We had to stop allowing automatic registration on this site. The spammers were simply out of control. Every day there will be about 20 new spam blogs. I would delete like 200 of them at a time every week, and it would take me an hour or more, taking pains not to flag any legitimate blog, but it didn’t stop them. I think they spent a lot more time than I did creating those accounts and blogs, and for what? It’s not like any of you read their crap about shoes or trading or decoration.

No, I remember asking you guys, especially the spammer who cost me valuable time, to please click our ads. But no, nobody is interested in the stuff in the ads. What makes the spammers think anyone is interested in reading their crap? They must have realized they don’t get any money from wasting their time. Did they think they get SEO value? By crapping up copies of their blogs all over some list of blogging sites of theirs, on some Spammers’R'Us forum? If you guys have any info on this, please leave me a comment.

What is pertinent to this post is that as sad as it is that you can no longer create blogs automatically, we will happily create new blogs for you if you email us at info@evonypress.com. Additionally, now is a good time to post to your blogs, and tell your readers about it. The front page no longer will get full of spam, and you have a good chance of being seen there!

Yes, I admit, the spammers finally beat me. This is almost as sad as The Extraordinary League of Lords beating my posts count lead, which I’m determined to get back!

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Evony did something uncharacteristic of them in my opinion, but also probably their first truly intelligent and decent promotion (masked as damage control), and their best promotion so far in my opinion, as well.  I’ll let you read it in their words.  Snipped:

Evony Community,

Today we experienced a critical downtime of over 3.5 hours with all servers and the main website being unavailable and then some issues with the forums.  We understand that this has made many of our great players frustrated and disappointed.  We’re disappointed too.

… Today’s downtime was caused by an error from our hosting partner, The Planet.  … as we’re a small company, when problems like this arise, it affects us very deeply.  We’d like to take this opportunity though to try and make something good out of it by offering a token of goodwill to all players.  We are releasing to all players a Compensation Pack consisting of 10 Amulets and 100 cents, FREE.  While we cannot make up for the issue that The Planet has caused, we do hope you accept our apologies and gift and still continue enjoying the game.

Please allow us 3 business days to send out this pack to all accounts.  Accounts must have been created before today in order to obtain the pack.  You will be able to claim the Compensation Pack in the left hand corner in the game.

Evony had pretty much killed the competitive advantage of players who don’t pay them when their servers cut down the drop rates of medals astronomically.  In particular, it’s nearly impossible to get enough rose medals to be promoted even to a baronet – which is just your second promotion.  Which means most players who don’t pay Evony are stuck with two cities, and if they are not careful they have to destroy the second city to build NPCs level 5 around them to farm.

Don’t get me wrong.  You can still be the best player in the game and on the server without giving Evony a dime.  SoCCo did it on W19 quite dominantly.  You can be really good in terms of prestige if you have the right strategy.  What I am saying is that ultimately without those promotions you are at a major disadvantage, mainly militarily.   With 6 cities you can build your army 3 times faster than with 2 cities.  You can do your research 3x faster.  You might need to spend more time to maintain the cities, that is true, but you clearly have a huge advantage. 

Now that you have 100 free cents you have the ability to equalize the odds just a tiny bit.   You could buy a junior medal box which contains 6-12 random low level medals for 80c, or you can buy 16 Amulets for the same price.  Which is better?   Evony claim the wheel of fortune pays out 24c each spin (5c) and that they increased the average daily reward 4x to like 100c.  I wonder if the median reward was increased at all…  Anyway, you might get lucky with 16 spins, or you might get 16 speakers.   I’m going for the junior box.

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Truth be told, you and I would have been spared a lot of headache if Evony had allowed us to access their map data.  There are preliminary indications that we will be allowed to do so soon, hence all your hard work may be for nothing!  Hahaha! 

Wait.  What are you doing?  Go back to work on entering that map data!  Do you have anything better to do while you’re building another cottage now that you’ve discovered you need people to recruit armies?  Maybe you think you’d better take up blogging?  Nah, it takes a special caring person like myself to do that.  I’m not judging you… You care too, it’s just that… you care about the map more.  Which is good for everyone!

My cottage is nearly done building, and I’m thinking of taking a short nap in there, you know to test it out for my residents.  So let’s wrap it up:

Currently all the map is, is a fancy game map.  You can see the real Evony world and you can see how it zooms to the small Evony map, and you can actually see about 10 times the detail that you can see in that small Evony map.  That said, it gives you no additional advantages.

But if you enter the data here is what the map will be in a week’s time:

• The map is integrated with EvonySocial.  By default, only your friends from the Evony social network will be able to search for your name and find your cities.  The permissions can be changed by you in EvonySocial, so that for example all you EvonySocial alliance members will be able to search for you.
• At the moment city markers are only visible on the grass patches.  Later on, when you login to EvonySocial you will see all the icons of your friends and others who allow you to see them on the world map at any zoom level.  So you can see your friends right away at different states with a global map zoom level.
• You will be able to enter enemies and friends coordinates manually, and share them with your alliance members by default.  The enemies and friends will be visible on the world map and you’d be able to search for them by name.
• You will be able to customize flags and assign them to enemies or friends, say one flag for one enemy alliance, and another flag for another one.

