So this is not our beloved JJ, I'm wondering who is this?

#80 is JJ, finally he is playing fair game like a real man!

Congratts to the winner, I'm on a stupid blkberry, so I don't know who won :(

didnt bother finishing, had crap to do. spent most the reset warring. would have hit around 15M if i blew my stock/turns. not even worth it.

thought what happened with this country all reset was pretty fishy tho

and dont ever accuse me of cheating since you cheat. not to mention farm shaney every reset you do well.

k thanks.

I ran Useless Without Antonia #8

I would like to thank half the server for grabbing me for 100 acres at a time, and keeping me in deep DR allowing me to run an all jetter and settle in with 24k acres as a Rep. However, I do feel inclined to give a special thanks to:

Express Police (#36) - Thank you! The Express Police himself was my biggest ally, putting me in DR with 30 consecutive hits on 4th day, allowing me to stay in heavy DR almost until the reset ended. However, I do not understand why you committed espionage against me about 25 times and bombed my banks about 75 times... we're you trying to put me in spy DR too? It worked, although you did steal about 50k tech and blew up a couple hundred million dollars!

Angry Birds (#152) - What can I say? 29 Hits, 14 DH. Some advice for next time- Please don't send AB's, they are more damaging to me than SS and PS. Also, that CM was uncalled for.

meow cat (#21) - I can't forget about you with your 11 PS and SS, successful on 10 of them. Thanks man!

All in all, I was hit 86 times with 16 DH for 70 successful breaks. I was also hit with well over 200 harmful spy ops from about 6 different countries. Again, I just want to say thank you guys! It was a hell of a reset and I couldn't have won it without all of your help. Cheap tech prices a bonus too. This is my 6th reset playing express, and my 3rd top10 finish.

In these 6 rounds I have learned how to get knocked into continuous DR and how to use it to my benefit. I tried to do this same thing last reset but the DR ran out after day 4, and I got hit twice on the last day for almost 2k acres each. This reset was different, I learned, and I adapted, and as a result I won(need I mention by a lot?).

A few days ago, Oldman wrote on the: Potential Fixes for Express Thread - "What happened to these fixes? there's another guy doing the DR thingy in express this set."

Shortly after, Crest wrote: "Isn't abusing DR in Express "exploiting a bug" according to the rules?"

In response to this I have two points. First, I was not doing the "DR Thingy" the same way people did in the past which involved multies or friends GSing them into the ground. I made myself vulnerable and attractive to hit, and people fell for it and hit me continuously. Check the news people! Is this against the rules?

Second - Dear Mr. Crest- How did I abuse DR? By sending out landgrabs? Go fluff yourself. I didn't put myself in DR, you people did. Do you expect me to bottom feed when going all jetter and nailing the countries with the most land is more valuable? Why not take advantage of this. It's not a "bug" it's the way the game works. DR has always been a part of this game, learning how to take advantage of it is no different than how you (crest) take advantage of idiots who sell their goods too cheap and resell them for a profit. Is it "against the rules" to buy cheap goods on the market? of course not. These things are out of our control and those who benefit from them will succeed. If DR was a "bug" it would be fixed immediately. It's not... it's a part of the game, and I'm sure the programmers are looking (and have been looking) for a way to change it in moderation and make it fair for everyone.

Long message - but that's all I've got to say. Once again, thanks for the help, I couldn't have won this without all you guys!!!

P.S., Oldman, I didn't know you were such a dirty player! You tried to bomb my banks 10 times, and failed all 10. Were you upset that you didn't get an opportunity to Retal me? :(

Oldman got lucky i couldn't spend my turns fast enough. I was going to make a 2k hit on him but it's so slow playing on a phone than a laptop and got cut off. I believe i still had a ton of turns left with at least 22 bonus points and $650mil cash.

Impressive finish smlandau84. Congrats on the win.

I left 1.3 bil on the table.

First, I cannot say I am surprised that it was smlandau84. Once dirty, always dirty.

Second, I have always been against anyone abusing DR, what makes you think I will feel different about you doing it dumbass? Who cares who put you in DR. So no, you go fluff yourself.

