Regarding Draft Game: DDoS

[XDemonX]

First wanted to say, great job to everyone on my team for working hard and making this game easier for me.

I wanted to address a few things so JJ's team could see as well. I was talking to JettJackson and he said this

12:15 xDemonX No you're saying I disinfranchise the game, I kill the playerbase
12:16 xDemonX That is not right at all
12:16 Jett_sleep really because it is an opinion shared entirely by my team, so who is right, your team or mine
12:16 xDemonX Would love to hear from them
12:16 Jett_sleep when the game is inactive we will have our answer

This is a game I have played for a extremely long time. Longer than most admins. So hearing something like this coming from a admin concerns me. My intentions of this game was never to disenfranchise the game or kill the playerbase.

I enjoy games that are competitive. If I ever play a game that has a casual playing style then I do not play the game long. JJ and I have been talking day 1 since the draft voting even started to discuss the draft. Of course, JJ has led many times. He has most likely led more alliances than anyone in SMR history. I told him many times before the draft round started I did not want to lead but there isn't many people stepping up. When Naeblis was flirting with stepping up I even came to him and said I would let Naeblis lead, or possibly Milly was thinking about it. JJ of course laughed at the idea and claimed it wouldn't even be a matchup for him. Also I had several people trying to force me to lead (ahem.. CK).

Of course with every draft round, trash talking will occur. It makes the game fun and gets people invested in the game. Makes them want to win just to beat the other person. JJ claimed before the round that he was "Going to go hard" at me from the get go. Which gave me some interest. Like I said I love competitive games. I think the previous draft round between Azn and Seldum was the most fun i've had in a while because I think it was competitive.

Before the draft round started, JJ came to me to make a deal. He wanted Bouncer on his team. He claimed it was unfair that he had to be separated from Bouncer for so many games to try to balance the team and now its his turn to have him back. He said Bouncer is the only one he trusts outside of Sergei and Sergei had all these vacations planned. Bouncer is one of my favorite people in SMR. When I quit a few rounds ago, he was the one who convinced me to come back. He made the game fun for me again so of course I wanted him on my team as well.

I wasn't going to give Bouncer up easily. The draft style was selected beforehand that first pick gets 1 person, second pick gets 2 people then it goes back to 1 pick, 1 pick. Now, I originally refused any deal JJ wanted to make for Bouncer. As days went on I thought about it and approached JJ because other circumstances came up.

CK and Hugh were not sure if they were going to play and they did not want to play for JJ (both had various reasons for not wanting to play at all). So the deal was made, he gets first pick which he takes bouncer and I get CK and Hugh if they decide to play, Also JJ can tell me who he wants with his next pick and I won't take them with my next 2 picks as long as it wasn't Sergei. (This essentially made the draft style to be each person got 1 pick). He wanted Shady_FA so I agreed not to pick Shady. Deal was agreed on and that was the end of it.

I had several plans for the game before the game even started strategy wise. I had everything on a timeline. Less than 48h into the game, JJ sends his first message to CK saying "Congrats you won the game". This is after we killed JJ at the bank pulling money out for a Rav. For the first week or so, CK and myself were the only ones in my alliance who had a hunter. I understood money is usually the biggest hurdle in any alliance so I needed everyone trading as much money as possible. I had some traders working their ass off to just make 2-3m a day, but when you have 30 people on your team that 2-3m a day adds up and that is what I had to explain to them.

After a couple days, JJ started sending more messages already claiming we were ruining the game because we were on 24/7 and he couldn't do anything against robots who don't sleep. Now, we gave the impression we were on a lot. Realistically we were not on 24/7. How many people do stuff in their daily lives which doesn't involve them having access to a computer most of the day? Exactly. CK and myself hunted together for multiple reasons. One of the reason being is we don't have to be paying attention. I would walk away from my computer for hours at end and just have someone alert me if a certain trader popped or something. CK would do the same. Hell, I even had TeamSpeak on my phone so I could hear someone who was in TeamSpeak say who is on cpl so I don't have to check. JJ never lifted a finger to contest CK and myself. We sat on Salv/WQ gal almost everyday we were pretty obvious about it but instead of JJ trying to set a trap or protect his traders he decides to hide and make people trade when we slept.

