Open Discussion Defining Pushing

HotLikeDat

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No one has really responded to my points or raised questions / loopholes that they see. However, I'll respond to some points raised by others and also clarify something I should have mentioned earlier.

Different types of pushing: In order to improve the ability of the mods to stamp out the pushing that matters from that which is relatively inconsequential I want to make clear my opinion on the different categories of pushing.
- Casual pushing: some bloke out on the rim ranked 600 nobles 1 village of a mate and moves up to rank 500. That's it for the entire world. This doesn't really need to be punished, at least not very severely. Give the guy a warning maybe, but this isn't the type of pushing that is really destroying the game and even affecting outcomes of certain worlds.
- Professional pushing: players who go HAM on pp and do all they can to "get ahead" by any means necessary. These are the accounts spending big bucks, probably using bots, and using several if not into the double figures of push accounts to either improve their farming area / gift free villages / bash off competition early. This is what really needs to be stamped down on. Tbh, any player outside the top 100 isn't really making much of a difference, it should still be punished of course. But the mods should not be dedicating hours and hours to inconsequential grey-area merges, when there's clear top-ranks professional, systematic pushing going on that's being unpunished.

How should pushers be punished? What is the punishment?
I think it should be a strong sanction but pushing isn't as serious to me as botting so shouldn't be our most severe consequence for first-time pushing bans (30% point/village reduction feels justified).

By botting do you mean a farm bot? Or is there another type I am unfamiliar with.
The advantage a player can get from pushing (2,3,4+ players gifting at various stages of start- and early-mid game) FAR exceeds the benefit from "bot" farming, there is no doubt in my mind there. The punishment should scale accordingly. The punishment should also take into consideration the likelihood of being caught: this is standard for deterrence policy in most real world situations (think parking fines: if you don't pay a £2 parking ticket and get a £90 fine). It has to be that extreme to account for the fact that most people who don't pay for parking get away with it. The same applies to pushing.

Losing 30% of an account can be game-changing - keep in mind the coins for those nobles also disappear (so say a 100 village account loses 30 villages, it also drops the noble limit available by 30). Troop and positioning loss alongside this is huge.

It depends on the stage of the world, but unless a tribe/player is at a critical stage of a war where troops are desperately needed, the impact of a 30% loss is likely to be negligible to the types of players who typically push. The types of players who do anything to get ahead, including rule breaking via pushing, maybe botting, they will also be spending big bucks on PP and at events. The threat of having a few villages taken off them and losing some coins, which they can easily replace in a matter of hours with an event or spending in the PP exchange and then rapidly re-noble the villages, is laughable. It really is. If the punishment isn't increase, there is no deterrence. Most pushing cases clearly go unpunished due to the large grey area. These professional push accounts know exactly what they are doing, they know its rule-breaking, and they should pay the price for that. Right now they clearly believe the risk is worth it: they probably won't get caught, and even if they do the punishment is minimal.

The same doesn't apply to casual pushers, newer players who effectively 'push' out on the rim by mistake and it has little effect on anything. Sure, a 30% loss of villages and 24/48 hour ban is sufficient to make the point and then allow them to continue. You cannot take the same approach to infinite res pack / double flag professional push accounts.

Until reading this discussion I had no idea the punishment was so light. This is clearly a MAJOR issue in the enforcement of this rule at present. The downside is almost nothing to these professional pushers, and the upside is huge. This must be rectified if the game has any real desire to cut out pushing.
 

Deleted User - 848983838

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Punishments aren't there to cripple accounts to stop people playing; they need to match the severity of the rule breach. But ultimately we want players to learn from a ban so they don't repeat it in future. I'd be on board with increasing any punishment for 2nd time banned for pushing etc :)

punishments should be so severe you should be making sure you aren't doing anything sketchy so you don't end up getting banned. a permaban is a warning to the account owner and everyone else that cheating is not allowed which is very clearly the exact opposite measure given.

30% is a slap on the wrist and encourages everyone who is cheating to keep cheating,
 

DaWolf85

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to assume inno would be capable of doing something about cheating and not hiding behind some eu law about account data everytime they can.
I'm just going to explain a little further on this, as I noticed nobody else really touched on it. I think every mod has that moment where they're like "I hate GDPR". It does not make our job easier, in fact it does the exact opposite. We like to tell players why we can't do certain things, otherwise it does feel rather arbitrary - and because GDPR is very influential on the things we do, that means we have to cite it a lot. That doesn't mean we're hiding behind it. Responses like this are what I meant when I said being open with players tends to backfire on us as a team.

Until reading this discussion I had no idea the punishment was so light. This is clearly a MAJOR issue in the enforcement of this rule at present. The downside is almost nothing to these professional pushers, and the upside is huge. This must be rectified if the game has any real desire to cut out pushing.
We do not publicly state our exact punishment structure, but I will note that our standard punishment for breaking the no-push rule on EN125 varied based on the severity of the offense, and there were several 'typical punishments', depending on the situation. 30% was not our punishment on EN125, it is a suggestion Googly made for future punishments moving forward.

I do agree though, that if we are acknowledging that no pushing rule will be able to match our other rules in terms of percentage of cheaters that we ban (and I'm not sure I'm willing to concede that yet - but it does seem that some of you are), then that would mean for a punishment to be an effective deterrent, it would need to be stronger than it would be in a vacuum. Otherwise, the risk of cheating is too low.

