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ANN - Ghost Ships and Magic Treasure!


Zei-Sakura Alsainn
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What I'd like to know is exactly what people think that they have to gain by attacking random former nova members, whether or not they were in gove it really doesn't matter. The fact is, this came as a surprise to us all, I was informed about it by Inst and I'm pretty sure that everybody who was not banned was informed about it in a way that was not Pooball telling them what was going on in a shady backroom meeting. People attacking former nova members are not attacking people who decided to cheat, they are attacking people who are attempting to move on from an alliance that for many has been home for months collapsing in a matter of 2 days, for reasons tthat they could never have predicted. It's neither right nor just to ever drive innocent people out of a game.

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Just now, Dio Brando said:

I stand corrected. This was great!

Thanks... I told everyone I'd have more time to work on P&W stuff now that I'm done with school! ;)

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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." ????????

 

Edited by Spaceman Thrax
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Slaughter the shits of the world. They poison the air you breathe.

 

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34 minutes ago, Spaceman Thrax said:

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.

The "issues" that were reported to me over a month ago has been a known issue for months or years. There's always been some very low probability of a race-condition case where things can be processed by the server twice because they happen simultaneously. It's happens extremely rarely by chance, and it's such a minor and generally inconsequential bug that it was not a high priority.

The "bug" that was reported to me was that what I already knew happens sometimes, happens sometimes. That's far different than reporting to me that someone has a method to systematically exploit the bug, which of course, was not reported to me.

Furthermore, I get dozens of PMs in-game, DMs on Discord, pings in the server, etc. every single day. Most of the messages I get are about people just misunderstanding the game and asking simple questions, or reporting "bugs" that aren't actually bugs, just misunderstandings about how the game works. To deal with the workload in an efficient and timely manner, I have to quickly judge and prioritize messages I receive and pursue the ones that I believe to be most important. While obviously this was a big oversight on my part, it's not like someone DM'd me saying "hey, I can spawn in thousands of resources for free" and I ignored them. I believe the DM I received was like "hey, sometimes when you nuke someone it happens twice."

35 minutes ago, Spaceman Thrax said:

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.

I'm not influencing game politics. Everyone has already made their judgement about the Nova Riata cheating scandal, turning it into a meme is going to help the community heal and move on.

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43 minutes ago, Alex said:

The "issues" that were reported to me over a month ago has been a known issue for months or years. There's always been some very low probability of a race-condition case where things can be processed by the server twice because they happen simultaneously. It's happens extremely rarely by chance, and it's such a minor and generally inconsequential bug that it was not a high priority.

The "bug" that was reported to me was that what I already knew happens sometimes, happens sometimes. That's far different than reporting to me that someone has a method to systematically exploit the bug, which of course, was not reported to me.

Furthermore, I get dozens of PMs in-game, DMs on Discord, pings in the server, etc. every single day. Most of the messages I get are about people just misunderstanding the game and asking simple questions, or reporting "bugs" that aren't actually bugs, just misunderstandings about how the game works. To deal with the workload in an efficient and timely manner, I have to quickly judge and prioritize messages I receive and pursue the ones that I believe to be most important. While obviously this was a big oversight on my part, it's not like someone DM'd me saying "hey, I can spawn in thousands of resources for free" and I ignored them. I believe the DM I received was like "hey, sometimes when you nuke someone it happens twice."

I'm not influencing game politics. Everyone has already made their judgement about the Nova Riata cheating scandal, turning it into a meme is going to help the community heal and move on.

Okay. So what you are saying is:

1) You always knew about this bug, and decided not to fix it when it was first reported to you. You decided it was inconsequential.

2) When people came to you a month ago to report that a bunch of resources appeared out of nowhere (which you should have already known, probably), you incorrectly decided it must have been someone coming out VM, and decided that was that. You did no further checks, which likely would have led you back to the culprit, and probably even the duplication bug that spawned them, since you already knew about it. This *directly* led to about 50-60 people in Nova's membership becoming entangled with those spawned resources, as well as the community at large buying them, essentially tainting the entire game's economy.

3) Having done some halfassed fixes now, well after it is too late, you decided to make a meme so that everyone can move on, using that community's flag as part of your joke.

4) 1-3 happened while you were taking people's money, advertising credits, and purporting to be an admin.

I mean I guess I'd want everyone else to move on in your place at this point, but that doesn't give me any confidence about your ability to do your job. I'm not totally numb to the idea that running a game is a lot for one person to do. But if you're not able to do the job you need to to support the community you are taking money from, hire someone who can. And if you can't do THAT, then trying to make a cute joke about it seems to me to be in very, very poor taste.

