Negative Scholars

[ThatValorPlayer]

Balance issues are in my opinion, much more of an issue at the start of a world. If balance was a concen, players city counts in old worlds should be zeroed/equalized periodically so that everyone is on a level playing field.. Right? ;-)

Negative scholars have the biggest impact in the first month or two of a world opening. In one world, I had managed to be -100 in a month, and -600 after three. That does destroy balance. But old worlds are far past that point now.

[LordFirefall]

KJ – Again – your argument is that it should stay because it has always been that way. A good analogy to further illustrate the problem with this argument is athletes and performance enhancing drugs. Some substances weren’t banned, because they were too new. However, they are banned now. You don’t let athletes who were using them before they were banned keep using them, nor do you tell all the other athletes they need to start using them to keep up with those that do.

Fark – While negative scholars certainly give you a huge advantage in the early game, they also give just as huge advantage in the mid-game, in the area of inactivity management. That advantage comes as players become inactive or leave and you need to cap those cities before your enemy figures out they are up for grabs. If you are exploiting negative scholars, you can more easily absorb those players, than teams who are not using negative scholars. That advantage allows you to keep up your offensive momentum because you don’t have to spend resources for scholars/scholarships and can further devote those resources to troops. You know as well as anyone, that hammering an enemy continuously is far superior to hammering for a week, pausing to cap a mid-size inactive for 2-3 days, then go back to hammering for another week…

To me, the answer is certainly not to keep negative scholars for all pre-TBS worlds. Although a large percentage of players may be using negative scholars in very early worlds, there are still a lot of pre-TBS where it is not happening. I’m not sure there might not also be programming problems to closing that loophole on some worlds and not others. A good demarcation line might be the same worlds that no longer have chaos. Fix negative scholars in W75 and up, where less are using the exploit, and leave it in place for everything under that.

[Kingarthur3]

Fire you make some good points and applaud your dedication :-)
The mass city management (mcm) is something in my opinion should have been addressed long ago, as I know many people have complained over the past year or so about the need to make city management quicker. Cause at some point having so many cities is more of a burden than an enjoyment. When it takes over 5 hrs to scroll thru a couple hundred cities, it is so painful and boring......imagine doing nearly 1800. I've seen many people leave because the game became more work than actual work!

I also agree that there should be a timeline as to when the change was implemented, and the chaos changes made around W75 sound appropriate. Obviously the programmers are creative so there has to be a way to implement from one point going forward, just like they did with that change.

[LordFirefall]

Fire you make some good points and applaud your dedication :-)
The mass city management (mcm) is something in my opinion should have been addressed long ago, as I know many people have complained over the past year or so about the need to make city management quicker. Cause at some point having so many cities is more of a burden than an enjoyment. When it takes over 5 hrs to scroll thru a couple hundred cities, it is so painful and boring......imagine doing nearly 1800. I've seen many people leave because the game became more work than actual work!

Thanks - I also applaud your's and the other participant's dedication to the debate as well as the game. I wouldn't have engaged in the debate had I felt otherwise

I also agree that MCM is long overdue. TBS makes it less of an issue, but it is still an issue there. I do feel your guy's pain, as I've been there before and chose to leave worlds for that very reason. I just think it is too much of an imbalance to leave as is.

[JingleBellz]

It's all been said far more eloquently than I could ever say it but taking away our scholars that we've worked and played so hard for and changing the gameplay mid-field is just wrong. Plain and simple.
Quark - just leave things the way they are PLEASE.

[Kingjason666]

Taking them away on worlds after w75 is a good option. They are relatively new worlds and people are not going to have 1000-2000 citys and never be able to catch up. I and negative. In w14 but didn't bother to do it in later worlds cause I saw no point as population wasn't 60k like in old worlds so it was possible to keep up with scholarships

Fire your athlete point is almost valid. Except in this case we didn't go and invent a new drug or hack the system to make one. The ability to scholar build was given to us by playmash( quark) we just used what they gave us

[Kimakaze77]

My main issue with negative scholars is not free scholars gained by capping an enemy city and being fortunate enough to have free troops to pull that included a scholar. That is part of the game.

My issue is with people that have multiple accounts for the sake of speeding up their growth and purposely building scholars in their secondary etc. accts to gain free scholars in their main acct.

Since there doesn't seem to be a way to eliminate or monitor multiple accts, the only way to keep it fair for everyone is to eliminate negative scholars all together.

If there is a way to limit every player to one acct, I'm all for negative scholars. If not, let's keep it fair for everyone.

[LordFirefall]

Fire your athlete point is almost valid. Except in this case we didn't go and invent a new drug or hack the system to make one. The ability to scholar build was given to us by playmash( quark) we just used what they gave us

Grabbing at straws still I could come up with all sorts of analogies for this one, and you still wouldn't agree.

[KMT]

Kimakaze i understand what you are saying, but multiple devices are allowed. we have to play knowing we can use mulple devices and we can fight people using them. I have been able to stay in touch with some friends and playing with them like i had 2 accounts.
About negative scholars: in old old worlds (let say before w75) who has negative scholars has a huge number of cities. what will happen when multiple devices users have their scholars erased? they will use biggest account to nuke and to feed the other/others: they will be able to cap with small account/accounts. i can't see a real improvement. i just see one-device players punished because they will have to collect tons of resos to get positive without the possibility of playing with another account.
Anyway the point, like kingjason wrote, is: it has always been a feature of the game.

Last world i joined to play was w69 so i don't know how people are using negative scholars now but i think rules should not change retroactively anyway i understand there are two different point of view. so if the result is to cut scholars for w75+ please do it after MCM. let us test MCM and cut scholars after fixing bugs that we might find.

[Kimakaze77]

KMT. Point well taken. I understand that multiple accts are completely acceptable. And players with multiple accts are not the only ones exploiting negative scholars. I have seen players purposely exploit negative scholars and thus cap several cities quickly. Getting rid of that exploit is good for the game. As for when and which worlds it affects...we shall wait and see.

Don't get me wrong. I love finding free scholars. However, like many good things, players have found a way to exploit it.