So I'm a recent returnee to the game and I never played Team server until this reset. Do you play in both team and alliance? Why do you play on team server? Educate me.

Team server is the only server left that allows warfare against other alliances. It's probably the closest to the initial EE vision. And the 'team' rules aren't actually enforced. So it's team only in the sense that the alliances are forced to be split by an in game mechanism, but the teams operate as one big alliance, just like they would on the alliance server.

The other nice advantage to team is the turns tick a lot faster. So it's a bit more action packed.

So I'll ask here what i asked on the alliance forums. Why not put in a big recruitment effort to this server? I loved E2025, never played EE until this year. The biggest issue I keep seeing is the lack of players. Adding more bots to alliance just obscures the issue and helps the land-obese top players play as if the game is somehow still competitive. It's not. Placing top ten in alliance server is like beating a six year old in one-on-one basketball. I know nothing about this game as it stands today (except what I read on the outdated wiki), but finished 21st in my 1st set in alliance because there are so few real players. I'm not even proud of it, after realizing how easy it was.

I don't really want to get into the whole recruitment issue again. I tried (and did) recruit a bunch of new players to this server. Many of them didn't stick around. There are reasons for that, that I've talked about ad nauseam on other posts. I'm sure no one wants to go through it again. I'll just say this. This game is not appealing to new players.

I've complained much about the SOTS (Spirit of The Server) not being enforced here. In the beginning, for some time, it was implemented or attempted to be executed.

The failure of this server is that the in-game mechanisms do not enforce the desired gameplay (read the server description) and, therefore, ultimately failed.

It is a disappointment for me because the 5v5 concept would make for a fun server different from what we already have. Now, the differentiating factor is a few weird relics from the past (cannot leave a tag, cannot ally outside of your tag, etc.) and no bots. Which for some is enough to play here.

Mostly, it comes down to a lack of development. I would support just making this server alliance v2. Remove the 5 man tag rulesets and logic and be a non-bot alliance server while keeping the faster turn-rate and sorter sets.

That would interest me, and I would probably continue to play this game in the future if that were the case.

Req can explain?

There’s only 1 group that has 4 teams but works as one? I won’t say which one but it’s the one that got their asses kicked.

Darkness has 1 team
You have 1 team
Freedom has 1 team
Sol has 1 team
Alpha has one team
Elders have one team
Hempman running duo
Cath is running a separate team
Derrick has a team?
No idea where fastcars are.

When you were suicided and griefed with those ABs by that one weirdo, we gestured goodwill by helping you. I think the SOTS is being enforced.

yea none of those teams ever work as one coalie give me a fu cking break its been that way since long before i came into the mix i learned it from you guys!

Are you incapable of having an honest discussion about anything, Coalie?



Req - I agree with you. I think the 5v5 would be a TON of fun. But you'd need to enforce the anti-collusion rules that solo servers have, and I think that'd be even harder to do here than it is on solo servers, where there is already grey areas. I would think there'd be a ton of purples!

To Milk:

We won’t be pushed around. You did a lot of stuff recently to cause a bunch of groups to get together like that.

I dunno if you’re doing it intentionally or on purpose, but I think you were having fun messing around. Well I hope you had your fun.

We've already been down that path, which leads to where we are now. There were much worse offenders of the SOTS in years past.

This is precisely why I said:
"The failure of this server is that the in-game mechanisms do not enforce the desired gameplay." The answer is not to purple people, as you say.

Because of the lack of development and the amount of work it would take to do right, my current recommendation is to turn this into a faster-paced non-bot Alliance server by removing some of the oddities of the team environment and pivoting into an Earth 2025 classic server.

I love this idea req something i been saying would be good for a while now as well, as far as coalie you knew what i was up to what is the lot of stuff ive done? Gerd doesnt play with us anymore isnt that what you wanted? i told you guys what i was doing and why so whatever this is it's just the same as before but for you to act like we are the bullies is really comical if anything at least everybody knows who we are yall crawl outta the woodwork half way through a set if we went head to head with an even war could you really beat us that bad? idk but im betting not you can only win by outnumbering us and its still weird that no matter how many people join me somehow you always get more numbers! you giving out punchcards for Sub Sandwiches or something i just dont get it!

