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Thread: NPC Clearance (not for whiners!)

  1. #1
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    Default NPC Clearance (not for whiners!)

    OK so we've just seen what we all knew was coming sometime soon.... an NPC clearance of larger than normal proportions.

    I, for one, actually appreciate that Evony do this, since a fully locked down map is BORING, and sometimes it's nice to be able to revamp your field, get rid of 5's, or that someone left behind, etc.

    Yes, the suggestion has been made that Evony delete levels 1-4 and 6-9 (dear GOD get rid of the 6's), and I also believe that this is something that really should be embraced, but I'd like to suggest instead/also that the NPC's be deleted AFTER the levels have been flipped.

    At the moment, the necessary removal of NPC's means that people are left with fields full of L6 and L1 NPC's, both of which are entirely useless, both for food and defence.

    If the NPC's were deleted AFTER the flats were levelled up, we would still be left with open flats, but would be able to immediately fix troop upkeep issues.

    Yes, there's the argument that people would immediately refill the flats that were just opened... but that's already happening anyway. At least this way there would be less screaming every time it happened. (OK, there'd still be grumbling, but welcome to Evony).

    A suggestion... no whinge, no whine, no trolling. Would love for an Evony rep to take this onboard as a possibility, or advise it can't be done and answer the question for future.
    ~
    I don't believe in thinking before I speak
    I prefer to be just as surprised as everyone else by what I say

  2. #2

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    I think there would be less whining if:
    1) they do something about inactives. Not saying those very recent, but there are dead accounts which are dead for over a year. Just on my server 20-25k of them.
    2) they stopped taking npcs which are 1-3 miles from players cities. Players are more likely to go extremely mad if they are hit by this and I once lost 3 npcs in 2miles radius from 1 city. I do think this is one of likely the major reasons for such complains and you can hardly blame people for being mad as it prolongs farming and makes you vulnerable to point 3
    3) on some servers flat filling accounts just pop in and screw players npcs. Also flats can be taken out and an alt port in to annoy your hostile (met this). If the flat is filled, they just take it from you, while you are offline, if the flat is not reinforced (but that can be costy on food).

    Full map is boring, but there are now areas in the map which looks like deserts, nothing left there.

    One possible solution can be to like remove only npcs in certain distance from players (if lvl 5s and 10s, other lvls from any distance, as that would be welcomed), or do really long inactive clearing instead of 1 npc clearing.

  3. #3
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    Default

    The NPC clearance is random. Asking for it to be specific to "not within 1-3miles of a player's city" is impractical and uneducated to the scope of how large THAT particular task would be. Not to mention the can of worms when people start whining about how Evony picks on THEIR NPC's but not Joe Friday's.

    Clearing inactives is something entirely different from NPC's, and Evony reps have already addressed the fact that the accounts where money was spent will never be removed. I think you'll find that this has root in legalities regarding money. Additionally, the term "inactive" is too often applied by assumption, just like "oh, they must be botting". Just because a city appears dead, doesn't mean that someone isn't logging into that account periodically, either as a social chatter, or some nefarious scheme to steal your flats.

    The fact that Evony do mass-NPC-clearing periodically is something that needs to be accepted and adjusted to, since current gameplay seems to centre around filling the map with often useless NPC's. Please don't whine about losing "3 npcs in 2miles radius from 1 city", since I personally know of 1 player who had to move his main city due to having NO NPC's of any type within a 5mile radius of his city.

    But to be practical and productive, if flats were levelled PRIOR to deleting NPC's, this type of calamity and sob-story would be fixable within fairly short order.
    ~
    Last edited by Khalee; 05-01-2011 at 08:36 AM.
    I don't believe in thinking before I speak
    I prefer to be just as surprised as everyone else by what I say

  4. #4

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    This is the fairest and most practical suggestion that I have heard regarding this. As it is. it feels like Evony are hurting players, this way, they get open flats AND their farms back. (I think you should post in suggestions or have this thread moved there. +1 )

  5. #5

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    I think on ss60 they removed the inactives. If my ss is to merge for the 3rd time it is going to be a huge problem with 60-80k inactives afterwards.

    Well, what about just dont do mass npc clearing? and I actually had my main sitting in the middle of a desert before as well and unfortunatelly I did not have the option to port due to lack of ports and no money to buy them with. So I know too well how that feels, especially when you are stuck there and have to cope. But on crowded ss 3 lvl 10s removed can cause a huge problem to a player, because you have suddently less food and you struggle and loose reserves fast - especially with botters farming all your lvl 5s. Maybe instead of cleaning 30-40 npcs in one area (have that close to 2 cities now), do more regular, small npc taking away? And try to spread it. For some reason it seems that if an area was hit by npc clearing once, it is more likely it will be hit again and it is not funny to have the same npc taken away just 3 days after you actually managed to fill the spot (and the said npc is next to your city). Maybe focus on npcs which dont get farmed? Lets say npcs which were not farmed for x (number) of days before the clearing? Those are likely the npcs which would actually cause less hassle when removed.

  6. #6
    Join Date
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    Default

    Quote Originally Posted by Khalee View Post
    The NPC clearance is random. Asking for it to be specific to "not within 1-3miles of a player's city" is impractical and uneducated to the scope of how large THAT particular task would be. Not to mention the can of worms when people start whining about how Evony picks on THEIR NPC's but not Joe Friday's.
    Correct, as it is people complain when maintenance takes 5 minutes longer than they expect, but I can see maintenance for that system taking a long time.

