Travian kingdoms has issues, and we have to talk about it.

Hello travian kingdom community!

You might know me, you might not know me, but I am not important in this situation. My words that speak facts are.

Before getting into the issues Travian Kingdoms has, I'd first like to take a look at the forum rules that are in place here

They can be found here:

As you can see, under 5. it states

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The staff reserve the right to delete particular posts and messages without providing a reason for it.

Do not be suprised if you can't find this post in a few hours, as you can see staff has all the rights to silence me my posts without reason.

Some might know this as "Censorship"

(This rule is also applied to bans)

I will split my points into a 2 parts.

1.Travian kingdom staff does not know how to communicate

Travian forum rules are very limiting, so I will have to use speak without providing proof, but I will use common issues so everyone can relate.

As travian staff has all the rights to ban someone without a reason, it doesnt mean they do it...right?

Well, if any of you played this game, you might have heard about some of your fellow players getting banned without reason.

Travian kingdom staff sadly, does not ask questions and bans first, again, without reasoning.

But hey, they respond in 24h in the support centre, whats the issue?

Well, even 24h is probably too long for speed server, the issue is travian staff do not always respond in 24h.

Or they might respond in 8hours asking for more informations, then reply the next day, and then the next day and the next...You see where this is going?

Known players have been banned for random reasoning, only to be unbanned in 3 days. Imagine being unable to play 3 days for no reason. In travian, the most valuable

resource is time, which the staff can take away from you as they please.

2. Comx5 is a failure, a playtest server in disguise and also proof Travian Kingdoms does not really care about players.

You can use a lot of my points from the previous part, so I will not repeat myself here. I want to talk about the shitshow Comx5 is.

We all know how comx5 launched, and all the issues it had for days and weeks. But hey, it's an halloween event!

An event!

Finally kingdom is giving back to the players, everyone was soooo hyped.

Ok the start didn't go smoothly thats fiiine the server is sooo much fun to play.

Oh the servers still aren't working...some players are getting their second villages and I can't complete the tutorial...well thats fine...they said they're working on it.

The chat doesn't work weeks after the server started... but they're working on it!

Another day, another "we're working on it" response.

BUT HEY, WE'RE GETTING FREE REWARDS, IT'S AN EVENT!

wait what do you mean the rewards are worthless? oh a single scroll of experience...5gold...400 silver...

BUT HEY,WE ARE GETTING NEW GAMEPLAY ELEMENTS

wait what do you mean they're using comx5 as test server under disguise? they are using us to test new features?

Playtesting isn't bad, don't get me wrong. But hiding a playtest as a SPECIAL EVENT server is just plain disgusting. The mist is just menhir 2.0 and everyone knows that.

Oh wow you changed some attacking numbers to make it special,you changed the value of animals,as a programmer I know that took you what 10 mins at best?

Come on, you put no effort into anything anymore, but you expect us support you with money over money every round.

This is the time we start speaking up about all the issues kingdom has. I would go on and on about all the issues but I can not do that as I can't share any information

about support tickets without getting my post removed (look forum rules above) so I will just list a few more issues I sadly can't go into detail:

1)The staff does not understand their own rules, often going back on their decision, in the matter of hours, or days depending on when they respond to you.

2)Following up on 1), the staff does not consistently enforce their rules, same situations can have multiple outcomes.

3)The rulebook for travian kingdom does not cover most issues that can happen on a server, forcing players to search forums to even know if its allowed

because well, their policy does not allow them to tell you what will happen to a reported player (doesn't matter if they're guilty or not) and apparently that

means you will not get a response if the thing the reported player is doing, is allowed.

Thank you for your attention, share your opinion in the comments, let's start a discussion.

Beast

Be2-e4 Thanks for your response, let me breakdown your points a bit from the start to the end.

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I didn't read the rest of your post (yet, but will do so in a minute), but you reading the forum rules and concluding from it, that one may ban you without reason ingame disqualifies you as competent to judge anything in my opinion.

This is not true. I did not conclude from the forum rules that they can you ban you ingame without a reason. Game rules are not forum rules and vice versa. So I think I should just move onto the next point because, I would just repeat myself here.

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Which gets me to your next point. As I don't play com often (and if I did I never experienced bans anywhere)

This is just a funny thing to say really, you can pretty confidently say bans happen on most servers if not all, and for you to never experience on ANYWHERE is kinda weird don't you think? Maybe you meant saying in your kingdom.

