Mr. D

Before anything else I want to remind you that I am the last person who wants to get rid of the Trade System: not only it was my idea to introduce it in the first place, but it also took valuable time to design and implement. So the decision to remove it is not only difficult for me, but also based on months of contemplation. And once again, the reason we are doing this is because in all these months we have been unable to find any permanent solution that would solve the problem while allowing lands to change hands. @Олег Поленин recording a history of land owners was one of the first ideas I had almost a year ago, but as correctly pointed out by @ValarMorghulis it is easily bypassed by having a second account to which you sell your lands and never see them again (as they merge with the other account's growing land). The second account can do the same action in reverse. I do not deny that being able to trade lands adds interesting elements and strategies to the game, so there is no need to try and convince me that this system is good. The problem lies with the built-in exploit that continues to be abused by new players on a regular basis, which also leads to the veteran players giving up and joining the crowds of cheaters, as the prolific nature of the exploit makes them visible in the leaderboards and impossible to catch up to. We are not talking about banning "balls from the schoolyard"; balls are harmless indeed. We are talking about shutting down drug distribution: if the 4 drug addicted kids didn't bother anyone and everyone else followed the rules we wouldn't have this problem, but the addiction is spreading like a disease and it affects reputation of our "schoolyard". If it gets labelled as a place where cheating / using drugs is a norm, then the attitude of all players will change, this is inevitable and akin to location spoofing. However, we do not need another anti-cheat (the original one took months to perfect) and I do not want to be spending my time investigating suspicious trades all the time. This is neither efficient or nice; not only I hate giving out punishments to people who enjoyed my game at any point (just because I left a possibility for them to abuse an exploit), this also creates an unpleasant atmosphere of a "nanny state" and administration constantly being involved in players' affairs. I would personally prefer to know that anything happening in the game is fully legitimate and doesn't need constant manual review. I am open to any ideas and if anyone finds a solution (no matter how hard to develop) that would allow to keep the land trades and prevent people from growing the same land via multiple accounts while sitting at home, I will reconsider. However, at the moment I do not believe that such a solution exists, which is why we are offering the next best thing: the ability to swap resources for resources directly. If this means that the game will become boring for some we will just have to consider new features that will serve as a replacement. But there is no chance of us keeping a system that produces cheaters and corrupts honest players. P.S. Thank you to those who have already PM'ed me with their confession; I will review your accounts as soon as I get a free moment and will come back with feedback on what we will do next.

Hi all, It has come to my attention that despite the official prohibition of the land trade system abuse allowing to infinitely grow your lands and/or base without actual real-world travels this has been actively happening in the last few months and some of our best leaderboard scores now consist of the abusers of this exploit. After a long discussion we have come to conclusion that there is no elegant way to solve this problem as any reasonable restriction can be bypassed via creation of multiple accounts or usage of multiple physical devices. Because of that I am afraid we were left no choice but to discontinue the current trade system altogether: within the next couple of weeks a new version of "Domination: Earth" will be released featuring a trade system replacement, allowing to trade resources instead of lands. It will no longer be possible to become an owner of another player's land. Please note that until the new version is released continuing to exploit the current trade system is strictly prohibited. I will be conducting a thorough investigation of the accounts involved and all perpetrators will be permanently removed from the leaderboards. Additional punishment involving loss of accumulated progress may apply depending on the severity of the abuse. Finally, anyone who comes clean about their involvement before they are caught by myself will receive a much softer penalty. As always, please post if you have any questions.

We do have a number of automated backups happening, but I was unaware that any of these are causing such downtime... how inconvenient! Thanks for both of your reports, @S Keillan @Олег Поленин, I will investigate!

That sounds like a really nice idea indeed! I will definitely look into it.

Exactly. Thanks @S Keillan for being faster than me!

Okay, as of right now you no longer need my help to associate a regular password with your Facebook / Google account! All you need is: Tap the "Forgot your password?" link on the main menu screen. Enter the email associated with your Gmail or Facebook account & tap "Send Reset PIN". Enter the received PIN on the next screen and select any password. That's it! Please let me know if this doesn't work for you though!