But the mods should not be dedicating hours and hours to inconsequential grey-area merges, when there's clear top-ranks professional, systematic pushing going on that's being unpunished.
The interesting question here is... how do you tell the difference?
On the one hand, I absolutely agree that a large majority of what was reported was ultimately rather inconsequential. On the other hand, I remember coming across multiple cases of clearly intentional stuff, that was not top-rank players. This is one thing that I think is oft-forgotten - cheating doesn't inherently mean that you're high-ranked, just the same as massive premium feature usage and even event spamming doesn't make you high-ranked. You have to actually use your advantages properly, and a lot of the people who cheat do so because they aren't good at the game. That doesn't mean that what they do is inconsequential, but it does mean that it's not visible to just anyone.
Ultimately, on EN125 this meant that we had to take every report seriously, no matter whether it was reporting someone in the top 10, or someone rank 1500.

The other point is of course that grey-area merges are exactly what the players who do this all the time love doing. If they get a sense that a certain thing is not being punished because it's too ticky-tacky, then they will do it again and again; while others might not risk that same thing because it's in the grey area. That's why allowing grey areas is a problem, and why the EN125 rule ultimately did not solve the main problem we have with pushing, which is that it's not rigidly defined. You can say 'no gifting villages' and that sounds defined, but then players will just try to find the grey areas in how you determine what is gifted, and there were, quite frankly, a lot more grey areas there than I think we expected.

Just to give an example: One of the grey areas that I would really like to see a potential rule resolve, is intentionally recruiting players to your tribe in order to kick and noble them when they are not expecting it (something @bobertini brought up earlier).
 

Space Cowboy

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tell me you push without telling me you push
If you think I'm doing it you can report it.
You are not ashamed to cry every day and be disgraced

I'm just going to explain a little further on this, as I noticed nobody else really touched on it. I think every mod has that moment where they're like "I hate GDPR". It does not make our job easier, in fact it does the exact opposite. We like to tell players why we can't do certain things, otherwise it does feel rather arbitrary - and because GDPR is very influential on the things we do, that means we have to cite it a lot. That doesn't mean we're hiding behind it. Responses like this are what I meant when I said being open with players tends to backfire on us as a team.


We do not publicly state our exact punishment structure, but I will note that our standard punishment for breaking the no-push rule on EN125 varied based on the severity of the offense, and there were several 'typical punishments', depending on the situation. 30% was not our punishment on EN125, it is a suggestion Googly made for future punishments moving forward.

I do agree though, that if we are acknowledging that no pushing rule will be able to match our other rules in terms of percentage of cheaters that we ban (and I'm not sure I'm willing to concede that yet - but it does seem that some of you are), then that would mean for a punishment to be an effective deterrent, it would need to be stronger than it would be in a vacuum. Otherwise, the risk of cheating is too low.


The interesting question here is... how do you tell the difference?
On the one hand, I absolutely agree that a large majority of what was reported was ultimately rather inconsequential. On the other hand, I remember coming across multiple cases of clearly intentional stuff, that was not top-rank players. This is one thing that I think is oft-forgotten - cheating doesn't inherently mean that you're high-ranked, just the same as massive premium feature usage and even event spamming doesn't make you high-ranked. You have to actually use your advantages properly, and a lot of the people who cheat do so because they aren't good at the game. That doesn't mean that what they do is inconsequential, but it does mean that it's not visible to just anyone.
Ultimately, on EN125 this meant that we had to take every report seriously, no matter whether it was reporting someone in the top 10, or someone rank 1500.

The other point is of course that grey-area merges are exactly what the players who do this all the time love doing. If they get a sense that a certain thing is not being punished because it's too ticky-tacky, then they will do it again and again; while others might not risk that same thing because it's in the grey area. That's why allowing grey areas is a problem, and why the EN125 rule ultimately did not solve the main problem we have with pushing, which is that it's not rigidly defined. You can say 'no gifting villages' and that sounds defined, but then players will just try to find the grey areas in how you determine what is gifted, and there were, quite frankly, a lot more grey areas there than I think we expected.

Just to give an example: One of the grey areas that I would really like to see a potential rule resolve, is intentionally recruiting players to your tribe in order to kick and noble them when they are not expecting it (something @bobertini brought up earlier).

I will tell you two very simple things.
There are 2 accounts in game.
In the 1st account, the player is playing attack. and one day he didn't play because of his private life and lost his village.

In the 2nd account, the player is playing attack and growing his village for another.
that person doesn't enter the game one day and loses his village.

which one is pushing?
How will you know?

bring the rule you want people and games don't change
everyone somehow finds a flaw in the game
The important thing is to prevent this vulnerability from harmful use.
 

HotLikeDat

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The interesting question here is... how do you tell the difference?
On the one hand, I absolutely agree that a large majority of what was reported was ultimately rather inconsequential. On the other hand, I remember coming across multiple cases of clearly intentional stuff, that was not top-rank players. This is one thing that I think is oft-forgotten - cheating doesn't inherently mean that you're high-ranked, just the same as massive premium feature usage and even event spamming doesn't make you high-ranked. You have to actually use your advantages properly, and a lot of the people who cheat do so because they aren't good at the game. That doesn't mean that what they do is inconsequential, but it does mean that it's not visible to just anyone.
Ultimately, on EN125 this meant that we had to take every report seriously, no matter whether it was reporting someone in the top 10, or someone rank 1500.

Tbh, any player outside the top 100 isn't really making much of a difference, it should still be punished of course. But the mods should not be dedicating hours and hours to inconsequential grey-area merges, when there's clear top-ranks professional, systematic pushing going on that's being unpunished.

As I said, it should still be punished. But in terms of mod man-power, they should prioritise the more extreme cases if there's such a high number of reported "pushing" cases that not every single one can be investigated extremely thoroughly. I agree that less skilled players cheat because they aren't good at the game: they need the help! They want to navigate the tricky early stage, and not get rimmed on 1 village again. While this is a rule-break and should be punished, but it's not the same as a top-rank pushing case. By a player who doesn't need the help, would be top 25 anyway cause they spend big PP and are reasonably good, but decide to get 5 players to gift to them off the bat to give them an insane lead at the top. That's the big issue in my opinion.

