Hi, I would like to provide my input regarding the new changes.
I wanna note this from the beginning: I have never received any feed in oly. I love olympiad, I think it has some of the most awesome mechanics of the game, and I always play for fun/personal challenge. Olympiad is something really important for me in every server, and as such I wanted to write my opinion about the recent changes.
Firstly, I will talk about /olympiadstat function. Now you can only see your points, and command doesn't work for other player, as it always shows you your own points. Aside from this, now at the end of oly match you can't see either your or oppononent's points, as it shows both players with 0 points. Combining these two there is NO way anyone can know anybody's points, as long as you don't tell them of course.
There are a few reasons I think this is not a good thing:
First of all, a big part of olympiad is managing when you enter, what wave you catch, and how you are going to compete with someone that is going for the hero of your class. Olympiad isn't just entering randomly and winning every match, this is not possible with most classes. In many cases, it is better to just skip many rounds alltogether. But to do this, you need to know your opponent's points. Take for example Fenix that won paladin hero last round with only 1 point more than Casanova (and they both had around 1500!):
He knew Casanova's points and didn't enter at all for the last 2-3 waves. If he didn't know Casanova points he would have to keep playing cause he wouldn't be sure he has the hero, and he might've been countered by me or Conan. I'm not blaming Fenix, he is a good player and what he did was wise, I would've done the same, but this new change seriously affects this. This is a necessary function of Olympiad! I might even go as far to say that this is the essence of olympiad: last day, when you are close points with your class antagonists and you keep racing against each other. Now all of this won't happen.
Also, another problem is time spent on the game. Not all people can play olympiad 6h every day for 2 weeks. Some people might want to build a good lead (~200-300 pts) against their opponent and stop playing after that until they start to get close. Now the only thing you know is when you are first from olympiad manager, but this really doesn't say a lot. You have to know your antagonists' points so you can manage your time spent on olympiad, it's pointless to just keep playing and not know how close or far away you are from others.
All in all, I think the removal of /olympiadstat function is really bad, and it kind of makes the whole olympiad competitive spirit nonexistent and pointless.
The other change is that you can't be matched against a clanmate.
First of all, I wanna say that yesterday (12/4) when this was live I still got matched with clanmate (Azogg vs whisp), so you might check if this is really working.
Aside from that, this definitely has no point, since you can just leave clan before entering. This doesn't help at all against organised feeding, and the only thing it does is take away the fun of playing against your clanmates. I, for example, really like to play against some good players from my clan, you can't just remove this option from the game or force me to leave my clan just to get them as opponents.
Now, I know this is all done to prevent feeding, but I think this is a wrong approach. Sadly, with relatively small communities (in comparison to official) in servers like these, where not many people play oly, feed will ALWAYS happen. In one form or other, you can't avoid it.
There are two kinds of feeding in oly. First is when you organise feed wave, 5 players log weak char and only one player enters with his main. This is REALLY easy to spot, you only have to keep an eye on chat/oly, and you'll see it. GM doesn't even have to watch every oly match 6h/day to stop this. First time warning, second time jail for 1day, third time jail for 1 week, 4th time perma ban is a fair and simple solution to that. Same applies with matches when one person from same class takes off jwls/clothes and loses. All of this I think is simple to fight against, and I see that there is plenty of footage in this forum as well.
There is also some less obvious "feeding". This is not exactly feeding, it can be considered helping too. It's when you get matched against clan member that needs points and you don't give your 100%. I don't agree with this, but really, consider that you are in a server with 4-5 good clans, these clans mean a lot to players, we help and support each other, and you can't expect people to give their 100% against a clannie, and then perhaps lose against war clan. There are not enough players to reduce the chance of clan members getting matched together, but I think we have to live with this. Some people have their ethics, and never give/take feed to clan members (I try to follow that as much as I can), but I don't blame players that don't give their 100% when playing against clan member that needs the points. It's not black/white in this matter, it's more of a grey area, and I think there is no fair way to stop this, better just accept that this is gonna be the case in "small" servers and focus on punishing real feed.
I think that's all I wanted to say, might add something later if I forgot something.
Thanks for reading and sorry for long post.
Ancano
