I am curious about what YOU think.

Blankit, yes, the developers have sometimes taken feedback from the community into account and changed existing game mechanics or introduced new ones.  

Robertscott wrote:     Blankit, Ten Kulch and his reasoned persuasive writing is a great asset to this game, throwing him a shot with the "fancy formal tone" is uncalled for, his prose is a delight to read.       Also he does not call people names in a malicious way in his blogs.  His labeling players "carebears" or similar is funny and justified.     You are choosing the wrong guy to Ad Hominem.  We are blessed to have his intellect here in our little game of a few hundred players.

I apologize for my snarky tone. I was just trying to find something mildly offensive as his arguments were opposing my small way of playing this game. I would like to see if the same doesn't happen if someone respectable suggested that every person can only operate only one account from now and one of the accounts will have to be abandoned or the devs will do that at random.

And I would like any to tell me why my arguments are wrong. I still don't understand why terraforming is so annoying.

Btw has any such discussion ever changed how and what developers implement?


Edited by Blankit - 18 Mar 2018 at 11:13

    Blankit, Ten Kulch and his reasoned persuasive writing is a great asset to this game, throwing him a shot with the "fancy formal tone" is uncalled for, his prose is a delight to read.  

Ten Kulch wrote: Terraforming encourages account churn, and it also encourages people to break the two account rule. The theory behind moving the plots is that new players shouldn't be penalized for moving their first city. Moving the plots allows the city to be moved completely intact, to a new location outside the n00b ring. On the face of it, that idea is fine. New players might be discouraged at the possibility of losing any progress (although I would argue resource plot progress is probably quite survivable for a few plots). The problem I have with terraforming is that people are selling accounts for gold, in order to exploit a loophole to change the resource plots, resulting in very powerful fortresses. These fortresses are powerful because people have used a disposable account to remove the balancing factors to defensible tiles like solitary mountains. Accepting a 5 food square, or a particular 2/3 resource deficit, should be part of the fortress equation. Tiles shouldn't be perfectly suited. Some people even use terraforming to transform the tiles around their cities, altering the resource distributions of entire areas. People also feel free to go into GC and troll on these disposable accounts. One look at the siege page shows just how prevalent terraforming has become. I personally believe that terraforming also makes it impossible to get a true read on the number of remaining active players. That's a long list of negatives. Much like the Defy Death exploit, I believe that clever players observed a loophole in the game rules, and have been abusing teleport to the detriment of the game. I think it would be much healthier for the game if terraforming worked like a one-time instant exodus with no building level loss. You get the plot distribution of the new tile, period. I also believe that if terraforming is such a valuable technique, that people should be able to purchase a plot re-distribution for perhaps $5. That would cut out all the account churn and sock puppets, and pay money into the game to change the map, instead of the current underground gold-for-accounts economy.

Note to self: Even people who write in a fancy formal tone may be wrong.

Any terraformer who doesn't want to be kicked doesn't use more than one terraforming account at a time. Or in cases like Eowan's where all he wants is gold, he can do two a week, shifting gold from one terra account to the next.

And if you want to get "an accurate read of the number of active accounts" you can count the number of accounts older than 2 weeks. Anyone who can't terraform a silly tile in 2 weeks (the pop is done in 4 days) should probably not be used by anyone. It will also allow to ignore the people who don't get the hang of this game.

And the "troll in GC" is just you getting mocked one time by Eros' terra alt which you accused Shells of doing (I read it in the forums). You call people worse things on a regular basis in your blog, that's nothing. And if you were referring to Biff, devs can ban him anytime they want. Anyone can make a temporary rant alt for that purpose even if terraforming was removed.

And like paying $5 for a tile distribution won't make this game even more pay to win than it already is. I can see you wisely commenting that this should only be allowed to be done on the tile which the city is on, then anyone can get newbies to make temp alts to tenaril next to them and then pay them real money to do this. It will have the exact same affect and real money will change hands. To stop this from happening is the reason I have heard the devs added gold for pres system (not sure about this one, but allowing money for one thing will give people more ideas about selling highly developed accounts). And once the real money start changing hands, the terraformers will feel this as a source of income (one which will fund their gaming needs without ever connecting their real identity).

The truth is that all this does is pay new players who haven't made any alts yet some money to spend. It is almost a viable strategy to earn gold to feed one's main (just to keep a defense army). You may rant 24X7 about those big bloated account, but other than your ascetically designed military main, you have hoarded just as much gold and adv res from your blockades as any of them.


Edited by Blankit - 18 Mar 2018 at 04:20

Ten Kulch, I don't like terraforming either. (I think it discourages people who do it from engaging in the game in more interesting ways with a second account, or sometimes even both accounts, not to mention multi-accounting temptation, and I agree with you that having constraints in difficult terrain like desert and jungle would make the game more interesting overall if there were not an easy way around it.)