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Hola Chile


About two months ago I took Chilean CS so that I can write an article, it was in the time of the great confusion soon after TWO and EDEN made a deal of convenience for damage and money. There was a sort of divergence of opinion what is "tactically" sound and what diplomacy is correct.

I actually wrote it, but never published for "professional" reasons and in time it became outdated of sorts. Well some things, others are still the same but anyway, back to the subject, I'll try and write a more "up to date" analysis of the global situation.

The PvP "scam"

I know the word "scam" seems strong here, but considering that the admins know what is happening for nearly half a year now and have not done anything about it, willingly or through inactivity they have greatly contributed to it.

The situation is simple, because the advertised fighting against similar opponents does not happen there is a process of inflation of D4 damage as a result from PvP module. While the system may actually be designed to pick out players with similar strength for opponents, because at any single time there are only a very few options the end result is that there is a huge difference in strength in PvP fights which of course works to the advantage of the ones with high strength. To compound this obvious lack of foresight (erep labs is quite predictable in this) is the bonuses given both to damage dealt and critical shots in the PvP module again based on strength differential as well as ranks (the ranks do not have as much a difference unless you're division 1 and 2 where there is a big difference there too).

The end result is that regularly accounts with 30-35 ranks and 10K strength go up against accounts with 50+ ranks and 45K+ strength, the end result is easy wins that do not even cost much health to the stronger accounts. This has meant that the weaker accounts have low chances of winning a PvP battle and so has lowered even more the "participation rate" of weaker accounts thus making the actual problem even more acute, which lowers participation rate and so on, it's a downward spiral.

This has given back to "tanks" the ability to win rounds on their own if 2-3 hit together in a given round. Something that had not been true for years in the game as since V1 there always needed to be support for tanks to be able to do anything on the battlefield.

Here is how it happens, for every 10 hits on average there is 1 PvP battle (if you use bazookas then it is for every 5 hits), that PvP battle has different costs depending on your strength, for D4 accounts with high strength on average that is 20 health so 1 PvP "cycle" costs on average 120 health. The reward for a win is the equivalent of 30 hits with Q7 or what would normally cost 300 health. Thus the "inflation of damage" is equal to 250% of pre PvP levels for a cycle.

Now, even with the cards stacked in their favour occasionally there are losses for the top accounts too, they however are about 10-15% of the time which is in contrast to the average which would be 50% and much higher to the average of everyone else if the top ones are removed which would be at about 75% (if the wins of the top tier is removed). So for accurate estimation the average inflation of the damage is about 240%.

There is an added and hidden bonus here too, one that is directly tied to the economy as well. Those who win PvP fights actually save money and do not spend more, those who loose spend a little more then if they didn't fight. The difference comes from the expenses for Q7 tanks, both sides would have the same expenses, but the winner gets 2 times the rewards and a little over half the cost in health, thus his costs go down dramatically per hit.

The end result is that not only old D4 accounts get their damage inflated, but are seeing their costs lowered thus they're actually being "payed" to make more damage by the admins. This on it's own in a balanced game would not be as much as a problem as it is, however it is a great incentive for cheaters and as we know this game is a cheater heaven actively encouraged by the admins to mimic activity.

Simply put, D1 fighting bots are created who enter the PvP module from the opposite side after which retreat from battle, which gives easy victories, but more importantly ones that do not cost anything to the opposition. I told the admins about this months ago and though I've not been as active lately it doesn't seem the practice has been stopped, it only disappears when there is a change to the game, this however lasts for a limited time.

How big is the effect of this, well let's say that during the 4 days in which the PvP module was down 2 months ago, TWEDEN won only about 33% of D4 rounds and only 3 battles all-together. The fighting sides were in the same configuration as now.

