask Pang why he put ghost acres back and I can guarantee you it wasn't for land tradeing.



If you do a little digging you can find what the creators of this game think.



Do you have no game ethics of your own or are you only out to rape and pillage so long as no one stops you? Is it not still wrong? [/quote]

Calling someone a moron is a flame.

Land trades are land grabs. It is like squares and rectangles - one is a subset of the other.

Why don't the people who are so vehemently opposed to this do the work to make their point if that is the case?

I have plenty of ethics. This is a victimless "crime". No raping or pillaging going on. If you have an issue with that there is another thread about that on this board.

I think the fact that you just called it a "crime" says a lot aye?

I put it in quotes to acknowledge that you seem to consider it one while I do not. I would say that it means nothing other than I recognize your point of view and disagree with it.

Alright I can live with that. A difference of opinion... Good luck winning over the rest of the server.

inside trading is also a victimless crime, but people get locked up for that

insider trading does not materialize money from nothing (money doesn't grow on tree's last time I looked). For a trader to make more money than they are due from an inside trade that money has to come from somebody else that had, or otherwise would have had that money.

Unless I'm mistaken, I do believe ghost acres actually DO come from nowhere. hence victimless.

Ya, that's kind of what I was getting at... it's an ingame issue that will require a political solution. The admins are conscious of how planned land-trading can cause issues in terms of balance and we've already taken steps to stop it once we saw some results. All I'm saying is that we'll see how things go as you guys try this... if we determine that the mechanics are giving people who do something an unfair advantage over others (as the old system did, based on the FFA land results (llaar :p)), then we may see further changes. :p

I wouldn't say it's victimless because what about the guy who doesn't stoop to this tactic of game play to try and get a competitive advantage? What about the guy who plays honest and gets bumped down in rank due to some jack off who land trades?

Indeed... the top 10 ranks should be filled with people who worked on their countries decently hard... not people who got to 70k acres landtrading and did nothing of skill to get there

Ghost acre is put in place and these persons are using them. There is no exploitation whatsoever, just cleverly using the game mechanic. If it is a bug that moderators are trying to fix, then using it to gain acre is abusing it.

It is a legit way of getting land. same as how exploring is a game mechanic and being used by many players.

Perhaps if this was done between members of the same clan, it can be considered as land trading. Even then, a specific rule saying that hitting a member of a same clan is prohibited is nowhere to be found.

ok 1 posting rager

Actually the changes you made only stopped unbuilt land trading being quite as obscene as it was.

What the changes do is not a lot to built land trading since the main limiting factor is building/rebuilding costs.

That is more of a limiting factor than turns once acres get high enough (~12kish probably) so your only doing 2-3 exchanges per day which means your getting full ghost acres on each hit.

When land is lowish you lose more csites if your bpt is above a certain level, but when land is highish its impractical to have double the csites on double the acres your csites actually trend upwards. For example i started one set at 100 bpt and they grew to 120bpt or so.

The only real change is a psychological/convenience/safety one which makes doing a high amount of hits all in one play session with little rebuilding then buying defence or having PS'd troops/tanks coming home less effective. Since the more you do at once now the higher build/rebuild costs go.

I would argue without a high risk of your countries being topfed and retals getting a lot less acres/buildings back that it is much more effective than last set.

This particular occurance was obviously horribly inefficient as you can see on the last exchange they only gained 101 acres between the 2 countries. Even exploring would be fairly close to that just in pure acreage let alone averaged land/turn gain.

The problem will be ovious if anyone seriously netgaining does land trading properly, but even those who do will eventually feel that its no longer a game.

lol how was that raging??

Apparently someone isn't happy when something not going according to whatever he wants.

I was implying you are either a rage member or a pdm member but ok.

Enshula you know too much. :P

Members have been "quitting" this game for years and subsequently letting their countries be farmed by their friends. Someone recently volunteered on these forums to play a country in express for the explicit purpose of giving land to predetermined countries.

Why have these forms of land trading never been frowned upon?

if two seperate clans/alliances are happy to keep a 1:1 non-escalating policy between them, i don't see a problem here.

i get a bit annoyed when a clan chooses to do the same with its own members without any real fear

how is there any fear between 2 separate clans doing it if they agree to it? It's exactly the same as if they we're tagged the same.

If there is no agreement there is atleast the fear of def helding and getting fluffed in return. Or your opponent being able to buy more milstrat or have a tyranny retal you.

These post's always seem to be ignored..hmmm.

What cracks me up is that all but 2 of the people shouting at each other on this topic could not net their way out of a paper bag. Pretty sure Detmers idea of netting is trying to build amusment parks on his land.

;p

I'm with Toma on this one. If PDM and rage are going to be so lovie dovie they might as well be in the same clan.

