Get it all out of your system and then use another thread to soap box. I'll be cleaning this thread up later.

The reasons for wanting ClandGDI are valid, but it cut out all diplomacy from the game, which is the main non-starter in my opinion.

From the griefing aspect, when I thought it just meant someone would have to declare war to attack a country in ClanGDI, it seemed like that could work. Griefers could still hit, but only one person per war declare period. It's still a challenge for the small tags, but now a late start couldn't grab 20 bot farmers, grow to 100k land immediately and cause mass destruction. They could hit one target, get into DR, and likely get taken care of.

From the war aspect, if you had to declare war on your opponent, you would need to make sure you finished them off or you're out of action for the next killrun. If you have 10 second kills etc, then of course you can just declare peace with the dead country and move on to the next. HH and others calling out throttling for attacks is a reasonable place to discuss the speed (and something I thought we'd tried in the past - wasn't their C:C DR for fast attacks at some point?).

But that's not actually how it worked, of course. I think adding a formalized process to war seems like the bigger piece that would need more testing and balancing - so probably should follow the voting of #2 - but maybe there's some middle ground where ClanGDI just means you have to declare war to attack (as long as there is still some cost to it - defaulting back to it being free doesn't make sense). This would still help with one-off suiciders and if you have anyone stonewall in the FS, basically buys your whole alliance a reprieve in locking up those attackers to that one country. Not perfect, but seems like a much easier thing to code, and maybe moves a step in the right direction. You still need diplomacy, war is a part of the game that everyone can be involved in, and individual griefers have at least limited damage potential.

So I'll call this option:
1.5) remove the ClanGDI alliance level aspects until further testing, but bugfix so that if you want to attack / perform hostile ops to a country in ClanGDI, you have to declare war first.

Thanks for your continued development, qz. I think there's a lot of ways to improve this old game (with a hundred differing opinions on how best to do it) but we probably need more incremental progress based on discussions with the community (like this thread - well parts of it) rather than a small vocal group pressing you for rushed, game-breaking changes privately.

I want to be constructive. I want to be, doubt I will be.

BH - I know this is crazy to think. But life before you got to Earth Empires existed. Just like your parents' happiness before you were born. Every alliance warred each other. Every alliance has been allies with LaF in the past. Most of the people here being the "greifers" have been in LaF before. My guess is LaF was tired of being nice to other alliances and virtual blowing QZ was easier to get sets without being hit instead of doing the political work to keep them from being the target.

LaF - you have a long history of being a great alliance. Good netting and good warring (even if no one remembers). However, recently you're kind of meh. All the people that enjoyed other aspects of the game from your side has left and we are left with Gains, En4 and then a bunch of turds (besides HH and maybe Karn. Um....no offense). The people who actually care about playing the game and the actual turn by turn gameplay remains. The rest of us actually like the real game, which has very little to do with turns or turns spent. It's about people, fluff posts, schemes, politics, drama, backstabbing, frontstabbing, sidestabbing, and hot chicks. The game is just the engine that fuels the fun part of the game. So, where am I going with it all? You get a bunch of fluff heads in the same place that now have zero accountability of their actions and there is nothing anyone can do about it. You used to have to earn that status. This is the current state of the game.

QZ - honestly. I'm hoping you do nothing with it. Screw this community, myself included. It truly doesn't matter what you do. You are going to have people unhappy. It is thankless. There are like 5 decent humans left playing this game that actually appreciate that you are trying but also understanding that you have a life. Having said that, are you guys taking investment? What would the dollar price be if someone wanted to buy it or at least majority stake? DM ME! In USD please.

I want to post something meaningful here but to be honest the toxic rhetoric of this community really has me broken now.

Sweep sweep. Constructive, on-topic posts only. Let's not make reading feedback any harder on qz.

Further necessary deletions on this thread will be accompanied with bans. Take your venting to the lovely thread Suicidal provided.

Making sticky for qzjul. I am afraid this will get lost.

+1 to this

So far it looks like option 2 has the most votes by far, with a few voting for 1 or 3. Is there a deadline for this discussion?

