You haven't beat LaF in a war the only thing you can do is ruin their netting fun which is the only way you derive fun.

See the circular reference?

There is a lot of whining here. As far as I can tell it’s because war tags have lost control to dictate who is going to war them. Sucks for you, good for everyone else.

I have a wife, 3 kids under 3. My time is limited to say the least. Getting on irc to participate in war chats and wall doesn’t happen much. Spending 5 minutes here and there or an hour every couple days when the kids are in bed, sure.

I find war boring for the most part. It’s fun for 3-4 days at the start and then it’s a grind. I’d rather masturbate to the bots all day then war, especially on other people’s terms. If the Dons decide we need a war to appease the fighters in LaF or for a challenge every once in a while, sure. At least there you can take some pride in building a strong war country.

I like the change. Let’s me net without some douche hitting me at the 11th hour and ruining it and it allows netters options on when they want to war. Like Pang said, if you want to war then self organize into groups that want to do it. No harm no foul.

You do realize you give no reason for why this should be a viable option anyway, right?

"better strategist", by that I suppose you mean play weaker countries that inspire less envy?

Your supposition is incorrect. Alliance is a multi-clan game all striving to establish the best empire on earth, kind of like a competition. Strategy is to both attack AND defend with each clan starting on equal footing.
Mebbe a new game should be added to EE where folks can have bots and no attacks are allowed and you can just build on bot land and see who wins. Kinda like playing solitaire. The exact same thing, only different.

You do understand that since the beginning of time getting hit by a suicider or several topfeeds equate losing the game in terms of netting, right? Currently suiciders decide who wins. This Clan GDI, if it works, may possibly put the decision back into netters hands. If it could be achieved another way I'd be all for it.

The alternatives as I see it are:
1. A fundamental and thorough upheaval of all the game formulas in such a way that suicides can be brushed off.
2. We appeal to the good nature of griefers to stop what they are doing altogether.

You are repeating yourself since it's the convenient argument. Limit the protection to be against untaggeds and very small tags and your problem is solved.


I don't even like this solution but putting out there as a possibility because you all seem hell bent on reducing attacker effectiveness - then make it relative to tag size. For example if the war is even numbers no reduction, if it is a small tag of 5 vs 30 non-GDI vs GDI make the reduction a relative number. Sounds silly to me even suggesting it that a 30 member tag needs protection versus a smaller one.

luck with that aka so not gonna happen.

Pointing out an idea that has zero balance to it is a terrible idea is not whining. Or if it is whining by your weird logic, then the entire line of reasoning that lead this to be a suggestion in the first place was driven by whining. I don't think that's true but maybe you do. I have not seen a reasonable argument for why this should be implemented without balance. Normal gdi has costs. Clan gdi, which is far more powerful, will have zero costs. What is the justification for people getting a handicap, and that's just what this is, without paying for it?

sin, it's not free, there will be a cost associated. It's just TBD at the moment. If cost implies something else, then ignore me :)

Umm the costs are immense. Far far higher than regular GDI. Also I do not think of it as something that needs to be balanced, as it is here to counter the unbalanced mechanisms around suiciding.

It is a bit weird that a low-effort+ low-skill player can demolish 5+ well built + high effort countries in 10 minutes. The vast array of changes needed to counter this would be so hard to theorycraft and implement, and would likely be far from perfect either way.

Missed his edit but I doubt the costs go far enough to appease my criticisms.



We should be more concise with our language. When we say "demolish", we mean "slightly lower a country's ending networth"

Thats an absurd wording and you know it.

It's glaringly obvious that this change will happen no matter what is best for the game, but I'm glad this post and the discussion is here to be looked back on. Don Pang lives to please La Famiglia.

But it's less absurd than demolish. That high effort country will still finish higher than most ln the server. They might lose 100m NW and end up in 2nd instead of 1st (and if this one suicider is spreading his efforts among 5 countries you can't argue they'd lose a whole lot more). That's not demolishing. Sometimes it's justified (in the cases where people like Marshal try to invoke might makes right in order to farm solo players when he lacks the might, for example).

