How to stop the games decline

Travian needs to change the rule enforcement policies.

There's way to much cheating going on, I know it's hard to detect all the cheating, it's a problem in every game. But in other games I've played cheaters get permbanned whenever they're caught, because of that there's very little cheating. Travian hands out warnings and slaps on the wrist for major infractions. Every server I play I run into at least 2 'top' teams that are in the top because of 'special tricks'. Like setting up multiaccount alliances for farming, sitter system + password sharing + attack detection script sending warnings in a group chat leading to the entire team suddenly coming online at any time of day whenever one of them has a incoming, farmbotting, simbotting etcetc.

A warning or 33% pop reduction isn't enough of a punishment for botters, multiaccounts or password sharing. Cheating has a HUGE impact on the game. A 33% pop reduction is rarely more of a setback than what the cheaters gained from cheating. Then it's not just about setting back the cheater by what amount he cheated. In FPS games for example, you get permabanned for having a aimbot shooting headshots for you not because of the unfair headshots you got. It's because of everyone who got headshotted unfairly.

This is a example from last server I played

https://www.gettertools.com/tx…an.com.25/Player/126-ReZo

This player and his alliance was in the top pop and troop rankings throughout the server. It's very easy to tell that it's not just one bad apple in the bunch, look at the times he got popreset and when the rest of the alliances top players suddenly flatline in popgrowth. What they did was to settle 200-400 fields from the center and turn simbots on. They had the biggest hammers on the server because they had a multiaccount alliance setup with 125%-150% 15ccs for their biggest hammers to friendlyfarm. They got to grow because no legitimate player wants to send the hammers they spent weeks/months building 300 fields away to death against scripters.

I play this game obsessively and the more I play the more I notice that this is a thing. That around half of the top teams are cheating, not as in that they have cheaters, because at this point every top team has at least one cheater, but that the entire alliance is partaking in it. It's honestly a f*cking joke, other games don't have entire teams cheating server after server because other games bans cheaters when they find them. If you'd start banning the cheaters then people wouldn't leave the game because of them. Stop with the trying to calculate and set them back by the exact amount cheaters got ahead by cheating and do the legitimate players a favor by sending the cheaters out the f*cking game whenever you find them.

LemBot wrote:

Penalty for botting has actually been reduced to -5% pop a while ago, fairly sure they did that cause TG know how bad their own detection systems are, so giving a possible innocent account -66% pop + all troops removed like they used to years ago, wouldn’t really be fair to anyone.

Im 100% for cheaters just getting their accounts deleted if TG know for sure that they actually cheat.

So TG, spend your resources on improving your non existent anti cheat, instead of driving your loyal and long time users away with UI updates.

I've led a alliance on the previous and current rounds of comx. I've had 5 players that I know botted because they told me they did, 4 of which got banned, none permanently. When I ask about it they tell me they do it every round, they go nuts with the scripts from the start and stop after the first ban to avoid major setbacks. After the first pop reset they're still way ahead of where they'd be without bots, which is why they do it over and over again. Out of ~400 people who I've played with, there's only been one who claimed he got banned unfairly and there's no doubt in my mind that he actually did it and was just lying to try to get out of popreset. So from my experience there's nothing wrong with the botdetection system apart from it not being able to catch all of the cheating, which no system is able to do.

I hate cheating, I don't want cheaters in my alliance and I don't want to play against them but I find myself in a bad position because of the weak rule enforcement. If I kick cheaters from my team I'll end up not only losing a top player but also having to deal with a top player who's resentful towards me and has a unfair advantage, it's not strategically viable to enforce rules that TG aren't enforcing. The biggest challanges I've faced from enemies is to try to maneuver around their unfair advantage, it would be great if TG banned cheaters because then I'd have spies leak the evidence to get rid of their team in one fell swoop. Instead I find myself trying to mitigate their advantage by faking attack detection scripts till they're turned off, grinding down multis that are defending important targets suicidally and so on.

ELE wrote:

I agree in general that cheating is the biggest problem and would agree 100% except I am one of those who got banned for botting and I know I don’t use bots neither do my duals or sitters. The punishment was reversed yet, obviously cost me and my team some. We had 3 account banned on the current server, in 2 cases punishment was reversed and the third was fair. Does not look like good system from my perspective.