That's why allowing grey areas is a problem, and why the EN125 rule ultimately did not solve the main problem we have with pushing, which is that it's not rigidly defined.

I agree! As I said earlier, the current definition that is written to allow legitimate mergers allows far too much wriggle room for anyone with 3 brain cells to make a case that their pre-meditated pushing is in fact a spur of the moment merge due to UNFORESEEN RL circumstances!!!!!!!

I refer you to my earlier post, I've just quoted a section of it but the full sh-bang is on page 2 of this thread.

I feel like the issue here is, in order to permit a legitimate "merge" (or whatever people label it), a rule has been created that means illegitimate "pushing" is now entirely unenforceable. I don't see a way to allow the "legitimate merging" without giving people plenty of room to argue that their "pushing" is in fact allowed.

How would this work compared to a merging rule?
This is where the issue lies.
"aha I just HATE mid-game, it's super time-consuming amirite??? Going to merge with my best mate to share the workload aha x".

First idea: During a merge only x% of village can be nobled by a single tribemate. A ticket must be put in to warn the mods.
What is x? Maybe 15%? Number isn't that important, just low enough that it really nullifies the benefit of the classic push strategy. And also small enough to avoid 2 or 3 players with a push account swapping each other for villages to get around a 50% or 33% rule.
You might need an equation to base this off no. of tribe mates.

Second idea: In case the above receives push-back for whatever reason. Here is my second ingenious idea xd
Merging is effectively banned. When an account wants to "merge" he puts in a ticket and he instantly barbs. Def troops are placed in all of these villages, this might be based upon stage of the world and village points. E.g. late game, a 10k village could have somewhere between 15k/15k to 20k/20k def. In start-up a 10k village might have only 5k/5k to 10k/10k.

If merging is really so "innocent", then there should be no real downside the sharing the villages out.

By "grey area" btw, I mean where people push very cleverly. Zero in game interaction between the two accounts, and then they stage a fight in which one player overcomes to other by backtiming his offence or "sneaking in during NB when his troops are scavenging" whatever it is. Flag it as grey area if there's no conclusive proof, and if a similar thing happens again or next world, well you then the evidence starts to mount and get more suspicious... I don't mean "yeah we're going to allow merging, and then try and enforce a pushing rule at the same time xD". You can't have both.
 

Tueur De Roi

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Due to the way tribal wars works, I don't think pushing can ever be fully defined or limited and in certain cases I'm actually okay with pushing. If I join up on a rim and meet some players and have them bash for me and in return I protect them and eventually they quit and I eat their villages. This is 100% pushing but it wasn't premeditated which is what most players, myself included, do not like. Because then the game is just a popularity contest of how many friends do you have that are willing to push your account for you.

Thus the best way to stop pushing is to eliminate the ways in which players can push. Relocation items, choosing direction and inviting friends all come immediately to mind. I think doing what the .de servers do is pretty cool. If you pre register on a world with a tribe, your tribe can choose which direction to start in. Otherwise your direction is random. This does mean tribes will have pushing accounts/tribes near them, but they will also have other premades near them too because it will force premades to pre register.

Doing this would delegate much of the task of resolving pushers from the TW staff to the players in the game.
 

Comply Or Die

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How would you define pushing?

- Pushing is when an account is used for the growth of another.

I think this is the best definition of pushing I’ve read. But in the question of how to manage pushing you first need to look a little more in-depth at what constitutes ‘pushing’ and how an advantage can be gained.
I think Googly covers the most utilised methods below
- Resource pushing through market.
- An active user being farmed while building up pits/warehouse (with other factors that prove it is arranged and not a poor tactic choice).
- Bashing (clearing villages for others consistently, with no own growth...but this would be over sustained periods and not something that could be identified accurately in early game)
- Account merges where an account gives a huge portion of villages to another account

Reading through the thread what I gather is it’s virtually impossible to catch pushers on the most part with beyond reasonable doubt evidence. So the only alternative I see is to legalise pushing whilst disincentive the use or putting in place limitations so it becomes less game changing.

- Resource pushing through market

Again from what I’ve read this is one of the few methods that can be monitored and might not require changes. However the forced 1:1 trades seems like a good idea

- An active user being farmed while building up pits/warehouse (with other factors that prove it is arranged and not a poor tactic choice).

Again I don’t know what restrictions above a 1:20 attacking ratio that is often already in place. I suppose as a lot of people have mentioned limiting the use of inviting friends and relocation items
Personally I think the invite a friend should be disabled and relocation item should be directional only.

- Bashing (clearing villages for others consistently, with no own growth...but this would be over sustained periods and not something that could be identified accurately in early game)

I think to limit bashing the biggest thing needs to be an overhaul of the morale system. I like the 1:20 system that has been implemented but I’d like to see morale be changed to have a heavier weighting to time based rather than point based

Not going to pretend to understand the current maths or what changes could be made to the morale however!

- Account merges where an account gives a huge portion of villages to another account

I think this will always be in the game and if a person is quitting then it’s fair and almost impossible to detect/punish if the motive was to always merge


I’m sure there better methods than above that smarter people will think of. However the key to me is to
Legalise but disincentive
 

Nova

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I’ve been thinking for a couple of days that I wanted to add to this discussion but the more I thought about it the more complex and difficult it got. Added to that was a pile of great arguments, thoughts and definitions that popped up from a lot of different people, both team and players alike.

The main problem is that with GDPR introduced in 2018, the way the game itself evolved during the latest couple of years (merging/co-playing) and our standardization of the rules (also in 2018) has sent us down a slippery slope where it’s gotten increasingly difficult to manage.

