--RevolvAroundFrom what I have seen, the starting capital is not really the problem. The main problem is the raw materials that new companies start with.
I know a lot of people sell it to grow faster, but if there were some sort of restrictions placed on the sale of these items (min/max price for q0 steel, wood and stones for Traders) the cheaters would not have such an easy time to boost their real account.
Oh yes, I had forgotten about those starting mats. I used mine for construction when I started, so it didn't come to mind, but certainly, they represent a lot of money if someone reseting accounts over and over were to sell them =)
They would totally benefit from being something else. Like be "Training steel", "Training wood", etc, differing of the regular version, by not being sellable. I do however not know if a flag of the kind "this item can't be sold on the market / via contract" is a flag that currently exists in the game, or could be coded with relative ease in comparison to other anti-cheater suggestions.
Along the same lines of a starting tally I elaborated above, and probably easier to put in place, these starting mats could be added to the tally as well, and be totally absent from the warehouse. That is, instead of having "the tally" be just construction and production cash, have it also include some "steel credit", "wood credit", etc, and withdraw new construction materials from the tally rather than the warehouse (until the tally's empty).
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From some input in this thread, it seems many ideas were suggested along the course of the game, way before I joined, certainly some of them better than my own =) I'm not sure in which measure bots are a problem. If they are, I really liked the above suggestions of manualy clicking to hunt them down -though popups in your browser have the double edge of being an annoyance to non-bot players too-.
But even without a bot and simply browsing manually, a cheater could sell everything and reset several times a day, making several milions. After slightly over a month of non-cheating regular play, I need about 2 days to make 3/4 of a milion. I understand older and well established player would be more worried about bot browsing competing against them on a comparable scale; but from my own perspective though, I wanted to point out that to new players like me, who are starting the game around now, the relative ease of doing it simply manually, without any bot help, combined with the sheer number of people apparently doing it, and how out of proportions that money can be to a daily legit production -even with a month of gameplay under your belt- are really very disheartening to the fresh blood in the game.
Automating it with programs only makes the problem worse, of course, but beyond the problem of bots, and beyond the tools available to hunt down/report cheater effect, I feel the primary root of the issue is how much wealth you can corrupt -with or without bots- out of its original intent of helping you start in the game (hence the tally suggestion).