Fast forwarding a little while some struggles my alliance had was getting numbers for ops. Our first op we barely got 10 people online to port raid. People showed up 10-15 min late for the op ect. It worried me for the game. This is right after Hitmen had their first PR op and had 15+ people to port raid. So of course I understood that it doesn't matter how well I strategize and plan stuff, if I can't get the numbers for ops we won't win this game.

Several days later Hitmen come on with 20 people. I haven't seen a op this big in a LONG time (https://sphotos-b-ord.xx.fbcdn.net/hpho ... 5010_n.png). So here I am struggling to get 10 people to do port raids, and JJ's alliance gets 20 people to do just port raids. I couldn't imagine the turnout he could of got if he said "Okay guys time to kill them and take some planets". After this op, many Hitmen were claiming to be winning the game, which they were they already had one planet and I was worried.

Of course I started to retaliate by hitting a port. Sorry hitting the port wasn't to "ruin" the game. Hitmen still had 10+ people in birds and made 300-400 mil 3-4 days they had that port up and running. If JJ would of had everyone trade for 2 days he could of made 500m+ most likely. We decided to hit the port after we took one of your planets (1557), yes we were struggling on turns. But I had too, you make 300-400m off of trading and spend barely 50m mining your entire galaxy? Yeah i'll take advantage of that.

Our final op, which we took 3 planets again we did more than expected. I had a plan from the get go to take 1551 first, then possibly retake 1557. Again, no mines and no counter op against us. We only had like 12-13 people. We figured out you parked your entire fleet in fed, so of course after we take the 2 planets I planned the op with, we still had majority of our members having 300+ turns. So why not take 1574 as well if no one is going to contest us. I was not going to say "Oh okay guys good op i know we have people on and you all have 300+ turns but go park". The second JJ decided to park his fleet in fed was the second he lost that game. Few days later he conceded. This was less than a week after Hitmen had a op with 20 people and they decide to to give up?

Last game we were in a extremely similar hole. Seldum had a op to take 1563 (our last big planet). Of course our team could see this coming, instead of running to fed we decided to all land it and hopefully we'll get enough on during their op time to counter. And we countered and they didn't take a single planet. this is what turned the course of the game for us that game. Hitmen could of done the same thing. They had the activity and that is usually the struggle. I just can't figure out why JJ decided to give up so easily.

So again, my goal was not to kill the game. It was to play competitively and win. A lot of my team had fun playing at a decently high level. I tried my best to keep everyone on my team active and use turns when they had turns. I don't think it was too often that anyone sat on full turns with nothing to do. There was always something to do.

JJ never approached me once asking us to hold off a little bit. He could of came to me and said "Hey Demon, look, we made a few mistakes and we would like a week to get our stuff together. Can you give us a week so we can keep this game going?" I would have agreed. In fact, before the op where Hitmen took a planet I talked to CK and told him if JJ came to me asking for a little room I would give it to him. Instead, JJ decided to attempt to put the pressure on us by hitting us. I would have loved to put a route together for people in my alliance who like to do nothing but trade but I did not get the opportunity. Instead, JJ took his ball and went home.

[aznplaya06]

No need to explain yourself Demon. You simply out-thought and outplayed the other leader this round. They had plenty of opportunities to do something but instead decided to hide in fed and not challenge us. We didn't even have a port or route the entire game. There were many times this game when JJ had numbers and could have shipped ppl up to come after CK and Demon but didn't (maybe they weren't trusted enough to get birds?). Demon did nothing to kill this game, if he had just let the other alliance trade in peace until they had a bill in profit then let them op it would do more to kill the game then doing what we did. JJ attacked us first as well so he started his own demise.

