Is trolling bad for a community?

people who don't troll: yes
people who troll: no

What does dagga contribute to the community? Levity?

No one cares what you think dagga.

You weren't cheated out of any acres because of spy ops. Again, spy ops have nothing to do with how much land you gain with a SS or PS.

Which adviser style are you using?

No, the point is that the 50 intermittent spy ops will not affect the grabbing returns. Size doesn't matter as long as you keep it roughly constant.

If the word of two game developers is not enough, I suggest the following test:

-Find a country with 25% or less of your NW with no defends over the past 24 hours.
-Grab this country once. Write down the returns.
-Perform fifty(50) harmful spy ops on this country.
-Grab the country again. Write down the returns.

My mind isn't made up, but if 80% of the player base is against it why don't you guys do something about it?

You are misinformed. Every attempted harmful spy op adds to spy DR. This is an invisible variable which makes it more difficult for additional harmful spy ops to succeed.

There is a separate form of DR that affects SS and PS returns. This DR is visible to players and is only affected by the 24 hour attacks and defends of the target.

Ok, cool. I editted out your country number now that this is resolved.

Try clicking "play my country" and upon getting the error page type in "http://alliance.www.earthempires.com/main"; in the url bar. Everything looks normal in the db, so this might be a weird isp thing?

The only way that spy ops can affect SS or PS returns is by changing the NW of the target.

A penalty is applied if the target has significantly more land than the country attempting the spy ops.

dagga: despite your squealing to the contrary, qzjul did everything properly and reasonably tested the code. It's impossible to write bug free code.

This reset? What happens to the ants when the reset is over? :(

Which page exactly? The /mainffa page?

Did a country perform bioterrorism on you? Did you switch governments recently?

So why doesn't that exact argument apply to any server besides FFA?

If you wish to play in an environment where you are allowed to cheat and abuse bugs without punishment, there are plenty of other online games out there for you to play.

If you wish to play a game which is not being developed at all, again, there are plenty of other online games out there for you to play.

This was not some academic and pointless experiment like you and others have been claiming. The project needed lots of data from players, so hosting it on a different test server was not an option. It is disheartening to see that people would rather complain about aggressive development in a free online game instead of taking responsibility for their own actions.

If you want to avoid embarrassing your clan in the future, show a little bit of restraint and integrity like 99% of the server did.

The amount of work required for you to restart and build your country back up is far less than the work we had to do to clean up the mess you made.

Why are FFA players unable to follow the rules? That seems to be the meat of your argument.

"Exploiting bugs are healthy for the community as long as the mods are told about it and everything is fixed, including retrograding countries."

Reporting bugs is healthy for the community. Exploiting bugs is unhealthy for the community because it wastes significant developer time and we won't be able to perfectly compensate countries for what they lost.

It's rather disingenuous to claim that someone who ran a single country in EVO to spy on us and multiple countries in NA isn't a "NA member".

You're welcome.

llaar is correct.

Also TAN, you can't post ingame news like that.

We must be doing a good job when members expect us to take full action after only a few hours and both sides accuse us of being biased against them.

You need to relax and be patient.

Both of you knock it off.

It's against the forum rules to post information about countries which requires a turn to obtain.

You don't need to make a dozen threads about this.

min for SS: ~0.3%
max for SS: 100%

:P

There has been no proof presented to me that LaE's site or boxcar was hacked. There are a number of scenarios which can explain why the same ip address is there. Some are legal, some are illegal, and some are in-between.

As I've repeatedly said, we would be happy to work with your leadership to investigate the hacking and to take appropriate action ingame. That's going to be a separate issue from restoring the countries though.

"If someone anonymously sends us information, that person is probably either a whistleblower or a hacker. It is impossible for us to tell which."

We currently use whatever information we come across, with the option to punish the provider if we deem it necessary. I believe that is similar to how the US legal system works. The admins aren't the ones hacking into sites. We basically received an anonymous tip.

