W3C - Do No Harm

We had a player here who threatened to destroy the markets, once and for all.

Then he continued by dumping huge amount of products, (including EP), that could not have been obtained by any country without some unintended tricks.

In all the years we are running, we have never had a case like this.
It was his intent to cause harm.
He also had multiple accounts.

we have cancelled his actions and the market restored.
then he did so again and we have cancelled them again.

now it is impossible for him to do this again and we are watching for such actions in general.

This one is a first and again it exposes a weakness in the way trading works.
sometimes we learn it the hard way but in this case too, we know what the problem is and we will fix it.

extreme situations result in extreme behavior,
It exposes existing problems and leads to their solution.

Unfortunately, all these incidents and extreme situations where supported by very large players. Not all of them of course.

We love successful players but there is some arrogance involved here and the thought that they can decide how things will continue without any regard to other players, large or small.

The account of this player will be destroyed.

We request you not to get involved in any such action as we easily discover who is involved, we always could, but this time we will clean up.

"Then he continued by dumping huge amount of products, (including EP), that could not have been obtained by any country without some unintended tricks."

Are you sure? You've claimed REPEATEDLY that people who did NOT use tricks are dumping products they could only have acquired by cheating. However, you've not caught them actually cheating, you just are surprised at how much product they have.

My entire LU account disappeared for a day or two before you restored it when I sold a large amount of electric power that I DID NOT CHEAT TO ACQUIRE a few months ago. The reasoning was people selling large quantities of product were suspicious. I could sell that amount every couple weeks. I am not the only one whose account you've done that to. You've not actually caught anyone cheating with acquiring products that wasn't reported to you.

It's not hard to acquire products if you have a lot of CEOs contracting to yourself, if you have a lot of countries where you have auto orders set up, if you play for a while etc. It's my guess that this player had all three variables and simply stockpiled for a long time because there's nothing to else spend money on when you're already rich.

It's also interesting you're suddenly discussing tons of multi-account issues. These clearly aren't *new* multi account players, so where was your concern before? I spent months dealing with a player who had a half dozen accounts fighting against me on Golden Rainbow. You did NOTHING. You were aware of this. Are multiple accounts allowed until Andy gets mad at the player? Or is it multiple accounts are allowed if you spend a lot of money on the game? What is the rule?

Successful players test your game but can only play within the rules you've created. Being upset that they push the parameters of what you thought was possible and then calling them arrogant is strange. They can only play the game using the mechanics that are in the game. There's no rule against dumping products on the market, is there? There's no rule that they have to be nice to others (if so, why do you allow wars?). There's no rule they have to care about how others play so long as they're not rude on the forum. Posting that players are arrogant because they're selling stockpiles of goods makes no sense and sounds really tone-deaf.

This player's account will be destroyed for selling goods, but another player can attack EVERYONE above war level 3 on Golden Rainbow with a half dozen accounts? Seriously?

What is your goal by saying things like this?

He did the same thing to me. When I sold a huge amount of electric power, my WG empire suddenly disappeared. I currently have about 6 billion EP. If I sell it, does that make me a cheat? I can confidently say that the player in question didn't use any glitch to acquire what he had. I remember him acquiring those products over the years.

I urge Andy to provide evidence for this development. We need proof—just one piece of evidence! Andy, please be transparent. Until this is justified, no one will believe what you're saying. With all due respect, I've seen you make costly assumptions about some sales on this forum without any evidence. You've also canceled player trades simply because you thought such transactions couldn't be possible. It seems to me that players' assets aren't protected and can be removed without any investigation.

It would be worthwhile if you let everyone know what's going on..

What's the evidence of cheating? I came back in January so my account is not old. I may have been around long time but the account I am on is new. I have almost 2B in EP in my account that I could dump on WG or FB if I wanted to. If i saved it all up and dumped it after my account was a year old, I could easily dump 30B+ in EP. I'm not cheating. I don't play the game the way Andy tells me I need to, but that isn't cheating. It is a choice I make because I like the challenge. I wish that was how you talked about WF and EP instead of telling people they shouldn't have more then x number of WF. Instead, say the ideal ratio is x WF per X population, and maintaining more than this will get exponentially harder in the following ways.... Give people the choice to challenge themselves instead of setting up that I am playing wrong... or maybe I am "cheating" I don't know anymore.
BTW, I dumped 500M EP on FB before I read this post. It was all acquired without cheating through my nearly 40k WFs. Maybe I am doing whatever you accuse this person of doing. We'll see if my account still exists later.

"It seems to me that players' assets aren't protected and can be removed without any investigation. "

Yet war was made almost impossible to "protect assets"

None of the cases mentioned above are the result of any intervention but rather database errors that fortunately we were able to fix and restore.
and to date, were not able to find them.

