"If a signatory of this resolution believes a country or spam tag (definition below) is going to suicide on their or another alliance, they are allowed to declare their suspicion on AT up to 24 hours after a pre-emptive EAoW against the suspected suicider. If the suicider initiates hostilities, there is no need for such a declaration as the suicider, by attacking, would have violated the terms of this resolution."

I'm pretty sure Evo is in the clear on this.

Deleted? Wow, I suppose you're right.

So why hit DANGER?

...hahahaha I'm only seeing this now. Tells you how often I look at FFAT.

:D

I don't mind you telling me that at all, but I think you're mistaken: on AT, you are OMA. Your tag wears absolutely everything you say.

Most people aren't going to spend to try to sort out the difference between your personal opinion and your tag's official position or inclination, especially those you've already written you (and OMA) off as not worth their time. I suspect there are a lot of those people and I suspect those people include a lot of leaders in established tags.

Generally, the safest course is not to post at all as no matter what you say you're likely to offend someone. Perhaps this sounds like I'm ignoring my own advice with how often I post here, but I personally don't advocate for doing the safest thing as that is far less fun.

I'm pretty sure all established tags have land:land retal policies these days meaning that the only benefit you'd possibly derive from hitting them is the ghost acres. You'd effectively be land trading yourself, only with higher military losses and inspiring hostility instead of goodwill.

You'd be better served by establishing your ability to retal and by finding people willing to pact you than by constantly attempting to aggravate larger tags.

Targeting land traders means targeting established tags. I honestly can't imagine why you'd think something like that would be a good idea, or why you'd announce it on AT.

Back in the Earth:2025 days, ghost acres were removed when land trading was originally coming into use, as it was viewed as an exploit. However, it was deliberately added back in when EE came to be. At this point, it is a feature and certainly not an exploit.

One of the results of the removal of ghost acres back in the day was that all-x strategies became far, far more prevalent and grabbing (and activity with it) went down dramatically. Making changes that would dramatically deter land trading would likely be the kiss of death for the game at this point.

Cool, good to see you around. Hope you're doing well.

Hash as in former AoD Hash?

This isn't a solo server. The dynamics of alliance politics mean people band together to protect their land, and before long that leads to the kind of balance you find here. It really didn't take long for retal policies, pacts, and the like to show up after tags were put in.

Furious: Much of bottomfeeding was just doing a country search on GT, plugging the values into a grabbing calc, and then making the hit. It was always about efficiency and effectiveness, and never about excitement. You didn't want excitement when bottomfeeding, that was bad.

It isn't that land trading has reduced bottomfeeding, it is that bottomfeeding isn't viable in a game where there aren't thousands of countries, many of which are bots. Land trading exists because there aren't any other alternatives.

braden: I don't know if I'd agree with that, but if you look at my post you'll not find the phrase "bottomfeeding is a skill" anyway.

Do two tags that have exchanged a grand total of 5 hits in the past 24 hours really need policing?

It used to be that bottomfeeding was preferred because it was something an entire alliance could do fairly simply and effectively. There are exactly two countries in the game doing something that I'd say fits the description of what bottomfeeding used to be, and that's probably about the limit to what can be supported by that style of grabbing as things stand. Generally, bottomfeeding is no longer a viable strategy.

Land trading is an effective and efficient replacement. It is something that favours tags who put effort into doing it properly, and it is something only tags with good protection can do on a large scale basis. It appears to me that proper trading is still as much of a skill as bottomfeeding use to be, which is to say that it always favoured those with the proper tools who put in the effort.

People pay money for players? I wish someone had told me sooner, where do I sign up?

I love you and all Angel, but if you're looking for agreement I doubt you'll find it by trying to equate the evils of climate change with the evils of government intervention.

That reads like a lot of bitterness that has next to no basis in reality, yearning for a past that never actually existed. I'd maybe try a reply with some actual substance if I thought it'd accomplish anything, but you're looking for a fight and not any kind of a discussion.

I checked the news from last reset. braden hit them more, but I suspect I got more land.

I farmed xSx harder than anyone (except maybe braden) last 'set.

That's a lot of assumptions in your post there, Requiem. And that's a horrible analogy, too.

Sure, but that they pick "spam tag" rather than "farmland" is telling. They're both insulting, but one suggests ambition while the other suggests apathy.

On a completely unrelated note, I'm sort of disappointed and bothered by the way some terms are being used now. A "spam tag" is now any new tag, and not one that sends out its tag password in recruitment message. "Bottomfeeding" is now any kind of landgrabbing on untagged countries or smaller tags, and isn't a reference to countries attempting to make the maximum number of attacks per day at minimal readiness loss while carrying the least amount of military possible. I'm sure there's more.

