What some of you may not realize is that Bytro originally ran things as in SP1914:
A: Gold for MTX on a minor scale for income
B: High Command as a subscription for access to a good chunk of content
C: Gold Fees. Their used to be Gold arounds in SP1914 that you had to pay Gold to make/Gold to join which had the toggable options of: Certain map types, Elite AI, premium units(Air units, balloons, etc)
As nice as the Gold Fee idea is, it's something they used to do. They did away with it ages ago and moved to focusing purely on A above, removing C and stripping down B.
From my time as Support Staff, you don't have tons of "Bots" in this game. Botting is popular in MMORPGs such as Runescape, WoW, and other games as you have a vast variety of items in a in-game economy and Gold, and you can exchange such things for real life cash. So their is a financial incentive to bot. Their is no such incentives in Call of War. What we had here is primarily a massive problem in people making multi accounts for the hell of it to troll in Global Chat. And to put it quite bluntly, this itself has little effect on tons of players going inactive over time. This has been a pretty big norm over the years - It's just a this point their are tons of better/alternative online browser games, HTML5 things, and Mobile games - And most of the community is or in the process of moving on. So with a reduced mature community pool, it might be a tad harder to find random good games to join these days. Things are just dying. That's all.
Even if their were a imaginary Chinese-Gold bot problem and a few other things, some of which people are messaging me about, the Support Staff don't have the tools to properly fight such things, never have, never will. Against people who actually know half of what they are doing, the most the Support Staff can do is smack them down if they become a nuisance in the in-game chat.
What some people may not realize is that the majority of "Inactives" are
A: Just kids/Newer players mass joining rounds and going inactive
C: People just joining games to chat in Global and ignore the game. Not much of this these days.
D: A. A. A.
I mean, seriously. Their is no incentive for the Chinese, Venz, or anyone to bot farm this game. They don't do it to bigger games to "Troll". They do it to make money. Their is no money to be made in this game from farming. And though their used to be a lot of people who make multi-accounts for Trolling/Lulzing in the past, a good vast majority of inactives are people just quitting the game. It's been like this for over ten years. It just gets more noticeable as more and more of the dedicated community quits. People don't just make multi accounts to go inactive in games. If anything the opposite.
And yes. The "Anti-Bot" system is utter rubbish that doesn't work properly when it is even turned on. When people go on about "Detecting Bots, Multi-Accounts, fighting this or that", they really don't know how limited and broken the Support Staff tools are - When they work, and how very easy it is to circumvent them. The vast majority of bans are just kids who can't keep their mouths shut in Global or family who play the same game from the same household and trigger MAD by accident and get banned from that round. The last remaining are people who get reported for offensive in game articles/messages or what not and get smacked. If anything the Anti-Bot system was kept off Server side for ages as it consistently had false positives and was banning legitimate players left and right - And I have no idea if it was ever fixed or not. Most it can do is detect the same IP in the same game round. Nothing else. It's rudimentary and bad. That's all the "Automatic" system is, and the manual way is just checking the IPs yourself or logging into the game round as Staff and looking around. Nothing else.
The Gold Fee idea was used for years and scrapped. It doesn't work for Bytro's current business model. And you can achieve the same effect(More activity) by making a better, more enjoyable game and grabbing more people into private Communities/Discords and linking them together.
Better ideas as always is Bytro making a more solid game (Technically) with graphical eye candy. With people in the community doing fun events(The official Events are rigged to cause resource shortages/To psychologically encourage people to spend/Buy Gold el la Casino style), Competitive Alliance matches, Role-Playing games, Players League stuff, and what not. And having fun private Discord Communities.
Though, you keep playing the same game under a different theme for the same ten to fifteen years, eventually things get tiring and you move on. Or not.
TL'DR
"Trolls" aren't ruining game rounds, and "Gold Fee games" won't fix the problems at hand. The former due to the fact that it just isn't a thing/Proof. The latter due to the fact it's been already done and didn't positively affect anything, and removing the Gold Fees short term to mid term improved player retention and activity(Those are really old graphs though from years ago from SP1914) and wouldn't really have any effect here other than restricting content. Do community stuff and have a solid game. That's all you need.