You seem not to trust us. It opens a new era.

This guy threatened to destroy the markets as a revenge for something.
Burn it all.

Threats like these will result in sudden death.
No warning.
Had multiple accounts on top of that.

The account will be destroyed.
never had this before.

I hope no one will try the same.

we WILL make it impossible.

we are now convinced that not all players can be trusted to remain constructive.

This current situation, as I said before, created extreme behavior and exposed some (old) errors that we will now fix, one after the other.

Many large old time players used to be an asset and used to help.
No more.
Some do not.

You happen to think that we do not understand the wind energy game.
we do.
I created it.

You seem not to understand the warnings we gave you.

I repeat the same again.

if you do not make sure you have all the wind turbines needed for maintenance, you will end up without wind energy.

we are not scared by any group of players who decide to leave, it is up to you so forget about threats.

As far as I can see, no one did. words only. I see transactions with a time stamp, lasting many hours every day.
I must admit, one stopped for one day after moving cash to all these countries to prevent problems while he was "gone".

you are welcome to stay, we hope you will.
But any thought that we will not fix the errors that have proved to be disastrous, is futile.

we will fix them all.

The cheating was discovered and was reported to us by a player who used it himself and gave us some details.

"This guy threatened to destroy the markets as a revenge for something.
Burn it all."

So if he simply did not post on the forum but had the same actions, it'd be ok? If so, are you just reacting to what people post here and letting it impact game rules and policy? Why can't a player stockpile resources and sell them all at once? That's what the player in question did. He has *NOT* been caught cheating to acquire resources, he just... sold them in a way you didn't fancy. Apparently that's not ok for some reason.

"You happen to think that we do not understand the wind energy game.
we do.
I created it."

Maybe you understand how you think wind should be played. However, creating it doesn't mean you understand how anyone else will play it.

You commonly seem to not understand how your players use the game functions available to them, specifically experienced players with large accounts. These players know the game better than most and know game mechanics better than most. There's no more clear evidence than you temporarily removing my LU account or parts of other players' accounts for simply selling electric power acquired from wind farms. Players may act like they think you don't know what you're talking about - but they do so because it can sound that way when you post.

Wind power profit reporting was more than 3x off for a year. When you realized you could generate any quality power you wanted and get paid at 330q, it got updated. It was *wrong* for over a year. Reporting still isn't quite accurate even though you insist it is.

No one is perfect. No one is asking you to be perfect. You just seem to post blame on players for playing the game by clicking the buttons you allow them to click. Recently, everything is about "cheating" that was allowed for years but now suddenly isn't allowed or is not allowed because someone made you personally upset. You're removing this account for selling a lot of goods but not the accounts someone attacked me with for months? Why? Does my account not matter? People can cheat so long as it only impacts me and not you?

Looking at peoples' login timestamps means nothing. Are people logging in or are they playing? I leave simcountry open to see who's going to get called out on the forum next. I haven't really played in a month or more.

For someone who openly dislikes only specific instances of multiple account abuse, I'd like to bring up that Romeo Vicardi's account was used to falsely push a point on this very forum by someone who is not Romeo Vicardi. What I and I think many others see by how you respond to most players is that this is not a good way to treat customers. Repeatedly saying you don't care if players leave is a terrible business idea, true or not. What you're actually doing is encouraging people to leave.

What exactly is the goal with these posts?

<!-Quote-!>Quote:

we are now convinced that not all players can be trusted to remain constructive.<!-/Quote-!>

Not really news, is it?

Judging by the state of the game and the sea of minor imperfections, there are some deeper organisational and communication issues to be solved. By the looks of it, the proper feedback has not been offered by the players, and the necessary actions absent for some years now.

If players were managing to create stock out of nothing, that is a serious flaw that needs to be fixed. Otherwise, this EP and Wind Farm scandal seems pretty minor on the face of it all.

On another note, I still haven't seen anyone explain why they all suddenly decided to start selling EP in large quantities after months of hoarding it. What changed? What's so different now from then to stop the hoarding?

Nothings changed, large players regularly sell off parts or all of their stockpile, whether it be EP or something else. The particular player in question for this thread decided to sell off his large amounts of resources prior to quitting. This wouldn't have been bad for the game in any way unless it was sustained in the long term.

Andy seems to think those resources were acquired illegitimately and not through hoarding resources for many weeks/months/years. Whether that's true currently is only known to Andy himself and the player in question who has since been banned. All any of the rest of us can do is make an assumption based on individual opinions of Andy's previous actions, whether that's good or bad.

