Jan 28th 2014, 4:18:33
Originally posted by blid:
The game doesn't need bonuses. The commie 60% sell is not the reason why commies dominate the game either. The reason for that is that commies can stock enough to cover their entire destock without going into corruption, and can focus their last few hundred turns in the other players' destock period. The 360 (360) makes turns another resource and an interesting thing to play with, it's not really a big deal. It does make commies supreme, but it also makes theos more powerful. Now that no one plays farmer, food prices are high and demos/farmers are also competitive more often. Rep casher might be the weakest remaining strat, but it's a really solid one for exploring with. All in all, this server is unique and it works with proper moderation. Slowing down the turn rate would destroy what it is.
The 60% bonus is part of the problem that contributes to it. The reason why Commies are so strong, as you said, is because "commies can stock enough to cover their entire destock without going into corruption". And why is this? Because finishing NWs are so low on this server. There is only 1800 turns per reset, about half the number compared to other servers! Change this to be in line with other servers and you will see Commies no longer dominate.
Again the reset of 1800 turns is the problem because it is too fast paced - even if you kept the pace of turns at 1 per 4 minutes, and doubled it to 3600 turns (and each reset is 10 days), it would go a long way towards solving the problems, you have double the time to stock, double the time to catch cheaters, double the time to police the market, etc. The finishing NWs will more than double, and high expenses and such considerations then come into play.
You keep saying that the solution is to have more moderation. Sure, but
A) Moderation tools are weak or non-existent.
B) It requires active community participation in reporting problems.
C) There aren't enough moderators to cover all time zones consistently, or to have a response time lower than 6 hours (any longer and it would be too long for such a fast paced server - other servers have a 2 days equivalent turn-wise).
D) Moderation helps, but doesn't solve the base problem - game mechanics are still abusable. The fixes should be going towards fixing the mechanics, not patching it with moderators.