The OP provides a fairly accurate account of the events that have occurred.
The worrying conclusion I draw from these events is this: if you are a committee member, you can not lead a faction because not all strategic options are open to you. Even though the faction Relentless made a deal with the faction FLUX, I was unable to make the only sensible strategic choice for us: civil disobedience.
Bogie has effectively rolled back our decision, leaving us with nothing, simply because I am on the committee. Nearly 100 people were screwed out of money that was rightfully theirs because I wanted to be on the committee to represent the average player, and provide counterweight to the usual debate held among high-tier players. The whole point was to help the average player, and I failed those players in my faction.
We complied with Relentless' demands at first, worried that refusing would cost us our territories as well as the racket. However, by this point, we've decided that if Relentless really want the $25m a day so bad - they can come get it. We benefit greatly from the $250k per member per day. I hope Relentless benefits from this money as much as we have, when they come to take the racket. It's clear that they need it much more than we do.
I can understand, though. Relentless is surely short on cash, contrary to what their significant position in the networth Hall of Fame might indicate. For reference, FLUX doesn't even show up in the top 50 of this same list, and as such I can't find our total networth. It's safe to say it pales in comparison, though.
Our firm position remains that there is no scam, as a scam would imply some exchange being promised. Under Relentless' deal, we stood to gain nothing. The following happened: - Relentless approached us with a proposal: give up 100% of our racket income or be s7'd - The first week, we chose door number 1 - The second week, we chose door number 2 - They failed to collect, and after two weeks decided to collect everything at once, calling it a scam. Bogie sided with Relentless in this matter.
We gained nothing from option one. It is IMPOSSIBLE for any exchange to have taken place, as we gained nothing. We only gave our things up, and we only initially did so because we didn't want to be removed. After the first payment, we decided to grow some balls and say "come get it if you want it so badly".
So then, where does that leave us? I have great respect for Bogie as a player and as a community manager. Do not take this thread for a call for removal from this position: it is not. However, I am entirely convinced that this decision was erroneous for the reasons outlined in the OP as well as in this post.
P.S. Respect to Subversive Alliance. They took two other rackets we had. No extortion, no threats. They came in and took it, fair and square. Sucks, but we can live with it. They put in the effort and they held it themselves, no proxy. I salute you.
We are FLUX. We have a solid core group and are looking to expand our ranks. If you have 1m+ battle stats and are looking to grow further, feel free to apply to us!
We ask: - Donator Status - Level 15+ - Over 1m battle stats - Mandatory participation required for most wars - Activity. Don't just pass by once a day -- play! - Must not be obviously under 16
We will not accept scamming or begging. If you do this, we will kick you.
If you do not help the faction when it is needed, you will be kicked. We do not ask for all too much, but some commitment is in place.
Want to join? Be sure to add your NNB and stats in the application so we know where you are in the game. We look forward to seeing you!
I'm buying defends for $250,000 each. Do them whenever, I will pay you when I see the events.
Please do not: - Message me asking if you can do the defends - Message me saying you're going to do the defends - Message me saying you have done the defends (with the exception of if I've forgotten to pay you - in that case, please DO message me)
You are however perfectly welcome to message me with any questions about the game, or anything else I can reasonably help you with. I'm always happy to help you navigate the game or work something out. Just... not about the defends.
Thank you kindly.
I have reached the goals I wanted to reach. Thank you.
My best guess... toss up between a very elaborate and successful scam with a huge payday, or a very elaborate and seemingly successful self-fed by mod. Sending the 100m with threats is weird... but I don't know what I'd do if I were scammed out of that much money.
Most of all, I hope the human behind the Zapi account is well.
Ironically, this really hammers it home for me: the person comparing ESC to SHAT is completely right; greed as much as you can, grab everything that isn't bolted down, shake down whoever you can manage. And then, be a prick about it in the forums and blame whoever complains about you.
The only difference between you and SHAT is you have some kind of delusion that you are not actually like that. SHAT has reflected and accepted.
Don't be a coward. Embrace the trashy greed you lot unleash on the game.
It's a good way to get started financially, but you should look at transitioning out of selling losses ASAP, for the reasons that players already mentioned in this thread.
