Re: WAR CHEATS! HELPS
by SuperpraesiOriginal Post
I have some thoughts to add onto actually. Finally got the time to sit down and type them out. At first, I was shocked to know the extent players will go to level up their disasters. But on the retrospective, I think certain players are still without a doubt cheaters based on the type of disasters they had unlocked, which reveals a lot more about them than they know.
For one, almost all the cities that have only magnetism and Movie Monster unlocked till level 15 are incredibly shabby, with few pathetic buildings and low happiness. It is like the city is just created solely for war, to be exact, it’s a feeder city to make up the numbers needed to go into war. The laziness in the creation of the city is apparent, so I doubt the player will be that hardworking to hop around to refresh the war store.
And if he has lots of money to burn on wars, it’s strange that he didn’t bother to throw a bit more into building his city. The only reason not to do so: it’s just a feeder city. And what are the chances someone will use almost a thousand to level up the disasters of a feeder city? Very low, I think.
More often than not, these kind of cities will all strangely be on same team. What are the chances of five or more people, who have the exact same style of having dumps as their cities but have high level magnetisms and movie monsters, being in the same club? Too much of a coincidence, no? They are operated by one or two people, and they will need to spend thousands of dollars to upgrade the disasters of all the feeder cities. The probability of them hacking to level up is higher than paying thousands for a game that they do not care about (based on the fact they hardly bother to take care of their cities).
And oh yes, you are famous for your claims that shielding up is form of strategy. So I don’t see what’s the problem with us bringing this up.
And I found this cheater whose profile has a dead giveaway that she is a cheater. She had unlocked 5 regions with less than 10mil population. This clue cannot be refuted. Though sad to say, she is still out at large. It has been two months since I reported her. What’s up, EA?
I'd like to share my 2 cents in this interesting discussion.
My position is in the middle: something superpraesi said is correct, as some other things by J6niceL and PinnacleValley are correct too.
What I can't share, superpraesi, is refusing the fact that there's a lot of cheaters in this game.
As I told in some previous post, I have an experience as a game operator in an other strategy game. I'm not repeating to be arrogant, like a God of RTS games, 'cause I think I'm not a God. I simply am a player who like to play analizing the game trying to find the better and fair ways to be successful. This passat experience as a g.o. just opened my eyes on how different can be game providers point of view from player point of view.
Online games could have 2 kind of problems: exploits by unfair players problems and gameplay problems. The first ones are a main issue for a provider, as an exploit means a direct loosing of money: players uses exploits to bypass things that would require real cash to be unlocked (or a lot of time playing). Gameplay problems are somehow important too: if a gameplay is not well calibrated, players become bored in the long time, until they leave the game that would mean loosing money too, but a provider has lot of time to resolve it, so that these problems are somehow secondary compared to the exploits problem.
About wars, 3 problems seems to exist: duplicating items problem, improving cards problem and bubble problem.
The bubble problem is a gameplay one. Noisy, boring, but absolutely legit. You can like it or dislike it, but at the end it is a strategy. There has been lot of purposes for how to improve and change this gameplay issue (IMO the best one would be to cut some war period, as told on another J6niceL thread). Players using this strategy are not violating any term of the EULA (user agreement), and for this reason we can't technically call them unfair players (we could discuss about the ethic question and we already did lot of times, so let's not repeat it now and let's stay on the technical question). We can just hope EA will someday improve it, otherwise we have to accept it or leave the game.
Duplicating items and improving cards are a different question, as it seems both are kind of exploits, forbidden by EULA (see 6.16), but it's not so simple to prove it.
The duplicating items question is very complicated. Technically, in this procedure you only take advantage of a problem of synchronization. Is it enough to consider it an exploit? Ethically, of course is it. But to ban a player a provider gotta demonstrate that player cheated, otherwise that player could open a lawsuit and even worse win it, and that's a thing really hated by providers. The situation shows that maybe it's very difficult: russian clubs are using this procedure from longtime ago, and only few players seems to have been punished. The worrying thing is that now lot of clubs from the rest of the world have learned and uses this procedure too, that's very frustrating
To improve a card you can buy it from the war store. If you change club, entering a new one from a different arena, the war store refreshes, offering new cards to buy. Until here it seems a questionable but legit thing, but there's some limits. Let's take the Movie Monster as example. Let's say you got it at lvl10, and you want to improve it to lvl15. 1600 cards needed. It's a legendary attack, so war store offers a 5 cards pack. Assuming that changing arena you'll find the same cards offered, you'll have to change club for 320 times!!!! -good luck!-
Second and more important limit: the first card offered costs 120 simcash, and the price increases after every purchase (but I don't know each price, as I just bought some common cards, never legendary ones), so to buy 1600 cards you need more than 192000 simcash. Where do you find all that simcash? If you always win megalopolis COM, win all wars and get simcash at every ads (utopia), you'll get less than 3000 simcash weekly, and with 3000 simcash you'll need 192000/3000=64 weeks!!! Will you buy simcash? that's about 2500€ (or 2800USD); in this case EA and every one who plays for free -like me- must be thankful, as that's the way to give long life to the game.
Oh, you'll need a lot of golden keys too, but let's ignore this matter.
Even if questionable, all this procedure doesn't seems to violate any terms of EULA. But if you don't buy simcash this is not a fast procedure for sure, is it? So the only other way to accelerate it is to somehow get lot of simcash for free with some kind of exploit, and that's violating EULA terms for sure.
What more to say? Long life to fair players!
I get it that there’s a possibility that the examples highlighted may not cheaters, but the chances of them being cheaters are higher since the methods you had mentioned still require certain amount of efforts. And I doubt that the countless of players with dubious stats are all employing the methods you had mentioned.
I hope EA will not assume that it is possible to achieve those stats, thus deciding not to probe carefully through the data of the reported mayors. This will cause club wars to become wild wild west where cheaters, who are getting away with it, will be as abundant as the sand on the beach.
I had personally encountered cheater banned by EA. One became a pile of rubble halfway through war, and EA had confirmed that that person is a cheater in their reply to me. See picture below.
Another encounter: this team, made up of 3 low level cities with high level disasters and other cities with terrible stats in everything, has a couple of clone clubs where all have those three special members in them. After I reported them, the clubs vanished into thin air.
Recently, I fought a team from China, which is basically a two-men show. Two has very high level of magnetism and Movie Monster while the rest are inactive cities with zero population or less than 1k pop. I don’t like how they play the game, plus the fact that their stats are way too suspicious, so I wrote on my city description that I would report them to EA. Guess what, those two only active guys disappeared from the club after that. They are not in their clone clubs either. My guess is they abandoned the club out of fear. Guilty conscience, maybe? By the way, we won that fight, but it was painful to fight them.
I had reported quite a number of clubs, but since no action had been done on them, meaning EA did not find them guilty, I should not mention them here.
