Spam Attacking - Let us begin the conversation here

DeletedUser55701

Guest
We still spam-ping our allies to wake them up from sleep whenever needed so could use the usual alarm for that.

We may end up killing offensive troops on ally town in the process with the discussed alarm so just wanted to put the idea here. :)
 

foogaloowhoOP

Strategos
I think implementing a system of delayed alarms is not very viable. There are some problems not with inno's system but with the players themselves. However I did have in mind a reporting system. I believe grepo does store every command given attacks and cancels etc. (correct me if i am wrong). Players should then be able to report spammers (instead of retaliating with more spam) and which can lead into a banning system. I think this should be rather simple o implement

Sorry if its a little confusing, english is not my first language, and not even a conquest player either so haven't faced much spam
 

DeletedUser31931

Guest
I think implementing a system of delayed alarms is not very viable. There are some problems not with inno's system but with the players themselves. However I did have in mind a reporting system. I believe grepo does store every command given attacks and cancels etc. (correct me if i am wrong). Players should then be able to report spammers (instead of retaliating with more spam) and which can lead into a banning system. I think this should be rather simple o implement

Sorry if its a little confusing, english is not my first language, and not even a conquest player either so haven't faced much spam
First of all, your English is more or less spotless.

Second, I agree that the "issue", if you consider spam to be one, is with the players and not the system. Even something as simple as shortening the maximum recall time would have unintended consequences; I love being able to send attacks from two of my cities to the same target if the TTs are within 10 min of each other and keep canceling until the timing is perfect. This is a skill that I have from my nearly-decade of playing (albeit a pretty easy one), and why should it be squashed?

Now, reporting players is a slippery slope. I mean, what even constitutes spam? This definition has never been agreed upon with specificity, and I personally would want some pretty concrete formulas in place rather than leave it to the in-game mods who are prone to enough bias (or even just accusations of bias...whether the accusations are true or not, they're still bad for Grepo) as it is. The current definition is fine, but would still leave a whole lot of gray-area.
 
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Raydium88

Strategos
The problem with reporting is for mods to make the distinction between annoying/malicious spam and spam required for strategic purposes (gold prevention, self-snipe disruption, etc). For right now, all spam is regarded as a viable in-game tactic. And unless mods and Inno make this distinction clear, it will not work.

Some clever solutions posted here regarding the app alarm, but unfortunately I can see how it could be a tough implement. Or even reliable at that, since the app alarm isn't even 100% reliable nowadays.
 

Rachel.L

Phrourach
I mean, what even constitutes spam? This definition has never been agreed upon.
for the purpose of this discussion, we are all sticking to the definition in the topic post
if you want to debate the definition, there is a thread in the US forum

there do seem to be some good ideas
with the same drawbacks mentioned
 

DeletedUser36697

Guest
huge waste of time for devs, simply by removing ingame alarm altogether spam is solved, ones that want to stay up 24/7 and deal with inc they will, ones that want to enjoy RL more and sleep more will do just that.

solving spam as limiting attacks nor anything similar that will effect spam as it is will not happen, knowing how discussion about it between German council members and EN council members ended.

I prefer to leave the Alarm on volume to the max and then my partner wakes me when it goes off

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DeletedUser55572

Guest
One of the ideas brought up in the GPC was to have a slider on the app which allows you to let attacks only give you a notification after they've been sent for a certain amount of time (varying between 0-10 minutes)
For example an attack gets sent at 10:00, if you have the slider on 5 minutes the alarm will only go off at 10:05 if it's still on the way then. If it's canceled beforehand there will be no alarm

An issue we saw with this was that on fast worlds a cs can take down to 7 minutes (speed 3), meaning putting the slider anywhere over 7 minutes could lose you cities without notification, and ping recall spammers would just let their attacks go out for 7 minutes before recalling
A possible solution to this would be to reduce the cancellation time on attacks to enemies or neutrals (brown) to 2 minutes, as the fastest attack on a speed 3 world would be around 3 minutes with harpies. This would allow the slider to be set to 2 minutes to completely cancel out ping spam, while still getting notifications for every real attack

We'd love to hear your thoughts on this and other ideas as well as spam is a really hard thing to get rid of in one go without affecting different aspects of the game

