Workshop #7: Alliance Troop Management

With regard to troop management:

A troop over view for alliance leaders would be helpful, like the "plus" overview.

A defence tool is also a good idea, where incoming attacks could be marked in the players rally point for leaders to view, leaders could then get a list of marked attacks coordinates and times. When sending reinforcements, the players could also mark those in rally point for leaders to see. This way, leaders only get the troops movements marked (can just be a check box, like the rally point has green, amber red already), and don't get thousands of troops movements not required. The other thing which would be useful, is if players could mark their outgoing attacks too, to aid offence coordinators too, to check what has been sent to where and when it lands, since gettertools is very good at the planning but there is no way for the off planners to check it has been executed correctly.

The second topic is crazy, and is a deal breaker. I have played for 8-9 years at least and spend hundreds on each server, and i will never play a server with any single type of punishment for an alliance. I will not "make the best" of any situation i don't like, i'll just find another game to play.

I cannot stress enough:

DO NOT IMPLEMENT THIS.

The reasons:

• some people cannot help themself from cheating, it is a fact of life. I will not be disadvantaged because of someone else's lack of self control
• it will demoralise a team if 59 people are disadvantaged because of 1 persons misbehaviour
• the reason 99% of people who play this game give for playing it, is because of the people they play with. By implementing this policy or anything close to it, you are going to destroy the only reason customers are paying to play the game
• it will be too easy to get a tech or a friend or a multi or whatever to join an enemy alliance and deliberately sabotage that alliance by getting themself banned for something
• it will make the game impossible for new players to establish themself, or even old returning players, because nobody will want to risk taking in people they don't know

I understand why people want to punish bad alliances, but the people complaining about cheats are in my experience just losing and don't understand why a better alliance can play so much better than they can, hence the clamour for a witch hunt. If there is clear evidence of cheating, just ban the player. But don't implement any counterproductive measure to punish innocent players just to placate bad losers simply because they are currently shouting the loudest.

sorry for double post, but i have also been told by a number of my current allies who have had incorrect bans, or even bans due to mass reporting and nothing wrong found, the whole issue with incorrect bans and the lack of transparency around bans needs resolved regardless of what happens with this vote, but it also reinforces my opinion that this suggestion is the worst idea ive seen brought forward for discussion.

Secondly, THIS VOTE HAS ALREADY TAKEN PLACE!!

Even a politician couldn't claim that was a close vote, it was an overwhelming "no", so why is it still being brought forward to the workshop? Isn't the community rep not supposed to bring forward the views of the community? Yet this vote wasnt even mentioned in the post above. If it is travian games wishing to bring this idea forward, I'd expect the community rep to say "this was voted down" and in the post here say "travian wants this, can you guys vote for a second time"

alestorm wrote:

Secondly, THIS VOTE HAS ALREADY TAKEN PLACE!!

Even a politician couldn't claim that was a close vote, it was an overwhelming "no", so why is it still being brought forward to the workshop? Isn't the community rep not supposed to bring forward the views of the community? Yet this vote wasnt even mentioned in the post above. If it is travian games wishing to bring this idea forward, I'd expect the community rep to say "this was voted down" and in the post here say "travian wants this, can you guys vote for a second time"

Thank you for taking the time to explain how you feel about these ideas.
As I explained on Discord, we're not the only Community, others are in favour of alliance "punishment".

Our ambassador already mentioned the previous vote in Anglosphere to TG back in 2020, and again recently.

Since the main subject of this next workshop is alliance management, TG wants to hear from (all) the Community again because only very few ambassadors did a vote about it.

ps: this idea doesn't come from Travian Games.

As far as alliance punishments are concerned, I think what could be valuable is for the alliance leaders to see who got a ban, when (including their history as long as they were in the alliance), and for what. This could just be a one-line reason, "multiaccounting", "toxic behaviour", etc. That makes it easier to police your own.

Making an entire alliance suffer because of one person's actions will work well against some multiaccount alliances, but as Alestorm said will inconvenience real players probably too much, depening on how this is implemented exactly. Are any details at all known yet about how they would implement alliance punishments?

Ammanurt_COM wrote:

As far as alliance punishments are concerned, I think what could be valuable is for the alliance leaders to see who got a ban, when (including their history as long as they were in the alliance), and for what. This could just be a one-line reason, "multiaccounting", "toxic behaviour", etc. That makes it easier to police your own.

Already done

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Ammanurt_COM wrote:

Are any details at all known yet about how they would implement alliance punishments?

I'll let WdwndSpecialist answer this.

Whether or not an alliance leader can see why someone got a ban, which is after the event, does not solve the issue of alliances not accepting any new players as a preventative measure. I don't think anyone wanting to push this idea forward has thought through the insurmountable barrier this will create for new or returning players.