I had spoken to you in private about my concerns about Greene. I felt that you handled that entire situation entirely incorrectly (for those who may be less familiar, Greene was using real life money to buy in game money from other players, in effect getting around the credit limit. Alex took no action against him, said the community should police itself, and merely made an announcement saying "well from now on you better not do this!"). Compared to literally deleting nations who he has no proof were involved in the Nova exploit, it's hard to ignore the inconsistency.

 

Edited by Spaceman Thrax
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Slaughter the shits of the world. They poison the air you breathe.

 

~ William S. Burroughs

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1 minute ago, Spaceman Thrax said:

Okay. So what you are saying is:

1) You always knew about this bug, and decided not to fix it when it was first reported to you. You decided it was inconsequential.

For the most part, it was inconsequential. It happened extremely infrequently, and I didn't really have any ideas about how to fix it.

 

2 minutes ago, Spaceman Thrax said:

2) When people came to you a month ago to report that a bunch of resources appeared out of nowhere (which you should have already known, probably), you incorrectly decided it must have been someone coming out VM, and decided that was that. You did no further checks, which likely would have led you back to the culprit, and probably even the duplication bug that spawned them, since you already knew about it. This *directly* led to about 50-60 people in Nova's membership becoming entangled with those spawned resources, as well as the community at large buying them, essentially tainting the entire game's economy.

I didn't know it was possible to systematically duplicate resources, and in fact I thought that was so unlikely that it wasn't worth a super-thorough investigation. The way records were kept at that time, there wouldn't have been clear evidence that was happening anyway. Obviously this was not a desirable situation, but I do also have a busy RL and I was finishing my undergraduate degree, my thesis, etc. and it's not like I was sitting around on my computer doing P&W related things all day and just ignoring a potentially serious issue.

 

4 minutes ago, Spaceman Thrax said:

I had spoken to you in private about my concerns about Greene. I felt that you handled that entire situation entirely incorrectly (for those who may be less familiar, Greene was using real life money to buy in game money from other players, in effect getting around the credit limit. Alex took no action against him, said the community should police itself, and merely made an announcement saying "well from now on you better not do this!"). Compared to literally deleting nations who he has no proof we involved in the Nova exploit, it's hard to ignore the inconsistency.

At the time, there wasn't an explicit rule against what Greene was doing, and I didn't think it was fair to arbitrarily punish him because I felt it went against the spirit of the game. I told him to stop, he did, and we wrote it into the official rules. It hasn't been an issue since.

---

At the end of the day, this isn't a AAA game studio (and even AAA's screw up too) and I'm doing my best here. If that's not good enough for you, you're not required to play the game. I'm not a computer science major, I don't have a lot of expertise with developing perfect software, and I'm pretty sure everyone here knows that by now. Obviously I'm always learning and trying to improve the game, but things like this are going to happen, and ultimately Politics & War is never going to be a perfect, flawless game.

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11 minutes ago, Alex said:

At the end of the day, this isn't a AAA game studio (and even AAA's screw up too) and I'm doing my best here. If that's not good enough for you, you're not required to play the game. I'm not a computer science major, I don't have a lot of expertise with developing perfect software, and I'm pretty sure everyone here knows that by now. Obviously I'm always learning and trying to improve the game, but things like this are going to happen, and ultimately Politics & War is never going to be a perfect, flawless game.

You know, I hear you. And I've made that argument in the past to people who have been less than impressed with the job you do as admin: it's a tall order for one person. But here's the problem: it would actually be less effort to be consistent, and if you used some of the money you were advertising for to have someone come on to cover some of those gaps for you, you'd have a better game.

I hear you that you'd prefer I quit than speak my mind about you taking people's money, though, loud and clear. I'll probably just tell people my opinion of you as an admin instead, but thank you for the suggestion.

 

Edited by Spaceman Thrax
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Slaughter the shits of the world. They poison the air you breathe.

 

~ William S. Burroughs

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2 minutes ago, Spaceman Thrax said:

You know, I hear you. And I've made that argument in the past to people who have been less than impressed with the job you do as admin: it's a tall order for one person. But here's the problem: it would actually be less effort to be consistent, and if you used some of the money you were advertising for to have someone come on to cover some of those gaps for you, you'd have a better game.

I hear you that you'd prefer I quit than speak my mind about you taking people's money, though, loud and clear. I'll probably just tell people my opinion of you as an admin instead, but thank you for the suggestion.

 

Clearly you just need to buy more credits. 

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1 minute ago, Spaceman Thrax said:

You know, I hear you. And I've made that argument in the past to people who have been less than impressed with the job you do as admin: it's a tall order for one person. But here's the problem: it would actually be less effort to be consistent, and if you used some of the money you were advertising for to have someone come on to cover some of those gaps for you, you'd have a better game.