The spam tag thing especially bothers me because it suggests the game has become more insular, as new people are completely dismissed and ignored instead of being engaged with. Even "farmland" would be better than "spam tag", but it seems today's alliances aren't even ambitious enough to make that true.

Hawkster:
My apologies for the mistake regarding your name, there really isn't any excuse for that.
I don't care in the slightest how dirty or incivil wars get so long as the aim of the war is positive, like "I am doing this to prove we are better than you" rather than negative, like "I am doing this to drive you out of the game". Blindsiding an opponent is a great way to ensure you win and demonstrate your superiority, and the bad taste it leaves in your opponent's mouth is a great way to ensure they do their best to get you back in the future. That's the kind of thing that drives competition, but I'm not sure competition is the aim for much of anything when it comes to war now.

Furious:
I mean no offense by this, but the simple truth here is that you and OMA are only slightly more consequential than I am, and everyone knows that. OMA is not involved in the politics that drove the pact and your desire to do your own thing cements that. Accordingly, you are not a consideration for the signatories of the pact. I'm sure that if you were willing to involve yourself in alliance politics and attempt to generate some goodwill with the larger tags rather than being contrarian, the response would be different.

If you want to be a consideration, you have to be consequential. So long as you insist on being independent of everything else that happens on the server, you won't be.

Furious:
I think there's something to be said here about wanting to have your cake and eat it too. I mean, you were at first opposed to the whole idea of the pact, but now you want to be protected by it. You criticize how the signatories play, but you want them to help protect your tag.

Part of the reason I run my mouth on AT so much these days is because I lead nothing and represent only myself; nothing I say is likely to have any consequence (at least I hope not) because I am not of any consequence. However, that isn't usually a luxury that is available to people who represent a tag, and your disdain for the way larger tags play the game isn't really helping you much in this instance.

Hawkeye:
This game thrives off of wars and bitterness and bad feelings. Those aren't the problems themselves, they're part of the charm of the game and can provide a lot of good, positive motivation. The problem is that the game has become less about becoming the best alliance and proving that you're the best alliance but about grinding the other side into dust because it is more likely you can make an opponent quit than you can grow and improve your own alliance.

Nothing changes without the ability for alliances to be ambitious, which may honestly not really be here at the moment.

No offense to the memory of TheFIST as they were a good group, but if I recall they were usually around 40-80 members on a server where most of the top 20 alliances were 100-300. They weren't ever a major influence on policy, so I don't personally find that one example relevant.

Even then, though, you're describing a small alliance picking the least offensive landgrab policy possible. While it may indeed have been picked because the leadership and membership was genuinely concerned about the people they were hitting, it also had the convenient benefit of minimizing conflict and keeping them out of wars they'd likely lose.

You know why it used to be double taps at most?
Because bots and multies flooded the server making bottomfeeding incredibly easy, alliances didn't trust their members not to get greedy and hit tags that actually mattered (which is reasonable when you're talking about tags of hundreds of people), and because in the days before retal policies were solidly established alliances were concerned about avoiding challenges to their policies. Alliances did that kind of stuff because it was practical at the time rather than because they were good sports of any kind.

Large tags barely exist anymore while smaller ones and even untagged countries have so much leverage compared to the past. All you have to do get protection is appear to be reasonably competent and generally play by the rules of the FA game.

The only tag getting hit like you're describing is STONES, and the main reason that's happening is because you didn't do what you needed to make sure you'd be protected.

And that's why I didn't lump you in there: it really does take all kinds to make the game work, and there is absolutely room for us all.

That said, it looks like you're saying that bottomfeeding is more prevalent now than it was previously. You have to remember that back in the day exploring wasn't a viable strategy so everyone grabbed, and most of the people who grabbed bottomfed. The difference is that back then, the multies and bots created room for new players to hide to some degree, but it honestly isn't like that was any better than it is now.

Regardless of how you grab, you're going to always hit a person (unless you're hitting a bot, and that's a different kind of issue altogether) and that is a fundamental part of the game. This isn't anything that has ever changed and honestly, I have a difficult time making a moral judgment about one grabbing style or another when considered in that light.

No, I'm the nasty one :P

I'm getting kind of tired of people being so quick to criticize and point fingers, though, especially when it is the same recycled drivel that's been wrongly spouted basically since RockFamily and RockCorps came into existence and the country search tools it provided introduced bottomfeeding to the game. Maybe I'm being unfair to unload on Blade specifically (ford is no better), but it is frustrating to see the appeal of the game so completely misunderstood. We've never attracted and kept the kind of people that didn't, for one reason or another, like the competition that is inherent in the game.

