Tue Oct 22, 2013 3:51 pm
This Game is Falling Apart.
This is an open letter to anyone who cares about this game and how far it has fallen. I write notoriously long alliance letters so I'll try to keep this concise.
Bit of background, my user account is WorknBoy. Originally server 89 which was merged into 128 (soon to be merged into 134). I am the highest ranked player from 89 and currently #10 on 128. I've lead the most successful alliance (judged by alliance rank on 128).
What has happened to this game we all fell in love with?
I've played it for 2 years now. Things have changed. Over the past several months some of the most egregious issues of cheating and application bugs have occured with little to no help from support. It took involving the CEO of Haypi, Thomas Ren, to even get some of the issues addressed.
Below is an account of what has happened to my alliance, Warr,Inc83 on server 128 recently. We were (are) the #1 ranked alliance for 1.5 years.
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On Sept 23rd we first encountered it. 220,000 catapults starved out of nowhere. There were at least 12 of us online at the time. All actively farming. It was late my local time but I was on as well. Crops were at 15 million units at the time of starve. We did what we were supposed to and screen captured everything and sent to support. When we finally received a response we were told that the starve was legitimate. Wait legitimate? We have 12 eyewitnesses that say it wasn’t and we sent you alliance events over a period of 5 hours. How can you say this? So I spent hours compiling the crop donations into a spreadsheet and performed some reverse calculations. It wasn’t complicated. I’ve gone into the details before and won’t bore you with them again but essentially we proved that crop levels could not have possibly been 0 at the time of starve. We sent them the spreadsheet with a 5 paragraph explanation. Instant response… all of support is on a 7 day vacation. A 7 day vacation. A 7 DAY VACATION! Look, I’m all for holidays and I have no problem with a Chinese support staff celebrating a Chinese holiday week but here’s the problem, you are supporting a paid global application and as far as I can tell, the majority of your users and not Chinese. What you’ve done is permitted at least 7 days of total anarchy. I could go into solutions such as hiring some Western support staff in different timezones with different holiday requirements but I won’t do that here.
Before we ever received a response to our new evidence, ppiver’s account was hacked and 860,000 of our alliance cats were suicide into a convenient 999,999 of China’s. Funny that it happened when we were only a few builds away from being able to win on defense. Support notified and one slow response later…. Ppiver should have taken better care of his account. HOW? How can you say that? He had a password that was not shared. He had an email address that was not compromised. What more could he have done?? So he changed his email address and started rotating his password daily. We hesitantly decide to keep rebuilding. A few days later, 180,000 catapults starve with 8 million crops. We didn’t need a complex spreadsheet to prove it out this time since Xoltriks has donated 350,000 units of crop 1 min before starve. Our burn rate was 100,000 a minute. Easy math. Even support couldn’t argue that… yet they did. I sent out a letter notifying Warr that until further notice all building will immediately halt. Around the same time, I was sent screen shots of China feeding their alliance army using their alt alliance CCTV. Not just a little feeding but blatant feeding of nearly a million catapults. And that's just what we know about! Tip of the iceberg.
We then got the CEO of Haypi involved and all of the sudden support pulled a 180 and was “looking into our issue” and then a day later we were informed that we would receive compensation for the starved cats, china would be dealt with, but that the 860k suicide could not be compensated. So we went building again, applied pressure to get the refunds (they came slowly and separately). We leveraged the refund timing to give us an apparent gain that could not have been naturally built within the time span. It worked. Despite all the adversity, we caught them. We won. They couldn’t handle it. Haobaobao went into world chat and accused us of cheating. 6 hours later, our alliance was decimated. China gained #1. They exercised their nuclear option. Maybe it wasn’t them but how could I (we) not think that? Regardless, it wasn’t right. It’s not fair. We were robbed in the worst way possible. Support notified. They’ll “look into it.” A day later, second response, Ppiver’s password was too simple. Too simple? Unreal. He was changing his password daily. This was not a lucky guess. In fact, he had other accounts hacked at the same time. Support even admitted there was a hacker.
So things then got ugly. Over the weekend we formed a group to coordinate and gather evidence. We’ve pulled in leaders from other alliances on other servers where something similar has happened. Patriots on 93. Their entire alliance disbanded a month again and 17 users were compromised and had their accounts decimated. Response from support? Their passwords were too simple. Want to know what the leader’s password was? “17/22/3811->OPa$”. I’m not kidding. That was too simple? Are they blind in not seeing that the hacker(s) have direct access to their servers and password complexity doesn’t matter? Hell is there a conspiracy? Are they part of it? It’s hard to rule anything out and it goes without saying I’ve been completely disillusioned by the game. Everything is wrong. Nothing is working. It’s utter madness.
************************************************************************************
The game I started 2 years ago has changed. There’s nothing innocent about it on the whole. It’s run by hackers, cheaters, lowlifes and thieves. Someone like AvioNova (server 128) can glitch up 6,000 crowns and dupe a 3 million pp army in a few days and not even get banned. Sure some of the treasure and money was eventually taken away but do you honestly think that he doesn’t have billions hidden on alts for later transfer? What about all that money artificially inserted into the server’s economy? It changes things. It causes unbalance. Have you been to the newest server 608 recently? A glitch ran wild there and caused trillions of dollars of unnatural growth. Every level 1 account can have maxed equipment and techs. Alliance money is not an object. The entire server is a lie. What’s going to happen when that server merges? Do the alliances on 607 have any chance against the alliances with trillions of dollars on 608? Do you like paying $12.00 per unit of crop? What if you wanted to get a real life friend into the game? A new account hasn’t been a viable option since July. Let me repeat that, it is impossible for a new player to have an experience anything like what we had when we started. The cheaters have ruined it and Haypi Co has allowed it to happen.