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There of course may be false bans, Travian staff is also just human, and there are also bans for not cheating (e.g. insults and payment problems) - and I even agree, that often one might wish for a quicker response time from the staff in such cases, but your accusations of being random or even intentionally random or false are just nonesense.

Aaand we got the problem right here.

I feel like your statement of my accusation being random or even intentionally random or false are just nonsense.

Your only reasoning of saying that from your post are:

1) It never happened to me - what you're saying is therefore not true

2)Even if it did happen, they're humans

You can see, those points aren't really strong, but lets focus on the second one shall we?

How many mistakes can you do and say "but they're human"? 10 bad judgement calls? 20? A server that failed fully and people spent thousands on dollars on it? But they're human? Right?

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If you were are professional programmer or had experience in professional programming, you would know that changing the numbers and adding a few if statements and database columns is the lesser part of the work. There's testing, that has to be done, organisation stuff to be done, writing test cases, letting QA test changes, thinking about balancing, and so on. In a company there's more to it than just changing a few lines of code - but yes, those particular changes weren't hard or stresful to implement

I'm happy we agree on the point that the changes made on comx5, were not hard to implement. The mist was already programmed (menhir 2.0)

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But whatever. I don't really care about the time it took to implement anyway, but telling it 10 minutes work is just clueless ... in german there's a cute word for it: Gesabbel. If someone knows an english pendant, feel free to hit me up.

Seems like you do care about it no? We both agreed the changes were not hard to implement. They changed values. Maybe I should have said a day. But I thought it was obvious I did not mean it in exactly 10 mins.

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As a professional programmer you would know how much stuff can go wrong, how many unexpected issues can occur and that 6k+ registrations at the start (compare to a forth or so for regular servers?) while having more load per player due to 5x speed is a big deal to prepare for.

6k is a very big overstatement, else you'd start with the bucket from reward window.

You forget there is also travian classic and legends.

They also do events. They don't lag this much. They don't have these issues. It's sad to see kingdoms being the worst. The updates here are slow, it feels they don't care about kingdoms as much as other versions, but that might just be me.

Servers can indeed go wrong if you underestimate the playerbase and don't have a way of checking (which I hope they have a way of simulating players on server) and it happens in other companies aswell and they get them fixed day 1 and everything goes fine after that, here it wasnt the case.

Changing values in an already made project, no. I'd be suprised if you managed to screw that up tbh.

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Also I'm pretty sure, if Kingdoms wouldn't care about its players, comx5 would still lag like a piece of eating-results, but it doesn't, because they cared and looked for a solution

This is again something that doesn't make sense to say

"If this is true, then this is false, because as I stated this other thing is true"

Yes they fixed the servers, how does that mean they care about the players?

You do understand we are the ones who spend money on this game, allowing it to run?

They do not care about the players as much as they care about our money.

See the "rewards" on the server which I feel like you totally avoided in your post.

I give proof as to why I feel like they don't care about us, look rewards you avoided to talk about the whole post.

They didn't really spoil us on an event server eh? Something that was suppouse to be more casual and fun.

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Also, the amount of posts from BridgetB should show pretty unambigiously that one (at least she) care(s/d) about the users, one wouldn't inform them on an almost daily basis about news. Note that Bridget herself probably has no idea how to code or how to fix anything, just to prevent "wow that's nice, a post, how about a fix?"-brainless-comments.

Isn't she like, a community manager? You know someone whos job it is to, well, talk to us? It doesn't mean she cares about us, its her job.

This is again the same point as above "Because she talks to us therefore she cares about us" just bad logic. I believe this is called a fallacie but I don't know them all to say for sure

I'll agree with you that BridgetB does her job as good as she can in these circuimstances.

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You're trivializing a lot, ignoring a lot of facts, assuming what fits in your thesis and basically arguing against a false reality that you made up by yourself. Sure, it contains some true facts (like I said, comx5 start was horrible, response times are often way improveable, ...), but all of this is absolutely worthless, if you make up so much stuff.

My words are limited here, as I can't share tickets or anything of that sort. You can make the point this is all made up, sure, but your post just didnt really say anything im sorry, just a wall of text with not big meaning behind it.

