@Hansel, re full T3 being too strong to steal from... Have you got any friends with 20 T3's and 4 guilds? You seriously tellin me they can't steal a guy with 24 T3's???? Pure spy is a build that's good at being an OSF and at being totally immune to attacks when it wants. But if you wanna damage people with steals and also make money and do all kinda fun stuff, put up 14 T3's and 10 guilds. Pretty sure that's enough power to do everything under the sun. Who you can and cannot steal is not a calculation based on spy stats alone-- it's a total power vs total power evaluation. So to steal 24 T3's, just put together a nice powerful mixed build. Not hard. Show me any player in this game, and I could design a build to take them down. Well, except maybe Pollyanna. Lol.
Eggshen, Just try once to steal from Majesty with a fullspy. It won't let you. Up until they stripped him, Trueplayer was the same way. The allies make them completely impossible to touch unless you do strip them. The new mechanics make it so that if you do buy their allies so that you can hit them, they will only earn extra money. There is no way that you can steal enough before they come back on so that they will lose anything. Just as Meatwhistle said in the failed attempt to strip him, he took a bunch of hits and still made money on the deal. Whether they did this to cement these guys on the leaderboard or not, the result is the same; there is now no way whatsoever to beat people who spend crap loads of money on the game. It used to be, time invested and money invested were roughly equal. Now they clearly aren't.
monkey_spybuild Of course you can't steal from majesty at your level. You have one ally. A full attack build with only one clan member wouldn't be able to attack majesty either. In the same way, majesty can't attack you. This has always been the case, and has nothing to do with the loss changes. One way to have enough power to attack majesty is to build up your own allies. And it is not true that you can't hurt these players anymore. If you co-ordinate between a few people, you could damage someone significantly (maybe make them lose 25-30%), but not 100% like you used to. 25-30% is still quite damaging, but it will take more co-ordination now.
Ok this subject has seem to run it's course in my opinion, unless devs are doing something significant? Are you devs? Cor your last message seemed a bit cocky, please re read it ( unless that was you being sarcastic... Yet again?... Sarcasm added for your bemusement). As for bruised spy egos, well if your one main attribute were taken from you eg a warrior told it's going to take you four more hits to do what you have been doing then they would get pissed too. The fact that a warrior can make 15 mil a hit is just daft and puts a spies 5 mil equivalent at a very unjust disadvantage. By the amount of messages this and the other forum post based on this has generated do you not think you have gone to far this time round. Will you stop farming next? To now destroy an opponent you have destroyed a lot of players fighting styles... Can we have unicorns and fluffy dragons added next and a kitten or two because that's the way this game is going... If enough people that have spent let's say a thousand dollars on this product cry at being raped of their allies will you change it some more because that's what it seems like you have done. I am disappointed that you've taken another step backward however if your pockets are slightly fuller then well done. This up until now was the best game on the iPhone your getting soft devs ( oh and Cor no need to reply to this one it is aimed at the devs not you). So we should all turn into deathmonkey and hit the same button 50 thousand times... Lmao funk that. Assassin.
Thanks for the post assassin. It appears that your primary concern is that the feasibility of spy builds are much less now because stripping was an integral part of why spy builds were powerful. To your note, we are looking at the data right now, and this is what we can see: 1. For the same number of hits it took to take all a person's gold before, you can only take ~30% now (conservative estimates). Damaging, but not crippling and still effective. 2. In a war, spies will still be effective because they can cripple an attack build in multiple ways (partial strip, assassination thus reducing their plunder, etc.) and also bring in plunder during the war to help their clan. Although the steal loss changes didn't impact you directly in terms of income, your concern seems to be the usefulness of a spy build now that you can't completely strip a user (in war or otherwise). The war scenario concern is valid (you're questioning if an all spy clan win against an attack clan?). At this point, based on our data we believe that this is still possible. The other primary thing you mentioned is that spy builds make much less than attack builds. While this is true, spy builds lose a lot less than attack builds because they can't get infinitely farmed out and there are more cases in which you can become un-attackable. So the net effect does not equate to attack builds making 3 times more. However, we are looking at NET plunder rates for users in each category over a period of time to see what the differences are. Note that this isn't directly related to the change in defender spy losses, just a part of determining whether or not spy builds are feasible.
