Changes to Town Betrayal

[Magpieman]

Nothing too major, but wanted to let everyone know that there will be a small change in the way we handle town betrayal rule breaks. From now on any town betrayal reports staff deem to be a clear fault of the owner will result in a strike. This is mainly things like not zoning areas of the town appropriately and general negligence. This strike will be applied to both the current full owner and the town itself. If either has 3 strikes on their account staff will no longer be required to assist further with town betrayals.

The reason for this change is to reduce the unnecessary workload on staff and put some of the responsibility back onto towns and their owners. The town betrayal rule was added to encourage owners to invite new players to their town with minimal risk. This has clearly worked well, however, there are some individuals who are taking advantage of the system and using this as an excuse to not put any time or effort into setting their town up correctly and securely. As a result, staff are having to spend vast quantities of time tracking down lost items, which may have changed hands multiple times, just because someone couldn't be bothered to zone their main storage to prevent level 1 members from accessing it. Staff are more than willing to help explain how to use zoning effectively and give tips on preventing the incident from happening again. But in the past, some individuals have been ignoring said advice and letting the same thing repeatedly.

To be clear, these strikes will not be applied every time we resolve a town betrayal report. It will only happen when there has been clear negligence. If we feel there has been a lack of care from the owner we will explain why and what to do to prevent it going forward.

A small side note, please only make town betrayal reports if you are the main owner of the town. We don't want to chase people around trying to establish whether the owner believes it is a betrayal or not. So if you feel a town member has stolen something, please speak with your town owner and ask them the file a /report. We will only be dealing with betrayal reports made by the full owner.

 

[Silver911]

Watch out silentstorm

 

[Lampp_]

bruh

 

[SayreSlayer]

so once you get 3 strikes your town is dead because the other alliance will flood it with spies and clear the entire place out

 

[SilentStormSix]

 

[SilentStormSix]

so once you get 3 strikes your town is dead because the other alliance will flood it with spies and clear the entire place out

hopefully by then the message would get across that you should zone your stuff

 

[koi0001]

What happens if a town has three strikes but correctly zones stuff and there is actual town betrayal? Will it not be looked into at all?

EDIT: Also, just from thinking out loud my initial thought was that these strikes being a forever thing sounds harsh especially when you consider towns can be alive for years.

 

[SayreSlayer]

hopefully by then the message would get across that you should zone your stuff

your town is effectivelly dead when this happens though why isnt the rule something like 'if the problem is zoning and the tb is minor we arent refunding' not 'once you get 3 strikes your town is dead because anyone can clear it out'

 

[SayreSlayer]

Like is stealing pots/sets gonna be considered a strike worthy offense, considering that everyone needs access to these to do conquest, but they are expensive enough to be worth stealing? This seems just to be a really bad rule overall where after three strikes your town is just dead, and the line between 'just zone better' and what is needed to not zone for conquest is small. I would understand a strike if someone didn't zone their personal gear/lore and they got a strike but for pots and other conquest gear this rule just seems punishing

 

[jakeman5]

Like is stealing pots/sets gonna be considered a strike worthy offense, considering that everyone needs access to these to do conquest, but they are expensive enough to be worth stealing? This seems just to be a really bad rule overall where after three strikes your town is just dead, and the line between 'just zone better' and what is needed to not zone for conquest is small. I would understand a strike if someone didn't zone their personal gear/lore and they got a strike but for pots and other conquest gear this rule just seems punishing

I think Ringo makes a very good point as there seems to be a lot of gray area. If someone steals thousands of pots or pearls that you have to grind for hours to obtain how is that handled? These often times are zoned so everyone has access to them. Will that account for a strike? Also it is getting harder and harder to tell who takes things due to the fact that feathering a chest is unreliable.

 

[Sparky___]

We have a lot of experience with town betrayal issues. When it comes to conquest related materials, especially in conquest oriented towns, it becomes incredibly obvious that there is only so much reasonable zoning a town owner can do.

That being said town betrayal reports take up far too much of my time as a Guardian. Some of us have spent LITERAL IRL DAYS trying to track stuff down as a result of someone just refusing to zone their stuff. Most town betrayals could honestly be avoided if people zoned their stuff and only added people they trusted to those zones.

This policy isn't technically new, just a bit more strict. It's something we have done with towns before, the biggest one being Miracalis back in the day. New Fruitopia was another, after the month I spent fixing their town betrayal issues every week. We just never publicly broadcasted it.

Consider that Loka will only continue to grow. It makes sense then that the frequency of town betrayal will grow as well. We cannot be spending all of our time on town betrayal. (And also I don't want to).

why isnt the rule something like 'if the problem is zoning and the tb is minor we arent refunding' not 'once you get 3 strikes your town is dead because anyone can clear it out'

This still requires investigation on our part to get to that point.