Third, your analogy shows how bright you are which leads to,....

Fourth, no, I will not be congratulating you for anything. You ain't that good. Without abusing DR you end up like your past 5 finishes, ranked outside the top 50. In other words? Useless Without DR (#8).

In my view the ABs from angry birds seemed somewhat timed. Also want to point out that it was the only country you chose to double tap.

Despite that, gratz on wining it!!!!!

Crest - I never "abused DR" I used DR. And when have I ever played dirty? I did finish outside the top 50 once when i forgot to join GDI and got suicided on. You don't know what countries I run in the past, I have only claimed my countries on here the last two resets, and besides that I don't tell people. But now I will make sure to grab you ever reset im in heavy DR, just for fun ;) I'll try to time it for when you're goods come off the market. Let's call it Seth's "new market timing strat" - 1500 acres and $200 million.

Justtaint and mdemon, thanks guys, appreciate it.

Which will be everyset then since we all know you will mysteriously be in DR every set. Tduong already did that by the way, try something more original.

If you don't call what you did abusing DR I cannot fault you for that afterall JJ ran around for the longest time claiming he doesn't cheat.

FTR, consecutively, these are your past countries.
Useless without Antonia.
Hidden Valley.
Fried Chicken and Donuts.
Crap.
Djokovic.
Blackwind (you ran this one 2 or 3 times).

These are the times I bothered to pay attention to your country. So yes, once dirty, ALWAYS DIRTY.

Crest, you're pretty good, you got 3 of 6. Either that or you suck since I already claimed 2 of those. You got 1 of 4 of the ones you actually had to guess on.

I was "mysteriously" in DR this set? I let people put me in DR by being land fat and having 500k turrets or less for the first 4 days with a tiny SPAL so everyone could spy on me and see. There's no mystery. You're quickly becoming one of the most hated people on here :) Keep it up buddy.

you are throwing accusations without much proof. I was never mysteriously in DR. I have been in deep DR once by some random retard that threw chems, bomb banks, stole tech and GS'd me. The other times I put JJ in DR because of whiners like you. Never once have I benefitted from any of it so I don't see why you even assume i'm cheating.

I was referring to stalking my country to hit everyset not about the DR thing. Sorry for the misunderstanding.

Crest, you might notice a common theme on this server... batch explorers that log out for 18 hours on day two-three come back and login deep in DR, it happens to multiple people every reset. Some know how to take advantage of it, and stay in DR. Others don't and go to war because they're pissed off with the double tapping+. Taking advantage of that is not dirty, or cheating, it's strategic.

Maybe you should try it instead of running the same boring Dem Techer reseller on 12k acres you always play. Don't be jealous you're not in the 30mil club like some of us, bro.

I'm in the 30M club!!! =D

Are you suggesting people like me, 133tz, tenshim0, Fatty etc, are too stupid to figure out we can use DR to our advantage?, did it ever cross your mind that (a)we like to war, and (b) we preffer to stay clean and try win without taking advantage of an obvious DR flaw in Xpress?.

KoH, sorry you do have a good point. People in DR have many options the same way people who play the game have many options, netting, war, stalking etc. My comment was referring to netters that want to net. With that being said, no I do not think you guys are too stupid, you do with DR what you want :)

No you weren't and sorry crest, i don't do that either. Of how many resets i've played vs how many i've actually LG you. You'll see that it is not true. There was ONE reset where I intentionally hit you but then again I get intentional hits on me more often than you. There were several sets where I get topfed by countries that self delete right after.

Fair enough, thnx,smlaundau :)

If I get into the 30 mil club, it will be clean my man. You played so many sets and figured you didn't have what it took, you cheated 2x got caught and then decided to do DR. Not impressed, sorry.

I don't see anything wrong with the way he played. Using DR to his advantage, he still lost over 6k acres but he ran with it and gained 16k. Unless the other countries are his also or his "friends"

Dude you make a ton of BS accusations. Give it up.