The reason there is such a discrepancy between TWEDEN and CoT is simple. In CoT is much of the fresh blood of the game, though Macedonia is one of the top countries it remains the youngest one after Chile, Mexico and Columbia along with Taiwan. The only "old" countries in CoT are USA, Indonesia and to a degree Bulgaria which though it is to be considered old, is still the youngest of all the established powers in the game, much younger then Romania, Croatia, Greece, Turkey, Serbia, Poland and so on. When you add Germany, Italy, France, Peru, Paraguay who all have gain most of their population in the last 2 years ad are old CoT or pro-CoT countries it becomes apparent how this D4 inflation of damage is having such an abrupt effect on battles.

Things don't end here however the same country "age" contributes to another "scam", which is being perpetrated with the active or passive assistance of the admins.

National org bonanza

Daily on the monetary market about 30-50 pages with offers get traded in the currency for gold section (this is the relevant section for currency trade volumes). Of those pages the amount of currency traded through government orgs and through individual's accounts is about 20:1 in favour of orgs. This means that on a daily bases about 20K gold is being traded for currency on the monetary market. The average profit on a trade is about 12% and the average duration of profit generation is 10 days.

So daily there is the equivalent of 2400 gold (480K CC)in profit generated from the monetary market and 95% of it goes to government orgs. To put things in perspective this is more then the taxes which are generated daily by all countries put together as the average tax income (without cheating) for all countries varies between 10K and 20K for the top countries and below 5K for most others with half the countries in the game generating less then 2K taxes per day.

So far so good, this on it's own is not a problem but only a different avenue in which the redistribution of resources happens. The problem comes from the amounts of orgs the diferent countries posses and this is where the admins are the primary actors.

For example they though it sensible, credible and believable that Romania had 208 orgs which were used by their government at the time the transfer of orgs was done and so granted to all of them national org status, Croatia has over 100 ors as well, Hungary, Poland, Serbia all have over 100 orgs each the MM is swamped with their "government" orgs, many of which are in private hands.

On the other side of the coin, the only country that actually played by the rules and offered only their government orgs for approval Bulgaria has 32 orgs of which currently 6 or 7 are banned (many countries have banned orgs, but I'll get to that a little later). Add to Bulgaria Indonesia, Russia and USA, the only countries that had sizeble populations at the time the transfer of orgs was being completed and thus the only ones with any chance of having more national orgs.

Countries like Macedonia, Chile, Mexico, Peru, Paraguay, Germany, France, Italy which have seen there populations grow after the change to mechanics have very few national orgs and the admins do not make new ones. The end result is that after the TWEDEN contract, one side possess about 75% of the national orgs in the game. So out of the 450K in profit generated daily by the national orgs on the monetary market over 380K go to TWEDEN countries, this creates a disbalance of about 290K daily more income for TWEDEN countries then CoT, more importantly this represents more then all their tax income combined and is in essence more than doubling their budgets. Of course those money do not flow into the governments hands per say and so are not readily seen but they flow into the hands of players from those countries and are ultimately utilized by them on the battlefields. I cannot start to estimate what % of the national orgs of different countries are in private hands but I imagine more then 50% of the income generated from the MM goes directly into private hands, much why there are quite a few staunch "elite" groups in the many countries who have been running their countries for years now.

To compound things the admins ban and unban orgs selectively and thus have compounded over time this problem even more. Simply put the Croatian national bank has been now banned 3 times and unbaned, the Argentina one as well along with at least another 20 orgs in former EDEN countries that were banned in a short time just before the fall of EDEN. Most of those are now unbanned while a few Bulgarian orgs which were targeted by bot farms and then reported have not been unbanned. At the time they were used to collect donations through the markets as transferring of funds to orgs was impossible and this was the only way to fund them as they were used by the military, bots were created by Turkey which "donated" to the orgs and then mass reported them. This has been explained to the admins, they were shown articles in which the general population was asked to donate in the manner stated and that it was only those orgs that were targeted. To be fair I was not "quoted" a price for the unbanning of those orgs when I attempted to take up the issue so I do not know if there is a price for unbaning orgs, the fact remains however that some orgs get unbaned and others do not and there seems to be a clear "political" line along which this happens.