 

[FoxyBearGames]

I think Ringo makes a very good point as there seems to be a lot of gray area. If someone steals thousands of pots or pearls that you have to grind for hours to obtain how is that handled? These often times are zoned so everyone has access to them. Will that account for a strike? Also it is getting harder and harder to tell who takes things due to the fact that feathering a chest is unreliable.

We spoke about this in the last LCR meeting and the strikes likely will only be added in situations where it could have been preventable. You aren't going to be striked for making a report if someone found some backwards way into your higher level storage room and I seriously doubt that the Guardians are going to strike you if someone were to clean out your public void storage of all it's items, or in the case Ringo brought up, steal your potions. The rule does get a bit fuzzy when it comes to the strikes never expiring though, and I think that adding an expiration timer for strikes would probably be a good idea.

 

[MoistP]

i have 25 pages of zones and im still finding out that people can access things they arent supposed to every day, can you implement a special item that can show zones outlined in particles or something like that so i can see gaps / unzoned areas without having to break a wall and /here?

 

[FoxyBearGames]

i have 25 pages of zones and im still finding out that people can access things they arent supposed to every day, can you implement a special item that can show zones outlined in particles or something like that so i can see gaps / unzoned areas without having to break a wall and /here?

Adding zone borders to the feather would be epic

 

[Sparky___]

i have 25 pages of zones and im still finding out that people can access things they arent supposed to every day, can you implement a special item that can show zones outlined in particles or something like that so i can see gaps / unzoned areas without having to break a wall and /here?

Way ahead of you...

 

[SilentStormSix]

2 years ago

 

[jakeman5]

Way ahead of you...

Oh lord.

 

[Magpieman]

What happens if a town has three strikes but correctly zones stuff and there is actual town betrayal? Will it not be looked into at all?

EDIT: Also, just from thinking out loud my initial thought was that these strikes being a forever thing sounds harsh especially when you consider towns can be alive for years.

Staff can use their discretion and we have dates of when they were applied. We may choose to wipe off a really old strike or help with a situation because of the circumstances despite the town having 3 strikes. Although if the town has failed on 3 occasions to change things after being advised by staff, they have really messed up. Hense the staff equally have the right to turn you away.

I think Ringo makes a very good point as there seems to be a lot of gray area. If someone steals thousands of pots or pearls that you have to grind for hours to obtain how is that handled? These often times are zoned so everyone has access to them. Will that account for a strike? Also it is getting harder and harder to tell who takes things due to the fact that feathering a chest is unreliable.

Again we will use discretion but you can certainly take measures to restrict how much level 1 members have access to. The point is we need to put some of the responsibility back on towns.

i have 25 pages of zones and im still finding out that people can access things they arent supposed to every day, can you implement a special item that can show zones outlined in particles or something like that so i can see gaps / unzoned areas without having to break a wall and /here?

Yeah, this is something we want to do, and up to this point has been a fairly low priority. LCR's brought this up recently and as a result, has moved up the priority list.

 

[SayreSlayer]

Can we get an actual list of what we are allowed to give to our level 1 members that would be rolled back, instead of it being vague? Much easier for our town owners to know what exactly will be refunded or not. For example, I know pots, pearls, and food are borderline necessity for all members to have access for, and I assume we all can agree that should be refunded, But what about sets, niche gear (end crystals, tnt, etc) tools and AIs, which all would be nice to have access to at level one, and most of our towns are zoned as such, yet might fall under the discretion of this new rule? I understand the need to help staff by lowering these investigations but without knowing what does or doesn't fall under this rule, my alliance and others are more likely to gain strikes.

 

[Silver911]

Can we get an actual list of what we are allowed to give to our level 1 members that would be rolled back, instead of it being vague? Much easier for our town owners to know what exactly will be refunded or not. For example, I know pots, pearls, and food are borderline necessity for all members to have access for, and I assume we all can agree that should be refunded, But what about sets, niche gear (end crystals, tnt, etc) tools and AIs, which all would be nice to have access to at level one, and most of our towns are zoned as such, yet might fall under the discretion of this new rule? I understand the need to help staff by lowering these investigations but without knowing what does or doesn't fall under this rule, my alliance and others are more likely to gain strikes.

would probably depend whether or not you had an accessible storage or not. safest option would be to have members ask you when in need of a new set. It would be much better if we had the ability to make rules on what our town members were allowed to take or not, every town is different in aspects and such things like pearls wouldn't be as plentiful. It would seem we keep our own things safe, but if we could make blatant rules there should be no reason it isn't town betrayal.