We have noticed a number of automated bots that purchase allies at a high rate in a short amount of time lately. To deal with this, we are implementing a limit on the rate at which an ally can be purchased. Every time an ally is purchased, the time between the purchase and the next purchase will increase by 1 second, up to a 2 second maximum. If an ally hasn't been purchased for a while, this limit will steadily decrease back to zero.
To those who are concerned about stripping effectiveness or ineffectiveness due to this change. We looked at the stats for stripping. After the first few times an ally is bought, the other users move onto the next ally since they are effectively giving the target 5% every time they buy back, so our rate limit has little effect on this (since they only repurchase a few times only). There is no limit on buying different allies that aren't being actively traded or a limit on your purchasing (i.e. you can buy 100 different allies very quickly if you want to).
The reason we changed this is for a number of reasons: 1. We put in this limit so that bots would not overwhelm the system, volleying people to incredible prices in a short amount of time. There were cases where a user would jump from 200k to 800 mil in under a minute. This is unacceptable. 2. It doesn't make bots any easier or harder to detect. However it allows us to minimize the impact of a bot while still hunting them down. We've actually banned a number of them already, but due to having no limit, they already caused a lot of damage to the economy. 3. We will be looking at user actions over the next little while to see if the upper limit needs adjusting downwards. 4. The number of people that were being purchased at a rate of over 1/15 seconds was under 0.01% (1 out of 10000). This is why we chose 15 seconds. 5. The limit does not affect how many allies you can purchase at once. You can purchase 100 different allies consecutively if you wanted to.