Posts by sacroima

  • Exploiting the game to gain unfair advantage

    naike wrote:

    When I get kicked out of multiple asso's in one day I can join without any restriction a new association. With this fact I can hop e.g. unlimited between two or more asso's.

    Who wouldn't want the possibility to benefit from all the workers possible at the exact best time ? :D

    "I have a building to construct, let's go to association A for 5 min, and the let's go back to B because they have +50km and -35% WT workers". "I must remember to switch to C just before 1 am for the +50% prestige though".



    Would you guys really enjoy that kind of game ? Is that what the devs imagined when they developped the game ? I think Mihai points out the right questions. Things we all know have existed for a while, but we never really paid attention to them if it didn't actively penalised us.


    I mean, I can imagine all those exploits. pulling them off requires quite a bit of coordination, and 0 self-esteem. So I won't ever achieve that. But I would feel bad if someone else used that and beat me because of that.


    But let's face some facts :

    1/ It's not because it has always been like that, that it's a good feature.

    2/ It's not because it has never impacted you negatively so far, that it never will.


    With those facts taken into account, some things should be done about that. An easy fix (probably difficult to implement though) would be to have the same timer for workers when you join a corp, compared to when you create your own (10 hours before the first worker shows up?) >> No way to see the worker in advance anymore.

  • Exploiting the game to gain unfair advantage

    Yes, that's the issue of the rule.

    But then, there is a difference between paying for a worker to help your team and yourself, and for example selling half your wagons to get a worker because your team needs it and you don't care about your account.


    Second case should be banned based on the rule, right ? But what is the limit ? What is the point where someone doesn't play for his own success ? Is selling 20% of your wagons accepted ? or is it already too detrimental to your own account ?

    Or is selling all your wagons to invest in industries for your association accepted ? Would it be accepted if you do that to trash another corp's industry ?


    That rule is definitely too vague and needs interpretation. Which is usually a bad thing, when different domains do not have clear guidelines to apply the same ruling.

  • Exploiting the game to gain unfair advantage

    /Mihai wrote:

    3. HOT SEAT ACCOUNT


    Hmm, yes, but much like alternate accounts, you can devise a database query to sort the online time table. Thus you would see which players have been online for unreasonable amounts of time and cross-reference with the IP table. If the IPs don't match, then it's pretty straight forward I'd say.

    I usually play from phone and from computer. I'm pretty sure my phone has a few IP adresses (the IP is linked to the internet source right? > a few for 4G access, one for each wifi, etc). You would most likely flag me with such a query, wrongly.


    Furthermore, this "2-3 player on one account" thing is not that big of a deal in RN I think (compared to travian, where if you cannot defend during the night you are dead for example). Yes, it's an issue in x2 and in x4 (reason why I don't play on those servers), but on regular servers, I can handle my account by myself and compete against 2 people quite easily I think. Sure, I won't do that every server, but once in a while it's ok.


    The 2 other issues I fully agree with you.



    One thing with the multi-account issue (and the workers) is listed in the rules :

    1.5. An account must only be played for its own success and is not allowed to exist for the exclusive benefit of another account. Accounts that are exclusively used to provide other accounts an advantage (‘pushing’) are forbidden.


    Some accounts that invest too much money into workers should get banned according to that rule. It cannot be reported by players (because we don't have access to that data, except if we are in the same team, in which case there is 0 reason for us to ban our teammates). And it should be looked at more closely by support.

    And a guideline should be decided by RN across all servers for that kind of behaviour (what are the limits, and be consistent across servers).

  • Maintenance Primus engine

    Jalistair wrote:

    You repair your trains twice a day? I justly repair my trains back to 100% when they get down to 95% or so. Guess it just depends what your goals are.

    Depends on a few things yeah. Someone made the maths somewhere and I think the conclusion was to repair when they went below 80% for maximum cash gain, below 90% for a good compromise, and below 95-97% if you really want to maximise deliveries and don't really care about money.

    You could also change schedule every 30 min or so and only repair them in the morning since they stayed at 100% the whole day.


    Also dependent on the engine's max speed.

