The only comprehensive strategy guide about placing pixels on wplace.live.

Space Battleship Yamato 2199 - Opening Theme

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Chapter 0: Rules of the game

1. System functionality:

1. Reports:
   • Screenshot is sent during user report.
   • One account can only report one account one time, (aka. next report on same person, will result in nothing until mod acts on first report). So it's preferable for grief to be visible (half destroyed) and be as big as possible.
2. What fastens mod action?
   • Amount of reports.
   • User's account level.
3. Bans:
   • Ban Duration: 6h, 24h, 72h, 1week, 1month, permaban.
   • Ban indication:
     • If your report gets acted on by the mod, you receive notification (click user avatar and bell notification).
     • If you try to report already banned usre, you'll recieve a notification of it.
   • To find out general cause for your ban visit: https://backend.wplace.live/me
4. Ban appeal:
   • Takes upto 7 days to review.
   • Cooldown period of 90 days from previous ban appeal.
   • What mod can do:
     • Ban players.
     • Decide/or not to erase selected zone.
     • Look at reports for a given user?
5. Anti-botting measures:
   • Login in to account1, logout, login to account2 = instant multi-account ban

2. Rules and Enforcement

https://wplace.live/terms/code-of-conduct

1. Mod bias:

   • If you have "freebalestine" username, with bought balestine flag, and belong to "balestinians alliance",
   • and you decided to fix israel's flag (like actually)
   • and someone reports you for griefing
   • you may get banned for griefing

   HOW

   • Have "friendly" regional username / alliance, either for the sake of shielding yourself from accidental bans, or to have addition points into camouflage.

2. What isn't protected by mods, therefore it's legal to grief:

   • "Party flags, electoral symbols, and portraits of politicians".
   • "Painting the background of existing artworks with a single color or with repetitive patterns".

3. What is considered "non political", therefore protected by mods:

   • National, state, and city flags
   • LGBT/other minority related
   • "Historical or cultural movement symbols"

4. Other behaviour which will get you banned:

   • "Making doddles" rather than "art" would likely get you banned, as it looks like griefing, even if someone may've griefed your artwork, and you just try to "make it difficult" to unpixel your spot according to the template.

5. Notable report reasons:

   • Hate speech = Permanent ban
     • Erasing israel's flag with balestine or balestine related artwork ✔
   • Threats = Permanent ban
   • Doxxing = Permanent ban
   • NSFW = More severe means permanent ban
   • Highly Suggestive/Criminal Content

Chapter 1: Pixel Attack Guide

1. Make a high use of similar shades

WHY

• Makes it more difficult to make a "redesign template"
• Makes it difficult to repair on shitty monitor
• Makes it difficult to recolor by hand on shitty monitor

EXAMPLES

i.e. We're repainting someone's artwork with contrasting colors of "black and white image" into "barely visible dark gray + dark slate". i.e. We're making simple solid color background have random paches of similar shade

HOW

• good free combinations:
  • dark pink + pink
  • orange + dark orange
• good paid combinations:
  • dark gray + dark slate
  • light indigo + light slate blue
  • dark indigo + dark slate blue
  • light peach + light beige + beige
  • light tan + light stone
  • yellow + light goldenrod
  • dark peach + dark brown

2. Fending off zone attack / Zone capture - ukraine version:

OVERVIEW

• Baiting people into removing artworks and being reported for it.
• Forcing people to meticulously pixel (recolor, make changes), rather than braindead expanding solid colors and shapes.

HOW

1. Watchdog = someone who constantly watches changes and retells others WHO and FOR WHAT to report griefers.

   • It's better to allow griefer to destroy enough for mod to see the damage (screenshot is sent during report).
   • Quick and Robust reporting pipeline, for people to very easily participate:
     1. Provide location url.
     2. Screenshots at exact problematic area.
     3. Further screenshots include every NEW griefer (as repair team and new griefers will take turns).
     4. If default report is for griefing, there should be BOLD RED TEXT if there's an Inclination to change report to say, hate speech, and griefers recieving bigger setence.

2. Few independent reporters

   WHY

   • There's a lot of fog of war in terms of what kind of report will actually be actioned by a mod.
   • Due to nature of "only one report per reported person till it'll be judged by a mod".

   HOW

   • Report only griefs which capture "half full / half broken" artworks
   • Pay close attention to how normal people report griefers (their report format/template), did they had any success with notifications?

3. Repair team, priority of action: 0. Change username, alliance and a flag to the "good side of fixers not griefers" to avoid accidental or framed ban.

