How to noble a village you are account sitting

Checking the back-end of my blog I found a strange search term that has been used a lot to get to my blog:

“How to noble a village you are account sitting”

The answer: Not

Tribalwars: Running a forum

Introduction

Tribalwars Forums. Useful interaction platform for people with a common goal: To discuss the game they love. This post is all about the behind-the-scenes of the forums at Tribalwars with an aim to give regular posters a bit more insight into the dealing and wheeling that happens behind the scene.

My background

I come into my latest role as the forum moderator for Worlds 17 and 18 with a long Tribalwars history, I started playing when W2 was relatively new, by now that makes me one of the longest-playing people in Tribalwars (although I just deleted my W35 account!) I joined the TW team shortly after starting to play, Hoodoo liked my application and pulled me in from a large group of applicants. I started on the forum but soon moved into the role of multihunter and have had various positions on the TW team since.

Spirit of the forum

I have witnessed many changes to the game, but one thing remains stable throughout, the problems of making sure the forum is a level playing field for everybody, from newbie to noobie to decorated war-veteran. To ensure a standard the code of practice, or rules, for posting on the forum has evolved over the years, but in the end it is the moderators’ responsibility to ensure that his/her forum is operating in the spirit of the rule and the game.

Some mods prefer to do this by infracting everything that goes into the rule, sometimes taking the written word a bit too strict and upsetting people which results in regular posters abandoning the forum and a reduced activity overall. Other mods, like me, interpret the rules for specific situations. Sometimes resulting in swift banning, but frequently ending in a warning for poor understanding of the rules, warnings that usually end up in a “thank you for not infracting” message from the recipient.

This result is possible because regular posters know that the other category of mods (the strict ones) exist as well, together we form a team that ensures optimal performance of the moderating. Balancing this is down to Wim, aka Lord-Haste, who does a great job in supporting and managing a large group of mods, compared to when I started the team of mods is now at least ten times larger!

The forum-moderators now operate in a hierarchy, a so called elder-mod ensures that when I am not able to fulfil my role, it still gets done, the elder-mods in turn are managed by Lord-Haste. The elder-mods are experienced hands, guys and girls that have been around TW for a long time and know the game inside out.

Things to do and not to do…

The things I look out for when modding are numerous:

Language

The forum is frequented by children, this is something that should be in the back of minds when posting at all times. Unfortunately it frequently is the case that the children we aim to protect are the ones that think swearing makes them look tough. It doesn’t and when I spot it I will infract. Thinking that hiding swearing by using alternative characters is OK, is daft.

Spamming

Spamming comes in different categories, I don’t object to the occassional off-topic remark in a thread, it adds to the liveliness of the forum and I will only warn if it is out of context entirely. Usually, when a thread derails, I will notify the posters in that thread that I expect it to get back on track, when that fails I will lock it. The sort of spamming I detest, and for which I will ban without exception, is when two or more people think it is fun to derail topics on purpose and go off on a so called spam-fest. As four people in the last week will testify, a two month ban is on offer for those that think they can get away with it.

trolling

People that make it a hobby to haunt other posters, to wind up other posters and to be derogatory to other posters. This is an image that builds up over time, as a mod it is impossible to read all posts, but certain names will keep coming up and this results in building reputations with mods. A mod can easily see all posts by one poster, a useful tool to find out what the overall tone of the poster is. If and when I identify trolls, I will warn them to alter their attitude, if that does not work they will get banned.

Flaming

Two types of flaming: one is when one tribe is at war with another and tries to get the moral upperhand by fiery posts that trick the other tribe into losing their cool, fine. The other type is when a single player is continuously singled out by one or more posters, not fine. There are different ways to deal with this, but frequently this will end in a warning with a follow-up ban.

learn to speak English!

I thoroughly detest people telling other people that their English is not good enough. Frequently this is done by people with a superiority complex that fail to see that other posters can have a variety of backgrounds which cause them to not speak English well, dyslexia, poor education, or most often, not being a native-speaker. I will warn for this as it is unsavoury, however there is no rule against it, merely a moral etiquette. Please adhere to it!