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You will reach NOBODY with accusations like "nobody cares all is intentional blablabla". Critics in honor, and I'm sure Kingdom-Guys care about critics, but what if I would tell you "eh, please stop intentionally spreading lies and fakenews without any reason, you're such a bad person, go shame yourself", instead of (trying to) staying objective, tell you why exactly I think that your post is poor and giving you reasonable things to consider? Bet it wouldn't change anything for you, because you'll think "eh, what an idiot, let him shittalk".

You see these assumtions you make here about me? Your post was fine up until this point, don't know what happened here at the end.

You didn't give me any real critic here, I just broke down your points, and I didn't find anything in them. I did not say they're intentional, you're making assumptions again, from your own fake world as you would say.

They're mistakes that happen because the rules are not clear and many situations that can occur in a server are not in the rulebook, meaning you have to contact support who is not allowed to tell if you that action the player did is allowed or not

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Yes, obviously it's true that people would have been willing to accept lags and bugs, if they called it test server. No doubt.

Agree.

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But it wasn't meant to be a test server. Accusations like "ehhh all intentional, TG just wants to guinea pig us" are most likely wrong, frustrationbased, unproductive, unconstructive and probably some more negative words. You have no insight in their management and in what their plans and true intentions are. You say yourself you have no knowledge about the behind the scenes of online games like Kingdoms. Yet you think you have the competence to decide whether the problems were intentional, expectable and whatnot.

Again, how can you come to the conclusion that they MOST LIKELY wrong if you don't have insight, you can't have an opinion without insight.

You have no knowledge about the behind the scenes, you think you have the competence to decide anything?

I just used your own point against you, make you see how it sounds ridicilous and how you in the same point, don't follow it as you seem to have decided that our opinions are wrong based on, well not insight.

We play the game. We all see what's happening. I am saying what I feel like is happening. I do not have to be part of the company to voice my concerns or to have insights to speak. My points are made as I said, from things everyone can relate, and everyone can realize that comx5 feels like a big playtest server. It's an event server yes, but they also used it as test server, check the new things that are added, they're planning on implementing them to the real game anyway. This is a big playtest. Feel free to change my mind on this

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But if one has no idea and zero knowledge, one should just stay back with accusations like yours or OP's. You don't know what could go wrong unexpectedly, you can't judge whether something was guinea pigging or just were non-predictable or hard-to-predict problems - but yet you do judge and say "ah, it's intentional, TG abuses us as test subjects, fucking ripoff". And this is where you're simply wrong, destroying your argument, rendering your critic useless and causing yourself to be ignored.

(10,000 char limit)

Again, it seems like we are not allowed to speak in your thinking. How can you say I have no idea and knowledge, what insight do you have in my private house to make those points!!! Thats ridicilous!!!

As stated above, you did not talk about the rewards on comx5, probably knowing they make your points weak.

You have this very weird thinking of what is right and wrong, what you can do and not, and it seems like you can call others wrong, (see quote) but we can't call something bad or a playtest.

It's very hard to have a normal conversation if you don't really give arguements why it's not a playtest, but rather say YOU DON'T WORK AT THE COMPANY YOU DON'T KNOW IF IT IS OR NOT.

I was really excited to talk with someone about this, but your points do not allow a conversation to be held.

I still thank your for the time you took to write all this, and the time you took to read my post.Have a good day!

Edit: I also hope we meet on the battlefield some day, together or against. I was planning on joining a DE server, I can understand german perfectly but my grammar isn't something to brag about

Hello Be2-e4 here is again my response.

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I did not say they're intentional, you're making assumptions again, from your own fake world as you would say.

You did not finish my quote, as I go on to say

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You didn't give me any real critic here, I just broke down your points, and I didn't find anything in them. I did not say they're intentional, you're making assumptions again, from your own fake world as you would say.

They're mistakes that happen because the rules are not clear and many situations that can occur in a server are not in the rulebook, meaning you have to contact support who is not allowed to tell if you that action the player did is allowed or not

Your mixing points here, and it's hard to have this debate when on one hand we're talking about

1)Comx5 being a failure - which we agreed on

2)Travian Kingdoms using this event as a playtest aswell as an cheap event - which we don't agree on

3)Travian rulebook is outdated, and needs to be updated.

And you seem to be using my arguements from one thing, for another one.