Hi! It is possible to merge a Google-created account with a classic password-based username; at the moment this is performed manually by myself upon player request, but I am planning to make it possible to do without my intervention using a forgotten password reset facility. I've actually run into a similar restriction myself recently, so hoping to do this fairly soon!

Hi! Each base has a cooldown of 2 hours between attacks. There should actually be a progress bar showing the amount of time remaining within the "Army Controls" window ("My Lands" -> round yellow button with an icon of "people" on it). Let me know if you can't find it!

Hi @Republic of America, Thanks for sharing your thoughts and being upfront. I always encourage to do just that as I don't believe I've told a single lie on this forum and always share the truth about what's going on in my life whenever someone asks. And as I mentioned in the news thread, I am still working on the 2.0 and my original intentions haven't changed: no matter the content changes, no accumulated progress will be reset; no one will have to start from scratch and no, the game is not going to get shut down - the servers are prepaid for the next 3 years and thanks to everyone's contributions DE has enough to run a lot longer than that. The lack of updates to the current version does not come from the fact that I've "lost interest" in the project (so I continue to ask everyone to try and refrain from fuelling rumours and false accusations in Discord) or do not intend to develop it further, but because I am going through a number of various difficulties in my personal life that exhaust all of my available free time that I normally use to develop games (Flamefrost and "Domination: Earth"); difficulties due to which I am currently providing development services to two other companies (so yes, technically I have 3 concurrent jobs right now). As you can imagine, with only 24 hours in a day there's only so many jobs one can fit in, but it would be unfair to assume that I prefer being tied up in someone else's office from 9am to midnight to working on my own projects. That would be the same as to say that I prefer renting an apartment to owning my own house. So no, "Domination: Earth" and Flamefrost aren't getting "sunset" anytime soon (and unlikely ever) as I've spent almost 10 years of my life building them and I do not see myself launching a third game on my own (i.e. without a team and significant funding), so I am fully committed to making the existing games a success. When will my personal issues be resolved and I get back into active development? Honestly, I do not know. I have fears that my entire 2019 is likely to be focused on fixing our financial situation (sabotaged by the unsuccessful re-development of DE 2.0 via an external agency; lots of money went down the drain there!) via my 3rd party jobs, and there may not be any significant updates in this time. But whenever I get a chance to work on my games - I do, that I can promise. Please post if you have any further questions!

I'd be happy to help you start from scratch and delete your account if you are 100% sure you'd like to do it. Just PM me your in-game email / username used to login and lands title!

It is a known issue of the iOS platform and I'm afraid its fix isn't part of the 1.19.7 release. I do have it in my list though!

Hi all, It's been a while since the last update! Many of you know that this is due to the fact that our development is currently fully focused on version 2.0 of "Domination: Earth", which is a huge project: I am rebuilding the game from scratch and unfortunately, it is unclear how much longer it will take (probably a while!). Because of this development I have postponed all bug fixing on the current version as the new one rebuilds most of the problematic areas anyway. However, just to remind you of the fact that we're not dead and that development is still actively taking place, I have released a small update, featuring: The ability to switch Map Style from Earth View using the "three-dot" context menu. Similar to land upgrades, it is now possible to use Unobtainium to capture resource stations that are outside of your reach. Stations appearing in the completely inaccessible real-world locations will no longer go to waste. The update should appear on the Play Store in the next hour; Apple release will happen later this week. As always, please post if you have any questions!

Interesting! Do you have any lands that do work (i.e. upgrade or propose construction of the utility structures)? Or literally every land above level 100 doesn't do anything?

Hi @NinjaFili! Did Bjørn send you to help with in-game translations? If yes, welcome on board the translation team! Check out this thread regarding how to start:

Sorry, missed that message somehow. I am afraid the size of FoT does not change depending on the amount of trade offers nearby, so if you have eliminated the nearby FoT base your trade offers will be safer! It is an interesting concept though that I'll keep in mind when building new features. @Олег Поленин thanks for the idea! I have to agree with @Eerienkah on this matter though; as of last year I am trying to make things as simple and straightforward as possible, with no overly complex formulas or game mechanics that a new player may struggle to understand in less than a minute. My golden rule these days is that any individual feature should be possible to explain with a single sentence (and if it requires a spreadsheet then I am doing something wrong). Having said that I am positive that there will be some sort of a change to the trade offer system, but I haven't worked out all the details yet. That sounds useful indeed, agreed!