Reporting

Our most effective way of finding posts that have gone bad, is by other posters reporting them, please do! It helps us keep control and it helps you keep a forum that is worth visiting! There is always a group of ‘core-reporters’ these are the names that will end up being nominated for functions as mods.

Appealing

If you do not agree with an infraction or a warning and you want to appeal, please feel free to do so. Contact the infracting mod, if the answer is not satisfactory, contact the elder mod and if that is not conclusive contact Lord-Haste.  But remember to keep your argument clear and fair. Appeals from people that reduce themselves to a swearing and insulting heap of pity will get ignored.

I hope you gained some insight in the way modding the TW-forums works, feel free to PM me on the forum with questions or ask them in reply to this blogpost.

Tribal relations

Yes, another Tribalwars post, an academic one next

Currently I play World 24 and World 26, in both worlds I am part of a tribe with a low number of allies and NAPs (Non Attack Pacts). Due to recent events in World 24 I reminisced about the situation in World 2 where I got so bored with all the diplomatic ties that I decided to go Gung-Ho against RUM, leading to me leaving that world after gifting my villages to the Saints and ESL (RUM didn’t manage to get a lot of the villages, even though they tried hard and I had at least 2000 incoming over the time span of a week.

The dreaded Sea of Blue that forced me to come to that decision was built up over time. ESL have always had great esteem for their allies and this philosophy in the end led to us having too many alliances. Hence our careful decision making process in World 24. In light of this progress that we made over the last two years I decided to describe what an alliance means to ESL.

ESL is a very hardcore and solid group of players, we are reclusive and it is very difficult to get access to our tribe. Those that manage tend to like it so much that they take up our philosophy very quickly. It is exactly that mentality that leads to us being careful with alliances, we believe that an ally is bonded to us by more then light blue dots on the map. When they are in need we will support them, when we are in need we expect them to support us. When they go to war and it isn’t going well we will join them and help tip the balance and vice versa.

NAPs are exactly that, an agreement to not attack each other. However, a NAP with ESL tends to be what an alliance is to other tribes. We will not drop an NAP nilly-willy and will consider requests for assistance from our NAPs.

I am curious as to what your views are on alliances and NAPs, I know there are quite extreme views, for example an NAP standing for Next Attack Project etcetera. Let me know!

Tribalwars, new special world?

By now all Tribalwars players that are reasonably engaged to the game will have heard of the extreme settings that Lizy treated us to for World 27. No changing of tribes, automated joining of pre-made tribes, election of duke at 100 members… madness!

There is no doubt that World 27 has opened the way for a discussion on how the game could possibly progress. After reading Moomix1’s post in the world 9 forum, I realised that there was another pre-made tribe variety that would be interesting. Namely the one where you get to join the world with your pre-selected tribemembers. Five in total! In this pre-made world you decide on your tribe before joining, without the option of leaving, and you will be guaranteed neighbours.The world would also be without restart.

This would mean that in this world you don’t get rimmed, you get KOd properly.

This then would result in your tribe being one member down, meaning that there is an increased pressure on the other four to compete.

I would imagine this world being a lot of fun for the dedicated players. It would almost feel like a speed world on slow speed settings. The fact that you would have to choose your partners in crime beforehand will be great, can you imagine the discussions on IRC and Skype? “No Sachiye! I don’t want to swap Spleen.mage for you…”

Apparently there are numerous reasons why this world wouldn’t be possible, but still. Lets throw it out there via this blog, lets get some discussion going and who knows what comes from this!

Tribalwars returns to this blog!

I stopped blogging on tribalwars for a while, as I moved posts to the TWstats blog. However, that is some time ago now and that blog is not active anymore. Therefore this brief statement that blogging on Tribalwars has returned to this address.

I am looking for topics, so I want to have feedback from you on the topics you would like to see this old Dogg write about.