Saying its okay becasue they aren't in the same clan is the lamest excuse I've heard. We could tag up half of Collab in a clan called Sant adn the other half called Collab and land trade and I'm sure PDM members would be in here screaming that its not fair.

When I was in PDM at least they tried to take the high ground.

AND ONE DAY I'LL HAVE THE BIGGEST ROLLER COASTER EVER!!!

Toma, people have tried a bit of land trading. PDM has not been screaming for anything.

Notice how much enshula knows about land trading. It is stupid for us not to acquire that same knowledge. Pang acknowledges that ghost acres are at a point where this is a political issue.

There is no skill required to mercilessly bottomfeed an untag. There is no skill required to camp the news. Really this game requires no skills except for mathematics. This is an alliance game and I am not opposed to an alliance doing something internally. Any finishes NA has done within the rules of the game are legitimate finishes because this is an alliance server. I am sorry that they worked harder as an alliance to take the top spot than your alliance did.

LOL @ PDM members screaming its not fair

Its been done before, I've hardly seen anyone screaming anywhere, not even on our boards.

unless he's using a psuedonym, he's not in PDM.

and earlier you mentioned that PDMers should stop complaining about LaFers lging us. again, as i mentioned earlier, we did stop complaining and we started retalling. so why do you keep bringing this up?

why are you quoting this as me?

I never posted that. Please do not make things up.

I see no problem with this.

When you add in military and building losses, you're not gaining a whole heck of a lot.

Mr. Lime: Fair or not, with RD, the assumption will always be that the same person is running both land trading countries.

You know what assuming does, dont you ?

Those two countries were tagged EEVIL and as part of the head council of EEVIL, I assure you they were two separate people playing those countries. I am sure the admins could very easily have verified that as well.

There is absolutely NO different between what they did last reset and got fluff for and what these guys are doing this reset.

In fact, some other tags benefitted from it by grabbing them because they did this.

Make up your freaking minds already.

Dunno what the deal is but last night the quote function wasn't functioning quite right. That could be what lead to the seeming false quoting there.

It's very common to blame RD for all issues on all servers, even when we do not cause them.

I don't play on this server, But i'll take all the blame for those attacks.

I was under the assumption that making game mechanics work to your advantage was part of playing any game, not just this one. I can understand frustration in taking advantage of a mechanic to make a game less fun, but then again, those who do well in Earth, in my opinion, are those that spend so much time crunching numbers that there isn't any fun to be found anyway. I always thought that was what separated the veterans from the rest of us: the ability to exploit the advantages of gameplay.

Pretty much this. The Rage philosophy from the early days on has always been that anything not explicitly against the rules is fair game. That's what the rules are there for: to define what constitutes fair play.

I've never been a fan of this tactic. I'm glad the game mechanics were changed a bit to make it less effective :P

funny thing is, i first learned about the concept of land trading from PDM when i was in PDM. Death was running numbers on its efficiency, and then i went and ran my own numbers. the next set after that was when i had my 278k acre country in FFA which was also the last set of ghost acres in 2025 :P

the way the mechanics of it are now, (after the changes last set with my 90 million acre, 6.4 billion NW country in FFA hehe), does destroy a lot of buildings and CS and is only good for 9 hits, maybe even only 6 since the returns drop so fast after the first 6. dropping defense for making such few hits isn't really as worth it, considering rebuild and rebuy costs. i tried land trading this set in FFA on two pairs of countries and didn't really like the results myself and therefore won't be trying it again. just trying out some straight self farming now, but thats not something that benefits both countries, and therefore would never be used in alliance outside of someone running a straight landfarm, but thats another issue.

also, i would guess it would be even less worth it in alliance since between two players to have breakable breaks to do like 6-9 hits a day or something, you would either have crazy low def or have to rebuy defense so much in addition to building that the costs aren't justified. i'm sure theres an optimal acreage and defense to have, i don't even know how i'd go about finding that though. and with low def, to make it easier, you'll look like an awesome grab target, and while spending your cash on rebuilding... making a retal would become harder

theres totally nothing wrong with testing game mechanics though. this game has set rules and formulas, and i assume we're expected to use those to make the best countries we can.

ruthie, never said that I was making the assumption...

you'll be an ass and the ump will shun you!!!!

Hey guess what, I own the Commie that was supposed to be playing as a retaler for RAGE. I am going away soon so I figured that I would try land trading with my buddy from PDM and guess what????

it is not worth it.

we exchanged 10 hits and I had to rebuild 5.4k land and I spent 30 turns on building CS's to get my BPT back up to 55.

I started with $800million cash and after the LGs and rebuilding of all the land I was left with $175million cash.

I gained 2k land and PDM gained 1.2k land.

