16MAY24 Bugfixes: Siege, Blockade, Occupy

King Sigerius wrote: SC you told me and gc that Sma did not go behind the ui to launch their seige.

At the time, we believed this to be the case.  As you and many others know, it is perfectly possible to have a siege from inside a city wall if the 'sieging town' was in exodus at the time the siege was sent.

As I said in another post, this is something we are looking at changing.  It's a complex balance, mostly because of the difficulty in sieging cities surrounded by plains, using conventional methods.  We think we have a solution, but will be testing it extensively before release.

What we did not know at the time was that Google Developer Tools (GDT) or plug-ins like Tampermonkey were being used to push invalid data (via the raw HTML) into the back-end.

When (in hindsight, unwisely) I said that "if it's done using the UI, it's legal", I - in no way whatsoever - thought for one second that anyone would believe this meant "SC says it's fine to go behind the User Interface, using GDT or Tampermonkey, and push manually-altered data into the back end that the publicly-available front-end would never allow.  I'm sure the game meant to allow me to set up a siege or blockade from 100s of squares away."

I don't want to get into a discussion about who cheated more, or more effectively.  At the end of the day, it doesn’t really matter if you plagiarise one chapter or an entire thesis: if you get caught, you’re not getting your PhD.  You’re certainly not getting any sympathy from us.

We continue to find new GDT exploits being used - eg the "non-standard commander unit GDT exploit” or the "non-standard commander equipment GDT exploit", both of which have been recently closed. 

I would strongly recommend that any alliance members from either SMA or Iron who suddenly find themselves ‘inexplicably’ missing some of their military commanders do not open a petition about it.  It will not be received sympathetically.

So far, about 2 weeks of development time has been spent on fixing these various GDT-related exploits.  I’m not complaining about this dev time: a closed exploit is not lost or wasted time at our end, it’s a win for the game itself as it improves the fairness of the game for everyone.

However, I’m genuinely not going to countenance any whinging from either side about how they have been unfairly treated.  You should all be counting your lucky stars that the other side did it as well.

My sympathy/tolerance level for players and alliances involved in GDT cheating was zero Fahrenheit, and my sympathy/tolerance level for those same players and alliances who continue to cheat has reached zero Kelvin.

We don’t like kicking people out of the game, but the next GDT exploit I find being used will result in permabans.

If anyone is aware of a GDT exploit that we haven’t yet closed, I would urge them to get in touch with us, via petition, immediately.  If you directly let us know about an exploit that you’re aware of, there’s currently an amnesty on the ‘how-to’ knowledge, but not the practice. 

I’d rather know about it and get it closed than throw people out of the game, but my patience threshold for players and alliances who continue to use GDT exploits has been broached.

Regards,

SC

IMO 

It was so we could destroy the wall and remove the seige. We would have razed either way, except if Sma hadn't hacked, it would have been our way. We planned and observed everything for countless hours, spent so many resources. You changed the game with hacks and only we will suffer for it. Unfortunately how long and how much prestige did I spend to save myself before I sent the blockade? A simple repatriation would have been punishment enough for sma. Now that can't happen and I want justice.

Edited by King Sigerius - 15 Jun 2024 at 15:13

Edited by Thirion - 15 Jun 2024 at 15:52