The famous paladin logo!

blog at twstats.com

In recent weeks I have worked on launching the blog for twstats which hopefully will turn into the (un)official tribalwars.net blog. It has been a lot of fun to set it up but now we hit a brick wall trying to get it launched properly. I feel we need some more contributors, click on the thumbnail below to get an impression of the great artwork by Mandril!

The blog will serve a gamers community with over 250.000 active players so it is bound to make an impression somewhere! I don’t actually know whether this is the reason I am postponing it’s launch

If you feel you can contribute as either a World-blogger, a columnist or someone that can help writing entries on tech and graphics then feel free to drop me a comment here! If you want a sneak preview before the official launch then check out http://blog.twstats.com

This also means that on this blog I will be paying less attention to tribalwars, I will still use it to vent my personal opinion (I think) but this blog will slowly shift to an Information Management Blog (Gotta love education!)

Tribalwars: Politics on-line

One of the fatal attractions of Tribalwars is no-doubt that it involves a massive amount of politics. Most players will not be interested in this until they feel they have some knowledge of the game in general, but once you move up the echolons of tribal management and get a dubious title like Diplomat, the game has got you hooked forever.

Personally I have encountered tribal management at the highest level during the beginning months of World 4. I was the duke of a well respected tribe that had moved into the top 40 of the listings and had a massive reputation from a previous world. I decided to go in head-up, shoulders broad and full of pride. That was a mistake, and declaring war on the number one and two tribe was as well.

Now that I play again in World 10 I am once again encountering the politics of the game and loving it every bit as much as I did back then. Fortunately for my tribe I am not the duke this time (So we have a chance of survival!) but I am close enough to the fire to realise that World 10 is proving to be very interesting indeed. Never before has there been a tw.net world with so many good dukes around! All the tribes in the top-segment appear well organised and it is going to be a real tour-de-force to make it to the top 5.

All in all, Tribalwars is such a succesful game because of the politics. The people that manage the tribal relationships and declare who you have to fight next. I have witnessed first hand that the right politics make a tribe move forward, and bad politics can implode a tribe in no-time. Therefore I wish the DND-members a good time in World 10, albeit as part of a different, rimside oriented tribe!

(See, what I did there was a bit of politics!)

Tribalwars: Complicated Server issues

A lot of people have questions about why the server(s) go(es) down on tribalwars.net. The answers are not straightforward without a basic knowledge of how the Internet works. I will give a basic overview of potential causes for problems in this blog. If it gets a bit technical I do apologise.

Tribalwars.net is an Internet based game. This means that you, as a player, log onto a website to play the game. This is important to know for two reasons: One; the game does not run on your own computer, a lot of problems that affect all players therefore have nothing to do with your computer. Two; you are relying on the internet to provide a stable environment for you to play the game on.

The fact that the game runs on the internet does not mean it does not need a computer to play. The computer (simplified) that this game runs on is called a server, you log onto this server with your home-computer. This server provides all the ingredients needed for you to log into an active and non-stop gaming world. This is also the reason why sometimes the game has collective problems. If the server can not process something, because of a bug, because too many requests from too many players occur, or because it is having difficulty with the connection with the internet then all players logging into that server will encounter a problem. It is important to realise that the game does not actually run on ONE server, but relies on several servers to be presented in the way it is.

One of the servers that can cause great grieve is the DNS server. You might have heard of DNS and I will not dive into what it is supposed to do other than that it provides a way of connecting a specific server (computer!) to your computer by resolving the name of the game and connecting it to the right combination of numbers (IP plus port) . This DNS server is not actually maintained by the makers of Tribalwars but by the provider of the game. The provider tends to use one DNS server for many other servers which is a reason for the provider to look after it extremely well. However: Things can go wrong, and when they do, it causes problems for all the servers relying on that DNS server to provide the right instructions.

The recent problems we have had were mostly to do with the DNS server. I can assure you that as a team we apologise for the inconvenience caused! I will continue blogs on this subject, I don’t want to bore you to death. If you have suggestions for this topic then please let me know!

Tribalwars: Grey village disputes?

