Illegal Strategy?!? The Explorer!

[Holby]

I think the best resolution would be to disallow land dropping below 500 acres.

I don't think there is any doubt that this tactic is massively detrimental to the game in the minds of most players. I also don't believe it can be passed off as a "strategy", when it has no benefit to the player actually using it.

It has no practical purpose in what we wish to be a balanced game, but kudos to Shade for finding it.

[wolf bite]

Sorry, I don't like it when people say they have not read the whole topic, but post anyway. Sadly I don't have the time right now but feel I need to comment on this.

Sure, people should be allowed to gain land in scouting and should be able to drop their own land. Agreed with the concept of this topic.

However, the intent of the game is to help people get from the bottom to the fighting as soon as possible. This is why when at low land and low net worth you gain land faster. Here is the problem, dropping all a person's land to lie to the game to convince it that you are in trouble and need extra land per turn is an exploit of the intention of the code.

I see this as someone begging on the corner in a wheelchair during the day and going out dancing at night.

I am wanting to find ways to fix this in such a way that we will not be forced to reduce the benefit of needing help as we take away the deception to the code that the person pretends to be a vagabond.


Wolf Bite

[bjornredtail]

However, the intent of the game is to help people get from the bottom to the fighting as soon as possible. This is why when at low land and low net worth you gain land faster. Here is the problem, dropping all a person's land to lie to the game to convince it that you are in trouble and need extra land per turn is an exploit of the intention of the code.

No offense, but there's a reason you are a layer and not a software engineer. The code is doing exactly what it was designed to do... It just so happens that design is flawed. There's a big difference between taking advantage of a design flaw and taking advantage of an implementation flaw in my view. To make a moral judgment about the former is simply dishonest in my view.  Now as an engineer, instead of saying that folks that would think of this are somehow bad people, I would instead wonder, what is a better design for the system... Which takes me to point 2.


If I understand this 'exploit' correctly, a player will simply scout for 1 turn with minimal land and networth, drop that land, and repeat until his/her turns are depleted. When land is dropped, it goes into the landfarm, where other hordes are able to grab it at minimal expense. Putting asside my views on land starvation in RWL, I think the easiest and fairest fix would be to make dropping land exponentially more expensive turn wise as your land and networth go down. Implementation would be simple and would require no changes to the database format (data description language, whatever). This would increase the turn-cost of this tactic without hurting new or upcoming players, and with less of an effect on leader-based players than a hard-limit.

[taekwondokid42]

I like that solution the best. Make dropping land as expensive as demolishing huts (or any building).

Then, you will able to drop land at low cost, but if you are trying to drop 90% of your land per turn, your entire run will still only garner a small amount of land. This is something we have talked about before. Now we have a real reason do act upon the discussions.

[Gorak]

I could be wrong, as I know nothing of coding,
but would it not be easier just to limit land dropping so you cannot drop below 500?

[Shadow]

I think that people are overcomplicating the issue. There are many ways to fix this, it's a matter of choosing the one that has the least overall effect on gameplay. Nobody drops land below 500 land. Unless you a) want to get killed or b) are doing this strat. So setting it up so that you cannot drop to below 500 will have no overall effect on gameplay other than stopping this exploit in its tracks, and at the same time stops people from being able to commit suicide by dropping land as a way around deleting penalties. Which is perfect.

The solution Bjorn proposed will penalize leader strats, where players regularly drop land in order to get the most out of their loyalty, and keeping low net increases output, but would also increase land dropping cost. The effect would be small, but it would be there.

[bjornredtail]

Well it would be a multiplier... The question would be, where do we put 1.0 on that scale? If we put it low enough, it will actually help leader strats... Meh.

[taekwondokid42]

Hmm. I think exploror strat is an okay strat, just not to the level of 1/10 the game land per run.

Perhaps if you could pull 20k, this strat would be acceptable?