Again the contract between EDEN and TWO precipitated this problem into a major one as all countries with "special" treatment all of a sudden found themselves on ones side.

To illustrate the effect of this:

1 Q7 tank costs currently about 9 CC (I'm being generous)
290K can buy 32222 Q7 tanks which make 322K hits.
on average 1 Q7 hit in D4 makes 25K damage, thus if we assume that 80% of those funds go to D4, then 250K hits with Q7 tank generate 6.25 Billion damage daily, this represents about 10% of the D4 damage of TWEDEN daily.

TWEDEN countries have on average 400-500 more PvP wins each PvP win is worth around 1.2 million damage and win rates which are 2 times higher. This in terms of actual damage is not that much only a 40-50 billion since the implementation of the PvP module but it has a very strong effect on single rounds and especially heavily contested battles as it allows for the much faster generation of damage by one side.


"We like you, we no like you"


The "favouritism" of the admins does not end there however as we know. A few months back after apically failing at their AS, Romania got their costs returned to them, because of some "bug" and because it was stated that a player had provided much of the funds for it. There are a few problems with this favouritism of course, because in the past when bugs have adversely effected anyone in the game the admins have generally closed their eyes and refused to compensate any part. Actually not quite, they did the same to Turkey and EDEN in the battle of Sofia, but when a little later the tables got turned, Bulgaria and CoT and it's allies did not get the same treatment. There are many other cases of the same notwithstanding the mass hacking of Phoenix presidents at the end of V1 when through it Romania managed to delete Hungary and in the process appropriated vast amounts of gold and currencies from the 1 week long occupation for which the admins did nothing much.

The afford mentioned Romanian player however was in the Romanian government at the time, was the main genius behind the AS and was at the same time a moderator on the admin team. Had already used internal information about pending promotions/changes to gain an advantage in battle but if all of this was not enough he consequently sold his account (W.A.R). If it was another player it would be easy to overlook, but this was the account of a well known player and so it is impossible to not notice. His previous name was Fremenul and he did have a lot of top articles over the years, which still stand on the account but will probably disappear soon. Now the admins have stated they need a "proof of purchase" to sanction this obvious illegal practice, so like many others before his, this will not get sanctioned either. This however means that account transfer and sale in essence has become legal and acceptable practice, the only question is when will we see another admin account be compromised again as was the case at the end of V1 as 50% of the admins actually play the game.....

I'll also mention offhand the numerous "bugs" that seem to only plague CoT countries in the last few months. Both USA and Indonesia had to wait an extra 24 hours to be able to take down their NEs so that the TWs they had could be closed and while this did not alter the military situation in general drastically it did cause the loss of a couple of battle which were strategic and would not have been lost otherwise if MPPs were able to be resigned in time as was planed ahead of time. The numerous bugs with non disappearing NEs, last of which was with Chile which altered the military campaign outright and so on, the cases are so numerous and almost all on one side that it would take an article longer then this one to state them all.


Corporate game balancing


In essence the game has now divulged to who has the biggest and strongest "lobby" with the admins who will implement promotions and tailor game changes to the wishes of these lobbies. As the lobbies of the former sworn, blood and eternal enemies of TWO and EDEN who became best buds over night, combined the admin generated bias became game altering. Right now through their actions and/or willful inactions the admins are increasing the damage of TWEDEN by more then 20% daily and decreasing the damage of CoT and independent countries by about 10%. While this is not the only reason for the disbalance of the current sides it is big enough to be game changing and is one which cannot be overcome by the players themselves no matter what excellence they may achieve.

To that we should add the pointed (yet again) attempt to spark hatred between two groups of players with the international meeting banner provocation which however this time backfired and instead of generating more income from hate, caused the exodus of many Macedonian players from the game and lowered income from that country for the admins. Of course the Greek and Turkish lobbies are happy by it and are looking forward to the destruction of the Bulgarian community as well, which is not far off.