I mostly agree with this. Though I think the whole 10m jets / 100k turrets things can't be ignored.

I feel like attackers acreage begin a factor in calculating grab returns would nerf the biggest tool that "griefers" can use. Similar to how bomb airbases needs jets. so e.g if your max grab possible was something like 10% your current acreage.

To be clear I use the term "griefer" here in the specific context of low-effort / low-skill countries. I think when you dig down thats where the "injustice" of it lies, and thats what rankles the netters. (It does me).

If you get your ass handed to you by someone running a high-effort / high-skill country that a whole different thing - but then I would say that, because I can run half a decent country ;p

come on sin you cant be that naive :) The higher your final nw the harder each successive $100m NW is to get & the damage a suicider can do compounds the better your finish would be.

A suicider hits my crappy 500m potential finish country and I might get $400m. No fluffs were given.

A suicider hits a record attempting $1.2bn country and they end up with only $900m. That's pretty rough.

There is that injustice again.

The better you are at net gaining, the easier it is for some hapless idiot to do even more damage.

And as usual, Ugo makes a much better suggestion that easily solves the problem. Not only does it do so parsimoniously but it also eliminates most of the complaints brought forward in this thread

20-30k acres country gets quite a much of that to his/her restart and by grabbing botshe/she gets losses quickly back.

This would have to be pretty extreme to work. 10% isn’t workable. How hard is it to get a 20k acre country? Then your still taking/destroying 2k acres/hit. If you could scale it so once land starts hitting very high amounts the returns/destruction go down to next to nothing. This helps against suiciders/low skill but has impacts on war strategy and just makes suiciders try harder.

Not being able to grab established tags from established tags basically already exists through retal policies. The GDI stops untagged and the ability of war alliances to smack around netters who don’t want to war. This has to sound good to Omega, Monsters, likely Evo who don’t have to be worried about being smashed over nothing.

I understand the frustration about that loss from the war tags it’s just not something I relate to. It dates back to e2025 since I’ve had any desire to war anyone that didn’t want to fight an alliance I was in.

Sinistril what do you think the t10 would look like last set without suiciders? You are speaking as if a suicider costs 1 rank lol. If only.

Easy to get a 20k acre country yes. But at 20k acres then 2k acres is your maximum first hit rather than, say, 10k. Have DR's apply to your max hit and you've massively nerfed the primary cause of grief imho (massive topfeeds with no possible recourse). If 10% isn't right then make it 5%, w/e.

If a 100k acre country grabs you for 10k at least you get to retal for a reasonable chunk. Those kind of grabs would be less about 'greifing' and more about PvP no? maybe even balance up the def/attack ratios a little. Crazy I know ;)

The thing is you can't (and why would you want to?) make PvP grabs go away entirely. I think the objective is to try and mitigate those griefer style topfeeds where you basically have zero recourse. In fact the worse they are, the less recourse you have - thats the irony! That's the injustice! That turns people off the game.

I dunno just rambling Saturday night innit.

Unless you have away a untag can war a GDI Clan solo your lose 1/3 of your players.

Like add

Say clan A hits Country B(untag) 3+ time. Country B can hit anyone in Clan. How every they feel like.(missiles ABs GS BR, harmful ops.)

It’s the clans responsibility to keep there members form farming untags. If they fail to keep there members in line it’s the clan responsibility to get what’s coming to them.

its sounding like this whole thing is only useful for very edge cases

that being

netting:
allx lazy players
minor grabbing hardly trying
very late set suicider protection
slightly more useful for techers but probably promotes bad play

warring:
opting out of war, until tag dec war comes in
potentially some sort of timing attack where you drop gdi and hit

griefing:
the two step thing

but most of the netting cases will require multiple tags to work, which seems like a bad behaviour to incentive

possibly leading to drama over tags accepting or not accepting duel tags

and thats without knowing how much it costs which might be a lot, even not counting the dec war costs which arnt nothing, and are as much as 5% of gross income at the start for farmer, more of net, and even more for non theo casher

I think you might be off here. It allows full bot farming with no chance of getting hit by an untagged you haven’t hit yourself.
This is pretty inclusive to what netting tags are doing

I think you have misunderstood Enshula. But Im getting different meaning from different edits and explainations, so I think time will tell.

