Conquer Club

Accused:
smestelle236
josh48

The accused are suspected of:
Conducting Secret Diplomacy

Game number(s):
Game 9822783

Comments: josh48 was having a dominating position in the game but smstelle completely leaves him alone and attacks other (weaker) players instead. First I thought he was just a bad player (cook and all) but he has played more than 1,000 games. So acting on my hunch that maybe I am dealing with multi's Ilooked at both players history together and indeed, almost all of the games that josh48 has won, smestelle236 played in as well. Maybe they are not multi's but then they surely are buddies because they play doubles games together as well. Which implies they are friends and will go soft on each other when they play standard multi-player games.

josh48 has won 103 games in total. In 97 of these smestelle236 also played. Coincidence?

maybe someone could look into this. Clearly I will foe both players but maybe this post can serve to warn other players so they know that when they join standard games against these two, they are in fact dealing with a team.

smestelle236 has been officially warned and they have been blocked from playing together in their future games.

I know these guys and smestelle236 definitely isn't feeding josh48 wins. smestelle hates to lose. It's too bad this was reported and the moderators took it this far.

Iron Carrot wrote:I know these guys and smestelle236 definitely isn't feeding josh48 wins. smestelle hates to lose. It's too bad this was reported and the moderators took it this far.

...and you must know smestelle real well because of your 50 games played so far, 34 were with him. I looked at a number of their games and in each game, they avoid attacking each other, until it's the 2 of them left. Of course he hates to lose, but if he's not going to attack josh48 when he's clearly the dominating player (in troop count and deployment) and instead attack josh48's opposition, he will end up losing.

Other players that do not know these 2 should be protected from playing non-team games against these 2 because other players chances to win are greatly diminished if there are 2 players that play a large number of games together and who simply won't attack each other. Alliances are fine but have to be announced in the game chat and they're not doing that. That is secret diplomacy and it's not allowed. It's a fair decision. they have not been banned from the game, they can play as many games as they like, just not together anymore.


***edited to refer to smestelle236 in the masculine form***

I get that you are trying to make the community a better place to play. "They don't attack each other enough" just doesn't sit great with me, but this isn't my site, not my rules. No warning seems a bit harsh to me though. I won't post in this thread any more I just wanted to say that I don't think they are colluding.

Okay, let's take it from the top.

First, aad0906, to refer to smestelle236 in the effeminate instead of the masculine [or gender neutral], especially after their being referred to as "[a] guy" is offensive and unnecessary. I understand you're upset, but literally verbally emasculating someone isn't a good way to make your case.

Yes, Iron Carrot does know them both well. Because Iron Carrot, smestelle236, josh48, Saltlick, coombsbp, nannyberries and myself all play together almost exclusively. It's not collusion, we're not alts or multi's or whatever. We are all friends who don't get to hang out often enough, so we started playing Conquer Club together.

Here, to make this as simple as possible, I've made a chart. http://bit.ly/niPzlt (It's a google docs link, I promise.)

I'm going to assume from this point forward you've at least taken a moment to look at the chart. Now, if I had API or SQL access I could've done a lot more with this, but I don't.. so you'll have to deal with what I could pull out in 10 minutes.

If you'll notice I've highlighted the ratio of our games with smestelle236. We've all played 70%+ of our games with him. I didn't want to waste hours pulling win/loss ratios or total percentage of games with one or more members of the set.. but point being.. we play together a LOT.

Now, back to this particular complaint, josh48 actually plays a fewer percentage of his games with smestelle236 than everyone but Iron Carrot and I. (And frankly Iron Carrot shouldn't count for anything statistically, as he has so few games.) That's the core of this complaint, they play together a lot. Well, we all do. Are you going to keep any of us from playing together?

Typically if we're playing with people outside this group it's because one or more of us missed the invite period. We aren't secretly helping each other, we aren't making truces. We just know each other well enough to know what the other will usually do.