But I do have one to make. Yesterday right before midnight server time someone sold 6 million oil barrels at $60. I went to cash my turns to buy it up but 1 minute later all 6 million barrels were gone.

Crest bought though barrels. He had one of his "friends" sell those barrels at $60 so he could buy them up commission free and resell them at $150. Crest, you cheated, I caught you, and now I'd like you to admit it.

What I just said above I honestly believe. But I have no proof. This is what you sound like, Crest. I really believe that you did it because I don't know who else would have had $250 million to buy up oil that is actively watching the markets every 20 seconds to resell. Obviously it is cheating because no one in their right mind is going to sell oil at $60 when the average of the previous few hours is $150. And Crest, obviously it is you because I have proof. The proof is above, duh.

lol why would anyone sell oil at $60 on the public when they can sell it for $60 tax free on the private lol. And if they had military tech then they can sell it even higher.

Well.. i was about to congratulate the winner.. but after i read about him being bomb banks for 75turns and esp ops for 25, i decline to.

spy dr would set in even if the 'winner' has 0 spy.

This is the reason why i dont play seriously anymore.

unfortunately, the way express works. It's hard to have a round without any shady business. At least the past several months that i've played, there hasn't been one set that went smooth.
If it's not DR abuse then it's the all jetting topfeeds. It's crazy when I can run 1080 turns in a day. That's 3/5 of the game. With that kind of craziness in the game mechanics, how could you prevent people from doing crazy stuff?

just to be clear, i only bombed bank 4-5 times, not the 10 that you mentioned. how's that dirty? you took acres from me, if i can't get them back the normal way, I've got to find other ways to do it. i realize you were in spy DR, so i stopped. also because i had to blow my turns to make a point to someone who purposely bought 15m jets just to retal me thrice over a 100 acre grab

Oldman, I apologize if I misrepresented your actual number of spy attempts. I had about 10 different people trying to bomb me today so I may have likely made a mistake saying you attempted 10 instead of 4-5.

I don't really consider that dirty, but you have bottom fed me a few times before and I never retaliated you... So this set, I got you back.

I ran Express Police.

Yeah I hit you 30 times. 30 minutes before the DR from my hits wore off. Angry Birds gave you 7 more DR for the rest of the round.
Don't insult me. You were never leaving max DR period. You're simply a cheater everyone knows it. Don't make excuses.

what is this DR everyone is talking about, jus curious. thanks.

edfjr, I can't control what you, or Angry birds, or anyone else on the server does. Along with his attacks he was bombing my buildings and stealing consistently for 3 days, just like you. Outside of keeping me in DR he probably did more damage to me than anyone else.

Don't accuse me of cheating, You are pretty much the reason I won, you gave me all jetter in DR heaven for another 24 hours, Are you pissed off because your genius plan to send 30 land grabs at me backfired?

This is a game in which you can benefit from other peoples mistakes. If someone bottom feeds you, you can retal for 10x the land. If someone sells goods cheap on the market you can purchase or resell for a profit. If someone attacks you into DR you can go all jetter with no fear of being damaged by retals for 24 hours.

Don't accuse me of anything other than getting land fat while you and others allowed it to happen by putting me into DR. You know your attacks helped me, so point the finger at yourself. I did nothing except play the game and take advantage of an opportunity that you and others gave me. I play to win. If someone sells bushels at $20 I'm not going to let them sit on the market because that person might lose money, I'm gonna buy them up and take advantage of it. The same way I'm going to farm the top 20 to death when you put me at DR 45. The opportunity was there and I took it, plain and simple. You did a great job of "policing the server," genius.

The previous reset when I ran Hidden Valley (#46) you did the same thing to me, day 4-5 bombing away a few hundred million dollars. Go look at my news from both these sets and show me patterns of "cheating." They're not there. Being put in DR and taking advantage of it isn't cheating.

I batch explore intentionally so people will put me it DR early and bottom feed me.

http://www.eestats.com/express/oldcountry/317/46
http://www.eestats.com/express/oldcountry/319/8

-Yours truly -
Smlandau84
The newest member of the 30 million net club (thank to edfjr)

DR is diminished returns. When a country is attacked, the returns the other country receives by breaking them diminish more and more with each attack, and that continues 24 hours from the time of each attack.

ahh ok...got it.