I believe this will be a greatly enhanced set of map feature, long overdue for this game.  It should be out in about a week my time.   Given that my brain calculates at the speed of light most of the time, it means about 10 days for you ground folk due to time dilation.  Hey, blame Einstein not me. 

I’ve also worried quite a bit about security here, and I hope you find it adequate.  Like it?  Hate it?  Have suggestions?  Please leave me a comment – unless you really do hate it, then just go away, why do you need to insult me?  What did I do to you?!

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Dear Players,

We have been excited at the success of iEvony, but we have also come across an unintended side effect of the iEvony system. Some players have abusively and unethically engaged in spamming practices on a variety of websites with the intent of boosting their credits. This practice affects site traffic and makes headaches and extra work for moderators on a variety of websites. It reflects poorly not only on these users, but also on Evony as a whole.

For this reason, we will absolutely not tolerate such spamming practices. Players who engage in spam practices (posting multiple threads from multiple accounts on the same site, attempting to get forum users to follow a link) will be aggressively pursued and sanctioned. Penalties may include: being stripped of ALL earned Credits and any Coins or items they were exchanged for; having your iEvony account permanently disabled; being temporarily or permanently banned from Evony.

An unintended side effect huh?  Hmm… who could have foreseen something like that happening?  Completely out of the blue, and totally shocking.  

What?  The message didn’t say they were surprised, or that it was unexpected?  Hmm…  They will not admit stupidity here, which makes sense.  What doesn’t make sense is that this notice is only put up now after the “headaches and extra work for moderators on a variety of websites” rather than when the iEvony rewards program was posted.  Even worse, they still support this spamming program and a much nastier email spam program which will pay for every email sent (not just for actual joining).  Do I really need to predict more negative spamming reputation and this program being discontinued?  Shouldn’t you just start using sustainable advertising/affiliate practices Evony and discontinue your spam ones?

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You sat through that short rant, great, I apologize for wasting your time with it.  Here is the part the you should care about:  yesterday evony announced in-game (snipped):

We wanted to thank all of our players for making the iEvony Open Beta such a success so far! Keep up the good work!

Evony continues to grow primarily thanks to word of mouth recommendations from our fantastic players! Thanks to you, Evony has grown to over 5 million registered players from every part of the world! 

We’ve lifted cap of 50 credits per day for invitations, and players may now earn a maximum of 1500 credits total just by sending invitations, so you can earn credits as much as 30 times more! Each invitation earns 1 credit.

Now, we also improve the iEvony client to ensure that you can receive all credits when you use it to invite friends.

Remember my previous post about iEvony and how they support spamming the net?   Of course you do, it was very funny, especially when that tsenseless guy spammed my comments.  He’s been busy around the net, it’s not personal.  And Evony banned his account.  Well, as a thank you to all your wonderful work, now you get paid for each invite 1 credit!   Go ahead, find e-mail addresses on the web, spam them, Evony pays you, yay.  1500 spam messages per player.  Sure, you could have done so before, but it would have taken you a month. 

Some may think, wow what an amazing advertising strategy, instead of paying for more ads (as if there was anywhere left to advertise) they give money to word-of-mouth.  Well, spamming is wrong, and it’s damn wrong if it’s your friends you’re spamming.  It’s okay to send collective generic email about stuff you care about, though I hate those in general, it’s much different when getting paid for it.  Imagine one of your friends getting a job with an ad agency and emailing you all their different offers.  Hope you’d ban him, if you know how to do it that is.

Did Evony just remove the cap in gratitude to a program that worked far better than expected?  Would you pay more money if something that cost less was such a success?   Are there really 5 million Evony players?   Is that why there are new Evony servers everyday or is it for user retention cause the game offers little for experienced players who are not millionaires?  Feel free to check quantcast for Evony.com traffic.  About 250K users a month from the US alone.  Is showing breasts on website ads a good way to attract future Evony players?  Sure, the people who would click on it are willing to pay, but will we, in the near future, see x-rated videos when upgrading a town-hall to level 10?  Will a surprise MPEG be in a bonus package for buying in-game cents?  And what’s the deal with that last sentence in the quote?  You didn’t receive all your credits before?  Well, now for sure you can trust them!

Without commenting on the quality of The Guardian, I leave you with an article of theirs – has evony become the most despised game on the web?  That and saying that Evony is a great game that you should not be afraid to play just because the company’s policies suck.  Just treat it like a casino and set a budget if you want to beat other people.  Oh, and you won’t be getting any money back even if you win.