Just writing down some random thoughts...I don't know if there's a way to please everyone but I'm glad your taking another look at this. It seems like to get both sides to agree we both need to make some sacrifices but being that this is an alliance server, war is inevitable and I don't think it can be coded out of the game.

I think the declaring war heads up from one clan to the other is a good idea. I don't know what the proper window for response would be but maybe 72 hours since that gives both sides enough time to save turns.

There should be a cost associated with clangdi. Your getting extra protection and just like gdi, it should limit who you can hit.

I think it's been mentioned before but I feel like pacts should be built into the clan page somehow.

The "war alliances" all suck at war so they only want to do it with a big numbers advantage, which means forcing the war on someone smaller who has the ability to fight back and make it fun. It basically means waring LaF. You can see that they didn't attempt sol v LaF with even numbers, but wanted to FS with a 30 to 18 advantage.

What they've failed to grasp is that by going to that well too many times they've taught LaF that there is no advantage to winning a war, so there is no reason to fight back. So by the abusive behavior they had zero potential war targets.

They've essentially killed war on the server as the result. They also think clan gdi is the reason they can't war, but in reality all it's doing is letting LaF net rather than quit.

This is the current state of earth empires.

Some other things, the countdown to war should look like this, the war can be accepted/rejected. If accepted it begins a 5 day countdown to allow everyone to prepare. An accepted war should be reviewed by mods to be legitimate (so it couldn't be exploited as a defensive tactic), create a shared messages board between the sides, have war stats, be a permanently recorded game event. It should lock both sides and eliminate all external alliances and influence (other than bots).

All members should see the war information in red at the top of the main screen (or every screen), especially with a countdown to the start.

War decs with multiple tags would be created as a single entity and require approval by all participants.

This should also be extended to team and require even numbers of teams.

Tags should be able to set themselves as interested in war or desiring to net. Netting tags should be unable to be declared on but also unable to participate.

Warring tags would have to accept the war or pay a huge penalty, assuming it was a balanced war, based on some math to make that type of calculation. Probably numbers and networth.

#2: 23votes
#1: 1 vote
#3: 1 vote

#1

An ingame heads-up that this vote was happening would have been nice.
Ya know, for the people that play the game that don't live on AT

That's a side effect of playing a community-based game as if it were a single player game...

I missed the part that says checking into this forum regularly is a requirement to play the game.
Oh wait, it isn't. That's just you trying to be a.. boss?

hmm.. yes, I was only

Hmm.. yes I was only just made aware of this thread. I, and I suspect many others, do not frequent AT because it has become such a toxic place.

I question whether a vote consisting of 25 people is representative of the community. I would have liked an ingame msg to participate but alas, it seems the die has been cast. I hope those that remain got what they wanted.

The forums have become toxic? YOU DON"T SAY!!!!!


I've literally been saying this for a year, but all the toxic people call me a snowflake. Welp, maybe the mods will start ACTUALLY enforcing the rules that are written on this forum in the future.

Well my Impromptu Vote thread has 25 Yes to keep clan GDI presumably the way it is, I think that's a good indication that most of the community does not read the threads often enough to vote on anything. But It looks like an even split down the middle the way i'm seeing things QZ. I appreciate that it hasn't been deleted, it's a way for voices to be heard for those who didn't get the previous memo.

“Qz we didn’t vote in your official thread but please see my impromptu thread where we mass emailed all of our members and retirees to come vote”

“I don’t post here very often because of (insert reason) but here is my vote”

“You guys don’t even know what clan in or where I play, or have heard of me but here’s my vote”

Yeah. Seems legit.

Coalie - what in the fluff is illegitimate about people who don't read the forums expressing their opinion?

It's not like these are alt accounts. We aren't all realman where we have multiple forum handles. fluff.


There is absolutely nothing 'illegitimate' about people who didn't know QZ was looking for feedback, providing it.

You're just pissed the community is split and doesn't agree with you on everything.

I expressed my opinion and my post got deleted. Seems some of the mods are going a little overboard lately.

[quote poster=ツ; 52239; 1025382]

I expressed my opinion and my post got deleted. Seems some of the mods are going a little overboard lately. [/quote]


My guess is you broke the forum rules and were toxic.

