With the strife that self-farming has caused in the FFA, I think it might be time to consider taking ghost acres back out.

Self-farming can still be something done for profit, but it would eliminate the fact that it's really become the only way to compete for the top spot.

Self-farming has unbalanced the game in several ways:

1) Landgrabbing (the intended way of getting land, I would argue) and exploring simply cannot be as effective as self-farming because of the land gained in ghost acres. This takes out a lot of the interaction in the game between clans, and furthermore makes it seem a lot worse when someone is land-grabbing heavily to try to get their land.

2) It completely destroys the market as many people have run incredibly low defense, high land countries to trade land back and forth with. This limits the amount of goods being bought and makes the indy strategy pretty much entirely worthless for the vast majority of the set.

3) A lot of people on FFAT are arguing over issues of this as well, leading to players leaving or threatening to leave the game, which is obviously also not good for the server's health.

With all these things in mind, I think it'd be wise for the admins to consider getting rid of ghost acres. Furthermore, I believe it HAS to be an administrative decision, because I don't think it's a reasonable request to ask players to quit doing something that's beneficial to themselves or something that will help them to compete for top spots.

Thanks for your consideration.

DETAH TO TWAIN

I <3 ghost acres

And I just wanted to be the first person to say that when ghost acres are gone I will still farm myself anyway :-P

Err have you seen our ghost acre DR stuff?

I have. My personal opinion is that it hasn't done enough to entice people towards exploring and/or grabbing other countries.

Sure, llaar isn't winning the game by simply trading hits between a bunch of countries anymore, but it's still the only way to compete for a top position.

And I can say this as someone who has put together some pretty solid countries with 40k or so acres each pretty much entirely based on trading hits.

Ozzite: From our discussions and from seeing how well you've done this set, I have no doubt you still have the talent to put up very good countries. Will your overall NW and land go down? Sure. But so will everyone else's.

Very true Twain. I mean I like ghost acres and i think they are just another strategy in the game, but it would be fine if they were gone =] I guess we could better distinguish the true netters or some crap like that.

I will whole heartedly agree with Twain on one point (and probably others, but I won't admit it). The community as a whole isn't going to band together and stop doing it, it would have to be a decision by the admins.

Mhmm but without land creation it's pretty much just All-X unless you farm somebody who's doing all-x.... which would lead to self farming again no?

It could lead to another type of self-farming, but it would at least be benefiting one of your countries to the detriment of the others, not benefiting every single one of your countries.

Furthermore, I think it'd be a fair change to increase the explore rates or at least change the formula for the diminishing returns of exploring so that exploring would be beneficial for more of the game.

Ozzite: You know I'm awesome, just buy in to the hype. Twain is win!

Why is the top 100 cutoff lower for FFA than for alliance?

especially considering 7 people playing 16 all x countries can get a lot of nw in each easily if they wanted to

one thing to consider though is the TNW of t10 t25 t50 t100 or better the tnw/anw of countries in each of those brackets