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Changing spy information to be public


Prefontaine
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Should spy totals be public?  

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  1. 1. Should spy totals be public?


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  • Poll closed on 08/11/22 at 03:14 PM

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Simple question, should the number of spies a player has be viewable like other unit types? This used to be the case, but was changed to add increased secrecy to spies. Due to data collection and bots though, most of this information is accessible to those players with access to that data collection.  

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While your at it, let’s go ahead and make everyone’s day change setting and holdings on their nation public as well. 
 

lol. The best spies are those who are hidden in plain sight! 

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  1. Pre you're sus. Stop changing stuff that doesn't need changed. They are called spies:
spy
/spī/
noun
a person who secretly collects and reports information on the activities, movements, and plans of an enemy or competitor
1 minute ago, Marika said:

Spy scraping/data mining is crashing the server pretty regularly, a LARGE portion of "why is the server so slow on a blitz when only 500 people are online?!" is from these scrapes. Spies very specifically.

 

I would say just upgrade the server but it actually seems to be worse after that.

Edited by Codename V
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So the actual problem is that people are using bots to figure out the spy totals and that is slowing the game down.  That is some solid root cause analysis there.

Ok dev team, go figure out how to fix that.  How do the bots pull that data? Do they just refresh espionage screens over and over?  if that is the case, just a quick thought, could you put a captcha that pops up every time you go to the spy screen, I think sheepy said something about charging 1000 dollars every time you go to the espionage screen? 

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Nice discussion poll. I'll make the real petition so people can vote yes.  

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Hey Krampus, the signature edit is under account settings. Actually, here's the link.

https://forum.politicsandwar.com/index.php?/settings/signature/

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11 minutes ago, His Holy Decagon said:

Please stop changing things post end, that are internal problems; isn’t it better for all of us, if the actual causes of the problems are fixed, not covered with a bandaid?

This has been an issue for years. The game was pretty much held hostage at one point from spy scrapes. I'm fairly confident someone got away with resource duping using it. 

30 minutes ago, Sweeeeet Ronny D said:

So the actual problem is that people are using bots to figure out the spy totals and that is slowing the game down.  That is some solid root cause analysis there.

Ok dev team, go figure out how to fix that.  How do the bots pull that data? Do they just refresh espionage screens over and over?  if that is the case, just a quick thought, could you put a captcha that pops up every time you go to the spy screen, I think sheepy said something about charging 1000 dollars every time you go to the espionage screen? 

 

https://politicsandwar.com/war/espionage_get_odds.php?id1=<attacker ID>&id2=<defender ID>&id3=0&id4=<safety level (1-3)>&id5=<spies to use>

You just use that. You don't even have to be logged in. Try it out yourself. Open this link in an incognito browser which is me using all of my spies to spy SRD .

That those links aren't rate limited so you can spam them as fast as you want. 
 

Hey Krampus, the signature edit is under account settings. Actually, here's the link.

https://forum.politicsandwar.com/index.php?/settings/signature/

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Pre 1984'ed my counter thread so I'll repost it here

Quote

The recent downtime has finally forced the dev team to look at spy counts critically. The current system is unusable:

  1.  Spy counts are only hidden for those who are new or unwilling to engage in the spy odds exploit
  2.  Whether maliciously or accidentally, automated spy count scraping has SEVERAL TIMES brought down the game

Sheepy has decided to institute a $1000 cost for checking spy odds. While it remains to be seen if that will work properly, even if it does it unfairly biases towards the top 5 and against any small alliances or lone actors.

  1. Krampus calculated minimum $6 million to determine spy odds for the game assuming 100% efficient data collection. For whales, that is a small cost. But even then, consider $6 million cost multiple times per day as you update spy sheets. 
  2. This cost is prohibitive for smaller nations and alliances

My suggestion: Temporarily (2-3 months) close the spy odds and make all spy counts public. During that time a more permanent solution can be discussed and implemented. 

 

Hey Krampus, the signature edit is under account settings. Actually, here's the link.

https://forum.politicsandwar.com/index.php?/settings/signature/

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Wouldn't it be more productive to address the ability to calculate spies? Making spies public may be a short term solution but isn't beneficial to the spy system in the long term. 

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I would actually be okay with making the spy counts public, if it's already that simple to gather how many spies any particular nation has. $1000 an op isn't going to deter anyone- you only need the odds for the opposing coalition, and even if there's a thousand nations in that coalition, that's only $1m to check odds on all of them. The gasoline for my (c31) air strikes costs more than that.

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If this goes through please add the change where spies get 1 turn immunities similar to missiles.

That way we don’t get the same situation with spies where missiles being instantly spied before they had their 1 turn immunity.

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7 minutes ago, KingGhost said:

If this goes through please add the change where spies get 1 turn immunities similar to missiles.

That way we don’t get the same situation with spies where missiles being instantly spied before they had their 1 turn immunity.

Under the existing system, bots can already get your spy counts more often than once a turn if they so choose and it has not lead to insta-spying. The reason being if your nation only has one day's buy, your enemies can still successfully execute any spy op they want against you without having to spy them away. Best to let a nation get at least two days' buys of spies befote wasting a spy op to assassinate them.

16 minutes ago, Avakael said:

I would actually be okay with making the spy counts public, if it's already that simple to gather how many spies any particular nation has. $1000 an op isn't going to deter anyone- you only need the odds for the opposing coalition, and even if there's a thousand nations in that coalition, that's only $1m to check odds on all of them. The gasoline for my (c31) air strikes costs more than that.

To be clear it's 1k times however many times a bot needs to pull odds to get your exact spy count. It's nothing that'd bankrupt any major alliance but it'd cost a few million to get a coalition's spy counts. Not just 1m.

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You gotta be kidding. Not only are we in a world where you display your exact military numbers to everybody, now we have to show exactly how many top secret spies we have. 

Next update can holdings and my password also be public?

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58 minutes ago, Avakael said:

I would actually be okay with making the spy counts public, if it's already that simple to gather how many spies any particular nation has. $1000 an op isn't going to deter anyone- you only need the odds for the opposing coalition, and even if there's a thousand nations in that coalition, that's only $1m to check odds on all of them. The gasoline for my (c31) air strikes costs more than that.

Its a pretty big cost for smaller AAs though. And if its not that much of a burden, you might as well make it public to make it fair. 

Hey Krampus, the signature edit is under account settings. Actually, here's the link.

https://forum.politicsandwar.com/index.php?/settings/signature/

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Code the game better so people cant find the spies through scrapes.

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