Speaking as a grubby bottomfeeder and, more importantly, a former alliance leader:

The alliance server has always been a place where you have to earn every little damn thing. No offense Blade, but when I see you complaining about how bad bottomfeeders are after you leave your cozy tag protection all I can think of is that you are taking the work that everyone did establishing RAGE (and every other tag in the game) for granted. No one gave them any handouts, and if a helping hand was offered you can be sure that whoever extended it wanted something in return.

More than that, it should be pretty obvious what steps need to be taken if you want to get a DNH: you find someone to police for you, and you personally contact the FAs from the alliances you want a DNH from. Not everyone reads AT, not everyone checks other people's news. If you want something, do the damn work and have some respect for the people who put in the time to facilitate these kind of things.

If you don't get police and you don't contact the FAs, you're not acting like a real tag and shouldn't be surprised when you get treated that way.

Edit - Regarding bottomfeeding supposedly ruining the game and driving away players:
I've been hearing this same complaint since about 2001, when the game was on the upswing. While it may drive away some players, the competitive nature of the server that drives this kind of thing is also exactly what attracts and retains people. Not only that, but bottomfeeders are far more likely than others to actually have contact with new players who are otherwise isolated. It isn't hard to tell who the new players are and point them in the right direction when you're looking at their countries more closely than anyone else would.

Everyone likes to complain, no one wants to do the work needed to make things happen. If you want to help new players, message untagged countries and recruit them. If you want DNHes, take the steps needed. Don't complain that other people aren't doing what you think they should.

Having situations where the admins intervene in the server political dynamics is bad news for us and for them. For them, it is a huge headache where nothing they do is ever right and no one is ever happy (like now, but worse) and the players have to react to admins making judgment calls in situations where the lines aren't always going to be black and white.

The simpler it is for everyone, the better.

mrford: Comparing the admins to lawmakers seems inaccurate to me. Probably a better comparison would be to say that the rules the admins make are similar to the laws of physics.

Sure, the admins could do that but just because they could doesn't mean they should.

Neither of those things would solve the real issue, which is that the game needs to find a new audience. Instead, they'd just alienate everyone who still remains. I mean, look at the way some quarters view the staff already: can you imagine if the admins started actively interfering in politically related topics like when to war and applying more aggressive bans on AT?

The best changes the admins can make are ones that don't require them to babysit.

tellarion: We were always this bad on AT and the like, all of the nice stuff was reserved for what we said to our alliance mates rather than anything we ever said to the idiots who'd dare to compete with us etc etc. Problem is: as the game declines the main forum remains active and the friendly ones are dead or dying.

Everyone currently playing should hopefully realize that we're mostly irrelevant to a real solution though; we'll be almost entirely washed out if there's any influx of new players at this point.

I'm all for this :P

While I'm not in agreement with what Pang is saying, blaming him or any of the other EE staff for earth dying is hilarious considering that this game would have been dead years ago without them. Thank the admins and staff, don't ever blame them.

Anyway, alliances and the alliance community were toxic almost from the beginning. We've always been a horrible bunch of assholes and expecting us to change at this point is probably wishful thinking. In the past, we managed to entertain and retain people despite that because the alliances themselves were vibrant and there was stuff happening to draw people into them, be it spam on the boards or politics and intrigue or fighting wars. Being horrible assholes to each other is honestly a large part of the appeal provided we're able to fight in ways that are constructive rather than destructive.

It seems to me that as the number of people coming into the community dried up, attrition changed the game dramatically for alliances. Forcing an opponent out of the game became as viable a strategy as trying to recruit and outgrow them when considering long term victory, and the internal activity declines dried up the boards and made it difficult to retain new people.

Pang is certainly right that if we actually want to make a difference, every single post here is worthless and our time would be better spent trying to recruit other people in, but it would honestly be hard to hell to retain them given the age of the game and the tiredness of the community. There isn't anything exciting happening here.

All that said, I really wonder what some people in this community would do if new people showed up. It wouldn't take many for the new players to completely outnumber all of the old ones, and the balance of power people invested years in would be thrown in the air in a second. A vibrant 100 member alliance could rule this server with an iron fist if they put in only a relatively minimal amount of effort.

It'd be hilarious to see, too bad I doubt it'll happen.

OMA yes, STONES no.

ebola: STONES would be considered a spam tag by the terms of the treaty, though.

I wish I'd jumped when you did!
#395

Also, my apologies to #256: I'm sorry I took 6th spot from you. If only my tanks had sold.

