Limits for number of frriends supporting each other on the map

Hello

In relation to question about pre-game alliance I was thinking about limitting number of players whoenter map in join effort to win it.

As there is no limits on how much resources you can move between friends and this grately influence starting balance I would say there are two choices:

1. Automatic limiting number of resources/money send to friends including restriction on market so they do not use market to go around. Same with number of troops 1 player can receive from friends per day. Additional limit on taking for free provinces from friends . This is less likely to work so here it goes second idea.

2. very strict rules how people can cooperate with each other and then GOs thake responsibility for point 1 checking how people cooperate with each other. This will include setting up limit up to say 5 people working together on the the 500.

I saw people sucking up 600 provinces belonging to dozen of players in a matter of 2 weeks, taking over resources provinces and mech army. The only reason that peopel were takign friends to a map 500 was to use them later as a "food". When friend was having problems in war, was sometimes going afk, was getting bored or did his part in protecting eastern border this guys were eaten alive without any resistance. Now this is something that grately influence balance of the game but as you see single players have no chance at all in supremacy played like that. This in response force other to create huge pre-game groups up to 15-30 people joining same 500 map. I will say that it is closed circle and devs job will be to break it and replace it with something more balanced and user friendly. Once more- not skils but share number of supporters count in that strategy. And you probably guess that some players from top ranking with great achievements are using this strategy of eating allies.

I would be grateful if smething could be done about that.

For more info please look in this thread "Is it legal for someone to donate all of his provinces and armies to some other player drastically changing the flow of the game?"

Quote from Rotekatze

The game has alliances and with those encourages players to form groups that play together. To then limit them and suggest they have an unfair advantage because of it is not right.

You have 2 choices, you can join an alliance and play with people you know and trust or you can chose to go it alone and hope allies you make in games will work out for you.

My experience of allying random players in maps is that most will stab you in the back and that is the reason I chose to create an alliance and play with people I know I can rely on.

There is already a limit to how many troops & cities you can transfer, limiting resources would have little effect IMHO, when a group of good player chose to play as a team it is their combined experience and tactical knowledge that wins for them.

I think the main problem is not with groups of real players but of individuals running multiple accounts, even when you can get them banned from a game the damage has already been done. I do not know what the answer to them is as it is pretty simple to set up proxy servers if you really want to cheat your way to victory.

As you said it is mostly about multiaccounts, remote control of of "friends", or just giving up whole countries to one guy while doing nothing to enjoy game. I would say that guys who join map just to support one player brake to rule of wolfpacking as their only intention is to work against neigbours of the main player in he group thus it should be forbidden. especially if they send all troops on the neighbouring nation, lose all army, allow main player to take over their provinces. This also means that player who was attacked by such a mindless country will have no chance whtsoever to play map in 99% of cases.

most of MMO SG I know have rules limiting this kind of behaviours. I myself am tired of killing so mindless blobs who only fight AIs, eat alive their friends from alliance or coalition or attack people 5- 10 times weaker. Ofc you gain a lot of military points from that and almost undamaged countries but killing brainless waves send on me by players who has no idea how to play is not a kind of fun I like to spend my time on.

Personally I would preffer to fight someone smaller but with more skills to elarn something.

ok bobokill- this sounds as a reasonable ending

but imagine guy who hsa 2500 provinces and 60 mln troops and he just floods everyone with it because he is bigger.

so your only task is to kill wave after wave and then move forward taking his provinces. asa you can imagine he will resign after loosing all frontline troops so theere is no fun as that player had no idea how to play and how to win. the only thing he knew was how to eat allies with their resources and provinces, and then use numbers against others. you learn exactly 0 from fighting such a oponent and this summarize stagnation in Supremacy strategy and tactisc development. Why to think, look for new solution if you just need more friends on the map than others and hopefully you will not meet any proplayers with enough time to stop you.

It is closed a circle and without doing something about it you will get rather boring games in 99% of cases. and who wants to play broing game when the result depends on the numbers of supporting account and not the skills or knowledge? I saw similar games when kids where fighting each other in the woods. The ones who had more people or longer sticks always won. So as you see system forces people not to get better but too get more guys. And if I see 6 people fighting my 4 people it is obvious that someone from my smaller team will join bigger alliance to secure coalition victory. ( that is probably another topic how to make the game more enjoyable).

In general from a military game supremacy changed into diplomatic (backstabbing,betraying) and economical ( more friends, more multiaccounts) game . And even though there are still pro players who can defeat 10 times bigger armies players who were defeated by this prplayers are called cheaters,exploit users and their reputation is often damaged but false comments made by players who have not a clue how game mechanic works. (this is one more topic how to keep balance between diplomacy,economy,military ).

In the end getting people to try harder instead of getting more friends should stimulate progress of players.

