Land Catching proposal

[The Beatles]

It still means whoever gets to it first is lucky. Suppose someone drops land. His cronies then attack the land farm -- free land transfer without losses and big juicy attacks on no buildings.

Other scenario -- land is redistributed to 30 warbands. If they want to recover that, many more attacks, pissing off a lot more people (allies too), against heavy losses with less profitable attacks.

[Gen. Volkov]

Yes, but it still means that people are saddled with land that they probably won't use before someone takes it. And if people aren't on to get the land and use it, they'll prolly check box, and the land is gone anyway, or get's distributed to few enough people that it creates whole new problems.

[windhound]

eh. use it as a buffer then. as stated, any land you gain from stuff being dropped will be minimal. unless somone decides to drop 50 odd thousand. if somone is going to attack you, they'll do it anyways. this free land may buffer the hit of maybe a few attacks. if you dont want the land opt out.
I dont really see the sence in complaining about free land

if the game doesnt have enough people that the land wont get spread thin, the players have more to worry about than dropped land

[Nuclear Raunch]

I don't really like the idea of their being no means of removing land from a server that goes on forever. In WOA eventually there will be too much land since it never resets, so we may want to consider some kind of a permanent method of dropping land, but do it in such a way as to ensure it is not done with malicious intent. I've only thought this over for about 30 seconds before posting (which is about 31 seconds more than usual for me) so there is quite likely better solutions out there, but one thought would be to have a third option for each empire. Every empire would have to choose between

A: Their portion of redistributed land goes to their empire

B: Their portion of redistributed land gets dropped

C: Their portion of redistributed land gets redistributed to other empires

This way the only way any significant amount of land could be dropped a significant amount of the playerbase would have to be doing it.

Also I would like to see abandoned and deleted empires hittable to prevent someone grabbing land and deleting to bypass our malicous intent safeguards.

[The Beatles]

I had a similar thought last night, but my solution was different: admin regulation. Dropped land goes into a pool, redistributed in 24 hours unless admins block it. Well, essentially. But I'm not quite sure about it.

[windhound]

wait.. I thought WOA reset every three months or so? did that change?

letting the individual players to decide what amount of land gets dropped is kinda flawed as well
free land is free land, and even if you didnt want it, you would want to beable to get at it later (hard to make more hawks without land)

a delayed release is probably better, maybe 12 hours before land is redistributed.
if you're really worried about having too much land, have the game shave off 20-30% off the total amount of land to be redistributed.

I would think it would be best for everything to work more or less automatically, without admin intervention. possibly place the 20-30% in a side pool, which the admins can choose to release if the things are looking sparse

as far as I know, the abandoned and deleted horde land was going to be redistrobuted along with the dropped land

[The Beatles]

WOA hasn't been reset since its inception. I don't quite know when that was, though.

[Gen. Volkov]

Really, it hasn't? Wow. I was under the impression that it had been at least once. So technically I was the first Emperor of WOA, since at one point I went in there and held the top until I got bored.

Anyway, I still like the landfarm, because of the KISS principle. Keep It Simple Stupid. The more we add to make the land redistribution work, the more complicated it is. Or, Landfarm, bam done, problem solved, with the slight modification maybe of changing max hits. But it does work, even without a special hit limit, despite complaints about it, all the land IS redistributed with a day or so.

[Ruddertail]

As far as dead & deleted empires, I think their land would go the landfarm/redistribution system, instead of just going away.

I do rather like the idea of the admin control for redistribution. That would allow us to get rid of land if we start getting too much. I don't think we'd need to worry about admin abuse of this feature - most of us are pretty anti - land dropping anyhow...

[Nuclear Raunch]

So we have redistributed land or all to one landfarm empire. Beatles has brought up several points in regards to possible negative consequences of all to a single landfarm, so I'm not gonna beat that dead horse. Now in regards to the redistributed land Rudder brought up the good point that mages (or theoretically anyone else) may not want it so he proposed a check box to opt out.

My biggest fear is that we don't provide for any type of permadropping and someone comes along and skyrockets the land in game. If there was no scout spell it wouldn't be that big of an issue, but the reality is without land dropping a skilled player properly using the ED spell could have land in the millions in a week no problem. (I'm not at all trying to say he could hold that land either) If he had an accomplice it would be exponentially worse. Then we either get stuck with a bunch of empires topped out at 2.147 bil of each troop or have to explain to someone who just spent a couple weeks casting scout that we're gonna change the code to remove the land he just made. As they say an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure

To allow land to be permadropped while still maintaining safeguards against malicious intent is in my mind absolutely imperative. So far the only methods of removal mentioned are, a cut off the top of every land drop does not get redistributed, allow empires to have any land they would have normally received be permadropped, and having it all go to an admin controlled pool where the admins can set the "floodgates" to allow whatever % of land they want redistributed. The only problem with any type of straight off the top removal (IE if 100k gets dropped only 90k gets redistributed) is that by nature the % that does not get redistributed is either too small to be effective, or large enough to be exploited maliciously. The problem with the idea of allowing players to opt for their portion of redistributed land be permadropped is that it can be confusing, probably difficult to code, and it's not super effective when only a small portion of the playerbase thinks their is too much land in the game. The only problem with the admins controlling the % of land that gets redistributed is that I can forsee tons of arguments over whether or not it is set at a fair amount. Let's be honest, there will be 30 different opinions on how much land should be redistributed, even if there's only 20 people.

Oh, the idea of land from deleted empires getting redistributed is much better than my idea of just making them hittable.

[windhound]

*yawn*
there comes a point where it becomes too complex to try to cover all possibilities
a land farm suffers just as much, if not more, from the fact that land is never removed from the game with it inplace

if you wish, there is an alternative. decide based on the number of players or the amount of total networth, or a combination, how much land is /supposed/ to be on the playing field and use that to scale the % of land which gets dropped or redistributed
if there is excess land, then 100% could be dropped fully, or sent to the admin pool.

[Gen. Volkov]

Well, as a partial solution, if you don't want the land to stay in the game, all the land that that landfarm has could be perodically deleted except for some small amount, or an admin could do it when he thought there was too much land in the game, but that never seems to be a problem on BFR, and is not really a problem on WOA. Really to have as little land circulating given the amount of time that game has been running is remarkable. It should be well into the millions by this point.

Ok, here's a another thought I had, instead of automatic redistribution, or that with a percent skimmed off, or even a land farm, how about an admin controlled cache where all the land is dumped to, and then it can be released in full or part in a mass redistribution when the Admins saw fit, and you could still have the option to opt out of recieving the land a la Rudder's idea. This game has enough active admins for that too work.

[Freenhult]

Yeah, that would be kinda a good idea Volkov. But, what about also just also letting land amounts under a certain precent of the total land, just be dropped completely?

[The Beatles]

That's kind of like my second idea except I proposed to have it redistributed if the admins did nothing, i.e. proactive.

[Freenhult]

Ah I see... Meh, whatever works. Not like we can't fix it if it isn't working.