Posts by A.A

  • Revitalizing Ikariam


    I took a quick look at this and I see your point.

    It's very play style dependent though, most of other players can't do the same thing.

    Also you have 14% bonus for research and not having theocracy as a government form so it makes more sense for you to do so.


    It's a thing I'll keep in mind, maybe I'll find a use of it in the future.


    Thanks for sharing it

  • Revitalizing Ikariam

    1. No not a barren server, just a lot of self sufficient big guys and illegal multis causing low demand on the market. You just don't play on many servers in many language communities to be aware of the variations.


    2.I have more traders than this actually but still that's a design flaw, I played since 2008 with a few breaks and the occasions you mentioned are pretty much the only 2 times I got free traders during the last 17 years, by the way one winter event many years ago they were giving free Ambrosia for the 7th day login, should we ask the avreage player to use Ambrosia now?

    Just go ask any game designer should the remedy of a potential problem in free to play game be using premium item just because the game gave the players some of this item once or twice before and let me know what they will tell you :/


    3. I did not mean this at all, you got it totally incorrectly.

    The crow bro, can you please tell me if the following 2 quotes refer to the same idea? Was I not clear?

    And

    Quote from User12996

    3. This is even more convoluted, but let's see if I understand. Player X donates 100k to 52:52 on server Y. If Player X graveyards and recovers to server Z, he'd still have a 100k debt on 52:52, even if the sawmill is a lower level? That makes even less sense, but I'm not sure how to understand what you're trying to say. But as long as he moves to 52:53, he's debt free? That's not a punishment at all; it doesn't even make sense to implement this.

    Please tell us The crow maybe I'm too sleepy to know how unclear I was



    I don't know why this is 3b but anyway, I mentioned town numbers just to let you know how things are, and why they don't build more cities, no need to repeat things.


    4. Ok, I didn't say he didn't. I was just letting you know the facts, actually my old server got harmed by the first merge mor le yhan the second "soft" merge.

    Probably other servers got jarmed more because our server was very competitive and it scared people away.

    Also after the soft merge suddenly all players from the graveyard came back to world map, surely a flaw on the backend side of things but was nice for us to pillage them ^^


    7. I know you have no problem with it, you made it vividly clear that you want to PUNISH THE WHOLE ISLAND if a player goes to the graveyard, but using the sawmill example hides the severity of the problem you are requesting to be implemented I had to clarify the severity of your proposal


    8. Why would I go back to an island with 1/1 production site? I won't be going back to a new world, your 1/1 example makes no sense.

    It's either:

    a) You go back to a level 30/30, or whatever, island and pay your personal dept and go on or move to a new place. Piece of cake!

    Or, with your proposal:

    b) 1. Go back to find your island a in dept because other players left it and be unable to upgrade it anytime soon and wish things were as before "no refund or penalties" or have to search for another set of islands that have the miracles you need and enough spaces for your towns which is very hard in active worlds.

    2. Find no dept other than yours but decide to leave the island when you go back for any other reason and leave your neighbors with a further dept that they have nothing to do with.


    Also can you answer this:

    According to your design what will happen if I relocate a town without ghosting? Just relocating what will happen to donations? Will there be a dept?

  • How can i make a bank of generals

    1. Easy!

    You just need a lot of multis in a server with "lenient" GOs.

    Join a, or the, big alliance in that server so that the GOs would consider you with their "friends" in that alliance and get the process going.

    2. Multis, multis produce resources and gold, get pillaged by you larger account(s) and buy from you to give you gold, you build a lot of units, then you chanel all of it to your bank account.

    3. Through trading in game, black market and trading post, obviously.

    4. a) "Lenient" GOs, I saw GOs engaging in making banks before.

    b) Knowing how not to get caught by good GOs.


    This is the real way how these accounts with large amounts of general points are made, I have talked with people who make generals banks before.


    That said it's clearly illegal and you may, and should, get banned for this.

    Also there's an increasing pressure to eliminate these banks from the game.

  • Revitalizing Ikariam


    I'll try to make my replay short because this is getting very repetitive, I'll try not to repeat what I've said before because repeating won't make anyone change their mind, lets go:


    Quote from User12996

    ....donate all wood, sell all luxury for gold, put your towns into donation mode, and ghost. You won't lose anything and will come back to a lot of research and gold. Yes, there's a small opportunity cost, but the long term gains of merging on your own are generally worthwhile


    If you don't want to sell your res, you can either pool your res and use traders to donate or use a trader in each town and donate....

    Selling luxury goods isn't easy by the way, I'm currently in a small war and always offering the most needed goods in my server and the demand isn't that high.

