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Domination: Earth

Land Trade: End of Life


Mr. D

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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.

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Removing land trade feature does, however, ruin few other features:

  1. An ability to trade lands in remote areas to grow your remote bases; this I hope never was discouraged and it did create many opportunities for positive interactions between players from far away locations; another downside might be that now a military action would be the only way to achieve same goals, thus game becoming more aggresive.
     
  2. An ability to purchase-off players that are leaving the game, though I do understand that this actually might be good (us being not so eager for other players to quit :P).
     
  3. An ability to traffic resources over large distances, through a chain of players; this will hamper alliance efforts to be, well, effective alliances in case of any conflict.
Edited by Олег Поленин
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My frustration with this is pretty huge. Really I don't have much to say except to indicate that I find it hugely annoying that rather than fixing holes with the current system it's just being gutted. 

 

If my car has bad brakes and needs new tires I don't throw out the car I just replace them. 

This is a situation that I feel you should have done something to replace the bad tires of the mechanics rather than throw the whole car out. (Oh, and tell us "just use Uber!")

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I still think that a more gentle solution could be arranged, eg. stamping each land with a list of previous owners, so that a land once sold cannot ever return to the previous owner.

This could even include taking over by force, ie. when a player attempts to take over the sold land, the land disappears, like what happens when you attack FoT.

It's also easy enough to explain in a short warning on trade: "Once you sell this land, you will never be able to get it back again".

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6 minutes ago, Олег Поленин said:

I still think that a more gentle solution could be arranged, eg. stamping each land with a list of previous owners, so that a land once sold cannot ever return to the previous owner.

This could even include taking over by force, ie. when a player attempts to take over the sold land, the land disappears, like what happens when you attack FoT.

It's also easy enough to explain in a short warning on trade: "Once you sell this land, you will never be able to get it back again".

Great solution! 

Oh... But that might require development 🤔

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Consider how many players, including me (but let @Ruvox also be a fine example) based their play style on land trade and flag accumulation. And this had hardly much to do with couch gaming. It motivates players to reach out to each other, to maintain diplomacy (~good relations), generally brings on good things.

I also remember @Ruvox comment against one of my couch-surfing feature suggestions, that the game already has many sufficient features to occupy him and reward him, land trade being the most prominent one.

@Mr. D, I urge you to reconsider. Do not resort to a collective punishment that has a likely potential of significantly reducing the fun we get from playing this game.

Let's find that gentle solution :)

Edited by Олег Поленин
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4 minutes ago, Republic of America said:

Great solution! 

Oh... But that might require development 🤔

Boy you are some piece of work, it's not enough for you to be THE reason that were having this problem now but your gonna insult the guy because

15 minutes ago, Republic of America said:

This is a situation that I feel you should have done something

He did you dummy! He told us it was prohibited!


 If you don't like the rules you don't have to play! And playing the victim card and blaming the dev is just absurd. Grow up

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Furthermore..

I've been thinking quite a bit about the state of most veteran players and I've had some ideas that I've wanted to bring up but haven't because I know your busy Mr. D.

Hopefully we can start a more productive focus on easier fixes that would improve the game.. Going back to another thread that Oleg made, would there be an option to sell large flags to the FoT? That way some players could reorganize their lands as Well as have a Really good battle!

There's always options, and losing the ability to shuttle rss's around the globe via flags is something that's really valuable.

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Yeah I remember that one. I was actually referencing the thread where you lost a flag to the FoT that you had a trade offer on and lost your rss's. So I wondered if we could fortify the FoT.

I still haven't organized my other thoughts but I Did want to note, after reading the OP again, that it says that the trade system would be changed so we can still shuttle rss's..

Just possession of the flag won't change

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Heres my input on this, tryin got keep the quotes as clear as possible.

1 hour ago, Олег Поленин said:

Removing land trade feature does, however, ruin few other features: *List of features*

All fairly minor losses taking in mind the current player base. Also military take-over only grants one 1lvl land in a period of what? Several hours? Also you could always surrender if you don't wish to fight. So no, this would not really make unwanted wars happen. And is being in an alliance all of a sudden a horrible thing?

1 hour ago, Republic of America said:

If my car has bad brakes and needs new tires I don't throw out the car I just replace them. 