It did not break any of the rules, but the rules do state that any post can be deleted for any reason.

didnt know there were any options lol

ClanGDI needs to have a cost associated with it which adds a balance because of the protection it offers, much like regular GDI and government types. If you're having to rely on ClanGDI because your leadership fails at the basics of deplomacy it shouldn't give you the right to farm anything else in the server and be protected from everything else in the server. ClanGDI only "works" because there are bots, alliances used to fight wars over every scrap of land to get the best finish but that got dumbed down with the use of bots. If you had ClanGDI but no bots, clans wouldn't join ClanGDI. It would go back to the old ways of grabbing and retals.

ClanGDI should be a last resort, not the mainstream.

Good post.

If this place had more players, the trolls and war mongers wouldn’t matter as much, it may even be fun to run into an evil clan every now and then, I think the issue is when the player base is so small that the same people get wrecked every set and then the tensions build up over time. It is frustrating to get wrecked and way more so when it happens every set.

I think as unpopular as it is that they are headed in the right direction with clan GDI but I don’t want to see war removed from the game either. I think a duality and balance is always the best route and that’s why I recommended having a Wild West war server AND a netting server.


But if you guys figure out how to have both on one server and make everyone happy both the netters and war clans then that would be optimal.

As I've said before, the only real solution is to grow the player base, and several players have been outspoken against that idea because "one time we tried and it backfired". They're like cancer patients refusing to take chemotherapy because it's unpleasant... you can follow the analogy to the natural conclusion.

1. Who said "one time we tried and it backfired"?
2. If you're going to reply, can you at least address some of the concerns raised in this thread, such as: "How would you or anyone here address the above 5 problems?". https://www.earthempires.com/...s-and-input-52239#1024769

Hey BEM when have we tried? I just told QZ this and I’ll say it here. Thd toxic environment isn’t conducive to player retention and growth. You and I both know that and I’m sure we may agree. Yes, it spreads like wild fire. But QZ let’s Prime oversee the mods, Prime can’t sift through all this junk on his own all day.

But I don’t think we should try and quit. If that’s what you think happened. Auk is also right. But let’s try to find a common ground rather than point counter point arguments as we soooooooooo often see here. 🤓

I'll try and find my previous posts about it and summarize the replies here, hopefully today.

After looking through past posts I see most were referring to BH's recruits and the resulting attack/retaliation/quitting. So that's not really representative of everybody clearly. While looking up those posts I reread Auk's post from August and I like several of the suggestions:

- Drastically decrease expenses and food consumption;
- Drastically decrease the cost to construct buildings; and
- Drastically increase build per turn.

I disagree on the following:

"Adding expenses to clan GDI will likely result in a meta where most netters will stop using clan GDI to stay competitive for netting purposes. Then we'd be back to square one with problems unsolved."

If ClanGDI is the surest way to avoid griefing, players will pay the price to preserve their netting ability. Meaning it's not a disadvantage to netting if everybody is paying the price (or nearly everybody). The only way to net without it would be careful diplomacy / good PR, and that still carries some risk of griefing.
In a game where most things have been optimized by the player base, if you introduce a feature that is very powerful and allows them to accomplish their goal more reliably and predictably, you have to add a cost. Without a cost it becomes a mandatory way to play the game to remain competitive. With the right cost it becomes one option among many and adds depth to the game.

Just get rid of Clan GDI and even the attack again button, a bit taste of old school.

Changes are good but see how much BS can get boiled up?



***************Just FYI to all responders: answers need to be simple and short and not damn books! Nobody got time to read your damn books!****************

Please explain why Bot's get GDI protection, and it forces me to declare war just to hit a bot ? GDI authority will not let you perform this operation without declaring war! For hitting Bot's this is kinda Stupid.

It's probably to add some variability to the game. It also requires you to incorporate some strategy in navigating GDI bots from a grabbing perspective.

I want bots to be marked by the game so as not to enable people _trying_ to hide as a bot for whatever reason(s) they may have.

What rationale was there to mark them on express? I would imagine that would be valid on all servers.

when is this returning as we need it

Probably won't. There is a net only server coming up if you check announcements.

Agreed they should all be labeled.

Agreed they should all be labeled.

as i see it dont matter anymore as its to late to stop the decline of this game.