  • End Game Assassins

    rurald wrote:

    The bigger point is this. All games must evolve and keep adding new twists to keep the players interested and coming back. Making engine maintenance another game strategy to master with twists turns that test and confound algorithm mashers like us would be enjoyable. It would make the game more realistic in terms of actually maintaining your fleet in tip top condition and if it thwarted a slimy tactic used to steal a win, so much the better.


    Finally, anytime you can use the verb "teleporting" to describe the way to move a 100 ton train engine you are describing science fiction and not science.

    Yes, you are 100% correct. I don't like the teleportation system either, because it's a pay2win feature (if you compete for top1 and base your strategy on competitions to some extent for example, you have to be able to run 2 competitions at the same time at 2 different places every 15-30min). If 1 player can teleport all his trains and the other can't, you have a p2w. But well, they decided to implement that feature... And you can have enough vouchers to use it with olympii in era 6 if you keep them.


    The other point (not sure if it is fixed with html, didn't check, but it worked with the old version) is that the engine maintenance is badly coded. And you can avoid it altogether.

    From what I've seen the engine maintenance works like a timer (that is influenced by your engine stats, and your engine age). Every time you change the schedule of one of your trains, your reset its timer. If you know well enough the timers and are willing to change schedules often enough, You can keep your trains at 100% efficiency at 0 cost.



    I, myself, only had to service my trains in the morning using that "strategy". (would call that a bug, but it was never acknowledged when I reported it...)




    For your specific example : I wasn't there so I cannot say 100% why they fell behind so hard in the end. But from my experience, human factors were the reason for catastrophic EG failures (even though 5 goods isn't that much, depending on the goods left).

    EG is a stressful time and I've often seen issues caused by investments/breaking of majorities, disconnections, etc, that end up demoralizing everyone. Or simply a configuration of goods to deliver that was harder for you at the beginning, and you thought it was neck to neck when I reality you finished all the difficult goods and they didn't, or failed 1 call, or another reason entirely. Yes 1 guy with 5 engines can destroy the WT of that era 6 factory that is still level 1. But that's exactly why you call that good first in most cases.

  • End Game Assassins

    I mean, starting with the flaws of your system, or ways to avoid it altogether.


    1/ selling and rebuying the engine

    2/ teleporting the engine through the museum

    3/ pre-servicing your trains just before EG start (EG are usually finished in 48h, dunno if it has changed dramatically since the new update with EG tons scaled based on active players but I expect not).


    Now about your "EG assassins". The ones you complain about are called PP-hunters, or freehaulers, and they are usually the people I care the least about, because they don't cause any trouble. I don't give a shit between 0.00 and 0.05 WT when I'm a caller. And neither should you. What is 5 seconds when you have a 3 min TT delivery ? 2%. So yeah sure in a perfect world, it sucks. But RN is far from a perfect world. And when you end up with 1min+ wait times everywhere, the few guys ruining it by 3 secs should be at the bottom of your priorities.


    The true EG assassins are the one hauling the wrong good with the full force of their 5 olympii. Either because they don't know, don't care, or are just offline.


    But then, I'm giving you a basic lecture on how wait times work right now, and you know all that like everybody.



    Tldr : focus on the people that fully haul wrong because they don't know. It will be easy to get them back to the correct good. Once that is done, focus on the people that are offline (or better still, focus on those before the EG actually starts). After all that, you will still have the issue of the people that don't care (for that, I can't help you, but I have rarely seen those in action, the only thing you can do is call in a way that they do the least damage possible).

    After all of that, you can start discussing with those guys that haul 50 tons of each good (often through the warehouse or from a neighbour city btw, because they don't have the money to connect your industries).

  • RN average age of the players

    We did an "anonymous" survey in our corp (only the chair knew the age of the people, and only people that were willing to say their age).


    If I remember correctly, the average was 40ish years old.


    So yeah, definitely older that your mainstream multiplayer game (LoL, Fortnite, etc), which is more between 15 and 20 yo on average. But not that high, when you come across a lot of older people playing (I expected the average to be 50 to 60 in my corp for example).



