Quote Originally Posted by davemata View Post
Forty-two.
W26 has never been merged Dave. Maybe you didn't know that. If you did, but still went for Douglas Adams references, that comes off as very flippant and seems to indicate that you don't really care. I would hope that's not the case. As I have indicated to you, previous employee visits to these forums were of a flippant nature, which in turn causes the pushback you get from customers. Yin, meet Yang... Yang, Yin...

Further, my server, N4, was merged on Christmas Eve / Christmas Day, 2009, but not again since (approx 15 months). Just the date that the company chose was absolutely brutal, since merges back then did NOT keep you in your alliance. Hundreds/thousands of players were tossed out of their alliances while away from the game for the holiday. You only gave just under 3 days notice, so many had already started travelling. We had people coming back for weeks wondering what happened. Many of them just quit because of where they were plundered silly because of your company's actions.

Other N servers were merged prior to us too, so 15-17 months for them.

Frankly though, I don't want any kind of merge until you all do something about the large number of inactives and the performance problems that are dogging nearly all of the recent merged servers. My guess is it is something to to do with a database issue, because the lag seems to have the clients idling waiting for a server-side action to complete.

Anyway, as for removing incentive for people to cheat, well, you all had an opportunity to do just that with the whole building queue, but your company opted to take the route of making more money. That's fine, as any company has the right to make money, but let's not pretend that at least one reason why people use automation tools is so that they can level up their cities without having to be there. If you had made the building queue FREE, then that would've removed an incentive, but no, we got told that doing so would "negatively impact game balance" or something similar.

So, I hope you've made it this far with me telling you things like they are, not how you're wanting them to be. You've basically told every single person out there that is cheating that as long as they are careful and do things a certain way, they're going to be able to have advantages over the rest of us who don't cheat.

Could you explain to me why a customer that does not cheat should remain a customer in light of this? What benefit is there for those of us who have played fair and square from the beginning for us to remain?

Thanks...