Monkey_spybuild, please reread my post. Pure spies are not the ones who can steal majesty because they are too weak to do it-- the ones who can steal him are strong mixed builds. And the argument that majesty is too strong to steal because of allies...if you're looking to strip/steal him, the first step is to take those allies away, so that kinda solves that issue. Well, coming up with $1T, which is what I've heard Majesty's allies cost, that's another issue. You'd either need tons of very rich people to work together, or you'd have to be one of them folks with the hacked illegal iTunes action.
Yep. I brought this up with the devs. Still waiting to hear anything back. I have heard others bring it up with them before too, and saw the screen shots of a personal message from the devs saying that it is not possible. The very fact that you, who they presumably respect as knowing a lot about how the game works, feel that it is a real enough issue to post in these forums means that real or not, the devs do need to address it officially. As you said, and I was trying to say (such an account, or at least the accounts that claim to be such accounts), are absolutely untouchable now, and were almost untouchable before, unless you yourself want to spend a fortune of real money, or try to follow one of the "hacks."
I have nothing even close to proof that anybody has any hacked iTunes action. But I do know what it looks like when you build a kingdom up over the course of lots and lots of months by natural means (look at people like zmn or Wrathbane for example) and I know that other folks in a small number of clans (like 3 that I can think of) are clearly not of that same natural months-long buildup. I myself reset only a few weeks ago and have built up ridiculously fast by volleying in money and by buying the Chaos pack and whatnot. But there's a small number of people who are clearly operating on a different revenue path. Whether they spent $1000 of their own real world money (which means they are super rich, to be able to drop that on a game) or $1000 from hacked iTunes action, I have absolutely no idea and can only speculate. Get together 25 people with $20b each and you're halfway to a trillion. I don't know if the trillion figure is even close to accurate btw, just a rumor I heard. For me personally, I don't care about this stuff. I think it's crappy that people might be on top of the hill because of illegal hack stuff, but I also like the idea of the devs being given thousands of dollars for all the work they've put into this game. This game is a complex program and requires that they support a server and all that good stuff, and other than a couple glitches the software and hardware have been rock solid for many months, which is no small task. If they get a few thousand from people buying their way to the top, good for them. It doesn't affect my game playing experience unless those people decide they need to destroy me, which they surely could but I don't know why they would want to. I'm just here to have fun and study the game mechanics and share what I know with whoever is listening. I'm helping everyone equally, I'd say. I'm sure others have personal interest in bringing down the very small number of people who appear to be built on tons of real world cash that's presumably not legit. Who knows the truth about it though? If iTunes says it's real, then that's the end of the story. If you're getting destroyed by those folks, you have my sympathy.
Yeah, I have no complaints about people spending real money on this game. It's a great game. The dev's do deserve it. It just is a bit disheartening when the people you are talking about claim that it isn't real money they are spending.
Officially, we've taken up all your concerns with Apple (about iTunes fraud). We cannot stop a purchase after they've authorized it. There is no way for us to tell if something's a hacked iTunes account or not. The way the iphone/itouch platform is designed, Apple prevents us from knowing anything about how/what the user paid with. If they say that the purchase is legitimate, then we must accept it as being legitimate. Failure to deliver goods purchased through iTunes/Apple causes us to incur a penalty. We've already put in purchase limits in place to deal with unlimited buying (this happened a while ago). Also, people may claim to be 'hacking itunes' just to sound like they're hackers. There's no way to definitively prove or disprove these claims on our end.
Lmao ! I love how ass-ass-in can say 1000 words of meaningless **** and still look like ****. Your pityful! Please keep bad mouthing me as I'm a legit player and just cause I'm better than you doesn't mean you can try to make me look bad.
RE fake iTunes cards: from what I've read it seems that someone (or a group) of hackers has figured out the algorithm apple uses to generate gift cards. since all legit cards are created the same way as the fake ones, even apple can't do anything about it, as that would void all exsisting valid and invalid gift cards. google it if you're interested.