New Community Prizes LANDMARKS

Excruciator69 wrote:
Answer this, please: If EA is using a fake counter, why bother changing the milestones since they could just manipulate the rate of the fake counter to match them?

As an experienced programmer I can give you a very logical answer: because it's much easier to bump the community total and change the milestones than to alter, test and debug the code that runs the (IMO fake) community counter.

It's exceedingly easy to write a chunk of code that'll make a counter increment in identical fractions every second. It's a bit more work, and a LOT more testing, to create a chunk of code that'll make a counter appear to increment in random amounts at random times.

(And I guess you already know - it's also considerably more work to create a counter that actually polls users' game sessions to keep track of the actual totals)

And if they already wrote it the first way, there's no easy way to change it to the second way. But it would still be simple to keep the first type of counter, bump the community total and change the milestones.

May i ask, why does it matter if it's fake or real? Either way we get the prizes so it doesn't matter!

Excruciator69 wrote:
I am also a programmer and I can think of countless ways to code the counter.

Then you should also know how extremely risky and ill-advised it is to make any change that's not absolutely necessary (e.g., a bug fix) to a chunk of code running on a live game that people are actively playing, and you should also know that if the counter were truly an accurate reflection of actual player activity, it wouldn't keep ticking forward at a steady rate no matter the hour of day or night.

You should also know that if it were polling and collecting actual user data, it would not be possible for the counter to go up, then back down, then back up again, as many players are seeing.

But ultimately, I'm with the commenter above: it doesn't matter if it's real or not, we're getting the prizes. I only raised the matter to try and calm some posters' nerves over this silly counter obsession.

thejudd67 wrote:
If the difficulty of building the counter is the main evidence for its being fake then I don't really find that all that persuasive.

Um, it ISN'T. There's also the fact that the counter was totally fake during Halloween. The fact that the counter mysteriously jumped by about a mill when they changed the targets. The fact that it keeps incrementing steadily, in mechanical fashion, all hours of the day and night.

And what evidence is there that it IS genuine? Oh, the fact that at some point earlier they wrote code to poll user games to count buildings.

Well if a genuine and accurate counter was created back in the day, and it's so easy to use and so reliable, why did they replace it with a fake one during Halloween?

Last I'm going to say on the topic, because only EA knows for sure and it ultimately doesn't matter to anyone except players who a) assume it's real and b) base their gameplay on that assumption. Since I'm not one of those, it doesn't matter at all to me.

thejudd67 wrote:
The Halloween counter was fake just like the moon landing, right? ;)

If you believe the Halloween counter was genuine, I think you're the only one here who does. Pretty sure even Exruciator would disagree with you on that one. :|

spAnser wrote:
450,000,000
625,000,000
800,000,000
975,000,000
1,100,000,000

Awesome! Thanks for letting us know and thanks to the developers for realising that the first landmarks were borderline impossible.

indieauthorALH wrote:

thejudd67 wrote:
The Halloween counter was fake just like the moon landing, right? ;)

If you believe the Halloween counter was genuine, I think you're the only one here who does. Pretty sure even Exruciator would disagree with you on that one. :|

Nope, he's not the only one.

Poorly coded perhaps, but fake, no, given the argument of both side and my experience in software development (ie how I would code the counter) have no reason to think it was fake, despite the public opinion of this forum.

You know noone cares if its fake or not as long as we get all prices? Lol

Glad you came down to earth, EA!

jennylynj21 wrote:
It's ok ea...math is hard

http://i.imgur.com/6w6U44e.jpg

+1. Wait, no that is wrong 1+1... carry the seven... oh yeah! 2!

+2!