Lu Xun

Which is to say, how to cheat more effectively, and how to evade detection more effectively. I suggest that if you sincerely believe what you are saying, you should look for mentors to teach you how to cheat effectively because following this sort of policy will result in ban evaders devising ever more effective methods of cheating and PnW will be overrun by cheaters. The first banning, hurts, basically, but once you've been banned the second banning is just "try again later".

If you look at this from a Western perspective, also remember the Athenian legislator Draco, who lends his name to the adjective "draconian", and has thus been repudiated by the ages. If you want to know something amusing, consider this. The Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker wrote a book called "The Better Angels of Our Nature". It explained how the incidence of violence declined over the years, as well as the cruelty of punishments have decreased correspondingly. You could claim it's a chicken and egg thing, but the reality is, punishments that are harsher than called for don't work, in fact, they push people to cover for each other over the perceived unfairness of the legal system, and well, what's the difference between being draw and quartered and being shot through the head? You're dead anyways; after a certain point returns diminish near zero. You are a (That terrible game that is totally irrelevant and I shouldn't be bringing it up anyways) player, are you not? Are you familiar with certain ban evaders who end up operating multi-schemes because they're already banned and if caught, the recipients of tech can claim that they didn't know, and that the ban evader just gets rebanned?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacobellis_v._Ohio Shall I look it up for you?

Wrong. Banning should be avoided at all costs and used minimally because you do not want to create an increasing population of ban evaders. I've been there, done that, I've shook hands with quite a few of them. After all, once you're banned, what can the game administration do to you? It's sort of like the death penalty, except you get free respawns in this game. I will admit that in a certain game, I have been banned over 30 different times within 4 months (actually, I believe the first time after I was banned I made 80 different rerolls and had them all PM the game administration). I never wanted to play that game in the first place, but I caused quite a headache for the game administration. When you're banned / ban evading the administrators are no longer a problem to you, but instead you're a problem to the game administrator. Essentially, banning is more useful as a threat than as an actual punishment.

You should know me from (That terrible game that is totally irrelevant and I shouldn't be bringing it up anyways), and I know you from (That terrible game that is totally irrelevant and I shouldn't be bringing it up anyways). If you understand the dynamics involved in a particular game, and for that matter, in real-life law enforcement, using an ethical concept alone does not solve much. First, ethics are subjective, for instance, I can quote you the Analects of Confucius where Confucius argues with a local duke about morality; that is to say, the duke claims that his people are moral because when a son steals a sheep the father will turn him in, and when the father steals sheep the son will turn him in. Confucius argues instead that in his state people are moral when the father covers for son and the son covers for father. This isn't to say that either of them is necessarily right, or wrong, and there are societies that think the duke is right and there are societies that think that Confucius is right, but it means that you cannot work off absolute moral standards for purposes of administration, because there are none. There is only what the userbase will accept and what is best for everyone involved. Second, if you sincerely depend on people to be naturally good and do their duty, then you should abolish the police and all punishments. A system of law, jurisprudence, and policework exists because people will always want to step out of line when methods of social control fail, and you need a way to force people to work in a socially beneficial way. The problem with this is this, if you want to avoid a brush with the law, there are actually two ways to do it. The first way is not to actually commit the crime, the second way is to figure out how to cover up the crime effectively. If you are simply going to depend on punishments as a way to control behavior, and especially in online games such as these, the end result is that people will develop convoluted systems for getting out of bannings, and when they're banned, as I've mentioned either above or elsewhere, they become ban evaders. You have insulted me with profanity so I will respond in kind and call you an idiot. I cannot seriously believe that people think like you. This is half the reason the world is so !@#$ed up, because everyone thinks they're in the right and always refuses to look at things from other people's perspective.