I stole $150mil cash off you from Bomb Banks =D

actually you are an an idiot. if you did not hit him, angry birds would have put him in DR 7. now. after he does say, 4-5 topfeeds, his DR drops to 2-3, and makes him very vulnurable.. where at his acrage (20k)+ someone could easily get 1500 acres still.. which is probably about what your 30 hits did...

say first person to retal gets 1500. then next gets 1200, then 800, then 500, and downward exponentially, more people would have been able to do damage to him then your idiotic 30 lgs. all you did was allow him to farm other players and not have to worry about it, because there was no way he was gonna do 45 more grabs to get himself out of DR. at his hitting rate, he needed max 5 hits to get to his land goal and stock....

so once again, your genius helped him win, which he stated i cant believe your too blind/dumb to see it.

and at this point its pretty much easy to ignore crest, because hes a complete retard. Seth brings up a good point. him exploiting DR is like crest exploiting newbs who undercut, allowing his demo to buy cheap and resell high.

he also chastised me for leeching tech, telling me its not legit and all that, and then turned around to say if oldman asked him for a tech leech, hed more than willing give it to him.

so once again its not for me to do it because "im dirty" but for one of his buddies, anything goes.

crest is what you call a hypocrite. if youre in his circle, he will make justifications for what you do, but if youre not, he will make delusions that if you finish higher than him, theres no way you could have done it without cheating.

im just calling a spade a spade. fwiw.

l33tz - Yes you did, and it was quite annoying, but if you didn't do it someone else would have. I was so far in spy DR on day 5 that I think only 1 of the last 50 or so harmful spy ops broke me.

JJ, thank you for confirming my point. I'm going to throw a 30mil+ club party in Nigeria. You will be invited along with mdemon, Oldman, Nick, and the rest of the crew. Crest will not be invited but we'll take lots of pictures so he can see what it's like to live the good life.

http://www.onlinenigeria.com/tours/

Take a look at that site, let me know if there is anything exciting you would like to partake in.

LOL. the funniest thing about that site, is the advertisement. club one. thats my friggin gym. bahahaahahah

damn. i clicked on it again and the ad changed. but that was priceless. i click to see whats up, and bam! my gym. lol.

well done tho. honestly... i would have prob given up even if i didnt get involved in a war, because finishing 2nd -100th doesnt matter to me... and honestly at the rate you were going and with the idiots who chose to be dumb about their attacks on you the way they did, there was no one who was going to be close to you.

tech prices werent high enough to hit 30M to compete, and neither were indy prices. plus, there wasnt another indy player who was even close to you in land, which is sad. everyone knows that for a commie to compete, they need the most land. which is why you see me at 25k+ just about every reset i play indy. you need to ideally hit 20k by turn 1100, and 25k by turn 1200 or so..

i didnt hit you and you didnt hit me. but had i been express police, i would have patiently waited for you to have your DR down to 2 or 3 and then gone on my farming spree. because it would have changed your strategy immensely.

you would have

1. had to get more turrets to protect yourself, which would in theory force you to not buy as many jets and reduce the amt of topfeeds you could do.

2. play the safe route and not do as many hits, preserving your DR, but then also you would have been stocking on 15-18k instead of 24k. which would have put you in the mid/high 20M nw range.

but then again. most of the idiots who play here lack that critical thinking aspect.

my checkers versus chess players analogy. although i believe checkers may be still too complicated for a man like crest. hes more of a tic tac toe guy.

Thanks JJ, you made a lot of good points there. Just before I came out of DR 45, I had to up my turrets from 2mil to 6 mil, just like you explained, which made my grabs less useful because I couldn't topfeed anymore. I had to grab downward because I didn't have the jets to break countries of equal net.

I hope next round along with the express police we can have express firefighters and express paramedics. What I'm going to need is 30 SS's / day from one of them on the 2nd day, 3rd day, and 4th day. If we can get all of the arms of public service working together I'm pretty sure I can be the first member of the 40mil NW club.