I hear you that you'd prefer I quit than speak my mind about you taking people's money, though, loud and clear. I'll probably just tell people my opinion of you as an admin instead, but thank you for the suggestion.

 

I'm not telling you to quit, I'm asking you to consider P&W isn't the gold standard of games, development, moderation etc. and that if you require a gold standard to be satisfied, there are other games that are better staffed and developed. I'm simply asking you to lower your expectations with P&W because it's not a huge professional enterprise, it's a game I made when I was 17 and in high-school.

Just now, Redarmy said:

Clearly you just need to buy more credits. 

I also wish people would stop thinking that I offer preferential treatment to people who buy Credits. I don't.

Players (such as Blink) tried to threaten me with legal action over the money they spent and demanded special treatment because they spent money on the game. It actually happens all the time. But I don't give people who spend money and more special treatment than people who don't, because I believe long-term that's a much better policy for the game.

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15 minutes ago, Alex said:

I'm not telling you to quit, I'm asking you to consider P&W isn't the gold standard of games, development, moderation etc. and that if you require a gold standard to be satisfied, there are other games that are better staffed and developed. I'm simply asking you to lower your expectations with P&W because it's not a huge professional enterprise, it's a game I made when I was 17 and in high-school.

Expecting an admin to not spend his limited dev time making jokes about his unwillingness to fix an exploit that was reported twice is not a gold standard.

Edit: also, dropping Blink's name as an example of people who have made appeals to you on the basis of contributing to the game and not any of the other people's who have done that is preferential treatment. Will you be giving a list of names of the other players who did this out, or will it only be happening when you are trying to win an argument?

Edited by Spaceman Thrax
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Slaughter the shits of the world. They poison the air you breathe.

 

~ William S. Burroughs

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10 minutes ago, Alex said:

I also wish people would stop thinking that I offer preferential treatment to people who buy Credits. I don't.

Players (such as Blink) tried to threaten me with legal action over the money they spent and demanded special treatment because they spent money on the game. It actually happens all the time. But I don't give people who spend money and more special treatment than people who don't, because I believe long-term that's a much better policy for the game.

A). I was sarcastic, which o know is hard to pick up with text

B.) People think it for a reason. 

C.) I don't know if would compared my self to "AAA" game publisher. I don't think anyone would plays PnW expect you to run as a "AAA." I think we as players feel you as Admin should attempt to fix glitches when report. Especially ones that get people banned. 

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18 minutes ago, Alex said:

At the time, there wasn't an explicit rule against what Greene was doing, and I didn't think it was fair to arbitrarily punish him because I felt it went against the spirit of the game. I told him to stop, he did, and we wrote it into the official rules. It hasn't been an issue since.

There's not an explicit rule about your alliance leader brother not be able to send you a loan from his AA in-game but you saw fit to arbitrarily punish Blink because "they were helping each other", which I believe is the inconsistency Thrax was pointing out here, so I would agree. And that wasn't even the original reason supposedly for the ban. Whatever you decide on when you have to make these decisions, be consistent.

 

39 minutes ago, Alex said:

I'm not influencing game politics. Everyone has already made their judgement about the Nova Riata cheating scandal, turning it into a meme is going to help the community heal and move on.

 

18 minutes ago, Alex said:

At the end of the day, this isn't a AAA game studio (and even AAA's screw up too) and I'm doing my best here. If that's not good enough for you, you're not required to play the game. I'm not a computer science major, I don't have a lot of expertise with developing perfect software, and I'm pretty sure everyone here knows that by now. Obviously I'm always learning and trying to improve the game, but things like this are going to happen, and ultimately Politics & War is never going to be a perfect, flawless game.

What would help the community "heal and move on" is knowing what you are going to do to make sure this doesn't happen again. This isn't solely Nova leadership's fault - you knew about these issues for years and you didn't look into a way to get them fixed. If it weren't pooball, it would have been someone else eventually. We all know you're not a computer science major and we're not expecting you to be perfect. We do expect you to find ways to fix issues when they arise and to find people to help fill out your gaps in your knowledge, especially when you have people paying for this service. Alex, you have people - IT and programming experts - that are here, in your game community, offering to help for free. There's not an excuse here. Use your resources.

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3 minutes ago, Nizam Adrienne said:

 If it weren't pooball, it would have been someone else eventually.

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.

Edited by Spaceman Thrax
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Slaughter the shits of the world. They poison the air you breathe.

 

~ William S. Burroughs

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49 minutes ago, Spaceman Thrax said:

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.

Well we know Seb benefitted and got a city purchased for. Had so much left over that he handed 1.9 billion back to sheepy. Yikes.

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So does @Alex or anybody else agree with me that the market crash seems to have been caused by this 'feature' of spawning resources out of thin air?