    And "come back to a lot of research"? Really? Are you suggesting using scientists? You know they are very cost ineffective, right?

    Also "merging on your own"? We are talking about changing islands not changing world.


    "Use traders" ? I thought we are considering the average player, the average player does NOT pay for free to play games, so suggesting a premium feature to remedy an issue the average player is bound to face is a big no no, you make premium feature to monetize your game and make the less talented people able to compete as well as to allow the willing players to support the game, some players use premium features and buy cosmetic content just to support the devs, they say so clearly "we buy this to support the devs we don't need it". Otherwise you are giving spenders an unfair advantage.


    Quote from User12996

    So even if the penalty is server wide for a specific account (and I feel like this hurts legitimate players more), that just means that that specific donation account can only donate once per server and I don't believe that really solves the issue while legitimately hurting players that ghost, come back, and then can't spend their own donations.

    Is that why you were opposing my suggestion? Because that's NOT what I meant at all.

    When I mentioned the server I meant keeping track of which server this account was in before, otherwise I can donate to Alpha EN, ghost, go to Beta FR, donate then back to Alpha EN and so on.

    My suggestion is if the player donates to an island, 52:52 for example, and goes to the graveyard then back he will find a dept for this island, 52:52.

    If he for any reason, mainly having no enough town spots on the islands of his area, wants to:

    a) Leave the whole area he will move easily with the free town relocation and donations refund to a new area and donate to it as the situation is now and as per the refund's intended purpose.

    b) Relocate 1 or more towns but not all of them he will have the dept on the islands he didn't departure, so if he wants to stay on 52:52 he will find in this island and won't be able to donate from the refunded wood to other islands before he pays off the dept.

    Conclusion: NO penalty for legitimate players whatsoever.


    1b) Just login to say... Minotaurs EN and take a look at the top 100 donations page. You will find that this type of donation accounts is of very little points max 2 towns, if 2 towns at all, I mean their main advantage is to repetitively donate to very large mines using a not equally large amount of wood, otherwise the guys would be buying Ambrosia and donating use his own large account, so why build many towns? To take more spots on the islands which could be taken by potential enemies who are waiting for the donation account to to the graveyard? Or to split the amount of wood donated between half a dozen islands with a dozen of resources production sites, sawmills and luxury goods?



    1c) No no no. No insult intended here, I did NOT intend to insult your intelligence whatsoever, I do indeed thing your design is not well thought out but I won't insult you for this.

    I may be a bit too straightforward for some people's taste but I definitely am not rude.

    To be honest you have a valid reason to think I intended to say so, I should have been more careful when choosing my words but I often write these replies half asleep, including this reply, so you can find a lot of typos that bypass the quick proofreading I do.

    Anyway you have my apology, I'm sorry ^_^


    By the way, I'm not salty I just fear that this island based dept idea would find its way to the game, that's all.


    Quote from User12996

    In regards to soft merges, that's why the last merge wasn't a soft merge. They explicitly stated that everyone was merging because soft merges were too advantageous for the accounts merging in.


    I don't know if they have said so but that's not the main reason, but an important reason was that a lot of the target servers in the last 2 merges were old servers which were build based on the "OLD" miracle system the one from 2008 with passive bonuses.

    For example Hephaestus Forge used to boost sulphur production, accordingly it only existed on sulphur islands, so if you wanted to have permanent forge miracle while playing in one of these old servers/worlds you will need a lot of sulphur cities which caused people to rely on dozens of multis to get other resources illegally.


    7. "And?" Well, all of your calculations are based on the sawmill that needs a much less amount of wood to get upgraded and doesn't need to be upgraded as much because most of the new servers have a production boost for wood, while some of the most crowded servers have either little or no boost for marble and crystal the currently most needed resources.


    8. Exactly, so no need to make it hard for returning players by adding a penalty or making them return to find their islands heavily penalized.

  • Revitalizing Ikariam


    1.a) In case of a merge we:

    1. Get free town relocation.

    2. Have empty islands.

    3. Coordinate with a friend or two and move together to suitable islands and cooperate to get the mines working quickly.

    You don't get anything of this when a large player on your island goes to the graveyard server, if we follow your suggestion and ghost our account we are at risk of losing our place(s) on other islands when we get ghosted and loosing our resources to because getting ghosted requires not logging in for 30 days straight during which we are defenseless.


    That said, a large amount of players hated resetting mine levels and wanted to keep things as is to keep the old mine levels but the devs got the wrong conclusion from their protest and made one of the new merge target worlds to be "the good old days" with no bonuses and ended up having it pretty much a ghost server in most language communities.