[JettJackson]

You won, we lost. Is it necessary to then spit into our faces on top of it. Of course you say you would have given us a break after the fact. There were a lot of things my alliance did wrong that I will openly admit, but you post this sort of diatribe as if you are without blame. It started out as being a loaded draft, yes I got bouncer because of our agreement, inturn you got serg hugh ck for free. You bring up shady but he would have never been your pick you even said as much, so his pick by me is irrelevant. Futhermore you got 2 of them for free mid and after the draft. I had to use my first pick to get bouncer which is where I wasn't given the luxury of having a free pick like you did. Yes this does matter in the scheme of things. Beyond that there were other issues that I had that were done incorrectly when discussing the map for example, the racials were way too connective for the speed of the round. I suggested a racial ring which means they would be connected but someone could not hunt everywhere all day especially with 2x speed. This however was ignored. Then the creonti route was put in place, Jouldax noticed after the game had started which meant it couldn't have been changed and it was way over the top profitable. Yes I could have mined and traded that exclusively but it should have never came to that. It was completely over the top compared to anything else in game. Yes I had a problem with you being on all day, but that was your choice to do so, the problem is this game isn't like years before, people dont have the time to devote to being on all day every day and when someone is, it makes it completely unsettling to want to play that way or be forced to play that way. It got to the point where I was making people trade at 5am Eastern time just to avoid you guys, should that have been the case?

As for taking my ball and going home, I let the alliance decide if the game was over, I never once voted whether or not to concede because this is a team game and I wanted my team to decide whether or not we had the will to keep going and they decided with a great majority mind you that they had enough.

[XDemonX]

You won, we lost. Is it necessary to then spit into our faces on top of it. Of course you say you would have given us a break after the fact. There were a lot of things my alliance did wrong that I will openly admit, but you post this sort of diatribe as if you are without blame. It started out as being a loaded draft, yes I got bouncer because of our agreement, inturn you got serg hugh ck for free. You bring up shady but he would have never been your pick you even said as much, so his pick by me is irrelevant. Futhermore you got 2 of them for free mid and after the draft. I had to use my first pick to get bouncer which is where I wasn't given the luxury of having a free pick like you did. Yes this does matter in the scheme of things. Beyond that there were other issues that I had that were done incorrectly when discussing the map for example, the racials were way too connective for the speed of the round. I suggested a racial ring which means they would be connected but someone could not hunt everywhere all day especially with 2x speed. This however was ignored. Then the creonti route was put in place, Jouldax noticed after the game had started which meant it couldn't have been changed and it was way over the top profitable. Yes I could have mined and traded that exclusively but it should have never came to that. It was completely over the top compared to anything else in game. Yes I had a problem with you being on all day, but that was your choice to do so, the problem is this game isn't like years before, people dont have the time to devote to being on all day every day and when someone is, it makes it completely unsettling to want to play that way or be forced to play that way. It got to the point where I was making people trade at 5am Eastern time just to avoid you guys, should that have been the case?

As for taking my ball and going home, I let the alliance decide if the game was over, I never once voted whether or not to concede because this is a team game and I wanted my team to decide whether or not we had the will to keep going and they decided with a great majority mind you that they had enough.

The point of this thread was not to "spit into your faces". It was to explain my actions because you told me your alliance members believe I am out to ruin the game. We played on the same exact map. I did not have a map advantage, in fact I came to you directly and told you I disliked the racial setup but you wanted to promote early hunting more. I believe the game accommodates for people to be online MORE than they could years ago. There is not many activities you can do in life without being around a computer.

All you had to do is bring out a couple hunters to protect your traders. You had the most salvs in the game and salvs had peace with just about every race. You guys could have flooded Creo which I thought was your plan as soon as Creo/Salv peace passed. I was kicking myself for not paying attention to that but I don't think you had a single salv trader go over to trade that creo route. Again, CK and myself were the only ones in hunters while you had 6+ people in hunters that weren't even hunting our traders. We are not some unstoppable godly force i was in a tiny rogue and CK was in a rav with a connection that died every 10 minutes. I am just trying to explain that we didn't play this game air tight. We didn't play where you guys had no chance.

