Most of us don’t like cheaters, farm bots, multiaccounts, all tricks that are used who maybe isn’t against the rules but still leaves a shadow on some topplayers ranks.
The most troublesome is that younger players wants to imitate those players and try the same since they seldom is punished. Even if a players behavior is clearly a cheat in others players eyes the MHs need real proof to ban them.
I think it is up to us that want’s a fair game to set pressure on our members in the alliances and firmly state that we don’t accept this.
On the forum.com I saw a post about how russian players farmed their own wings and it was said that it existed a picture of it. I begin to hunt it and met a friend. Shayne on Seditious, from the Final 2013 and we discussed the matter. As it turned out I think it can be of interest for my readers so I turned it into an intervju.
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Safiren: Hi, can you help me to contact a player on the forum? He have a picture I want.
Shayne: It was me who gave him the damn picture in the first place. It was me and my co-leader who got Combat banned.He was banned 3 times I think. 3rd time he was reduced population and probably lost his troops.
Safiren: When did you first suspect that Combat was a cheater and in what way?
Shayne: The first ban wasn’t us. We were having issues with him farming and hitting players, and one day he stopped, and he had been banned.
We had a player getting hit once every 11-22 minutes~ it started to become a pattern—after he was unbanned. My co-lead and I began tracking his attacks, had a list of attacks for over 18 hours in a spreadsheet. Webegan mapping out the pattern over a couple of days, sent and explained it to the MH with report links. That finally got him banned the 2nd time.We had a player delete because of it (He moved to another account) but as we told the MH. How was he supposed to rebuild with attacks coming in non-stop?
The third time, I was sitting a friend, moved her to a SW wing to help with moving accounts over to the new alliances. I saw Combat doing it there, sent a report to the MH. I think they did the same with our wing and the one guy again since he picked it back up.
He was banned for 1-2 days the first time, 3 days the second time, and I think 3 days the third time–this time with pop decrease and troop reset.
Safiren: I’ve got a player, Punisher, banned on qualification.de for farm bot, rank 3 robber. He sent about 25 raids every hour, day and night for weeks. I think that who made me tired on him was that he never seemed to notice that he never got anything. So I put my heroine on duty, killed all his raiders and wrote to MH. If you use bots you at least have to be clever enough to let it rest sometimes and not beeing so obvious 😛
I have my suspicion that I have been visited by farm bots on other qualification servers too. For example on .fr I had more then 200 incomings every time I logged in for a big part of the server before midgame, it was 4 players, I think, but I never had time then to follow it up.
The saudiarabian qualification, who have been very calm, usually 5 incomings, suddenly exploded up to 80 some week ago. I checked it out. It was 3 players. One seems to be real, he sleeps regulary, but not on the list, as none of them. The other two sent as regulary as Punisher did, but they have lesser troops so only 5 per hour. So I guess it is smaller players trying the same as the bigger ones. Both stopped today as suddenly as they started.
And look at this, the climberlist – full of bot accounts, all with 10 pop.
Safiren: Have it been many bot registred accouts on .com this round? I remember the picture I got from .uk where it was thick rings with bot accounts.
Shayne: usx had Russians/Iranians come in large numbers to play, 12,000/20,000 accounts were banned a week or so into it. Not as many here, but there were quite a few.
Safiren: So the russians aren’t alone as massive bot users?
Shayne: We think it was the Russians there, but could have been the Iranians.
Shayne: I just got 12/15 people in a Russian alliance banned for multi-ing.
Safiren: Yeah, the ones with simular villagenames. I noticed that in another context.
Shayne: Reports from Ku-ku alliance I believe, The attack list you asked for earlier. It was said that ku-ku is full of multi-accounts only.
Safiren: What I noticed in the Final, was that inactive russias account was moved to a separat wing, so they know who they could farm. That ku-ku ally have been punished now. All have lost more then 50% pop and are still banned. I wonder why they just only delete them? Banned account should be deleted faster than today. On aux several banned accounts sat on many importent artefacts. It should be a limit on 2 weeks.
Shayne: This one’s deemed COMEDI’s personal farm alliance.
Shayne: We have a player, Mainz_srb– he has single handedly put his team on the Robber Board at times just by raiding inactive Russian farm accounts.
Safiren: The easiest bots to discover – for us players at least if not for the MH’s is it farm bots and multi-accounts?
