You could fit the number of steals logged against a person in a calendar day into a 4 byte integer for sure. So if you had a million people playing it would only take roughly 4mb of server space to track. That's nothing much. KaW Admin thanks for clarifying! I didn't mention the threshold where it switches from flat percent to stats-based when giving those numbers cause of the assumption that any respectable (and I use that term loosely) strip/steal will not hit that threshold till so far into the op, well past the 50% down mark. When you're starting with billions, or tens of billions, that threshold is so many steals out, I would suspect it rarely gets hit in a bigtime op. But then again, you'd know for sure. cheers and cheers again!
What I meant is when will you start the steal count? Normally when keeping track of .... let's say resetting, you would keep track of when the last reset was and disable the reset feature for 24hrs from that point. But if you're suggesting that it should take 20,000 steals for 95% gold loss, when should the count start? What happens if the money is changed in the middle of it all from buying/selling ally or a battle win/loss? Determining specifics like that takes unnecessary coding and memory. A fixed percent loss with bigger numbers with stat-based loss with smaller number is still a better idea IMO.
By doing this the devs have now made the leader board even harder for people to jump on. Due to the fact that a lot of these players will not give up theye expensive allies or reset... Pity really I thought it was at war not to keep posterboys and girls up there. So much for effort, this is the second time this has been done the first time being when what you stole you got without the percentage lossess to protect your fortune. Shame really tje rich get richer and after having to recruit 20 people to strip someone is kinda epic in my opinion. Is this aimed at people having to invest in gems hmmmmm. In essence this makes the spy build more redundant, kaw devs if you want to get rid of spy builds do so, there's a lot of us that enjoy this style of play but you really do seem to wan it to die out. So far there is no tables for assassinations, steals or spy runs, no quests and certainly not tier two buildings unlike the love that the muscle builds recieve eg greater plunder bonuses tiers two and three and a table to show who is supposedly greatest warriors ( also I think you ought to add a total overall attack win as well as current leader version just to prove that there is some consistency). Also get rid of farms that are redundant and make people work for their wins and gold. I hate seeing a leader boarder with 800 wins makes the efforts of the valiant a lot less plausible and undermines the efforts of all those that play the game not buy the game. Dearest devs please reply to these observations... I have many more that have been passed onto me by others but for now these should take at least a minute or two of your precious time...
Spies build have been demoted by a factor of 10. Really what is the use of a spy build now, till u can get together 100 spies. A single strong attack build can do a lot of damage. A single strong spy build can do little damage. Now on the flip side this spy build changes can be exploited to make a farm. Let's think people hmmmmm
Lets also not forget spies now lose twice as much gold as before too. Before 12m from NA (unwilling donaters) would supply enough gold to cap out 2-3 allies now I lose 800k down to 400k on last each attack. Making spies even more useless now. Seriously strips the fun out of this game.
To those talking abt LBs... I've played for 4 mos now without buying nobs and have climbed abt half way up all LBs. Why would we need to reset them? Anyone can get up there if they play consistently with dedication and use basic strategy. I understand this is not the case for spy builds... They have a much tougher game to play (and some would say more boring?), and know that from the start usually.
In reply to concerns about spy builds and leaderboards: The leaderboards were rebalanced a few months ago to take into account raw power and experience. We are currently adjusting the leaderboards to take into account spy experience more, so spy builds will still be able to get up there. In reply to why stripping is harder: Basically, stripping in the game was completely unbalanced. A player could get completely stripped in under an hour by a handful of people, and not be able to do anything about it (i.e. cannot retaliate because of the rules in place, the spy builds would appear too weak). Now, if you want to strip as part of a war, you still can, although you will need to co-ordinate your whole clan. This is also done in preparation of the war system that is coming out soon. Without it, it is quite possible that wars will be won by spy builds completely stripping all attack builds on the other side very easily, making it not much of a war.
Also, we do track all spy actions by a user. We don't prominently display it because they are 'spy' actions. They are covert ops by a user, and thus we don't expose those stats for the world to see.
Here are a few reasons why spy builds have an edge: 1. You can spy hit someone, and they won't know who did it. You can do this FOREVER. When an attack build hits, you know who it was and can retaliate. 2. There are more scenarios in which a spy build can 'hide' and be unattackable. These scenarios have been discussed before in other parts of the forums 3. You can decrease an attack build's troops, making them easy to hit by your clan members. There's no opposite action for spies (i.e. soldiers cannot decrease spy units). Although, these advantages come at a trade-off of making less gold per steal (although they might get more successful steals on average than a fight build will win attacks).
kaw_admin but with these changes, won't the spy builds be strip farmed faster. The spy builds are loosing money faster when attacked so that puts them at a disadvantage.