[JettJackson]

You won, we lost. Is it necessary to then spit into our faces on top of it. Of course you say you would have given us a break after the fact. There were a lot of things my alliance did wrong that I will openly admit, but you post this sort of diatribe as if you are without blame. It started out as being a loaded draft, yes I got bouncer because of our agreement, inturn you got serg hugh ck for free. You bring up shady but he would have never been your pick you even said as much, so his pick by me is irrelevant. Futhermore you got 2 of them for free mid and after the draft. I had to use my first pick to get bouncer which is where I wasn't given the luxury of having a free pick like you did. Yes this does matter in the scheme of things. Beyond that there were other issues that I had that were done incorrectly when discussing the map for example, the racials were way too connective for the speed of the round. I suggested a racial ring which means they would be connected but someone could not hunt everywhere all day especially with 2x speed. This however was ignored. Then the creonti route was put in place, Jouldax noticed after the game had started which meant it couldn't have been changed and it was way over the top profitable. Yes I could have mined and traded that exclusively but it should have never came to that. It was completely over the top compared to anything else in game. Yes I had a problem with you being on all day, but that was your choice to do so, the problem is this game isn't like years before, people dont have the time to devote to being on all day every day and when someone is, it makes it completely unsettling to want to play that way or be forced to play that way. It got to the point where I was making people trade at 5am Eastern time just to avoid you guys, should that have been the case?

As for taking my ball and going home, I let the alliance decide if the game was over, I never once voted whether or not to concede because this is a team game and I wanted my team to decide whether or not we had the will to keep going and they decided with a great majority mind you that they had enough.

The point of this thread was not to "spit into your faces". It was to explain my actions because you told me your alliance members believe I am out to ruin the game. We played on the same exact map. I did not have a map advantage, in fact I came to you directly and told you I disliked the racial setup but you wanted to promote early hunting more. I believe the game accommodates for people to be online MORE than they could years ago. There is not many activities you can do in life without being around a computer.

Who besides your alliance was on all day, did you see anyone from this alliance being on all day long? Just because you are capable to be on all day doesn't mean the game is setup as such that you should be, this is where we will differ from here to eternity I am sure, but the reality is this game isn't set up for people to be on all day which is why this 2x speed failed.

All you had to do is bring out a couple hunters to protect your traders. You had the most salvs in the game and salvs had peace with just about every race. You guys could have flooded Creo which I thought was your plan as soon as Creo/Salv peace passed. I was kicking myself for not paying attention to that but I don't think you had a single salv trader go over to trade that creo route. Again, CK and myself were the only ones in hunters while you had 6+ people in hunters that weren't even hunting our traders. We are not some unstoppable godly force i was in a tiny rogue and CK was in a rav with a connection that died every 10 minutes. I am just trying to explain that we didn't play this game air tight. We didn't play where you guys had no chance.

Yes I already admitted to the fact that I got it wrong here no need to continue to repeat it.

[XDemonX]

Who besides your alliance was on all day, did you see anyone from this alliance being on all day long? Just because you are capable to be on all day doesn't mean the game is setup as such that you should be, this is where we will differ from here to eternity I am sure, but the reality is this game isn't set up for people to be on all day which is why this 2x speed failed.

Gotta keep people's interest. The reason I have so many people in this alliance that is online most the day is because we do other things and sit in TeamSpeak. We have about 8 people who play Minecraft fairly active. Many of the people who play, play Minecraft more than they do SMR. They only login to SMR if something is going on.

But you will have your wish JJ, I did not know being active on a game that already struggles with activity is supposedly "bad" for the game. This is why I will not be leading again and will not play in a serious alliance next game will most likely just play with a few inactive people from fed. If really me being active "hurts" the game then no problem I can find other things to do.