48 kk: 0.5 kk in 24 h in one war against 3 guys

problem is it is boring and I let my allies to finish them when I am done with killing main armies as there is no point in killing strings of lemings going against your armoured armies without any thinking. So there is a feeling of uncertainity for 1-2 days if you are going against guys 5-10 tiems bigger and stronger. You are thinking if you have enought troops, maybe you shouldnt given them upperhand restricting your military on purpose. But after that it is just regular slaughter.

but maybe I will give you another eample how this could be exploited. 10 guys. 2 in australia, 2 africa, 4 in both americas and 2 in europe. Guys from europe got resources from 8 others. They quickly conquered spain and started to move towrds africa where resources went next. Then with West europe and north africa secured they pumped resources into australia that was easily overrun by share number of mechanized troops sponsored by 8 other guys. We had new zeland Guinea and celebes at that time and without any problems took australia from them. This stopped whole their coalition as they were not able to support americas properly so american guys from this group were destroyed as australian group. This prolonged game but as you imagine they already created empires in africa and europe reducing it only to two players, eating 2 other allies with 0 casualties. Asia joined their coalition thinking they can survive in that big coalition . but in the end they were asked to prove what they can do and they died in our malasia and indonesia. so they gave up whole asia for free ( 0 casualties) to europe and africa. As you can imagine at that stage fighting 3 k provinces with only australia and indonesia was quite hard as we were at war since 100 days all the time. I myself finished upp with 37% morale in my country because all friends of this big alliance declared war on me. This is why I was not using cavs and inf - they were loosing morale to quickly to be usefull.

maybe it was possible if I commited all my free time to S&S. but there was no point in wasting real time worth hundreds of dollars per day to defeat someone who does not even know how to conquer asutralia with 10 times bigger economy and army. ANd this, more than anything else force me to play less and less in supremacy, even though it is a great game and has a potential. There are not enough pro-players left to kill all this blobs,multiaccounts,activity players. If there was at least 1-2 guys like me in every continent and they were not eaten in the first week by a swarm of infantry from 5 countries then I would play more and put more effort, and probably more money into a map. But because I know I am playing someone who is weaker than Narmer or Nemuritor ( ;-)) there is no point in wasting Gms or real-time.

I guess now I made it clear what I wanted to achieve by limiting swarm-type players based only on share numbers.

In other topics I try to show how to atract pro-players to come back to a game but even I cannot do anything if I ask my friends to join me after many years, they come back, they read chat/forum, they see how peoeple write in DE and backstab themselves, how they exploit weaknesses of the game , how they build 100 fighters instatnt. It is really hard to translate them it is worth to stay, that this is a norm and we need to close our mouth and play nice even though all this crazy things happen around.

I believe that should be enough to highlight a problem.

Quote from NarmerTheLion

I'm not a very well player, I used to have time as my main defence, and waiting my strike out at the right locations/timings. However with a job, moderating and other hobbies my time is more limited then ever, I'm more then likely a sitting duck in most maps.

and that is exactly why there should be a balance between time-GMs-skills.

players are discouraged from joining games and bytro is loosing players. Thank you for summarising it.

arty with S&S,AC Warp Jump and harvesting are to powerfull to other kind of units.

even planes can be easily countered but not combination I described above. Just to say - I once shoot down 297 planes in one go - this could tell you how easy it is to kill them in the air.

Quote from NarmerTheLion

In this thread we'll put attention to some more general ingame rules.

1. Wolfpacking

All Wolfpacking issues will be reviewed/determined by the SGOs, any Players found to be Wolfpacking will be removed from the Game Round immediately.

Any Game(s) may be created with as many Friends/Alliance Members as the game will accommodate.

Wolfpacking can be defined by the following events:

1. Should Player X ask/invite other players into a game with just the sole intent to aid in killing off / kamikaze into Player Y, will be considered Wolfpacking
2. Should Player X ask/invite other player with the intent to have them trade Land/Resources/Troops to Player X, will be considered Wolfpacking
3. Should players join a game with the intent to influence the outcome and aid Player X will be considered Wolfpacking

Note contrary to the past Wolf packing does not apply to a certain date of joining, and is defined as solely joining to aid another user not to play the game.

2. Capital farming

It is not allowed to exercise capital farming, which is the act of recruiting other players with the purpose of harvesting capital cities with the intention to receive cash and/or morale boost.

Players that violate this rule will be removed from the respective game without warning.

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So this is what I pointed out:

1. most of players doing this huge alliances are kamikazes- they protect back of PlayerX and then grow to certain levels just to kamikazes into new enemies. It could be trated like normal game but n many cases they cannon fodders and as soon as they lose whole army Player X moves to second phase ->

2. PlayerX takes what he can: resources, mechanized troops, puts his soldiers into empty towns of kamikaze ally. When ally lose a war - Player X takes over everything for free while person attacked by a kamikaze player loses a game. We also have here capital farming as taking over ally/coalition member/multiaccount finishes with taking capital

3. from two above we see it is very easy to say that most of 500 games have woflpacking issues. You can debate that kamikaze players joined a game to play and then decided to be kamikazes for player X- but what is a difference between being kamikaze in the begining and becoming kamikaze in the end- for game outcome it is the same as it destabilize balance of the map and put other players in worse position.