So I started thinking beyond that, way back to the dark ages when we didn’t see this as a big problem. In 2011 I updated the rules for the Swedish version of TW, adapting the rules from .NET. Before that we had rules that felt stupid, and didn’t make any sense at the time. One of these rules stated that a player could only “gift” 10% of the villages on the account, to gift more than that the account had to noble up the same amount that was gifted.
Another rule stated that you could only gift max 60% of your villages to the same player (when merging or quitting) and a third rule stated it was not allowed to grow an account that was quitting/merging, nor use its troops on other players.

Perhaps the reason the pushing discussion never really moves forward and instead keeps bouncing between a couple of different impossibilities (due to GDPR, impossible to determine/prove and so on.. ) is because we’re approaching it backwards. We can’t have clear, exact definitions for pushing because it’s a grey area begging to be explored for loopholes but maybe there are other ways to limit it by re-thinking and add to/extend other rules? But why was pushing a lesser problem back in 2010 than it is now, when it should be the other way around considering the number of players back then was several times higher?

I don’t have a perfect or even good suggestion, but I don’t think the discussion has much chance of moving forward if we don’t change the perspective and try to see if from another angle and perspective.

Here’s my take on the template:

  • What is pushing? What is it to you?
    • Pushing is gaining an unfair advantage over other players from actions that are not allowed in our rules.
  • How would you define pushing?
    • Considering all restrictions on sending resources as well as the PE, resource sending is just a minor part and not what we should be focusing on first. So, instead I think the definition to me is basically starting up an account on a world with the only intention to boost the growth of another account with any means available.
  • How can the team enforce a rule on pushing?
    • This is where it starts getting difficult as foreseeing the future and mind reading isn’t a part of our admin tools. What we can do is “follow the money” or in this case advantages gained and/or growth. Some cases are obvious, but the majority of them are not; investigating and acting on the breaches of rules that we find is what we can do.
  • Should the team intervene at all or should pushing just be an allowed thing (for everyone equally) as long as the other rules are respected?
    • Allowing it would mean giving up, and take the easy way out of a problem that is never going to disappear. Even allowing it at this point would just expand the grey areas, and probably create more loopholes.
  • How should pushers be punished? What is the punishment?
    • Currently all push investigations are done on a case to case basis with the same punishment for the same breach – based on all surrounding circumstances. While it might look like we just remove the illegally nobled villages, there’s more to it than that but it’s based on the circumstances. First breach always gets a more lenient punishment than the following and I think this is wise – imho we want players to learn what they did wrong and get a chance to get back into the game; a punishment should be a punishment, not a death penalty.
  • How would a definition of pushing work if we keep allowing village gifting?
  • Should village gifting also become disallowed?
  • How would this work compared to a merging rule?
  • A combination of "thresholds" or one clear line?
    • This is where I’m thinking that perhaps the pre 2011 rules we used on the Swedish version weren’t as dumb as I once thought. Limiting the gifting seems like a different take on the problem that we could perhaps consider (if it’s still possible considering the impact of GDPR)
  • How do we detect pushing?
    • Clearly not the same way players considering how often we spend hours investigating what they see as evident cases just to find nothing punishable. This is probably because of the different ways we define it from player vs. team perspective and actual proof vs. suspicion.
 

Deleted User - 848983838

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imho we want players to learn what they did wrong and get a chance to get back into the game; a punishment should be a punishment, not a death penalty.

probably can't say it, but how often are pushers who get banned first time offenders doing it on "accident" ie relatively bad at the game and genuinely just suck and how often is it good players on new accounts or good players only getting caught for the first time.
 

=Bit Cloud=

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At this point just get rid of the pushing rule all together or take the feedback you're getting and come up with a black and white definition of what pushing is. Currently the rule is vague and the mods are either making judgement calls or can't explain why they're banning players and yet we have been told we just have to trust that they are doing so without bias.

I would much rather see Inno put more effort into detecting those using VPN's which would catch the biggest abusers of pushing. Instead of banning players who internalled an account who told them he was quitting.
 

bambamsam1997

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I would much rather see Inno put more effort into detecting those using VPN's which would catch the biggest abusers of pushing.
I have brought this point before, the team has historically defended VPNs citing the fact that some people use VPN for all of their traffic etc.
IMO banning VPN usage, and simultaneously removing the ability to have "connection sharing" with other players (or make the connection sharing penalties permanent on the world, i.e. if you share an IP with someone even once you are never allowed to attack or support their villa) would remove a lot of the pushing accounts. (or at least the ones that people are doing by themselves for themselves, people would still be able to push as long as its not from the same connection)

I do want to give some appreciation to the team though I have had my grievances in the past. The 40 day no-merger rule is a step in the right direction, and has the correct spirit "if you want to play together, join the world together" (in my opinion this could be without time limits, remove merger altogether. But I know that TW enjoys the late game mergers for the sake of ending the world in a timely fashion)
 

One Last Shot...

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I have brought this point before, the team has historically defended VPNs citing the fact that some people use VPN for all of their traffic etc.
IMO banning VPN usage, and simultaneously removing the ability to have "connection sharing" with other players (or make the connection sharing penalties permanent on the world, i.e. if you share an IP with someone even once you are never allowed to attack or support their villa) would remove a lot of the pushing accounts. (or at least the ones that people are doing by themselves for themselves, people would still be able to push as long as its not from the same connection)

It is worth pointing out that in almost all reported cases of suspected pushing (and almost all cases of pushing being acted on), the users involved were not at any point sharing IPs, or using VPNs for that matter. Nor did the many cases I investigated ever share connections with each other.

Restricting people who share an IP would affect everybody in huge areas that use a 4G connection; essentially dozens of users can share an IP on a world without even knowing it because of the way some 4G networks work. Given that some tribes are set up predominantly as friends from a single country, this suggestion would hit them particularly hard as it would prevent entirely legitimate tribes from ever supporting or attacking in coordination. That would certainly drive away entire communities from the game.