It would be much better spending time and effort trying to encourage new players, and keep existing players rather than this nonsense which will just lose travian paying customers.

I have still seen a far more significant number of false accusations of cheating, than i have of actual cheating. All it takes is to raid more, or have a bigger army than some people know how, to get reported for being a cheat. Same second attacks before wave builder was brought in, high raiding with low attack points, following an attacker home, even online times/activity, have all been reasons that I've seen people get accused of being a cheat by less knowledgeable people. Spurious and malicious claims by inexperienced or bad losers is every bit as big a problem as cheating, if not more.

If genuine cheats are banned, then the problem is solved without having to go the effort of ruining the game for innocent players.

ThomasGB wrote:

Already done

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I'll let WdwndSpecialist answer this.

Well, getting an IGM is not exactly the same as a nice graphical overview with a timeline. Still, it's a start

Ok, so if I routinely put multiaccounts into other alliances, longterm, and get them banned on purpose eventually, this is going to mildly annoy real players. Which helps to stop people cheating...how again?

if anything it will encourage multi accounts, specifically made to irritate or inconvenience enemy alliances, for example if the alliance had bonuses turned off at WW time, there goes a big chunk of the alliances ability to feed their WW when their merchants can no longer carry the amount of crop set up in trade routes.

It might seem like a small effect to individuals but that raises 2 points:

1. If it is supposed to be a small effect, why bother in the first place

2. If it is supposed to be a small effect, then alliance bonuses should not be used as the penalty, since losing commerce bonus at end game could affect the outcome of the server

Finding ways to combat cheats is commendable, but this "solution" is yet another example of the cure being worse than the problem, and in fact won't have any effect in reducing cheating.

On Anglosphere2 Round 2, my WWK account Bro Leopard got banned for 'using a bot to scan oases' and had 30 million resources deleted + account made inaccessible. 2 days later, after a lot of nagging the forum staff, it was further looked into and found to be an incorrect ban (obviously) and my account was unbanned without losing any building levels, although the resources were never returned.

God forbid if my entire ally got punished as well because of Travian's mistake in that instance. The ban system is already tentative, think it would be rash to start punishing entire alliances over it.

Why would you punish an entire alliance for the actions of potentially 1 rouge individual?

If an athlete is found to be doping do the entire team get banned too?

Can I sit in the next ambassador workshop? I reckon listening to these discussions would be a right laugh

I hate the idea of alliance punishments, also.
So I have a suggestion to ameliorate them if they are implemented anyway.
Allow the alliance to kick the player in lieu of punishment. Perhaps add a 7 day no alliances allowed punishment to the individual account, and ban them from rejoining the original alliance at a future time.
I do like the idea of a defense tool and getter type troop tracking functions added to a leader's toolbox.
I'd still use Getter for the other tools, but it would be a real help to see how many troops players have and where they are located.

Excel wrote:

Allow the alliance to kick the player in lieu of punishment. Perhaps add a 7 day no alliances allowed punishment to the individual account, and ban them from rejoining the original alliance at a future time.

I know the order of the day is to say ambassadors have no clue about anything.. But we are actually well aware of the various issues and abuses related to the suggestion (this is not directed at you Excel)...

What you said here is exactly what ambassadors told TG too, already when we first conceptualized a possible way to implement it, for the sake of discussion. Leaders would be able to kick the players before alliance punishment (the notification that they are implementing to let alliance leaders know when one of their players gets banned came directly out of this discussion actually), and then player wouldn't be able to re-join, at least for a good while. That said, majority of ambassadors are against the idea, though a couple of communities (.fr, .de, if I remember well enough), who have a strong history of policing their own players, do like it.

For me, .com community is about as strongly against it as anglosphere.. And while I do like the idea of incentivizing teams to police themselves, and not play with known cheaters, I don't think it can be implemented in a meaningful way.

As a former leader, and one who struggled hard to ensure my team played honestly, I would say that if TG sees a player on my team cheating, I want to know. I love having creative players who figure out best practices to make their account outstanding. An anvil who produces massive amounts of troops. A hammer that builds catas in multiple villas and creates a spreadsheet of launch times so he can singlehandedly zero an opponent in 2 seconds. Cheaters on the team tarnish the outstanding players, and those dont deserve to be painted with that brush. It can and will follow you server to server.

Why not send the leadership of the alliance a warning? X player is doing whatever. I have booted top players from my team and still won servers.

Give the alliances control rather than punishing them.

Quelaana wrote:

Why not send the leadership of the alliance a warning? X player is doing whatever. I have booted top players from my team and still won servers.

Give the alliances control rather than punishing them.

It's already a feature

Official announcement

Patch note: TL-8773