Lol you didn’t attack our FDP partners last set and said you were using them as “target practice”?. We won’t hesitate to help our friends.

Then you were running around messaging our friends and allies and trying to get them to side with you for war?

Also tell Astral we said hi. We will all band together to kill suiciders and where they came from.

I used to send you messages saying you were doing a good job.. just last set and that one you kinda did a 180. We’re not your bullies, don’t forget who took time out of their day to set up your clanhosting/bots/etc. but we’re not gonna get pushed around.

I think you were having fun and I hope you enjoyed it but don’t come cursing at us when you lose and play victim.

Ironically clan GDI might work here despite killing the spirit of 1a... they applied it to wrong server....

should we just cut and paste for future posts? i feel like your just phoning it in! and what is this We stuff Demon did that for me kinda petty to hold it over my head although he never has! as far as Astral thats a whole can of worms there miscommunication or lack there of, Im new im learning but its always gonna be this way its been an uphill battle since i started taking this game serious. I wont quit and if anything yall give me something to strive for! I got a good group of guys and we are getting better every set ya better watch out one day you might be blinded!

Darkness team has always been clangdi around here. We kill the untags (usually griefers) and suiciders so the netters can net in peace.

As Misses Blackhole already said, many of us have said the same. It would he great to see recruitment and the game needs it badly.

Maybe if you know a good way to go about that you should hit up Qanon. I think that’s the guys name that runs this place. Q shaman. Q something anyways

If a constructive discussion can take place on the topic of the old Spirit of the Rules. Start a new topic here or feel free to necro the thread below that I've included from what seems to be the last real (but small) discussion on it. As the players, you should have a say in such changes and I support the open discussion, feedback, complaints, etc. so long as they aren't out of line and add value.

I don't think (and admins have said such on other topics) that creating new servers is unlikely for a few reasons, and turning Team into a sort-of Alliance2 is essentially the same thing. It's a roundabout way of just separating the primary two sides of the recent "Safe Space" change in Alliance into two separate servers that mostly do the same thing - which isn't a productive solution in my opinion. But I am interested to see if things have changed on the "SOTS" topic for Team given the recent Alliance server change.

A few statements to potentially guide you:

- I was elevated from Forum Mod to game mod around the time the SOTS rules were relaxed/removed so I can only speak to what I've been able to read on both Team Talk and Mod Talk to the pros/cons and complications.

- Clarification: SOTS rules were nothing more than additional moderation on this server. The ingame mechanisms never really changed that I recall. The game mods attempted to initially let the game flow naturally until a majority decided there needed to be more active enforcement policies. Off-hand I don't recall how long it lasted but was ultimately abandoned due to a change in the majority opinion on top of moderation headaches.

- Some old previous game mechanic change suggestions like ingame war dec providing protection from outside hitting would be easily exploitable. It would need to be setup using some of the language as the Alliance Safe Space to allow exceptions for retals of sorts for attacks made prior to war dec and during said period. Although it still does not fully resolve the potential issue of two tags simply using the war dec option as a means of mutual exclusive protection. While individual moderator judgement posed challenges in the past, especially in gray areas and tolerance levels, adding the human component helps reduce exploitation in my opinion but obviously increases the risk of absolute consistency.

- Things moderators likely won't do of it was enforced again (subject to discussion, but still unlikely):
--> Moderate based solely on information/source that would seem to be politically driven; I.E. - relationships/alliances/hate between players and clans
--> Police tags based solely on similar or shared name
--> Follow and make decisions based on forum activity. Example - official declaration of war on Team Talk used as a method to start receiving attention for possible moderator policing. I can elaborate why if needed.

The good news is this would be mostly a moderation initiative if we simply did this with no ingame changes needed and would take less effort than making other game tweaks.