Well, it is to be hoped I will get subjects like this handed on a regular basis. This has really got me riling. Apparently in World 2 there is now a discussion about who should take which grey village! I am a World 2 vet, it is the world that I got innoculated on and I have learned most from playing this world. I had a fantastic tribe (ESL) with some fantastic leaders in Lokinder and vpar2. I grew more and more frustrated with the enormous clusters of allied villages though so I decided to give up by launching attacks on RUM independently, thanks to the Saints and ESL backing my villages RUM didn’t manage to delete me though, so in the end I gifted my villages to these tribes.

What frustrated me then has probably grown into a new cultural habit on World 2 as apparently it is now even necessary to eliminate the last viable targets by discussing who gets to take which grey (abandoned) village. I have one word for you lot:

SICK

Tribalwars is a wargame, I don’t understand how you do NOT get completely pigsick of playing a wargame without actually having a war. An organised attack/defense scheme as you seem to develop on this world is beyond all tolerable playability levels in my opinion. Basically the strongest characters/tribes dominate the world and decide it is all cast in a pattern that no one can jump out off. It is a good job the world got locked for new players as they would immediatly leave the game again due to boredom!

 

For those that argue there are wars going on after the CEG debacle, true! Good for you! but the war is only interesting for those that are on the frontline. Players like Pepperbro and Cpt_Jack have a great time slugging it out against each other, but I know for a fact that the majority of players are so hemmed into the brutal strapjacket of their tribes faulty and ridiculous alliances that logging in once every three days to avoid being gobbled up by your own tribe is enough to play.

 

 

 

I say we lock World 2, set all inactive and semi-inactive accounts (including those being sat for weeks on end) to Barbarian and generate some fighting spirit again! Oh and whilst we’re at it anyway, let’s disband all tribes. Bureaucracy should not be tolerated in the one place where war actually creates fun and excitement!

Tribalwars: Gifting bans

There are not many rules that I have difficulty with to enforce. But the gifting rule is one that causes a lot of controversy. I will try to explain what is going on with this rule that actually causes the problem in this blog, I am looking forward to comments on the subject.

Someone called Player X is fighting for months to gain 50 villages. He does so with help from his tribe, but he is always free to join another one as ultimately he is an individual entity in the game and gets judged as such. Player X however has a girlfriend that is pregnant and decides to leave the game. He clears his villages by sending the troops as support to needy tribemates and organises his tribemates to noble his villages.

This is fair, it is allowed and will not cause any reason for me to shout at you.

Someone called Player Y however is also the proud owner of 50 villages. He got them with some help from his tribe. He however gets bored with Tribalwars (Yeah right, like that is realistic!) and sets a sitter and leaves. The sitter is likely to be a tribemate and after a few weeks decides he is fed up with sitting the account. He sets up his tribe to noble the villages and clears them out beforehand.

This is not fair, the problem occurs because the sitter is not the original owner of the account and the sitter will benefit from the distribution of the villages between his tribemates. This will result in me getting annoyed with the sitter and the tribe, resulting in a punishment (of various nature, depending on a lot of factors)

A lot of people get upset about this. But the answer is actually really straightforward: If you are a sitter of an account you don’t want to sit anymore, choose to end account sitting. Wait for a good while (24 horus at least, but I advise to wait for a week) and then take the account over WITHOUT having moved all the defense out of the villages. If we see proof that the villages were legitly conquered (ie. troops were killed in the process, no troops were moved out before by a sitter) we will not oppose the taking over of the villages as it then falls under the normal ennoblement rules. And ennobling is a standard exercise of the game, regardless of whether it is in-tribe ennobling or not.

The controversy this rule creates is open for discussion but at the moment we lack any other ways of dealing with the concept of gifting. We do need a rule however because of the last example:

Player Z has set a sitter because he is going on holiday for a week. He is the proud owner of 50 villages. He comes home from a great time in Greece and logs into his account to find he is left with one 250 point village. He checks twstats.com and sees to his astonishment that all his villages have been taken by his tribe! His sitter betrayed him and emptied all his villages for easy ennoblement. Trust me, this happens. Would you like it to happen to you? Be smart, gift with sense!