As you can see, the full quote is actually a part of the 3) point, about the rulebook, which you just did not want to include for whatever reason.

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I also wonder how one can even mess up to interpret my "I never experienced bans on com, therefore I have no idea about the specific bans you mentioned" as "never happened to me => not true and even if true, they're humans". I did really rarely read such a nonesense. In case you really missed the point: The paragraph as a whole says "most cheaters lie about their ban and it's very likely that a banned guy who claims to be innocent is a lying cheater and not an innocent player - but I don't know the guys that were banned, so I can't tell in that specific case".

And by the way, no. I did not mean my kingdom. I meant that no player I tried to interact with was ever banned on com.

I skipped over that point because as you can see, it gets us nowhere, I didn't feel like I had to explain that, but sure let's talk about that one aswell.

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Which gets me to your next point. As I don't play com often (and if I did I never experienced bans anywhere) and don't know the specific cases you're talking about, I obviously can't speak for those. But speaking from long-term Travian experience (not only kingdoms, but also Legends and T3), I know that nobody will ever admit to cheating at all. Never. Everybody claims it's TG's fault, even if they're botting with 12 bots at once and having 4 multis. There of course may be false bans, Travian staff is also just human, and there are also bans for not cheating (e.g. insults and payment problems) - and I even agree, that often one might wish for a quicker response time from the staff in such cases, but your accusations of being random or even intentionally random or false are just nonesense.

I don't know whether the problem is much worse on COM than in DE, but I know a lot (most?) active and long-term players in DE and write with them occasionally and I would definitely have heared if players would be complaining about random / incorrect bans and irresponsibly high response times.

By the way. One time a guy in DE was banned for multiaccounting + pw sharing + blackmailing (back then when the last one was forbidden). I was in his kingdom. In kingdom chat he was like "nah I'm innocent, TG sucks, wtf are they thinking, idiots, blablabla", when talking to him via PM he was like "no idea how they found out that it's my multi and that I have xxx's password -.-". So better think twice whether you can trust your information, cheaters will never or rarely admit their cheating towards publicity.

This is your WHOLE point, so it can't be taken out of context, let's look at it in great detail.

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As I don't play com often (and if I did I never experienced bans anywhere) and don't know the specific cases you're talking about, I obviously can't speak for those. But speaking from long-term Travian experience (not only kingdoms, but also Legends and T3), I know that nobody will ever admit to cheating at all. Never.

Sure, we can agree that people will not admit on cheating, we will ignore the fact that later on you write

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By the way. One time a guy in DE was banned for multiaccounting + pw sharing + blackmailing (back then when the last one was forbidden). I was in his kingdom. In kingdom chat he was like "nah I'm innocent, TG sucks, wtf are they thinking, idiots, blablabla", when talking to him via PM he was like "no idea how they found out that it's my multi and that I have xxx's password -.-". So better think twice whether you can trust your information, cheaters will never or rarely admit their cheating towards publicity.

Because well, the arguement won't go anywhere, because I can claim oh well he is honest to me in private, how do you know he isn't blah blah blah and we get nowhere. This information about him telling you just doesn't mean anything.

This information does not discredit my point, and it does nothing to further yours therefore I did not respond to it as it doesn't acomplish anything.

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And by the way, no. I did not mean my kingdom. I meant that no player I tried to interact with was ever banned on com.

Now hold on a minute, you said you don't play on com! How can you have an opinion about com! - You see this arguement of yours that you use in this post im responding too aswell, I don't know how you can even respond to this if you don't play on com using your logic, it's feels like to me you put yourself over others or something along those lines for certain thinking rules to not apply to you but to others they do. Which makes this conversation very hard, as if I use all these random rules you made about having an opinion, I could just respond in 1 line of text saying

"You have not played on com enough"

And conversation is over, but no, I am breaking down your points for you, to try and explain why they aren't that great.

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1) True, 6k was an overstatement, but the actual number doesn't really matter. Comx5 had way more registrations than a normal server, and it's hard to plan, test and prepare for.

Agree.

