Besides, my hats off to anyone who can create a bunch of cities to push another city and keep leveling it all up in order to be FUNCTIONALLY able to push another city. I barely have time to deal with my single cities in each world, much less conspire against the game by making other cities to push mine.
Ehh... those push accounts didn't have to actually be functional. All they had to do was passively accrue KP. I mean, it's a serious flex to have such cities actually perform in some shape or manner, but I figure KP pushing cities would be kept bare. The only real hardship would be logging in and out of each of those cities, and I'm pretty sure many of the serious pushers would've crafted their own quick logon scripts for the purpose of cycling through those cities to push.
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Anyhoo. I did mention earlier that these lockouts have gotten more common after the rune changes, which made the anti-push measures feel much more restrictive since it can (and has) been triggered over the course of normal gameplay since those changes. If you didn't read or get too far in the thread linked, here's the gist of it:
1. Game keeps track of a hidden balance between incoming and outgoing KP moved towards any particular city's AWs.
2. If the game detects that a city has received (much) more KP than that city's player has disbursed to other people's AWs, it becomes locked down until it receives enough daily KP credits to become unlocked.
3. We've been told not to discuss exact limits. It's suggested that that sort of information is actively modded against.
4. Prior to the change, lots of large players had boatloads of previously unusable runes of all flavors since their corresponding AWs were either leveled comfortably, or completely maxed out.
5. Said large(r) players wanted to be nice to others.
6. Smaller players started choking on their kindness. People went onto the forums asking the mods how to
metaphorical CPR their drowning friends.
7. We were told "oops. accidental anti-push measures that we never told anyone about. so sad. tell your poor friends to stop being poor, lol"
8. Everyone involved caught an acute case of the angries. There was much fire.
Then things sorta went back to normal as either (or both) the overflowing supplies dwindled down or people began figuring out that kindness can be problematic. A new normal. One riding much closer to the edge. Some unfortunate people fall right off and smack face-first into an invisible wall, leaving us dazed and wondering what the heck happened.
It may seem silly, but I've also heard of some weirdly malicious people intentionally blocking off cities by dropping tons of runes on them. It sure does mess up swap threads when you try to perform a swap and realize that the other player can't reciprocate because someone walked in and dumped runes someplace else, thus locking out your city and keeping the other player from completing the swap.
EDIT: I may have overdramatized the last few points in the recap, but people really were upset about the situation and the official response to that situation.