So... feel free to run with this topic if it's something you're passionate about. Fair warning from the start: keep the random nonsense chatter in its place and let the discussion have its day. You know who you are.


===================================

While I'm not starting a new topic regarding this, and will save a good few comments for that were it to be a serious discussion that takes place without bickering about recent politics, here's some of my feelings going into the conversation.

1) Prime referring to ClanGDI as Alliance Safe Space is pretty funny and I hope he never calls it ClanGDI again.

2) I've never, and will continue to never, support any server changes that require the moderator to delete players for things they are allowed to do in-game. Like it or not, moderators biases, whether they're attempting to have them or not, are at a minimum called into question every time a delete is/was made. I firmly believe all rules of the server should be built into the server, and deleting people after the fact for rules they could be unaware of isn't normal, and creates drama. It's either a built in mechanic, or I'm not interested.

3) Reiterating a point Prime made, during SOTS clans would often declare war on 2 member tags or spam tags if they felt a threat from a warclan, to avoid a losing war and easily kill new members of the server. These sort of circumventing the basic rules of SOTS were responsible for MOST of the deletes that occurred during its time, and also caused Team to plummet in membership due to having a high bar for entry (i.e. you better have 5 guys who either shake a ton of hands or can protect themselves because if you're a softer war target than the best wallers in the game, you'll be targeted as a way to avoid losses).

If these rules do go thru, I'd be near adamant Prime be in control of every deletion. Simply put, I feel like he hates all of us equally, and that's better than any alternative. Team had good moderators during SOTS, but they also had clearly biased mods. Like, without question biased mods who announced their intentions to protect their friends very publicly, and it made the server near unplayable. It's a very delicate rule that needs a very steady hand who can either empathize with everyone or hates everyone. Prime being the latter is the only one I'd trust atm.

Doesn't clan GDI protect from getting hit by multiple clans? Why not apply it here? Less work for mod team.....

No one on this server wants to not be able to hit each other. Think of SOTS more like "you can only hit one other clan at a time" than "you can't hit anyone."

Risk, reward, politics and war are intended to remain on this last real server of Earth alliances non-bot experience. It's just a way to very stringently make it 5v5. Like 20 people can't FA 1 to the top for netting, 20 shouldn't be able to hit 5 for war. It makes sense in principle, but had a rough go in its first iteration because it's a lot of insane judgement calls daily for the mod, who can at any point have a vacation on not delete people for days etc.

Anyways, too long of a story too long ago for most people on this server to care about or consider, but popular opinion on SOTS was below 20% when it got ended because its enforcement was pretty brutal judgement calls most times, and we chewed up mods who were extremely war biased, extremely netter biased, and then somewhere in the middle and the whole community was unhappy with all of them haha.

Derrick - I agree with a lot of what you said. Truth be told, I don't think there is a solution. Hard coded solutions would be best, but could still be gamed. You declare war on a friendly alliance to avoid having war declared on you. Or you attack the weakest alliance to avoid a stronger alliance from coming after you.


And those issues could occur with or without the hard coded solutions.


I also fully understand the mods reluctance to get into the gray area of enforcing the SOTS. It would be incredibly complex to suss out every political motivation, every mistake, and every legitimate attack. And then creating a punishment system thats fair? If one country were to suicide another team, do you delete just that country? The whole team? The damage has already been done. What if there is an accidental hit from a typo, deletion for one attack? And then you have the whole 'We aren't coordinating with them, we were planning on attacking you anyway' type of issue. And all of that could still be gamed as well.



Ironically, I think the best solution to enforcing SOTS would be for the player base itself to enforce it, and adhere to it. Almost a gentlemens agreement to not break SOTS. And for new players that do break it, we inform them of how they made a mistake.



