Messages

31

Suggestions / Re: CityBuilder - share ideas/comments

« on: October 07, 2012, 08:10:31 pm »

and if necesarie, compute diferent things in diferent servers to get an homogeneous score.

your sentence points out the problem pretty well. did you notice you just said: "different + different = homogeneous"? it's full of variables that don't have anything to do with each other. how do you want to bring them together?
and yes, we do plan to run several CB servers, as this seems to be a very popular game mode. i don't see a reason to extrapolate when we are going from one score system to 2. if you're married for 1 year with your wife and have 1 child, i will tell you in 20 years you will have 20 children from 20 wives. do you think that's a correct interpretation of the tendency? 

Your preocupation in relationate CV and population is excesive, although you say, they grow separately and is not related. You must get x points for x population, at equal you get x point for x CV.

it doesn't work like this, CV grows faster than population and it doesn't grow in a linear way. you might have 10 million for 5,000 population. then you got 100 million while at 7,000 population. then you got 500 million at 9,000 population.
it will be more like f(x) = 2 * (x - 2)³ - 0,0005 * (x-2)² +2 or something.
tell me the formula how they are related and we can do it 

32

Suggestions / Re: CityBuilder - share ideas/comments

« on: October 07, 2012, 10:51:39 am »

our problem was that we also wanted to integrate CB into our existing score system. that score system does know nothing about "population", so you could have won a CB game but if your CV wasn't good you would have gotten 0 points for it. hence the idea to also show CV in the goal so it is transparent to players that CV is also necessary if you want to get scores. we cannot just add population to the score algorithm, because nobody knows what would be fair equivalents of CV and population. would it be fair to give the same score for 5000 inhabitants than for 100 million euro CV? or rather for 10,000 inhabitants?
and even if you find two numbers that are matching: growth rate of CV and population are different and both are not linear. it would be nearly impossible to integrate it in a fair way, arguments would arise whether CB servers got an advantage for scoring or "normal" servers.

anyway, remember the server name is TEST and it was meant to find out exactly about things like this. and what we have learned is that
- the additional CV goal contradicts the whole CityBuilder idea too much and fades out the actual town growing idea
- there won't be a fair way to include population goals into the current score system

next step is to draw conclusions from it and come up with new ideas. on this thread lots of ideas were discussed how the score system could be changed. it seems it goes into the direction of having a separate score system for CB, including a separate highscore table and personal scores.
also we are thinking about changing the system to give scores (or maybe call it XP then and give players ranks/levels?) every quarter to resolve the unfortunate situation where people play 80% of the time on a server but aren't connected when the game is won, not getting any points for it. with points/XP every quarter players could even go to a long run server and only participate for one or two game hours, still getting some points.

33

Suggestions / Re: Additional points

« on: October 07, 2012, 10:37:09 am »

yeah i guess we will end up using data we can get in a mixture and then use the delta between quarters to calculate scores given per quarter. we can take many things into account: transported CV, perf., income, transported cargo, number of vehicles, number of stations...plus the ideas TechNoir had on his initial post, remove XP if you had vehicle crashes and so on...
and then every quarter you get a message like:
*** You received [14 XP] for your efforts in the last quarter, you now got a total of [1,337 XP]

34

Suggestions / Re: Alert players who haven't set password for their company/companies..?? whatever!

« on: October 07, 2012, 10:28:19 am »

yeah, so far it looks like we're going to get the alert. but we need more votes before we can really decide also on the interval.

35

Suggestions / Re: Additional points

« on: October 05, 2012, 10:51:58 pm »

it seems more and more like for the CityBuilder servers we will need a separate scoring system. so alex and me just discussed the idea that we could use this chance of starting over to test such a system there: let the CB servers have gradual scoring (e.g. tied to the growth of your city between quarters). as CB scoring would start at 0 we have the chance to play around with new scoring ideas in this sandbox, so we should use it 

36

Suggestions / Re: Additional points

« on: October 05, 2012, 10:16:02 pm »

the very basic idea sounds good, because even on a long run server players can get scores when they only want to play an hour or so.
in a next step we should be more clear about what "making things" would mean.

something that was also discussed between admins on IRC a very long time ago was some kind of XP system, like other games have it. so you get XP for certain things, you level up with certain XP amounts, maybe also make achievements part of that.
the hard part will be deciding what to give XP for. delta of CV to the CV you had last quarter? same for income? or for transported cargo amounts? giving it only for building wouldn't be a good idea, people could start to abuse it by spamming unused structures everywhere.

37

Suggestions / Re: City builder test #k1 -- enable "never expire vehicles"

« on: October 05, 2012, 05:52:55 pm »

i wouldn't mind. it gives more freedom of choice to people while not having a too high impact on gameplay. anyone else seeing a problem with it? maybe i am missing something.

38

Suggestions / Re: Alert players who haven't set password for their company/companies..?? whatever!

« on: October 03, 2012, 11:55:50 pm »

i agree that still many players seem to forget it, although ST2 also has a point there, because you only need to remember this "Default password" button a single time and from then on no longer have problems, as your client will always automatically set a password.
anyway, such warnings have already been programmed and i would only need to enable it in the configuration, so it would be no problem to do it. although it does not "prompt" the player, it would only be warning messages on the chat.

anyway, maybe there are players that just want to reply on the company protection on our servers and wouldn't want annoying warnings? let us know your opinion...
if we would enable it: in what intervals should the warning be shown? every 5 minutes? 10?

