Discussion: Update to version 8.22

[DeletedUser656]

Update to version 8.22

Dear players,

A new update is coming, which will be released on Monday, the 28th of April, between 10:00-11:00.


Send commands and resources from the map

We've added the possibility to send attacks, supports and resources without leaving the map, saving you the step of being directed to the Rally Point or Market.
-It is possible to still be directed to the Rally Point or Market by opening the "send troops" or "send resources" links in a new tab.
-It is also possible to disable this feature entirely.

Other

- Clicking "Overviews" in the main menu will now direct you to your village overview if you only have 1 village and do not have an active Premium Account.
- Unit research requirements will now be displayed in the Smithy.
- Arrival time shown on the command confirmation page will now update itself to reflect the time at which it will arrive. This feature was in the game a few years ago but removed again because it wasn't as accurate as it needed to be and so caused confusion. Due to the time improvements we added in 8.21, the displayed time will now be accurate in the following browsers: Internet Explorer 10+, Firefox 27+, Chrome 31+ and Opera 20+. In other browsers, it will be an approximation. (Note: players with a Premium Account can see the seconds of an arrival time on the command confirmation page.)
- Apps and the mobile browser version will no longer have their pages reload when a timer reaches 0, which for example can be inconvenient when there are many attacks shown on a page.
- Added milliseconds to the arrival time displayed in battle reports.
- Made filtering by ratio for other players' market offers work better with the various world configurations that influence allowed ratios.
- Command IDs have been obfuscated so that they can no longer be used to accurately determine the sending time of a command.
- Menu in the Rally Point has been moved to the top of the screen to provide more horizontal space for the Rally Point contents, such as commands.
- Minor text and ui changes
- Bug fixes

 

[DeletedUser64451]

"Command IDs have been obfuscated so that they can no longer be used to accurately determine the sending time of a command."

Why? What's wrong with being clever and figuring out when attacks were sent? What's wrong with being able to know what is coming?

 

[d4m0]

Everything else, great, command id change, terrible. Using ids is the only way to play solo you guys have never supported coplaying before but this makes it mandatory. I have probably said this over stupider things but i'm 100% serious here: there is no way i am ever playing solo again if this command id change is not reverted. And it's extremely unlikely i will ever come back long enough to find a co. This just means that 24/7 accs automatically win -- i'm sorry but that's just pathetic i have a life and other actually fun games to play (tf2, dota, lol whatever) and if i cant make do with a login every few hours WHEN I AM AWAKE it would just be completely irresponsible of me to commit to any sort of tw world when I know I will get wrecked the moment someone disguises their attacks in a bunch of mindless fakes.

As i was reading this I was thinking "great, long overdue changes... maybe I will come back for some fun in a few months"... but the command id obfuscation has killed that for me

I don't see why you guys are trying to push us to spend ever-greater lengths of time in this game we pay monthly lol it doesn't really help you

And ids are not an easy exploit as you probably thought when you made the change, deciphering them requires quite a lot of thought and even then one tiny mistake or false assumption can wreck all your tags, and this is more common the better your opponent is at disguising their attacks and ascertaining your online times, that sort of thing.

 

[DeletedUser94483]

Attack id's are no where near as important as players think they are.

Just because you have gotten used to a particular tool such as attack id's does not mean that it is the end all solution. I do not mind their going away as for the last 5-6 years whatever it has been I have only used that as a tool once and got bored very quickly. The game is designed to be played without that accuracy...this will bring back alot of the strategic elements of an international game that I personally miss before people figured attack id's out.

 

[DeletedUser105718]

Just because you have gotten used to a particular tool such as attack id's does not mean that it is the end all solution

There's no other solution. :icon_neutral:

It won't add any strategy to the game what so ever. People will just try and be active so they could auto-tag the incomings.

 

[DeletedUser]

^This. Removing them just puts another time restraint on defenders.

 

[Muldie325]

Agreed. This is stupid.

 

[DeletedUser]

They had to do something to compensate for easy mass-tagging, added in the last update. If you leave that and ID-tagging in the game, there's basically no way to sneak a noble in against a good player. I think there should be some uncertainty about whether you've tagged right.