Don't underestimate the resilience of black market online gambling. Self exclusion-free illegal online gambling is a growing problem in the real world too, and the fact that they can't be normally advertised doesn't necessarily kill them, it just changes their marketing strategy to word-of-mouth. This is much like with drug dealers, who also can't openly advertise their wares, yet have been in business constantly even if they are hunted by the law all the time.
While it's certainly detectable from logs, you would need to set up a system (or if a system iis already present, a filter/pattern detection config) that will let you detect the signature of the flow of items/money that is characteristic of these off-site casinos.
Probably smart to export/put aside logs related to current off-site casinos so that it's easier to set up that detection.
These patterns are different from the patterns that I would imagine the multi hunter is set to detect. I am only guessing, but for an off-site casino, it would be items (mainly xanax, but probs any item of value or even cash) being sent from many different players to one/a few central players (buyins), and then a similar flow the other way, so from one/a few central players to loads of different ones (payouts), probably slightly smaller in volume/value as the house always wins, but to roughly the same set of players that are sending stuff in.
All in all, a good change. I've only seen one casino that tries to be ethical about this (capping buy-ins and bet size, openly showing expected cash return %, stripped dark patterns), a single one, out of however many zillions are around. If auditing these was in any way a feasible amount of work I would instead be in favor of regulation, but staff have plenty to do already, so banning is IMO the best solution.
#20 is page 1! The sorting confuses me, but you made it, and anyone who tells you otherwise is high on copium.
Incredibly impressive achievement to clear so many achievements in so little time.
Very keen to see how you proceed from here; like I said in our chat just now, you have all the pieces for a complete merit cabinet. By my estimation, 100b is the most time gated to attain for mere mortals. Dirty bomb is manageable with some luck and some consistency. If you can get slots + lotto win, you can absolutely get the DB merits.
Also, fuck RNG with a rake.
OK, rant time! Skip this if you are neither an admin nor an awards HOF enjoyer.
Chedward pls,
Release Time Traveler to be bought by players!
For transparency, I already have this merit by blind luck, as I got it before I took the game seriously in any capacity and hardly ever logged on. This proposal is not in my own interest. It is in my interest for it to never be handed out again, because then I am higher up in the awards HOF. However, I argue the opposite.
The last time it was given out was over 13 years ago. Twice as long as since OP made his already-98.6%-achievements-attained account. Modern server infrastructure is designed specifically to prevent a Time Traveler situation, with redundancy and backups and redundant backups and disaster recovery configurations and...
I - an IT professional working on (distributed and single) server environments - would bet half a kidney that it will never be given out again, even if we wait two decades for such a situation. The worst unavoidable outcome is downtime, not data loss that requires a rollback.
I know the explanation is usually "but we want to keep something to compensate in case we do have a disaster", and that's fair, but also, currently the awards HOF - which is competitive - is unbalanced because any account younger than 13+ years has a handicap.
At the top end it can take years between a single merit gain, which means the effect of this -1 handicap is very significant.
An alternative solution that would cover both competitive fairness in the HOF and allows you to give a little something to the player base when a rollback happens is to create a new merit when the rollback happens, hand it out for free to any account that exists at the time, and then make it purchaseable after e.g. 5 years (around the shortest possible time to reach the highly competitive part of the awards HOF).
If a fair competitive landscape is not relevant, why even bother making an awards HOF? The existence of players like OP proves the relevance.
...
RNG being given to only 25-35 players a day, when there are 100k+ active players, is bad enough (yes I'm salty because I don't have it after all these years). Having a guaranteed now-unattainable merit by the name of Time Traveler, which some players have and some don't, is worse.
Nemesis is an absolutely shitbrained, egotistical troll. Has been for years, at least as lomg as I can recall. Can't imagine how you're surprised you have to pull out a DB to attempt to inflict consequences, when virtually any other conflict could be solvable through diplomacy and explaining the situation.
Basically, if Nemesis were actually done dirty, you wouldn't need to threaten. You're telling on yourself to a legendary extent.
Once enlisted, a matchmaking algorithm will begin to look for an opponent faction based on a number of parameters:
Faction Rating (hidden), made up of stat strength and performance
Faction Size (Factions will be matched with other factions that are within the following range...)
Maximum range: round(({members} + 5) * 1.25)
Minimum range: round(({members} / 1.25) - 5)
Recently Fought (There has to be at least 6 wars since the previous war together.)
