Proposals

[The Beatles]

1. Time expiry of protection (say, 3 days) -- this was suggested because of untouchable accounts being created to lead clans or gather net.
It's not entirely a good solution because these accounts can just be rotated. There isn't a simple solution to this, because there is obviously a need for players under protection to interact in clans (say, Duels, or when rounds start), it's just that the feature is abused. Another option to prevent this would be to disallow having a leader in protection while some are out of protection, but that's not a clean solution either, because it depends on the order people break protection.

2. Failed attacks should not count toward the attack limit (not counting hawk attacks, of course).

[Turock]

Well the players staying in protection is a tough issue. Not sure how to fix that 100%.

As a test on ME I made it so that failed attacks do not count towards max_attacks and within 30 minutes the players had figured out that mage battles would still count failed attacks, so I fixed that. Well, it wasn't even an hour latter that they figured out that murders still count failed attacks. I haven't look at how to fix that yet.

[The Beatles]

Murders actually do harm, so it's not entirely unreasonable to count them as failed attacks. It's very hard to determine when something is bona fide or not.

[Devari]

Is this an issue of people maxing out an unclanned fellow so that he cannot be attacked? Why not simply make it so failed attacks from another player only count up to a certain amount a day? Say, two failed attacks total will be counted from that player onto the player on which that attack failed? Furthermore, it could also be expanded to a six failed attacks/week limit.

Failed attacks are actually a legitimate notion, but if it is occurring too much, than it is obviously involves an attempt to "cheat" with attack limits. I do think it's important to maintain failed attacks counting towards the limit, but try to do so in a way that cripples the cheaters.

It is my opinion that you can deal with the hawk mission issue by making shielded attacks count as "failed" attacks for the purposes of the failed attack counting limit. That way, if one tried to max through shielded murders, they'd fail. They could still max through unshielded murders, but you'd certainly take a hit.

You'd run into some problems, though, since someone could stash all their resources and do rob granaries/destroy resources/steal cash missions without shields... I suppose you can always make those count towards the "failed" limit if they yield less than a certain amount of goods/damage to goods. The real problem is figuring out what that limit would be.

Even if you don't agree with the rest of this post, that above bit might be able to address the problem... I dunno.

As for implementation, one idea is to have another mysql table that involves the matchups between player to player, with failed attacks that day and week. It would obviously be cleared by however the "fake" cron does daily events (I have no idea, actually). The other idea, of course, is to simply count from the news items. They both have their own issues, though; the news item count would take longer, as it would need to aggregate all sorts of items from an every-increasing database... But the separate table idea increases the database footprint of the game, and gets really messy when you consider, in a game of 50 active players, each player would have probably at least 25 entries from them attacking another person and failing... 50*25 = 1250 table rows, and that only grows as the game gets bigger. Might scale badly.

Sorry if I'm a bit unclear here... And this solution might be too complex and not worth the effort.

Ah, one thing just set off the alarm bells. Couldn't someone, under my proposal or if murders did not count towards attack limit, exploit this to infinitely murder someone (until they ran out of turns)? That's a real danger.

[Freenhult]

1. Time expiry of protection (say, 3 days) -- this was suggested because of untouchable accounts being created to lead clans or gather net.
It's not entirely a good solution because these accounts can just be rotated. There isn't a simple solution to this, because there is obviously a need for players under protection to interact in clans (say, Duels, or when rounds start), it's just that the feature is abused. Another option to prevent this would be to disallow having a leader in protection while some are out of protection, but that's not a clean solution either, because it depends on the order people break protection.

2. Failed attacks should not count toward the attack limit (not counting hawk attacks, of course).

1. Can't you just set it so that Protected accounts have x amount of days to break out? Instead of them logging in to refresh the timer, force them out or face deletion.

2. I think Devari kinda has the right idea, if I interpreted that correctly.

[Turock]

I think it should be 3 days from account creation then forced out of protection, no login to reset this time.

As for the murders, thats the loop hole that we are facing now. All you need to do is look at the attack logs in ME and see it. Every hour or a little before 30+ murders all on the same people by the same people. I have sent out a game wide message stating that doing this is grounds for getting your account deleted.

[The Beatles]

Well... murders could simply show up a message if your opponent has too few troops that there are not enough troops for your spies to go safely in, and exit without doing anything.
"too few troops" could be determined by a metric similar to the hero system.

[Turock]

The problem I see is that the players simply aid each other in order to have enough troops.

[The Beatles]

And if they do that, then the murder actually hurts 'em, right?

[Turock]

30 or so murders while shielded is a small price to pay in comparison to losing say 100k or more land.

[Freenhult]

The way I see it, is that there is almost no way to fix this. So with the idea, that requires that most amount of effort for a person to exploit.

Edit: 3 days seems kinda short. I was thinking 5 would be good. I forget sometimes when I make a new account, 'cause you don't have full turns then. or enough to break out and make a good first run. That takes about 3 days to do.

[The Beatles]

Well, here's one idea. The too many attacks thing only kicks in under 500 land?

Or shall we make that 1k land, both for standarding and for too many attacks?

[Slasher]

Obviously it depends on the game pace as to how much land for too many recent attacks doesn't it?

[The Beatles]

It's always configurable, of course. And anything can be done per-server.

[Gen. Volkov]

Well, you guys can go ahead and delete my account if you want. I just have so little time nowadays. I'm not abusing the code, I just can't afford the time I know I would invest were I to start playing again.