I think where we go wrong in this server is this 'suicider' rhetoric. It's thrown around a lot, but I think inappropriately. For instance, when I was new to the game and I and a few of my guys hit another clan, we weren't suiciding. We were labeled as such by Darkness, and that's why 20 teams killed us. But what really happened? We picked a fight with targets we thought we could win against (netters). If they had hit us back and we got into a 5v3 against them, or whatever the numbers were, that would have been fine. Hell, we might have had a chance in that fight. We wouldn't have 'suicided' we would have fought, in a somewhat fair fight.


But because everyone who attacks someone related to a Darkness (or other alliances even, it's not just them) member is labeled a suicider, that can never happen. In short, the term suicider is misused and overused.



Instead, we need to move away from this 'patroling the server' BS, and move towards a 'worry about yourself' sort of mantra. Worry about your team. If your team is effected, sure, fight them. If not, what are you doing getting involved? Let others play the game.


This could all be achieved by the player base simply agreeing to play that way. And in the instances that the rules were violated..... Ok - here's an idea.




Let's nominate a council to assist in making decisions related to breaking SOTS for the mods. People who are a bit more keenly aware of politics, mistakes, etc. The council should consist of people of differing opinions, and be represented by many people.

As an example - You could have one Light member, one darkness coalition member, one from the netting clans, and maybe 1 or 2 from smaller alliances or newer alliances? Obviously we could discuss exactly what that would look like. But we put people on this decision council that we think would be fair, and then they make a recommendation to Prime or some other mod when there is a rule violation.

Prime can then see if there is a split on the council and it's clearly a politically motivated problem, or if there was actually a SOTS rule violation that everyone (or most) agree should be dealt with.

I think it would be tricky to get the right balance of people, but... it's an idea?



Ultimately though, I think the SOTS needs to be agreed upon by the playerbase itself, and we need to agree to abide by it going forward, or it has no hope of working.




I thi

Just to be clear; there is no SOTS (Spirit of the server) rules anymore. They came and went before I even started playing this game. The community wanted them implemented and then some of them wanted them gone because they couldn't kill a waller with 1 team.

The experiment was probably valuable tho.

Yeah that's what happens whenever a worthwhile discussion happens regarding the game and then people wonder why changes get made that they don't like. Threads are often unreadable with people derailing valuable conversations by either taking shots at the posters or the length of their posts. It tends to make mods/developers go "fluff it imma do whatever I think is best" which considering most of them haven't played the game in a decade or more, tend to be super tone deaf.

RE BHole: "United Nations" type pacts actually used to be a main factor of politics at the game's height. Old heads will often reference the TIL wars and SLIT wars as "the best wars in the history of the game."

https://wiki.earthempires.com/index.php/The_Ivy_League

The discussion of actual problems is fine but to a point. In regards i say this earth is earth whatever changes happen are going to happen with or without long discussions from players. I have been playing for far to damn long to care about what happens now. Just go with the flow.

Can I occasionally abbreviate it as ASS?



Are you not in support of players on non-clan solo servers being deleted for coordination/collusion? There is no real ingame mechanism to stop this occasional problem, and the moderators essentially do the same thing on those servers that took place here as part of SOTS rule enforcement.



I'd say this is unlikely to happen. Having just one person presents a clear access problem potentially, limiting oversight. Plus, I'd really rather not be without any assistance. Additionally, Martian has access to mod all game servers being in an elevated mod position. We have two more mods with oversight of Team but I honestly couldn't say much offhand about their experience here as players. I will say I trust their judgement and wouldn't really entertain the idea to remove their access.

Lol.

1) Yes. Please do. Hahaha. Love it.

2) I'm not in support of it, no. I think alliances and collusion should be allowed on the solos. Super unpopular opinion, but that's where I land on it. If I have to choose between Ratski and his neighbor not being able to hit the same target while LaF members simultaneously share their country numbers to avoid each other and game the market together VS Ratski and his neighbor being able to do whatever the hell they want while LaF very much colludes in "acceptable" ways, I'm very much choosing the latter. I don't really understand how people gaming the market together vs gaming their grabbing/war together is different. Neither should be allowed or both, and since it's impossible to enforce neither being allowed, logic leads me to the collusion rules being unfair to the average player who ACTUALLY plays alone, so I've always been a 1 man opposition to that. If there was a way to stop netters colluding, I'd less likely feel that way, but recent sets have shown even market transfers work. If one person sells tech for 9999 and another person buys thru it, no one gets deleted. That to me is obvious collusion that doesn't get anyone in trouble, so since the rule only supports the netterverse, I'm out on it.

