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Last Official Nova Riata Forum Announcement Over the past few days I have made one difficult decision after another, knowing that any and every word I say would be analyzed at every angle by a reasonably angry community. Nova Riata hosted a great many things that I will miss, from the ridiculous amount of voice chats to the day to day banter. From the poker nights fueling our gambling addictions to the endless furry memes. What I'm going to miss the most though are the many people that made up Nova Riata, all of them innocent and unaware of what Pooball and Ar Gud had done. They all created a fun community that I believe had no equal, even though it was structured around the exploits of a leader who only wanted to save us from his past mistakes. Of course in doing so, Pooball caused the very thing he was hoping to prevent. I'm here today to represent the innocent of Nova, and by day change today I will be the last one standing, ready to absorb the community justice. I hereby surrender to Pantheon and from now on I request that Nova's not so Secret war be renamed to The Great Sock War as requested by rawr. After everything is said and done, I will disband Nova Riata. I wish all my members well in their future ventures and hope they had picked new homes by now that will keep them safe and treat them with the respect and dignity they deserve, perhaps in the future we will all united again. but until then, Good bye tl;dr The captain must go down with his ship

Jesus, there is so much to unpack with this incident. I see that many are focused on the perpetrator(s) and their participation in activities that are so blatantly in violation of the terms of use of this game. Rightly so, I might add. But this does raise, at least for me, what I consider to be bigger questions regarding this game and the operation thereof. For background, I have 25 years of experience in IT, mostly in endpoint management but I do know systems and have participated in large projects for multiple Fortune 500 companies. Some serious issues have been highlighted because of this incident from a systems operation and control perspective. I do not have insight into how Alex is running his operation so there I am probably making multiple false assumptions. The point is that the questions are being raised, not that I am providing answers to them. To start: 1. It appears there is a systems-wide lack of verification and process control with regards to player actions. Apparently a player was able to spawn massive amounts of resources without admin notification. This implies that there are no processes in place with regards to potential abuse vectors. I'm talking about a scheduled process/script that monitors resources and production by comparing current production to long-term trends and against outlying potentials (i.e. 1st and 2nd std dev potentials). Since there are theoretical limits to the amount of change that *could* occur to production in game (i.e., maximum production capability per nation and game-wide) this is simply a programming problem, and does not have any problem in implementation. It's totally doable and the apparent fact that it hasn't been done is concerning. 2. It also appears that there is documented proof of a similar exploit in use in a prior self-reported example by the original perpetrator. This points to a lack of control over session interaction with clients and the game system itself. I can only assume from face value and the example of nuking an opponent twice by simultaneously employing two separate and discreet clients that there is no system in place for identifying unique sessions and therefore multiple clients could indeed interact with the game within a relatively short period of time and conduct the same operation without failure. This points to a lack of database interaction control. Again, this is simply a systems design and programming problem, not an implementation problem unless the game system itself is really limiting the implementation. 3. The kicker for me is that this is a for-profit operation. There is an expectation by a paying customer that the game will operate within a set of expected behavior - that is, that you will gain an advantage by purchasing something within the game that someone will not be able to gain for free. Obviously this exploit calls this expectation into question and raises the most important problem of all: that the fundamental balance of the game is easily exploitable because of poor design and implementation. While I have purchased credits in the past I will no longer do so due to the serious administrative impact this exploit has highlighted. In short, this game needs to be run better. Things like this are avoidable. If asked for my advice it would be to hire professional staff to constantly evaluate the backend operation and question where potential exploits might be found, build reporting and verification systems to highlight exploits that were never considered, and to be more responsive to reports of exploits. LOL, I'm shaking my head that the original report was not acted upon from a systems perspective. To continue to allow customers to purchase credits while not addressing that issue is unethical and highly problematic. TL;DR, old man rants about things he cannot easily change. Thanks for coming to my TED talk.

Better to go out with a bang than with a whimper, Best of luck to you guys, hope you end up staying in the game. Uhmm, not counting the fact that Uriah didn't cheat. You realise that many many times cheaters do win, its just in this case they got caught for being too cocky. Good to see you back in TF, hope you guys get back on track as quick as you can. Don't worry Madden just does these posts that make no sense sometimes,

I agree it was handled poorly. I rerolled a 500+ day nation to clear myself of the stigma and try and salvage some reputation but I’m still being branded a cheat and being embargoed. Alliances have even given orders to embargo the innocents in Nova *cough*Typhon. I think Alex handled it badly but also the community hasn’t helped in my opinion the guilty have been banned so let the innocents play on without witch hunting them

wtf, Uriah posted a nice post... he wasnt a cheater. But goodluck to you Uriah!