 

Considering Nova was nuking people 3x back in January and the market started dipping that exact week:

 

da6fJM.jpg

 

 

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2 hours ago, Alex said:

At the time, there wasn't an explicit rule against what Greene was doing

But there was.  I don't know what world you're living in if being paid isn't a "real world benefit" or whatever the wording was.

2 hours ago, Alex said:

I'm not a computer science major, I don't have a lot of expertise with developing perfect software, and I'm pretty sure everyone here knows that by now.

Sure, but there are many players that are programmers that you could ask for help, even if it doesn't involve actually having them code things.  (Like asking "What's the best way to prevent this type of exploit?")

Dec 26 18:48:22 <JacobH[Arrgh]>    God your worse the grealind >.>

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To first clean up the palate from the recent quality of discussion:

 

pics25.jpg

pics114.jpg

pics72.jpg

 

 

As for actual content:

-1 Chaos is pissed because they're now losing the present war badly as a key alliance on their flank (Nova Riata) got mod-bombed and rolled by BK. It's a really ridiculous show, but they do have some valid points.

-2  Let's first discuss what PnW's situation is.

 

I did a scan last war on credit movements and the total number of donations made to PnW. The operating cashflow should be either 5 digits or lower 6 digits. This isn't enough to hire professional moderation or administration. With server costs estimated in the 4000-12000 range, the free cashflow of the game could be very low. This means that PnW is very short-staffed.

-3 On the other hand, PnW is still rapidly growing. The active player pop is around 5000, an increase of 25% from this time last year. The total number of nations is growing as well. The problem is, as the game gets larger, the probability of scandals such as NovaGate increase simply due to the increase in number of players and alliances. More capable surveillance is clearly needed.

 

-4 Lastly, Alex clearly did not harden versus a major exploit that was known for months. I said I agree with Chaos on some points, and the most crucial point is the negligence aspect. The race condition bug has been known for years; I've heard someone claim that someone knew about it for around a year, eclipsing Nova Riata by 7 months.

 

The general problem with cheating is that it's a frequency dependent phenomenon. If only one player cheats, it's their problem and they can be banned or punished as individuals. If half the game cheats, the game admin is going to be very reluctant to ban half the game. The worst problem is that the way PnW is structured, with a relatively fluid economic system, players can easily generate massive amounts of RSS, then completely break the game with it, as Pooball did so recently.

 

-5. Consequently anti-cheat in this game has to be stepped up. ss23 obviously is qualified to handle admin functions, but does he have the interest to do so? Obviously, cash payment is out of the question given how much the game makes per year, but one solution in CN was that the head moderator received part of the revenue. ss23, for prompt and serious hardening, might be willing to help out if he were given a minority stake in the game.

 

-6. The alternative, unfortunately, is that this game is going to get exploited more and more often. At some point, administrator action and community punishment can no longer control cheating, and people will eventually leave PnW when Orbis turns into the Test Server, where making multis is a common and permitted hobby.

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-7. I also want to point out two other things. The rules in this game are extremely vague. That's okay if Alex would like to spend more his time on this game, but if real life comes into conflict, there should be more definite rules with less gray areas.

 

For instance, there's nothing in the rules that say that refresh scripting is banned, for instance. Nor is there anything in the rules that say that warbotting (running scripts on your members computers to fight for them) is banned. And I'm told warbots WERE used on the Test server, among other things, so they exist.


More flagrantly, Pooball never broke any of the rules of the game as listed in the Game Rules and Terms and Conditions.

 

-8. For better transparency, Alex should provide us with a roadmap of features and changes to the game he has in mind. All players are staring at right now is this awful resource exploit, and unsure as to who else is going to get exposed for cheating. Focusing on the future, i.e, future features and game changes, might be a good way to take players' mind off this nightmare.

Edited by Inst

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8 hours ago, Alex said:

I'm not telling you to quit, I'm asking you to consider P&W isn't the gold standard of games, development, moderation etc. and that if you require a gold standard to be satisfied, there are other games that are better staffed and developed. I'm simply asking you to lower your expectations with P&W because it's not a huge professional enterprise, it's a game I made when I was 17 and in high-school.

I also wish people would stop thinking that I offer preferential treatment to people who buy Credits. I don't.

Players (such as Blink) tried to threaten me with legal action over the money they spent and demanded special treatment because they spent money on the game. It actually happens all the time. But I don't give people who spend money and more special treatment than people who don't, because I believe long-term that's a much better policy for the game.

If you're going to ask for money for your product...

Look, I don' t want to pile on. I actually would like to see this game improved so exploits like this cannot happen. But that probably requires a level of professional development that you don't seem to be willing to commit to. It's a simple question, one I fear that you've already answered, Alex. Do you want the challenge of this or is this still just a hobby (albeit a profitable hobby)?

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Priest of Dio

 

 

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