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H4xOr WaNgEr Game profile

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Mar 27th 2024, 12:01:26

Originally posted by SirJouster:
Originally posted by Primeval:
Originally posted by Slagpit:
What if we changed the identity of the server so that the best clans are the ones that are good at both war and netgaining? ...


I'm of the opinion that the most disappointing thing to happen in the game (besides the player count plummeting) is the culture shift many years ago that implies the two have to be separate. I feel clan servers are already mostly designed to accomplish the goal being suggested by simply allowing large group cooperation - players changed the meta themselves. At some point attacking, stealing resources from, and/or destroying an opponent became taboo and those that joined or rejoined this community after that shift simply accepted it as truth.


Primeval hit the nail on the head. In the early 2k's a struggle started between the netters and the fighters. Established strats were around but weren't widely available to most players. PvP was the wildcard, magnified by the extensive proliferation of multi's on the server. You could net, but you had to know how to grow a country with defense, have an alliance that had your back and was able to retal. Belonging to a strong alliance meant protection, and it was need in 1a. If you were a small alliance or even worst untagged, you were gonna be farmed.

Somewhere along the line, everyone on started singing kumbaya and looking for a safe space. Bot's replaced land grabbing, and you didn't need defense unless you agreed to a war. Point is, the players made the change in the game culture and the Devs I imagine made some concessions to appease that (latest being clan gdi). There's been some great ideas on this thread, but the best and easiest change to be made is the one the players can make themselves. Theres no need to join an alliance if no ones going to grab you, make the clans mean something again.

We need to change the culture


Hindsight is always 20/20. I fought the culture changing to what exists now tooth and nail back in the day, and was labelled as toxic, evil, uncaring about the game community, and as interested in driving people out of the game :P

A lot of people at that time weren't that interested in the game anymore, and only stuck around for their friends. They wanted to run all XP countries that took 10 seconds a day to play, and to be otherwise left alone. Not leaving them alone (grabbing them) was seen as driving them away from the game.

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Mar 24th 2024, 10:34:39

Crusading against the tools is silly, mostly because it is completely futile. There is nothing they can do about it besides removing the APIs, because they don't administrate third party sites. Removing the APIs would make administrating tools less convenient, but it is "newer player" naivety to think it would get rid of them. The APIs have only been around for 13 years or so, but tools have existed since shortly after the game launched. People would just rebuild them to function the way the old tools worked before the APIs existed. It is also a slippery slope proposal. Are we going to demand that nobody is allowed to use discord either? That is a third party tool that allows for coordination and info sharing that creates unfair advantage compared to newer players that aren't part of a clan after all.

You'd be better off (and likely more successful) trying to argue that tools shouldn't be gated behind logins, and to have the earth wiki updated with links to tool sites etc. than you would be lobbying to have all third party tools banned, which quite frankly would be a nightmare for them to attempt to enforce.

Even if they did try to get overly militant with enforcement against third party sites, then people would just switch to sharing spreadsheets like they do now with destocking models. How are they possibly going to stop people from sharing destock and grabing calc spreadsheets? It seems poorly thought through to me.

Edited By: H4xOr WaNgEr on Mar 24th 2024, 10:41:09

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Mar 21st 2024, 22:31:58

"That min-maxing that HW called out is actually enjoyable for a number of us geeks"

I'd consider that survivor bias though, and there aren't a whole lot of survivors since the bots were introduced. If they hope for a 2025 reunion to cause any sort of sustained bump, then need to think about what caused what was a relatively stable couple thousand players for many years to leave in the first place.

Edited By: H4xOr WaNgEr on Mar 21st 2024, 23:56:44
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Mar 21st 2024, 19:37:16

Originally posted by BlackHole:
Originally posted by BigP:
I think you nailed the big topics. To me, the game gets repetitive sometimes, did you guys ever think about adding small perks that change set to set? Im thinking like if there is a strat/gov that really isnt popular, making a change to benefit it for one set then switching to something else another set? I dont know if alliance is a good place for it but maybe another server can benefit from it.

Also, have you thought about trying any mass emailing to try and bring back old players? Figure you have a list of emails already, maybe send some out a couple times a year...a newsletter or something? I would love to see more players in the game.



I like this idea. Maybe even have a server that drastically changes each set, giving people a reason to try again, do something new, experiment. Maybe some sets things are incredibly broken, but it makes it fun an interesting.

A parallel here is games like Path of Exile that have 'leagues' or 'seasons'. The game gets a refresh every 3 months to keep people wanting to come back and try again.


