Would this be considered grieving or some kind of abuse?

[ccX]

Before I turn this into an actual report, I feel this could fall into a grey area so I’d like people’s opinion on it.
Let’s say a World is almost fully dominated by a “single” Company, for obviously a Faction.
I say “single” because they have 3 different companies, we’ll call them DIRTY 1, DIRTY 2 and DIRTY 3, which I guess has been normalized.
Since they pretty much abused everything they could to get to the top, they managed to dominate 90% of the territory, with most of those being from one of their 3 companies.

So, after the fixes for PvP, they decide to hop to another faction. From Marauders to Covenant.
However, they keep some of their clan members behind and rename their “original” Company to “Stained Reputation 1” and “Stained Reputation 2”.
Therefore, they are all Covenant, but they have just a couple of guys staying back leading those territories and keeping it under their control, though from a different Faction.

They start throwing territories into conflict, and so does the other faction. In this case, keep in mind, Marauders are close to powerless as 80% of their population moved to Covenant.
Territory fights are in general unbalanced, with a team of 50 level 60s for the attacking team and all kinds of level on the defending team, since they don’t have the manpower to fight back for reasons already mentioned.

This leads to Covenant and Syndicate starting to dominate the map overall.
However, Covenant was exclusively attacking territories that are dominated by “Stained Reputation 1 and 2” in wars that end in a couple of minutes.
Syndicate also gains ground against the OTHER Marauders in a similar fashion, but against Companies that do at least try, though 50 level 60s vs 10 level 60s and 40 lower levels is hard.
However, one of the Companies from Syndicate actually beat Company DIRTY 1 into throwing one of the territories under control of SR1 in conflict and declare war.

Now, this Syndicate Company schedules the war to take over the region (Let’s say it’s Weaver’s Fen). When the war comes up, to noone’s surprise, the defending team is 80-90% from Covenant, from the 2 clans that moved from Marauders to Covenant.

I ask if it’s abusive as it seems they are protecting their OWN territories as the original clan that was renamed to SR1 has close to zero members and they are just holding it in so they can give it up to the Covenant to keep it to them under a new Faction.

As I recall, from day one, AGS has been saying their main goal is to keep THIS kind of behavior out of it as much as possible.
I feel like this goes against a lot of what AGS has promised in regards to toxicity, bad behavior, negative conducts and grieving as they are intentionally holding territories so they can take it later on.

So, what is the angle here? Is this worth a report or just people using the system in their favor in all “honesty”?

[Aramis]

TBH I’m not sure either what should be the action here if any at all. Territory control is pretty lacking and because there are barely any faction population balance options in the game this was bound to happen (and already has multiple times) and will keep happening until they do something.

My take on it: as long as they are not intentionally kicking players from wars or doing things like purposefully replacing all of the fort siege with warhorns and they are letting people sign up to defend and play as normal, then its not doing anything wrong.

Hopefully AGS does something to make the faction warfare better and less prone to massive imbalances like this example. Either way as an individual it might be in your best interest to swap servers if you can. Maybe the server merges will help but its not guaranteed.

[GregM]

@ccX

They there and thanks for posting about DIRTY DEEDS, DONE DIRT CHEAP.

Is it an abuse? Hard to say really. With concurrent players declining and feeling more sparse (whether or not that means they’ve quit/uninstalled/whatever), multiple governors and entire servers find themselves in a spot to try to keep something alive, especially if they’ve xferred into something that’s become a ghost-town server and can’t move again.

There’s definitely a mentality of new players wanting to join the winning side. I could see a dominant faction splitting off to swap sides, just in the name of keeping conflict healthy and wanting to keep a server alive.

If there was some xp or server benefit to collusion and zerg-runs of flippin ownership in waves, I guess I could see it being exploitable. But most wars by multi-company ‘guilds’ only field 60s.

Even servers who aren’t exhibiting this are frequently engaging in faction politics and conversations among sides about who’s getting what town as collectivism. That, I think is good.

But on balance, when I personally try to think about this stuff, it’s follow the money/xp/loot. What’s in it for the people that are doing this?

Perhaps I’m missing something.

[ccX]

Well, the biggest issue here is not the lack of defense but rather the Covenant holding companies in two factions and defending Marauder in place of the Marauders just so they can give up the territory later on.

[ccX]

Quick update on this:
The Covenant Company that defended the Marauder territory has just declared war on the territory they defended.

[Noother]

I don’t understand the point of what they’re doing. They took most of the settlements, changed sides while leaving some dead companies behind to maintain the settlements, then attacked them again. It just sounds like they changed sides for some reason (fighting within the faction with other companies maybe), and wanted to more easily take their settlements with them.

It’s not like they gain anything from any of this. If they’re stronger then the other companies, they’ll just take all the settlements again anyway.

[ccX]

I don’t know their real reason for switching sides.
The issue is their method:
Leave one or two of their members behind as Marauders to keep the territories (otherwise it would move to an independent company)
If anyone else from Syndicate attacks their former territories, they defend it (it was 48 Covenant members and 2 Marauders defending a Marauder territory). A couple of hours later, they threw that region into conflict.
I can promise you and I will try and join only to record, though. They will win the war in 5 minutes with no resistance.