Automated tracking also doesnt work, as people very often exchange those instants creating massive amounts of false positives. unless you use self learning algorithms to correct the errors, but thats expensive stuff only huge IT companies can afford and experiment with like google, microsoft, amazon ect.
Not something you create in a few min to battle a few cheaters in a game like this.
This isn't nearly as hard as you think. Simple plus/minus tracking shows who is cheating and who isn't. Granted it can't tell you if one particular transaction is a push, but tracking KPs received and KPs donated over a week is quite simple and if you are only looking for major cheats, it is very accurate. There are no false positives when one player gets 2,000 more KP in donations than they give every single week. There is also no excuse for a player to give 90%+ of their KP to a non-FS member that hasn't "discovered" them on the map.
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My personal opinion on why this change was implemented is twofold.
1. Players asked for it so that we would stop losing hourly KP when our bar filled on Saturdays.
2. Balance. KPs for the bar are very plentiful with 5 ways to buy them, houry Kp, the map, quest rewards, aw rewards, and the tournament.
Because of that, players almost never got stuck in the tech tree waiting for KP.
This made players feel that the guest race resource requirements(or mana/seeds) where too slow, when in fact it could be viewed that getting KP was too fast.
Simply removing some of the KP would cause an insane amount of outrage from the playerbase, and reducing guest race requirements would be very difficult to balance, so shifting some of the KP to wonders is actually a rather elegant solution. Giving players an 80-130% boost on those KP is a very nice touch as well.
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There is also potential for an anti-cheat system with KP instants if implemented:
1. KP instants are only earned in a FS
2. (new rule) KP instants can only be used on FS wonders and your own wonders
3. (new rule) KP instants are lost when you join a new FS
If they do that, then they put a nice little dent in pushing.
