May 9th 2010, 16:55:25
gregg: Sure, parity is good for the game, but I don't think it's the role of the admins to be involved in forcing parity. In fact, I agree with their current stance so far which is to do everything they can do stay out of the politics of the game as much as possible.
And let's clarify my earlier example.
Clan A has 400 countries one set. They have 1,000 the next set.
If you catch them and say: "Ok, as your punishment, you can only be 80% of your previous size" then you're telling them it's ok to cheat, as long as they cheat LESS.
The admins are doing exactly what they should be doing. Players who cheat should have their countries deleted. If the cheating becomes habitual and continues multiple sets, then admins should look into banning those players.
As it is now, Blake, Juggs, DM and llaar were involved in cheating, so they got exactly what they deserved. The offending countries were deleted. That's as far as it should go for now.
If they continue to cheat in future resets, that's when you talk about banning them from the game.
Remember, when you're trying to come up with ways to handle cheating, you have to consider certain things:
1) What fixes the problem in the short term?
2) What's reasonable?
3) What's enforceable?
It's simply not enforceable to say those 4 people will never be allowed to play on the same alliance again without putting far too much work on the admins, as that would be a rule that would simply have WAY too many ways to get around it.
What's reasonable? What I stated above. Deletion the first time up to bans for multiple instances from the same person.
What fixes the problem in the short term? Deletion. LaE is now back down to earth (pun unintended) when it comes to country numbers. Part of this is the deletions and part of this is the group of players that left due to the problems. LaE is still the biggest, but in one sense they deserve to be. I'll still reiterate what I said when I was part of LaE. Their member list is extensive and most of those members login regularly. If everyone on the LaE website played 15, they could have had 700-800 countries legitimately.
Obviously from what's come out, that wasn't the case, but if the admins are satisfied that the remaining countries are clean and there really is that much activity on their boards, the "punishment" fits.
From here on out, the admins' role should be to sit back and wait to catch the next instance of cheating, not to make a witch hunt out of the last instance just because it was on a larger scale than many other people who got deleted.