So I know it's been suggested in the past but what if there is some sort of penalty for hitting your own country.

Now this could be a few different things maybe make your gains 50% less or some other more complicated formula. Or your own country is very deep in DR only if you are the one hitting it etc.

Or perhaps both countries lose more military as well as gain less land then a normal grab.

After all what countries knows how you fight and what you will do next then your own country?

I'm pretty much all explorer and don't care to net so maybe I'm just biased but I think something needs to happen to slow down the rampant farming of your own countries.

Perhaps even just eliminate ghost acres when you are hitting your own countries etc. That way it makes it more lucrative to hit other people.

Yes I know this will most likely lead to other people running farms for the good of the clan or whatever but fine it's a start you know. Also making two or more people work together is more gaming like then letting folks just play solo. It could further encourage people into clans etc.

Landfarms are so beneficial it's unreal.

I've seen landfarms finish 50m nw -- so they can play just as good as the netters.

there is actually some discussion about this relating to the game in general (or two countries taking advantage of ghost acres by hitting each other back and forth).
Not sure what is going to be done game wise about it yet (if anything)

Or maybe have a limit if you hit country X more then 10 times you no longer give ghost acres or something? I'm trying to think of semi easy way that a game designer could implent it.

as of right now as far as we've gotten is someone asking if this is an issue and what should be done:P maybe some very rough ideas. But yes I'll draw attention to this.

I wouldn't be object to no ghost acres on self-farming. That would even the odds.

correct i just don't know how easy that would be to implement each country would need like an owner flag (if they don't already have one)

Also no ghost acres after 10 hits or something could reduce farming untaggs too. or what ever is determined as a "fair" amount of hits a week/month/set

No, Ghost acres on Untags is to protect untags. It really is.

Also just reducing self hit ghost acres can easily be gone around by farming someone else's string. which does implement more strat i suppose. But also limiting the hits would force entire clans to farm each other lol.

what ever it takes.

or even just no ghost acres if focus hits focus or something idk.

I know its to protect untagged. I'm talking the attacker doesn't gain ghost acres so its hit isn't as big as it would of been. or something.

Landfarms = lame way of "netgaining"
Usually, the people doing it don't/won't protect the land once they get it and cry like little babies when they get "topfed". I figure it this way, if you're that lazy then you should just shut up and retal the hit. Problem is that you still won't protect that land and therefore deserve to get "topfed". On the other hand you're probably one of those a$$holeas from 1a that bottomfeed knowing the country can not retal you so you farm the heck out of that small country.

Wasn't it a bannable offense early in FFA to attack your own countries?

I've never been a huge fan of self-farming, but in terms of population on the server, there aren't enough spam tags/untagged countries to gain acres.

Call me silly, but an occasional "top feed" is a cost of doing business in the world of self-farming, IMO.

And all "self-farming" isn't what it always seems. IMO. For example, I would definitely farm down a country I was using as a retaller to keep it lean and mean. I've always believed that retalled land is "clan land".

At the end of the day, I think what you gotta do is let go of the fact that guys are gonna self-farm one or two of their countries to ungodly acres that turn into ungodly networth.

I don't play in the same class as those guys, so I don't try to compare myself to them. It's apples and oranges.

i think it was a 72 hour suspension for self farming, but only if the mil sent was low and more than x attacks or something

think you kept getting turns too

and back then ffa was 36+6+2=44 turns a day i think

with 80(60) max turns on hand maybe, so youd login about

86(46) plus what you had on hand, so not really a penalty

after 4 hits of under 10k military -- or you could delete cookies :P

as to whether im for or against it, in ffa i think we could live without it, since if you have 16 you can do something about farming

but it should probably be balanced by increasing exploring somewhat if its made less effective

but really i think you take your 16 and you do what you want, if you want 1 good 1 and 15 creap ones fine

if you want to sacrificie some to try and get the whole as high as possible which is how im thinking that should be ok too


and if it does get taken out i see it being like 1a a while ago when land totals got very very small and everyone started being all explore

with how small the game is and how many pacts people have i cant see anything else happening

even in the old days when i used to grab and get 50k odd countries in ffa very few people were grabbing, but since the server had 50k countries it was spread out a lot

and there were a lot of untagged

including untagged bot countries that didnt retal, which i believe was where most of the land came from

That's a great point. If you increase the amount of land a player can explore, there's less incentive to self-farm. A positive side effect of that is that a player has more countries being an active participant in the game economy as opposed to being just an "explore be farmed" robot.



Yep.

Meh. If I wanted to netgain going allx/occasional bottomfeeding i'd do that in 1a (which I do, and can finish top 20 with it). Like said by someone earlier.. FFA should be about doing whatever you want with your 16 countries to achieve whichever result you want. I wouldn't be totally against some minor hindrances (no ghost acres etc though).

So exactly what kind of netgaining/grabbing are you looking to do in FFA? Or what would you like to see?

Landtrading isn't good for either side as I'm sure you know.

EAsy way around it though.

For instance, if Blake and I were playing together--he could make land farms for me and I'd make land farms for him.

