Fixing maxing

[Gorak]

would take some getting used to by many, but could work here

[The Obliterator]

Attack opportunity is a discussion for another time. But just quickly, the reasons people are giving to keep it "that without it would make it hard to take someone down" is exactly the reason it should be gone. If with no intentional maxing someone can withstand 21 attacks, and one more each hour until they have full turns again, they deserve to stay on top.

As far as the staff monitoring intentional maxing, NO! I am still catching flack for giving the minimal punishment to someone I personally sent mail to concerning rules.

When the one rat attack with loss of land was outlawed, I would normally find out about it a day or so later. By then the person had the benefit of making a few runs on turbo with the land locked and had the game taken over already. Then people would argue that the person making the attacks was new and randomly doing it and the attack-ee did not ask to be attacks. Thus I could only punish the person making the attacks, which left the attack-ee emperor already having destroyed the game for everyone else. On the other had, people were yelling that I should somehow back out whatever the benefit the attack-ee emperor with locked land had made, which is impossible to figure out. So people argue that both the attacker and the attack-ee should be disabled. Gee, then all someone has to do is find a friend to max their enemy and they get their enemy disabled! And finally, when I was enforcing the land loss rule, people were all yelling that because each situation was different and at different points in the games, that I was not treating everyone the same. Geeez ....

In short, by the time I learn of a intentional maxing violation, the game has already been destroyed and whatever punishment I dish out I am attacked with some saying it should be more and some saying it should be less.

Which bring us back to either the members kill those abusing the rules of good sportsmanship or we program in something.


More programming ideas and flaws which will stop intentional maxing?


Wolf Bite

Well with the issue of people giving you a hard time.
The way i see it is that you are the authority here what you say goes if we dont like it too bad.
As you have said before this is not a democracy.

[windhound]

Naw, I said it wasnt a democracy.  And it aint.
But the staff still likes to listen to its members

With the varied styles of play here, a change in the code is going to effect everyone differently...  some for the better, some for the worse.  The goal with this and like discussions is to find a good middle ground
Its best if the limits are built directly into the game so people cant complain they were treated unfairly or were singled out

QMT came up with this fix, for both eliminating intentional maxing, as well as clan hopping, in one code change
what they did was abolish hit limits all together, and instead, put in an attack limit
you could only attack max 25 times, with 2 additional attacks every hour, unless tagged attacking another tagged empire in warslot.
impossible to max someone, since they have no hitlimits, and there is no more clan hopping, since you can still gather enough empires together to gang bang a solo empire

I rather like that idea
Simple, elegant, and encourages players to find the best source of land per attack instead of maxing everyone they can break

[taekwondokid42]

And, leaders would have to choose when to capture and when to gain land.


We could try it out for a turbo round (upcoming?) and if it doesn't work, don't use it.

[Gorak]

I also liked it, because it encourages clan play

[Shadow]

That's a cool idea, it would really change the dynamic of the game. However, small problem - with no hitlimit, a team could suicide someone unlimited times, effectively removing the possibility of emperorship if the opposition is in any way organized.


Still, it would limit the attacks unless the team was a really big one.  I like it.

[windhound]

Sounds good to me
Its been ages since I've seen a good, organized team do anything

Too many solo-ers, or those that are clanned simply doing their own thing...  which is fine and all, but there's so much more that can be done if teamwork is used.

[taekwondokid42]

small problem - with no hitlimit, a team could suicide someone unlimited times, effectively removing the possibility of emperorship if the opposition is in any way organized.

Very Certainly. But you could limit that problem by making leader suicides far less effective.

[Shadow]

Necroing a guest-read thread since it has neat ideas about attack limits that might be a fun theme at some point

[austfit]

It would be nice to shake things up. And whatever happened to wolf bite?

[windhound]

Agreed.  I liked Gorak's (well, QMT's) idea then, still like it now. 
In theory it wouldn't even require that much of a code change, as we could reuse the field that tracks attacks taken to track attacks done.

Put in a few if statements, an extra line in the control config, and it's good to go.  I like easy to implement ideas. 

Guess we could repurpose 'Open Attack Op' to 'Refresh Stamina' or something, and make it fairly expensive.
Or remove it, as the original purpose is gone.

Also, wolf bite wandered off a while ago.  He came back for the RTR round, but that was intentionally temporary.

[Gorak]

Would stir things up abit, which is a good thing. Also helps the balance between indy's and leaderers as leaderers currently have the massive advantage of opening attack oppertunities far easier then an indy player.

But the biggest thing is the advantage to being tagged in a clan as opposed to solo play. Encourages players to join clans for protection since they can't just hide behind a hit limit anymore. More clans = more wars. More wars = more activity. More activity = more interest. More interest means more players.
On that note, with the player base only being about 10-11 active empires, it might be an idea to limit clan size to 3-4 empire max