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2) You say I can't tell your accusations concerning TG's intentions are wrong, because I don't have insight either. Partly true, I don't have insight. But mostly false, because I do have the technical knowledge to know what's going on behind the scenes. If you recall, I even posted a workaround to the lags for the players. The lagginess of comx5 is exactly what I would expect to happen if an unexpected amount of server load is happening. As Dev (to clarify: not dev at TG), I know, that just throwing more hardware at the server won't work. => Find the bottleneck, refactor it, test it, patch it, see if it's better. Which might take some time. Sure, if you offer some game like idk, LoL, CS or similar where a single match contains only a hand ful of players, it's easy to add more servers to balance the load out. Doesn't work for games like Kingdoms though, at least not so trivially.

I don't believe you have insight. And what now? Your way of thinking is impossible to argue with.

I will ignore this whole point aswell, there is nothing I can add to it. If I ignore this all insight thing of yours I used to make fun of hoping you would realize how ridicillous it is, I agree with your point here.

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3) Obviously it's Bridget's job to communicate to us. But the way she does her job, that she's doing it well and putting much effort in it shows, that she actually cares. Pretty sure her contract didn't state, that she has to post highfrequent updates about the status, try to entertain the users with forum games while incidents, etc. - caring and job doesn't exclude each other. More like the opposite, caring and job have a great synergy.

So, we have my background knowledge, Bridget's posts and the benefit of doubt for TG for the "nope, no test server in disguise"-side. And a "there was lag!!!!!!!!!" for your side. May everyone conclude for oneself.

Well we can't argue about her job, we don't have insight do we now?

She does the PR here.

Lets say amazon goes down, and their PR person gives you update on thats its getting fixed, I don't think you go the next day thinking amazon really loves its customers do you?

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So, we have my background knowledge, Bridget's posts and the benefit of doubt for TG for the "nope, no test server in disguise"-side. And a "there was lag!!!!!!!!!" for your side. May everyone conclude for oneself.

My god, what is this message?

You background knowledge means nothing.

I assume you mean bridget "we're working on it post" seems like you're mixings and this needed to be higher up.

How is it benefit of doubt, we have proof the mist is menhir 2.0, it's on them to prove this is not an test server in disguise with REWARDS because it's an EVENT and it should feel SPECIAL hence the name EVENT.

You AGAIN did not say anything about rewards knowing it makes your points weak. So please, next time use all of my points, I even said above you did not react to them, now you did the same thing. If you feel they're not important, please explain that as I did just now, why I did not respond to everything you wrote as some parts just seem to be a waste of text.

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Also, I mentioned a few times now, that critic is completly fine and appropiate - but accusing other people (in this case TG) that they (ab)use their community as labor rats to disguise special servers as test servers is a nogo. Also, please re-read my (first) post, this time without taking stuff out of context and interpreting what you just feel like. Few of your points were totally nonesense and arguing against what I never said or intended to say, you completely missed the point a few times.

Critic is fine, but not fine if you don't agree with it? Sure it might seem like accusing, if you I don't know IGNORE MY POINTS, IGNORE REWARDS, IGNORE THE POINT THAT THIS EVENT SERVER IS NOT SPECIAL,IGNORE THE FACT MIST IS MENHIR 2.0, then yes, IF we ignore all of that I agree with you here, you should critic, which I did, and not accuse without proof.

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Also, please re-read my (first) post, this time without taking stuff out of context and interpreting what you just feel like. Few of your points were totally nonesense and arguing against what I never said or intended to say, you completely missed the point a few times.

I mean what do I respond to here, no quotes no nothing, I don't have a clue which point you meant with you didn't which part I missed or which part I didnt understand you with, so good job on calling my points nonsense without taking time to explain them one by one which I did.

Thank you for your time again!

I will make this my final message on this thread.

I am sorry if this came over as crying, I am not certain what I could had done to change that, I felt like I gave some valid points and did not cry about this and that, rather asking for certain changes to be made which I will highlight here one last time:

1)Rulebook needs to be clearer (sitting inactive account come to mind first).

2)Support response time has to be improved, waiting days is not acceptable.

3)Event servers need to be special (make real rewards, not 1xp scroll)

4)You should get a reason why you were banned in-game, so you can plead your case faster

If anyone wants to continue this debate or ask me more questions, please feel free to send me a private message, I will respond to everyone.

Last but not least, I want to thank everyone who responded, agree with me or disagree, and in general took the time to read this long thread.

I wish all of you nothing but the best, in future travian servers as in real life. Hope there are no hard feelings after this small and very civil debate we had.

Beast