Board Thread:Game Discussion/@comment-35180316-20180409075909/@comment-107.167.113.32-20180429072259

Yes, Hulk that was me in both of the posts you replied to. As for me being someone who is a member, and have logged out in order to voice concerns anonymously, that is not me. I would never join a site like this, as I'm worried about wasting too much of my valuable time. That is not to say the site does not have a great value, it does. And that has nothing to take away from the hard ass work the admins to on this site, thanks again.! Just for myself, I'm worried about spending too much time on a video game. But I am interested in reasonable and reasoned discussions like this. As for sharing anything on social media, I can't because I don't participate in those fora, which I hope is obvious from my above comments. If Facebook allowed me to be anonymous, I'd be there, but because they demand my real identity, they're never going to get me as a user. I have read here several times that various serious problems have not been addressed by posting in those fora either. It seems that EA turns a deaf ear to any complaints we have expressed there.

I'm sorry I'm not gonna go back and look at the history, but I do know that I did learn of an exploit here which allowed me to have over 1400 gold added to my total. That exploit was written here, it existed for at least a week as an ongoing thread. However, now it seems if even one link is provided or one person even alludes to an exploit they're immediately shut down. Again, I'm only advocating for exploits that take money away from the unscrupulous owners of the game, I am in no way urging people to cheat in gameplay. Yes, I aknowledge that it cost money to run the game, but I am still a firm believer in all entrepreneurs creating quality products, while not cheating or abusing their all the stakeholders. If they see a benefit that cheating their customers or abusing them in any way drives profit, they need to be spanked hard.

That is why I again am praising hulk. He is in a small way the Edward Snowden of the overall problems with this game. He is trying to highlight a problem, as he initially, apparently, tried to provide the engineers with a fix, which they seem to have disregarded. I can't speak to his ability to code an offering acceptable to EA, all I sense is a good-faith effort on his part to do something to improve the game, which has fallen on deaf ears. judging by the company's history, I also fear that perhaps it's not so much deaf ears, as it's the classic, it's not a feature, it's a bug, except in this case to the senior management, the bug is a feature. So I fear the ears are not deaf, it's that the ears are actively engaging in manipulation and they have designed these frustrations into the game, in order to drive engagement. there is a whole field of economics that deals with games. You know there's a ton of those people who have studied this and are "gaming the system".

So, well yes, I am in many ways trying to look at the forest, not the trees, this exercise that hulk is engaging in, and my comments, are completely on-topic, and is a microcosm of the larger whole. Sunday is my Bill Maher day, so I just finished watching his latest episode, and two Vice's. If you just watch the YouTube of the Bill Maher overtime for this week you'll get a sense of where I'm coming from, And why I'm wasting your and my time with this rant. We need to question the motives of everybody, especially those in power, or large corporations. The promise of the democratization the early Internet offered, has been co-opted by this new top-down control approach.

Further, I am questioning your assertions 777, you have said that this site NEVER provided help with gold exploits. I unquestionably used this site to that end. You need to go back in your history and try to find that. I'm sorry I cannot come up with an exact date, or the user who was the focus of that, but my sense is that he was not an admin, but was certainly a significant, but at that moment had stepped back from being, a major/silverback user of the site. There were absolutely no moderators stepping in to suggest what he was showing us was in anyway antithetical to the site. There was a large back-and-forth between various users asking how to do certain components of the exploit, which involved rerunning special events and force closing the game in order to get extra gold.

So all I'm suggesting is that we go back to that. If that was in fact against the terms of service of Wikia, now fandom, let's look at what and who they are. It's in their best interests to have the game companies on their side, (maybe) but they ain't nothing without users. What we users want should mean more than whatever the game companies would like them to do. If they, Fandom, are suggesting that we need to not provide information deleterious to the game companies, that ultimately requires moderation by admins. The admins can take a lackadaisical approach, or they can take a strict approach, or they can do nothing at all, what will Wikia do then? Will they close the whole site down? I doubt that. That is the beauty of where we are, and what folks are slowly waking up to, we are creating mountains of content for them. They need us more than we need them. And I think that the admins could look at that and perhaps change, if not the overall terms of this segment of Wikia, certainly they could lessen their diligence in forcing some the terms of service. To the admins I ask the simple question, what are they gonna do to you if you don't police this segment as vigorously as you are now? Are they gonna be able to sue you? If yes, quit being an admin and let somebody else do this thankless time suck of a job, who can go in and masquerade their IP, or whatever is necessary, to have an admin that is not in the thrall of either wikia or EA. An admin who can surface the information that is useful to all players, while maintaining a standard of honest gameplay.

Gentlemen this is only a game. There are those who think that perhaps cheating is a component of games, I don't believe that. But I do believe in fairplay by all parties, which includes the game inventors and proprietors. Lacking skills or not, I assert that 8.3 in the last special event was showing EA has no interest in fairplay. Forcing, on the last day, once time and gold have been spent, a ninety gold skip is not in any way fair gameplay. Undoubtedly there were people who were able to pass it "with zero upgrades" and yes they're heroes, but that isn't the fat part of the bell curve, who like me, agonized over dropping this additional 90 gold. From where I sit that's no way to treat your customers. This is why I advocate exploiting gold exploits. The argument could have been made several years ago for what certain admins are saying is their sworn duty, but increasingly EA is choosing to disrespect us, so we need to use all the tools in our tool chest to fight back.