One night of taxes and we're criminals for life

======= NOTICE FOR HELP =======

What happened: ABN learned how taxes work last night when we slightly exceeded our max ship count on “Issa Planet”. Contributing factors are: 1) many new players who are learning the game have recently joined the faction. 2) We have allied abandoned ships that we’ve been trying to get rid of/wait for them to despawn that we cant get rid of. 3) The server is well designed, usually when you’re about to make a critical rules violation such as ship size or having too many private/faction ships in a playfield you get a series of red-text warnings. Unfortunately, nothing could really prepare us for realizing we were at 150 cores on-planet until this mornings taxes rolled in. (By the way, until now, we’ve never had any trouble with taxes- we always avoid getting taxed by not violating tax-laws.)
Player(s) with issue: Definitely everybody in ABN faction, possibly allies on-planet as well but if so they can write their own report since I dont know their details.
Server: NA
Time (cb:time): Last nights tax calculation
Playfield: Issa Planet
Structure Name(s): 150+ cores
Structure ID(s): 150+ cores
How can we help you now: Well, we’re all completely drained of our accounts and each have a minimum of 20m in debt, possibly more such as myself at 32m. We immediately cut down our ship count to be well below the limit and will be deleting more as members get on to handle their assets. Further, we’ll be sending out our armada to go fight and die to cut those down as well.

Help could come in a number of ways: If we could be granted a character save data restore to yesterday that would be a miracle and a lesson learned. This might be too lenient - up to the admins - but we had no real way to prevent this without it occurring once. Usually you lose a mill or two (often far less) to a bad tax mistake. We’re cumulatively out 200+M just in debt we cant pay -after- we lost all our $$. One member had 60M and was close to getting his OCD6.

Alternatively, if the above is too much to ask, then if the remaining unpayable taxes could at least be zeroed before we lose all our ships, that would be great.

If -all- the above is still too much to ask, then could you message me with the best rules-legal way to fix this on our own? The objective here for us is to keep our ships which now are legal but are in risk of being set to public.

Keep in mind, we have a private planet so, theoretically having our assets set to public wouldnt actually do anything negative to us, we’re just legit trying to play the game right and not get nuked off the server by a mod feature.

Hello @Rabid

first of all thanks for the report.
So close to the HWS 8 release this is quite a big task for us… there is no easy / fast way to do that…

The most important info for you guys is this:

With Global Scan you always know how many cores are on what playfield.
At the moment the technical limitation don’t allow me to exclude PvE from that list you have to pay RP for it, hence you could ask me how many cores are on your Donator planet. Many did this already before learning about Global Scan.

Not saying you didn’t care about being taxed but all in all this situation could have been prevented.

Anyways, since the wipe is very near and I really hope you learned the lesson I will take the time now to do what I can.
Keep in mind it can only be done roughly. Not counting each penny in detail.
I’ll write here if I’m done…

I took care of ABN as fast and good as possible.

Please keep in mind: that was an one time service and this is not a reference for other tax occurrences.

Admin of the year to you. I need to find you a coffee mug sir.

Thanks for your help rex. Much appreciated.
I’d leave it at that because I really do appreciate the fast response and assistance.

However, I popped open my registry and noticed that we only have 97 structures total on that planet, which is rated for 150. Granted, I removed 14 today, but only had added 12 last night (which would have been what put us over)

This doesnt seem right but maybe im missing something. I’ll pop a deep scan thingy

You better type in faction chat “fa:scan” sooner than later…

You are welcome.

I just want to preface this with another thanks. Everything seemed fixed with everyone in faction I’ve spoken to.

I’ve done fa:scan but its not loaded yet for me. Thanks for the screenshot above. I did get confirmation that I turned fa:scan on, and im sure it works, so no worries that it hasnt updated on HWS connect yet.

Much appreciated, both the save for the faction and for your time. I know you are busy with everything going on for next season!

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FYI, still no luck with Global Scan and I’ve turned it off and on again. Asking about it in global, players reply that it takes as much as 2 days to get it to show up.

So, its a little slow but works. I’ll leave it running

It should be updated within 15 minutes… let me check…

So you see only ??? in HWS Connect > Universe?

Gotta get off of here for a bit but still no update. Can confirm I see only ??? in HWS connect > Universe.

I will look into this as soon as I get back on and post here the result!

Found it!

In the end it was the Cache control system of Cloudflare. It was caching all Header requests, even this GET request straight from the game server, ignoring my Ajax cache prevention system.

After I bypassed that cache proxy I was able to reproduce instant updates for global scan (and maybe others).

So overall your “lesson learned” cost me 2 hours (rip some HWS 8 features) but in the end I found a bigger issue for everything affecting HWS Connect. #worthit :smile:

Nice work sir, im online now and its working again as intended

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