01 · Why I said yes

Day 1 — Oct 6

Leader asked yesterday evening. Slept on it, said yes this morning. Being honest with the journal: the anti-cheat motive is real but secondary — someone finally gave me a reason to take the game’s tech apart, and I’ve wanted one for months.

Context worth writing down, so future-me remembers what the stakes felt like:

• A year in Last War now. It’s the first game in ages that’s this engaging while still letting me play on my schedule — everything except fixed-time events bends around real life. It lives on the side monitor while I work, and that’s fine because it doesn’t demand hands-on-keyboard all day.
• F2P by written policy. I burned ~$3k on Lords Mobile years ago and learned the only way a game like this stays fun for me is if it costs nothing. Last War has been shockingly kind to that policy — and each season it gets noticeably more F2P-friendly, which says something good about where it’s going.
• The Discord community is genuinely healthy — planners, theorycrafters, drama at a normal dose. And the game itself is an engineering curiosity: a diversified, genuinely complicated damage formula with layer over layer of multipliers. The small tricks (walk-time shaving, queue stacking, the timing windows) are a big part of the daily fun. Games that reward knowing them feel earned.

What I thought I knew about auto: it existed, people whispered about it, and I assumed it was the Lords Mobile kind — an image-clicker farm, dumb screen-scraping, brittle, barely worth the hassle. Filed under “solved problem, not mine.” Time to find out if that’s true.

Day 2 — Oct 7

Scope conversation with the R5. What leadership actually needs: (a) know what the tool does, (b) know how to spot it, (c) rules that hold up. Not a witch hunt — a policy. Good. I’d hate for this to become accusation theater.

Day 3 — Oct 8

Collected the community chatter. The recurring complaints line up suspiciously well: digs vanishing in the middle of the night, rally slots filling in under a second, station shop items gone the moment shops rotate, “reindeer plundering” accounts hitting the same tiles with perfect timing, kill counts that don’t match any visible activity. None of that sounds like image-clickers. Image-clickers are slow. Whatever this is, it’s fast.