This reminds me of the time when Theo and oil were added to the game back in 2000ish. It took a few resets of tweaking to get balance, and that made for a very fun and interesting time as there was a lot of novel experimentation occurring. A similar thing occurred a couple years later when they adjusted food production/consumption and prices and took a couple rounds to get that balance right (though that time wasn't as interesting as the theo introduction). But a big part of this was the lack of transparency. Players were told these changes were being made but the specifics of how they would work were not made available, and adjustments from reset to reset finding balance were vaguely explained. Part of the problem in my mind is that the players know too much about exactly every formula the game functions on now, and it has turned the game into a min max problem.

Honestly I (and I feel like I've championed for this in the past) would like to see more random variability added to the game, beyond the simple earthquakes and PCI boosts countries get now. Add in a randomness factor that attacks will fail even when all the numbers say it should succeed (maybe with increasing probabilities of failure at smaller margins of mathematical attack superiority), you could also do the opposite and make attacks succeed even when they shouldn't at varying probabilities. Make the bots actually interact with players beyond sending/accepting pacts (e.g., make them have a probability of retaliating that can vary based on factors like how many times they've been attacked, attacked by you specifically, your tag specifically etc.) Give them a chance of suicide you if you attack them with similar style varying probabilities, etc.

I quit playing about 10 years ago as well, but I've been active in the community again for the last couple months (and have poked my head in once every couple years to check things out over the last decade) and one thing I've noticed about the game is that is has become far too predictable. It seems to me the biggest (but not necessarily the only) contributor to this is the addition of the bots. The bots exhibit very predictable, consistent behaviour. People have completely mapped that behaviour out right down to the turn. Very precise strategies have been crafted around the bot behaviour. They know the strategy the bot is playing based on it's country number. They know that at A turns issued/played you hit bots with country #'s ending with B with X amount of offensive power at Y NW differential between you and the bot to maximize returns etc. etc. etc.

Playing a good netting country has just completely become a matter of following a script. Boring AF.

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Mar 19th 2024, 18:45:49

there used to be a culture that was strongly against cross server retaliation/bringing issues from one server to another. What happened to that? Why hasn't the community continued to enforce this? Such a culture existed for good reason.

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Mar 17th 2024, 2:17:16

That seems like a post hoc rationale for posting this.

The post is complaining when you've already taken action. It is redundant.

H4xOr WaNgEr Game profile

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Mar 16th 2024, 23:13:57

Why are you crying about it here?

H4xOr WaNgEr Game profile

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Feb 14th 2024, 1:37:16

Originally posted by Symbolic:
Its not 2025 yet.


This is the way.
Should do it in 2025

H4xOr WaNgEr Game profile

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Oct 19th 2023, 22:44:03

mm

H4xOr WaNgEr Game profile

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Sep 19th 2023, 16:32:30

I was playing with this idea for a while, but moreso the idea of creating a bonds market where people could buy and sell them. Gets complicated when you factor in what happens if countries don't have the capital to pay it back or if the county dies after selling a bond to an investor etc.

H4xOr WaNgEr Game profile

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Dec 16th 2022, 17:26:53

mm

H4xOr WaNgEr Game profile

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Mar 1st 2022, 16:41:03

.

H4xOr WaNgEr Game profile

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Feb 22nd 2022, 3:27:43

mm

H4xOr WaNgEr Game profile

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Feb 15th 2022, 21:53:31

heh

H4xOr WaNgEr Game profile

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Feb 10th 2022, 23:19:55

ahhhh AT. Never change.

H4xOr WaNgEr Game profile

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Mar 27th 2020, 18:46:09

I think this question regresses to "why are people selfish".

H4xOr WaNgEr Game profile

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Sep 23rd 2019, 23:36:45

I replied to your message. Sorry I was away for the wekend!

I am also on the EE discord all evening.

H4xOr WaNgEr Game profile

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Sep 6th 2019, 20:50:07

I'll be home from work and on the EE discord in about 45 mins.

H4xOr WaNgEr Game profile

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Sep 4th 2019, 16:58:04

good to know. I won't be there until I am home from work though.

Thanks.

H4xOr WaNgEr Game profile

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Sep 4th 2019, 15:55:04

Could a representative from RAGE should me a PM please?

Thank you!

H4xOr WaNgEr Game profile

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Aug 16th 2019, 18:26:38

clearly I should be on this list :P

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Aug 13th 2019, 14:44:39

Originally posted by Marshal:
I know that gains but on either I use Marshal nick.


I don't follow what the problem is... ?

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Aug 12th 2019, 18:09:05

Would like to get in touch with someone over there.

gchat:

or I am on the EE discord any time after about 21:30 - 22:00 game time.

Thanks!

H4

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Aug 5th 2019, 13:20:38

Originally posted by DerrickICN:
I went thru the history boards on three sites and my own notes. The following are the only references i can find (all between 2000 and 2001):

LaF was in danger of being beaten in TNW by UCN, so TKS detagged to laf to steal the victory from them.