The game has been changed again with the introduction of the ability of MUs to pay for damage directly on the battlefield in one sense this is good for the game as it will eliminate the "mercenary" practice over time which often escalated into outright racketeering by some mercenary forces demanding they get payed for damage or they would hit against the given country, as well as spread some of the resources to lower divisions as well and not only D4 which would lower somewhat the disbalance in D4 which we're already noticing the last few days. However it will make the disbalance in income that more accute to the end results in battles as it will now translate directly into damage without the need for any sort of organization, planing and so on, all of which were being utilized to compensate for the built in disadvantages from the admins. Not only that, but the fact that level 25 accounts will be able to donate funds to the MUs means that the illegal funding from bots will continue and will once again have a major effect on battles. D1 and D2 battles are already largely decided by fighting bots, so the same will now be funding the MUs as they reach the end of their lives.

Simply put, as bombs (5 mil from missions) are the deciding factor for D2 battles as well as D1, the fighting bots no longer need to even spend money to build up their strength but only exist to take advantage of the "missions" and then when in time they go up to level 25 dump all the gold from levels and medals that they may have won over their existence into the MUs for financing. A single bot can generate anywhere from 50 to 150 gold over it's lifespan to level 25 which would translate into 10-30K CC. As the average rate of financing is about 50-70 CC per 1 million, one bot can generate money to finance 133-399 millions of damage, which may not seem much. Considering however, that out of the 225K accounts that are the population of the game currently, only 40K fight daily and another 60K are active with the rest being either bots or dead upon registration. 2/3ds of the accounts in existence are either multies or bots, that makes a rough estimate of 10K bots and multies fighting everyday, 50K with some activity but not fighting and maybe another 50-100K in "stasis", things start to look much worst. Now all these bots are there generated over time, so they will not be entering or exiting the game daily, but considering the lifespan of a bot will be 60-90 days, it still makes for about 1K bots daily turnover. So if even 10% of them get utilized for financing battles as mentioned above, we could be seeing 13 - 40 billion damage financed by bots daily.

For example Argentina, which has had on average 300 registrations daily for the last 2.5 years which makes about 280K registrations over that span of time and only a growth of 700-1000 active players or a 0.25-0.3% retention rate, about 5-10 ties lower then the average for the game is one of the main generators of bot accounts in the game. While it does not necessarily mean they're Argentine per say as there is no way to know who creates them, a lot of the benefit fro them goes to Argentina and of course this is with the active or passive support of the admins who have not done anything to stop the practice in nearly 3 years now. Bulgaria as one of the youngest of the big countries (only one younger are Chile and Macedonia) now has the highest average rank of it's population while it has had for years similar registration rates and retention rates as the other top countries (excluding Poland and Serbia who have had higher nominal rates but similar per population rates) while countries like Turkey have stayed at the same levels for years. Not counting China, the farm parking spot, Macedonia and Bulgaria have the highest average level per citizen which is indicative of the lack of multies and bots and just shows how not cheating is a detriment in this game.


What can be done


Of course all of that should not be an excuse not to try and and change the status quo, on the contrary it is even more a reason to do so, because in the end when you're not suppose to win, you cannot loose. If you loose you were suppose to loose anyway so you achieved what was expected, if you win, you beat the odds in this case the admins as well and your achievement is that much better. The only way you can loose is to abandon your own principles and accept to give in to what you're being forced into.

As for the admins, the only way to punish the greedy b@ster*s is to not indulge in their hate generating exercises and to combine our voices and make them loud, so the paying players of USA, Macedonia, Germany, France, Italy, Bulgaria, Russia, Chile, Mexico, Indonesia, Canada, Sweden, Finland and so on, have to come together and demand from the admins to cease the favouritism towards certain countries and their lobbies to and among the admins. While the admins don't care of they loose the income from any single country as they showed with their disregard of Macedonia, they cannot turn a blind eye on all half the countries in the game who incidentally probably generate if not more, just as much revenue for them as the rest yet are getting disadvantaged by the admins and in essence are not getting the same product for the same money in other circumstances that would be called a scam.