I actually agree with you Suicidal.

let’s get to the core issue here

Is this a war game or not?

War is unpredictable. War involves personal sacrifice. War has unintended consequences.

This is the dynamic nature of war. The profession of arms.

I would seriously question any changes that are designed to limit the ability and impact of countries waging war against each other in a war game. Just an opinion.

That's much like asking if WoW is a PvP or PvE game. The game is both a war and netting game. Two distinct play styles with different goals. Neither play style is the 'right' or 'wrong'. It's a matter of personal preference for a multitude of reasons for each individual player. Those individual players group up into 'netting' or 'warring' tags.

Why is it a problem to have a group of players who wish to leave others alone but still be able to play without harassment? If you are a war country and you do not care about your networth what do you lose? Why were bots put on the server in the first place? This is a natural progression in my mind.

The game should have a place for both types of players not just one IMO. The way to achieve that can be done by many, many different paradigms (see what I did there!). Keep in mind no matter how you shake it having a game that appeals to as many different types of players as possible is good for everyone.

Well said

I've never played WoW but my understanding is that PvP and PvE exist on separate servers, am I right? If that is the case why not just create another server where alliances can net freely? The counter argument may be that there is not enough player base to support playing on another server but look at team server and tell me that an alliance netting server is not worthy of that space.

Earth has always been about the dynamics between alliances, whether they net or war. The fact that war can break out at any moment over reasons more than just in-game, country vs country interactions is one of the most appealing parts. If I want to have boring, meaningless wars there are plenty of games out there that offer that opportunity.

Adding a PvE server to soak up all the netters from 1a would create two games with dysfunctional markets so that in itself is a bad alternative.

Maybe if they shared a market like the tournament games it would be better but the bot code would need some work then because as I have mentioned before the bots kind of outgrow the players in market contribution if they are allowed to grow unimpeded by 2-7 landgrabs a day as we have seen in some of the largest wars which cause dysfunctional markets($8000 tech lategame, techer bots with $5B cash, $500-1000 oil prices, etc etc).

With a shared market that wouldn't happen. But that is basically what the clan GDI does, if I understand it right. Pretty much what we get are two servers in one with a shared market and shared bots to hit if I understand it right. Shared market as I mentioned is totally necessary tho I also think that sharing the bots is important at least if the bot code is not changed in a big way because if half the bots are untouched in the PvP server they would still create problems all on their own with the current code.

Gotta remember the last 3 years of changes to the bot code has not been easy. Every change that solves a problem has created new ones so that is likely what would happen also in future updates.

If we were on another server, what would be better for you than if we are in the same server but you cant hit us and we dont hit you?

Is it the proximity that bothers you?

Have to give it to you Gerdler, you wait for me to respond to a post that is away from my actual suggestion and then ask me questions as if I am championing creating a secondary server.

I am all for Clan GDI if it is limited to actual suiciders and not real tags. I want us all on the same server with the potential for tensions to rise at any moment, I was just replying to Requiem's point knowing Pangea will do as LaF directs him either way.

Pang absolutely will not do what LaF tells him. He does think for himself and his motivations for such things are not in line with the motivations of an alliance within the game. Accusing Pang of doing whatever LaF says is just lazy.

Also don't get hung up on the WoW analogy.

The notion that this is purely a war game has always been a false narrative that I've never understood.

The game is what you make of it -- some people like to participate in wars, some want to build the best countries as an economic sim, some want to do the political clan stuff, some want to take part in the community within their clan. Our goal is to provide a situation where everyone is able to play the game as they like at least most of the time.

The game has shifted from thousands of hardcore players who would have dropped everything to play the game to folks like Savage (or myself, even) who now have a family and other priorities that preclude us from playing at the same level as we used to. Even if I wanted to be available to play like I did in 2004 it's just not possible. Offering the same mechanics that worked with a 10,000 person game with highly dedicated players (and a very large multi population that was largely overlooked) probably doesn't work for servers with hundreds of players.

