ok i was the one doing 1 ps a day - for the most part. i knew i was going to get retailed sure - but we both made out in land - that is the point. how many people signed up for your dictator only program? both sides were making out so how is that so terrible? or should we be like you and hit the untagged 20 times a day, and you wonder why you have to have suicide prevention in place.

people keep saying two stepping

when i was first hearing about two stepping it was in FFA

and people would topfeed you then two step the land to another country

it was an auto kill of both countries for some tags, a take your land back for others, or even a 3 incidents for the whole set equals war for one tag

but that was for tagged countries, or for identified untaggeds

this in alliance now is like saying 'if someone grabs me no one else can hit him until i retal'

the worst thing about it isnt whats fair or unfair, its that if we go that way we have to check every country before we grab to work out if retals are owing

plus we need to know everybodys retal policy when things get complicated because of retal window times and land to land and ror and over retals

with fewer countries the likelihood of crazy complex retal chains goes up

if 1 guy hit 1 of 200 guys in 1 of 20 tags the likelihood of things getting complicated was so much lower

then when things get crazy complicated you can make arguments for who is right or wrong based only of which hits you call retals for which other hits and which you call ror's or overretals

maybe we need some ingame system where we can tag a hit in the news as being a retal for some other hit

and an ingame system where since a suicider hit "taga" too many times in a time period without being able to validly tag them as retals then that country becomes tagged as 'retals owing by taga do not touch'

but its all so complex

and if we really did all stop touching countries that took a lot of acres maybe they would self delete or just ab/br instead

why not have a system where a country hit by another country always had a chance to get back some/most of what it lost even if the grabber was dead?

if its really that important

perhaps have two classes of countries where you had to belong to a 'real' tag or some anti suiciding preventions kicked in

LETS ALL JUST SUICIDE ON EACH OTHER

lets stop it here.

*back to business*

:~<

Some subset of the suiciders are griefers. Their only goal is to destroy countries and to piss people off. If you were a griefer, what better alliance to hit than one that will complain about it on AT and possibly start a war over it? That's probably the equivalent of winning the lottery for them.


About the rest of the thread, it's really sad that people can only look at things in terms of self interest and competition.

1 PS a day is fine.

if you want to brag about it on AT, then that's another matter.

and you didn't hit our dicts, you hit random people. the whole point was we were trying to start an initiative where the people who were interested in landtrading in both alliances can grab each other so no one will get pissy.

it was not an open invitation to grab random LaF countries once a day and brag about it on AT

Well ZIP if ICN had retalled laf's hits you would have made out at least as good too. Heck I see laf make a lot of dumb grabs. It can go both ways. But when laf has not grabbed you guys once and you brag on AT and start hitting us every day thats just not very bright, because we will hit back... apparently going overboard.

you know like most things, if we were able to talk to each other more, then these things would not get out of hand

you guys did talk ;P i read all about it on AT :P and i quote:



if you expected flowers and hugs after such a quote, i don't know what crack you are smoking

keep in mind that LaF did not provoke any ICN countries all reset up to that point. we had you guys on DNH in our embassy the whole time

@enshula

Granting a small window (2 to 4 hours) for the tag that was hit by an untagged to get their land back isn't too much to ask for. The original country might not get their land, but at least their tag does. They can figure out how to make up for it themselves, but at least they had the opportunity.

It's not something that needs a new feature added to the game. It's more to enhance the enjoyment of those who play this game. If it had happened to you, you would want an opportunity to get the land back, or at least have someone in your tag gain from your losses, rather than another tag.

If this is met with opposition, then perhaps it would spice a server up that desperately needs it.

what is so bad about that?
i was saying that i will not hit up anymore when i grab laf. and i will hit laf, or anyone that we are not pacted to. i spread the love around equally. and i bet i will come out ahead in most cases. is that so wrong?

if you said it this way, there's not wrong about it.

but you told us to "shove it up our ass"

Maybe he thought we liked that Hanlong... LT might... after I saw those pictures I questioned it...

find myself agreeing more and more with slag.

you guys are pathetic.

If you guys are at all interested, a little history on laf and 2-stepping.

Back in 2004 and before, LaF had an anti 2-step clause in it's pact. It basically stated that any country that hits an LaF country is protected by the pact until LaF took the land back. It was purely to prevent people from gaining from suicides done on us. In 2004, an LaF country, mine actually, was suicided by some random person (I'd assume someone in RD or KJ) and within seconds 2 RIVAL countries 2-stepped it. We went to RIVAL demanding reps because our pact had a 2-step clause specifically written into it and RIVAL basically blew us off and never paid us for it (this was also the start of the deterioration of our relations with them). This however, opened our eyes to the fact that rival had a competitive advantage over us in land, specifically suicided land. Land that was taken from others but nobody had any real authority over because nobody besides LaF recognized 2-stepping as an issue at the time. The following set, TC programmed a news bot for us so that we could also jump on the 2-step bandwagon and started competing with rival for 2-stepped land (this is also the time alliances started using newsbots in irc channels). Soon after, other netgainers were joining in on the 2-stepped land such as RED (which later becomes EVO) and 2-stepping as a major source of land was introduced to the game.

