The Aftermath

January 4th, 2010The Orkfian Times1 comment

So here we are.

Its been a few hectic days.

Lets have a look at how things turned out.

The punishment was dealt about 19 hours after it happened, the outcome was five suspended tribes. The two LEs getting 24 hours for the use of this loophole that LnO in discussion with Martel deemed to be a bug. 12 hours for three tribes who in the alli channel supported what was happening, not taking part in any way other then writing down their support.

I have no problem with the two 24 hours suspensions, even tho I wouldnt classify it as a bug but rather a loophole which used this way lead to something extreme but still working as intended. I will come back to this later on.

What I find questionable is the suspension of someone who didnt participate at all in this abuse other then writting their support for it, this sets some new and atleast for me totally unheard of standards. I could drop a number of examples here but I guess all of you can imagine how this is just plain stupid.

Lets go through what else this has lead to.

Martel posted a “Stricter rules for Game Talk” topic in Game Talk, calling for a more strict forum section to apparently make sure the staff doesnt miss valid points amongst the “spam” taking place there.

Alliances at War has now a third version, the three are: The Live one, a Balancing server and an Experimental server, this is to finally try to avoid having us players being beta testers every single age.

Light Elf should now be fixed. No question about it that that was needed.

Balrog was just after the initial suspension of the tribes be changed at the same time as Light Elf, this has apparently been changed and nothing seems to be done about them until next age change.

The aatw staff will apparently try to communicate better in the future.

Martel himself says he doesnt have an official comment about this whole situation atm.

Personally Ive now also been kicked out of #orkstaff, not that I had any official reason being there in the first place but Ive been there for around a year and a half, so I guess its quite a statement on how this statement we did with LE was not appreciated.

Martel himself said when he first logged in and saw this that he was upset that we went this far and that we could had gotten to him about this with a way less aggresive way. Thats just the problem tho, it wasnt Martel we tried to reach, it was the Head of devlopment we tried to reach.

Someone might say that we could had convinced Iluros with something less abusive and easier, well fact remains, he himself was a 9k balrog and couldnt see anything wrong when his main job is development which includes balancing not just having a race in pushing through changes.

We had the same issue with the whole toughness and industry thing, we even started a petition here on the portal which quite a few people signed, me and quite a few with me were pleased to see it getting delayed atleast for another age.

Someone might now argue that there is no one in charge in the dev team, that suprises atleast me a bit since it clearly states Iluros as head of dev. Lets see what else people we have in aatw dev.

• Iluros
• Joe
• Bolle
• Halcyon
• Amiralla
• Robokop

We have covered Iluros. Joe stated in game talk that he voiced the opinion in dev that Balrogs were/are overpowered, he even went so far as playing as them to prove it, this however was changed when KP went all Eagles thus making his statement ruined.

Bolle were at the time arguing for Balrogs, not seeing the obvious flaw with them.

Halcyon is for those that isnt aware of it playing in #17, the alliance that consisted of six balrogs (is now five cause one reset), having 50% of one race can only be described as intentional, I don’t believe any of the players in #17 are stupid so they gotta have been aware of the overpowerness in the race.

Amiralla has been inactive during this period of time so I assume he havent taken part of the discussion in dev.

Robokop is obiviously against Balrogs overpowerness since it was him and me that were the two Light Elves.

If dev had been a democratic group without a lord/head of resort then it should had been Joe & Robokop vs. Iluros & Bolle with Halcyon as a joker. Since Balrogs is overpowered I can only assume that IF the aatw dev is democratic then Halcyon joined with Iluros and Bolle.

So either way democratic or with a special leader it still came down to convincing Iluros.

Something that seems to keep occuring is that everyone is blaming someone else, ppl in staff are blaming eachothers, some staff even goes so far to blame the players for not doing the balancing for them.

This community is small but great, but it is not our job to find the flaws in stupid pushed changes, now that sentence and sure this whole article might have pissed someone off but the fact still remains, we are not some beta testers, before you go all defensive on your ass spend some extra thoughts on whats being said. Before its to late.

Cheers

~A player who gotten tired of seeing the devs misstakes beeing blamed on the players a.k.a Acwder

Sort it out

January 3rd, 2010The Orkfian Times0 comments

This is yet another petition against the changes taking place in aatw, and further more a protest letter against how things are currently being treated.

Lets start with the facts.

This will consist of three things. 1. Balrogs, 2. Light Elfs, 3. The mentality of some Dev people.

First of Balrogs. Currently 7 of the top 10 tribes in Alliances at War are all Balrogs.

Their stats is the following:

• Instantly replenishes 1 mp for every 75 citizens killed during attacks
• +1.5% bonus to mage level per 1000 fame
• 1 weaponry counts as 0.75 guilds
• 15% fewer homes allowed
• Balancing traits—Takes 25% less damage to buildings and military from invasions, thievery and mystics; Mines, farms and yards produce 50% of normal; 50% market/barracks space efficiency; 50% of normal military upkeep.