Shayne: Farm bots. There’s constant records of action, and checking if it’s humanly possible– as well as whether the account is logged in while the farming occurs (I think at least). Multi-accounting, they want to trace IP addressess, see similarities, etc.
Safiren: In the Final I several times got reports that it was hard to attack russians without beeing discovered. An account who showed all signs to be offline, suddenly woked up within 5 min after that the attacks was launched. I have read about a bot so you can set an alarm when being attacked. Have you noticed any like that this round?
Shayne: Most of the time, it’s after a few hours that the Russians seem to see attacks that they become active. I have heard of alarms like that, never from my team though…Wouldn’t surprise me if they had them, but I can’t think of instances where we’ve been caught by them.
Safiren: How about the silver cheating? Have TG manage to stop that?
Shayne: As far as pushing silver from one account to another. I think that is why they banned the 12k accounts on usx, because they were deflating auction prices. Not sure what they’ve done. Seller cannot see his item time or what the sale is up to.
Safiren: How has this qualification run, ccompared to the Final with all problems?
Shayne: No maitenance down times every day, I think there have been 1-2 cases of a few hours offline, but not as bad as the Finals. Cheating obviously equal to what we saw though- Mhs not eager to take action, etc.
Safiren: Nice to hear that T4.2 runs more smothly but what shall we do about this cheating? It isn’t good for the morale and a fair game.
Shayne: Good question…I spoke with some of my SE wing leaders last night and talked some about how we could go about getting the cheating to stop, or if there was a game similar to travian we could switch to… Until TG has incentive to get rid of the cheating, like seeing 1000-2000 players quit a server because of it, nothing will happen. Russians obviously put enough into their pockets to give them reason to not do anything as of yet.
Safiren: How about cheaters in your own ranks?
Shayne: Most of my guys know I don’t want to hear about it if they do. Vietnamese ran multi accounts, but have been dropped from my team. So cheaters are few and far between as far as I know.
Safiren: Should you kick a player you know is cheating?
Shayne: If a player brings it up in chat that they are, I tell them I don’t advocate cheating and would prefer they not, but that I don’t want to hear about it regardless. If another player brings up an issue with someone else within the alliance, I’d be more inclined.
Safiren: Our younger duals (18) on aux wanted the follow a leaders example with an own multi ally, I told them firmly I will not accept such behavior. But I think one of them fixed res to us from that ally in one ore two occussions. But he have told me later that he now knows that you can reach top5 without dirty tricks.
It’s not easy to stop this sort of cheating when leaders, who the younger players adore, don’t have any morale themselves.
Shayne: Agreed. I’m probably bit of a hypocrit myself. I’d jump at the chance to report someone I dislike/am fighting against, but when it’s from my side, more of see no evil type of thing.
Safiren: Ah well, if you want to stop the cheating you have to clean amongst your own first. I think we must talk more openly about the cheating. If we make clear such a behavior isn’t acceptable and don’t let cheaters join, some will stop. But not the big ones unfortnatelly, and it’s those who players will try to do the same as.
Thankyou for a very nice evening with a serious discussion!
Russian sites about bots
My interview with the german leader ended up in a discussion about bots.
Ron: You know that some of us played .ru, you know how they cheat?
Safiren: They are innovative too, some of the things they do is not against the rules as they are formulated now, much is all about activity and teamwork. But I know the igm’s with links you spoke of, they show up on the most servers.
Ron: Onlineshops for defense, for ressources…. Onlineshop uses accs played from bots. You can buy deff for not much money in some shops. You can change your country and currency, than the prices rise 🙂
Ron: Last tournament we were wondering why the Comedi-acc has at the 14th day 20k clubswingers in his mainvillage. He was a russian, the mainvillage was from the third day. On a mainvillage no great barracks. It means he was founding the main off at the first day. That is no problem – but from the second day he has to build with barracks average level 18 to reach 20k clubswingers
<<< explain this.
Safiren: I can’t, but it sounds rather expensive. I guess it is possible with a lot of boost, but then next question is what sort of accounts who are in use. It maybe isn’t possible any longer now when they have stopped boosting if you have less then 40 pop.
Much of what we called cheating back in the old days when the rules stated that you had to play your account to its own benefit, when it was forbidden to make agreements about chiefing, is now only another way to play the game. You can have a lot of friends starting account with the only purpose to support you.
