Currently attacks, defends, deaths, and kills update during the reset. This change in scores over time allows players to target other players by following stat changes. Bots can even be used to lower the amount of time it takes to id targets. Even if a profile is hidden the bots can still detect who the player is based off of profiles being previously opened or manual input based off of assumptions.

High scores should only update at the end of the reset. This will help prevent targeting of key players.

Absolutely!

I think it's great that someone took this 'exploit'(I dont mean its cheating I just mean its clearly not intended) to the next level by making a bot to check through the leaderboards lol. Its that kind of ingenuity that force game changes! :)

haha yet this is what you guys in IMP do all the time :P

Pretty sure this has been suggested for a few years now

I think Gerdler or Enshula has suggested it before.

So, it would require a pretty significant change to the scripts that run all the time, the game runs atm with a low overhead because of things like this script.

I can see the benefit of changing them, but I also want to make sure the games play isn't negatively effected by any major script changes.

I think it would be hypocricy to try to get something like this changed if he/his friends didn't do it. Then you can't shake the suspicion that your purpose is just to remove an aspect of the game you don't understand because you are either incapable or unwilling to learn it.

It's like if I am useless at techer and suggest techer should be weakened or removed. You probably are not going to take that as a good faith suggestion, right?

I track players like this all the time and I want it removed.

@Bug - an alternative solution could be to let the scrips run but don't propagate the UI changes. Abstract away that layer a bit and put it on a delay. I say this without actually seeing all the source, but there should be ways to do this without changing the underlying infrastructure that it was built on top of.

There are also other strategies to make it harder on simple web scrapers, but that can be a topic for another discussion.

Would the delay be constant tho? Because if it's a constant delay there will be workarounds if it's still important to track players.

how about let the scripts run as normal

but only update the reults after a set is finished

that would be easy for all the single server leaderboards

for ones with multiple inputs the ones with alliance+team would only update once in the middle of alliance which is obvioulsy a lot less than before

but ones express would update weekly, plus the odd other update when weeks dont line up with other starts

ffa and alliance are always 3 days offset and ffa woould allow a data point at 2 days in ffa and 57 days in alliance but because that only applies for attack percentage its probably not going to matter given you dont attack for the first 2 days of each set usually

so ffa is probably the easiest one to take this away from completely

primary looks like its always halfway point of ffa sets, while team rotates 1 day forward every set of ffa/alliance because of an extra setup day every two months

and tourney looksl like it might be a 30 day cycle with 29+1? so rotates 1 day the other way to team? maybe it has an extra rest day

in other words just make 2 leader boards, 1 as normal and 1 that we see that is only snapshotted at certain times when certain resets end

as requiem said

on delay if you put the whole thing on a 60 day delay then obviously no one can be tracked during a set, and if nothing else is viable to solve the situation then it might be worth it as a temporary solution

So at this point, Web scraping is moderatly difficult to do unless you are willing to risk being deleted in game (Yes, all of your countries, if you look like a bot enough we will delete you and ban you.)

as for the leadership boards, they update once per day.. because its after the servers stop. yes its probable that the script could look for the "endtime" of the reset before going forward, or perhaps even creating a caching datatable to hold the data while the reset is in progress.. but it will require more work..
The main reason why it is once per day for all servers is that the script can lag the server when running.. if for instance we have 50,000 new items for a FFA server reset.. that could equate to something ridiculous like 10-20 minutes of downtime from the game which would be right in the middle of some planned war in 1a (how often do you have warchats at 12am or some such?)

So how about you guys leave it with us. I agree that YES the boards need to be hidden untill the end of the reset.. but i also think things need to be a lot more open for everyone which is also a sticky point of a lot of players and staff.

I think all countries and owners should be open to everyone after the conclusion of the reset. And there should be the option to open it already in the current reset but no loophole like this to find out if the player doesn't want to.

I like your idea Gerdler! Imagine how many “clean players who call themselves saints and victims” would be exposed as the true suiciders that they are.

Would be awesome to take it a step further and identify all the “new member” alias as sub accounts of the main account to shine even more light on them saints and Ángels that we have had over the years :)

Bug I don't think you've been debriefed as to the exact method(s) this is accomplished? It has been going on, how many people have been banned?

Yeah, the devs I've talked to all agree with me that all our forum accounts should be linked for everyone to see. its just they dont prioritize it.

I think that is also very important. Open all profiles, link all fake forum nicks. The more people who support this the faster it happens.

I would vote for all those changes Gerdler! Would be cool
If they polled the player base :)

Yeah. I've been an advocate for 100% open profiles and forum nicks for some time now. It's basically just a handful of people who use fake nicks to suicide on occasion that have ever opposed it I feel, and the real man nonsense now is hardly an anomaly.

I've never seen a game with so many things to protect griefing. It's strange. Like the closed/open profile option and the ability to make fake nicks for the forums are literally things someone took the time to build code for to protect the identities of griefers. It's madness to me. Haha

... and would take very little time to circumvent.

Sorry this is going nowhere fast.