Since the tournament is also largely based on luck (as are fights individually outside of the tournament), it means that the more bots you own and enter a tourney, the more chances you have to win the category.
Example: My category, category 15, where a user has around 10 bots ("Mr.[...]) with surely same builds. This means he has 10 times more chances to win the category with one of the bots since luck is a factor.
PS: I know that you're going to say, that no one stops me to do the same thing and build 10 bots and register all of them, but I find that the tourneys should be 1 bot per user per category to make it more competitive.
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It is a shame and it does encourage that, but theres no way to enforce your solution until bots "belong" to a user. It is something Ender has considered/discussed in the past, but I think it's fair to say it won't happen any time soon as it's a mammoth task.
Short solution - make 20 copies of that same not!
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I only entered 5 bots in your category, not 10 as you say. I entered a total of 34 bots in 7 different categories and was lucky to have 5 winners.
Not all my bots in a category are of the same build btw. How many tourney bots belong to one owner in Escapism I wonder?
~Bazza
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Don't think it was a personal attack on you Bazza, just at the system. For what it's worth though, Rene and Myriad mostly have one bot per category.
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Unless you count the month they entered all those answerer dumpers :P
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Yeah, this sort of brute forcing is definitely a problem. Unfortunately though I'm not sure I see an easy way around this. I think it might just be a fundamental limitation of the game's allowance of multiple accounts (I think this is somewhat of a rarity for browser-based games) and the largely hands-off/non-interactive battle system. In general it's very hard to link specific logins with specific "real" people, at least to an accurate enough degree.
Note that for the clan competition, I do think this is solvable. The current loophole is that you can invite a ton of bots to your clan right before the tournament starts, do the tournament with the giant clan, then remove all the bots before tax is collected. A few weeks ago I had been playing around with tax formulas and new clan rules and such to try to figure out a way around this, but couldn't settle on a solution I liked. I do want to come to this though.
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Actual solution: Add PvE to the game so we don't need to make 100+ whores/dumpers to attack for energy. Lower number of bots per IP to 2 afterwards. Add IP checking to the tournament (I'm sure some would change IPs to roundabout this but it wouldn't be to much of an advantage). Max out the amount of participants per clan to 20 or less instead of fixing the tax problem. Add different variables to the tournament other than "bot with best weapons/most freaked" wins like "best energy scorer build" or "best non-freaked bot (could check if armors are too high of str for the bot) or "best bot with less than 35 redistribution points used". Something like that so other people can compete in it versus just overproducing freaked bots in order to win.
But this may be more than Ender really wants to do in this matter. So yeah, whatever.
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i agree with the last part of what zal as said
anyway to stop people from entering a load of bots i would do 1 bot per email address and not let bots with no email address join
most people who enter all there bots into the tourney wont sit there for a few hours making new emails so this im sure would stop so many bots from entering
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One issue with entering multiple bots isn't just having a bunch of freaked builds. Certain builds in certain brackets have a rock/paper/scissors thing going on. One can put in a bunch of regular bots that their main tourney bot shits on, while other freaked builds struggle against more. This tilts the odds more in favor of their main freaked bots build opposed to others.
Pretty sure this is hardly abused, but I think it's a more realistic issue than hordes of duplicate freaked bots.
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Lower number of bots per IP to 2 afterwards. Add IP checking to the tournament (I'm sure some would change IPs to roundabout this but it wouldn't be to much of an advantage).
anyway to stop people from entering a load of bots i would do 1 bot per email address and not let bots with no email address join
The problem with the ideas about limiting participation to one/two bots per person either via IP address or email address is that it would only stop "average" players from gaming the system. The players that really want to come in first will work around these restrictions. It then falls on some sort of human-based system to manually investigate suspicious cases/disputes on a case-by-case basis, tell people we don't believe that it was their "brother" on the same IP address playing on those bots, etc.
Max out the amount of participants per clan to 20 or less instead of fixing the tax problem
I've thought about an idea like this, but the part I always get stuck on is - how would the 20 bots be chosen? Obviously it can't be the 20 bots that do best in the tournament since that has the same problem as before. Picking bots based on monthly energy doesn't seem great either because it's nice for a clan to have the option to have energy race bots and separate tournament bots. Did you have another idea?