It is a nice thought to say that we will never use information obtained through immoral means, but that's a very grey area and it's very easy for the accused to claim that they were hacked.

Players can also have their username changed upon their request by sending an email to .

There was a similar situation like this before. An alliance leader demanded to see the proof against his alliance. After seeing the proof, he denied everything and he used that information to cheat better.

So what value is there in releasing detailed information privately? Maybe a few people have their curiosity satisfied, but someone could potentially use that information to evade our cheating detection systems, to blackmail individuals or alliances, or to make political attacks.

So for now, we are willing to do three things:
-Explain to the people who had countries deleted what went on in their accounts and to listen to their appeals.
-Work with LaE leaders to investigate any hacking that may have happened and if possible deal out appropriate punishment for it.
-Post a near full disclosure on the boards for everyone to read, with permission of iceman.

I don't necessarily care about things that are posted here because everything said here is for political reasons. I also don't read every single post on FFAT.

The admins discussed the issue of what information to release in detail. We determined that our responsibilities are to delete cheaters and to protect the integrity of the game. We are willing to work with lae leaders to investigate the hacking issue fully. That falls under the umbrella of protecting the integrity of the game. However, we are very hesitant to release information of what went on in players accounts, except to the players who own those accounts. So far, we have only received one email from a player, and he didn't use the correct email or state his username so we've been unable to help him.

I could post the complete set of evidence that led to the deletions in ffa and alliance. However, what would be the point of this? It would cause political damage to certain alliances and could quite possibly limit the ways we have of catching cheaters. It's not our job to make political attacks against other alliances. As far as I can tell, we'd be doing a lot more damage than good.

I will offer you guys this: if the president of LaE asks me to post the information we have on this board, I will. I don't actually know who that is offhand, so someone will have to verify his identity.

"I was told all of this stuff has been emailed to mods or discussed via aim, ip's and all. I'm guessing that isn't the case? "

All I know is that no emails have been sent and I haven't been told anything personally.

If someone anonymously sends us information, that person is probably either a whistleblower or a hacker. It is impossible for us to tell which.

If there is proof that a hacker did this and the hacker has an ingame or forum account, then the admins will look into ways of punishing the user. If you'd like to see something done about this, send us an email with the evidence that you have. Posting on FFAT will accomplish nothing.

SUBMIT TO fluff

Can you PM me the country number?

The bonuses are 12/18 hours for all servers.

I'm suspicious of everyone and more suspicious of certain alliances: if you feel that makes me biased, fine. But I was the last person to sign off on the LaE deletions.

I don't have a problem with anyone personally in NA or LaE, but I do have a problem with cheaters. I don't know what the exact overlap is between cheaters and those alliances, but I also don't know that for any other alliance.

The comments in this thread seem to be more about politics and preserving reputations, which is exactly why I said I was done posting before.

A "formal request" means to send an email to using the email address that you registered with.

jagernacht: we know why you aren't defending your friends and you are so confident that your countries don't match the same pattern as theirs. You are only solidifying your guilt in my mind.

This is going to be the last post I'm making about this subject. We bought back FFA so all players could enjoy it. It's honestly a shame that so much effort is being spent to circumvent the system and consequently the developers have to spend so much effort tracking things down.

Forum accounts are not tied to game accounts, so for specific information the owners of the deleted countries will need to make a formal request.

mrford, why do you assume that a single IP logged into them and how could you explain that if it was the case? The bottom line is that we don't like deleting countries, but the users involved know why they were deleted.

If your password was "bulletproof" that would suggest that it would be nearly impossible to hack or guess. You kind of shot yourself in the foot.

The evidence in this case was incontrovertible.

"you nuked llaar, when he had 1,100,000 countries"

:o

I am not thoroughly familiar with the terms of service, but if you don't click for the sake of clicking you should be fine.

Ok, that's fine. Who is this bias against? Who has been treated unfairly and who should be removed from the staff? What does aponic have to do with moderator bias?

You made a fairly strong accusation here.

Clicking ads for ingame rewards violates the ToS of the ad providers.