Re: additional servers -> fragmenting the user base of the Alliance server is really not something we're looking at doing. Even the "hey let's have a Patron server!" discussions make me feel like it's not something worth doing unless we grow the game significantly. And we can't do that without some better mechanics to offer some better protections.

Like I said earlier, I'd love to do an escalation mechanic for clan interactions on top of a clan GDI, so that's still very much in the cards to allow wars to more organically happen. But as a warmonger, do folks like the situation where you can blindside someone who is not ready for a war, ground them to dust for a few days, then watch as their activity and numbers falter over the following rounds until they leave? We've watched that over the last decade plus. And for this server specifically, when some clans stand up and give warmongers a taste of their own medicine during "grudge wars" we've even seen war-focused clans quit all together. It just seems like no one is happy with the status quo.

I think the big takeaway that I have from trying to talk to more folks over the last year or so as I've been working on the UI project is that they feel there's too much advantage to those who want to be fluff disturbers -- FSing clans, suiciders, topfeeders, etc -- who can really screw you over even if you've done nothing at all. It's hard to grow the game with that albatross hanging around the game's, and this server specifically, neck.

No offense to LaF, but one of the lenses through which I view these changes include "how would clans like LaF abuse this mechanic?" :p

If you're not fully caught up, LaF burned a lot of bridges with me during the Hanlong days and hasn't done much to regain my trust. That being said, I'm still on good terms with them like I am with almost everyone here nowadays. Not playing helps.

So you dont want us to hit LaF because theyre netting, and we should only hit other war tags. Elders/SoL/Stones the only war tags around, and we are all a big family who dont want to war each other, do we net and FA chain ourselves and claim all Top10 spots until LaF cry about that too?

Will it eventually become a rule of 1a war clans must war other war clans?

Presumably, doing sketchy stuff to steal top ranks from netting clans would make them want to fight you in the future.

If your complaint is "war-focused clans can't fight whoever they want, whenever they want" I'd counter with the current situation being "netting-focused clans can't net however they want, whenever they want" which isn't good either.

Like I said, it'd be great if players could do what they want to do most of the time -- whether that's fight or net.

Second comparison you've made to another game that is not relatable. You have to take these things as a whole and not piecemeal aspects of different games you like.



Agreed, not enough players to fragment the user base. I just don't understand why netting tags want to even coexist on a server with people who want to war other than to have someone to buy/sell goods. The threat of being hit is one of the risks in netting in this game.

It's funny how this started as being protection versus untagged suiciders, and you even defended the clan interactions as a "what if" of multies tagging up and abusing the system if tags were excluded.

On my post if you delete that once sentence it doesn't change the message. That's what I mean by 'dont get hung up'.

Pang makes great points BTW, none of which you have addressed in your concerns.

I have a feeling you only want to play to ruin the game experience of certain people, or groups of people. The problem with this is that your satisfaction comes at the cost of others which is a losing proposition overall --> only a few hundred players left. The status quo is not working anymore and hasn't for some time.

If you don't want these things in the game ie. Griefers, make a rule against them. That is the only effective way to stop the thing people are complaining about. This clan GDI will NOT do that if that is the intention. It benefits netters in that they get a far more powerful gdi that doesn't have a country size restriction. It erodes the need for diplomacy on this server. If you're worried about fragmenting the player base, then why are you fragmenting it? Making a non PvP server will not have any other effect. Who really cares about what other players add to the market when we have bots?

And if you don't want to make a rule against griefers, even though you've basically said they shouldn't exist in this game, why would you turn to this idea first? There's a dozen better, easier ideas that would do far more to eliminate griefing... Unless thats not the point of making this change. And it doesn't seem to be.

First of all, props to Derrick. This is more than I've written on AT in my whole playing career and I'm already exhausted!



Wrong. I don't have to prove my motivations to play to you, I have been playing on and off for 18 years and we have probably never crossed paths so pick someone else to make your assumptions of.