[JettJackson]

Who besides your alliance was on all day, did you see anyone from this alliance being on all day long? Just because you are capable to be on all day doesn't mean the game is setup as such that you should be, this is where we will differ from here to eternity I am sure, but the reality is this game isn't set up for people to be on all day which is why this 2x speed failed.

Gotta keep people's interest. The reason I have so many people in this alliance that is online most the day is because we do other things and sit in TeamSpeak. We have about 8 people who play Minecraft fairly active. Many of the people who play, play Minecraft more than they do SMR. They only login to SMR if something is going on.

But you will have your wish JJ, I did not know being active on a game that already struggles with activity is supposedly "bad" for the game. This is why I will not be leading again and will not play in a serious alliance next game will most likely just play with a few inactive people from fed. If really me being active "hurts" the game then no problem I can find other things to do.

You can be active and not obsessive, being on all day is obsessive. The last time we had 2x speed we had the issue of there being no skill to the game and all people did was throw turns at the issues, some of your own alliance mates crucified me when I made a 2x speed game saying that it took away from tactics, however because they ended up on the winning side this time 2x is just fine and dandy. The double standard some hold around here on account of my opinion on something is simply amazing.

[silverx2]

just my 2 cents

I dont think you did anything out of the ordinary xdx, my issue with this round was that:

1.) aside from 1 or 2 people the teams were essentially the same from the game before. Thats very boring.

2.)because the speed was so high, the map was so small, and the (at least i hope it was) random placement of ports, you had people who had the ability to be on at all hours of the day have a huge amount of turns and could sit within 10 moves of every major route in the round. All the salv ports where dead end sectors just outside of a warp. it was utter nonsense.

3.)this is a major personal opinion, I've just outgrown this game. Its not my cup of tea anymore. I like to trade, I like to op. Those two things do not mix well, the prior draft game i traded to over 300k exp, I lost 100k exp in 2 deaths to a planet, i lost 30k exp to a death to mines, i lost next to nothing when someone thats actually a person, actually managed to kill me. Why bother trading if you are a random drone strike from a planet away from losing 30% of your EXP.

For me personally its just not fun, just pressing the F key a bunch of times in under a second to get off 6 shots is to be quite frank, retarded.

And to be fair, jj could have picked different players, but who is to say that they would have even played if he picked them. I think JJ gets a bad rap sometimes, and people who dont like him for whatever reason dont put out the same effort level they would if they were on "the other team" I think it goes against the spirit of a draft round, and i think that maybe if people were a little more open minded the game could actually grow, instead of always having 1 alliance which is the boys club full of BFF's who never choose not to play with each other, and then the alliance of left overs.

[JettJackson]

And to be fair, jj could have picked different players, but who is to say that they would have even played if he picked them. I think JJ gets a bad rap sometimes, and people who dont like him for whatever reason dont put out the same effort level they would if they were on "the other team" I think it goes against the spirit of a draft round, and i think that maybe if people were a little more open minded the game could actually grow, instead of always having 1 alliance which is the boys club full of BFF's who never choose not to play with each other, and then the alliance of left overs.

This is the crux of the issue, I had to make a deal to even get someone I wanted off that alliance because if not I wouldn't have got him. CK joined until after the draft, Hugh joined mid draft. Both went out of their way to say they wouldn't play for me. It is things like this that ruin the integrity of draft rounds. With how small this game is you can't have a team of bffs never breaking up it will end up causing people to say the hell with it because they can never gain ground. I mean several games ago I was told by people I had to bust my alliance up for the best of the game, maybe that needs to happen again now. I thought draft rounds would have allowed that to happen but seldum didn't draft to break things up and I could not because of people openly being obstructionists to the draft.

[XDemonX]

And to be fair, jj could have picked different players, but who is to say that they would have even played if he picked them. I think JJ gets a bad rap sometimes, and people who dont like him for whatever reason dont put out the same effort level they would if they were on "the other team" I think it goes against the spirit of a draft round, and i think that maybe if people were a little more open minded the game could actually grow, instead of always having 1 alliance which is the boys club full of BFF's who never choose not to play with each other, and then the alliance of left overs.