Considering that the 3 unfair bans were reversed and the fair one wasn't it seems to me like the system is working quite well

IMDubzs wrote:

Maybe unpopular opinion but I think the decline has more to do with game design decisions then ban waves. I mean tell me, why should a new player without prior game knowledge or any contacs to veterans start this game?

Yes they need to improve the ban system (e.g. stop triggering automated bans), yes there is a need for better and faster communication. But even if they archieve all those things, still very few new players would join this game.

The game itself is very good. It's the best strategy MMO I know of, there's a lot of depth, it's hyper competitive, there's a heavy reliance on team play, because of the gold price there's very few kids and a overall more mature community. I think it caters to adults in a way that other games don't, you don't need the speed and reflexes of a teenager to play in the top. Preferably you're a stable and reliable adult. Finding new players isn't a problem, this is one of the most played games of all time, retaining them is.

I'm not talking about cheat detection triggering too seldom or too often. What I'm saying is, when it triggers, cheaters need to be permabanned by default. It's insanely toxic to the community to let cheaters off the hook, it's why other games permaban them. Imagine you loved counter strike and put in all the time and effort required to reach the top echelons of CS, to find out that what the top guys are thinking about is what aimbots and wallhacks to use rather than gameplay. Would you be happy about how your love for CS has lead you into the glorious world of scripting or sad about how valves EDITED you over by being to goddamn EDITED to deal with the cheaters?

The game is good but very mismanaged, the way things are now it's a nightmare. The fact that cheating is the meta in Finals is beyond belief, could you imagine what'd happen to CS:GO if aimbot and WH was the meta for playing their majors?

Ticker wrote:

I completely support your point of view Rovdjur . The only problem is, they need a reliable bot detection. So I believe that's what they need to focus on, and not new UI, wave builders, this and that. The game was good as it was. It's falling apart now. Sadly, I think the other faction is currently in TG's ear and there's not much room for anything else.

Agree, I like the new updates but there's more pressing issues that needs their attention.

fnx wrote:

Others have replied here already, but I will post my experience. 2 years ago we were playing the game with round the coverage acc and at day 13/14 of the server we get banned for boting. We argued and tried to explain that an account that doesn't raid with 3 duals on who wait to get enough resources for any buiding to NPC them and raise something do not require to bot. But they said nah, we have found something and we cannot tell you about it. After 2 days where we even complained to their emails, we gave up and let them apply the punishment. It is really frustrating when you get banned for no reasons and really worried about what triggered that ban so that you fix it.

Regarding ban system, in my opinion the real problem is the cheating by system abuse which cannot be detected by a bot and the TG should themselves act to fix it. Multihunters should read the complaints from the players and manually check if a player is twisting the rules or not. How much of a team game should be tolerated by the MH? A player getting like 300 to 700k+ per hour to feed his hammer perhaps is crossing a red line? A player whose hammer is being fed by other players? A player that is feeding on private farms that suddenly reinforce troops when someone else tries to raid them? A player who sets trade routes to a specific player to feed that player's hammer? All of these perhaps require to get addressed. Find the silver lining that distinguishes the team game from cheating please...

Let me put it in these golden words that I have been uttering for a decade now. If 10 people are allowed to build 10 accounts to play for 1 account, then 1 player should also be allowed to build 10 accounts to play for his 1 account. Either both are breaking the rules here, or neither is. END OF THE STORY. Just stop trying to use semantics and rhetoric to justify what you're doing is right so that you don't feel bad about the reality. Because those two cases are THE SAME.

I think one of your duals lied to you honestly. I mentioned above a issue where a account playing for my alliance was banned 'unfairly', but knowing the 3 players on the account there's no doubt in my mind which one of them did it and that he lied to the other 2 about it. Naturally the other 2 lost their minds at MH.

I'm quite certain that unfair bans that happens to dual accounts has far more to do with the duals on the account rather than the system being broken somehow.

The rule you brought up is definitely the hardest of them all to enforce, I know the rules used to say that a account must be played for the accounts benefit. Now I can't find it, maybe they've given up. In this case I'd also like a clarification on what applies. To me the "must be played for the accounts benefit" was quite clear in the sense that it was forbidden to build private farm accounts.