2-stepping became worse around 2005 with the removal of ghost acres. Without ghost acres, land became an even rarer commodity and so easy land became more attractive. In 2006, when EC was created on swirve and RD became more or less non-existent 2-stepped land became the ideal source of land due to the lack of countries on the server and the lack of ghost acres. Since then its become the ideal source of land for any alliance wishing to be competitive in netgaining.



All this said, if there was a serious movement to halt 2-stepping I would be all for it and I'm sure LaF heads are with me on this. Halting 2-stepping could also help curb suiciding in some respects since the offending country would be losing whatever they grab to the alliance they're taking it from. It would basically be transfered from one country to another.


Something to think about I guess.

if anything you could say rival is to blame since they started it :P

but its just morphed into all the netters looking for a competitive edge over each other over time.



IF all the alliances on the server agreed to stop 2-stepping I would happily agree to it too

Eugene, you're a horrible troll.

well we've tried our damndest to teach him how to troll.
poor guy just can't quite handle the penis references properly, or the references to somebody's mother's sexual orientation, or the average iq of particular clans etc.

the only times ive had experience personally with two stepping lately is when ive started late

so i start maybe halfway through a set and i get grabbed a fair bit

i look at the countries that grabbed me and they are all in high DR and being farmed by people, i think some might have even been hit by other laffers

so technically i could have claimed that they had stolen my retals and demanded reps

but instead i decided that i was a decent target for those people, perhaps they had a sort of valid reason to hit me, such as being farmed by other laf countries (this is also relevant to suiciders since someone probably did something to them unless they are griefers), but most importantly that other people would have grabbed them regardless of if they grabbed me or not

are we going to create a system where untagged countries run as landfarms do hits on your tag so that you can own their land and no one else can touch them?

now we want to extend that technicality to the entire server for all hits, i dont care if we do it

it increases fairness and decreases how much it feels like a game

we can always try and make other changes to make it feel more like a game, bots for one

but what i dont want is to spend all day checking every untagged country grabbed by anyone in our tag so i can then go through there news and work out who i should over reps land to, probably from my own country, or auth retals on our countrys if i felt they were dolng it deliberately rather than making a mistake

even when i was looking at 160's news it was a a pain just working out which country people were talking about because no one even mentioned it, i think one person mentioned it but flipped the last 2 numbers

so why not combine the problem over this with a general big guy hits little guy, little guy cant do anything problem and make a game change (the other option i was considering is an ingame retal tracking system where you have to tag what your hits are considered retals for or people get a warning when they try to grab you that your land is property of someone else and that you will be liable for retals if you hit this person by the other person lol)

anyway if you have stuff taken in some way have a system where you can hit back and get some stuff back regardless of who else has hit

heck make it so if you do hit back then you stuff comes from wherever it wound up

but also put in what rockman referred to by some utopia name, i think raid? that you can recover part of what you lost if your a small guy without enough mil to break you can do a partial attack and get part of your stuff back

agreed

but when wars stopped being about legitimate in-game reasons and more about political out-maneuvering, the pact system was bound to move in that direction.

now we have a combination of alliances being completely pacted out and unable to do ANYTHING (even help allies) or they're basically a sitting duck to be hit if the wheel of misfortune lands on their alliance that round.

the natural order has broken down and I'm still waiting for it to be properly re-established. It's been a year and a half and we're still on the same path that led us here.

i think everyone can agree that this server's community is not as healthy as it should be, and realistically it hasn't been since around the time EC started.

those are criticisms across the board, and I definitely bear my share of the responsibility for that -- I was one of the advocates of ridiculous pacting and political maneuvering for years :p
but it's those sort of short-term decisions that have created long-term structural problems in the Alliance style of gaming. And that's unfortunate because the Alliance style is my favourite style, and I know a lot of other folks feel the same way :p


agreed on this 100%.

it's not so much someone else grabbing the land so to speak, its the fact that generally (and I don't refer just to LaF here) the hits go by the following pattern:
untag a hits country b from tag c
country d from tag e hits untag a 5 to 10 times within 1 minute of untag a's hits, enuring that country b cannot even try to get his land back.
doesn't seem unreasonable to think "well give the tag a few minutes to get the land."

ignoring differences in alliances size tech and playstyles your basically going to have odds of

1/numberofalliances = get to hit back first

so roughly 5-10%

is it possible to code ingame a way that grabs on a country/tag are visible to effected parties for a time period but hidden from everyone else?

wouldnt hurt to have a system where the grabbed country/tag can retal the agressor for a limited amount of time counting the land as not being dropped/ongrabbed or deleted/killed or perhaps even not put into other DR afterwards

a country hit (or tag) should really get a bonus to ignore DR in general as well

that way even if we didnt change anything else a country grabbed could retal some of their land much more easily after others hit whoever hit them

if this is a big issue people can sign it into pacts.

locket: I think you will find pretty much every clan has 2 stepping in their pacts. Problem is, no one else wants to recognise it when one of the countries is an untag.

as I said, at the end of the day, if someone else ends up with the land, fine, I just feel very cheap when it's almost as if the person 2 stepping off the untag has been specifically waiting for that untag to hit.