I can see why people who aren't able to access the information we have would assume that people predominantly use VPN to try and mask things, but focusing on VPNs and shared IPs in relation to pushing wouldn't actually reduce pushing in any noticeable or meaningful way (in the sense that a lot of the community view pushing as and send in tickets regarding).
 

0.2 Percent Nigerian

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(Disclaimer: I skim read the thread and replies sorry if anything is repeated etc)


I feel like Nova had a solid point with the thought process, you have to look at problems backwards. But I feel like Nova didn't go all the way to the back of the cause of pushing and reasonings behind it.

I feel like pushing will ALWAYS have loopholes and issues with any black and white rules INNO put into place now. As Nova mentioned 10 years ago pushing wasn't nearly as bad as it is today. Not because anything other than technology advancing and expanding. Whatever we decide as a community today doesn't mean shit in 5yrs with how fast technology is evolving around us.

Thus being said, I don't think INNO should just throw in the white flag and say screw it, its a free for all everyone can do it as it will get very obnoxious if I'm fighting one person and he has a tribe of 50 push accounts that he just unloads on me early game. It'll kill what life is left in the game.

So my suggestion on the situation is to look at WHY push accounting is done, and then adapt the changing game from what it was in 2011 to what it is now. What meta's have changed and how the game has evolved and how people have adapted.

Few reasons for push accounting and ways to counteract:

#1 Mobile defense
Its always a fearful thought that you spend 2 weeks at startup on a 1 speed to FINALLY get your academy and noble and then by the end of the 2 weeks you get launched on in the middle of the night and you lose 2 weeks of effort. This causes for people to make defense push accounts to be able to stack themselves to prevent losing their village if their nobles fail on their target that's an hour away. There are rules for some worlds where no outside support is allowed whatsoever, but the worlds that don't they're able to run free with mobile def push accounts/multi's.
Now solutions of how to counteract:
  1. Only allow outside tribe support after 30 days, so only tribemates early game are allowed to support each other. This allows for the opportunity of stacking someone outside the tribe to have backstabs still as this is a war game and backstabs are always fun.
  2. Limit tribe changes, only allow LEAVING tribes to be changed once every 24hrs or something along that time frame. It stops people from abusing the 30 day no outside support method and allows people to track tribe movements of people allowing members to do their own investigations of where said member is changing tribes and obtaining support from where etc. Obviously prompts etc will need to be had stating leaving the tribe is only allowed every 24hrs prior to joining. Allowing kicks from leadership makes it where they lose tribe level in exchange for them to move tribes etc. A little give and take.
#2 Free village(s) this one also consists of offense acc pushing.
If someone's making a push account that's offense lets be frank, they're typically going to noble it right when the offense is dead at early game. So they're going to use this account to just clear people near and noble them with limited amount of offense troops that they personally created since most res went into nobles in the first 14 days.
(Will give an overall method to prevent further down)

#3 The "Coplayer" method
This strat was brought out a LONG time ago, back when bonfires were a thing. The old policy was if you've got a friend that's your typical coplayer to have them start with you and whomever got bonfire that's what account y'all were on for the rest of the world and internal the other. Its now evolved to whomever gets a better startup, and or if either account doesn't get railed out the gate. As we all know not every coplayer carries as much weight as the main player on accounts. (I.E. Jon carries Liam when they coplay)
Solutions to counteract:
  1. "Relocate to friend at xxx|xxx" needs to have a tether to it as well. Making it impossible to attack your "friend" for 30 days. Making the coplayers have a month long commitment and or players asked to "start up and gift".
  2. Limit the amount of "friends" that can relocate to you to 5. This makes it where people that will VPN and abuse the system have to add multiple different accounts as friends etc and makes the investigation process a little easier to tracking the multi/piggy backing accounts. The spawning location will start getting hard for close range nobling and defending as the push accounts will be forced to get further away from main account.
  3. Along with the 30 day non-attack on friends would need to implement a black and white rule that the account can't be sat for "X" amount of days of the 30 days to prevent someone from starting an account dumping sit and letting a tribemate build the village for you. (Suggested days 10-15 max sit days). Saying the account has to be played half of the month by owner is sufficient enough. As most people that aren't committed will either flake and not build the village properly for their friend/coplayer and just delete and or go inactive. This rule will allow investigations for staff a lot easier as they can just peep the sat days and determine in black and white if they followed the rules when merging.
  4. Allowing the "coplayer" method in my eyes is essential to the games life, if INNO starts weighing in to much on accounts for merges it will run off the casual players that have made friends that they work well with together but just don't have the 24/7 schedule to devote. Early game is very boring there's no debate on that. Having a group of 5 people that all coplay/have coplayed on multiple worlds together starting a new world seems insane to have on one account, Giving the game life by having the "coplayers" stick around and play for a month changes a lot of things. It could convince them to running their own account etc. Granted "coplaying isn't allowed" but it is needed for a real time game especially since nightbonus has its own downsides etc so can't roll it out on everyworld.
  5. Obviously limit the amount of "coplayers" you can noble within the first 30 days. So someone doesn't start VPNing multi-accounts claiming all to be "coplayers".
#4 The "Spy" method
Honestly this one shouldn't be considered into the push account rule as it falls under the "multi-accounting" rule. As this method is to plant a spy, which in my eyes is a tactic in war. Being a good leader is being able to pinpoint the rat in the bunch, I don't think I've ever played a world where someone wasn't leaking something. There's no real way to prevent this as if someone's going to use this method they're just going to VPN a multi-account and not do anything else to break rules so will fly under the radar.