    Haven't seen many people below 20 in this game. Or they don't stick / play actively. But then again, it's kinda difficult when you are not independent to play actively during the EG for example.

  • Ways to reward team member's contribution to workers and/or overall

    Hey,

    I do get your wish to reward your top contributors, and that is something very valuable ! Not many chairs are as invested as you in that spirit to create an awesome team in terms of achievements, but also in terms of enjoyment / happiness. Often, I've seen top teams run very strictly. Your idea to reward instead of having that contribution as a given is great.


    Maybe you could think of ways already existing in the game as rewards. Some of your players might simply enjoy winning as a team, and it might be the only reward they need. Others might be more interested in other exciting challenges that you could try ?


    With my good friends that ran my corp for 2 years, we started doing some fun challenges every server, and fulfilling them was the driver and reward for our investment to the team.


    For example, we tried to level up the warehouse as high as possible once (that one needed coordination, workers, investments, planning).

    Another time we tried to level the landmark as fast as possible.


    But those challenges worked for us because the top contributors were all people that enjoyed winning as a team above all else. Try finding some things you could do with your team that would feel rewarding to them ;) They might even have some fun ideas.




    But to come back to your initial proposition, I don't see any balance issue with someone making a gift to another player (even if it's gold). As long as the gold is bought, it could have been bought by the one receiving the gift, or it could have been used by the one sending the gift himself.

    The only potential abuse is if you can send + account / won gold, because then you can farm gold on fake accounts and send it to yourself.

  • Prestige Farming Guides

    Mr J Hoff wrote:

    Does anyone have any advanced guides on prestige farming or the flipping game for the USA scenario? Havent had much luck finding any.


    Thanks

    Highly dependent on the server you play on as well.


    Some (most?) servers don't have many players, and you can easily turn cities by yourself, skyrocketing to crazy amounts of prestige (1M+) without much coordination.


    Other servers (german ones for example) have 1-2 good corps in each city, and you pretty much can't turn one city, let alone 5 in a day.



    The basic idea for prestige farming on the US scenario is : turn as many cities as possible in a day, abandon them the next day (or better still, turn other cities while you are at it). Repeat. If you have the worker for prestige when delivering to cities, even better. All the other strats are similar to normal servers (competitions, make money, drive direct, invest if it's cheap, ...)

  • Beginner slot

    Salix wrote:

    What would you think about more newbie slots in associations? Would that help?

    Start by modifying the newbie slot so that it is actually used by a newbie, and not as a 26th slot for an experienced player by some.


    After 3-6months, a newbie is not a newbie anymore. And I have never seen a corp that didn't have 1 player stopping in any 6month-period. Fix that, and we could maybe discuss having more newbie slots.

  • Beginner slot

    hilti2 wrote:

    No, not to my knowledge. The beginner needs to be promoted. There isn't any automatic. There is a bug though (surprise…). If the preregistered beginner is the first member of an association entering the new round he ist chair until the real chair enters and then the beginner is downgraded to "member" and not to "beginner". Happened to us this round on DE7.

    pretty sure our beginner was automatically upgraded to member due to pre-registration because the corp wasn't full anymore, and he wasn't fullfilling the criteria for beginner-slot. And that's how I think it was advertised when implemented. But it was a year ago or something, so it might have changed...


    And yes, you are right, I should have specified I was talking about pre-registration. There is no automatic during a game-round.


    And I wouldn't be surprised if it doesn't work as it was described :saint:

  • Beginner slot

    hilti2 wrote:

    Career level doesn't matter though. You can stil sit in the beginner slot after 10 round at career level 30. The chair has to promote a player from the beginner spot into a regular spot or the "beginner" will sit there forever. A chair has no inventive to promote a "beginner" though, because the 26th spot of an association is used for a knwon good player and there's no need to try one's luck with a new beginner.

    The beginner slot is automatically freed up if the corp isn't full, so this case of 26 spots usually doesn't last for a long enough time (once you reach career 10 or so, usually one of the members of the corp will have stopped / left).


    But with this career points reset bug, I can easily see how to permanently have 26 career 20+ members at all times.