Bit of background, my user account is WorknBoy. Originally server 89 which was merged into 128 (soon to be merged into 134). I am the highest ranked player from 89 and currently #10 on 128. I've lead the most successful alliance (judged by alliance rank on 128).
What has happened to this game we all fell in love with?
I've played it for 2 years now. Things have changed. Over the past several months some of the most egregious issues of cheating and application bugs have occured with little to no help from support. It took involving the CEO of Haypi, Thomas Ren, to even get some of the issues addressed.
Below is an account of what has happened to my alliance, Warr,Inc83 on server 128 recently. We were (are) the #1 ranked alliance for 1.5 years.
****************************************************************************************
On Sept 23rd we first encountered it. 220,000 catapults starved out of nowhere. There were at least 12 of us online at the time. All actively farming. It was late my local time but I was on as well. Crops were at 15 million units at the time of starve. We did what we were supposed to and screen captured everything and sent to support. When we finally received a response we were told that the starve was legitimate. Wait legitimate? We have 12 eyewitnesses that say it wasn’t and we sent you alliance events over a period of 5 hours. How can you say this? So I spent hours compiling the crop donations into a spreadsheet and performed some reverse calculations. It wasn’t complicated. I’ve gone into the details before and won’t bore you with them again but essentially we proved that crop levels could not have possibly been 0 at the time of starve. We sent them the spreadsheet with a 5 paragraph explanation. Instant response… all of support is on a 7 day vacation. A 7 day vacation. A 7 DAY VACATION! Look, I’m all for holidays and I have no problem with a Chinese support staff celebrating a Chinese holiday week but here’s the problem, you are supporting a paid global application and as far as I can tell, the majority of your users and not Chinese. What you’ve done is permitted at least 7 days of total anarchy. I could go into solutions such as hiring some Western support staff in different timezones with different holiday requirements but I won’t do that here.
Before we ever received a response to our new evidence, ppiver’s account was hacked and 860,000 of our alliance cats were suicide into a convenient 999,999 of China’s. Funny that it happened when we were only a few builds away from being able to win on defense. Support notified and one slow response later…. Ppiver should have taken better care of his account. HOW? How can you say that? He had a password that was not shared. He had an email address that was not compromised. What more could he have done?? So he changed his email address and started rotating his password daily. We hesitantly decide to keep rebuilding. A few days later, 180,000 catapults starve with 8 million crops. We didn’t need a complex spreadsheet to prove it out this time since Xoltriks has donated 350,000 units of crop 1 min before starve. Our burn rate was 100,000 a minute. Easy math. Even support couldn’t argue that… yet they did. I sent out a letter notifying Warr that until further notice all building will immediately halt. Around the same time, I was sent screen shots of China feeding their alliance army using their alt alliance CCTV. Not just a little feeding but blatant feeding of nearly a million catapults. And that's just what we know about! Tip of the iceberg.
We then got the CEO of Haypi involved and all of the sudden support pulled a 180 and was “looking into our issue” and then a day later we were informed that we would receive compensation for the starved cats, china would be dealt with, but that the 860k suicide could not be compensated. So we went building again, applied pressure to get the refunds (they came slowly and separately). We leveraged the refund timing to give us an apparent gain that could not have been naturally built within the time span. It worked. Despite all the adversity, we caught them. We won. They couldn’t handle it. Haobaobao went into world chat and accused us of cheating. 6 hours later, our alliance was decimated. China gained #1. They exercised their nuclear option. Maybe it wasn’t them but how could I (we) not think that? Regardless, it wasn’t right. It’s not fair. We were robbed in the worst way possible. Support notified. They’ll “look into it.” A day later, second response, Ppiver’s password was too simple. Too simple? Unreal. He was changing his password daily. This was not a lucky guess. In fact, he had other accounts hacked at the same time. Support even admitted there was a hacker.
So things then got ugly. Over the weekend we formed a group to coordinate and gather evidence. We’ve pulled in leaders from other alliances on other servers where something similar has happened. Patriots on 93. Their entire alliance disbanded a month again and 17 users were compromised and had their accounts decimated. Response from support? Their passwords were too simple. Want to know what the leader’s password was? “17/22/3811->OPa$”. I’m not kidding. That was too simple? Are they blind in not seeing that the hacker(s) have direct access to their servers and password complexity doesn’t matter? Hell is there a conspiracy? Are they part of it? It’s hard to rule anything out and it goes without saying I’ve been completely disillusioned by the game. Everything is wrong. Nothing is working. It’s utter madness.
************************************************************************************
The game I started 2 years ago has changed. There’s nothing innocent about it on the whole. It’s run by hackers, cheaters, lowlifes and thieves. Someone like AvioNova (server 128) can glitch up 6,000 crowns and dupe a 3 million pp army in a few days and not even get banned. Sure some of the treasure and money was eventually taken away but do you honestly think that he doesn’t have billions hidden on alts for later transfer? What about all that money artificially inserted into the server’s economy? It changes things. It causes unbalance. Have you been to the newest server 608 recently? A glitch ran wild there and caused trillions of dollars of unnatural growth. Every level 1 account can have maxed equipment and techs. Alliance money is not an object. The entire server is a lie. What’s going to happen when that server merges? Do the alliances on 607 have any chance against the alliances with trillions of dollars on 608? Do you like paying $12.00 per unit of crop? What if you wanted to get a real life friend into the game? A new account hasn’t been a viable option since July. Let me repeat that, it is impossible for a new player to have an experience anything like what we had when we started. The cheaters have ruined it and Haypi Co has allowed it to happen.
