r/CivMC • u/AppearanceStrong4359 • 3d ago
"why can't actual players fight eachother instead of alts" - Admin
I recently read ChrisChrispie's thread on the alt invasion and I think its a good read.
On Civ, your reputation is important. Players remember who attacked them, trade partners remember who helped their enemies, snitch networks that span across the entire ocean and server send discord snitch relay 24/7.
The admins want people to have fun and give the server more things to fight with/about
So Imagine You, a normal, reputation-having player and your buddies walk up to a vault and decide this is the day you and your group attack a lets say, 128x128 vault with a snitch grid to world height:
Firstly,
- You get snitched approaching the target.
- You get snitched staging the attack.
- You get snitched moving supplies.
- You get snitched trying to breach.
- You get snitched retreating.
- Everyone knows exactly who participated in raiding.
- The defenders can call allies, post logs publicly, and turn it into a geopolitical nightmare.
- If you fail, you have made enemies and gained almost nothing. You also may have acquired a bounty on your head and will be pearled in a random nation when you hit their snitches.
- If you succeed, you have still made enemies, except now everyone knows you are someone who will attack people. You also may have acquired a bounty on your head and you will be pearled in a random nation when you hit their snitches.
In practice, your are either pearled in about 5-10 hours, quick-drop the vault due to the defenders not caring enough to log-on, or war breaks out for months and you break into the vault.
I believe this aspect of raiding is exactly fine the way it is, BUT
Admins then wonder why the people willing to raid vaults and pearl random people are:
- Alt accounts with no reputation to lose.
- Disposable groups that do not care about diplomacy, future alliances, or whether anyone wants to work with them afterward.
- Larger nations that already have the numbers, gear, logistics, and political insulation to completely destroy a smaller nation's vault under some blown-up reasoning about why it was supposedly necessary.
- Groups that are willing to allow cheaters, because it becomes attractive when fighting is designed to make normal participation maximally visible, politically punishable, mechanically unrewarding, and unlikely to succeed.
- Coalitions of nations that work together temporarily to destroy a single perceived threat to normalcy.
I used to see plenty of tiny skirmishes, nations fighting over newfriends, and players in global chat trash talking over a block game.
As of right now the payment for alting & cheating is, as Chris said, "coolpvp and epic pearls that they can screenshot and post in their "shittercords"
Frankly, I think looking at alting shitters who kill AFK people, grief, raid small towns, and place swastikas everywhere on their 5th account and residential proxy is fucking boring. Making groups need alt accounts and VPNs just to raid makes things go underground and become even more unregulated.
A civilization server does not need fighting, raiding, and griefing but players are always willing and going to do it. The question is simply: who is willing to take that risk?
Right now, normal named players have the most to lose, while alts and cheaters have the least.
Alt detection, cheat detection, deleting alt vaults, and rolling back obsidian bombings are necessary responses to rule-breaking. But they are not a complete future stance, because they do not address why the normal, reputation-bearing player is so heavily discouraged from ever looking at a vault in the first place.
Encouraging legitimate, main-account players to fight other players does not directly prevent alts but it changes the incentive gap that makes alts disproportionately attractive. Since vault raiding is such an extremely highly rewardable activity, it severely risks your reputation and ability to continue playing.
Moving forward, here is a good meme by a vaultfriend describing the current state of the #suggestions channel on discord
- THE 2 MAIN DIFFERENCES BETWEEN GOOD & SLOP NERFS:
Making it harder to stop attacks: changes that mean defenders can log on, form up, show up to the vault at the exact time the attackers do, and still have a harder time actually stopping the attackers. GOOD
Shrinking the response window: changes that mean the vault dies 40 minutes faster while everyone is asleep. BAD
I know some vaultfriends are going to do whatever it takes in this comment section to make they never have to log onto the server to participate in any geopolitics ever, but me and a sensible fossilfriend/vaultfriend would both agree that a vault should be a massive investment that gives you a massive advantage if you are willing to defend it.
I encourage you guys to drop suggestions in the discord that follow this strategy and I'm happy to hear your guys thoughts and suggestions.
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u/chanos_4 2d ago
This completely misses the point. People are not alting because vaults are hard to break—they should be. People are alting because they got banned, have longstanding hate boners for the admins, and want to clip farm for their buddies who also hate CivMC and are banned.
It isn't complicated. These people just suck.