Why allow shard chat?

LordMorsResistis

Having belonged to one for over a year I can honestly say that these are about as unfair as can be. I've seen players trying to improve their ranking and payouts get put on a hit list, because they caused some whale to miss 50 crystals on his rewards. Collusion can be stopped. Mix everybody up every. 3 months or so. Let's make it fresh. There are several deserving players in my shard that are blacklisted because they irritated SirWhale. A guild mate is in a shard where the same guy gets #1 every day. That's ridiculous. How about something being done.

Mzee

There are shards where really selfish people run them and have to always be top of the board all times of the day etc, and then make everyone else in the chat to gang up on anyone not in the chat. I would support CG stepping in with shards like this, but I don't know what they could do about it.

Fortunately, the shards I am in are very laid back and mostly just rotate with other people in our payout, but not overly strict about it.

Personally, I see the shard chats as making a frustrating system more manageable. Without it it would be very frustrating dealing with sniping for top spots every day. The game is designed so offense has a massive advantage so everyone just beats each other on offense anyway so you can't rely on your defense to hold.

I do find it unfair that some people get 1st every day cause no one else is in their payout, and then me for example rotates with 5 other people in my payout. That's just how it goes though.

YaeVizsla

There's not a whole lot they can do about it. Especially not without considerable resources.

And shard shuffling literally won't work. The only way to do it without lumping people of wildly different ages together is to simply broaden the timeframe, and choose from the larger pool when redistributing people within shards. But that means you have metashards. And the formation of metashard chats. And the same problem.

Waqui

I believe that most shard chats simply aim at people not hitting each other close to payout. The ones, I know, are quite friendly and don't have such blacklists/hitlists aimed at dropping players that are not members of the shard chat.

Yes, I have experienced cooperation to fight a player as much as possible for a day to try and get a message through and then leave him be a few days again. That, however, was only because we couldn't get in touch with him through these forums or his guild. The aim was to send a message to not mess with others at the same payout. The aim was not to ruin his fun and his possibilities to rank high.

Poxx

Waqui wrote: »

I believe that most shard chats simply aim at people not hitting each other close to payout. The ones, I know, are quite friendly and don't have such blacklists/hitlists aimed at dropping players that are not members of the shard chat.

Yes, I have experienced cooperation to fight a player as much as possible for a day to try and get a message through and then leave him be a few days again. That, however, was only because we couldn't get in touch with him through these forums or his guild. The aim was to send a message to not mess with others at the same payout. The aim was not to ruin his fun and his possibilities to rank high.

This

Shard chat has drastically improved QOL 4 many, many ppl. The days of sitting glued to your phone during your payout hour to prevent sniping are over. Thank God !

On my shard chart we've reached out to, or been contacted by, everyone that regularly places top 20 and we r all in chat. We rotate spots for payout. 3 ppl in my hour. 2 swap 1st and 3rd and 1 takes 2nd.

Its cooperation, not collusion.

LordMorsResistis

Well, I've seen the greed of people being turned away because people didn't want their toes stepped on. I once thought just like you guys, that it could be a useful tool for coordinating payouts making sure everyone gets a fair chance. Couple weeks in I had a problem with a guy hitting me just before payout. I asked if I could reach out was told no because he shares a payout time with so and so and that was already being split X number of ways. Then saw others turned away and just a few brought in.

LordMorsResistis

Poxx wrote: »

Waqui wrote: »

I believe that most shard chats simply aim at people not hitting each other close to payout. The ones, I know, are quite friendly and don't have such blacklists/hitlists aimed at dropping players that are not members of the shard chat.

Yes, I have experienced cooperation to fight a player as much as possible for a day to try and get a message through and then leave him be a few days again. That, however, was only because we couldn't get in touch with him through these forums or his guild. The aim was to send a message to not mess with others at the same payout. The aim was not to ruin his fun and his possibilities to rank high.

This

Shard chat has drastically improved QOL 4 many, many ppl. The days of sitting glued to your phone during your payout hour to prevent sniping are over. Thank God !

On my shard chart we've reached out to, or been contacted by, everyone that regularly places top 20 and we r all in chat. We rotate spots for payout. 3 ppl in my hour. 2 swap 1st and 3rd and 1 takes 2nd.

Its cooperation, not collusion.

It's not collusion to purposefully keep people out of the top spots by group effort including people not in that time slot? I need to relearn the language. Man. I thought after all these years I was doing ok. .

LordMorsResistis

And it's

LordMorsResistis

Close enough.

Nikoms565

LordMorsResistis wrote: »

Poxx wrote: »

Waqui wrote: »

I believe that most shard chats simply aim at people not hitting each other close to payout. The ones, I know, are quite friendly and don't have such blacklists/hitlists aimed at dropping players that are not members of the shard chat.