This is a situation that I feel you should have done something to replace the bad tires of the mechanics rather than throw the whole car out. (Oh, and tell us "just use Uber!")

No but to be able to drive the car to the mechanic you need a handbrake. This is merely a temporary fix to a wide problem.

1 hour ago, Олег Поленин said:

I still think that a more gentle solution could be arranged, eg. stamping each land with a list of previous owners, so that a land once sold cannot ever return to the previous owner.

This could even include taking over by force, ie. when a player attempts to take over the sold land, the land disappears, like what happens when you attack FoT.

It's also easy enough to explain in a short warning on trade: "Once you sell this land, you will never be able to get it back again".

This is maybe out of the 10 messages in this thread the only good comment. A solution and not only a complaint. However this would require quite abit of coding and we need a quickfix to end the leaderboard rape until then. Clearly saying "don't do this" is not enough.

However I can already find a flaw in this; Multiple accounts/devices. Have one main account and one you keep capturing lands with. You just feed the mega land and the mega land never changes owner.

Or an alternative is to co-op with someone using this same tactic. Person A lives in city 1 but sells all the land to person B who lives in city 2. And reverse. This way both get a mega land and they are strong togheter. What you intend to do about this?

41 minutes ago, Irrelevents said:

Furthermore..

I've been thinking quite a bit about the state of most veteran players and I've had some ideas that I've wanted to bring up but haven't because I know your busy Mr. D.

Hopefully we can start a more productive focus on easier fixes that would improve the game.. Going back to another thread that Oleg made, would there be an option to sell large flags to the FoT? That way some players could reorganize their lands as Well as have a Really good battle!

There's always options, and losing the ability to shuttle rss's around the globe via flags is something that's really valuable.

I would sell a couple of my high lvl lands, farm the resource points and max out my perks in DAYS. Is this what you had in mind?

@Republic of America @Irrelevents

Edited by ValarMorghulis
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So this issue is basically a bunch of kids playing nicely in a schoolyard, except for 4 kids off in a corner yelling at each other about who can throw a ball the farthest.  

Noone else really cares who can throw balls farthest, and they're just having fun kicking/throwing a ball around, playing tag, whatever. 

Then the principal decides to just take all the balls away from everyone. 

 

I don't really care much either way.  It's your game; you do you.  Just seems like a bit of an over-reaction.

Good thing I already got rid of my big land, or I wouldn't be able to start over(kinda). 

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8 minutes ago, Riylan said:

So this issue is basically a bunch of kids playing nicely in a schoolyard, except for 4 kids off in a corner yelling at each other about who can throw a ball the farthest.  

Noone else really cares who can throw balls farthest, and they're just having fun kicking/throwing a ball around, playing tag, whatever. 

Then the principal decides to just take all the balls away from everyone. 

 

I don't really care much either way.  It's your game; you do you.  Just seems like a bit of an over-reaction.

Good thing I already got rid of my big land, or I wouldn't be able to start over(kinda). 

I think you said it best. 

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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.

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I gave it a thought and got several more ideas. They might not be the perfect fix, but might also start another line of thought that would nail the problem.

I use these concepts:

  • asymmetric abuse: a single player gathering additional lands via described techniques, using either other player or fake account;
  • symmetric abuse: two players performing a two-way asymmetric abuse, trying to circumvent various limitations;
  • local/remote abuse: refers to distance between players, relevant to base range.

1. The Capital Base concept

We could designate the player's Capital Base and impose trade limits on all lands.

There are several methods that could be used to designate the player's Capital Base, eg.:

  • base with the largest amount of lands, largest land or top aggregated lands level,
  • base with the largest amount of check-ins (counter being reset upon moving the base more than eg. 50km).

As an additional, but useful concept against certain kinds of symmetric abuse, we could also introduce a concept of Former Capital Base; each time a new Capital Base emerges, the Former Capital Base is set to the base that just lost the Capital Base status (ie., there is only one Former Capital Base at any time).

There are several limitations scenarios that can be imposed:

  • player cannot purchase a land located in his Capital Base or Former Capital Base
    - this is the most simple, and would clearly work against any kind of abuse, though might hamper some legitimate transactions;
  • player cannot purchase a land located in his Capital Base or Former Capital Base, if it's also located in other player's Capital Base or Former Capital Base
    - a bit more complicated solution, but narrows the effect and does not hamper certain legitimate transactions.