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Seeing as bot-building, camping for equipment, and entering in the tourney basically boils down to entering values into a system that manipulates them a predetermined way, I don't see a practical way around this. Of course people will build answerer bots.
I had an idea years ago about some sort of ladder system, where, say, categories would be determined by the max age of a bot allowed (with some measures put into place to negate against say, attacking the bot with a ratio whore, etc). Who can build the best bot in ten minutes, for example. So tourneys would be full of bots built for that "season" alone.
My very vague and rough idea with a lot of kinks, maybe someone can suggest something.
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Did you have another idea?
Like Gpof said, we could make seasons like Diablo 2/3. This game -is- based off Diablo 2. It was supposed to be a light version of the game in text form to do while Blizzard etc. did maintenance (way back in D2 days). A season would simply be a ladder based system where every bot can participate in the first one, then the same bots moved into the non-ladder for the next season so people make new bots every season. Some seasons could be short, some could be themed, some could have special rewards. Generally speaking it would require a fair amount from you though Ender and you seem to like to make every automate without much change so I don't know if you'll like it.
tl;dr More focus should be on monthly or weekly events to keep people participating then trying to automate everything, which will inevitably just end up like bots2, full of autoclickers before it dies.
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A D2-style ladder system could be interesting. As was alluded to, there are kinks to work through, but this could be the kernel of something interesting. I'll continue thinking on that. Thanks!
(As a general rule, don't worry about effort level on my part when making suggestions. I'm perfectly okay with spending the time to build something compelling (I've invested thousands of hours of my life into this project already!), plus software engineering estimates are notoriously difficult even for people that work in this field, so there's a good chance your expectation will be off.)
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Neps said that not me :P (unless I've suggested it elsewhere? I don't recall). I think it's an interesting idea though, would help keep some things fresh. There surely can be lots of creative ways to apply, like a time-framed build competition as neps mentioned.
Even simple things like leveling competitions or most wins within the season. And of course, ladder bots would not be able to interact with non-ladder bots. That one detail eliminates lots of advantages towards established players which is good; ratio whores, dumpers etc. Everything would have to be done within the allotted time. (sorry Ender, real wars still wouldn't happen, we'd all make win dumpers ;P)
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Neps said that not me :P
Dammit, you two both have green names! And so does Ender and all the text is in green! It's easy to get blinded by it :P
So sorry about that. Thanks for the suggestion Not Not Neps. And yes I know you spent a lot of hours on the game Ender and we all appreciate that, it's just getting a bit dull around here is all. If you ever want to look for inspiration for the game, just look at Diablo 2, I mean, 50,000 people still play that daily, whether or not they're all bots who knows. Ladders on that game also have cool rewards like special seasonal weapons and armours that you can trade for quite a lot on the non-ladder. This was of course before Blizzard kinda gave up on it. But all the best ideas of multiplayer games are in Diablo 2, I can promise you that. I'm sure there's plenty of people out there that would rather just have Diablo 2 HD than any new Diablo game lol.
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Ladders on that game also have cool rewards like special seasonal weapons and armours that you can trade for quite a lot on the non-ladder. This was of course before Blizzard kinda gave up on it.
Still holds true actually. Some runewords and uniques are only available on ladder. Said items go for quite a lot of high runes on non-ladder since more are only added to it every ladder reset.
I'm not sure how this would apply to bots outside of trophies though. Anything like ladder exclusive equipment (that is actually useful) would result in an advantage for veteran players of non-ladder in the long run, since they'd accumulate more bots from ladder instances over time.
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A ladder system could indeed be interesting as a more general game concept and go a long way towards keeping competition fresh. I like that idea a lot. Out of curiosity, anyone know how long are D2 seasons nowadays?
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Way too long. The last reset was Nov. 23rd 2016. In 2015 it was in May, so that's over a year.
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If we ever do get a ladder thing going, make sure to include the option of being ladder or non-ladder when you reset a bot. That way we can reset our main bot for each ladder reset if we want. Or if ladder times end up being one month, tie in the bot reset cooldown with the ladder reset time.
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