If you're wondering why I don't like bannings, the reason is simple. Banning leads to ban evasion. Ban evasion leads to multi-operation. The problem with banning people is that you have to make sure they stay banned, or you're basically giving them a license to act like a douchebag because there's nothing you can do to them. If they're behind a good proxy, you can't even report them to their ISP. The next worse part is when they become ban evaders, and then their alliance covers for them. A good alliance should have the esprit de corps necessary to cover up this kind of stuff long-term, and then it becomes that a good alliance has the esprit de corps to cover up general cheating. Then you have the ban evader handle the cheating, because if you can't prove that people know about it, the worst thing that happens is that the ban evader gets rebanned so he can be what he already is, a ban evader. Now, depending on game culture and how people handle things, this can end at the first step, which is to say, someone gets banned and the ban evasion gets reported. If you have an extremely low population of ban evaders, and the game administration is seen as legitimate, instead of tyrannical or psychotic, ban evaders will get caught and exposed, and you will be able to keep control of the game. However, if you have a ton of ban evaders to the point where they could more or less form their own alliance, then you have a major control problem and you will have difficulty implementing administrative and moderation decisions.

It is a multiplayer online social strategy and simulation game. Part of it, being a strategy game, is that you want creativity and aggression in creating new structures. Also, when you say "you know cheating when you see it", that's a reference to a US judge saying "I know it when I see it" as a reference to hard-core porongraphy, which is a terrible ruling because it basically means that the judge rules on pornography depending on how well his genitals are functioning on any given day, or alternately his gender and sexual orientation, instead of having reasoned, measured, and clearly-explained standards for pornography. So saying "I know cheating when I see it" is arbitrary. There doesn't seem to be any defined terms for cheating so far in this game, so...

@ Malone: I mean this in a negative sense. It is not healthy that you deliberately want Kastor in the community to keep people watching, talking, and playing.

That is pretty smart, I'm in awe of his foresight. He has the foresight to put a trade offer to take advantage of any sudden moves in the market that result in drastic increases in pricing, even something to take advantage of potential gamebreaking bugs. But you know me and how I work and you can judge me appropriately.

I play RTS games and most games are filled with imbalances. The best part of the game is not when players play it as "intended" but when players come up with novel strategies using gimmicks the game's designers never thought of in the first place. The practical matter is that all the tournaments tend to be won by the players using the "strongest" race at a given time, and players who use "cheese" end up dominating the tournaments and becoming pro-gamers, instead of being banned. Long-term, cheese and exploits end up being "fixed" by patches, or they simply aren't fixed and they become part of the gameplay system. I think when you're complaining about Pol Pot, you're complaining that he's smarter than you are and that he managed to discover this particular exploit and you didn't. He obviously shouldn't be allowed to benefit the way he is currently doing so from the exploit, but at the same time just summarily banning him creates a certain lackness in game creativity and the aggressive search for mechanics exploits and bugs. This is part of why people are literally backing Kastor because they complain that the game is boring; a mentality of purely playing by the rules, basically, leads to stale, formulaic gameplay. I seriously think that damming and diversion is the best solution; create a program that allows players to be compensated for discovering game breaking bugs, then make non-reports punishable by reduction (reduction to nation account), suspension, deletion, and banning, depending on severity. People who discover major exploits can benefit from doing so by mailing the PnW bugs department, upon which a ruling can be made on whether or not it's considered degenerate, and if it's banned, the person who discovered the bug will be compensated in credits.

Inb4 swimsuit catalogues can only be sold to people over 21.

That's actually pretty bad for the game, you know? The idea is that the game by itself is so boring that you'd deliberately cultivate and maintain annoying and unbearable players because they increase clicks and increase user satisfaction. While I think that Kastor, if he's willing to play by the unstated rules of the game, should be allowed to stay, I also think that Kastor knew what he was doing (well, not really, if he leaves, I can give you an assessment of his psychology) and this is the natural consequences of his actions. Both he and us deserve that.

Regulated capitalism is the most efficient economic system for humans right now, but why should humans be allowed to get off planet? That's what I'm afraid of, when it comes to humans getting off planet under a capitalist system, the likely outcome will be the despoiling of native ecosystems, the enslavement or annihilation of less-advanced aliens, or picking stupid fights with more advanced aliens that will likely come and wipe us out. Better to fix our problems at home, and replace humans with robots, cyborgs, AI, and other post-human life forms, before Terran civilization gets off-world. They, hopefully, will have better instincts and better judgments.

The end date is tomorrow. But time is cyclical.