    Quote Originally Posted by Khalee View Post
    Clearing inactives is something entirely different from NPC's, and Evony reps have already addressed the fact that the accounts where money was spent will never be removed. I think you'll find that this has root in legalities regarding money. Additionally, the term "inactive" is too often applied by assumption, just like "oh, they must be botting". Just because a city appears dead, doesn't mean that someone isn't logging into that account periodically, either as a social chatter, or some nefarious scheme to steal your flats.
    Again correct, we often get reports about people "botting" and being inactive that just isn't proven by server data, and then the reporters get ****ed off because we didn't do what they wanted us to do. Social chatters actually comprise a relatively large population of the player base, which is no surprise for a social war game.

    Quote Originally Posted by Khalee View Post
    The fact that Evony do mass-NPC-clearing periodically is something that needs to be accepted and adjusted to, since current gameplay seems to centre around filling the map with often useless NPC's. Please don't whine about losing "3 npcs in 2miles radius from 1 city", since I personally know of 1 player who had to move his main city due to having NO NPC's of any type within a 5mile radius of his city.
    I for one know that I went through my first clearing back in Dec. 09, and at that time we were bewildered, at this point though, 1 yr and 5 months later - it's the reality of the game until it's changed. I ordered the clearing on ss58, as I was trying to start an account to test something, and after a few minutes of not being able to get in because each state was full, I made the decision. It would also be unfair and impractical to institute "x miles from Y city, blah blah" and would only create a new strategy where people hurry ot make fake cities in order to keep their NPC fields safe. I'm not interested in helping that strategy or something like it evolve.

    We're making changes to better address flat fillers, and have already begun permanent bans on them throughout Age 1.

    Flaming CHICKEN!
    Courtesy: Sturm

  7. #7

    Default I had a response...

    but I decided to just post to the thread in general...

    Oh, and the response wasn't to the OP...

    Anyway, there are some servers where maintenance takes a very long time. I've seen reports of 1-2 hours for maintenance. If those claims are true, then that is unacceptable. That is anywhere from a 4.17% to a 8.33% downtime per day, if those claims are true. In comparison, for my server, the maintenance generally lasts 5 minutes, 10 at the most. That is 0.347% to 0.694% downtime.

    As for the NPC clearings...where to start?

    However long these clearings have gone on, from the very beginning I saw problems.

    First they only went left-right, down 1, left-right, down 1, until such time that they cleared the pre-determined amount, then stopped. This meant that various people were specifically targeted, while others had nothing happen to them. Sure, eventually everyone got their turn, but it took 2-3 months for that to happen. That is an eternity in a persistent game environment. With that approach, 5s and 10s were not being hit, but I predicted that eventually they'd have to be for the sweep to be effective.

    So, eventually the 5s and 10s started getting wiped. We were told that there'd be a distance limit, but, again, I predicted that people would adapt to that and strategically place cities to help keep their coverage area.

    I'm very glad that the company has caught up to speed on what was very obvious as of, I dunno, 6-8 months ago.

    What the company seems to fail to understand is that their lack of enforcement of any kind of rules is "the disease", and these NPC sweeps are just "treating the symptom, not the disease".

    One account per server. That means that a particular player can occupy a maximum of 10 spaces on the map. When you refuse to enforce that rule, players are going to abuse it. If I have 3 accounts on a server, I can then occupy 20 more than I was supposed to. If you have 100 people that decided to do exactly the same as me, that becomes 2000 more spaces. If 500 people, 10000 more spaces.

    OK, so what if people don't use up their maximum amount of space, either due to them only being Civilians or Knights? Well, that means 2 additional spaces per extra account, but people make these flat fillers in the hundreds, so eventually that becomes the same. If 20 people make 100 flat fillers, that's 2000 flats. If 100 people make 100 flat fillers, that's 10000 flats.

    Both things stem from the utter and complete lack of enforcement of one account per server.

    The company can continue to rake in cash, but this thing of laying all the responsibility at the feet of customers because the company doesn't like facing the possibility of losing some of that revenue stream is disingenuous at best, dishonest at worst.

    It's time to get off of the fence. Stop aiding and abetting cheaters while claiming to have punishments that are so rare, people doubt the punishments exist, or fully embrace cheating and cease all claims that there is any kind of punishment, as it's no longer "cheating", just simply part of the game.

  8. #8

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    if you really care that much about your "NPC's" then you obviously arnt playing the game properly. you arnt supposed to sit around and farm all day, your supposed to go out and take other peoples stuff and fight them.

  9. #9

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    Quote Originally Posted by Beelan View Post
    if you really care that much about your "NPC's" then you obviously arnt playing the game properly. you arnt supposed to sit around and farm all day, your supposed to go out and take other peoples stuff and fight them.
    There is a concept that shows how short-sighted that is...

    The Law of Diminishing Returns

    As fewer and fewer people are able to sustain high resource reserves, the less incentive there is to attack players, because there is insufficent reward in doing so.

    Never mind the whole thing about how people have clearly been able to game the system to profit from the lack of enforcement of rules...

  10. #10
    Join Date
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    Default

    I honestly don't mind the presence of the NPC's, so long as there are more 5's and 10's more than anything else.

    ss60 is a VERY crowded server, and problems about troops upkeep because your neighbor has to fend for his own food are more rampant than your neighbor attacking you and killing off your troops.

    Yeah, I have a myriad of uses for all the NPC's 6-9, and I actually savor having 1 of each near my towns (strangely enough).

    Yes, I appreciate the NPC's being clear and all, but I'd like to see more discrimination shown for the noob NPC cities sticking around for longer than a few days...

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