    Other than this your reply to 1.a) did not remedy the design flaw I mentioned, a donation account will donate to one island until it gets it to a high level then move to the next after its owner is happy with current level which is making it expensive for cheaters same as my suggestion but mine does NOT have your problem of Penalizing honest players in needlessly.


    1.b) Problematic donation accounts have only one city so there is no islands B and C it's just one island so they are having no problem.


    1.c) I was expecting you to give certain answer, a not so smart one, but I didn't want to mention it and adress it like a) and b) actually I was not going to mention b) but changed my mind at the last minute.



    3. What can I say, you don't see the analogy

    I keep mentioning the draw backs of ghosting your account and you insist on it, you even gave a more flamboyant idea, wait for the next merge :D

    Also what about new players, and soft merges? Because, make no mistake,the next merge is going to be a soft merge transferring the new small worlds they keep releasing every now and then to the older ones.


    I know the benefits of ghosting but it's not easy for everyone as it's easy for your 11 accounts on the edge of the map, I hope you can get this.


    4. Isn't the penalty island specific? So if they remove the colony they will not have the penalty anymore, are you confused about your own design? Because according to your design what I said is totally correct, you are concerned about players losing 9000 gold and 1000 wood for building the colony that you a tooltip to stop this from happening but you are not concerned about players having huge penalties.


    Quote from User12996

    I honestly have no idea why you'd think I'm badidol's burner account. It's pretty funny. I'm probably just a realist.

    I did NOT say you are badidol's burner account, Cheech said so and I made a joke about it, a joke you didn't get.

    Read carefully please.


    Quote

    The debt isn't any different than moving to a different island and starting over with donations. That's the whole thing, you act like the debt is a huge penalty. It isn't. It's simply the price that was already donated to get the mines where they currently are.

    I thought you said "mine should be shared per island" now you are saying it's same as starting over with donations i.e. as if there were no cooperation or "sharing" per island, a bit contradictory.



    That's a bad example, try considering luxury goods, it takes more than 22M wood to reach level 29 for luxury goods not 30, just 29.

    Now consider this for resources that doesn't have production boost in a certain world, like marble in the 3rd target world in the last merge.



    Quote from User12996

    All it is is a difference of opinion.

    Correct, I'll have to leave it at this point and let the devs and the community decide on the subject.

    Maybe even remove the whole idea of refunding donations unless there's a merge, like it was before.

  • Revitalizing Ikariam

    I wanted to reply to this earlier but I was very busy and had very little time to give a proper reply, I apologize for that :)

    Now let me reply to each point you mentioned:

    I'd like to start with your number 2:

    a) The game already saves all the needed data for all active players.

    b) A quick story: Sometimes I build piracy towns and when I want to demolish them I donate any extra wood I have in such towns to their islands. When I build a new piracy town on any of those islands and l want to donate the extra wood as usual I find that the island has a record of my previous donations, donations made a month or more earlier. Conclusion: the game saves the donation data for islands on which you don't have any towns anymore.

    c) The game used to save which island did you donate for before they came up with the donation compensation system. When an account returned to the game we could see the donation amounts it made to each island as soon as it returned.


    So you need to save the exact same data as before the compensation system, same as in point (c) and you need to make this data assigned to player accounts instead of the island if it's not already assigned to player accounts.



    Your number 1:
    Your solution also makes them benefit if their account doesn't come back to the same island, what's your answer to this?

    Let me guess, it will be either:

    a) "Oh, they will be having a large penalty on the first island so it's not a problem if they go to another island". As your current faulty design suggests.

    If so you they will be donating until they reach a very high level beyond which they aren't willing to upgrade then "ghost" their donation account, as you like to call it, and finally come back to another island and donate, so we are only giving innocent players large unfair penalties whenever a large legit player leaves the game to only make it a bit more expensive for cheaters.


    b) "We will not allow the same player to donate to other islands until dept is paid on all islands". Since you already mentioned something like that.

    Well, I thought you said your solution "does not require any additional data to be saved... their donations are negated, but mine levels stay...." so how can we keep track of this without saving additional data? :D


    c) I won't mention because I want you to say it yourself to prove that you indeed don't know what you are talking about ^^



    Your number 3:

    - "You can't take a breath while underwater"

    - "You still can take a breath while underwater you will just suffocate and die"

    :rolleyes:

    If you can't see the analogy then I don't know what to say :/

    I know that for someone like you who has 11 accounts on the same server paying 10s of millions of wood is considered a simple task as you mentioned "you simply have to donate the debt off."

    But for the average player this might be undoable especially if the server is either active or old.