LOL. make sure you get express social workers. who give you offense allies and tech leeches.

and maybe the express CIA agent. who will send you spy ops right before you attack, via IM so its not traceable by the gaming software.

lol. im being somewhat sarcastic... should be interesting to see how these next 2 resets pan out. ill be on vacation so i wont be playing very often.. to finish well anyways. would rather take care of my primary/tourney countries, which each only require once a day play for about 5-10 min each

I will be on vacation next reset as well, however, I will create a country and login once a day or so just to make sure I can break Crest a couple times with PS's so we can see how he reacts. If he knows what is good for him, he wont run a Demo with "nigerian" in the name again. But then again, we all know he will.

I predict next reset he gets: 23.5 mil NW, 12000 acres, and runs a demo tech reseller named Nigerian Medical Spa & Botox.

Im taking odds: I'd be willing to pay 40:1 on anyone who wants to bet against all four of those criteria being met, but I get 10% of wiggle room in either direction, and I only have to have 2 of the 4 words in the country name correct.

lol i will have a good laugh if you continue to break him.

i was building to do that this set but got into a war with a guy who hit me about 5 times... too bad.

If "abusing" DR is considered bad or cheating, then I'm going to start accusing everyone else of cheating for taking advantage of the benefits of technology whenever they purchase it off the market/get it from research allies instead of teching it themselves.

smlandau84 - true enough you got into the 30M club and I will update the records since you were not purpled, but I'm not going to congratulate you about it and here's why. I fully agree with you and JJ that exploiting certain features of the game to win is not against the rules but think about it this way, any decent player who knows how to play and is willing to exploit those same features will have similar, if not better, results than you. So, then it's not something to be proud of. A lot of players find it distasteful, including myself.

I don't usually post my opinions but I think Express really needs to be fixed. The potential fixes which are discussed in another thread is a good place to start.

Oldman...My response would have been different, but since you mentioned the world purple in your message I'll take this approach instead.

Any descent player that has a consistent arsenal of strong allies lined up every set has a huge advantage. Any descent player that has a well known country name and respect from others players in the game has a huge advantage when they continue to use that country name. Why do you think players like you and crest and rob don't get consistently topfed or land grabbed?

Do you really believe you don't start every set with an advantage? Why don't you level the playing field and play with a random country name and not pick your allies ahead of time.

And you're wrong. Any descent player that could "exploit" the same features would not have the same result. There's been 120 rounds on this server, if what I did can be done by "any descent player" then where are the hundreds of similar finishes? DR wasn't introduced yesterday.

In my opinion, I find the way you and others prearrange allies to be distasteful. You do it because it gives you an advantage and it's not considered cheating. You want to know ahead of time that you have solid players that are consistent to support you. Do you really wonder why people keep hitting you on day 5? It's because they're tired of watching you put in 30-50 bottom feeds every round and not get retaliated back more than 0-2 times. It pisses people off.

If you insult the way I play, I'll insult the way you play. Maybe the next set I have time for express I'll improve upon the few mistakes I made this round. There was a lot more that I could have done to improve my finish. Next time you won't be adding my name to the 30 Mil NW club, instead you will be creating the 40mil NW club.

Maybe you should achieve a net worth as high as the one I have before you should consider yourself worthy enough to discuss my strategy with me.

I find it funny how you hit 40 people a round that cannot retaliate you, but the one time it happens to you, you bomb banks. That's why I called you dirty in my initial post.. It's because you're a sore loser.

well I don't know about you, but I don't see what's wrong with using the word purple in my sentence. As long as the country's not purpled, it goes into my NW record list if it makes the cut. It applies to everyone.

and which part of my post is an insult? All it says was I agree that exploitation isn't against the rule but I just don't like it myself. I'm entitled to an opinion here. How's that an insult? Did I say you cheat? Did I say the way you played was dirty? Did I say I don't recognize your entry into the 30M club? Let me know if I did, cuz I for sure know I didn't.

Without calling any names first, I was then called a sore loser. Thank you.