When the rolling stones split into RA (a tag run by radek) and Stones, RA hit stones for being "traitors." BSS (my 11 member warclan) hit RA in response and "despite TKS support (type of support not listed), RA was tagkilled and BSS only lost 2 countries."

Supported LaF in the ALC war and helped laf to victory against such super amazing wartags as the immortal seawolves and The Sith Empire (rofl)

Supported sky deletez in a server war against omega. TKS all died but sky managed to pull out the victory and farmed restarts to make, at the time, the fattest top finishes.

------

And thats it. No other mention of them anywhere.

So they supported spam tags like Deletez, idiots like Radek and couldnt help them beat a 11 member tag, and cheated UCN out of a tnw win by tagging to laf last minute.

Sweet history. Seems like they were super badass. I officially don't feel bad at all.


They merged with laf, I was involved in that deal. They had been around for a while at that point and had been a small but fairly respected tag.

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Jul 27th 2019, 16:34:09

I will be playing for sure.

I've played both horde and alliance, but have played a lot more horde and prefer it.

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Jul 26th 2019, 13:48:45

Originally posted by Neil:
I'm not talking about LaF in this regard, yall need to calm down... Never said only LaF use it, never said SoF didn't.

Originally posted by sinistril:
What is sketchy about it?


Originally posted by Requiem:

eestats.com only uses the API feeds that the developers give out to most people who have a legitimate use for one... What is there to ok about a site that shows the scores list and some news?

the mIRC news channel was created by Qz and the bot is on his server.


Originally posted by Mr Gainsboro:

They have built a fluffing API that ghq, boxcar, sof, eestats etc are allowed to use to pull market, news, ranks and such from the game in near real time.


SKETCHY

"legitimate use" "pull market, news, ranks and such from the game in near real time"

Developers shouldn't have okayed this, makes me question what kind of stuff they will okay next.


LOL clan hosting sites have been doing this for 20 years...

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Jul 24th 2019, 17:37:37

Originally posted by Requiem:
But if we do it must be Horde because Alliance is gay!


obviously. It is all about the horde.

H4xOr WaNgEr Game profile

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Jul 24th 2019, 4:20:18

sticky-ed

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Jul 23rd 2019, 19:38:22

Originally posted by Requiem:
#1. SoL thought they could team up with SoF to get some (revenge?) for an arranged war where they got stomped by netters?
- They just got beat up again by netters, shame on a 'war' clan.

#2. How many sets can SoF (and apparently SoL) withstand a beating?
- 20+ days of fighting for no real gain (you were Tag Killed first).

#3. How many posts can Derrick make about kicking SoF's ass?
- Many many more, believe that! (even if his word count average is falling, you can do better Derrick).

#4. I am done playing Alliance until the game play significantly changes.
- Not worth my time currently (Not because I am salty, my team won: several times).
- If I want to grind I will resub to WoW classic in August #NoGrindEarthEmpires

Have a Swirvey day!



I just found out about WoW classic from this post. I am going to end up sinking a lot of time into that :-\

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Jul 19th 2019, 17:20:56

Originally posted by Mr Gainsboro:
Originally posted by TaSk1:
laf reeks of ex RD bot multi runners and babysitters, defiantly not the legendary alliance it use to be, ran by some dude from RD and his girlfriend.laf have been on a down hill spiral resorting to babysitting and spying as of late sad story of a former powerhouse alliance.

SoL's ranked too high,LCN is 11th equal and icn sucks ball bags.


Every alliance reeks of ex babysitters, it was very common to do that. I remember having to give out my login+pw to someone in the US to cover timezones when i joined MD.
QZ have a framework for botrunning, you should take a look at it its really fun to run bots.
What girlfriend? I have a wife and she is not currently playing the game. She used to play around 2005-2013.

You are just mad you got owned twice in a row.


LaF never did babysitting though heh.

H4xOr WaNgEr Game profile

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Jul 9th 2019, 11:56:05

does this mean that derrick will stop begging for FA multiple times a day? :P

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Jul 9th 2019, 11:31:07

Here it comes. I have to give you guys credit though, I expected the excuses and cheating accusations to start coming out days ago.

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Jul 4th 2019, 18:25:35

Makinso:

No I don't think there is anything wrong with the decision that was made regarding karnage's country. LaF would make the same decision (that we need to have it killed). My point is only that you can't expect a country you are trying to kill to roll over and timidly allow you to kill it. You should fully expect the country owner to try to defend/save their country if they can, and if you can't kill it in one swoop, you should damn well expect it to unload on you/your tag if it gets the opportunity.