    Your number 4:

    Why do we need the warning and the tooltip? The current concern is players already on the affected island not players who are yet to colonize the island, because those new colonizers will, if you implement the idea of collective punishment you want, be checking the mines as soon as their colonies are built.

    They will only lose 9000 gold and 1000 wood for building the colony, how thoughtful of you to consider this and prevent such a great loss :D



    Finally, when I said:

    Quote from A.A.

    "The only person who would prefer your version would be a backend engineer who doesn't want to implement the extra code out of laziness. That engineer doesn't happen to be you, right? 8o"

    That was meant to be a joke since Cheech mentioned he thinks you are badidol's "burner account", you can also tell it's a joke by the smily/emoji, whatever you call it, I used at the end, I really don't know how you didn't get that.


    Anyway, please don't get so personally offended and say nonsense like "That's just how it works. If you don't like it, guess what? You can also ghost your account, too."

    This is has one of two meanings:

    1."If you don't like it ghost you account and leave the game for good", I hope you don't mean this because:

    a) It's very rude.

    b) I didn't know you own the game. :D

    c) Even if you own the game it still is very rude.


    2. You mean "ghost your account then come back and change island" which is even worse than being rude because it will ruin the game even more.

    If I do so the island will have event more dept wich will encourage more players to ghost their accounts and do the same until the island is empty and has a dept equivalent to the donations required to reach its current level and no one will build any town on this island again, in other words Congratulations you managed to produce uninhabitable ghost islands, YAY!

    Keep this long enough and only cheaters with islands full of permanent multis are going to be able upgrade their mines.


    Also why should I have to ghost my account and risk getting all of my cities looted and risk loosing spot on islands that aren't affected by the removed player?


    And if I do so will I be able to donate freely to the new islands? or would you like to activate the rule that will forbid me from donating to new islands until I pay the dept of all other islands first?


    There's a popular saying in the game industry:

    "Everybody thinks they are a game designer"

    Unfortunately it applies way more than I used to like to admit :rolleyes:


    Quote from User12996

    Honestly, I'd take the status quo over your solution. Assuming I'm a "lazy programmer" because I want a different solution certainly is a choice of words lol.

    Now that you said you prefer the status quo over someone else's solution you didn't only turn this purposeful discussion into a competition but also showed you are a bitter loser, for preferring to keep cheaters cheat over having a non toxic remedy doesn't make any sense at all, even if you think this remedy is incomplete.

    I really hope that you have nothing to do with game team because with this mentality I'm highly concerned.


    That said, you can always raise questions and generate ideas rather than whatever you call this thing you are doing.

    So please if you have good, non toxic ideas share them, otherwise stick to mentioning your concerns regarding the ideas shared by others.

    Thanks!

  • Revitalizing Ikariam

    Quote from Cheech

    Thats crazy. So i have actually got back in my server so naturally i'm going to stop complaining. Funny enough, when i said i got banned for botting, someone else said they had this issue and has posted several screenshots of their exchange with the support system also blaming them when they were innocent. This is what? The third guy i've talked to already who has had the same thing happen? But regardless, from other experience i know what flagging it, its not just the heavy online usage but also the 2min30s pirate cycles which explains why my other servers dont get banned. Anyways, all is well, everyone i've spoke to has always been in agreement, i've laughed to all the people i've played with over the years as they know i don't bot. All good and god bless. My time will be re-directed back into ika and not forums

    I'm glad you got your account back Cheech ^^


    I just hope you can spend some time here in the forum discussing game problems with us, your contribution was, and will be, of great value.


    Cheers!

  • Revitalizing Ikariam


    Your suggestions is valid and doable Luky , but it goes against the idea of island cooperation which is a fundamental feature of Ikariam, especially for resources.


    The ability to cooperate between players to donate and upgrade resource sites is a good thing and sets Ikariam apart from other games.

    It also makes sense when colonizing, it's natural to search for a place rich in resources when colonizing, that's why European countries raced for colonizing the Americas and later Africa.

    It gives a great stats for the player who donated the most and it could also spark some disputes when some players refuse to cooperate and donate for the resources sites, these disputes can start healthy dynamics.


    But of course the downside of the current system is that people can have donation accounts to help upgrade mines and forest, even without using Ambrosia to get a small account several 100M donations and abuse the graveyard to donate again and again, but this downside can be limited if we limit multis.



    I like a more individualistic approach for miracles as neighbors could easily refuse to cooperate and assign priest which is different from resources sites because lack of cooperation in the case of miracles do have a direct negative effect on other players and no matter what you do you can't force neighbors to assign priests, they even can intentionally unassign priests just to harm you.