What's my point? Well, by keeping josh48 and smestelle236 from playing together you're effectively prohibiting all of us from playing together. I don't know how many of us actually purchased premium, but I know I only got it because I kept missing too many of 'our' games.

So, aad0906, if you have anything constructive to add, please do. Otherwise, I would please request that this gets reconsidered. I do know smestelle236 and what Iron Carrot said is quite true, he simply does not abide losing. Not to us, not to anyone. If he's propping anyone up, it's simply to win not out of any fondness.

StewartTFrancis wrote:Okay, let's take it from the top.

First, aad0906, to refer to smestelle236 in the effeminate instead of the masculine [or gender neutral], especially after their being referred to as "[a] guy" is offensive and unnecessary. I understand you're upset, but literally verbally emasculating someone isn't a good way to make your case.

Yes, Iron Carrot does know them both well. Because Iron Carrot, smestelle236, josh48, Saltlick, coombsbp, nannyberries and myself all play together almost exclusively. It's not collusion, we're not alts or multi's or whatever. We are all friends who don't get to hang out often enough, so we started playing Conquer Club together.

Here, to make this as simple as possible, I've made a chart. http://bit.ly/niPzlt (It's a google docs link, I promise.)

I'm going to assume from this point forward you've at least taken a moment to look at the chart. Now, if I had API or SQL access I could've done a lot more with this, but I don't.. so you'll have to deal with what I could pull out in 10 minutes.

If you'll notice I've highlighted the ratio of our games with smestelle236. We've all played 70%+ of our games with him. I didn't want to waste hours pulling win/loss ratios or total percentage of games with one or more members of the set.. but point being.. we play together a LOT.

Now, back to this particular complaint, josh48 actually plays a fewer percentage of his games with smestelle236 than everyone but Iron Carrot and I. (And frankly Iron Carrot shouldn't count for anything statistically, as he has so few games.) That's the core of this complaint, they play together a lot. Well, we all do. Are you going to keep any of us from playing together?

Typically if we're playing with people outside this group it's because one or more of us missed the invite period. We aren't secretly helping each other, we aren't making truces. We just know each other well enough to know what the other will usually do.

What's my point? Well, by keeping josh48 and smestelle236 from playing together you're effectively prohibiting all of us from playing together. I don't know how many of us actually purchased premium, but I know I only got it because I kept missing too many of 'our' games.

So, aad0906, if you have anything constructive to add, please do. Otherwise, I would please request that this gets reconsidered. I do know smestelle236 and what Iron Carrot said is quite true, he simply does not abide losing. Not to us, not to anyone. If he's propping anyone up, it's simply to win not out of any fondness.

I don't understand why, if you guys like playing together so much you don't make private games. None of this would have been brought up if you guys didn't have random outsiders playing your "group games." I'm not trying to insult anyone or argue, just pointing this out for future consideration. I do hope your friends can be unblocked but you shouldn't probably play with "outsiders" anymore if your main use of this site is for "should be" private games amongst friends.

Iron Carrot wrote:I know these guys and smestelle236 definitely isn't feeding josh48 wins. smestelle hates to lose. It's too bad this was reported and the moderators took it this far.

Whats really too bad is buddies gang up and play less than a fair game.

The decision made by king a/CC is absolutely correct.

StewartTFrancis wrote:Okay, let's take it from the top.

First, aad0906, to refer to smestelle236 in the effeminate instead of the masculine [or gender neutral], especially after their being referred to as "[a] guy" is offensive and unnecessary. I understand you're upset, but literally verbally emasculating someone isn't a good way to make your case.

LOL it wasn't my intention to offend. I just erroneously figured that "his" name was Estelle. I overlooked "guys". My bad, no offense intended. I edited the post. Sorry.

Perchorin makes a good point. If you are a group of friends that like to play together, just make private games or play team games. Given what StewarTFrancis has said, I personally would be against unblocking but I'll leave that up to CC to decide. In this particular game I just had an unfair disadvantage.