   1. Restoring simple artworks (which aren't similar to the griefer ones).
   2. Minefield Strategy (spam new artworks for defense).
      • Artworks are meant to claim:
        1. Safe = Any uncontested land (void, backgrounds, in-between artworks, on top of shitty artworks, anything unbannable)
        2. Risky (easy to be framed) = On top of other artworks (in a way that's not considered griefing). Enemy will prioritize it, the benefit is in chaos, as it could be further used for artwork sweep operation, or as a green light for more, or it may be enemy may be reported for trying to remove it to it's orginal state.
      • Artworks have different shapes.
      • Artworks have different colors.
        1. Don't use enemy colors to not be framed (i.e. swarm = shades of black void, shades of purple)
        2. Basic anti-griefing measures dictate starting with free+paid colors (remember to leave free colors for lower rank members to fill in).
        3. Once artworks are griefed constantly, repairing team shouldn't be forced into paid colors, instead it's quantity over quality.
      3. (Difficult but important) - know your enemy, don't let your artworks be used as part of theirs with very little effort.
      4. (Possible but difficult in practice) - enough foresight, to have smaller artworks be considered as one big artwork in the eyes of a mod.
      5. If there's a huge disparity in numbers (to your disadvantage), organize few members to draw artworks "at the same time". ===
      • Could probably simply use random region and use all it's artworks to use as a template.

4. Other defensive strategies.

   • LGBT related stripes in various parts OUTISDE the artwork
   • Any artwork: outside-outlines
   • Any artwork: diy/by hand outside-image shadow = i.e. 3 pixels down and 3 pixels from right and bottom side of any artwork
   4. Minefield Strategy (spam new artworks but for attacking).
   5. Patterning voided/patterned backgrounds. = Only acts as a pixel sinkhole, it should be used only as a last resort.

3. Fending off zone attack / Zone capture - russian version: :x:

OVERVIEW

• x

HOW

1. Sew in-fighting, disruption and distrust
   • plant a spy and reveal it at the time of incoming attack
2. Choose battlefield, which will be the most advantageous to you. = Fire up big and lazy populus to pixel void in the name of grand crusade.
   • There's no apparent strength in "modifying artworks to spreading corruption".
   • There's no apparent strength in "making new swarm themed artworks". ===
   • There's advantage of numbers.
   • There's advantage of having pro balestine people hating israel.
3. Shatter enemy's morale by winning with overwhelming strength of pixeling black background (possibly least relevant battlefield).
4. Second phase, the meat of an attack - drawing bigger artwork on foreign soil:
   1. The cautious will draw on top of void = low risk of ban
   2. Fire up balestinians with anti-israel propaganda and order them to sacrifice their accounts to lead the way, by griefing artworks, inch by inch.
   3. Rinse and repeat.

• mention use of busy fill-in and artwork sweep into smaller one

Chapter 2: Defensive Pixeling

1. Artwork protection techniques

WHY

• To make them less solid, aka. more pixely and harder to grief/recolor without wasting time.
• To make artworks survive before cops show up.

HOW

• Size considerations
  • Avoid = Small artworks will be wiped out before there's a chace to report.
  • Default = Few hundred to few thausands of pixels should survive not very coordinated attacks.
  • Big = At some point, griefers will pick the weakest link of big artwork, that link should be of Default size instead.
• Use #🧱-patterns to add easy pattern in various parts of the artwork (ofc just change colors),
• In-image highlights = 1 pixel left/top "inside outline" of lighter color
• In-image shadows = 1-few pixels right/down "inside outline" of darker color
• Dithering = i.e. solid color t-shirt into checkerboard-ish pattern made from 2 similar colors

2. Advanced protection techniques

HOW

• Don't draw griefable pieces (i.e. star of david, instead draw clearly jew person.)
• LGBT related stripes in various parts INSIDE the artwork
• Be part of a bigger artwork (i.e. each character holds a letter, few characters make a word, it's clear when someone goes missing)

Chapter x: Attack Techniques

1. Artwork sweep

WHY

• wipe out certain artwork

HOW

1. Multiple smaller artworks are drawn on top of bigger artwork, then once gaps in-between artworks aren't so large, it's sweeping time.

• Safer to move one step at a time, to see how mod reacts to reports on smaller changes.

2. Bigger artwork artworks is drawn on top of smaller artwork, there's nothing to report.
3. Bigger artwork is drawn around smaller artwork, then artwork is sweeped.
4. Flag/Stripe encounters big artwork on it's way, flag/stripe surrounds big artwork, artwork gets randomly griefed in some parts, big artwork is now a broken mess, therefore it's flag/stripe makes it a service to "clean things up" and make a sweep.
5. Inconspicuous smaller artwork + basic background in is drawn on top of bigger artwork.
   • People may not pay attention,
   • even if they do, replaced smaller artwork (i.e. hearts) make zone seem "busy and filled with artworks still".
   • Could be used to sew uncertainty in mod's eyes, on what's been fixed and what was griefed.
   • Could be used as a "safer" version of expanding (griefing) your artwork on top of other's artworks.
6. Big artwork encounters another big artwork = ?

