Rocketry wrote:Fireside Poet wrote:Greetings Conquer Club!
Today while browsing through some different things on CC, I got to wondering if there would be any benefit to having a farmer list so we can put them on ignore and expose them as a detriment to the CC community. There have been many threads regarding this behavior, but no resolution as I could see. While these tactics are within the guidelines of the "rules" of Conquer Club, perhaps the community at large should unite in an effort to put a spotlight on these shady, underhanded practices.
Example:
http://www.conquerclub.com/forum/memberlist.php?mode=viewprofile&u=231446In the above example, we see a cook with a score of roughly 650-700 being asked by
karelpietertje with a score of roughly 4800 to join in a nice friendly freestyle Waterloo game. The intent is obvious. While the tongue-in-cheek gesture of "would be fun if you joined" is just a ruse for their roughly 2 points for the win, it is neither fun for the cook nor a learning experience, except to be in awe of the fast clicking of a freestyle setting and game that was only made as a trap and over within 5 rounds of play.
I am sure I am rehashing old arguments and ideas, but it is nauseating to see this day after day and perhaps I just needed to vent. This is one example of many and I'm just tired of seeing it done by these "high ranking" people who then receive praise for how good they are, when all they really are are charlatans and the CC equivalent of a greasy used car salesman. Acquire and use some class.
PS - This is just an example and not a hard fact that karelpietertje does this regularly ... it was just the one that broke the poet's cool.

I'm siding firmly with fireside on this one. I think it would be really useful to have a black-list of players who farm regularly. It would never be quite up to date nor would it ever have every farmer on it but it would be useful none the less.
It would be difficult though. I think the first stage would be to define "farmer" in absolute terms.
Eg:
*20 or more "farming" games
*Use of freestyle
*Use of clickies
*Over 2000 pts
*Opponents all under 800 pts
*All in the last 8 weeks
That was just a quick off-the-top-of-my-head list and will need refining. It's just an example.
Rocket.
I definitely agree with rocket that we have to define farmer. People's definition's of farmer vary widely. This is part of what makes it difficult. We don't want to just start making rules, and then suddenly 3,000 people are accused of farming on the first day. As for his suggested terms there are a few problems.
1. 20 farm games. If we have no definition for farmer, how can we claim to know what farm games are. Do the include 8 player games or only 1v1's. Quads can be used to farm just as easily.
2. over 2,000 points. I just don't like the idea that having a high score makes you a suspect.
3. An enormous number of people on this site ues clickies, myself included, it is not against the rules. Also you don't need clickies to farm, you can make sequential games on waterloo, or perl harbor. Or you can make quads games and invite all noobs, the likely hood that they will work together against an experienced team and win is pretty low.
Having said all that, we do need some criteria, and maybe some of the ones that I mentioned will have to do anyway.
One final thought. Admin has to be careful with these rules. The last thing you want is your game is about to start and you get some automatic message saying, "game cannot start because it meets farming criteria", when your just trying to play a 1v1 against your sister from Georgia who just joined the site.