Thoughts on the Forsaken

Thoughts on the Forsaken

Clearly there are two classes of Forsaken, the cheaters and the clueless. If we do not punish the clueless, everyone will just “oops, my bad” their way out of punishment everytime. So we need paths to redemption that are painful enough to discourage stupidity and gaming of the system. We also have a duty to let the people who were attacked feel that justice was served. Lastly, the true cheaters and exploiters must be made to pay severly, and prevented from participating in the future if they refuse to work inside our rules.

What we need to do as a Server is decide on a baseline policy that applies to all, that prevent cracks in our guild level punishments that would encourage exploitation or resentment from the victims for any undue leniency a guild punishment may allow.

A unified baseline requires buy in and commitments from all, so I am not saying these comments and proposals are that policy, they are proposals to hopefully focus us on a final agreement. I welcome idea’s from the other guild leaders as well.

So in the case of the clueless forsaken we have:
 	1) The damage they inflicted.
	2) The loot they pilfered.
	3) The unfair advantage they gained in any contest.

This is the extent of the “harm” that they caused, and what we need to try to discourage in the first place, and address with their victim to show justice has been served.

(1) "The damage they inflicted" In most cases we are talking 100% injury, so there is insult, but no long term damage. Other events may not be the case, and a stealth reinforcement during a siege may also result in unrecoverable damages, but I think this is a low priority. I mention it because it shouldn’t be forgotten.

(2) "The loot they pilfered" This is the bulk of the issue, and problematic. In most cases the attacker is much more powerful, so it is impossible to easily return the damages directly to them via return attack by a weaker victim. Seeing someone else get your loot from the thief is a pyrrhic victory. Better than nothing, but not a lot better. And the cheater can easily shield and burn all the ill gotten gains via troop creation and upgrades, which can put the stolen goods forever out of reach.

So there has to be longer term punishment that makes these shorter term gains a very poor strategy.

In the case of direct revenge attack from the victim, all that is likely to result is further losses of troop lives with little impact on the villan, the game itself is broken in that way as it favors sneak attacks by a well prepared perpetrator.

What we *can* do is isolate those cheaters to force them to only operate from the capitol. That means never letting them join a guild where they can profit from any further attacks. It will require all city holding guilds to be “approval only” and agree to a communal list of Forsaken that have no rights of citizenship.

This, along with free revenge on them if they ever attack anyone, should make life pretty bad for those people. They will not progress effectively. I think it will be as good of a deterent as we can make inside this Game.

(3) "The unfair advantage" is actually a pretty big issue as well. Because there are situations where getting your castle wiped and being stuck in the Capitol has no actual impact on the cheater's ability to continue to exploit our rules. In the case of a “wall damage” contest, there is no serious disadvantage to attacking from the capitol with no walls, as one of our more clever players correctly observed. He happily harvested us while we uselessly smacked down his crumbled walls. Very frustrating, but a good lesson on the extent of short term punishment.

So in the case of a contest where there is obvious exploits, we need to be clear that winning a single contest is not worth a lifetime of solitude.

- Those are the “harms” defined (we can add additional ones if I missed any later) now to the point of redemption, which I believe in.

The Romans had the concept of ‘decimation’ which is misused and misunderstood in modern context. When a squad or legion failed in their duties, they were decimated, Latin ‘decimus’ meaning a tenth, the group would draw lots and one out of ten of them would be killed. As you can imagine, this was a very good deterrent for rule breaking. The way I envision it being applied is, if someone realizes that Alcatraz sucks and wants to play ball again, we allow this to happen. But a proper punishment is paid for reentry into scociety.

One way we can ensure this is done correctly is:
	1) They join a guild.
	2) They loan the troops we have required to a trusted guild leader.
	3) That leader duels the victim's leader with the intent of killing those troops.
	4) We repeat this process until the required count of troops have been ‘decimated’

The Forsaken will need to heal and loan until they have made the required restitution, then they will have paid their debt with blood so to speak.

For more severe cheaters, we can also demand they disband their entire garrison.
And we also have the ability to directly extract value from them by direct attack, and them not shielding.

So we have some potential tools to remove ill gotten gains, and apply some penalties to show others that there is no profit to be had for cheaters. None of these methods need apply, we have appointments, bonus spots, dukedoms, event participation and many other carrots to withhold, but I want us to have a baseline that is applied to all, and agreed to by the majority at minimum.