There is a simple list of demands that can be put forward and I believe are the minimum needed to restore any semblance to this game:

1. Elimination of all but 5 government orgs per country. (As MUs can have monetary accounts now, orgs are no longer needed in theory and they have not been used for military purposes in reality for years now. Money can be donated directly to MUs by parliament and to easy this a simple change to voting for donations where the vote ends the moment the 50% prerequisite votes are collected can be implemented)

2. Scraping of the PvP module or remodelling it so, players only fight players in their own division, all loose 100 health no matter if they won or lost the fight get only 150% of their Q7 damage equivalent and not 200%. (since the PvP module has gone live, the active fighters daily have gone down from 50K to 38-40K, a comparable drop of active players in terms of % as with the V2 idiocy.)

3. Removal of the donate functions between players, with the ability for orgs to have accounts there is no longer a need for the ability to donate or reinstate the "donation" log pages on accounts so that the cheaters can be identified as it used to be and not be protected by the admins.

4. Publish all the accounts of players who work for the game in any capacity and disallow for those accounts to hold any "official" positions within the user dependent modules of the game (elections, congress, presidency, appointments on the politics page of countries, MU owners, commanders). They can either play the game or be employed by the game, not both as it creates a conflict of interest and has led to the current situation of "lobbies".

5. Publish with at least 2 weeks warning impending "promotions", changes to mechanics and or other external influences to the game. Stop the practice of "modelling" promotions to certain lobbies needs and starting and offering promotions "per request". (At this point it is no longer a secret that there will be promotion and so knowing ahead of time does not alter player behaviour they know already, it only alters in-game behaviour as planed military operations can be adversely affected by promotions).

6. Publish the accounts of any players who are currently or will be in the future involved in testing for which they receive enumeration in gold or other in-game resources including any "volunteers" who are or will be involved in the organization of sanctioned by the administration events. (While I do believe people should receive payment for their work I do not believe it should have an influence on the game environment and the minimum that can be done is inform the general community of what that influence is.)

7. Bring back the accurate and exact statistics in terms of damage dealt and activity of players both in-game and on the battlefield. It is time to lift the veil that has been put in place to safeguard cheaters and bots from detection.

8. Add a page where all previous names of an account are logged and are visible to all with the date on which they were changed. On the same page can be added the change of citizenship as well. (As far as citizenships, this information is already there but it is impossible to be accessed by the ordinary players as it means sifting through thousands of pages. As for the names is is imperative so that cheaters and scammers cannot change their names periodically and thus cheat the general player population over and over hiding behind the means given to them by the admins.)

9. Change the level at which accounts can finance MUs to a prerequisite of membership to division 3. (This will make the ability to finance them with multies much harder and not worth the time and effort.)

The admins should be made to understand that these are not "negotiable" but imperative if they want to retain us as consumers of their "product". Unfortunately what we have been shown time and again is that the only way this can be done is through denying them their profit margins and not through dialogue. Considering that these are not in any way subjective whims but objective demands for "equal product" for all consumers there is no excuse for the admins not to implement them and considering the amount of frivolous "missions" that we have seen over the past 6 months it is well within their capabilities to do so and do so in a very short period of time.

It's time to force the administration of the game offer the same products to all or risk loosing it altogether. Key here is not to leave the game, no keep their costs running, just do not pay to be scammed anymore until they change so that everyone receives the same product for their money.

I know this article will be taken down as soon as it is seen, so I'll publishing it on an outside source as well and if they ban my account which I would not be surprised if they do, it was a pleasure.

PS If I'm around still in a few days I'll publish an article about tactics and in-game relation of power between countries and alliances, which is not derived from the admin "management" of the battlefields.

PS 2 This is the link to the googledoc where the article is published as well just in case I get silence😛 http://tinyurl.com/mgjeyjd