Additionally, the Capital Base concept could be used as a base for many more future game features!

The nice part of this concept is that it's also followed by a pretty nice game plot rationale - we can imagine times and scenarios, when empires are willing to sell their remote lands; but we can hardly imagine an empire selling off it's capital :)

The Capital Base recalculation should be pinned to various events that could influence the change of status, depending on algorithm chosen. It could also, alternatively, be scheduled daily or executed once per n events, to save the costs of calculations involved.

 

Further concepts I thought of earlier, but now that I put the above into written form, they have lost their appeal. Still, I write them down as other potential solutions, or supplementary solutions to any imaginable ways to circumvent the previous concept:

2. Forbidding the purchase of lands contained within own large lands

We could introduce a mechanism that would prevent player from acquiring any land that already resides within the borders of that player's land, if the land level exceeds certain size (like, lv100+).

This concept still allows for rapid illegal growth up to the designated level, but that's hardly ever an issue here. It is also successful both against symmetric and asymmetric abuse, but lacks of certain, I don't know... dignity :)

3. The Exchange Balance concept

Another interesting approach is an introduction of Exchange Balance. Let's say that each player pair has a digital indicator that expresses an equality in their trade. Once the indicator falls beyond certain limit, further trade would be impossible. Such counter could be permanent or diminishing with time.

A code-wise example:

Let's assume that before any offer being accepted (not placed), we select from global trade table all transactions between the two players involved that took place within a specified time (eg. 3-6 months) and calculate the balance by subtracting the number of outgoing transactions from incoming transactions (or the aggregated land levels involved).

The smaller the result, the more equal the balance of trade between players. If the balance factor exceeds certain value (let's for a starter say, 10 transactions or 30 levels), the acceptance of trade offer would be denied with a specific information to the seller ("You sold too many lands/levels to that player; equal your balance by purchasing some of his lands").

This idea is prone to any kind of symmetric abuse, but is otherwise interesting to think about because of other applications:

  • it could prevent trade induced by any form of harassment (were that ever an issue),
  • it could prevent buying off resigning players, whatever the underlying reason (also, were that ever an issue).

 

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1 and 3 are problematic for several reasons.

Capital bases would work against my entire strategy. when I do go to my "capital" area.. I work bases up to their 20's and then when I get on the road (like I am now)  I'll take specific routes so I can drop a 20 on a major urban area and not have to drive through there ever again.. Richmond and Orlando/Miami are on the menu this time. Why should I be punished or hampered in any way because I actually travel and spend ubt to move bases where I want them? ( Oh right..I remember ) This is a game for ppl who travel, I've met Lots ppl that I play games with while I'm on the road. Your time traveling is limited and important, it shouldn't be fettered.

Furthermore, 3 is nothing BUT codified couching. I like trade balance but not like this. If anything I'd suggest that value for flags actually gets established (like..an economy) and any costs for trading Very large flags becomes TRULY (deleted) OBSCENE.

#2 looks like everyone's Hail Mary. For serious..

The problem is with nested flags. Flags that most ppl buy are not inside their sphere of influence (they're also not lvl 100 but nobodies brought that up yet). And for anyone ready to cry "oh... There's gonna be so much clutter"  first of all, don't lie. There's already filters in the game, you can add a little check box on flags to show that flag on your map or not.. Or maybe you'd just never see it by default, they already disappear for ppl that don't log for a coupe weeks. THAT would stem the bleeding and put flag building back where it belongs..outside of your flag!

(And before it comes up, I don't code but I'm sure there's some way to treat flags -that you own- differently if they become enveloped while merging flags that were initially outside of your domain.)

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12 hours ago, Irrelevents said:

Capital bases would work against my entire strategy. when I do go to my "capital" area.. I work bases up to their 20's and then when I get on the road (like I am now)  I'll take specific routes so I can drop a 20 on a major urban area and not have to drive through there ever again.. [...] Why should I be punished or hampered in any way because I actually travel and spend ubt to move bases where I want them?

No idea where did you get such idea. Implementing any of the concepts wont in any way hamper your gamestyle.