#5 The "res boosting" method:
I personally feel this option should be allowed. If I'm on a world and I am in a position to get a friend (new or old) to come join and allow me to dump resources in them to get them to build up and caught up I'm beyond down. As most people on the "bad bois squad" will understand if you can get trex to boost up in your backlines on a world that is getting to mid-game that's a game changer. I'm sure the swedes will feel the same about Bob account, even 120 they boosted Mike (aceofspadez) as the 3 accounts are very dominant players no matter what anyone says if they can have any of the 3 accounts above on their team its going to boost team morale. The veteran players of TW that hold some form of "skill" that people see worth fit of boosting should be allowed. Those 3 accounts mentioned above are all great players and share and show knowledge to the less skilled/active players of tribalwars which keeps the game fresh. It gives a goal for newer players to be known and be "worthy" of being brought in to be boosted.
(Counter side of boosting: Obviously having a smaller account boost a bigger account should not be allowed UNLESS repaying resources from previously being boosted theirs elves from the bigger account, implying a free trade limit daily for accounts based on size should also be looked into with a proper formula.

Overall rule changes to adapt to new meta to help limit push accounts:

  1. Increase spaces between players, giving more time to react to incomings along with more of a "safe" feeling not having a player touching them and feeling like they need to prestack themselves.
  2. Increase barbs spawned per player, lets face it. Events and war packs have changed the whole meta; people that know how to abuse it go for villages, warehouses/markets and more nobles. More barbs make it more appetizing to players to noble barbs rather than going after someone out the gate.
  3. Increase barb growth rate, simply put people are more willing to make a push account as they grow faster and better than barbs and or players around them. As all their resources will be spent straight into either spears to scav or just buildings alone depending how fast someone wants to noble their push account. If barbs grew faster newer/unskilled players will start picking up the meta faster and realizing why experienced players are out growing them (flag boosting/clustering etc). Limiting the skill gap across the board. Allowing newer/unskilled players to be bigger and have more troops going sooner rather than later and learning about sniping etc. This new game adjustment will make even veteran players want to cluster more and screw off the push accounts as they'd want to be more clustered rather than sending a 5hr train at their "coplayer" etc.
  4. Keeping barb's max points around 3k should be ideal as at that point killing local players to limit threats should become priority.
  5. Consider barb growth rate to a formula similar to average ACTIVE (logged in past 48hrs) account points, obviously there's already something in place for barb degrowth so if average account point size decreased barbs will start too. Plus barb shaping will happen
  6. Making most worlds "limited haul" will keep the game fair across the board, this prevents the accounts with 5 coplayers from farming for 24hrs a day on the barbs that are adjusted for faster growth. Best and fairest way is to have the limited haul cap to the average of active worlds now. So if current day TW players farm an average of 15m on active worlds make that the cap. Anything above players will need to scav to obtain their extra resources.
  7. Above adjustments will make worlds bigger as well, but should still finish around the same time as typical so no extra server costs etc should be needed. TW is exponential growth, bigger worlds makes longer walking durations, but barbs and meta being met faster allows for growth to happen more quickly so should counteract eachother naturally making nothing change on Inno's wallets.
One of the few repeated statements I seen were of Googly saying how much time/effort was needed to investigate on these issues. So I'm assuming that's why this was opened up to the public as staffing will start getting shortages if they have to spend hours a day trying to investigate if some random 3 village account got a free single village (x50 tickets). There has to be some give and take on both ends as stated above technology in 5 years will change and whatever is put in place now could be worthless as something new comes out that screws it all and we're back at the same stage we're at now.

(Stealing Nova's format)
  • What is pushing? What is it to you?
    • Using another account for personal gain. Having someone use an account to push you ahead of competition. If there were options for the "coplayers" to have and everyone was allowed to use it, it wouldn't be pushing as no one is getting away with anything and they're doing what the game allows them.
  • How would you define pushing?
    • Obtaining ILLEGAL growth from outside your accounts abilities.
  • How can the team enforce a rule on pushing?
    • Having punishments tier based. First time slap on the wrist, with banned unattackable account until spoken to mods/staff, 2nd village punishment, 3rd attackable ban with village punishment, 4th perm banned.
  • Should the team intervene at all or should pushing just be an allowed thing (for everyone equally) as long as the other rules are respected?
    • Limiting reasons to have pushing done should help for this answer. Obviously if someone's VPNing 100's of accounts to push their account it should be punished, it shouldn't be a lawless land. No one would want to go against someone that has 2 tribes full of push accounts.
  • Should village gifting also become disallowed?
    It should still be allowed, just having limitations on gifting should help limit the amount of pushing that happens.
  • How would this work compared to a merging rule?
    Someone getting an account gifted from a friend they met on the game shouldn't be scared of obtaining their free gifts, they should be allowed to enjoy themselves and be happy they were able to be handed an undisclosed amount of villages. Most tribes will limit the merging rule as is, as in leadership demanding part of the merge etc.
  • How do we detect pushing?
    • The suggested above ideas/rule changes should help with detecting where an avid push account player is, whom their push accounts are and limit the amount of time/resources are needed to actually enforce a much needed rule.

@JawJaw you better read this shit I spent forever writing a reply to this. Obviously might be some holes to shoot through on some areas as I came up with this all on the spot but still think it should maybe help?
 

Black Hammer138

Non-stop Poster
Reaction score
231
(Disclaimer: I skim read the thread and replies sorry if anything is repeated etc)


I feel like Nova had a solid point with the thought process, you have to look at problems backwards. But I feel like Nova didn't go all the way to the back of the cause of pushing and reasonings behind it.

I feel like pushing will ALWAYS have loopholes and issues with any black and white rules INNO put into place now. As Nova mentioned 10 years ago pushing wasn't nearly as bad as it is today. Not because anything other than technology advancing and expanding. Whatever we decide as a community today doesn't mean shit in 5yrs with how fast technology is evolving around us.