Yes, I have experienced cooperation to fight a player as much as possible for a day to try and get a message through and then leave him be a few days again. That, however, was only because we couldn't get in touch with him through these forums or his guild. The aim was to send a message to not mess with others at the same payout. The aim was not to ruin his fun and his possibilities to rank high.

This

Shard chat has drastically improved QOL 4 many, many ppl. The days of sitting glued to your phone during your payout hour to prevent sniping are over. Thank God !

On my shard chart we've reached out to, or been contacted by, everyone that regularly places top 20 and we r all in chat. We rotate spots for payout. 3 ppl in my hour. 2 swap 1st and 3rd and 1 takes 2nd.

Its cooperation, not collusion.

It's not collusion to purposefully keep people out of the top spots by group effort including people not in that time slot? I need to relearn the language. Man. I thought after all these years I was doing ok. .

Now Google straw man argument - because that's exactly what you just did to that response.

kello_511

LordMorsResistis wrote: »

Close enough.

Except that a shard chat isn’t “secret” (everyone knows about them) nor is it “illegal” (there are no laws or game rules against it.

Oh, and it’s not intended to “cheat or deceive” anyone either.

Pretty close aside from that though.

Huatimus

How is it secret when you are in the shard chat for over a year?
How is it illegal when there are no game rules against it?
Have you even seen the looking for shard chat threads posted on this forum? Doesn't that kinda imply that it's allowed. Heck, they've even introduced in game chat which allows for shard chats to form easier.

cannonfodder_iv

The OP does have a point that some chats can be exclusionary. I've been in six different ones across three accounts (though fleet doesn't really count all that much given its relatively low key nature). They've each had their whale, there's been a little drama here and there, but generally the people playing the game share a common interest and get along well.

Shard chats and drama can all go away if payout times were no longer a thing, but instead you got payed out at the highest rank achieved in some window. I actually think you could do this without reducing crystal spend on refreshes (and therefore revenue). You'd need to change reward tiers around to incentivize it, and you'll upset some people, but, hey, Ships 2.0, so there's precedent.

Wouldn't it be nice to actually do your climb when you wanted to?

LordMorsResistis

Thank you.

LordMorsResistis

Whatever the argument, deserving players are nipped and bitten until they can't make a top 10. I've resigned myself to never seeing#1 again, but, everyone who can make the climb should have a chance. I was stupid lucky. Me and 1 other guy in my time. He was gracious enough to let me up there. I enjoyed many 500 crystal payouts. But would have shared with 20 had they come knocking. It's only fair.

StarSon

If you don't like it, don't participate. Allowed or not, there are very few things they could do at this point to get rid of them. It is unfortunate for those stuck on shards with jerks, but such is life.

LordMorsResistis

What helpful advice. God forbid the game Devs should actually watch after their own creation. Why should they help paying customers? That's positively unAmerican

Kyno

This topic has come up before but there has been no real suggestion of a solution. a shard shuffle has been stated to not be an option.

shuffling the shards also hurts paying customers. There are also a host of other issues with this "solution".

its not that they "can't" its more along the lines that they would likely do more harm than good.

sying

As kyno stated, the devs won’t shuffle the shards.

Let’s say they would. For those of us that have been around for years now, how hard do you think it would be to find our new shard members right away? How quickly did shard chats pop up once ships came out? Within minutes our guild had a chat going for those in our ship shard. It would be the same explerience if arena shuffled. I know I’d be refreshing like a mad man to get to the top right away and it won’t be hard to find the others doing the same.

Poxx

LordMorsResistis wrote: »

And it's

Neither secret nor illegal. Not "close enough". Thx 4 proving my point on cooperation.

I've seen enuf threads close that violated TOS / EULA. Ppl looking for shardmates posts remain.

I highly suggest u get on board so it is not only out in the open and legal...it's condoned.

LordMorsResistis

Ok. Apparently someone named Ghost Trucking commented, but for some odd reason, I'm not allowed to see it. I'm giving up on these forums. Nothing gets accomplished here. It's worthless

Slaystation

For those not browsing the forums desperate for solutions to get ahead "shard chats" are pretty **** secret!
I've known about them for a while but I just found out about blacklists - and I play since launch. Shard chats aren't openly supported and it's implied that they are looking for solutions (like shard-shuffle, which - as stated - isn't viable). If there are no laws against it, that doesn't make it legal (not does it imply it is). If you're allowed to talk about something on the official forum it doesn't mean it's actually (officially) OK to do it.

Morality check! Look up "gank" and try to put yourself on the receiving end. Keeping "blacklists" is a lot like organized crime. May the best player win?