But cheating exists, sorry to say, and as it looks it’s more common amongst the russians. The rumours also tells that players from Middle East also have this bad behavior. And of course it exits on other domains too. We can not only blame the russians without clearing our own ranks too.
Ron: But different is: if we have cheaters, its first division or second, russians are champions league. They cheat with maffia-structure, in our ranks we have just single persons, and its not called cheating travian, its playing travian I guess.
Safiren: I checked the links you gave me. I found this on a russian page:
This guy have had his business for two years and have had 500 customers who have bought 1700 items. 30 of them is VIP-customers.
I’m not sure how to read how many servers/versions there are cheaters on for now, but at least it indicate that some can be found at the classics which runs now.
This site is not the only one selling bots I guess and it is difficult to estimate how many that uses them. My opinion is that it isn’t as many as people believe, I may be naive, but the ones that use them destroy the reputation of their fellows too. And for sure a handful of cheaters dimish the pleasure for the other players on a server. (I only count those that sets their marks in the toplists, I guess there are many more that we don’t notice because even with bots they are not good enough).
On my 19 observation accounts (16 qualification, sez,aux, classic.com) it is quite easy to guess where farmbots are used. They always show up as a ridiculous amounts of incoming attacks, 24/7 on my lonely village – and they don’t care about getting no resources from me. BUT – when I put my hero in their way and kill the troops, they react faster than I think is possible and stop coming, so the bots must have a function where they stop to farm if troops dies.
Ron: Yes, one yellow flag and it is away from farmlist they told me.
Safiren: I deem that an amount of 5-20 incoming attempts every time I log in is a normal ratio of farming. On some domains it’s even lesser, that’s the one that in fact check their farms and delete me because they never get anything. When it pass 50 I think it’s begin to be ridicolous and over 70 it almost every time look as farm bots. The most I have had is over 200. That was on the french qualification and lasted almost the biggest part of the server before midgame.
And now you maybe wonder about the russian qualification? Most attempts in the beginning, up to 40, and no real suspicions about farmbots. For a longer while it have been down in 0-5 so as a normal server. Of course it’s possible that the bots haven’t found me but that’s not so likely.
For now I’m wondering if I shall report the player on .hu, an italian, for bot or not…
When I play seriously I myself is a Top10 raider so I’m well aware about the concentration that is needed to keep the farming up and how much time it takes to click between pages and scroll trough farmlists. And you also need time to build, queue troops and send traders between sending farmllists.
Ron: Same for me, during the time just before midgame normally we were klicking the farmlist every 10-15mins
Safiren: Next link shows a long list of available bots.
Here I think I have found an explanation on what happened several time in the last Final. Players reported to me that some accounts was very difficult to attack. They could have been observed and looked as they was offline. When attacks was launched it took 5 min for them to wake up. I’m quite sure that this accounts have used the alarm bot.
Ron: Of course the alarm bot is very widespread and a real big problem for the game all over the world, it fills the distance between actives and inactives.
You forgot the ww-builder-function of many bots, it is maybe a reason how they collects and BUILT up to 6 WWs in one account 😉
Safiren: But it make me sick to look on the bot list and see what it possible. A bot who send out hero on adventures?! How lazy can you be and still pretend to play?
The speed servers look to be where players are most tempted to use bots. But if you are willing to pay for such small amount of resources what does that indicate about your skills as a player? The site also claimes it can fill up your nearest oasis with 8 or 4K.
And it looks as he has customers on the .com Tournament too. And he offers transactions to other domains.
Safiren: What can we players do to stop this? My personally believe is that we should be straight about how discusting this is and not turn a blind eye when we suspect it in our own ranks. Kick them, hunt them down, zero their villages, give them red swords 24/7 and of course report them to MH (which have too many restrictions about being sure that it is cheating). A banned account should not be able to keep artefacts for weeks. They should be deleted whitin 10 days, especially if they don’t answer MH at all.
Ron: It’s not our job to do this, it’s the job of Travian GmbH, I know other sites with games and if you log in with the same IP like in another account just to show your acc a friend on his PC and he is playing the same game, you get instantly blocked. That shows just a little cheating, the beginning and they don’t do anything against this, cause Travian GmbH it’s a company. They want to make money, and the cheaters are buying very much gold, spending a heap of money, also for their multiaccounts, they are major costumer.
I think they are not interested to do anything.
Safiren: You gave me more links. The significant with all is that they are in russian. How can russian players think that we shall believe them when they says they are not cheating?