My Lands: Black Gem Hunting

After being caught - change the level of banned accounts.
Here is my mail conversation with Admin...
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Gangling wrote:
Hi:
Just a thought.
Would you please consider making banned player accounts level 3 or 4?
As long as you are going to leave them in the game as viable targets they should be available to anyone except maybe the most advanced players.
Thank You,
Gangling

Administration wrote:
Hello,
The banned players are removed from the server with time.

Gangling wrote:
Yes - that happened to a city I was using as a farm when I was a level 1...
BUT
You seem to catch them B4 they are able to get to level 2
SO
As long as their cities are still on the map it would not hurt anything if you made them a higher level. This way level 2, 3 and maybe 4 players could use them until you do delete their accounts from the game.

Administration wrote:
Sorry, but that's impossible.

Gangling wrote:
Sorry to keep this going ...
BUT
Is it because it would make the game easier?
BECAUSE
Other than that it's just a single line of code, an IF : THEN statement, in the same area as the input that allows the game to display the ban, that would use the same input info BUT would change the banned account level from 1 to 3 or 4.
I'll stop gnawing on this bone now.
Looking forward to your answer,
Gangling

Administration wrote:
You can try to post your suggestion on Forum:
viewforum.php?f=18
and if it will get support from other players - it may be considered by Game Developers.
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Hopefully you all like this idea...
Please leave your comments.
Thank You,
Gangling

The admin is right. From a code point of view, it is going to be if not impossible, certainly a lot of work. Level is a compilation of points, and is checked by the system regularly - you can go down as well as up. Others on this forum have used this fact to drop down a rank for strategic reasons - it is a tactic I plan to make use of myself, down the line.

So, every tick your banned player's cities would be checked, assets tallied up and their rank reallocated accordingly. I'm not too sure how often this happens, but almost certainly at least once every two hours.

So, the admin has four choices:

1. Give the player new cities for you to loot, ownership of mines / ruins which cannot be seized, (not army, for as you lose army your points drop) and other assets to make them worthy of that rank. These squares / mines/ pits cannot then be used by legitimate players.
2. Create false battle logs to justify the points ranking, and push these banned players up the rankings (somehow without compromising the cardinality of the battle database) and deny these rankings to actual players.
3. Remove them from the ranking system entirely, which will also remove them from the auto-deletion system, as the two are going to use the same subroutines - auto-deletion is a subsystem of the other. This means these cities would stay eternally, or require yet another new system to manage them.
4. Do nothing, and let the cities auto-delete within about 1-2 weeks, the same as they do for every abandoned city automatically once the player stops logging in.

Personally, I would vote for option four. It is by far the most viable option, and does not involve recoding large secrtions of the game.

I will note on the end, I do use a banned city quite regularly. However I am also visiting eleven different cities, and that is the only banned one providing resources and slaves. The cities that people just grew bored or frustrated with will always be a far greater source of income than the banned cities.

You do not need to do any of 1, 2 or 3.
I agree with your # 4 and if you had read the mail conversation you would have seen the part about... "could use them until you do delete their accounts from the game".

Still just one line of code... IF (account has been labled) "banned" (@ line so and so) THEN (cities under that account =) Level "X" (2, 3 or 4) regardless of the requirements to achieve that level BECAUSE we (the Devs/coders) say so.

Maybe I'm too old school - thinking in basic - BUT there HAS TO BE a simple way for the Devs and/or coders to just tell the game that, "This is a level (2, 3 or 4 city) and that's it - no ifs, ands or buts.
As it's going to be inactive it WILL delete in time as you say in # 4.
Gangling

Gangling wrote:You do not need to do any of 1, 2 or 3.
I agree with your # 4 and if you had read the mail conversation you would have seen the part about... "could use them until you do delete their accounts from the game".

How much are you expecting to get out of these banned accounts, really? You're looking at 2-3k of wood, and what, 500 stone max a time? If its a level 1 banned being elevated, chances of metal or crop pickings are slim, and you'll get maybe 500 slaves if you're lucky. Elevating the level won't change their production, unless you are asking the admins to level their buildings as well. You will get far better pickings targeting a level 2, 3, 4 city that has naturally grown to that level and gone inactive - or pounding the snot out of someone with all the tactical knowhow of a boiled cabbage.

Gangling wrote:Still just one line of code... IF (account has been labled) "banned" (@ line so and so) THEN (cities under that account =) Level "X" (2, 3 or 4) regardless of the requirements to achieve that level BECAUSE we (the Devs/coders) say so.

Its not that simple. You may be an old school coder, but I'm getting the distinct impression here that you are not a coder of massively concurrent user systems. The mechanics are rather different. Yes, something like that could be added, but it would be a really bad idea to do it that way. Let me see if I can explain why:

This branching statement (the if ... then ...else) creates a choice. Ignoring what it does to piping for the purposes of this discussion, it uses say 10 clock cycles to do this. Per user. Per check (which we are assuming is every 2 hours, as per my previous post). This has to be done for every city, mine, pit, camp, et al, whether the user is banned or not, because it has to check if the user is banned, to find out either way. You could argue that it could shave clock cycles by checking all of a user's holdings at once before moving onto the next user. It could, but these systems are not usually coded that way, due to performance issues inherent in that method.

This is fine whilst you have 10 or 20 cities. It is not fine when you have 10 or 20 million cities, across all shards running on your server. Especially not when it has to do it so regularly, as part of the scheduled housekeeping loop. It has the potential to create a bottleneck right when server resources are needed the most. You can work around that of course, but again, it does require quite a considerable amount of recoding, and altering the scheduler to allow for - this is known as scaling poorly.

This is all worth it of course, if it brings significant benefit to the players - the paying customers. If it increases their enjoyment or retention. Right now, I'm just not seeing how it could do that; certainly not enough to justify the cost, if its just netting a handful of l1 equivalent cities becoming available to the higher levels.

Vika wrote:How much are you expecting to get out of these banned accounts, really?

Mainly interested in slave capture BUT other than that JUST ENOUGH to not get the big guys ticked off while I'm building.

So pick a completely useless player at around your level, and take their excess population.

Unless there are a great many more specifics to your idea than you have given so far, this is a bad idea that causes far more problems than it solves. Perhaps take it away, think on it, and refine it into something that's going to appeal to all players of your level?

Just received a quest reward that CHANGES how the game looks at MY account and ALLOWS ME to attack ANY level ruin.
Regardless of the code involved - for 12 hours - the game ignores my level allowing me to attack a level 1 ruin even though my level might be 3, 4 or 5.
Same thing can be done for banned accounts MINUS the time limits.
SO
Maybe NOT so hard to do what I have suggested after all. To make banned accounts free for all to attack but the highest level players as they would not be interested anyway.
Gangling