Thus being said, I don't think INNO should just throw in the white flag and say screw it, its a free for all everyone can do it as it will get very obnoxious if I'm fighting one person and he has a tribe of 50 push accounts that he just unloads on me early game. It'll kill what life is left in the game.

So my suggestion on the situation is to look at WHY push accounting is done, and then adapt the changing game from what it was in 2011 to what it is now. What meta's have changed and how the game has evolved and how people have adapted.

Few reasons for push accounting and ways to counteract:

#1 Mobile defense
Its always a fearful thought that you spend 2 weeks at startup on a 1 speed to FINALLY get your academy and noble and then by the end of the 2 weeks you get launched on in the middle of the night and you lose 2 weeks of effort. This causes for people to make defense push accounts to be able to stack themselves to prevent losing their village if their nobles fail on their target that's an hour away. There are rules for some worlds where no outside support is allowed whatsoever, but the worlds that don't they're able to run free with mobile def push accounts/multi's.
Now solutions of how to counteract:
  1. Only allow outside tribe support after 30 days, so only tribemates early game are allowed to support each other. This allows for the opportunity of stacking someone outside the tribe to have backstabs still as this is a war game and backstabs are always fun.
  2. Limit tribe changes, only allow LEAVING tribes to be changed once every 24hrs or something along that time frame. It stops people from abusing the 30 day no outside support method and allows people to track tribe movements of people allowing members to do their own investigations of where said member is changing tribes and obtaining support from where etc. Obviously prompts etc will need to be had stating leaving the tribe is only allowed every 24hrs prior to joining. Allowing kicks from leadership makes it where they lose tribe level in exchange for them to move tribes etc. A little give and take.
#2 Free village(s) this one also consists of offense acc pushing.
If someone's making a push account that's offense lets be frank, they're typically going to noble it right when the offense is dead at early game. So they're going to use this account to just clear people near and noble them with limited amount of offense troops that they personally created since most res went into nobles in the first 14 days.
(Will give an overall method to prevent further down)

#3 The "Coplayer" method
This strat was brought out a LONG time ago, back when bonfires were a thing. The old policy was if you've got a friend that's your typical coplayer to have them start with you and whomever got bonfire that's what account y'all were on for the rest of the world and internal the other. Its now evolved to whomever gets a better startup, and or if either account doesn't get railed out the gate. As we all know not every coplayer carries as much weight as the main player on accounts. (I.E. Jon carries Liam when they coplay)
Solutions to counteract:
  1. "Relocate to friend at xxx|xxx" needs to have a tether to it as well. Making it impossible to attack your "friend" for 30 days. Making the coplayers have a month long commitment and or players asked to "start up and gift".
  2. Limit the amount of "friends" that can relocate to you to 5. This makes it where people that will VPN and abuse the system have to add multiple different accounts as friends etc and makes the investigation process a little easier to tracking the multi/piggy backing accounts. The spawning location will start getting hard for close range nobling and defending as the push accounts will be forced to get further away from main account.
  3. Along with the 30 day non-attack on friends would need to implement a black and white rule that the account can't be sat for "X" amount of days of the 30 days to prevent someone from starting an account dumping sit and letting a tribemate build the village for you. (Suggested days 10-15 max sit days). Saying the account has to be played half of the month by owner is sufficient enough. As most people that aren't committed will either flake and not build the village properly for their friend/coplayer and just delete and or go inactive. This rule will allow investigations for staff a lot easier as they can just peep the sat days and determine in black and white if they followed the rules when merging.
  4. Allowing the "coplayer" method in my eyes is essential to the games life, if INNO starts weighing in to much on accounts for merges it will run off the casual players that have made friends that they work well with together but just don't have the 24/7 schedule to devote. Early game is very boring there's no debate on that. Having a group of 5 people that all coplay/have coplayed on multiple worlds together starting a new world seems insane to have on one account, Giving the game life by having the "coplayers" stick around and play for a month changes a lot of things. It could convince them to running their own account etc. Granted "coplaying isn't allowed" but it is needed for a real time game especially since nightbonus has its own downsides etc so can't roll it out on everyworld.
  5. Obviously limit the amount of "coplayers" you can noble within the first 30 days. So someone doesn't start VPNing multi-accounts claiming all to be "coplayers".
#4 The "Spy" method
Honestly this one shouldn't be considered into the push account rule as it falls under the "multi-accounting" rule. As this method is to plant a spy, which in my eyes is a tactic in war. Being a good leader is being able to pinpoint the rat in the bunch, I don't think I've ever played a world where someone wasn't leaking something. There's no real way to prevent this as if someone's going to use this method they're just going to VPN a multi-account and not do anything else to break rules so will fly under the radar.

#5 The "res boosting" method:
I personally feel this option should be allowed. If I'm on a world and I am in a position to get a friend (new or old) to come join and allow me to dump resources in them to get them to build up and caught up I'm beyond down. As most people on the "bad bois squad" will understand if you can get trex to boost up in your backlines on a world that is getting to mid-game that's a game changer. I'm sure the swedes will feel the same about Bob account, even 120 they boosted Mike (aceofspadez) as the 3 accounts are very dominant players no matter what anyone says if they can have any of the 3 accounts above on their team its going to boost team morale. The veteran players of TW that hold some form of "skill" that people see worth fit of boosting should be allowed. Those 3 accounts mentioned above are all great players and share and show knowledge to the less skilled/active players of tribalwars which keeps the game fresh. It gives a goal for newer players to be known and be "worthy" of being brought in to be boosted.
(Counter side of boosting: Obviously having a smaller account boost a bigger account should not be allowed UNLESS repaying resources from previously being boosted theirs elves from the bigger account, implying a free trade limit daily for accounts based on size should also be looked into with a proper formula.