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• You can search all of our sites using our new customized google search at AskEvony.com.  You can use other search engines as well.
• Quick links to all our EvonyNet offerings, including Evonypedia, EvonySocial and my favorite EvonyPress.
• A chat button where you can go to the Evony chat site and chat with other Evony users online. 
• You can change the toolbar to show buttons from another Evony toolbar with many more links to other blogs.

Coming up is a feature that allows you to enter your construction time, and it will notify you when your construction is done!  Like the idea?  Hate it?  Please post here and let me know. 

Today is Monday, July 13th.  If by Thursday, say, July 16 you do not see that feature, please feel free (or even obligated) to write to editor at info@evonypress.com.  Believe me, he loves hearing from you, as much as you love sleeping.  Emails are really his caffeine fix and fairy dust.  I dare you to doubt me – I will forward to you the emails I get daily from him, which will teach you a valuable lesson in trust at least when it comes to this blog.  On a typical day, I get around 40 e-mails from him, 3 from the rest of our team.  We also have close to 5 million domain names, and growing, all thanks to him!  So don’t be shy, write ahead. 

Remember, I also get those emails, so be nice.

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My point was that there are many Evony servers.  You have to agree to that at least.  I played on server 14 for a long time, and then when server 25 launched I started playing on that as well.  I was the first one on that server thanks to our new notifier!!!  With the help of our start up guide I also went up in ranks quickly (what, you think I stayed the only one on the server?) and was one of the best players.  Next morning I was in a 200th place.  Next two days in 2000nd place.  I’m not complaining, I don’t play as much as others.   Did you read that editor?  (these are tough financial times, and I have to cover my rear.  Even though I don’t get paid, I don’t want him to charge me for being affiliated with him.  I did say he’s a very nice guy who would never do such a lousy thing didn’t I?  Good…)

The problem is, I click on map on the new server 25, and nearly every square around me is occupied!  I kid you not – take a look yourself!!

What is going on?  Did I pick a prime real estate location?  I am near a lake, but I understand it’s long enough to supply everyone everywhere.  I mean I wanted a secluded foresty spot, how did I end up in a major metropolitan area?   In server 14 which has been running for almost a month there are at least 10 times fewer cities around me.  There are two options that I see:

1. There are many new users.
2. Many old users want a new chance to beat up on new users.

Did you also notice that the Evony overlords have announced that the Wheel of Fortune will now give you 4x the daily reward it did before?  How come that is that every time I spin it I get 1 speaker.  Almost all the items there are useless, but the speaker is the worst.  I have like hundreds of speakers lying around.  I will never use them, why should I?  I understand conceptually it was a way for Evony to control spamming, but when chat is free for new users this entire concept is ridiculous.

Finally, you should have noticed an Evony system message about the ievony program.  Right now it’s in beta, which means you have to be invited personally by someone, or just use the codes from their bbs forums.  By signing up – in the Evony game client click shop, then click earn game coins, you’ll go to a website, enter your code, and download a windows referral client – you will be able to earn really miniscule amounts of cents by referring your friends to the game.  Instead of them signing in at www.evony.com they’ll sign in at say evonynet.evony.com which is the link I have at the beginning of the post.

That said, you like me right?  I’m nice to you after all.  I tell you about cool stuff, and I try to make you laugh, so you should be nice to me too right?  You wouldn’t try to spam me with your own ievony account right?  Depending on the number of friends you have, you may want to avoid spamming the ones you want to keep as well.

Seriously Evony, isn’t it better for your reputation to start having affiliate websites? Why do you want to be known as the internet gaming company which pays game money for spamming?

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Our heros made the biggest sacrifices possible to protect our great country, and I cannot be more grateful to them for it!

If you are living in the great city of Toronto, please pick up your garbage behind you, and place it in your pocket, since all the trash bins are taped.  You may take it out of your pocket and dispose of it after the strike ends (who knows when).  Thank you for not littering.

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The way the map stands now, you, the user, will get to click a grass patch area and tell the map what exists there.  Is it a forest, a lake or a city?   You will also specify its level.  Sounds simple enough, but it’s a lot of clicking so start saving your clicks from now for the map.  

When you add cities to the map, you would be able to specify the lord for the city as well as the alliance and other information visible in the Evony map.  This information will not be searchable due to Evony’s concern over unfair game play using 3rd party websites.  One of the most desirable features in building such a map is showing all the alliance cities on one world, and actually searching for alliance members city coordinates (one of the biggest peeves by Evony players). 

Ideally, we would want to show such information only to players in that alliance, however, now that we can’t access Evony servers, we cannot verify a person indeed belongs to an alliance she claims to.  Since the feature is so useful that we have to implement it, essentially Evony has created an unfair gameplay problem for themselves by restricting us from doing our due diligence and securing the map browsing.   If you’re as concerned as we are, please write to them and complain.

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