 

[DeletedUser]

Yes, because when you improve something to make it less time consuming, you have to do something else to undo that improvement. Makes total sense.

 

[Muldie325]

Anything that increases the pressure on people to play 24/7 is bad.

Defence is too strong with stacking. But making them have to guess where to stack is not the answer. I'd rather see a modified version of the farm limit.

 

[MR.MR]

Well, now all the attackers have to do is dump attacks on you for 60 days and you are done if you solo play, gone are the days where you can set 9hr of dodges go to earn your PP money for tue day and come back, same for sleeping. If you dont have a coplayer, you get 60 days of defending then you are screwed.

 

[DeletedUser40757]

They had to do something to compensate for easy mass-tagging, added in the last update. If you leave that and ID-tagging in the game, there's basically no way to sneak a noble in against a good player. I think there should be some uncertainty about whether you've tagged right.

Attack id's make little difference against players that are online all the time. A noble is fairly obvious, unless it's short range.

I think that the real reason that they were removed was that it made their labeling and notification feature look rather.....primitive/inaccurate, and if you are charging money for those features...you can't have that.

 

[DeletedUser]

Attack id's are no where near as important as players think they are.

Just because you have gotten used to a particular tool such as attack id's does not mean that it is the end all solution. I do not mind their going away as for the last 5-6 years whatever it has been I have only used that as a tool once and got bored very quickly. The game is designed to be played without that accuracy...this will bring back alot of the strategic elements of an international game that I personally miss before people figured attack id's out.

Your comment particularly struck me because if that were the case, I'm curious to know why you IGM'd me w70 to ask if the attacks sent at you were Nuke-Nobles. If you aren't bothered about ID-ing attacks, why would you have bothered to ask that question. Also, had you accessed the ID-er, you would have known that the launches were actually just random troops that were being suicided at one of your villages.

Also, if the game is not designed to be played with that degree of accuracy, shouldn't the Pally Weapon that gives information on troops that are outside a particular village also be removed? Cos like, if we didn't happen to be online to scout the troops numbers whilst they were at their base, why should we have access to the numbers that are not in their village when we do log on?

 

[DeletedUser7158]

Anything that increases the pressure on people to play 24/7 is bad.

Defence is too strong with stacking. But making them have to guess where to stack is not the answer. I'd rather see a modified version of the farm limit.

Completely agreed with this.

In late game, defending is already so time consuming that the majority of players end up quitting rather than defending a concerted op, if they happen to be targetted - because most people can't handle the vastly increased online requirement for a week or two.

Winning by making people quit is a) dispiriting for those that play alongside, and b) a sad reflection of game mechanics. I'd rather you made the effectiveness of stacking lower, or made it harder to snipe, if you wanted to make defending harder. Just increasing the time pressure on people isn't healthy, or constructive.

 

[sidd 271]

agreed,the time saving things (like attack id) in this game should not be removed as none of us are professional gamers.

 

[DeletedUser94483]

Undecoded..I asked because i did not take any time to tag attacks coming to a village that in GOOD faith I was not going to defend. I made an assumption that even ACCESS to an id tagger would not have helped with.

If I had taken 5 seconds and tagged those attacks I would not have been bothered and would probably have just laughed.

Also about the strategy bit yes...it does RE ADD strategies that were used when tagging was only done by vet players and most players did not know how to properly tag. There are different ways to attack.

As for ASA's comment about 9 hours I believe he is not accurate any type of warfare that would allow you to dodge out 9 hour anyway is going to give you a decent guessing window. On top of that sitters used to be used to help defend accounts in the manner being complained about for activities sake.

IMO this brings a small bit of balance back to the game based on alot of attack strategies I was seeing in use 4-5 years ago. That is just me personally though.

 

[Grammar Commie]

Attack id's are no where near as important as players think they are...

...this will bring back a lot of the strategic elements...

Congrats - you've managed to contradict yourself within yet another post. If they're not important (as you claim), then their 'obfuscation' should have next to no impact...

http://forum.tribalwars.net/showthread.php?270788-Automatic-tagging&p=6868600&viewfull=1#post6868600

^ That's the solution, right there...

 

[One Last Shot...]

I don't understand what the big deal with this is.

The In-game tagger only names it to troop speed; it doesn't tell you where it comes from or who sent it. It just renames it to the most likely troop speed.