12.6 mins ago
1,101,101 Tanks were returned from the market.

Ugh. Can't buy out my PM turrets now. Still, there's the $165m I said I'd get.

Troops are worth .5 NW, jets and turrets are .6, and tanks are 2. If troops, jets, and turrets are over $300, then tanks should be at over $1000 :P

While I'm usually one of the first people to attribute individual performance largely to the conditions provided by an alliance, the usual measure of that is on average as ANW or in aggregate as TNW rather than looking at individual performances which are far more variable and far less indicative of anything on an alliance level.

Everyone may try to contort things for their own purpose, but when they do so publicly it usually has the effect of pissing off whoever else in involved in whatever story is being told. Market FA is a very public story.

The individual ranking isn't an alliance competition, so any time an alliance bothers to get serious about aid it turns the individual rankings into a joke. You can't compare $30b in coordinated market aid to the little bit other countries might have messed around with.

The other thing here is that when an alliance does something like this they bear the responsibility for the disrespect of individual achievement that goes along with it. Those alliances with members getting pushed down in the rankings would be well within their rights to be pissed as hell that SoL is screwing with their members resets.

Market aid and skill are two separate things; that country had a great reset before they were aided but that doesn't mean that they're not disrespecting the unaided players whose positions they are taking.

How can you seriously be worried about this? What a joke.

timmie: I actually like that response. I'll give it a serious reply absent all of the extra inflammatory stuff I've been throwing in.

Every tag is responsible for every little thing their members do. This is especially true for small tags, where a single member's actions make so much more of an impact on how people perceive that tag's behaviour. To illustrate, I'll use an answer a question mrcuban previously asked: if someone from MD top feeds an LaF country does that make MD a group of assholes by default?

It depends entirely on MD's response and what happens in the future. If MD clearly says they don't approve of unsanctioned antagonistic behaviour and take steps to prevent their member from doing things like that in the future, then no, I wouldn't consider them to be assholes.

There are two problems here for Titans:
1. Titans and MD are not alike. One is four members while the other is near 60. The impact of one Titans member topfeeding is closer to fifteen MD members topfeeding than it is to a single MD member, in terms of perception of how the tag acts. If fifteen MDers were to topfeed an alliance, I'd absolutely call them assholes.
2. Titans (as evidenced by yourself and mrcuban, as well as #387's ingame actions) haven't clearly stated that they disapprove of what #387 did and haven't stopped #387 from taking further unprovoked aggressive actions; #387 also missiled #382. When a tag refuses to be responsible for their membership and can't stop them from provoking others, I'd call them assholes as their words are worthless and it is only the actions that matter.

Now, I'll freely admit that I came on here to rain your parade and ruin your farewell thread. I am upset at things Titans have done, and I am being deliberately provocative to piss you off since by leaving you're removing by ability to do anything about this ingame. You're clearly pissed, timmie, so as far as you're concerned I've made my point and I'll go ahead and wish you the best in the future.

And, I wasn't referring to you when I said Titans lie. I was deliberately interpreting what mrcuban has said in a negative light and then painting everyone with the same brush. I won't say I meant no offense as I'd be lying (I totally meant offense), but that was before I got you to blow up.

All the best in the future, honestly.

mrcuban: Just 'cause timmie is off the hook as far as I'm concerned doesn't mean you are. You still rate as a total asshole based on what you've posted.

I'll pretend my opinion means something and offer my two cents on this:

My personal experience leading has taught me to be very cynical about the ability of alliances to act in the interests of the game as a whole; it was always unfortunately common to see alliances filled with good people allying with bad actors due to expedience. I firmly believe that the game as it used to be, with thousands of players rather than hundreds, died directly because too many people found it expedient to cheat or ally with cheaters (it was always bound to decline given the age and nature of the game, but so many people were chased off by the futility of trying to achieve anything while cheaters had so much power).

Accordingly, I'm having a hard time wrapping my head around this agreement: is this really a group of alliances collectively doing something for the betterment of the game, or is this just a case where the stars aligned and it was in the individual interest of every signatory to do this?

In the end, I don't suppose it matters as the outcome is decidedly positive either way and I'm not about to look a gift horse in the mouth. Everyone involved should be applauded and absolutely encouraged to take game considerations into account when making alliance-level decisions as with there being so few people playing, attrition due to frustration is not something we can collectively afford if the game is to continue on.

Cool stuff, nice job.

I edited my previous post as you were replying; the edit is relevant to your reply. As a rule, I extend the benefit of the doubt as far as I reasonably can, so please don't think that my finding that previous statement offensive means I think you intended offense.