In idea #1, once you move your Capital Base:

  1. The "monstrous" lands you have near your home would either remain unlinked to any base (thus any purchase in the area would still not be possible), or...
  2. ...or would become linked to a nearest base that's overlapping the area, but this base would in most cases become the new Capital Base (after recalculation), then...
  3. Your former Capital Base would become a Former Capital Base, but that would only prevent you from buying lands in it's area for some period.
  4. After returning home and setting new base at home, it would in most cases again become your new Capital Base, with the neighbouring base (if any were involved) gaining the status of Former Capital Base and (in such scenario) your recently moved home base would then lose the status of Former Capital Base.

Ideas #2 and #3 have completely no imaginable influence that you could worry about.

Quote

Furthermore, 3 is nothing BUT codified couching. I like trade balance but not like this. If anything I'd suggest that value for flags actually gets established (like..an economy) and any costs for trading Very large flags becomes TRULY (deleted) OBSCENE.

I would agree, though I also think that hoarding resources is not a problems for many lategamers. Money is perhaps an issue, but so are Personnel and Supplies, and once P2P resource trade get's enabled, things will level out. But, like I said, #3 is a very far fetched idea that I think was only worth mentioning because it attempts to solve some completely unrelated problems (were these ever to arise significantly).

Quote

#2 looks like everyone's Hail Mary. For serious..

The problem is with nested flags. Flags that most ppl buy are not inside their sphere of influence (they're also not lvl 100 but nobodies brought that up yet). And for anyone ready to cry "oh... There's gonna be so much clutter"  first of all, don't lie. There's already filters in the game, you can add a little check box on flags to show that flag on your map or not.. Or maybe you'd just never see it by default, they already disappear for ppl that don't log for a coupe weeks. THAT would stem the bleeding and put flag building back where it belongs..outside of your flag!

Yeah, but there is a very specific issue when having a flag inside other players territory. Unless you ally with that player (and some people just wont ally), many of his actions over their land will trigger a war between you and him. And that's a bummer. But, otherwise, it is a simple and crude solution that would on itself largely limit the scale of the general issue.

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@ValarMorghulis voiced a concern about #1 being hard to teach to players. I'll just repost my answer:

#1, if implemented along the second option (cannot buy into Capital from other's Capital) would really rarely trigger and doesn't have to be explained much.

All I would seem necessary would be:

(a) a message: "You cannot purchase this land. Trading lands between players' capital bases is forbidden.\n\nCapital bases are designated automatically based on your gameplay.",

(b) a way to designate your capital base, both in the base list screen and on the map (different icon, perhaps).

I don't believe we need to expose every internal information at first glance. As with other games, curious people always find what they want to find (forums, etc) and the "automatically" magic word is well sufficient.

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@Олег Поленин thanks for your constructive ideas!
 

Apologies if I misunderstood something, but I think ideas #1 and #3 still have some potentially exploitable flaws:

1. If the limits are applied only to the "Capital Base" (i.e. based with the largest amount of [anything]), then people who move (like myself) still get to experience at least half of this exploit.
A made up example: I live in London for many years and have a base level 30 there. Then I move to Scotland and now can "multi-log-trade" from my new home to my heart's content until my new base becomes as big as the original Capital (which is going to take a while before I feel any restrictions).

Would it really make everyone feel better that I only get to cheat up to a certain level? :) Unless the system is 100% cheat-proof there would still be attempts to abuse it and the associated demoralizing effects on the other players will persist.

Plus if I can travel 100km sideways and move my Capital Base using Unobtainium, then resume my unfair levelling of the newly established base in the original spot, this would introduce the brand new concept of "pay to cheat", since moving your bases around would become the new easiest way to advance in leaderboards. :)

And just to confirm: yes, some of our cheaters whom I am currently reviewing have supported the game previously by purchasing Unobtainium.

3. Tracking trade values isn't going to help much against multiple accounts (or playing with a partner/friend who's "in on it"): all I need is to sell an equal amount of lands to my cheating account #2, while doing the same from that account and selling its lands to cheating account #1.
I.e. if I actively play using both of these accounts then I won't feel any difference.

 

On the subject of account reviews and punishment:
This is still happening (and is extremely time consuming); a number of accounts will be permanently removed from the leaderboards in the next few days, and I am still deciding on the additional punishment for those who are still abusing the system while this discussion takes place, and also for those who confessed (please note though that any subsequent exploit abuse will invalidate your confession and the maximum penalty will apply).

 

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