This is how alliances/coalitions worked in my national server and english server on maps 500 and 100. And I must say I do my best to stop such a players from winning maps even on the cost of my own victory.

Bytro and teams should be more straight forward and I guess more agressive in removing such a mehaviours from a game.

I have nothing against 20 players playing together. But if they are giving all lands resources, troops and lands to one player who is the best between them just to save their skin. Now this I will call cheating and wolfpacking.

every MMO strategy game has GOs who are analyzing flow of materials,troops and cities/provinces. If they exceed norms written down by company- players are punished for breaking the rules.

Even if ,like in case of supre, someone is attacking his friend to avoid the rules - players are still punished.

If GOs do not have time to track it- automatic system is punishing everyone and then you can appeal from that to GOs.

Allowing multiaccounts to rule a game, being afraid to hurt other players is the best way to lose players as you will lose more who will be dissapointed with a game and administration.

I lost couple of account because I have not read rules properly, I appealed and sometimes accounts stayed blocked but I never thought about it as an unfair.

IMHO hard limiting transfers of everything from account to another ( no matter how it is done) is better choice than limiting number of players who start a game together. We just need someone who set up a daily limit or exchange factor, using solution form other successful games (copy-paste if you want) and get on with that. Set up automatic blockade or automatic kick from map and then wait for appeals. Multi account should not appeal from ban so in 90% of cases punished account will not appeal. There is only 10% of work to be done .

I do not want to be punished with 1000 of new multis every week because someone is afraid to hurt feelings of a playerX who is balancing on the edge of cheating/braking rules.

rule of lesser of two evils

I am sure more people have quit game because of that as it is seen as a weakness of company. IMHO cheaters would be interested more in staying in such a system than casual players

it is all about rewriting auto-ban code as there is clearly something not right with it. It banned top 20 alliance from an alliance game where it should not work... and the game was lost. Almost whole alliance left the supremacy for good. I am not sure who was writing that code for bytro - but I am sure it was not tested properly before implementing.

when it comes to rest - reasonable rules do not hurt so much as a bad coding. So I would suggest checking what kind of instructions bytro placed in this auto-ban as for sure it could be coded better. If the code is written in an organized manner it is just about changing couple of variables and problem solved. 30-60 minutes work at most. Then sending first iteration for testing , then another iteration with testers till we get something working.

I am guessing that ban for resources exchange should be imposed automaticaly if you give for free more than half of your daily production ie. Could be also related to daily market prices offered by bots - as bots have already a script for that.

provinces- if you are acquiring more than lets say half a country in one day with lose of troops on enemy/your side less than 10% then automatic ban. but it also need testing, iterations. every game is slightly different. In XYZ game it could be 50%, in ABC it is 25%.

and so on. but frontline pioneers are from testing such a test cases based on plan written by bytro QA lead. I guess. I hope so. If there is a will to fix - there will be a solution too.

I still see all this multis, remote controls, multi-people accounts as a main weakness of the game. And I would prefer to be banned from 2 games that to lose 20 to cheaters. This is why I had to quit my national server as there was no place fo a fair play or entertainment. I have HQ but I was not receiving the gameplay I would be happy with there. EN is much better in that aspect and I am happy I can retire here.

Good Work EN Team. keep it that way. ( yes, I was not talking solely about EN server, but about all servers I have visited in the last 10 years).

yeah sounds it is impossible to do with 3 guys only.

you can rise flag levels to 5 like DEFCON levels

1 - noticed

2 - suspicious

3 - have a look as it seems to be tendency for this player

4 - GO required immediately

5 - this is happening toooo often ( especially if it is going only one side : to or from player)

When it comes to programmers - I beg to differ here. Maybe I do not know what is programing per sec but I am doing programming for games and code has to be reusable hundred of times within a game. You need to cooperate with QA, gameplay designers and community testers. So it takes a lot of test cases , a lot of time from every mentioned department and a lot polishing to get results that satisfy conditions of the test case and make our target audience happy. You cannot do it by changing code all the time. you specify what are main factors, store them in variables and change their values observing the results in tests. Guessing or assuming things on the basis what people think or say , without actually testing it , is not the best practice if I may say so.

Many MMO game companies from Germany and even Hamburg solved problem of exchanging resources,troops and towns between accounts. Why we cannot use working solutions ,tested on millions of people, from another games?

It looks for me that it is more important for bytro to keep this friend based gameplay alive hoping to generate more players and GMs than to solve push/bash/wolfpack problems it generates.

More about problems it generates :

here: