Originally Posted by
WitchyVudugrl29
Like many of the players that still post on this forum I am frustrated by the sharply increasing number of players botting on the server I play on. Not just the botting, but the players and alliances that keep ever growing numbers of accounts to supply their main accounts with resources. In nearly two years of game play we have watched botting go from something being whispered about to being a requirement for joining alliances or coalitions. The attitude has switched from one of ?botting is bad? to one of ?if you don?t bot you are not worthy to be part of us?.
Many of us have spent time and energy posting on this forum asking, begging, threatening Evony to stop the problem. We have sent screen shots, reported players and refrained from using these cheats to play the game. The company has tried a few methods to discourage the botting, but by looking at my own server it is easy to see that they have not yet been able to shut it down. In their defense, the players we complain about are their paying customers also and they do not wish to shut off so much of their revenue stream.
The cheating may have started out with one or two ?win at any cost? players, it then spread to players who simply wanted to be bigger and better and has continued to spread out to ensnare players who now feel that it is necessary to keep from being completely overrun. The fact remains that as long as the benefits of cheating outweigh the risks, it will continue and expand.
So where does that leave us? Evony representatives have indicated that they would rather remove the reason for cheating than remove the cheaters themselves. This will apparently involve some drastic reworking of the game code, suggestions have been tendered that capping troop counts or the amount of resources in a city could assist in stopping some of these actions. There are a lot of players who have good ideas that would help in coming up with suggestions that would keep the dynamic of Age 1 alive and yet remove some of the reasons that many players cheat.
Will players quit if they are unable to use the bots? Sure. Will players quit if others continue to use the bots? Sure. It is a catch-22 situation and no matter what course of action Evony chooses to take, they will lose players, you can?t make everyone happy all the time. In the past they have walked a fine line with the botters, handing out three day suspensions. I know players that have had multiple three day suspensions. Apparently the current system is a graduated series of three, seven and then permanent ban punishments. Each suspension is supposed to reduce their troops, walls and resources by half. I believe that in the early days of the game when you relied on one account to gather resources to rebuild that was a deterrent. But since now we have bigger heroes, multiple accounts and bots to rebuild, this is not much to stop or even slow them down. So what if the punishments were harsher? What if the punishments more suited the growth since those were first conceived?
For example what If we switched to a different scale of punishment?
First Offense:
Loss of 50% of troops, walls and resources
Three day suspension
Techs reduced one level
Prestige reduced 10%
Honor increased by 10%
Cannot truce for three days after suspension ends
Cannot march for 24 hours
Top hero loses 25 levels
Account gets flagged in the data base
Second Offense:
Random 3 ? 7 day suspension ? they will not know when it ends
Loss of 70% of troops, walls and resources
Techs reduced two levels
Prestige reduced 20%
Honor increased by 20%
Removed from their alliance ? Unable to join another for three days
Cannot truce, port or holiday for three days
Cannot march for 48 hours
Top hero dropped 50 levels
Second flag on the account in data base
Third offense:
Random 3 ? 7 day suspension ? they will not know when it ends
Loss of 90% of troops, walls and resources
Title and rank each reduced one level
Techs reduced four levels
Prestige reduced 40%
Honor increased 40%
Removed from alliance ? unable to join another for seven days
Cities randomly ported as at merge
Cannot truce, port or holiday for seven days
Cannot march for 72 hours
Top hero dropped 75 levels
Third flag on the account
The fourth offense would be the one that results in a permanent ban on the player logging back into the account. The cities are randomly scattered on the map, the resources, troops and walls are completely gone and the loyalty is set to zero on each city. Each player would have three chances to correct their behavior and stop using the bot before the final suspension.
Unfortunately many of these botted accounts are not the player?s main accounts; they are often accounts that were abandoned by other players when they left the game. Or they are accounts that were started expressly to be used for resource production to support a main account. Once the account has been flagged how difficult is it to see which account it is being used to support? There would be a trail of transfers leading back to the main account that ?owns? the flagged account. Evony would be able to suspend the main accounts as well, using the four step process outlined above. Most of us have spent a great deal of time and money on our main accounts and heroes. The ones using the bots will not want to take the same risks on their main accounts that they would take on someone else?s abandoned account.
To stop the filler cities or baby cities that plague each server after maintenance simply stop the creation of new accounts on any server over 90 days. To catch and identify the third party software pay a bounty to the first player to send you any new programs. That way you are guaranteed to have a current copy of any software or hack engine that comes along. This will allow you to identify it when it is running on the servers. You would pay the bounty only if the software, hack or cheat was new and would be in the form of game coin to the player reporting it. Each player can only collect one bounty.
Eventually the game play will swing back to one player/one account. It will no longer be one player vs. a monster main account with thirty plus feeder cities . . . those are some fun odds let me tell you. Looking through these forums the players devote time and energy to trying and keep the game play fair and even. They dedicate hours to playing the game and the common thread throughout the posts is one of loyalty. They want to keep playing, they want the game to stay. And mostly ? they want the cheating to stop. Meet them halfway, we have all read the comments from the company and its representatives on these forums. You and the players both want the same results, but change and progress can only be implemented by the company. The only way the players can change is to join the ranks of the botters or to quit the game.