Mrcuban comes across as whining about Karnage not laying down and just resigning to his country being killed. He is acting as though Karnage has ruined PDM's/his reset by having the audacity to fight back against an attempt to kill him.

Well... Of course the country is going to try to defend itself if you give it the opportunity to (e.g., try to kill it but don't finish the job). To argue that trying to defend your own country from dying is somehow "toxic" I think is delusional. That was my point.

Edited By: H4xOr WaNgEr on Jul 4th 2019, 18:52:22
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Jul 2nd 2019, 2:29:48

I don't get it. Karnage is supposed to just sit back and let PDM kill him because that is what is "right" ?

Makinso makes the comparison to murder and judgement. But what is the law exactly in this game? Who gets to be judge?

SoF or SOL or PDM get to decide that Karnage's country must die, and he has to accept that judgement and take it without a fight? How have perceptions twisted to the point where that makes any sense to you people? He is the arbiter of his country, not any of you. You don't get to decide how he runs his turns.

Edited By: H4xOr WaNgEr on Jul 2nd 2019, 2:36:36
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Jun 27th 2019, 17:53:50

Originally posted by archaic:
Originally posted by dagga:
Haxor Wanger is back? Are you still cheating?

Remember the good old days when you were in RD and ran bots and multies?

Ahh.. so easy to forget eh?


I'll never forget that Don Marshall admitted to having RD bot UCN off of the server because Laf could not be bothered to sort out their own problems without continuously resorting to using their colorful friends.


No. You are miss-characterizing. I didn't ask RD to do anything (as if they would listen). I was given a heads up that they were planning to attack UCN so we didn't have to worry about planning to fight them. I was relieved. That's not the same thing.

Added on edit: Also even if I had asked, I was about 17 at the time heh. Are you the same person you were almost 20 years ago?

Edited By: H4xOr WaNgEr on Jun 27th 2019, 17:57:00
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Jun 27th 2019, 15:33:51

Originally posted by TaSk1:
Originally posted by KoHeartsGPA:
I like the SoFt attempt to turn this into a server war in order to shift the attention from us whooping their ass at their own game..

🤐



LOL your FS was the joke of the server mate!

We were 5 kills a piece before the end of the day!

Weak as piss.


Only you would think that kills is the only way to evaluate a war.

Edited By: H4xOr WaNgEr on Jun 27th 2019, 21:13:35. Reason: Tempered my harshness

H4xOr WaNgEr Game profile

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Jun 27th 2019, 15:27:26

Originally posted by dagga:
Haxor Wanger is back? Are you still cheating?

Remember the good old days when you were in RD and ran bots and multies?

Ahh.. so easy to forget eh?


No I don't remember that. Sorry! Must be in your head again.

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Jun 26th 2019, 18:15:33

Originally posted by archaic:
Originally posted by H4xOr WaNgEr:
What Xyle is saying there is 100% correct (with exception to the very last line). SoF did stand behind LaF after the Hanlong/TC stuff, and if I remember correctly even offered to help us fight in the gangbangs that were scheduled. We asked them to stay out of it because we just wanted to take our licks and move on without drawing things out.

But they did stick by us for sure.


Except for the part where the war lasted for six sets and Laf/sof essentially broke the game and drove PDM, MD, and Evo off the server. Nice of sof to sit out that one three week stretch though . . .

To be fair, it's not your fault we were a fluffty coalition that got betrayed by Arsenal.

None of that makes Sof any less of a lapdog and this war anything other than an intersquad friendly.


Those coalition wars started long before that scandal, so to associate everything that came after the scandal as only being scandal related is disingenuous.

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Jun 26th 2019, 17:30:19

What Xyle is saying there is 100% correct (with exception to the very last line). SoF did stand behind LaF after the Hanlong/TC stuff, and if I remember correctly even offered to help us fight in the gangbangs that were scheduled. We asked them to stay out of it because we just wanted to take our licks and move on without drawing things out.

But they did stick by us for sure.

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Jun 26th 2019, 14:39:11

Originally posted by Vamps:
Originally posted by Requiem:
Vamps sof declared war for 3 sets... I like war just as much as sof :)


War is good for the game. It’s the last competitive aspect of the game. Look at how much the war has driven recruitment on both sides. It’s amazing what happens when you make the game something more than farming bots with no risk/reward element. There should be a big war every set.


Vamps, I think it is easy to look at it that way if you just came back to the game (which includes me, first reset back in a long time). But the bots, from what I told, really slowed down the decline of the game. If not for the bots there may not have been a game for all these old vets to have come back to over the last couple resets...

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Jun 21st 2019, 15:09:57

lol, never change dagga.

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Jun 14th 2019, 16:55:03

I see nothing has changed from when I retired before.