Overall rule changes to adapt to new meta to help limit push accounts:

  1. Increase spaces between players, giving more time to react to incomings along with more of a "safe" feeling not having a player touching them and feeling like they need to prestack themselves.
  2. Increase barbs spawned per player, lets face it. Events and war packs have changed the whole meta; people that know how to abuse it go for villages, warehouses/markets and more nobles. More barbs make it more appetizing to players to noble barbs rather than going after someone out the gate.
  3. Increase barb growth rate, simply put people are more willing to make a push account as they grow faster and better than barbs and or players around them. As all their resources will be spent straight into either spears to scav or just buildings alone depending how fast someone wants to noble their push account. If barbs grew faster newer/unskilled players will start picking up the meta faster and realizing why experienced players are out growing them (flag boosting/clustering etc). Limiting the skill gap across the board. Allowing newer/unskilled players to be bigger and have more troops going sooner rather than later and learning about sniping etc. This new game adjustment will make even veteran players want to cluster more and screw off the push accounts as they'd want to be more clustered rather than sending a 5hr train at their "coplayer" etc.
  4. Keeping barb's max points around 3k should be ideal as at that point killing local players to limit threats should become priority.
  5. Consider barb growth rate to a formula similar to average ACTIVE (logged in past 48hrs) account points, obviously there's already something in place for barb degrowth so if average account point size decreased barbs will start too. Plus barb shaping will happen
  6. Making most worlds "limited haul" will keep the game fair across the board, this prevents the accounts with 5 coplayers from farming for 24hrs a day on the barbs that are adjusted for faster growth. Best and fairest way is to have the limited haul cap to the average of active worlds now. So if current day TW players farm an average of 15m on active worlds make that the cap. Anything above players will need to scav to obtain their extra resources.
  7. Above adjustments will make worlds bigger as well, but should still finish around the same time as typical so no extra server costs etc should be needed. TW is exponential growth, bigger worlds makes longer walking durations, but barbs and meta being met faster allows for growth to happen more quickly so should counteract eachother naturally making nothing change on Inno's wallets.
One of the few repeated statements I seen were of Googly saying how much time/effort was needed to investigate on these issues. So I'm assuming that's why this was opened up to the public as staffing will start getting shortages if they have to spend hours a day trying to investigate if some random 3 village account got a free single village (x50 tickets). There has to be some give and take on both ends as stated above technology in 5 years will change and whatever is put in place now could be worthless as something new comes out that screws it all and we're back at the same stage we're at now.

(Stealing Nova's format)
  • What is pushing? What is it to you?
    • Using another account for personal gain. Having someone use an account to push you ahead of competition. If there were options for the "coplayers" to have and everyone was allowed to use it, it wouldn't be pushing as no one is getting away with anything and they're doing what the game allows them.
  • How would you define pushing?
    • Obtaining ILLEGAL growth from outside your accounts abilities.
  • How can the team enforce a rule on pushing?
    • Having punishments tier based. First time slap on the wrist, with banned unattackable account until spoken to mods/staff, 2nd village punishment, 3rd attackable ban with village punishment, 4th perm banned.
  • Should the team intervene at all or should pushing just be an allowed thing (for everyone equally) as long as the other rules are respected?
    • Limiting reasons to have pushing done should help for this answer. Obviously if someone's VPNing 100's of accounts to push their account it should be punished, it shouldn't be a lawless land. No one would want to go against someone that has 2 tribes full of push accounts.
  • Should village gifting also become disallowed?
    It should still be allowed, just having limitations on gifting should help limit the amount of pushing that happens.
  • How would this work compared to a merging rule?
    Someone getting an account gifted from a friend they met on the game shouldn't be scared of obtaining their free gifts, they should be allowed to enjoy themselves and be happy they were able to be handed an undisclosed amount of villages. Most tribes will limit the merging rule as is, as in leadership demanding part of the merge etc.
  • How do we detect pushing?
    • The suggested above ideas/rule changes should help with detecting where an avid push account player is, whom their push accounts are and limit the amount of time/resources are needed to actually enforce a much needed rule.

@JawJaw you better read this shit I spent forever writing a reply to this. Obviously might be some holes to shoot through on some areas as I came up with this all on the spot but still think it should maybe help?
I am amazed with how much effort Babin put into this and got no response
 

SirCharles40

Well-Known Member
Reaction score
12
Until you figure out how to block co playing pushing will always be around. It's easy to build up a village that would benefit the account your merging into then gift it to the person you always intended to co play with.
 

SwedishBlueCheese

Non-stop Poster
Reaction score
1,051
I think the first thing that innogames should do is to atleast look into if players have coplayed on worlds before. right now the rank 1 guy on w129 has 14 out of his first 26 noble targets being from his academy tribe which has 2 accounts that has been known to also play on his account.

I can understand new accounts being hard to prove but the same accs pushing for eachother world after world should be so easy to prove if you actually cared about the fucking game. Forcing ppl to push from new accs atleast remove the pp farming factor of the "push acc" also if you prereg you shouldnt be able to noble your mates the first month or so, right now it doesnt limit you at all and this is just so stupid, make it like "invite a friend"

bild_2022-08-20_204911350.png
 

SwedishBlueCheese

Non-stop Poster
Reaction score
1,051
this is from 123, so wild that the same 3 accs are RANDOMLY spawning next to eachother and "quits" right on startup

9de10b36b745a03a8adeeb6ec78b5207.png
 

world8vet

Still Going Strong
Reaction score
316
Until you figure out how to block co playing pushing will always be around. It's easy to build up a village that would benefit the account your merging into then gift it to the person you always intended to co play with.
They literally banned that in 125 lmao
 
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