Best post 2019

o7 Uriah o7 Nova Riata I wish every last one of you the best of luck in what comes next. You deserved better. ❤️ Adrienne and TKR

I made that myself actually

You sir, just earned my respect. The fact that you are sticking with your alliance until the very end is something I can't help but to respect. I wish you luck @Uriah 'the Fox'.

So what if I just cried a little bit. That little fox is so heroic ?

I definitely don't condone or even understand why someone would cheat in a game like this, but it makes more sense to me that someone might if they literally report it to admin and he does nothing about it. Pooball does not come off like a mastermind here. I think his fear that other people might be benefiting from that same exploit is actually quite valid. And he tried to do the right thing about it initially, only to be failed by admin. He deserves the ban and I personally really revile anyone who would put their membership in the position he did. But ultimately he's not who I blame for this happening.

Thanks I will handle it Edit: wrong account

I gotta ask who was the 1 guy who voted against? He is a hero, and would have saved this forum post filled with such intelligence from existing!

Paying to win mechanics and the people who use them disgust me, and I wish both were removed from the game.

Uhmm, I don't know if you've been using Internet Explorer, but TU merged into tCW months ago. Their leader @RightHonorable became an IA deputy in tCW as well. The active members merging with us and so did TU's bank as well. The inactive ones were the only ones left.

DOWN WITH THE PANTHEON HEGEMONY!

Nobody cares because you're declaring war on an alliance of people who've been inactive raider fodder for weeks.

I'll let it slide this time, thanks for being upfront and don't do it again.

Well, Lahey is drunk again and I'm basically running this park now. Julian skipped off with his little girlfriend so it's just me and Bubs keeping things together around here. Those International Trailer Park dicks kicked us out of their stupid little club - so we've come to Orbis to let everyone know how great Sunnyvale is. Anyways, I hate all these fancy word writings so if you need anything you know who to talk to. Not drunk Lahey, not fat cheezeburger eating Randy - me. I'm in charge here now alright boys? In the mean time I'm gonna look around and see if there's any good dope. Two smokes lets go, Ricky.

Uhhh. I don't find the ad particularly funny, considering how lopsided his enforcement has been and how lax he's been with actually correcting issues (that were reported to him over a month ago), that he thinks that's the best use of his time. I find it fairly insulting, and if I was someone who paid for credits I'd probably riot. It's also overtly political, which is messed up for an admin. I mean it's certainly not the first time he's done actions as admin that were motivated by influencing in game politics, but I'm still plenty baffled why anyone might think that's a good thing. "Remember that time I didn't fix a serious problem, and made credits have less value as a result? Hilarious! Buy credits." ????????

By that logic we should get Frawley to add a section for net damage to Inst's wallet ?

They are a disbanded alliance... good for you.

All glory, as always, to the Overking.

Nova was a great fun & vibrant community and I will sincerely miss it . I guess we had our own little disappointing GoT plot twist that turned into the "Brown Wedding" eh Uriah ?? The Fox Remembers !

TU merged you idiot.

o7 I will miss the gambling and the vc as well. But mostly the gambling

You’re a good dude Uriah, pity to see what happened to NR

I wouldn't call an "alliance" with 2 nations really an alliance, so this is not an alliance announcement. Moving it away from Alliance Affairs and locking it.

Jesus why didn't the guy just ask for help... If he really did tax at 100% he could have so easily taken a loan, paid them out and handled the interest. Or even asked TKR, they're rich, and at least for Ad Mech they gave no-interest no-period loans. I was kinda hoping for an evil mastermind confession, because this is just kinda depressing. It could so easily have been handled without all this.

