Jeweling Suggestion

[razzam21]

I think that we have a problem when it comes to the current method of collecting jewels. I have been thinking about it for the past few days and read several different options to solve the problem. Each does a good job but I think several of them put together may be the best approach.

First, the jewel rate should be a fixed rate.

Second, jewels can only be used by the user. They can not be transfered to another account. This would help solve any problem of users creating duplicate accounts and transfering to the main account.

Third, you should only be allow to collect jewels when the value of your mines, fields, wells, bank, cites, armies, and nukes drops below a certain value to indicate that you are newbie or that you have been wiped out. Once your value goes above that then they can no longer collect jewels.

The value of a player could be calcuated something like this.

oil well output * .9 + cotton field output * .9 + diamond mine output * .9 + banked geos + cites * 250 + armies * 10 + soldiers * .2 + jewels * .9

And then find some reasonable cut off point. if the player is below the cut off point then they can collect jewels if they are above then they can't collect jewels.

Let me acknowlegde that the work involved in changing to this might be extreme, since I don't know for sure how you did it. However I feel that it shouldn't be to terrible. The hard part will be seperating jewels from the rest of the income so that users can't transfer jewels into other players accounts. However I think a global function that retrieves the value may be the easy fast way around that problem.

I think this solutions solves the rate concerns, newbie concerns, wipe out concerns, and cheating by using duplicate account concerns.

Let me know what everyone else thinks. Will this work or am I dreaming here? Did I miss something?

[Timmetie]

Razzam, i'm sure you put a lot of thought in it, and if suggested a while ago, it would be great but at the moment:

1. the jewel rate (im guessing you mean conversion rate) is already fixed, at 2.21

2. jewels cant be transfered to other accounts, you convert them to geo's and then you transfer them. and saying you cant revert the geo's you make from jewels wont work cause youll use the geo's from your mines.
any solutions on this plane would cut into the freedom off noobs (actually a nice reference to the terrorism/civil rights discussion right there).

3. This was already implemented, and made for a lot of fake accounts. Mickey decided to cut it and just make jeweling so hard that there was a psycholical stop instead of a coded one.
and isn't this the oposite of point 1?

i might have misunderstood your point at 1.

[razzam21]

I don't think I explained myself very well. For one I know that you have to convert jewels into geos to use them. What I am saying is keep the geos convert from jewels seperate from the ones converted from other resources. Then only allow the geos obtained from none jewel resources as ones that you can transfer to another players account.

I am not sure how the thrid has been implement. I know that you can only collect jewels when you don't have 50 in your account but that isn't really a limit. More you have to conver them everyso often. So even if you have 2 billion troops and 100 cities you can still hunt jewels what I was proposeing was a method of limiting jewel hunting to newbies and players that have jsut been wiped out.

[Mickey]

I am not sure how the thrid has been implement. I know that you can only collect jewels when you don't have 50 in your account but that isn't really a limit. More you have to conver them everyso often. So even if you have 2 billion troops and 100 cities you can still hunt jewels what I was proposeing was a method of limiting jewel hunting to newbies and players that have jsut been wiped out.
As Timmetie said, we tried this and then undid it. I had worked out a pretty complex system for determining how much jewels should be worth for each player, but we had a LOT of players that created fake accounts that only collected jewels so they could get the full conversion rate.

The idea about having GeoJewels separate from normal Geos is a new one, but I'm not sure it's practical. Still, it's something I'll have to think about.

The bottom line is that I'm trying to do more and more to encourage people to use the other resources available and rely less on jewels.

[Timmetie]

erm, seperate jewels is not really going to work.

you'd limit the geo's sent away to other players to what you earn by jewelling, that's all, and that would be a weird way of limiting things.

you'd just use the jeweled geo's for everything and the others for transactions right? and you'd have to have 2 bankaccounts, and where do armies costs come from?

i'm really sorry, im sure you thought this out.

[razzam21]

erm, seperate jewels is not really going to work.

you'd limit the geo's sent away to other players to what you earn by jewelling, that's all, and that would be a weird way of limiting things.

you'd just use the jeweled geo's for everything and the others for transactions right? and you'd have to have 2 bankaccounts, and where do armies costs come from?

i'm really sorry, im sure you thought this out.


Yes storing the geos created form jewels would need to be seperate from those create from other resources. However the player would not necesarily need to know that. You could for instance change the bank field to be two fields one that is from resources and the other that is from jewels. Any page that the banked geos is displayed you display the total of both fields. Then onthe transfer page you only display the value of the bank field that has the transferabel geo's in. The part that would need to be worked out is which account would purchasing of mines, fields, wells, armies and the nukes come from. I would say that it comes from the other resources field first. When someone purchases something inthe background the computer adds both together to make sure that player has enough geos. Then takes it out of the other resources first. If that isn't enough then it takes the rest out of the jewels account. I think it could all be done in the background. Without the players knowledge. If you incorperate a player value based on all of the components of the game then when the player's value is about some specific value the jewel hunting kml file lets them know. when they get below it they can. i think the programming to change to two accounts (for lack of a better term) may be large but it would help solve the cheating by getting multiple accounts because geos creat from jewels would no longer be transfered.

[razzam21]

Maybe the abritraty value could be calculated once a day based on the value of the highest player and then put the jewel limiting value at something like 35% of the highest players value. This woudl make ti flexible so that players have more options to collect money as the highest valued players increase their value.

[Timmetie]

these text/site based games depend on people understanding the rules, just like a D&D game but simpler at the moment. Without this there would be no tactics, just people shooting in the dark.

[razzam21]

these text/site based games depend on people understanding the rules, just like a D&D game but simpler at the moment. Without this there would be no tactics, just people shooting in the dark.

I mean if you wanted you could always display both accounts and then let the player transfer money from the transferable account to the none transferable account. And then let them decide

That way the player would be in complete control. However once money is transfered into the non transferable account it could not be transfer out.

[Timmetie]

oke, to loop back to the beginning.


this is to help/counter/improve what?

i myself think the jeweling is fine atm, maby a little slider between 2.21 geo's and 1.21 geo's according to your cities, armies and such cause the new way of collecting jewels is nothing as hard as i thought.

[razzam21]

oke, to loop back to the beginning.


this is to help/counter/improve what?

i myself think the jeweling is fine atm, maby a little slider between 2.21 geo's and 1.21 geo's according to your cities, armies and such cause the new way of collecting jewels is nothing as hard as i thought.

I think this would counter any players trying to cheat with scripts. because if they can only script up to a limited amount then waht is the point in wasting time espcially when they can transfer any money from a new account to their other account.

I think it would also allow you to reinstall the moving jewel value because it would give those who have been completely wiped out a way to build up to a point and those that just start kind of a boost while the rest of use couldn't use the system at all.

by making it moving that would kind of wien the players off the jewels because they become pratically worthless the closer they get the some arbitraty overall player value.

[rasqual]

The idea about having GeoJewels separate from normal Geos is a new one, but I'm not sure it's practical. Still, it's something I'll have to think about.The new Jewel hunting system is brilliant. It'll be equitable after the next reset. ;-)

As for this geo differentiation idea, it's pretty cool. It's just a property on the geos, specifying their pedigree. Basically, we're talking about a money-laundering prevention scheme -- a darned smart one. Heck, tag geos with an identity property and you have each one nailed exactly where it came from, so long as you actually insert rows to your SQL for everything that happens in the game. Did I mention terabyte storage at minimum? ;-)

Keep up the good work!