SMG Studio

Well I learned my lesson today.  I will not play a grandmaster again.  They don't get that rank honestly.  It was so apparent that two accounts were working together it was pathetic.  They even both started spamming me alliance requests at the same time in order to delay my attacks so I couldn't wipe the grandmaster on my turn.  

There really needs to be a report function for this.  It takes the fun out of it.

If anyone is curious the player names are: Rjd10036 (grandmaster) Giselle the wise 3 (beginner).

Team @ SMG, you may be listening but I don't see SMG doing anything about this issue.  You make good points all very obvious ones that we all know but you are dismissing the fact that this is happening. It is one thing to have alliances but there have been multiple games where it is so obvious there is one user playing two accounts.  I just finished a game with a GrandMaster and a Master (Adalbert moonborn 5 & Alford spiff 5) in which this occurred. The moment the game started this was fishy.  I immediately noticed the similarities in the names.  Both start with an A and end with a 5.  The grandmaster was hosting the game and the master was second in the lineup.  The host kept kicking novice and beginners until there were all intermediates or experts to play against.  I completely understand this as there are too many novices and beginners that dont play with strategy and bail early on.  I do the same thing as I know losing to a novice or beginner can greatly reduce your rank.  In this situation from the start of the game, both accounts starting working on attacking one player.  Reducing them down until it was just me and both masters.  They were leaving their borders open with 1 taking over the map and only focusing on me until they blocked me in.  Due to my irritation, I just kept letting time expire with my one country while they kept piling up men at my border, not attacking one another.  Then the grandmaster just stopped attacking and piling up while the master took over the whole map until me and the grandmaster only had one territory.  The grandmaster with 40+men, my 15, and the master with the whole map.  This process went on for about 20+ moves.  Finally, the master took me out.  This was an obvious rank farming process.  It is pretty sad when someone cares more about having their title than actually having skill.  I have witnessed this type of behavior quite a few times and something needs to be changed about it.  You need to at least have a way to report players like this or give us a permanent block feature them so we can remember who they are. 

On another point, i think you need to revisit the ranking system.  I have been expert (now at intermediate) at 7000+ rank and lose one game early on to a bunch of novices and see my rank drop to 20,000+ (which i think is ridiculous) then it takes forever to move back up.  On the flip side i have beaten grandmasters and masters and barely moved up in rank.  I have won games and actually lost rank as well.  Your ranking system is very flawed.

In summary, dont play with these two accounts ((Adalbert moonborn 5 & Alford spiff 5)) and its probably best to host your own game.

Wow. Who has any games with 6 players that last more than 6 turns? Not a very good grandmaster at all lol. Probably was rank farming. I run into these sometimes. I've chosen to just give up on reporting most of them and use a now designated "crap" account until SMG does something about it. My other 4 grandmaster accounts will just sit and idle.

SMG seems to think it's ok for friends to play in the same game so it makes a lot of these sketchy players get off the hook as looking like friends teaming up together and then duking out the end of it. I say because there's ranks involved, they need to not be allowed to do this and should be playing only with friends in games where they want to play with each other. Or at the least, label players with the same IP address so that I can do the right thing and boot them from my games.I get that you play the board game with friends but they are ALL FRIENDS in that case. It's not fair to have friends use obvious bias to destroy all but themselves until the end just because they know each other. It's an FFA game.

Also, the major problem of low ranked players plaguing the high rank games has got to be fixed before it's worth my time and effort to find good games for my normal accounts. It could be done very simply by throwing in a min and max rank filter for game creation. If the player doesn't match the filter, they don't see the game. And I don't have to boot 50 people before I find good players AND other players won't leave the game impatient because it keeps getting clogged up with novices that I keep booting. f that's too tough to program then start putting games into rooms. Start actually segregating the players by rank. Or stop making games ranked unless we check a box that says we want a ranked game, where we can filter out the worthless players.

The above is related because not many of the cheaters have multiple high ranked accounts. I have multiple high ranked accounts but I would never enjoy the game if I'm cheating so I don't do it. Although, I'd love to get into a game with some of these cheaters and do a nice 4 on 2 with them. I have enough devices and accounts to do it lol