This is the crux of the issue, I had to make a deal to even get someone I wanted off that alliance because if not I wouldn't have got him. CK joined until after the draft, Hugh joined mid draft. Both went out of their way to say they wouldn't play for me. It is things like this that ruin the integrity of draft rounds. With how small this game is you can't have a team of bffs never breaking up it will end up causing people to say the hell with it because they can never gain ground. I mean several games ago I was told by people I had to bust my alliance up for the best of the game, maybe that needs to happen again now. I thought draft rounds would have allowed that to happen but seldum didn't draft to break things up and I could not because of people openly being obstructionists to the draft.

JJ, no one FORCED you to make a deal. You did not need to make a deal. You knew I wanted Bouncer just as badly as you did. You could of risked it and flipped the coin to see if you got first pick or not like i originally told you to do when you first came to me wanting to make a deal. I didn't offer up Bouncer nor did I have a lock on him. He was willing to play with you as much as he was willing to play with me. It would of just came down to whoever got first pick.

Do NOT take the Hugh and CK thing out of context. Outside of them not wanting to play with you, they were talking about not going to play at all. Hugh was freaking ;) it was another draft round and CK had some real life stuff going on like he told you MULTIPLE times that MULTIPLE people can verify. Again, after this came out that they might of not played and did not want to play with you I made this deal with you to give you first pick (Bouncer) to help you out. If I really wanted to be dirty I could of flipped the coin, took Bouncer and sat there knowing it didn't matter if you took CK or Hugh because they might not play at all and didn't want to play with you. Hugh was in TS during draft watching. The agreement was I got CK and Hugh if they decided to play. I thought Hugh at least joining the draft mid draft was better than him joining a day into the game and me grabbing him instead of a random newbie that never logs in again.

Once CK joined, to accommodate you more, (After you took Crusher that joined late which was a top 5 draft pick last round) I told you if someone joined that you wanted badly, tell me and he's yours. To refresh your memory more we joked and said "Yes, even if orca joins you can have him". Granted all this happend when CK and Hugh were not for sure going to play this round. Yes I got lucky and both of them decided to play. I cannot speak for Hugh or CK, but I believe mine and a few other's activity on TeamSpeak helped to get them to play and stay active. SMR isn't the only game we play, Hugh and Xotren play minecraft MORE than they do SMR. We have a channel on our TeamSpeak server just for minecraft which at the moment I am typing this message we have 8 people in the minecraft channel (Yes all of them are SMR players too).

I'm sorry, SMR is a fun game but what makes the game fun are the people. If there were another draft round and you led, I would be one of those people that would not play that round if I had to be on your team. I would have ZERO fun playing with you. I don't like talking to you. I don't like how you talk and belittle other players especially since you have a "Admin" tag next to your name. Again, I play SMR because of the people. If it wasn't for TeamSpeak and a few people I enjoy talking to on a daily basis then I wouldn't play SMR at all.

Also, remember I came to you well before the draft to give you the heads up that a lot of people were ;) you were leading and were refusing to play with you (this was before the vote for leaders finished). You could have set your ego aside and decided not to lead that draft round. Someone else would have stepped up and led or a draft game wouldn't have happened. Yes JJ, other people are capable of leading a alliance instead of you but people did not want to step up because they just assumed the round was JJ vs. XDemonX and didn't feel the need to step up. But instead, you complained to me like it was my fault that people didn't like you and constantly argued with me to throw people under the bus and tell you exactly the people that didn't want to play with you (yeah few days later you figured out who they were).

JJ, the reason I am being so detailed with everything that has happened is because you are saying stuff out of context and are making up more excuses. Don't worry, next game like I said you will get your wish. Alliances will be broken up. CK, Hugh and myself will all not be in any major alliance and will play from fed "casually". Which like I said in my first post means won't be very active at all for me. So traders can go back to trading all game and not ever have anyone attack them.