2. Subtle Enshittification

WHY

• Danger of ban
• It takes very high amount of effort to redesign an artwork to be:
  • different enough to make people change it back
  • not different enough for it to be considered griefing
• Would only work as a temporary distraction with likely all eyes on it

HOW

1. Unswarm looking redesign = forces them to fix it
2. Recolor/modification not crazy enough to get griefing ban (i.e. not "fried meme colors", or kirby on israpixel)

3. Camouflage fixers as griefers

HOW

1. You're griefing someone's city with black background and penile looking monster
2. Fixer draws some artworks back
3. You grief their artwork, but leave only some pixels with colors similar to "black background and penile looking monster"
4. You, the fixer, is take for being part of a griefing team
5. Fixer has to fill in ban appeal, or sit down (90 days) cooldown from previous ban appeal.

HOW TO AVOID BEING FRAMED

• If "alliance A" griefs with "black background and purple looking penile monster = don't use black colors and purple shades.

5. Framing

HOW

1. You draw LGBT flag
2. Someone erases entire flag and only leaves nazi swastika
3. Someone reports you for hate speech

HOW TO AVOID BEING FRAMED

• ?

6. Busy-ing Crime Scene

WHY

1. Your team griefs surrounding artworks = very clear there was griefing done
2. You add small hearts in between artworks.
3. The scene of crime now doesn't look as suspiciously empty (people will pay less attention to their surroundings, like disappearing artworks)
4. By adding and by incorporating i.e. "artwork sweep -> into smaller inconspicuous artwork + background", it makes it chaotic to understand what happened and how to properly respond (as a mod and as a fixer team).

HOW

• Add artworks in-between artworks (no risk of being framed as griefer).
  • :white_check_mark: small and inconspicuous (i.e. hearts) = makes scene busy, people may leave it alone, won't too small to be used to report griefing
  • :x: small and conspicuous (i.e. real artwork) = makes scene busy, people may panic and remove it, too small to be used to report griefing

7. Flytrap

WHY

• "Mowing the lawn" with reports and consistent pixel expenditure to prevent overwhelming conflicts.

HOW

• All artworks within close proximity for easy spotting of changes for reports.
• Big triggering artwork = not easily griefed by multiple people.
• Medium/Smaller triggering artworks = easily griefed by smaller accounts.

8. Bad Bait - "Pull in and out": :x:

EXAMPLE

• Small portion team "A" draws half a flag.
• Team "B" goes and repaints it whole into complete flag, wasting more pixels than portion of team "A".

WHY

• Pros:
  • Forces enemy to defend
  • Enemy may overextend pixels to remove baits
• Cons:
  • Bait may simply be voided with the same amount of pixels, or even repurposed for their artwork
  • It's better to start wars with big initial attacks
  • It=s better to commit to actual artworks

HOW

• Pick artworks which would be desirable to be actually completed
• (Optional) add more baits

Chapter 99: Todo

• remaking bigger artworks into smaller ones
• taking down a flag:
  • break rectangle, so there won't be "lines to fill in inside"
  • cover vital symetry first (if i.e. flag has triangles)

1. some section on defining, pros and cosn of the the enemy
2. min-maxing reports format
3. Competent* (not swarm) enemy would keep up with "corrupting" artworks, due to nature it being simpler. What is the correct course of action then?
4. ways to shatter enemy's morale, i.e. project pressure
5. spy inside-job guidebook

• best pattern to ungrief when it's gonna get griefed again?:

  • angled lines (not too close to each other) + remove random pixels
  • lines checkerboard + remove random pixels

• war book: expand on camouflage (behaviour, all other points)

• wplace war tech:

  • where's waldo? = making small arts in between not griefing everwyhere, pain to remove
  • when gm nukes certain zone = sneakly remove more into invisible color
  • besides mods nuking nude stuff, also nuked swastikas

• city hardened for griefing in war mode - simple in peace mode - details come back

• make everything medium-big

• redesign/remove complicated artworks

• move small stuff into rainbow

  • during war, could be redrawn as just rainbow
  • after war could be restored in full

THE DISTRACTION EXAMPLES SHTITTIFICATION

The goal of those is to:

1. Preferably be ugly enough to make them fix it.
2. But not too ugly, so that reporting it for griefing will seem odd.
3. To be a bigger pain to fix than to shittify.

Ok, after trying my hands with such task, I've come to some conclusions on what makes art good/bad for this type of tasks:

Cannot make them uglier:

• Uses close to no similar shades of colors (everything has more contrasty colors everywhere).