If cancellation was brought down to 2m, you would kill anchor sniping
 

Fluvisol

Phrourach
Possible solution is to apply the 2 min cancellation to only attacks, and not support, means you can snipe by sending support and cancelling.
This was our idea too
And make the cancellation time only 2 minutes against non allies, that way you can still snipe with attacks from allied cities
If cancellation was brought down to 2m, you would kill anchor sniping
Trust me mate, killing sniping is the last thing I want to do, I wouldn't suggest anything myself that would negatively influence it
I love sniping cs's, ask anyone who's ever fought me in game :D
 

DeletedUser43325

Guest
I don't think you can do a single thing about spam without affect other necessary parts of the game in a negative way. So here's a thought.. just make spam a bannable offense. The rules clearly state that it is prohibited to "violate or harm other players physically or mentally" - that is essentially the entire point of spam. If you make spam against the rules, the onus is put on the player and the mods to determine whether an attack is "meaningful" - and in this case meaningful is not "make the player shut off their alarm or clog up their command overview and make the game unplayable." From there it's a judgment call, and if mods are trained properly to identify the difference between spam and "meaningful" attacks, you'd be able to solve this. For example, favor farming 10 waves of harpies in 10 different attacks is not "spam", I can argue that those are meaningful attacks I send after I've killed militia with slings to steal favor while avoiding any real harm done by zues rage. My guess is someone who simply attacks and cancels all day long, or sends waves of 5 ls to every city will have a much harder time rationalizing their actions. If the player can show that a player is attacking solely for the purpose of harassment / spam, and the player themself cannot come up with an adequate defense for their actions (that are easily seen in the logs), then that player should be banned. Yes, you are relying on the mods to be competent enough to determine what is/isnt spam - which I fully recognize is a stretch and lends itself to bias. But I would argue that that is still a better option than changing mechanics of the game that would hurt those of us that play the game at a high level (and don't need spam to do so).
 

Baudin Toolan

Grepolis Team
I'll chime in again here. Making spamming a bannable offense is also an idea being considered but there are flaws to it. Mainly it would completely grind moderation teams to a halt. To begin with we'd need clear guidelines for what are spam attacks, favor farming as Miknel stated with smaller groups of flyers wouldn't be considered as such but other small attacks? At what point do we stop calling an attack a fake and begin to call it spam? Once we determined that and we set it as a bannable offense we'd be moving on to the second and more difficult issue: investigating and punishing for spam attacks. A moderator would need to go through all the attacks involved in the alleged spam attack offense to determine if enough of them are indeed spam attacks and were done with the intent to prevent the target player from defending themselves due to refresh issues and the like. This alone would take a serious amount of time. Quite often a second mod or even a 3rd might need to verify the results which leads to multiple mods being tied up for a long period of time. Given that moderators only have so much time to respond to tickets and look into issues raised via tickets this would result in the slowing down of those same mods getting other tickets done. Basically changing nothing but making the definition of spam attacks more clear and giving it a firm punishment to be enforced by the moderators would lead to an overload of work for most of the various servers. And before anyone says that each server just needs to add more mods to handle such a possible workload increase, we all would if we could. Finding people to be mods is not easy as most servers are constantly looking for or are in need of an extra few mods.
 

DeletedUser43325

Guest
Wouldn't just establishing a clearly defined definition of "spam" be an adequate way to address most those issues? I mean I'm pretty sure every player here that is even relatively competent at this game knows what is the difference between a) spam b) favor farming and c) stopping someone from golding troops. Those are really the three things that going to lead to ping after ping. For instance, it's pretty easy to define someone who sends attacks and cancels those attacks before the 10 minutes are up for the sake of "harassment" as "spam." Like I said, the onus should be on the player to "prove" the spam, not the mod to determine it. I can screenshot enough of these attacks/cancels, as well as 5 ls sends to every city, to indite someone for a spam offense. If you have a clear definition of what is/isnt spam - which I'm certain the community would be glad to help put together, put the burden of proof on the spamee, does that not cut down the work of the mods?
 

Baudin Toolan

Grepolis Team
No, unfortunately it does not. Even if a player added to their ticket a bunch of screenshots and other data the moderator would still need to confirm it which would mean going through the attacks to make sure they qualify as spam.
 