If you plug 75 into above formula you get range [55, 100]. For 74 its [54, 99]. So 74 member faction cant match 100 member faction. So this limit is to guarantee that everyone at the top can match everyone and you cant become #1 without getting to fight Monarch.
For "unwinnable situations" its actually quite interesting as new ranked system actually shouldve partially fixed it.
That doesn't really address the question I was asking, though I guess I phrased it wrong. Sure, it's not Diamond/Plat 3 that's causing the problem I'm describing, although it is tangentially related (as both tier and matchmaking take member count into account).
What I'm concretely asking is: why shouldn't or can't the matchmaking algorithm be adjusted in order to match IB to an opponent that can actually have a chance of winning? It's a genuine question, not a rhetorical one. It hasn't happened, so I'm assuming there's a reason, and I'm curious to learn it. A solution to this would also challenge factions like my own which are having a relatively easy time farming wins. Ideally, I'd like to win less often, but make more money when we do. This should incentivise less terming too.
It's not like there exist no factions that could. But those are not getting matched with them. I doubt they'd win against mainline HOF factions. They trounce all Plat 3 that they have ever been matched with.
Somewhere in between there should be a fair fight, no?
Wouldn't average stats in P3 be a lot higher due to <75 member factions smurfing in plat 3 with trillions of stats? IB style? I know such stat cannons also exist in Diamond, but they are necessarily watered down by the 75 member count requirement.
Speaking of which... maybe this has been asked before, but if anyone knows, what is the reasoning for maintaining the plat 3 cap for <75 member factions? I'd argue that IB is essentially exploiting the game design due to the fundamentally unwinnable fight that befalls anyone who matches them. Not exploiting in the "cheating and should be punished" sense, but in the "unexpected unfair/unfun outcomes due to aggressive minmaxing within the game's rules", which could potentially be resolved. Unless I'm missing something obvious about why that wasn't done previously.
And yeah, this would potentially be in our interest because we match IB a lot, but it would probably also make our matchups harder; besides IB, we ourselves get a disproportional amount of winning matchups - and from our IB experience I know that's probably not very fun for our opponents either.
Points based imports (flying/plushies) should be sort of propped up by flat money-based imports such as bear gall, counterfeit manga, and similar items that sell back directly to the game for profit. But when I look at the points price, it seems barely impacted. Maybe they don't spawn enough, or needs to be increased in value? They are already more profitable imports than points imports, but it looks like the flow of plushies (and therefore points) hasn't changed enough to increase the price of points.
You can't fly while racing, so making racing profitable inherently makes flying less tempting (if it is profitable enough). As it stands, racing is a hobby for people who can afford not to work fly. The rich man's hobby. Just like in real life.
I think this idea is actually good. Make racing great, even for those not already at the top of the racing skill HOF.
I know it's graved, but I wanted to respond something just to OP.
It's a social game - leaving is consequential for anyone who has absorbed into the community. It'd be the same if someone were in a sports association or social club for years and decided to leave.
Also, much more nitpicky, but people's individual departure or arrival isn't normally announced at airports - so I don't know if that's the best metaphor for the point you are trying to make.
I guess zooming out: other people are clearly affected by departures (otherwise those threads wouldn't be made); you not seeing that as relevant doesn't mean you get to decide how others deal with that.
The rage wasn't directed at you. The anon commenter was shitting on you.
If you insist on making fun of how I respond to someone shitting on you anonymously, I'll instead just share the entire comment:
You were sent $1 from someone with the message: He's not reading the comments, he just pastes it into a chat box and asks it to write a counterargument for him.
Are they wrong? It doesn't look like it. "Broken mechanic"? You mean a policy that wasn't broken, as the "work" is the submitting of things, and not the original writing being submitted?
Or, in your case, the generated image built out of stolen art? There's no point in slam dunking this point again, others have done so much more beautifully than I ever could.
You didn't submit the screenshot, so you didn't do the work the policy refers to. The tips are the work.
Also, "vocal minority"? Do you really want me to tally up all the arguments for and against provided in the thread? Lmao.
There's no point in further engaging with your ChatGPT. If I wanted to read hallucinated arguments that don't hold water, I would just ask it for those myself. You can't win any argument if you're not using your brain, as you've seen demonstrated in this thread.
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