    I have some ideas about miracles to have somewhat of a middle ground between the current and individualistic mechanics by introducing 2 more mechanics to the current miracles system which, if implemented, will result in new play style and make a new sink for crystal glass other than endless unit upgrades.


    Do you have other concerns or problems you would like us to discuss?

  • Revitalizing Ikariam

    Quote from User12996

    I know my version would cause a problem, but the problem is intentional because of people using alt accounts with 2000M donation score. Forcing them to donate and then have a debt reduces the utility of those accounts which was the design goal. Yep, some players might get penalized if a large account ghosts but they aren't losing mine levels and can simply choose to pay the debt off or not. As mines are community features, it should be a community debt. Plus, as the mine levels aren't going down, you aren't losing anything anyways, you just have to catch the debt up to the current mine level.

    Did you read all the way through what I wrote? Or you just stopped reading and started writing a new reply when you encountered the "your version would cause a problem" part?


    Because what I said would get exactly the same effect you want without harming other players!

    The only person who would prefer your version would be a backend engineer who doesn't want to implement the extra code out of laziness. That engineer doesn't happen to be you, right? 8o


    Now you say "as the mine levels aren't going down, you aren't losing anything anyways" but you are obviously wrong, the player in this case will indeed lose a very important thing which is the ability to upgrade the mines!


    The said player may end up paying tens of millions of wood before being able to upgrade his mines again, especially if when sharing more than one island with the removed account.

    What will you do then? Give all the guys on the island a free city relocation? Or just keep them unable to upgrade their mines?


    Now we can all see what I meant when I said sometimes players request changes but they "Don't take into consideration the the long lasting effects of such changes"


    Please read what I wrote again, I know it's a bit lengthy but when you carefully read it you can clearly see that I do achieve your goal while addressing the potential problems.

  • Revitalizing Ikariam

    I like this discussions very much, I didn't start any "in details" threads as per my plan and we already have a lot of ideas about different problems, their effects, the new problems arising from addressing them and even some solutions suggested.


    Just a quick answer to User12996, I thought the 36 accounts where all on the same server becaus we were talking about multis and you mentioned 36 accounts, if they are not in the same server they are not considered multis, you should have clarified their distribution, anyway I'm glad you are going by the rules ^^


    Now I like to discuss the following quote first becaus it's the most important thing, I hope the devs can read this carefully:


    You almost read my mind, I have a very similar idea to fix donating multiple times, let me first clarify why your version would caue a problem:

    Creating a dept for the island itself is bad because players tend to chose islands based on their forest and mine levels so if I chose a developed island and build a city there and invest in making it a great city then after a year or two my neighbor/s who made the largest donations goes to the graveyard for good or changes server I'll be unable to upgrade the mines before donating Millions of wood first to pay the dept and it's not uncommon for large players to take a long break from the game, quit or change world.

    So how could we adjust the idea? Should we a) give the player no refund for donations at all? Or b) check if he lands to the same islands before giving him the refund?

    Of course NOT, because if we do so and the player goes to graveyard and comes back to find some of his islands completely occupied he might need to relocate ALL of his cities to another area so he will need the refund so (a) isn't a valid answer and if some of his cities land on their original islands and we give no refund for those cities he will be losing a large portion of his refund for this cities which he will need when relocating all of his cities.


    So the answer is keeping a record of which islands the player donated for and in wich server and create the dept for only the said player and only in the said islands, example for player A:


    World[1] {

    world = Pangaia 2

    island[1]: 52:52 - donations { luxury goods mine = 5M, forest = 3M}

    island[2]: 48:53 - donations { luxury goods mine = 3.2M, forest = 100k}

    }

    note: the programmers can structure this however they see fits.


    So when he comes back he would get full refund for his donations as it's the case right now but finds a dept on HIM, and only on HIM:

    In island (52:52); luxury goods mine dept = 5M, forest dept = 3M and his donations on the donations list = 0, when he donates 1M to the forest for example his forest dept is reduced to 2M, his donations on the list shows 1M but the current total donations, "available" as the game calls it, and what's required for the next level remains the same until the whole of his dept for this island is paid.


    This way we are not forcing other players to pay depts that they aren't responsible for.


    Problem: Now we can notice that a player may think: "ok I'll pay the dept of one island then use all the remaining refund to upgrade this island, then go to the graveyard and do the same for another one of my islands."

    Solution: Check all the islands on which he has cities right now and if one of them still has dept then he can NOT use the refund to donate for other islands beyond their dept, he can donate to these islands beyond thier dept using real wood only.


    This way if the player isn't using one of his old islands he can use exactly the amount he donated for that particular island to donate for the new islands.