DeletedUser43325

Guest
I don't really see how that's our problem. If you, as in Inno, want to make it a better game, and this is the issue that has been most consistently brought up and is likely the largest reason for the decline of players - new and old - that it's your responsibility to do what is necessary to fix the issues that are most frequently brought up. I'm certain your Inno counterparts are looking for the "easiest" solution that fits in with their cost / benefit analysis, but quite frankly there isn't one. Your either going to totally change the schematics of the game, a change in which I'm certain would involve a great deal of programming (and thus cost) that I highly doubt the community as a whole would even be in support of, or invest that same (and likely far less) amount of money into recruiting and training moderators to supplement a rule change that the community would in large part support. Trying to find a solution to this problem that isn't going to cost you isn't addressing the problem. It's just being stingy and yet again ignoring your customer base.
 

Baudin Toolan

Grepolis Team
If our volunteer moderators are too swamped with investigating and handling the spam attack tickets to deal with other tickets, such as other rule breaches, questions, bugs etc, then we're replacing one problem with a second problem. Most servers wouldn't be able to handle the increased workload without finding a good number of additional volunteer moderators which would lead to much longer delays to other tickets. Finding more moderators is never easy especially if you are telling them the workload ahead of them. I keep saying volunteer moderators because that is what the majority of moderators are across all servers, just players who love the game and feel that by being a moderator they can help the game. These volunteer moderators can't be expected to spend 1/3 of their day dealing with moderation duties due to an increased workload. The CM's can contribute and lessen the load but only to a degree as all of us have lives and jobs same as the volunteer moderators as well as additional CM responsibilities that require a good portion of our time. I'm not against making spam attacks a bannable offense and having moderators deal with them but it would require either each server finding and adding a bunch more mods to their respective teams or there would need to be an additional change that would cut down spam to a lesser degree but not necessarily fix it outright. Reducing spam by a bit with a different change that would't greatly alter the game and then also having moderators ban for the unaffected spam attacks might work.
 

DeletedUser43325

Guest
Was the task to find an easy solution or an effective one? Recruit harder, utilize Inno paid staff to supplement the need with additional compensation for hours logged, add cash incentives to volunteers if they log X+ amount of hours of moderation, clearly explain the real benefit and need of additional mods to the community in hopes of garnering more interest from those that care. Hell if you told me that my few hours of volunteer work a week could help in curbing spam, I'd do it - and I'm certain I'm not the only one. Some ideas could cost money. Again, is that less or more compared to the programming you're proposing that would alter the game in a way that most wouldn't even appreciate? You make it sound like theres "nothing you can do" to garner interest, when literally all you've done to this point is make like 1 post every three years saying "mods wanted!" If that's the level of attention that is paid to a serious need to the point where you see cant even fathom any other means of addressing said need then yeah this is a pretty pointless discussion
 
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Baudin Toolan

Grepolis Team
We're trying to find a solution that works well. Placing a much larger workload on moderators and slowing down all the other tickets and rule breach investigations they have to do with no additional changes to limit spam is not a great solution as it causes problems even as it fixes them.
 

Rachel.L

Phrourach
on the US forum, there is a long debate about the actual definition of spam
some suggestions are far from what we are using here
if it is clearly defined and codified, i think that is a start, regardless of punishment/ change in mechanics
we've discussed looking at spam as the size of a wave or an attack being recalled
what i don't see (and i could have missed it) is something about the number of attacks (or supports) sent
this might be easier for a mod to judge, rather than the intent in the size of a wave
if i sent 5 attacks in a minute or 50, does that automatically say something to a mod?
idk
also, rather than looking at this from an individual, there is the alliance perspective as sometimes mass spamming occurs against one player
if an alliance sends 100 attacks in a minute or 10000, does it make a difference?
just asking a question here as idk have many waves it takes to crash the system
 

Baudin Toolan

Grepolis Team
Yeah considering spam from an alliance wide perspective is another challenge. There have been a few suggestions to mitigate the effects of spam attacks with one such being to stop the refreshing of the command menu within 2 minutes of a CS or a different qualifier. This would prevent the constant refreshing of the command menu caused by players sending and cancelling attacks which prevents backsnipe attempts from the defender. But that is hard to implement as well.
 

Rachel.L

Phrourach
it's all hard
i'm just trying for a different perspective that i didn't see "above"
my personal goal is to get rid of the part that is illegal (server crashing and pysch harming) and leave the rest alone
the smallest amt we can touch, the more options players have ig the better
 
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