The other thing that Sheepy can do is to just immediately reset the game, with considerations and compensation for new players. He can announce out that using anything that resembles the infinite resources exploit can be grounds for deletion, suspension, or banning, and that players should try not to push the boundaries until the exploit has been discovered and patched. Meanwhile, that would give Sheepy time to get into contact with Pol Pot and figure out what went wrong, and if he refuses to cooperate, Sheepy could put out an open bounty for the exploit so the game can be patched and the game can be put back to normal operation. That's what I'd do, but it's Sheepy's game.

Define an exploit. I would actually categorize the infinite money glitch as essentially game breaking, but at the same time tons of run-of-the-mill tactics could be considered exploits. If I were running things I would, first, put out a policy that if you're the first to discover an exploit, you should report it to us. If it's considered degenerate, we will give you credits for it, if it's not considered degenerate, you'll get an approval for using it. Next, I'd go shake down Pol Pot and threaten him with banning unless he explains what his trick was. If you run a business, you cannot spend most of your time blaming the consumer; one of the first things they teach you in business school is that the Customer Is King. Half the users here playing the game are customers, meaning that they pay Sheepy money to keep the server running and to help finance costs of running PnW. The other half are product, meaning they keep the customers happy and keep the customers entertained. If either side is unhappy the customers will stop paying.

Sounds fair, but people sent out money, and others converted their funds to infrastructure, and others received money instead of sending it out. The end result may be that a few people have tons of negative money, but tons of resources as well, a few others might have tons of resources / infrastructure for no money, and some people might have tons of negative money and little to show for it.

If your code sucks it's not the fault of the users for finding out that the code sucks. And as I've said before, exploits many times occupy a grey area between creativity and degeneracy; it's the players' job to find optimal strategies and if the optimal strategy is gamebreaking, why punish them for that?

The credit database can be reverted to April 30th, with bonuses reverted to April status. Payments made can be tracked individually and then applied to users after the reversion.

It's good that you've brought this to others' attention, but this can be handled by giving new players either a pre-set nation or a large starting bonus as compensation for the costs of rollback.

Blaming the users for exploiting exploits is stupid; if there's no benefit to be had from discovering exploits people won't search for exploits at all, just kicking the can down the road for later, and not searching for exploits limits players' creativity; the game is meant to be played as it's coded, not as intended in a mouldering design document in a safe somewhere. As far as VE goes, you have to commend them for announcing the exploit publicly instead of storing it in a safe somewhere for desperate times or as a way to surreptitiously generate funds. You also have to note that others have attempted to benefit from the exploit, so it's not only their problem. I think two things should be done: administration should step in immediately to indicate that attempting to benefit from VE's infinite money exploit can be considered as grounds for rollback or reset, and VE should cooperate by disclosing a list of members that have participated in this particular exploit, so that players know not to interact with them in ways that can be considered exploiting VE's infinite money glitch. Second, administration should make a reliable program to reward bug discovery and reportage. Many exploits aren't really "game-breaking", and many straddle the line of decency, so alliances have an incentive to hoard exploits / gimmicks for strategic and tactical use. Getting players in the habit of getting approval for their exploits and rewards if they're considered illegal keeps players looking for ways to break the game, sometimes in interesting and enjoyable ways, while reducing the odds of a labor-intensive reset, or god-forbid, the customer relations nightmare of a deletion or banning.

Idc either, but I'm taking a break from these forums now. @ Foxfire: you asked for it: Great tits, no?

å¾è¼©ã¯çŒ«ã§ã‚る。åå‰ã¯ã¾ã ç„¡ã„。 Wagahai wa neko de aru. Namae wa mada nai. I am a cat. As yet, I have no name.

Alataq: you'd be surprised at how much intel I've been able to extract based simply on good-will and reputation. You seriously would be surprised, Alataq. I do admit I've been burning my political capital as of late, but that is deliberate and with intent. If you want to bring other politics into this, be my guest, if that's more burning of political capital that is also deliberate and with intent.

This is called overreach; once a guy is hated too much contrarians show up and like him / advocate sympathetic measures simply because everyone hates his guts. This still won't change the fact that Kastor is terrible and either needs to change or get out, because eventually even the contrarians will get bored of Kastor.