• Basic: Damned Soul 0/0 100 cr
• Off: Devil 23/0 1,340 cr
• Def: Occultist 0/16 1,100 cr
• Elite: Demon 15/13 975 cr
• Thief: Spy 0/0 400 cr

There is a few factors here making Balrogs not only really good but also really imbalanced. I will here state a few of the imbalances with Balrogs and things around Balrogs

1. 15% homes and the reduced dmg taken makes Balrogs close to impossible to kill with EQ/DM/Arson unless the tribe is really really inactive and very very low deffended
2. The racestats combined with the weaps working as guilds makes Balrogs a superb attacker, currently not being match by any other race.
3. Due to how the failrates works atm with 50-200% for mages and thieves, tms cannot do anything against an attacker thats much bigger, attackers can on the other hand due to loads of changes recently improving attackers do raids, BCs and Razes on any tribes at any sizes (as long as they can beat them ofc), I personally experienced that my last lifespan (as Balrog so I know how imba it is and the attackers targeting me was 2 balrogs and a mori more then twice my size), I recieved about 22 attacks in the period of just above 48hours. loosing over 1.2million raw def (at ~11k acres).

Balrogs made their return in Age 26. There are currently 20 Balrogs in play making them the third most played race in aatw, only beaten by Eagle (31) and Spirits (also 20), tho having a look on the sizes of these races makes the statistics above kinda misguiding.

Out of those 20 Spirits playing only 11 tribes are above 400 acres, infact only 14 of them have tribes with any acres at all. Eagles on the other hand have 29 tribes above 400 acres, this mainly due to KP deciding to reset and going all Eagles.

Balrogs got 19 tribes bigger then 400 acres, out of the 151 tribes being bigger then 400 acres, making it 12.6% of all played races atm.

Taking a look at top 10 you’ll see that 7 out of the current top is all Balrogs (as mentioned earlier)

Now lets take a closer look into Balrogs immortality. I will base the calcs on a typical Balrog both in the top10 and one of the smaller to prove its immortality both on big and on small acres.

A 3,xxx acre Balrog.

• Homes: 15%
• Markets: 8%
• tmdeff: 18% acads (with fame bonus making it ml 20)
• (This is a tribe in growthmode)
• 68% citiz

To kill this tribe with Arsons, DMs, EQs and Razes would require 89% of the Balrogs Homes. 89%.. thats sick, that is ofc not voided, but its still a huge ammount, at these small % the dmg from tms are really low.

Raid/fb killing could be a option for smaller Balrogs but you need alot of raids/fbs to do so, don’t forget about pestilence that boosts the citz regen even more and nightmare if the alliances have any economics (we failed a fb/raid kill on a 2.6k balrog that had 20% economics, even voided he was almost 100% citz again before the attackers could raid again.

A 13,xxx Balrog

• Homes: 15%
• Markets: 8%
• tmdef: 26% acads (ml 36 with fame bonus), 7% ghs
• (Semigrowth mode)
• 65% citz

Here you need 85% homes if not voided.

The point here is not that the only are immortal (really really hard to kill) they are also damn good attackers, I personally believe them to be the best attackers ingame atm and I think this opinion is shared by alot of people.

You have to be a fool not to see the overpowerness with Balrogs yet the last age changes only held improvements for the race other then reducing the ammount of citz the non homes holds (which is a drop in the ocean as a change)

Moving on

To cut it short, Light Elf has a ability where any dark spell results in 1% mp recharged for the targeted Light Elf, it was noticed that even people from the same alliance could throw spells like visions and the LE would get his mp recharged, this could be used to such extent that two LEs could achive an unlimited ammount of mp.

This is ofc overpowered, and I say overpowered cause its working as intended, it wasnt written in any other way in the dev forum, nor in the guide nor in the age changes list. it litterly says:

Replenishes 1% of total mana whenever targeted by a dark spell

The current definition of dark spells is everything you can throw on someone else except for the alliances spells.

This is again something utterly overpowered.

When this was noticed earlier we started discussing it in our alli channel (Im playing in #45 in aatw), and me along with the staffmember that reported it (he also reported it right away as a issue) decided to go and kill Iluros the dev responsible for all this (he was at this time playing Balrog and being quite a big one aswell), we would then move on to kill the 7 balrogs in the top10, this would be to prove the point about both imbalanced and overpowered races and no fixes were anywhere to be seen.

So we started doing some fbs. About 1.3k of them, we didnt kill Iluros but he came online and sent to LnO that this was a bug and thus we should be suspended. My arguement has the entire time being that if Light Elves should be suspended due to using a overpowered function then so should all Balrogs, but this opinion wasnt shared.

I could now go on and on about the discussion that took place both on #orkstaff @ irc and on the ingame forum but I want to point out with this post is once again that players are taking the consequenses of stupid changes that wasnt thought through and pushed into the game, its getting annoying being beta testers every single age.

A LE fix was on devork just a few hours after it being noticed, Balrogs on the other hands wasnt even planned to be changed until after this whole convo, a change is now on devork, I won’t even comment that change but I can’t believe that it takes this much arguementation to show something obvious..

All LEs are now paused until this fix has been uploaded, Balrogs on the other hand are left free to play around tho Iluros stated if they would be paused they should have the lost years repaid.. And Iluros put it:

Balrogs are overpowered. People playing balrogs receive an unfair advantage from their choice, but their intent at least explicitly is not to take advantage of the imbalance.

So you do deserve to get suspended according to Iluros if you picked Balrog cause they are the best attacker in the game atm due to their overpowerness.

This post have now taken so long time to write down due to being busy on so many other places argueing about all this that most of the discussion is over.

Ive decided to post this anyway. Now for crying out loud spend some more thoughts and testing into the changes you go live with before you no longer have a game to change.

I hate to write another of these longwinding posts so please sort it out so I don’t have to do it again.

Imbalance is a bitch

Cheers

~An annoyed Acwder…