Land Trade: End of Life

[Олег Поленин]

5 hours ago, Mr. D said:

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).
 

True, as long as we decide to designate the Capital Base by largest amount of anything.

Quote

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.

Not true.

As soon as you move your base to a completely new place, it will likely loose the status of the Capital Base and become a Former Capital Base.

At the same time, the lands in original area will either remain unlinked or became linked to a neighbouring/overlapping base.

In latter case, this would be the base that comes to be the new Capital Base, with all the restrictions.

In former case, I think you can easily restrict the sale of the unlinked lands. You're already restricting it other way around, eg. one cannot purchase a land outside of own territory.

 

Edited May 20, 2019 by Олег Поленин

[Олег Поленин]

In overall, I'd say that concepts #1 and #2 applied together will pretty much kill most ill-minded trade.

#2 would hamper land hoarding significantly by itself, while #1 would prevent some larger schemes AND bring a new feature of Capital Bases for you to exploit further.

 

Also, I think the idea of a 100% faul-proof solution is unrealistic. A solution for any invented set of rules and preventive measures will sooner or later be found.

As in real world, I think the best we can set upon is hardening the system as much as possible, and making the potential bypass solutions as uncomfortable and unworthwhile as possible. Such as that when any player invents a way to crack the game and share the exploit, other players would feel discouraged by the amount of work and travel required.

To think of it, we do want to target couch surfers mostly.

[Mr. D]

16 hours ago, Олег Поленин said:

True, as long as we decide to designate the Capital Base by largest amount of anything.

Was there an alternative suggestion?
I am basing my thoughts on your original proposal:

On 15/05/2019 at 6:20 PM, Олег Поленин said:

• 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).

Anyway, what bothers me is that we'd either restrict the system too much by preventing trades within your current territory and all the "former capital bases" (what exactly is left? When would I actually use the trade system, if in most cases it's disabled wherever I play?) or there's an option to cheat in one of these zones until a certain amount of check-ins/land levels.

What is the benefit of re-developing a huge chunk of the game mechanics to end up with a severely limited trade system for which it is hard to come up with a use case (but still allowing some distant possibility of abuse), while we could simply swap it for resource trading and keep it unrestricted, clear and easy to explain?
This would be very much fault-proof and quite easy to develop.

Am I missing something?

[Grizzlyfilms]

Dan, what about my idea? 

 

It would make it a bit risky to always trade lands. It will cost

[Mr. D]

13 hours ago, Grizzlyfilms said:

Dan, what about my idea? 

 

It would make it a bit risky to always trade lands. It will cost

Additional costs for trading a land still make the whole cheat worthwhile: the point of the exploit is that you can grow lands & base to an insane size without leaving your home.
None of the cheaters seem to experience the lack of resources, so it's not going to stop them; it may make the process a bit longer, but we're still discouraging genuine players from real-world travels by allowing the abuse.

The risk of having someone attack your land isn't going to mean much as the process of the "illicit exchange" is super quick: I send a trade offer to my 2nd account, re-login, accept the offer, done. It's highly unlikely that someone will manage to do anything in these few seconds.
And simply adding a luck-based chance to lose the offer/land (e.g. due to attacks of the Ai) is going to be punishing legitimate traders and causing frustration.

So the problem seems to remain!

[Grizzlyfilms]

Troops to transfer the resources.

Supplies to transfer (further away the more it cost)

Takes time to transfer

[Олег Поленин]

On 21.05.2019 at 3:33 AM, Mr. D said:

What is the benefit of re-developing a huge chunk of the game mechanics to end up with a severely limited trade system for which it is hard to come up with a use case (but still allowing some distant possibility of abuse), while we could simply swap it for resource trading and keep it unrestricted, clear and easy to explain?

This would be very much fault-proof and quite easy to develop.

Am I missing something?

The problem is that, from my point of view removing lands from trade really hampers some significant game aspects.

Like, I do a lot of traveling, love to set up new bases where I get to, but the important reason for it is that these bases do expand my gameplay.

After returning home, I can still visit them in game, looking for FoT, other players and... land trading opportunities.

Trading lands in foreign lands allows me to grow my remote bases, thus the latter becoming less prone to enemy attacks (capacity).

It's hardly a form of couch play for me, but an interesting part of the game, involving diplomacy, and also a resource sink. It's not couch play because it's hardly imaginable that, even If I were to travel all year round, would I like to travel to same place all time.

Without land trade, once the trip ends and all FoT is eradicated, I could as well forget that I have made these new bases. No more need to meticulously search for new players in new range (game hardly makes this easy).

Unless I turn towards warmongering.

Also, think about fresh players. Right now, they're hungering for resources in early game, but do possess the option to easily craft new lands and sell them.

What would they trade for if lands were excluded? Gold they lack for the personnel they lack too? No. I bet no-one unless local friends or some extremely samaritan players would care about sponsoring new gamers.

I'd say the only use for resource-only trade would be during alliance wars. Already grown players would find it easier to support any conflict they wish.

Finally, resource-only trade is also vulnerable to exploits. An example? If I set up few fake accounts (say, ten), ally them all and stock up lots of resources for gathering (or just go on a magnet run to some new city) it's enough for me to activate each fake account for few seconds and then run the magnet to tenfold the resource return (once I trade back all resources from my fake "allies"). No game, no trade is free of exploit chances.

That said, I still urge you to consider saving the land trade.

[Mr. D]

Ok guys, you asked - we listened.

As mentioned in my second post in this thread, I am fully aware of all the advantages of the trade system; it is not due to the lack of such that the removal of trade system ended up in our list.
Our only issue is with the way the trade is abused right now. But let's not repeat what's already been stated above!

I believe I finally have some good(ish) news!
It appears that we have found a foolproof solution at last, which will allow us to keep the unrestricted trade system and all of the associated strategies.
This solution involves some drastic changes to the core game mechanics, which may not be appreciated by everyone because these changes will make certain aspects of the game a lot more difficult as they eliminate the "illegitimate couching" strategies pretty much entirely.

The new changes are undergoing some rigorous testing to make sure we don't introduce any new exploits, but so far things are looking very promising and a fairly significant release is now to be expected within the next few weeks (removal of the trade system is hereby officially cancelled).

Because of the fact that this update makes it significantly more difficult to end up with a single enormous land all pending punishments for exploit abuse have been postponed, as after this release all land-related leaderboards will be reset (and some of the obscenely huge lands - nerfed. Yep, sorry folks, but leaving these level 4000+ lands in the game will not be fair in light of the new mechanics).
Please note though that the original exploit is still strictly forbidden and if I catch you doing it before the release you are risking of losing your entire account.

More details will be posted closer to the upcoming update.

[S Keillan]

I mentioned this to my wife, who has one of those "obscene" level 4000+ lands, that she might lose her land. Her response was kind of a meh. In a sense, this might a nice reset for her.

[Олег Поленин]

@Mr. D Can we at least get some hint on the changes? Like, whatever is set firm by now or what current strategies (other than landmongering, if one can name it a strategy) will become invalidated?

I'm going to China in next few days, for more than two weeks, and I'll be setting few new bases along with whatever I can do locally to make them strong. This involves setting many small lands within merging range to pump up sandboxes later and with them, pump up base level.

And it involves some time and planning to maximise the effort while not sacrificing sightseeing opportunities...

It would be a pity to learn after return that any effort I did there, dedicated time to etc., is no longer valid due to game rule changes. Or that, knowing new mechanics, I would play differently, put accent on different strategies.

Again, it's not like I'll be coming back there any time soon to fix the errors in view of new mechanics

Edited May 27, 2019 by Олег Поленин

[Mr. D]

There you go!