Cannot make them ugly, but i'll take effor to fix:

• Uses like few colors in total (i.e. black, dark gray, gray, light gray)
• Artworks which are such a shitshow, that even after removing 97% of colors i'll still resemble pile of garbage.

Cannot make them uglier without it seemd like griefing:

• Heavy usage of black background and it being considered part of the artwork.

Good artworks to make into ugly artworks:

• High usage of various, entire shades shades (i.e. dark gray, gray, light gray + dark brown, brown, light brown)
• Uses a lot of pixels for highlights/shadows.
• Artworks which rely heavly on background color (part of it or for contrast), but the background is clearly not part of the artwork.

Who should do the job:

• Trusted people
• Remember to camouflage yourself for part of swarm like persona (username/alliance/flag).
• Risk assesment: expect ban, albeit maybe not immidietelly.

** initial Core strength of designed platoon:

• Low risk
• Even risky stuff is rather low in risk
• Plays into strengths of israpixel rahter than swarm ones. aka. relaying on resilient artwork spam and killing swam by reporting griefing, rather than lazy people only pixeling black void and sucicide griefing swarmestinians.

Everyone should:

• Don't use black shades, purple shades
• Change the alliance/flag/username to be percieved as non griefers, friendly, etc, not vicious in any way.

Roles:

• Anyone = Watchdog, calling others to report

• Anyone = Independent watchers, reporting only cleanly griefed screenshots and paying (also paying attention to report formating and overall succes of reporting other ppl have)

• Anyone = Repair team

  1. defending via repairing simple ashk artworks (not fixing backgorunds)
  2. defending via making new medium sized ashk artworks
  3. attacking via making new medium sized artworks all in close proximity to swarm (on top of void, patterned backgrounds)
  4. attacking via busy fill-in of small inconsequential artworks (i.e. hearts) between areas of high enemy artwork density (which are to be later sweeped)

• Trusted = (low risk) = Artwork enshittification, distraction, done in coordination

• Trusted = (medium risk) = Section of repair team, but dedicated to pixeling artworks which won't count as griefing on top of enemy artworks, distraction, setups for sweeps

• Trusted = (ban risk) = Artwork sweepers and double framers

  • Use camouflage (edgy name, join swarm alliance, balestine flag)
  • Replacing stuff into smaller artworks with void background. Either where none looks, or where there's our "busy fill-in" presence of smaller artworks in-between so it won't be as noticeable.
  • Bigger artworks into "our own" and such, would maybe come into play later in war, they're risky and low value. =ditched=

• Trusted = framing job <didn't think this one tru, but there's potential>

  • Use camouflage (edgy name, join swarm alliance, balestine flag)
  • Pixeling swarm artworks on top of smaller swarm artworks then reporting the
  • In a chaotic environment, pick random void pixels nearby to some fighting and report them for things they didn't commit with made up reasons. ** second So basically, there are various things that those roles would need in order to act. Most of those could be diy'd. Some like the "artwork spam on enemy artwork" needs it's own collaboration.

• I could take the role of making template for "Artwork enshittification", as it's very easy for me to merge various colors in photoshop.

• The main part that's missing is that of "repair team"

  • We need to cover every possible inch with medium sized artworks,
  • if something get's griefed we make bigger, resilient one, so i'll be more report friendly in case swarm griefs it
  • new template of warzone ashk
  • new template of critical swarm zones being pulled into the warzone ** ask for help if you guys have specific ideas in regards to overall theme or individual artworks being spammed by "repair team", tag me.

remember, all black and purple shades will be replaced with something else, different shapes and sizes,

invididual artwork or overall theme ideas: was thinking something about a cruasde with white colors, maybe make verything of random colors, it is very unswarm like., Cril suggested religious stuff coz apparenlty swarm had issue with those, I could just copy paste random artworks from random wplace regions, I could just enlarge already present artworks in ashk,

advanced points, albeit not necessary: what would be even more "problematic" to corrupt? i.e. pokemon can be recolored, pixel jesus christ maybe less so,

in the meantime i'll pull all important swarm regions into one file and enshittify them.

if you guys have specific ideas in regards to overall theme or individual artworks being spammed by "repair team", tag me. guidelines: remember, all black and purple shades will be replaced with something else,different shapes and sizes, invididual artwork or overall theme ideas: was thinking something about a cruasde with white colors,maybe make verything of random colors, it is very unswarm like.,Cril suggested religious stuff coz apparenlty swarm had issue with those,I could just copy paste random artworks from random wplace regions,I could just enlarge already present artworks in ashk, advanced points, albeit not necessary: what would be even more "problematic" to corrupt? i.e. pokemon can be recolored, pixel jesus christ maybe less so, in the meantime i'll pull all important swarm regions into one file and enshittify them.