I wrote the following wall of text, and intended to post it during the last 6 hours of the reset, but didn't feel like it. It'd be a shame to waste all that work, so here it is:
Another experiment, pulled off using the good ol' scientific method. The experiment being "How many countries can I keep in DR for the length of an Express reset?"
This experiment was conducted in response to several of the server's better players leaving, due to the abuse of DR by certain people. My country's name--The Golden n00b--is homage to a post SuperFly made on February 3rd, 2012:
Originally
posted by
SuperFly:
This is the 3rd or 4th set in a row where 1 country finds the golden "noob" that puts him into 50 DR and then that country goes out and LGs everyone and no one can retal him..
My experiment was conducted to hopefully make it much harder for people abusing DR to capitalize on their "good fortune". Obviously, I did this by putting several other countries into DR and, thus, hopefully off limits to countries already in DR looking for easy, lucrative landgrabs.
I had several criteria to determine whether or not a country would be put into DRs by me.
1. Countries which were obviously recruiting for 1A alliances were off limits.
2. Countries in the top 20 were off limits, unless I had put them into DRs at a time before they were in the top 20.
3. Countries already hit 4 or more times were off limits, unless I had put them into DRs at a time before they were hit.
4. Countries farming or otherwise putting other countries in DR were off limits, unless I had put them into DRs at a time before they were farming or giving other countries DR.
Other than the criteria given above, the countries I chose to put into DR were chosen randomly. I did not take requests to GS countries. Obviously, I couldn't GS any countries in GDI unless they had already landgrabbed me twice, and only one GDI country did that. I strove to put at least 20 countries into DR for most of this reset. I used mostly GSs, doing at least 4 GSs per country at a time. In the few instances where I used ABs because it was so much cheaper for me to do so, I only did 3 ABs per country at a time, to lessen the damage. With each country I attacked, I sent them a message, explaining why I attacked them. I knew that I didn't stand much of a chance of putting many more countries in DR, due to the fact that I'm just one country, with a finite amount of turns. This became apparent to me on Friday, when I realized there were around 180 countries active in the reset. I didn't have nearly enough turns to cover even a quarter of them.
Several more negative factors became apparent. Benefactors of my experiment who also had itchy trigger fingers did their best to turn my country into a parkinglot, or tried to kill it. Countries I had put into DR before either later joined GDI or bought up troops. One of the benefactors got killed and another one got ABed for no apparent reason. Other benefactors attacked other countries, thus negating the DR I had put them in earlier. Pretty soon, due to the fact I spent my turns GSing instead of growing, I began falling behind, and, due to the thrashing my country was receiving from other countries, I soon was unable to keep up.
On Saturday, I warned the countries I put into DR that I wouldn't be able to continue doing so. They understood, and most of them thanked me for my service. Speaking of that, the forum PMs and the ingame messages I received on this subject are priceless. I have them saved, just in case I ever need to look at them later for some reason.
Now, I have serious doubts that this experiment was very effective in achieving the results I wanted--namely, to level the playing field so that everyone had a fair chance of being in DR and not getting farmed by some GDI country in heavy DR. To the 20 or so countries that I was able to keep in DR for most of the reset, I was more effective at keeping them from getting heavily grabbed, but there were around 160 other countries that, due to the lack of turns, I was simply unable to provide the same level of protection. And by the time I began looking at the countries that had saved turns and started playing in the latter part of the reset, I was already too late.
The only method I can think of that would have helped the experiment achieve the desired results is if other players took part in helping keep other innocent countries in DR. If most of the 180 countries were kept in DR, the amount of land that would be grabbed off of them in a single attack would be lower and, thus, the ranks at the end of the reset would reflect that. However, the threat of being deleted due to collusion among players would make multiple countries taking part in such an endeavor quite risky. Also risky will be the reaction of other players towards countries GSing them or GSing other countries and not them.
It is unlikely that I will perform this experiment again. I had to keep to a strict schedule for the benefactors of the experiment to be protected at all times, and I was sometimes unable to keep to that schedule. It was an interesting experiment nonetheless, so I suggest that for anyone that can improve on it, to try their hand at it.
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