Last night, I received a message from pooball with a request for me to post something on his behalf on the forums. I was on the fence about posting it but I know a lot of you have questions about how and why this happened so I thought it would be worthwhile to share with you all here. He's not expecting forgiveness but wanted the opportunity to apologize and explain why he did what he did. "Hello everyone its Pooball I know you all dislike me right now and im now banned in game and on the forums but I wanted to explain a few things to you all. Please take your time to read this. Firstly I would like to apologise to everyone and come clean with this this cheat. I did know it was going on and even asked others to help me with it. Everyone who was taking part in this cheat has rightly been banned now. I first noticed that this could happen back during knightfall and at the time I did report this bug to Alex so that it could be fixed at the time Alex doubted me so I done it again and sent him the details but then never had a reply. Not trying to start a big argument now but I had seen others doing the same thing during knightfall. Now anyway a few months before knightfall I started doing a lot of trading I had a lot of people sending me money so that I could trade with more money meaning I could make more money buying bigger bulks. All my trading at the time was 100% not cheating and things was working out very well I had billions invested from many different people over Orbis. Anyway I started to hear a lot of people talking about this big nap ending so I thought great ill buy loads of rss and then sell them during the war. At the time rss was a lot higher in price so for example I bought roughly 500k alum at 2700 ppu. I had many trades like this and then the war hit Nova and I had to send everything away to be safe. Prices started to drop like crazy and I was making a huge loss when it was time to sell everything. Some safekeeping was never returned along with some money but it was my problem so I had to fix it. What money I did get back I ended up buying more rss with to lower the avg price that I had paid but this still didn’t work as nothing was selling on the market. I started to get a lot of angry people demanding for their investments back and managed to avoid paying anyone for along time. This really stressed me out as I was by that time doing so well with Nova and I didn’t want members to lose out due to my mistakes with non alliance issues. I was getting 50+ dms in discord from angry people asking for their money back I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t want to just delete and reroll leaving people losing so much so I wondered what the glitch would do with trades. At this point I didn’t care if I was cheating I didn’t want to let anyone down North 14 knew I owed so much and was stressed about it all so he helped me. No other gov or member or any other players knew this until now so please do not punish them any more please accept them into your alliances and treat them like you would anyone else. I made a lot of good friends and again im sorry to you all. I would also Like to thank everyone who helped me and I wish you all well. I would also like to add that Blink did not know about this even if we are brothers, He 100% would have made me not do it or even reported me. I dont expect any favours from anyone but he really should not be banned. I will stick around on Discord for a few days if anyone wants to talk to me."

It's a little worse, actually. We don't actually know it was only pooball. And I now lack confidence that Alex will find out if other people have benefited from this in the time it was possible.

Aren't you the guy who was sending his CC details around during Knightfall in order to buy credits for everyone? As well as re-rolling to buy credits It seems that you can get away with cheating aslong as you pay enough to do so???

RIP Nova. Gone, but not forgotten. Radiation levels aren’t the same without them.

Holy shit @Alex the savagery I assume someone gave it to you given how clean it looks, but god damn hahah.

gl in the world yall rawr

Meh.

Looking like the pointless nature of the war might create a grudge, no? Sometimes you have to stir the pot before you can eat your soup... hot.

Honestly, do Pantheon have a horseshoe up its ass? Like what are the chances.

.... so this is wat happens wen cities dont get deleted ? my sincere condolences to whomever has to deal with the crazies rawr

I totally agree, come on people it's a game.

alright even if they cheated death threats and shit should not be apart of it whoever is doing that you should be ashamed.

So there is a god. Thank god this is happening, and good riddance. Thanks for giving us your position as rank 11 tho, lol.

I just wanted to stop in and give another update here. Some of you may have already noticed but we did make the decision to cut ties with Nova Riata. As I stated earlier, we weren't aware of the situation and we don't support or condone cheating or using exploits. To that end, we have been upfront with Alex in regards to anything we had learned about the situation. Following Alex's earlier post and a conversation with Nova, we decided this would be the best course of action. We understand the desire for justice from the community and we will not stand in the way. We also won't be taking any further action against Nova either though and we'd caution against turning this into a mob justice scenario. The extent of this issue and who exactly was involved isn't known and punishing the entirety of Nova to the extent that has been tossed around for the actions of a few individuals - whether directly involved or "simply" complicit - is detrimental and destructive to the health of this game's community. I'd like to ask @Alex to reconsider his stance regarding his handling of this situation.

To be clear, this doesn’t make Pantheon good. One person’s Derp doesn’t clear another’s Herp.

For those of who who have already reached out to me, thank you. I appreciate you doing so. In the interest of transparency and keeping the community in the loop, I thought I'd comment here as well. When we were presented this information shortly before it was released, both myself and Pooh reached out to Alex with it and any other information we thought relevant. We at TKR don't condone cheating/exploiting of defects and are doing everything we can to support Alex's current investigation. Upon completion of the investigation, we will take appropriate action regarding those individuals and/or alliances involved. If anyone would like to talk to me further about this, please feel free to send me a DM.

I like the new laughy emoji

Lol no one cares