@Reiss I've just logged into your account (don't worry, I don't know your password; I can just view contents of any live account from mine! ) and it actually looks as follows for me! +20 Money seems to be listed correctly. Can you please hit the "Collect Resources" button again once it becomes available and keep an eye on the resource total? If it didn't work before, I think it should definitely kick in now!

Apologies for a delay in response! That is quite weird indeed, will investigate... I have also extended the lifetime of your oil rigs to compensate for the lost time.

Hi! Argh, this is a bit awkward, but I don't think it was a bug, rather an undocumented feature. Combat involving the traded land does invalidate its offers, so the Force of Terror has the ability to intercept and steal your offer with the associated resources (this is one of the reasons why using trade offers as a "bank" for storing superfluous resources isn't safe). I apologize for inconvenience this has caused and will add a task to my list to "de-confuse" this feature; it was originally introduced as a hotfix for an abused trade exploit, but another solution is clearly needed (plus a notification for when this happens; it's clearly missing). I have refunded part of your lost resources, but cannot return the full amount as it wouldn't be entirely fair to those who suffered from this game element and didn't receive anything back!

Flags and buildings are unrelated and do not have (or affect) any limits. Resource stations (e.g. Recruitment Beacons) do count toward the limit though.

Hi @Riylan, Sorry! I have reviewed the logs manually and believe that it was a misunderstanding from the anti-cheat's end (first warning has been removed). There are two levels of cheating in our system: "mildly suspicious" and "outright dodgy" (not the actual technical terms, but a representation of how certain the system is in your GPS abuse ). The latter is fairly bulletproof; I am yet to see any honest player fall under that category, while the first one is merely a suspicion (that's what you've gotten): sometimes real players do strange stuff (e.g. drive down a motorway faster than the speed limit allows ), so it is hard to tell whether there were any cheats involved. Sometime ago suspicions like that wouldn't warrant any punishment, but unfortunately, many users still don't respect our rules today and believe they can get away with cheating, so it's been decided to issue warnings for anything mildly suspicious too just as a "preemptive strike" (after all, it happens quite rarely with honest players and it's not hard for me to review/remove their offences manually). In any case, please let me know if this happens again and I apologize for any inconvenience caused!

A problematic piece of functionality has been identified and a fix - released. Please let me know if you run into any more freezes like that, just in case there's more than one issue.

Heya! Sorry for a delay, I have been away from my desk most of the day today (which, of course, automatically increases the chances for things to break down ). I have reviewed our logs and can indeed see that we've been getting weird spikes of performance issues roughly twice a day. All servers have been rebooted just in case and I will conduct an investigation of the root cause... will post in this thread once I have some answers; please also do not hesitate to let me know if things freeze like this again. Update: okay, the issue is clearly reproducible as we have once again frozen just now. I'm on it!

Unfortunately, Points of Fame are separate from the Peacekeeping Points and do not allow purchasing any benefits not to encourage player-vs-player battles for the sole purpose of point generation. Their only purpose is to advance you in leaderboards and show how much of a war-focused person you are!

Hey all, As most you noticed by now our original Discord server created by players has, unfortunately, disappeared. I am unaware of the reasons behind that and it was not coordinated with myself in any way, so we'll just consider this an unsanctioned act of treason against Domination: Earth. To avoid similar incidents in the future I have launched a new official Discord server, which will exist as long as "D:E" is online. It is still intended to be moderated by players with no intervention from myself, so @ValarMorghulis and @Riylan regain the full admin access with the ability to assign additional roles as they see fit. The in-game button and our official link ( http://discord.domination.earth ) have now been fixed. If you are using the desktop version and your browser has the old link cached, please try a direct invite instead: https://discord.gg/8yK5fQ3 Alternatively, the in-game button should become functional after reopening the app. Any questions, please post!

Thanks for letting me know, will investigate!