Please make the war siege timers all the same! (how to truly get rid of shell companies)

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While the dev’s have acknowledged the major issues with shell companies in the August Developer video, their solution is complex and taking too long to implement. Meanwhile PVP players are becoming discouraged each day this isn’t addressed. The dev’s proposed solutions include adding a cooldown for being able to war once joining a new company and a minimum number of company members to participate in any defensive war. These changes may help…slightly…but they will not be a final solution. The problem is that they can and will be circumvented by alt accounts.

The simpler solution would be to force the siege timers to be the exact same time on all territories on a server, and even in the entire region (ex: US-EAST). By doing this you solve two problems:
1.) Shell companies easily being able to defend many territories on a single server
2.) Individuals war mercing in many wars across multiple servers in a single night

These changes would effectively only allow participation in a single war each day. It would force everyone to choose who they want to fight for. Defend your own territory? Help an ally attack? And most of all, it would open up participation to the broader playerbase. Best yet, it would not be able to be circumvented by multiple steam accounts, characters, etc (the same human can’t be in two places at the same time)

The difficulty to this approach would be choosing this aligned siege time, since everyone has different work/personal life schedules. The proposal would be to rotate the siege timers each week or even each day (ex: this week its 6PM, next week its 9PM, the week after its 3PM, etc), similar to how mutators are rotated weekly. While this may still not work for some players some weeks, hopefully the vast majority would be able to participate.

What are we missing with this idea? What are the other drawbacks to such a solution? It seems like a homerun to me, and something AGS could implement immediately within the current game code.

We only put this forward because we enjoy this game, and want to see it succeed. This should increase overall player enjoyment thru a more fair and balanced war mechanic! (basically have less servers end up like orofena where the entire map is green and 6 territories are owned by a single company)

As a future potential enhancement to this idea: We’d also suggest a separate invasion time window be set with an hour or so offset to the war siege timer. This would prevent invasions from impeding the ability to declare war, and thus more wars could happen each week (further driving player engagement and providing more content). For example, this week the war siege window is 8pm, so then the invasion window would be 9pm.

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I totally agree with setting territory war time on the same hour!

It’s the only way to stop shell company, alt account(s) wars and other bypass methods of big companies.

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The biggest issue is what time do you set the war for then? For example, I know a few people in Nevada who play on US east servers due to ping time. That is a 3-hour difference between EST and PDT. So for example a 6 PM EST war would be happening at 3 PM PDT locking out the casual market, and a 10 pm EST war which would be 6 pm PDT would lock out most of the 8-5 M-F crowd on the east coast.

The rotation that you are pointing out using, adds to the problem because people with jobs and kids, usually have a set gaming time.

The current system of letting the companies pick the wartime while it sucks looks like the best solution…

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I like the ide and any ide that helps with this huge problem is welcome. But this can backfire. Lets say the timer is a time where you cant play? Then you cant play more wars.

I do like to set my timer for war when we had a land, but i think that each character should only be able to attend one-two wars pr week. Or like other have stated put some HW restrictions or IP to prevent those alt boys to get around the solution.

We all want a system where wars are something more then 5% of the playerbase can attend.

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If for example they set territory war to 21:00, it would be on all region at 21:00 their region time.

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The thing are war alts, people will just circumvent any CD by using alternative account and many of the top guilds plan to avoid the incoming restriction against shell in this manner.

We need fix server region wide siege timer, the rotation would be sth around 9h30 to 11h30 pm optimally.

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Thats why i stated that we need ip or HW restrictions. Also war timer dont help anything vs alts.

Im sure that disableing coin trade and make it so that leader and consuls can buy gear directly from company bank on AH would go a long way to fix the problem.

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Sorry, I don’t follow your thinking. Can you explain how aligning the war times on all servers within the region would allow alts to play multiple wars in a day?

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Dude that means each war is done four different times, that makes zero sense.

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I think he just meant the server region, all at 21:00 local server time for US-EAST, same for US-WEST, etc. So not wars played 4x each time based on a user’s time zone. Everything based on server timezone.

It still doesn’t address your concern about west coast folks playing on east coast or vice versa. This kind of system would likely drive more people to play in the region closest to where they live. Again, you could rotate the unified siege time around week to week, to give more people a chance to participate.

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Another issue with it is that the 35 players must come from the same company, etc. With 100 players per war and 8 wars per server… you have 32% of a server at war at once(I don’t think that is even close to what the current PvP numbers are you don’t see 1/3 of people running around flagged and OPR can take 20ish min to queue even with a login wait), I can see issues where wars happen with less than 100 people with the current queue times, or a company does not meet it’s 35 player cap due to queue.

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Now, you actually got the idea behind it.

This will make more people able to participate in war pvp activity rather than the same small amount of people and companies need to strategize around the weekly siege timer rotation. The reason of the current PvP numbers is that many just aren’t motivated to fight the same 50 members of a faction in each war seeing how shells are everywhere. I don’t think there will be an actual lack of interested in war pvp participation at all.

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What if someone wants to participate in wars, but due to regions or timezones the war timer is set for when they are at work or when they are asleep? How will they participate?

Delos is a good example. Its a mix of several different cultural groups all from different regions. We all work and sleep at different times. A one size fits all siege timer means a lot of people will miss out. I think it’d be hard to find a specific siege timer that suits all the players.

The current timers absolutely have problems and need to be addressed, I agree. But if some of the timers don’t suit you, we at least have the option to sign up for more suitable ones.

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Yeah, this is also an issue I was thinking about.

Yet, shouldn’t most people be able to participate if the lower cap is set at sth like 9h30 pm and the max at 11h30 pm. But yeah the rotation should be around late night hours for sure.

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By region I meant:
-all Europe servers to have the same territory war time.
-all SA East servers to have the same territory war time.
-all AP Southeast servers to have the same territory war time.
-all US West servers to have the same territory war time.
-all US East servers to have the same territory war time.

Now I’m from Europe. I have no idea if there are time zone differences between US East and US West.

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You seem to miss the point that wars can still happen on different days through the week.

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Ha, sorry I missed that part… US West should be West coast GMT(Greenwich mean time) +7, US East is GMT +3. There are some States in the US that are GMT +7 time zones, where most of the players play on US West due to ping, and a good part of middle America does not have servers in their time zones… US time zones are messed up at best.

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Would be nice, but nah, I don’t think it’s gonna happen.

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No need to elaborate its all there. Bump.

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Enuff of this meeting after school at 3:15 crap , you run up the influence and you pick to go to war then make it happen in 1 hour. Who ever shows up shows up. No more making sure you buy people to fight in your War for you. This will give morning, evening, and graveyard time players a chance at war.

1 Like