    This donation records should persist no matter how many times the player goes to the graveyard, only updated, and regardless of which server he transfers to so that if the player changes island, goes to the graveyard, returns to the same server and goes back to the first island to donate for it he will find the dept waiting for him.


    Let me know what you think guys and badidol too we didn't hear from the game team yet.


    Thanks!^^

  • Revitalizing Ikariam

    Quote from Cheech

    Ok, im going to expand on the quotes you said above. Not all the points, just the ones i disagree with the most.


    Ambrosia prices do influence alot of problems, there's about 6 or 7 really big ones actually and yes, military too. They are responsible for the massive donation accounts flooding new servers, both mines and helious. Then they can buy spartans and open them on new servers, trojan horse the server. There's a million ways to trojan horse a new server, thats why transfers are fundamentally BAD, the only possitive is populism which i have stated, has decreased. Ambro also causes mobile targets, 1 guy i was fighting was warping 2 or 3 times a day, a turkish account so obviously we know the issue here. And its unfair becuase i dont have the purchasing power to do the same and we know that its roughly 10x cheaper. If i was spending £2 for a warp instead of £20, id be warping 2 or 3 times a day too. Then there's all the shop items that can benefit a ambrosia account. These topics i can spend days typing over.


    Thanks for the extra info,

    I'm aware of donation accounts but I was going to discuss them with multis, I mean they fit more with multis because such players, most of the time, don't use their main accounts, they use smaller accounts then abuse the graveyard to donate again and again and again.

    Also you can get donation accounts without cheap Ambrosia you just need to wait for an "80% extra Ambrosia" offer when buying and donate to a 50+ mines; for a 50+ forest you get 40K wood/Ambrosia and I think it's 50K wood for lvl 50+ luxury goods mines. This way you will end up with +122M - 153M wood donated for $100 USD according to the price I mentioned earlier, you can get even more if an Ambrosia cashback event applies to donations or if you opt to buy the largest bundle.

    I did see Danish players using these donation accounts, so I guess not cheap Ambrosia for them.


    Using that many Spartans is a something I didn't encounter because, you guessed it guys, Banks!

    But you are correct if we fix banks cheap Ambrosia will be used to make banks of Spartans, but luckily they are a front line units and we don't and SHOULD NOT have any premium units other than this or we will be facing a new, worse type of banks.


    The warping guy you mentioned is indeed an extreme cases, not common at all.

    I once fought, alongside my alliance, a Turkish alliance in one of the Pangaias and they didn't do this, they moved few cities to the area of our leader and didn't move them until after the war. Then they, expectedly, got a bank open and kept sending endless amounts of units towards us.



    The aforementioned is for clarification only I'm not dismissing your concerns whatsoever, just pointing out other factors affectimg the issues you mentioned especially that you indeed have a very good reason to be concerned if Ambrosia is indeed 10x cheaper in the Turkey, I mean that's way beyond the cost of living and average salary differences between Turkey and the most expensive countries.

    Totally requires attention, thank you for clarifying that.



    Quote from Cheech

    When i said locking and bleeding, i didn't mean bashing. Locking is sending actions to someone's towns to make them unable to warp, freightering is the worst, it can be around 30 days and the ability to lock every town very very easily, i dont mean locking as in blockading. Bleeding is miracle bleeding. These are in-game mechanics and not breaking, just not too nice an idea

    Thanks for the clarification, I thought you meant blockading the cities and bleeding the resources dry, essentially bashing.

    I don't know why you mentioned locking because as you defined it it's your answer to the warping guy, it's a working mechanic.

    Bleeding the miracles is of course a bad thing, the way the miracles work encourages "cooperation or war" interplayer mechanics which good but easily abused by players either by using bots to maintain miracles or by ruining the miracle for neighbors, it needs overhauling and I have several ideas for that.



    Quote from User12996

    I do the same thing and have 36 ikariam accounts but I've never been flagged as a bot.

    The rules says that you can have a max of 11 accounts in one server/world and they need to have IP sharing active.

    If everybody gets to own 36 accounts in the same server then over than 97% of the accounts will be multis, a server with 5000 accounts will contain about 138 players only.

  • Revitalizing Ikariam

    Hey Cheech and User12996 ,

    Thank you for sharing your insights :)


    I like the idea of closing account transfer to some servers, we will definitely need to implement this feature in some servers after launching a new app to make it easier for new players to get started.

    Account transfer isn't essentially bad, you already can't transfer your account to a server if it will end up in top 50 total score but there still is a room for improvement, blocking transfers to a server for some time after its start is a good thing although I think that the period you mentioned is a bit too short because by the end of it it's already impossible for many accounts to transfer to this new world because the will end up in the top 50.

