November 11, 2009

How to prevent battle lock down

Filed under: Battles, Community — Pedro Santos @ 1:09 pm

The major cheating happening on Orion’s Belt, since the beginning, is the one where one player locks something into a battle. For example, players attacking it’s own relics with other accounts/players controlled by them. There is always something we can do, but there are always workarounds.  That’s because on the end of the day, nothing prevents player A from one alliance to attack player B from other alliance and agreeing on making the battle last for ever. We implemented measures that punish this, but even so, it’s not enough.

We can also see this on tournaments. There have been some cases of draws, and the administrators had to make something. The majority of times, it wasn’t clear who should win, and the game was restarted.

The fact is: there are no actions we can take to automatically solve this issue, because it’s impossible to detect. Not impossible, because players detect it and report the issues to us. And I think that is the only solution. Imagine a scenario where every battle has a report this button. All battles can be seen by everyone (example: relic battles). When a player detects something wired, he would report it and admins/game masters could analyze the battle and get a vote: Force victory to player A, Force victory to player B, Restart match, Force defeat to both players, Do nothing.

Several game masters would have to vote, and the majority would decide the course of actions. This is so that the community would auto moderate itself without the need for administrator intervention.

What do you think?

15 Comments »

1. Seems to be the only way arround it.
   But in case the game masters rule against a player, what would be the sanction?

   Comment by Don Corleone — November 11, 2009 @ 1:24 pm

2. Game masters could vote on the outcome of the match, and on a 0 to 5 sanction level. Where 0 would be do nothing, and the others could remove a percentage of the player’s resource, etc.

   Comment by Pedro Santos — November 11, 2009 @ 1:29 pm

3. Since my day one here that I stuggle for a cleaner gameplay,namely,this was the first game I played where its ok to control more than one player/account.
   Finally a measure coming my way of thinking
   As for the sanctions,the removal of resouses seems good,but the one that would make players think twice about breaking the rules,would be temporarily froze the account(no building,no production,no moves in battles) what you think?

   Comment by stoneage fan — November 11, 2009 @ 2:06 pm

4. I think that could be part of the biggest sanction level, yes.

   Comment by Pedro Santos — November 11, 2009 @ 2:13 pm

5. seems ok to me, this would force game masters to do something besides look at stats =D this is something I think could also be thought of, no need to rush but think a little about it at least, what are the game masters real functions? =)

   Comment by reborned — November 11, 2009 @ 3:18 pm

6. we discused it with danceman plenty. I think there is no good programmable solution that couldnt be abused.

   Just one remark. Game masters (as i understand it) are gaming this game too. So i think if there is danger of non-objectivity than the ones that cant be objective should be excluded from voting.
   And i thing that it should function more like in judgement causes. The game masters should always come to some agreement at the clause.

   Comment by vranasm — November 11, 2009 @ 5:23 pm

7. I agree vranasm, those that vote might be biased towards something and not fair. That’s why any decision should be voted by several members. Most of the cases we’re talking about, the outcome is well defined. If someone votes against it, then he/she must have something under the hood.

   We’re thinking on a parliament system where, for example, an admin vote would be worth 10, a game master’s 3 and an alliance admiral’s 1.

   We think this would be a fair a good solution.

   Comment by Pedro Santos — November 11, 2009 @ 5:26 pm

8. yes a vote system, but this situations must be handled quickly… so we dont have to wait for an admin to come out of vacations to have enough votes =)

   Comment by reborned — November 11, 2009 @ 6:20 pm

9. Or maybe a person on vacation can’t vote, jumps to next which are able. I also think that each admiral of each alliance should vote and it be equal in percentage, a alliance with one admirals equals to 100% vote of his alliance and a alliance with 2 admirals equals to 50% each, this way i think it will be fair and it would hard to cheat. About the worst case, we don’t want to scare players away, the sanction should be fair enough, to be at the top worst case, it has to be a very very bad situation. I like the idea of having many players, its a way to play the different races and have more fleets (i hate the limits), but i do think it isn’t logical the same account being in different alliances or without alliance if one of them has one, which would make it hard to do some cheats. Vacation is also a very bad thing in this game, but it is necessary, in a tournament i have no solution but in the Universe i should have the power to move away from the battle, maybe a battle screen before the battle (would be nice to have a nice image of two fleets battling like Danceman vs NoForGoodWarrior) and it would have details, like percentage, units and of course if the player is on vacation and have prompt to “no engage in battle”. Oh by the way, coordinates, this is very important, how many times, if its not my battle, where can i find that battle without the people in battle telling me where it is.

   Comment by Danceman — November 11, 2009 @ 7:44 pm

10. There are other solutions to this issue.
    1) Automatically draw battles that repeat the same position for 3 turns
    2) Automatically draw battles that don’t involve a unit being destroyed on the last X turns
    3) Automatically win battles when the ratio of strength between A and B is smaller and Y% (like 10%)
    4) Automatically resolve battles with less than Z ships (small skirmishes aren’t really battles anyway)
    5) Progressive bans on badly behaved players
    5A) yellow card (warning)
    5B) blue card (bench him for x days)
    5C) dark blue card (bench him for x*10 days)
    5D) red card (ban)

    Comment by Luis Ribeiro — November 12, 2009 @ 1:41 am

11. 6) Penalize passive play
    6A) Destroy ships
    6B) Stop battle freeze armadas for X turns
    6C) Randomly spawn pirate computer armadas that attack each player in the slow motion battles (effectively breaking up the fight and starting two new ones with the PC)

    Comment by Luis Ribeiro — November 12, 2009 @ 1:46 am

12. Hello Luis,
    Here’s why your suggestions won’t do it. Imagine two players trying to hold a relic, each one with a fleet of 50 rains.

    1) Automatically draw battles that repeat the same position for 3 turns
    -> They can just move units randomly

    2) Automatically draw battles that don’t involve a unit being destroyed on the last X turns
    -> They can destroy a rain every X turns

    3) Automatically win battles when the ratio of strength between A and B is smaller and Y% (like 10%)
    -> Won’t work, same strength

    4) Automatically resolve battles with less than Z ships (small skirmishes aren’t really battles anyway)
    -> Hard to do, specially on low level zones. And nothing prevents players from using fleets with 1000 rains, they’re cheap

    That’s why human moderation is the only option we can think of. All your other points are good to incorporate on the parliament.

    Comment by Pedro Santos — November 12, 2009 @ 9:51 am

13. still Luis ideas are good, maybe you can do a case for all the conditions and when they fail we use human intervention
    take the best from the machine and were it fails use man…

    Comment by reborned — November 12, 2009 @ 10:37 am

14. i dont like the rule about “small fleets” there are players that are battling even battles with 1 rain… when i started i battled that battles, trying outmaneuver opponent to win.

    Comment by vranasm — November 12, 2009 @ 11:43 am

15. Even though the solutions I proposed may not stop every case, they surely help, and make it more difficult, you actually have to think about what you are doing.

    Small battles can be progressive, depending on the area.
    So on high level areas you can just require that a battle will only occur if X heavy or Y medium ships are involved otherwise it’s a skirmish and automatically solved by the the computer. That would make it cost a lot more!

    Comment by Luis Ribeiro — November 14, 2009 @ 11:36 am

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