  • American Scenario

    @Cyb_R can't pm you :(


    Will take you up on your offer and come have a look Saturday. PM-me the side, eventually the city, I should start in if your offer still stands ;)

  • American Scenario

    I've had a look at the hall of fame. Happy to see some of my thoughts from last year were tested so thoroughly and by no less than 7 corps together ;)

    That might definitely be something that might make me play a round even though I'm not as available as before for this game.



    Yeah I get your point. But then again, you need to take the total points earned with winning the megacity.

    2k to 5k sounds like a lot (+150%), but actually it is rather (48*50 + 2000 to 48*50 + 5000), which is 4400 to 7400, +80% or something. Turning 1 city level 40, gives 800 points and is much easier than winning an EG.


    So yeah the strategy needs to be adapted, but maybe it is for the best. And if people manage to anticipate in which megacity the opponents will play fully, then maybe we can have an amazing battle of 2 large groups of players trying to rush different goods at the same time.

    That might be especially fun with the new EG rules with tons scaled with active players.


    I think it is best to see in practice how this change will affect the results, and then maybe they will change it again (just like they did minor adjustements to landmarks over the years).

  • American Scenario

    Dutcher wrote:

    In the end, the 'American Dream' scenario is exactly the same as the old USA map scenario.

    The ONLY change is reducing the prestige from city flipping a bit during the end game.....

    When nobody in their right mind is flipping cities anyway because they are all hauling to mega cities.

    Actually you are wrong.

    The easiest way to gain the East vs West competition was to actually flip all the easy cities the day before the end of the EG, during the night (11pm to the recalc at 2am).


    You could gain a few thousands points that way for your team, and the opponent was losing as much. And in terms of prestige, you could gain a few tens of thousands of prestige for nothing at that point too.


    But then again, people that haven't experienced the true East vs West prestige abuse can't really understand. You should watch the teams that coordinate to get to 1.5-2M Prestige to understand why the fix was needed.




    But yeah you are totally correct in saying that it's minor adjustments to the same scenario we have known for 5 years. In most games, it would simply be called a balance patch.^^




    Cyb_R  wrote:

    The thing that I don't understand is, why change the Points for a winning city from 2000 to 5000? I play on the DE107 Broadway and we almost never had rounds in which the regions were more than a few hundred points away from each other. Thats because we actively fight for the citys on the frontline and both sides have almost equal chances. So if it should be the case that one side is absolutely dominating during the round and having an advantage of let's say 4000 points at the beginning of the endgame but the other side wins the endgame in the end, the work of 6 weeks is ruined for the one side just because they lost in the endgame. In my opinion this isn't very fair and if this won't change again a majority of our players won't play anymore because the sense of an US/American Dream Server gets lost. I hope there will be some reconsideration.


    I'm sorry if some things are written wrong but I'm not a native English speaker and in the German post no one of the mods is answering.


    Cyb_R

    I don't know about your servers specifically, but the only time I played, I almost managed to win the East vs West by myself, even though my team color had the worse players, and was outnumbered 2 to 1 (yeah, one entire Red corp played for the Blue people because they couldn't pre-register with blue... Smart people everywhere). Still, we lost only for 200 points because I managed to turn 10 blue cities to red during the last night, and 2 megacities (that one was tough, luckily 2 friends finally understood what I was aiming to do and came to help...).


    So yeah, while it is not very representative (small server, mostly people that don't understand at all the server and just haul to the megacity like in classic), it shows some ideas of what could be achieved.


    IMO, the emphasis should be on turning blue / red cities before the EG, but then during the EG focusing on your megacity, because the EG megacity-win is still the goal of RN. So I understand why they did those adjustments. Before that, turning one level 40 megacity with 3 easy goods was as many points won as winning the megacity (400*3 for goods + 400 for city + 400 for city lost for the opponent if I remember correctly).



    You can still do some amazing stuff during the regular server, but now it opens up many new strategies (attacking the main megacity of the opponent for example, since most people love to rush the difficult goods first > you go grab the easy goods and wreck havoc in their organisation).