I'd be glad to shed some light on those situations for you. I may seem biased because admittedly some of my statements are critical of Andy and his performance of his GM role, but that's not really frustration as a player as much as it is frustration as a business operator and specifics in his behavior that run contrary to good business practices.

The minor imperfections littering the game, for the most part are understandable. The length that some have existed is a problem for sure, but I feel like everyone understands that in a perpetual game like this that appears to mainly have one employee tending the lighthouse so to speak, there will always be things to fix and any new change brings a potential new problem. I could be wrong but I don't get the distinct feel that players have a particular problem with that itself.

The problem with the statement that proper feedback has not been offered by players is that communication from the GM updating the game to the players that test and play the game's mechanics is very inconsistent. If you're just joining us recently, he may seem very active to you. Over time, however, his record is extraordinarily spotty. The GM will completely disappear from the game for weeks at a time without any word seemingly at random. Updates, when they happen, are actually frequently not announced at all. Players very frequently accidentally stumble upon changes of which no indication of any change had been given generally when those changes cause some sort of problem with the numbers that they had come to expect. When announcements for updates are made, they are often vague and give little actual information regarding the specifics of the changes and instead give the GM's personal feelings on what he hopes the changes accomplish. The announced changes are also very difficult to follow up on and keep track of due to the clunkiness of the forum, and the announcements are made only on the forum and not on the other pages (such as Game News) where they should be.

Players creating stock out of nothing, I completely agree with you is a problem. I may actually be the player that Andy was referring to when he spoke of a someone exposing a cheat of sorts as I started experimenting to find out how a player back in March/April was staring their account and almost instantly having astronomical amounts of money and military assets, mainly because that player began 'hostile bidding' on corporations of other players and causing considerable disruption. I was able to duplicate what I believe was the exploit he was using and reported it to Andy step by step. It didn't actually create products from nothing but it was a workaround that essentially gave the player unlimited spending space. I will say also, Andy seems to try to imply that the player that reported (me if this is the exploit he was referring to) also took advantage. I'll be glad to share the full e-mail that I sent to him on discord (even after being shown, I for whatever reason can't post images here) in which I specifically told him how many products I was able to get and told him he was free to remove them from the account as the experiment truly was to help pin down what the actual cheating player that I was hunting down was doing.

That is different from the Wind Farm / Electric Power situation, considerably. It doesn't take many Wind Farms to completely satisfy a country's month to month needs, and any excess goes straight into the country's stockpile. Because of the economic power Wind Farms generated at the height of their popularity, which admittedly was far too high but also players went out of their way to make Andy aware of and were ignored, many players have upwards of a couple thousand Wind Farms in each of their countries. Just 2,000 Wind Farms 15 million Electric Power units per actual day. Some players have 5,000 in a country, and have multiple countries. The players that can afford that amount also don't tend to be in a hurry to sell it because frankly they don't need the money. The Electric Power generated by Wind Farms doesn't factor into standard supply and demand, so the only way a player's generated Electric Power impacts world prices is if they try to sell it above and beyond current demand.

When players leave the game they do it in a variety of ways. Some like me just straight up deleted their countries and enterprises. Like the snap of a finger I erased a few quadrillion worth of assets from the game because I didn't even bother to move assets into direct trade storage. Some players, that had refrained from selling their excessive Electric Power generated by their farms because they didn't want to drive the price down, do what they can to help players on their way out by dumping supplies they have on hand. The player that Andy is referencing as being essentially an evil anarchist by dumping everything he had and turning most market situations to surplus, is actually good for the newer player. Absolutely him dumping his inventory means product prices are going to drop while they remain in surplus. So you will make less money on products you are selling. But look at the big picture. You are now in a position to buy up products that you know are underproduced at what can end up being a steep discount. That inventory that the player is selling will actually make shortages that were being experienced before he sold them worse, because C3 corporations tend to close down when products they produce are in surplus, and for products that are being underproduced (like the Oil that he was selling), it presents a great opportunity to buy and hold onto products yourself until all of that inventory is sold off and the market returns to its equilibrium and prices return to normal, because overall production supply and demand only tips the scale to more shortage when players do these dumps over the long term. I can't defend the multiple accounting, but the product dumping, even with the player saying they wanted to watch the market burn, it really was for the better long term for any active player that would take advantage of the influx of products that are normally in deep shortage. The temporary setbacks would have been more than made up for by shifting your spending space to buying products at a premium that you could then later flip for double or even triple the price you paid.

Andy I would recommend to try and help with cooling player hostility, that you can try a different approach on how you can communicate so that it doesn't feel like a tit for tat in communications.

Thank you all for the comments