Pang wrote a lot but I don't see much of significance or that I haven't spoken to already in this thread. The tl;dr I get from it is that netting tags want to be able to net freely just as war tags want to war freely, and that this is a supposed vehicle to grow the game. My point is you dictate the direction of your clan by alliances, pacts, and game politics. LaF won two wars against SoF and is in the midst of a second set of peace since, what's wrong with that? If the netters that want to be left alone are capable of building superior countries they will win every time and a war tag won't sign up for that repeated beatdown.

Regarding growing the game, I really don't see how Clan GDI or even the new UI will do that. I think there is a lot of potential in growing the game just by simply marketing it better, the focus is in the wrong place in my opinion.

i think odds are this is just more status quo in the immediate term

at least in the first pass, and it will take at least another set for it to do anything, and possibly 1-2 after that until you can declare on a tag in clanGDI with something like a 72 hour warning period

right now
the warrers think the netters will be safe and effectively in their own little game
the netters think it wont be viable to go for the win

I had a suspicion of what this was going to become but I waited for it to actually come to light. This is just a guise to implement isolation of netters.

pure netting and pure warring servers have been in discussions since ............. but if not shared market between those 2 then market would suck on both.

Make a rule:
You need the other person's consent to war them. You must continually ask their consent when warring them in order to make sure that they feel safe and respected. If they are drunk, they cannot give consent. If they regret giving consent the next day, then they never really gave consent and you will be banned.

tfm there is no peace when people from said alliances play untagged and sucide on non war sets. Look at last reset.

this set there was a bit of fear of missing out on suicide so people suicided before the 22nd

Is this speculation or facts? Please share the evidence. And even if (nobody from sof did) someone did that, your clan GDI can protect you from the untaggeds.

Yeah. I've given it some thought and read the responses. Ordinarily I attempt to find a way to agree with any developments to the game on principle. There have been full eras of this game, even recently, where devs or admins or even mods are too inactive and nothing happens here while the community slowly falls apart. So as a rule of thumb, i try to be as supportive as possible for ANY and ALL developments. Something is better than nothing.

This rule, however, distincly provides a direction where i would no longer have a use for an alliance with a clan like Monsters and vise versa. In fact, there will be legitimately NO REASON for me to interact with a tag like that AT ALL. If the fear of splitting servers is indeed fracturing the player base, then this rule applied does in essence the exact same thing.

Politics and interpersonal relationships are the primary basis for what clans do in a set. And i think if you took a poll, a vast majory of us are here largely because of those relationships, and not so much because this is the coolest game we've ever played.

I think providing a system where clans have no need to interact whatsoever fractures the relationships that makes this game enjoyable for a player like myself...

There's people I love and people I love to hate on. That's why i net. That's why I war. I wouldnt play 1a if not for the relationships ive made with people due to forced alliances at times or even arranged war. Hell, suiciders are the reason monsters and elders became tight in the first place.

Would i have ever met cyref, a guy i respect and care about in this game as much as anyone, if netting tags were allowed isolationism? My thought is no.

It seems to me, if killing the only reason i communicate with half the server does not completely fracture the community in anyone's head, they just aren't paying attention.

Whether or not this is a good solution for the suicider problem, to me, is a moot point. It's bad for community and our relationships. It will push players further away from each other. And people like me who value the community above all else, net or war, are essentially squeezed out. In essence, this kills the one part of the game i enjoy most which is my interactions with y'all. Therefore, as much as id like to support any development, i must say this rule is one of the worst ive seen. I feel forced to enjoy the aspects i like least, and enjoy the company of only whoever is left.

With that, i must say I'm officially adamantly opposed. The more i read about it, the more i think it's plainly a way allow half of the server to isolate themselves from the other half, and not a even an effective way to prevent issues like 2 stepping. I can even just two step the hell outta netting tags now and they cant even respond. The negatives, imo, vastly outweigh the positives. And as a person who does both net and war, I don't understand how isolating yourself from half of the community should be considered a solution at all.

As sin has said, i think there's a dozen ways to mitigate damage caused to netter type players that doesn't split the community in half.