Excel wrote:

Just some random thoughts after I saw this thread. Hope they generate some discussion and/or action.

I agree about the good things travian have done, in general they do a excellent job.

1. It'd be better to ban vpn/proxy browsers like tor, nobody except the 1/10 000 paranoid uses that for daily browsing.

2. Just delete accounts that are found guilty, no matter how well calculated the punishment is, it doesn't make up for what everyone playing fair lost out on because of the cheating.

3. Yes, preferably the offenders account gets deleted.

4. I like how it is now, if you get banned you have a certain amount of time to appeal the punishment, 3 days I think. If you don't it automatically applies. For bigger infractions having a longer timeframe would be appropriate.

5. Just delete the account the first time.

6. Look at 1

To understand where I'm coming from, this is how the current comx looks, WW building started yesterday.

https://gyazo.com/b41d7b6dbaba9a1ab2d0bf6a18013084

The sides formed weeks ago.

My side is TH, THX and TGC we hold the north.

Lteam and Kteam are one block, they hold the southwest.

S-K, S-K2, WARL and SE are the third block holding the southeast. They're cooperating with PKN in the northeast.

I'm quite confident we'll win, it's not the problem, but looking at the server from the perspective of going for the win.

Lteam block is a big issue for endgame because their main hammers are friendly farming the "GOD" alliance to afford queuing with trainers in gb/gs. How do we know they're friendly farming? Because we have spies in their block sending reports of their biggest hammers farming GOD, when the spies tried to farm GOD they got told to stop by the leaders because farming GOD is reserved for their main hammers.

It's way to expensive to knock these hammers out because they've got a unbelievable amount of multiaccs providing them with defense. "Why don't you knock the multis out then?" If you take a look at their wing k-teams list of former members, https://www.gettertools.com/tx….com.26/Alliance/17-KTeam we've f*cking tried.
How do we know that they have a truckload multis providing deff for them? Because their leader and WW holder straight up told us, with the intent to flame us, after we ran into 100k deff while zero popping his starter village

https://gyazo.com/118c10b7154a5114b18fbd67ccf8eacd
Which we reported, which he got banned then pop reduced for. Now he's holding their WW and still leading the alliance. https://www.gettertools.com/tx…ian.com.26/Player/728-ATE

S-K, S-K2, WARL and SE are playing fair. Which is great, but we don't get to play against them because we have PKN in our quad. Judging from the list of former members, it's blatantly obvious that they're gold farming with referrals

https://www.gettertools.com/tx…an.com.26/Alliance/30-PKN

https://gyazo.com/8a88a504c3cc65143e8b522d3b1ed1c2

Which is absolutely fantastic for us, because all the money they're not spending on buying gold for their accounts they can spend on buying accounts(they've been offering to buy the biggest accs playing for us for 100-300$ via Discord, the ones I know accepted told us like it was, I assume some just took the money and ran) and gold for tech accounts. Which we've reported several times, which MH finally took a look at and concluded that 9 accounts were password sharing. Which MH ruthlessly totally put a end too by handing out warnings to 8 accounts and a whopping 5% popredution to the main account

So to conclude, the strategically best route for me to take to win the server is to first knock out ~20 bought and built multis in PKN so I can get to the big hammer accounts they've built with the help of techs and multis. This will give me the freedom of movement I need to be able to go and knock out what's hopefully less than 60 multis in L/Kteam, so I can get to their biggest hammers and most valuable artefacts. After all that I can finally play against the actual players in S-K, S-K2, WARL and SE, by which time the server is either over since months or we've run out of hammers to play with the actual players with.

I want to play against the fair players in S-K, not the cheaters, but I can't do that without getting rekt by the cheaters. I don't want to play against S-K because they are smaller, the thing is they wouldn't be smaller if it wasn't for the cheaters. S-K gets a skewed point of view, where PKN and Lteam ends up looking really good compared to them leading to S-K not being able to take charge and form a serverwide meta against us. So because of the cheaters, rather than there being 2 metas of fair players, north and south going at eachother it's a snoozefest. My meta doesn't have the motivation and the S-K meta don't think they have skill/means because there's 2 cheater teams running amok because TG are tiptoeing around the issue of cheaters, leading to the server being ran by them.