|
TestUser Posts: 11
3/21/2018
|
Last weekend Sore Cogs Galactical attacked me with his alt: Dragons Gear.
This is his alt because:
-The way he roleplays with them in the following local comms:
*Public Warning: New Terrorist on the Block
*Renegades!
-Contracts supplies funds to this alt, I sadly don't have hard evidence of this only the following terminated one:
9159 Terminated Dragons Gear Sell Sore Cogs Galactical Sell Vegetables 2 at $250,000,000 each
I did see a completed one where a large sum of credits where transfered. If required this might still be available in the database.
Dragons gear attacked with fully upgraded Monolith, Heavy Bomber and Modified Varitek. No corp could manage to get those on their own so fast.
It violates the use of alts on these 2 points:
-Feeding another corp, Dragons Gear currently has $2,597,203,242 and lvl 10 fully artifact-ed: Monolith, Heavy Bomber and Modified Varitek.
-Making a corp just to attack someone.
I reached out about the attack to Sore Cogs and Dragons Gear but got no response. I suspect he made Dragons Gear to attack and avoid liability with Sore Cogs.
The RP started when the possibility of violation of alts was mentioned. Before that there was no RP. Dragons Gear never contacted me with threats or demands.
Please fill in the poll and share any thoughts you have on this.
|
|
|
0
link
|
|
Wreith42 Posts: 58
3/26/2018
|
This was clearly a violation of the alt rules as they are written. Units and funds were moved to an alt with the express purpose of attacking someone.
The roleplay was taken poorly because it was done poorly. Trying to excuse an unprovoked attack after the fact with an overused RP theme is in poor taste. Cogs just came off as a jerk who didn't want to take responsibility and risk his main assets.
Haedus Disciple, Safehold, and Light of Hypocrisy are doing it right.
The roleplay began before any attacks. That allows it to be entertaining for everyone and not just the one blowing other peoples stuff up.
I have no problem with alts in general and wouldn't have a problem with this one if there had been any hint of the RP before the attack and if there had been any attempt to make the alt legitimate with industry instead of just a vehicle for attacking people (and that only because that's what the rules say)
|
|
|
+1
link
|
Guest
3/26/2018
|
I’ve been out of the loop for a few months, so someone let me know if some new points were raised or consensus reached on these points while I was gone that I am not aware of.
The pirate faction sounds like a great feature, but I don’t think it speaks to the tensions at hand. I presume this whole Dragon Gears incident was motivated as much out of boredom as anything else. Sore Cogs been around since beta. They have a huge corporation that is humming along and has a huge army. It doesn’t look like they are struggling at all to keep their budget blanced. They are not challenged by playing against the economy and they are bored. The only potential source of tension is other players. So they will start messing with other players to keep the game entertaining for the self. Either by challenging themselves against a worthy opponent or toying with weaker players.
(I suspect most ARK players, assuming they are still the powerhouse they were 6 months ago, are constantly checking the impulse to stir up some drama for themselves because they don’t want to be bullies chasing new players away).
If the pirate faction is introduced as a more efficient mechanism to wage a proxy wars, then you have just figured out a way to make proxy wars boring as well. Players are getting into proxy wars because they want to command units themselves. And they are using proxy corporations either so they aren’t risking the destruction of their corporation or looking like bullies for going after a weaker player.
I still suggest alternate accounts should be treated like a baked in feature of the game that should be refined, since regulation is so difficult and subjective. What about a reparations mechanic that looks at a trade deficit with corporations that are facing reparations. If, say, 90% of a corporation on trial’s net worth came from an imbalanced trade with a larger corporation (whether they are suspected of being a puppet master or not), then 90% of the reparations liability will be also be charged to the potential puppet master against the potential puppet master’s net worth. Then it doesn’t matter if it’s an alternate account controlled by the same person. The larger corporation will be punished regardless for propping up the aggressive aggressive puppet corporation.
I don’t know what kind of history has evolved between you guys while I was gone, but just reading this thread it seems like you guys picked a fight with Baldur and are now trying to bait him into getting angrier about it. You’re mixing in character and out of character points that don’t fit together and therefor come across as a disingenuous attempt to get under his skin.
Don’t be jerks. Offer a mia culpa for the use of a proxy, emphasize here in the forum that you don’t mean for him to take it personally despite whatever role playing you do over comms, and remind him that he made himself a tempting target by leaving his infrastructure undefended which carries some inherent risks he chose to take.
|
|
|
+1
link
|
|
Hutton Posts: 276
3/26/2018
|
The above “guest” remark is from me.
|
|
|
+1
link
|
|
Hutton Posts: 276
3/27/2018
|
I want to parse out a couple of things. Baldur should play the way he wants and, as players, we shouldn’t try to undermine his fun by saying he’s doing it wrong. Maybe you find this loophole he’s found to operate off the radar is a little unsettling and feel like you need to throw a monkey wrench into his growth to hedge against the threat he might become to you. (That’s the kind of a risk/reward decision making opportunity that makes a game interesting). That is how you choose to play and no one should yuck your yum either here in the forums when we are communicating with each other as players.
I think it’s acceptable to fling insults and even mount nonsensical criticisms in the Comms when trying to justify your attacks in character. Case in point: that Baldur is not being a good corporate citizen because he is hoarding his wealth instead of investing in the economy. One of the abstractions of the BoE economy is that spending money in a city is acutually detrimental to it’s growth, so the suggestion that he’s somehow doing harm by hoarding his wealth is absurd on its face. But that doesn’t mean it’s not a good excuse in character in the Comms because it rings true. The politicking and saber rattling in Comms is a lot like the Baron Munchausen game, (https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/2470/extraordinary-adventures-baron-munchausen), where we are all making up pretexts to justify our belligerent actions and trying to trip up each other’s pretexts with exquisitely contorted logic. The better you are at inventing a good pretext, the more slack the rest of the player base will cut you when you start acting up.
The problem with proxy accounts is that the guidelines are nebulous, so everyone has their own interpretation. I understand why they are nebulous. People will figure out loopholes in any list of do’s and don’ts that Dr. Dread tries to set in stone, and he doesn’t want to be draconian with players screwing around occasionally. (Even if he did start swinging a ban hammer around, that would only take away their progress. How do you stop someone from opening a new free account or borrowing their mom’s credit card for another paid account). So the guideline is abuse; which ,like pornography, isn’t easily defined by specific actions but most of us will know it when we see it. It’s someone having their fun at the expense of someone else’s fun. (That doesn’t mean beating someone else in a fight is abuse. The danger of losing your corporation in a fight and tension that comes from fear of bigger corporations is an important ingredient for your fun, whether you realize it or not). It’s engaging in behavior that is going to harm the game because it is alienating players who would not rage quit after a fair fight.
But your metric for abuse might be different if you’re the one that just lost a fight you should have won or should have been close because the other guy pushed the envelope farther than you did. It reminds me of a George Carlin bit about driving on the freeway. Everyone in front of you going slower than you are is an idiot, and everyone passing you is a maniac. But of course no one is going the exact same speed you are so the world is just full of idiots and maniacs.
I had said earlier that I thought that the pirate faction would be a cool mechanic, but not as a substitute for proxy wars. After thinking about though, I realized it might kind of legitimize the whole mechanic. If I can anonymously send pirates after you, why would you complain about the more labor intensive and probably less efficient act of building and running a proxy corp to attack you. It would just be a more roundabout and interesting way of doing something built into the mechanics.
|
|
|
+1
link
|