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-Probes now have 0 consumption, 0 capacity
-Combat reports where attacker is destroyed in 1st round are only available to the defender. Attacker will get a message that his fleet has been destroyed in first round.
is now active in all universes.
Now that the fix is live, I should share the story behind this.
First things first, the combat reports destroyed on first round, was an issue started with graphical reports. In first ZE version, it was like this but once graphical reports were introduced, this loophole appeared. It has been fixed now.
For the probe raiding thing, If I am not mistaken, this strategy has been first used by dexternl (not sure - so much time since then). It was for sure pretty early in the game history. Administration decided to let this open as a "hidden strategy for advanced player" taking into consideration that it was a high risk mission.
However, that time, inactives were purged daily and generally we would not let more than 3000 accounts active in a universe. This also meant that big fat accounts with good mines were rare. Massacre came (Massacre has 6000 accounts right now, they are expected to fall slowly as we increased the deletion rate there recently) with smaller resource silos in order to create a different gameplay. This is where things started getting fat with this strategy. From massacre, it started spreading to other universes too. This is the story as we know it at least.
Here is why it was a bad thing from our perspective, in titles:
-Few people used it.
-It provided an additional advantage to these few people (with time at hand)
-It mostly affected newcomers (as this tactic was directed only against inactive planets). So newcomers had less food around.
-It provided a ridiculous way to raid; no brainer too. No analyzation of which is the best spot etc, Just a big list of targets.
-Fewer player interaction, turned a multiplayer game to a single player as active players would lose all their time raiding inactive planets instead of conducting a plan on how to raid an active player.
-Too fast to a point of making everything obsolete.
-Too hard to defend against it; Even if a player wanted to stop an enemy from doing so, it would be pretty hard. As probes move too fast.
-I am sure a whole more reasons can be found. Bottom end is that this strategy was never meant to be used and it ended up spoiling gameplay when used.
I am happy that most players agreed to implement this at all universes. I think this will help the game in the long run.