Last Point) I trust the mod team more than I ever have by a long shot, but don't like the position it puts them in. If it's a good mix of killers and netters coming to decisions together, I love it. But historically, biases played harder on SOTS than any other single instance a mod may have ever had a bias, so I'm nervous to revisit a situation that was terrible for Elders, and resulted in some of the only purples that true ICN play the game pure dudes like Thunder and Link ever experienced.

Hmmm good discussion

This has been great discussion and a good read. I have been feeling the same way about the lack of enforcement/viability of 5v5. I don't know the answer, as it seems enforcement was tried but failed due to biases. I don't know that the current situation is viable long term though.

I'm not sure what you are getting at here. As I understand it the mod in question did exactly what the community had agreed for him to do. SOTS disappeared when 3 tags got deleted for hitting one tag because they couldn't kill it without breaking the SOTS rules they had all agreed on.

It's possible, even quite easy, to just never die if 5 countries are the only ones hitting you. This was a 'feature' or a 'problem' of SOTS depending on if you were walling or getting walled.

Why do players want to wreck another server? This is what alliance used to be like.

Leave Britney I mean teams alone!

I guess I fall on the side that would prefer to "never die if 5 countries are hitting you" feature. If the intent of this server was to limit tags to 5 members, then the 5 members need to get creative in how to kill off an opponent, imo. Under the current situation, the only creativity/strategy is to just increase attackers (ie more than5) and hit faster. If the rule of 5 team members can't be enforced, why advertise it?

I understand that 3 tags got deleted for hitting one tag, but does that warrant changing the rules because 3 tags broke the rules?

It does if those three tags are comprised of the whiners who want to gank everyone else and have never shown the ability or the desire to fight a fair fight, let alone a fight where they are short handed.


Let's be honest about the people who are against enforcing the SOTS. It's the people that have 15-25 members in war clans that want to work together to kill their opponents who have far less people.


I am also of the opinion that if 5 people can't kill someone easily, if at all, that's totally fine! It'd be really awesome if warfare consisted of more than just kill runs and using bots. I think the rock/paper/scissors aspect of wars is far more appealing and interesting than 'get one guy with a lot of spies, and then everyone just get as many jets as possible and hoard turns!'.

10 days later and nothing? Ok then. Just checking.

Nah we're good. Thanks for asking tho haha.

The closer this thing is to the classic e2025 clan experience while 1a is unplayable the better. It doesn't need to be unique in any other way than just being the classic experience as it was intended.

So remove the 5man rules and junk and I would agree w you Derrick. Let there be one big tag etc.

Yeah I agree. That's another discussion but essentially people play around the 5-man teams already and do what they want. You ask someone to change something small and they might just blow the whole server up so I'm gonna vote for "dont touch it." But I agree yah.

I love you d but the fun side now is weedy.

I am all for either abolishing the 5 man team for a more alliance sized clan or enforcing it either way would be interesting! or even if we just upped the team size to 10

All good points milk

10 will definitely make this server spicier, I'll definitely play again since 1a got turned to Farmville 2025!

You gonna enforce 10, or is it going to be 10, but the rules still don't matter? Cause if the rules still don't matter, what's the point?

It's easier to defend 10 than 5 for obvious reasons and there's going to be more diplomacy involved, win win.

I'm all for trying something different to keep things relevant. How do we get it to 10?

Minimal coding, should be very simple as changing one number from 5 to 10

Well how do we go about this create a petition?

I’ll go with the rest of you guys on this, 10 man teams is cool.