Lets put some things in order first.
1)You are not allowed to do any kind of trading through the plunder screen.
-Why?
a)Because it is impossible for administration to know or review each such case separately. So we cannot know if this is played to an account's full benefit or not OR if it is DR manipulation.
b)Because it is falling into game exploitation. Plunder screen has not been created for this usage.
c)Gameplay wise, this is something only advanced players will think. Because it isn't normal. Have you heard many stories of two ships meeting in the ocean, starting to shoot at each other, with predetermined strategy to pass the ship to the winner? No. Everything in PG needs a way to explain itself so a new player will not need to learn a handful of new special rules in order to play the game. Do not mix it with voodoo. Voodoo is just that; the special rules of the game. Picture it like this: Magical things that do magical stuff.
2)Man o War ships cannot be commandeered (or have leviathan put them at the bottom and then try your luck with Tidal Wave). This means there is no legal way to "pass" them from one player to another. This is not a random choice but the result of a constructive gameplay strategy. We want players to
win a Man o War in a true battle from another player. Not to trade them. MoW is not a tradeable asset. If you know of any player that already won a Man o War on a setup battle, please report it. It is forbidden. Once Pirate Code wars are implemented, MoW will be vulnerable to Commandeer card from players that are at war with you. All such commandeer attempts will be logged at global events for everyone to see, to avoid setup trades.
3)Right now, the only way to send gold to someone is indirectly through voodoo.
You can also send credits. Voodoo is a good way to help other accounts as it limits the value of multiplay and possible milking between these accounts. Credits exchange as well as voodoo casts are easily monitored and tracked. In this way, we can track such accounts easily.
Besides the very important bonus for administration to be able to track down trades, voodoo is good for this for more reasons. Voodoo cards have a value on their own, as they are finite. Turns on the other hand are much less priced during peacetime. Not to mention that voodoo also cost turns. This extra cost again help in keeping trades away from cheating.
On the bottom line, I agree that it could be a good thing to have free trade of MoWs for example. But this is a multiplayer game. Someone out there might look to exploit the game. Or even worse, might try to exploit the game now that we even forbid it. How would you feel if someone ended up with 10 Man o Wars, just because he had the time, patience and resources to deal with 10 other players and trade for them? And how would you be sure that these 10 players were individuals and not multi-accounts which administration failed to check? You could end up accusing administration as suddenly, you would be losing in the War field not because of the war skills of your opponent but for other reasons. Which for me is acceptable on the one hand but at another, as a developer, I got to give you good enough tools to counter/stop this.
So every trade must be by itself clean and equal for all. Since MoW is forbidden on Commandeer, it is forbidden everywhere.
So now I come to your words:
Xepshunall wrote:we wouldn't have to contemplate other methods that aren't cheating but are looked at as such by Admin.
I have spoken of this in my topic about milking. Whenever you have to question yourself if this is allowed or not, then the answer is that it is not allowed. Deep inside, we all know what is fair and what is not. In the rare cases that you can't find the reason, you can always ask. Although like I said above, we want our gameplay design to be such that we will not have the need of any rules.
And we are taking care of this. The end of passing ships through plunder could come with Pirate Code wars. No pirate code war? No ability to plunder a ship of your opponent... So there goes the possibility to ever sneak such a battle under administration nose.
Regarding banks... Banks will open a huge new chapter in pirates glory. For the first time, players will be able to send their gold coins easily around. This ia very very good thing but also open a very very big chapter; How administration will ensure that no cheating through banks will take place.
Well, the answer has been given to this indirectly in the banks thread. TOday I will give more details as the plan has evolved. I have said that we want FEW bankers. The reason we want few bankers is because we want every "banker" to be responsible for possible milking/cheating through his bank. So a player that wants to cheat will have to avoid both the banker and administration.
There will be no need for bankers to review each transaction. We will create a great system for this, the few bankers will love it.
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