Mar 1st 2011, 12:02:08
i came back recently from a 6 year hiatus seeing if this game changed and was it better because i was told the game admins were actually old earth vets who cared about this game
but i can see one very big problem that i don't know why anyone would think this game is fun knowing this...
as we all know we have full understanding of the game now (as the admins are literally part of the community). with that knowledge we know every single nook and cranny of this game now which reduces almost all of the suspense or mystery in what's already a pretty deterministic game (based on math and formulas)
we need more randomness in this game. the lack thereof is really killing it.
think of all the things you can automate as information:
1) which alliance is allied to what other alliances
2) what alliance is going to war what alliance
3) who did harmful spy ops on who
4) who is tech allied to who
5) who FAed who
6) who suicided on who (in regards to two-stepping/coordinated/etc)
7) who is cheating
8) who is doing buyouts
i'm happy that all this information and non-randomness has helped the admins solved problem #6, but at what cost?
anyone can create a website or a script to parse out all the information now given to us via ee apis and sites like boxcar and remove every suspense from this game.
why are all of these possible? because of the deterministic factor of the actions of people on this server (all not cheaters, all relatively veterans of this game, all have the same basic beliefs)
we are a community all trained not to run multies, that we try to retal with SS/PS whenever possible until things get messy, that we don't grab our allies, not to run rainbow countries but specific governments and strats for war and net.
for example let's take each example and i'll demonstrate why nothing is "secret" anymore. this is also made much easier than before because of the lack of alliances in the game period, make the error for mistake of guessing using these algorithms much less than before.
Q: which alliance is allied to what other alliances
A: write a script that parses all the hits done this reset, any alliance who hits each other (can take out the 1-2 hit outlier as mistakes by members) aren't uNAPed/LDPed/FDPed to each other and are capable of warring each other in the reset.
Q: what alliance is going to war what alliance
A: gather all the possible pairings of wars between alliances above. if one has lots of theos/repubs, they aren't looking for a war. if one switch their theos/repubs to monarchy and/or then to tyr/dict they are war prepping. list all the combos of possible nonpacted alliances they have as war possibilities.
Q: who did harmful spy ops on who
A: look at the times and networth changes of all countries and match them up. this gives you all the information you need from the game. in this case we are looking for networth loss from one country pair and networth change based on their usual turn taking patterns. this also going to include real attacks like AB/SS/GS/PS/missiles/etc. but those you can easily deduce those from the news. the stuff that doesn't "show up in the news" that is hurting one country at the same time someone is "playing their turns" based on the networths is going to be a harmful spy op.
Q: who is tech allied to who
A: variation of the earlier one, someone gains their acres plugged into the tpt formulas worht of tech in nw, some other country gains 1/10th of that amount.
Q: who FAed who
A: same thing as above, but the nw gain and lossed between the two matches the FA package size + 3x the average nw change of the FA sender's nw.
Q: who suicided on who (in regards to two-stepping/coordinated/etc)
A: same thing as above, match playtimes. if thye consistently match, you smell something fishy.
Q: who is cheating
A: the admins got this, i don't need to go detail this (standard ip matching, cookies, etc. etc.)
Q: who is doing buyouts
A: same thing, anything market related information is public, you match the nw you get by selling your jets, you can match who bought ur jets that time from the networth changes and market news. from this you can figure and match who bought what from who easily, and from all of this it's not too hard to see buyouts as well as a wealth of other information.
there's so much more you can do from just observing the game formulas in related to networths/land/etc./etc. that i can take forever to list them all.
you give me one week, and i can host a website that will list all this information nonstop to any person in this community who wants to see it. or we can pretend to have suspense and drama in this game ;)
given all this, like i said why are we even so worked up about what's going on all the time on AT?
we can all know the exact answer to everything.
what we need is more randomness imo. otherwise we are losing so much dynamics in the server game. in primary and other servers there is less widespread collusion because of the lack of alliances so things like this aren't as much of a factor.
Don of La Famiglia