I'm pretty much with Dragon. Back in the day of running TIE, I always was very much against self-farming, and we always banned it amongst our own ranks.

As of now, the game's just too small with the fact that Dynasty is 7th in membership with 80 countries and any of the one-man tags could become 10th in membership by recruiting a 2nd member and getting to 32.

I've adopted the practice simply because it's really the only way for me to compete with the top players. I'm sure there's other players good enough to compete either way, but I'm not one of them.

That's a reasonable and common-sense point of view Twain. Which is why you should drop everything and join ESD.

In those days, there was, like 25,000 countries on the server. And probably an easy 50% of them were untagged or were just a spam tag.

For all I know, half of THOSE were untagged multis being run by players with their 15 in "legit" clans, but the point is that there was a TON of available acreage and that there really was no reason to self-farm.

If I become unhappy in my current clan, Dragon, you'll be the first person I talk to.

Definitely true on the untagged multis too. And even those that were illegal countries that were run by people in big clans as "reinforcements," as long as you didn't farm a particular untagged into the ground, it seemed like most of those players just dealt with getting hit occasionally.

Of course, I remember many times when someone would farm the hell out of an untagged and get jumped.

Yeah, but only the clans that were idiots banged a player who farmed up their untaggeds. It's not productive for cheaters to give themselves away.

Most times, like you say, if you didn't go to a well (meaning a particular numerical seriies of countries) too often, you could yank sweet acres and be on your happy way.

Now and then, I'd get a PM from "soandso" letting me know I was grabbing his countries, and I'd back off.

And to be honest, if it was in my sphere of interest to finish with a top 10 country, I'd have to self-farm as things are in the game right now. And if that was in my sphere, I'd do it.

The one thing I would NOT do is brag about how great I am or let my clan go on and on about how uber they were because I decided to self-farm my way to fame and fortune.

That's really the only thing I might have against self-farmers. They're really not any better than the average bear at the end of the day and shouldn't be elevated as if they were.

That said, the hard core self-farmers really need to have their own class so that they can compare themselves with like-minded players.

Maybe they should make FFAa (self-farming allowed) and FFAb (no self-farming).

one other thing to remember is the 15 and now 16 country rules did not come in for game balance reasons

they came in because mehuls server couldnt handle the load

back then there were a lot of bots being run

and a lot of people who ran a lot of countries by hand, up around the 400 mark fot the highest i think were legit

then there were some people i forget who, but in TAKERS i think that got up to a 10k obvious bot

each set people would make more than last set including the botters, but that set broke the server

the biggest set was something like 55k

then mehul started closing country registration after a few days, so people rushed to make spare countries they could use as restarts when their mains got killed

i think mehuls intent was to limit the server to 40k countries

after that i think he shut ffa down grumbling about profit and bots, then brought it back with a laxly enforced 15 country limit

which created the concept of strings of 15, since no one really respected FFA not being what we thought of as a free for all at the time

it took quite a while before it became frowned upon to run more than 15

i think after the server shut again and it became a bit of "use it responsable or lose it" situation

nowadays i have no idea about the cost server cpu and so on situation but i think we all play with the hope that its a level playing field in most ways

per rule changes i ran 150 never cared about LGs i would just give all retals to my netter friends

the lax 15 limit i ran 45 some times did my retals but generally gave them up to netters

then the 15 or lose it came around only ran 15 gave up all retals to netters they needed the free land

Did this topic really deserve ANOTHER thread?

yes yes it did

ok - just checking. I usually don't pay attention much.

its good to discuss where we as players want to see the game head since the devs are active, maybe not necessarily this issue but we should be discussing things like this regularly

particularly things only relate to this server since the devs may not know as much about that as other aspects of the game

all i'm saying is make it some what penalized if you do it. i'm not talking about banning it but make it less lucrative so there is still an incentive to go out and grab retal etc...

so if you got like 50% of the land and lost 200% of the military in both countries or something it could allow for people to still do it if they want but also make grabbing other people more plausible.. right now its like you could grab yourself and its no different then actually calculating a break and dealing with a retal.

I'm not against self farming I just don't think it should be as lucrative (or more lucrative) as going out and doing an old fashion land grab.

well any restriction you put based on same player or same tag can easily be gotten around by 2 people farming eachothers countries in eachothers tags

it would be possible to put in place restrictions on

a grabs b
b grabs a
a grabs b
b grabs a

and so on, by reducing dr wearing off or making a special rule for it
(as in if it happens reduce building gain 10% each time or something)

and you could make penalties for grabbing the same country a lot, but it would need to be pretty harsh to effect non techers

if you made exploring less effective for a farmed country that effects too much other stuff

and self farmers could probably circle farm or staircase farm fine anyway

circle..what? jerk?
Sorry, i had to.

I have no experience in programming. I don't know how feasible it is to make diminishing returns higher for farming oneself as opposed to land grabbing other players.

its doable in programming

even if you do that though it just makes anyone who teams up with one other player almost as efficient as before

would need someone who plays the same way you do and so on

so the result is anyone who wants to abuse it can but the entry barrier is higher so now those doing the same thing it would aim to prevent would have a larger comparative advantage