    But as you said it's too early to draw conclusions and we need to wait and see, it's a natural part of the game, or any software, development cycle.

    I'll be discussing account transfer later in relation to other problems because transferring 1 account to another world doesn't cause a problem on its own, I can't elaborate without making this post too lengthy so let's keep it for later.


    About Ambrosia prices, it's natural to have price differences because what is considered affordable or even cheap for some one living in San Francisco or London could be substantially expensive for someone in a low cost of living county, like South East Asia countries for example, for them you are the one getting cheap Ambrosia actually.

    So you need to use different prices or you will end up losing potential revenue, this is the case even when selling ceiling fans in different countries.

    But are you sure guys there's any price difference? I read about this a couple of times before but I've just checked the price in the EN server/community, 2 other servers with 2 different languages and one of the international Pangaia worlds as well and I found the Ambrosia price to be exactly the same. e.g. 1700 Ambrosia for $100 in all of them.

    So it appears to me that the price difference, if there's indeed a price difference, is not based on the community, so what is it based on? IP address? Because, if so, it's easily manipulated and they need to change it or the company might be losing money already, let alone affecting players' experience.

    From a game dev POV I'm equally concerned about losing revenue and annoying players.

    Could someone from Gameforge please tell us if there are any price differences? badidol ? We need to know more about this before we can discuss it any further. Thanks!


    That said I need to mention it's not likely going to be a top priority to fix right now unless it's influencing other problems because, although it feels unfair, it's not breaking the game or causing immediate military advantage to for one side over the other except in some extreme cases, let me know if I'm wrong.


    Now for the remaining issues you have mentioned, I have encountered pretty much all of them.

    I really like something you did here which is differentiating between different types of multiple accounts, because multiple accounts term refers to one player owning more than one account in the same game world.

    We have bots which, as you mentioned, are further divided into several types depending of their purpose but they generally have low points and limited fighting capabilities.

    We also have the actual multis which can be very close to there owners main account, some are legal multis with IP sharing which pretty much are unable to help each other thus having low potential for causing problems, and some are illegal multis which are the ones causing problems.

    I will be surely discussing multis as a top priority issue.


    Unit upgrades: unit upgrades are not actually as bad as you think, there's a somewhat evil intention behind them but I won't upset the devs by discussing it now.

    Other than that the upgrades also aim to fix a crucial design problem which is low demand on crystal glass which in turn causes less demand on city spots on crystal islands and more demand on marble islands, and if a player opts to be more balanced and have more crystal towns anyway he will end up with a ton of unneeded crystal, now that's a problem in game economy which has two fixes:

    a) Cutting the source. i.e. making you get fewer resources.

    In Ikariam that means making fewer crystal islands which will obviously require rebuilding the islands world. Why? Because simply lowering the amount of produced crystal per worker won't be enough and players like new features more than getting resources income lowered.

    b) Creating a sink. i.e. something that will drain the extra resources which is exactly what they did but they did NOT design and test it properly.

    Now if you need some advice regarding upgrades then just don't invest in obsolete units like archers or slingers, don't invest in upgrading the defense of ranged/second-line units and keep in mind that a player will need a large difference in upgrade levels to have an observable advantage over you, at least it is the case for many unit types.


    Banks: there's a lot of ideas we can implement to end them, in fact I think the first thing I'll be discussing in details is going to be banks, especially that User mentioned they are already discussing it on Discord.


    Leniency do exist, in some servers more than others, I'll even need to mention an incident highlighting this:

    Several years ago there was a GO on my world, luckily retired now :D, who had a large area, well OVER 20 ISLANDS, covered with piracy bots, each is a small 3 cities account doing one thing only: producing piracy points. I pirated one of them once and I got threatened by him "Don't do this again or we will have a problem".

    So yes there is leniency and there's also a great deal of GO corruption in some communities and we can't complain or we will get banned for good, I'm actually at a serious risk of getting unfairly banned from the forums for discussing a similar issue a few days ago.


    Locking and bleeding: A long time ago there was a rule limiting this; you would get banned for pillaging a smaller, total points, player more than 5 times in a 24 hour period. It had some gray area though as some said it applies to each city individually so you can attack each city of that player 5 times.

    Anyway, as the player base deteriorated this rule got removed to enhance engagement, there were not enough accounts to fight as some would argue.

    This rule could be applied again for new servers where alliances are still forming and unable to defend its members effectively, for older servers I don't know if it's a good idea.