Would I do it again? Hell no.

I should have just LGed one of you clowns that is crying about us "land tradding" and crossed my fingers that you could not have broken me on the retal.

Last set when I was playing with LaF I made a few LGs on will retal allainces and they were big LGs that where always retaled land:land. Some times I got lucky and kept 300 ghost acreas and some times I was retaled by lower NW all jetters that cost me 500+ acreas.

I swear people b*tch about everything on this server. That is why I enjoy playing on Team Server. You dont have all that BS and drama that you see here in Allaince.

Well have fun every one, Las Vegas awaits SuperFly!

what about the honest players that get bumped off the top 10 by the FA chainers and organized market buyouts?

Detmer, enshula knows a lot about everything in the game. It isn't because he does landtrading that he understands something.

You're just mad because LaF didn't try it up before we did.

And no I am not one of the ones doing it. I am far to lazy for that.

It makes god kill a kitten?

For the fist time in several years I find myself in complete agreement with llaar.

"I swear people b*tch about everything on this server. That is why I enjoy playing on Team Server. You dont have all that BS and drama that you see here in Allaince."


LOL are you kidding me? There is even more drama and fluffing on Team Server, although most of it is RD this and RD that.

Ignoring of course the fact that their non Color person are 2 very old and well known personas.

Paladin, if laf were to do landtrading, they would do it better than you. Just like they do everything else better. Fortunately we dont support that and so we don't do it. But hey... yah we are jealous of the people who get tag killed every set...

If enshula would like to comment, have you done any formal testing on land trading enshula?

I´m on vacation but I just had to come back for this...

Are you serious? RAGE grab Fist, lose land on retals and then retal the retals. PDM and iMag seem to enjoy losing land to us too, not sure if that´s a coincidence. Maybe they´ll decide they don´t accept retals anymore soon as well, isn´t that what your coalition is about?

Or is it about pissing off as many clans as possible before Collab kills you all? Kind of ironic that you decide to "initiate land grabbing" with smaller clans instead of say... SOL or LCN after you pitched this to us as a "coalition of small clans" last set.

*back to vacation*
*not an official Fist person this set. my country is tagged elsewhere*

And since spawn and toma haven´t responded, this probably isn´t the official party line.

the RD stuff aint drama, that is just stupid people being stupid. RD has the same old rule, you leave them alone and they leave you alone. Team server has a few idiots that will bash/attack RD and then they cry about getting the smack down from RD.

This server on the other hand is just a joke. If you are in a "major/big/established" tag and you hit another major you get retaled land:land by the other tag. Than you get flamed on your own board by other members becuase they are afraid that the other tag will hit them and take their little stock.
If you attack/farm untaggeds you are "killing the game" becuase you are not giving new players a chance. You once again get called out by your team mates becuase you are now attracting suiciders.
If you make an arrangement with a friend to "land trade" and generate ghost acreas you are a worthless cheat and you deserve to be killed and you are called out on Allaince Talk.

Based on all the crying about topfeeding, farming untaggeds, land trading, etc.. The admins should just disable the standard and planned strike options on this server. That way we can all play all-x strats and use the GS and BR attacks if we dont like some ones country name or tag name.

Well to give an answer that might appease both of you: ;p

Before doing land trading i did the numbers on rebuild cost, grabbing turns, building turns and compared them to exploring.

The averaged land/turn is in excess of anything else that is guaranteed in this game. With the current state of grabbing non landtrading grabbing isnt very guaranteed in alliance/ffa unless you resign yourself to always having less land than your targets.

What i wasnt certain of was what bpt levels at what acreages resulted in increasing or decreasing bpt. From testing it the answer is even if you lose bpt initially as your land increases your bpt will rise so dont really worry about it.

Basically there are 5 phases to a landtrading country:

1) grab/explore until you hit a minimum acres, perhaps 8kish, priority is income, bpt is only an issue early and wont matter later on

2) turn constrained landtrading, at this point you will spend all turns grabbing, building, and rebuilding csites if you wish, slower growth means you can raise income more (except oiler)

3) income constrained landtrading, to maintain tech levels and build acres eventually you need to stop and build extra csites/cash/explore unless you had very low bpt since income and land increase linearlly, tech almost so with some price drop, and build costs double as land doubles

4) since land gets more expensive than grabbing at some point eventually you want to switch to explore/bottomfeed/cash/csiteing and stock

5) destock easily since you should have large acreage

enshula: does that include the cost of replacing military units?

that cost is anywhere from near 0 to impractical

its an issue of safety as to how much defence you wish to PS out or buy and sell

its still better to get hit occasionally and lose a little on a retal while maintaining your faster growth rate, worst rate in alliance you could consider two fat 0 defence land traders as retal farms to give retals to your techers or others