39

Suggestions / Re: CityBuilder - share ideas/comments

« on: September 30, 2012, 03:10:51 pm »

I think it might be good to set the grid to 3x3 as it makes is possible to easily cover the whole town with bus stops as illustrated in the screenshot attached:

something Andreas suggested on IRC and i asked him to post here, as i really think that is a good argument for 3x3 cities. anyone not agreeing here?

40

Suggestions / Re: CityBuilder - share ideas/comments

« on: September 27, 2012, 07:05:48 pm »

"Population limit for starting a city" would fix it

No it will not, since the company you buy has allready claimed it (I thik)

you are talking about buying a company, but the others were talking about when a company got reset (so the town it had claimed is free again, but might have a raised population already). anyway, it's the same. if you buy a company you don't get its claimed town, you just keep yours.
and regardless of whether the company got bought or reset, its town will no longer be claimed. and as omer584 said if we got a limit for the town size that can get claimed this would solve it implicitly.

41

Suggestions / Re: CityBuilder - share ideas/comments

« on: September 27, 2012, 07:02:05 pm »

I don't think the watertower/bank not being present in all towns is abroblem because 1: they are relatively easy to fund and 2: I think it should be part of the stragety to select a good town, just like other factors such as available space, landscape, proximity to other cities and industries

i agree with Andreas here, the only idea i had was to maybe show a warning below the town name - so where cities have ".:: City ::." it will say "No water tower!" for towns without one. if a player decides to claim the town nevertheless the text will be replaced by the usual message indicating that the town was claimed by XY transport.

42

Suggestions / Re: Suggestion: Autocleaning of empty companies with no vehicles

« on: September 27, 2012, 06:56:54 pm »

the lazy programmer that i am i won't write even a single line of code only to make it 5 minutes instead of 6. we will simply use what is there, as ST2 suggested, autoclean_novehicles 6 it is 
the existing "autoclean on demand" can stay as it is, e.g. when a company slot is needed for a new company and all slots are taken empy companies will be closed even before that time runs out.

43

Server 4 Arctic Quick Goal ( 40 Milion Goal) / Re: Unbalanced server

« on: September 23, 2012, 10:08:02 pm »

the last change on this server was only a short time ago and has finally brought some activity onto this server that was often empty before. i say we let the current settings settle a bit before we start review again.

44

Changelog / Added options to hide users from scores

« on: September 09, 2012, 12:18:57 pm »

i have just added 3 new internal flags that can be set on user accounts:

hidefromhighscores
when this flag is set the user won't appear on the highscore board anymore. however, he can still get points as usual and his games and scores can still be seen on his profile.
it can be reverted at any time, removing this flag will make his scores appear on the highscore boards immediately again.

hidefromachievements
when this flag is set the user won't appear on the achievements top 10 anymore. however, he can still get achievements as usual and his achievements can still be seen on his profile too.
this flag is currently set on the 4 people (which includes me) that know the internal list of achievements - the list shows what you need to do to get the achievements so it would be unfair if people who know the list could participate in the competition for them.
it can be reverted at any time, removing this flag will make his achievements appear on the highscore boards immediately again.

disablescoring
when this flag is set the player will see the scores he would get in-game as usual, however, on the website all his games will appear with 0 points and also not count for the highscores.
scores they have already made in the past won't be affected and will stay, although they will slowly disappear from highscores as they expire after 60 days. the flag can be removed again at any time and the player can get scores again - however, scores from games already recorded with 0 points cannot be restored later.

the idea was brought up by our admin alex879ro because he no longer wanted to get scores, he also got the "disablescoring" flag set now.

the flags can only be set by n-ice admins, if you as a player want it for some reason simply ask us about it (on the forum or on IRC).

45

Suggestions / Re: Change of rule 4 (partly "the 50% rule")

« on: September 07, 2012, 02:28:23 pm »

And by the way, the 50% rule also looks good to me as it is now, being concise and easy to understand. If the idea of modifying it came from of a single obvious violation (with clusters of mines), the 50% part isn't controversial here, see my suggestion above:

nah, the rule is in question because it often causes arguments between players and admins. for example it always causes the question whether we really want to be very exact with that, as a number like "50%" implies - when actually the rule was only added to prevent players from thinking they can satisfiy the general "don't block others out" rule simply by leaving 1 tile free (or any other too low number of tiles) and to guarantee another company "sufficient" space. that means you also need to define what "sufficient" is, that's how we came up with 50% (half for everyone simply sounds fair).

the problem is that calculating what is 50% in reality is not as easy as it sounds. do you only count tiles in the catchment area? or you also count tiles around the area that can be used by a station that just touches the catchment area of an industry on a corner (which would be all that is necessary to connect to an industry)? for cities it becomes even more complicated, because some parts of the city will get you more passengers than others (big houses vs. small houses).

so my new proposals go into the direction of refering to things both players and admins can see and judge more easily (e.g. size of the station), something that has more transparency will cause less arguments.
ST2 followed a different approach but the same basic idea with his suggestion about only looking at "sides" (a concept which i agree also increases transparency, but imho still leaves too many grey areas).