    Idleness: if we fix multis and banks there's going to be a large amount of action going on, we also have events as a possible remedy to this issue I happen to have some grand ideas for events like a "Persian" event maybe? 8)

    You know, Persia was a great adversary of Greece trying to invade it several times including the one with the 300 Spartans, so why not?


    Finally about the scripting part, lately I have got my attention drawn to the fact that I some times repeat some tasks in a regular timely manner and it could be mistaken for scripting so it, unfortunately, is a thing to keep in mind when playing any game, I would suggest contacting support and reasoning with them to get your ban lifted.

  • Will I be discovered while helping with defense?

    I think spies can't tell who is helping, the report will only state the amount of "allied" units, same when spying on an occupied city the report states the amount of "occupation" units.

    Because if there are 10 or more allies stationed in a city, which is not uncommon when a large battle is nearby, the report will be very lengthy and unreasonable as you well need to calculate the total amount of every unit type which is your main concern when attacking a city.

  • Revitalizing Ikariam

    Hello guys,

    I think we all agree that Ikariam needs a good bath in the fountain of youth to regain its former glory.

    But since the whereabouts of the fountain is, unfortunately, unknown we need something else, we need a clear vision and another thing that I like very much: a Plan



    My plan is very simple, it's divided into 3 parts:

    1. Addressing the issues we face in the game; unbalanced and outdated mechanics, exploits, bugs as well as adding much needed new features and laying down the foundation for easy embarking for new players. Also fixing the monetization part of the game because I think the game has a higher potential when it comes to earning money and if done correctly this will actually adress some of the most notorious issues the game is facing.


    2. Extending game reach: This one is mainly on Gameforge because we will need a good Mobile Application, it's not uncommon for a browser game to have a good mobile app, unlike the old Ikariam app. A good example would be "Rise of Cultures" by InnoGames which has an app and a browser version that are pretty much the same, or "Call of War" by Bytro Labs which has a mobile app that's a bit different and, to be honest, inferior to the browser version but is very functional, actually I think their Android app is just a browser that loads a mobile version of the game's website and implements mobile rewarded Ads.

    By the way both of these companies are based in Germany so, if needed, Gameforge can try to commandeer some talents from them. ;):evil:


    3. Increase the player base: Once we have fixed the issues and made a mobile app or at the very very least optimized mobile browser version we need to gain more players which is done by a good advertising campaign, a thing which I know the company won't be very happy to do but remember more players = more revenue which will be pretty much guaranteed at this point since we have fixed the monetization in part 1 of the plan, also if we have a mobile app we can gain A LOT of players simply by having a good app store optimization (ASO).


    Now the plan must take into consideration the 2 parties of any game; the player and the developer.

    I have read a lot of posts by players and some suggestions appear good but will actually cause greater harm if implemented and some are valid and reasonable of which feware extremely balanced as if they were made by a game designer.

    The bad request will cause harm because they either:

    a) Focus on a certain situation the player is currently facing i.e. the player requests a change that would benefit him right now regardless of anything else, much more of a cheat code to use when needed rather than a useful change, or

    b) Don't take into consideration the the long lasting effects of such changes which is a thing the devs themselves have been guilty of lately which, to be honest, is not uncommon for game devs.

    Since we have came to the devs allow me to say that I think they don't play the game, at least not enough to know the real priorities of the players. I know the players sometimes make unreasonable requests as I have mentioned earlier but I have been getting the vibe that the devs are dismissing some valid requests and concerns without any good reasons, or at least without stating such good reasons.


    I think I can understand the different points of view of both the players and devs, I understand the players as I have played Ikariam since 2008 as well as many other games, similar to and different from Ikariam, so I know a lot of what can potentially work or ruin a game, also I have some game development experience so I have can understand the devs, at least better than the average player.

    According to such assumption I'll proceed with the first part of the plan, Addressing the in-game issues.


    I'll start a series of discussions about each issue, one after another.

    I'll begin with defining the issue itself, its impact and causes and will give some suggestions for fixing it then the rest of us players can give their opinion on the subject, give data from their in-game experience, suggest remedies for the issue or point out potential problems that may arise from other people's suggestions also we will need the game dev team to engage with us in these discussions to point out any problems they think will arise from popular suggestions and give us and idea about any technical difficulties that may stop them from implementing such suggestions, they will need to do so towards the end of each discussion so they will have as much data as possible before replying and to limit unnecessary friction.


    Now I'd like to ask everyone to kindly Mention the top 3 issues you face in the game starting with the one that harms you the most so we can establish a priority for our subsequent discussions and I'll start with the one that causes the greatest concern for players.


    Finally I'd like to apologize for the lengthy article and to thank you for reading it all the way through.

    Thank!