Attack IDs work in the same way; they are there to help you identify what speed troop attacks are, but the Attack IDs themselves do nothing else.

Anything that is done aside from those is done using scripts, and not the information available directly from the game (which Attack IDs always have been, if you look at the url).

If people were using Attack IDs for tagging up until now, it does force those people to be online more if they want to accurately tag using the ingame tool. However, that accounts for what, 0.1% of people who play this game (as it is something that a lot of players don't understand and is quite complex for an average player to work out for themselves). And Attack IDs give that 0.1% of members a huge advantage.

It just levels up the playing field. I get the impression that a lot of people posting here like an easy ride for themselves in this game, but this is beneficial to the majority of players - who don't know what Attack IDs are or how they work - and players who would like the game to be a little more challenging defensively. Which the game does need, as it is already over-balanced for defenders as it is.

 

[DeletedUser]

....The In-game tagger only names it to troop speed; it doesn't tell you where it comes from or who sent it. It just renames it to the most likely troop speed. ....

Built in tagger can do more than that

heres an extract from the developers blog that accompanied the 8.21 update

One of the challenges we face when implementing new features like this is balancing the customization wanted by more experienced players without making the game seem too complicated and alienating to new players. As such, by default, the tagger will currently only rename incomings to include the unit name. If you wish to customize the naming you can use a script. We’ve designed our tagger to make it easy for you to use a script with your own naming format with only one line of code:

var format = ‘%unit% %coords% %player%’; $(‘input[name=label_format]‘).val(format).parents(‘form’).find(‘input[name=label]‘).click();

This would label any selected incomings to include the unit, coordinates and player name.

The format supports the following variables:

%unit% %distance% %coords% %duration% %return% %sent% %arrival% %player% %origin% %destination%

 

[Grammar Commie]

The In-game tagger only names it to troop speed; it doesn't tell you where it comes from or who sent it.

OK, but that information's available on the incomings overview anyway, so what's your point there?

Anything that is done aside from those is done using scripts, and not the information available directly from the game...

Advanced tagging using attack ids only requires a basic sorter. Yes, scripts have been developed to automate it via a database, but impromptu communication within a tribe about launch times and their correlation with attack ids seemed to be the most common basic usage, in my experience...

... using Attack IDs... accounts for what, 0.1% of people who play this game...

It may well have been a small percentage of users, but those users are the most likely to have an account with thousands of untagged incomings dumped on them after the account holder goes awol, or if (for whatever reason) the player can't get online for a while. The attack ids were then a kind of failsafe that will no longer exist, and in general it puts an even greater premium on having co-players. Since you're commonly a duke, I'd expect your workload to increase dramatically as people dump their sits on you in ever smaller offline periods, while account merges will become even more common...

...players who would like the game to be a little more challenging defensively. Which the game does need, as it is already over-balanced for defenders as it is.

If it's been implemented to benefit attackers then it seems misguided.

Gathering information on attack speeds is only a small part of the battle from a defender's perspective - the real 'strategy' comes from how best to deploy the available troops to deal with a mixture of fake and real attacks (still unknown, however you tag).

24-7 defenders will still (invariably) trump equivalently active attackers, and it's these brick-wall accounts that lead to the notion that defenders are universally advantaged. They're not. As the activity curves decline a decent attacker is soon in the ascendancy, not due to tagging (or lack thereof), but due to the reduced potential for defensive response (snipes and/or redeployment), and luck (in general terms) that the defender's online times coincide with those needed to deal with the attacks - for any given village, defenders need to be 'lucky' every time, while the attackers only need to be 'lucky' once. Taking away attack ids doesn't really change that dynamic - increase the likelihood that you'll be online to deal with short-range attacks and you'll be tagging all of them anyway. However, where people are at the limits of their activity (and already disadvantaged in the face of their attackers) this creates more of a handicap for them, albeit a small minority in your estimation...

It benefits attackers in exactly those situations where they [FONT=&amp]hold[/FONT] all the best cards anyway, and will have next to no effect on accounts that'd laugh in the face of any OP or offensive strategy you can envisage.

As for the other possibility...if it's been implemented to benefit newcomers then it's downright laughable.