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Prestige Reset Concerns
Update: http://bbs.evony.com/showthread.php?t=25078&page=26#259
Update 2: http://bbs.evony.com/showthread.php?p=206161#309
Final Update: http://bbs.evony.com/showthread.php?t=25078&page=32#317
I feel a more thorough response to player concerns on Prestige is warranted.
As most of you are aware by now, there was recently a vulnerability in game mechanics that allowed players to gain large amounts of prestige extremely quickly by attacking high level NPC cities with inexpensive troops.
We closed this vulnerability, but we felt that some players had abused this to an excessive degree. There are a total of about 150 out of over 1 million Evony players (or about 0.015%) who were hit with this penalty. For these players we decided that a Prestige reset was in order. This was for several reasons:
- We wanted to preserve the integrity of the game. If players who use exploits can jump to the head of the pack, then this encourages players to continually seek and exploit such weaknesses.
- We wanted to protect the time and effort invested by players who did not exploit. If players who exploit can leapfrog players who are playing legitimately, this encourages legitimate players to exploit as well.
- We wanted to send a message that exploiting will not be tolerated. While our other goals could have been accomplished by merely removing the "excess" Prestige, that does not deter future exploiters. We wanted players to know that exploiting will have consequences.
Now, many people have raised the objection that "we never declared this was an exploit" but we believe that common sense dictates that sending troops to their death repeatedly should raise red flags in a player's mind that "hey, this might not be an intended feature." We want players to think about their actions and inform us if there are exploits instead of abusing them.
Bear in mind that we, as a company, do not gain anything from this action. We don't stand to make any additional profits (in fact, we'll probably lose some) and this has certainly created some negative backlash.
We did this to protect our players and preserve the legitimacy of the game. We don't want players to exploit and we certainly don't want players to feel that they need to exploit to "keep up with the Joneses."
Our goal was, and still is, to make Evony a fun, exciting and fair game in the long-term. Sometimes we have to make decisions in the short term which will be unpopular and financially negative to get the game moving back in the direction we want it to go.
That said, we are always open to feedback and comments from our players. For this reason, I'm going to open a poll in this thread, asking what you think we should do about this situation. This will not bind us to any specific course of action, but we'll consider your thoughts.
Please confine discussion on the Prestige reset to this thread and the related threads that are still open. We don't need any more threads on this subject. Please do not become angry or insulting, so that we can keep this discussion on track. Thank you.
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deleting my posts, not nice, do your job and fix stuff, quit sweeping it under the rug
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Ban the 0.015% that's what i say, who would miss that percentage anyway. Good riddence to bad rubbish. Cheers.
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Excellent post Dawn, you never seize to amaze me. What ever the course of action that will be taken I'm sure will be fair based on the facts at hand.
To Stulcan: Hes a Rep, not a Dev.
- Meph
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ok...
so you complain about us having HUGE armies and punish us for killing them in a way that gives us profit?
AWSOME!
yah as for your sending up red flags comment that is bull crap cuz logic has little to do with the machanics of this game i mean logicly an armored horse should be feared on the battle feild
but they are AWFUL
and 100k archers all stop to shoot at 1 swordsman? oh yah that should send up a few red flags!
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Remove everyone's prestige, that way we all start at 0 again.
But seriously you guys did good by punishing those that exploited. The devs made it clear that you weren't to mass farm prestige when they removed the exploit of macro'ing 10,000 warriors getting 10,000 prestige every few minutes.
This punishment is a good lesson. If you don't punish them then everyone will continue to find exploits and abuse the heck out of them. This way they realize there is a penalty if they do it and get caught.
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Dawnseeker,
Can you address how you will be handling the issue of people who did not know anything about this exploit, not used it, but still got their prestige reset?
How will these cases be handled?
Thanks.
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I really wish you would acknowledge that the players did nothing wrong here... you made the game... we did what you gave us... it cost us time and energy in real life and time and energy in the game ... for some reason you wanna push your faults on the players
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If the number of people affected is so small (150) then I'm wondering why my PM wasn't answered detailing how I was not exploiting the game and yet was affected by the reset?
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and there seems to be many more people than 150 that were affected...