Server Suggestion: Temperate, 1970 to 2080, 800/900 Performance, 40 Million CV

[Fauser]

Hello,
I'm new to n-ice.org. To my delight a few friends and I recently discovered an active online OpenTTD community, and decided to join up here. We generally play for 2 to 4 hour increments in which we aim to draw games to a resolution, before we discovered the GOAL scripted servers we used objective methods utilizing the various ranking systems native to the client.

However we have found that as the Performance GOAL increases the CV follows suit. It would be awesome if you would consider adding a higher Performance GOAL with a lower CV, so that a game duration may still fall within this shorter window but still giving the challenge of completing different factors attributing to this score.

Currently the #9 Temperate STEAMER WORLD server is what we have played and likely will continue to play in the meantime, as it still has a relatively high Performance GOAL without an excessive CV, ensuring the game doesn't continue beyond availability. This is just some food for thought, variety is always good though in my opinion. The subject is just a suggestion, the finer details such as starting year and specifics of CV and Performance aren't concrete figures.

Regards

[alex879ro]

Hello Fauser.

After reading what you suggested, I can give you the following answers:

1) A temperate short goal server (50 mil cv - 500 performance) is currently taken into consideration

2) A server with low cv but high performance(50 mil cv - 900 performance) is not possible because:

- the role of the performance is to prevent cheating (selling all you trains in the last year and accomplishing the goal faster because of the value of the trains)
- to improve the use of the stations and vehicles
- to improve the gameplay (some people where used to winning while they were still having loans to the bank which wasn`t fair)

Therefore what you suggested somehow contradicts itself:

From what I read, you want a 2-4 hours server with about 40 mil goal (perfectly ok) but with 900 performance (not ok)

This would pose a lot of problems :

- A certain part of our players are not people who want to use the forum, learn about all the triggers that we have added to the game(!cv, !players,  !status , !admin.....), contribute with oppinions and many others. This part of players doesn`t know what performance is and doesn`t understand it.

- Adding a bigger performance with a small goal would mean a Long Goal because accomplishing a performance of 900 means you must have minimum 120 stations from what i remember and a certain number of trains. To accomplish those demands it would take time. Therefore adding a server with 50 mil cv and 900 performance would be the same as adding a server with 10 billion cv and 300 performance. It would still be a long goal

A long goal usually takes 8-16 hours  (see server 8 or server 5, both temperate Long Goals)

So in order for us to understand what was your idea and what you want to suggest, please think it again, or add some explanations so there wouldn`t be any contradiction .

[Fauser]

My own experiences have led me to believe that Performance generates more competition among players than Company Value.

Adding a bigger performance with a small goal would mean a Long Goal because accomplishing a performance of 900 means you must have minimum 120 stations from what i remember and a certain number of trains.

100 points for at least 80 parts

The number of recently-serviced stations. Train stations, bus stops, airports and so on are counted separately even if they belong to the same station.

100 points for at least 120 vehicles

The number of vehicles that turned a profit last year. This includes road vehicles, trains, ships and aircraft.

To accomplish those demands it would take time

I have played many games that yield very high Performance after relatively short duration of time, because that was made more of a focus, the various mechanisms attributing to this score and it tends to provide a more competitive environment promoting players to fully engage and utilize more advanced strategies.

This part of players doesn`t know what performance is and doesn`t understand it.

I don't see why you need to cater for the less experienced player by tailoring every server to their needs, if there is variety then they may choose what best suits their requirements. It would be awesome to accommodate to all different players.

Adding a bigger performance with a small goal would mean a Long Goal

You are directly attributing game duration to Performance, and a Company Value a variable of your personal formula, when in essence it's dictated by players. In our most recent n-ice.org match, we all obtained around 600-900 Performance in a 2-3 hour duration. I personally had 853 and my friend that had 667 obtained victory due to reaching the Company Value GOAL, we all agreed that it made Performance meaningless at such a low level.

What my idea makes for is an action packed few hours, with dynamic and variable game strategies to attain victory rather than cheese.

A "cheese" strategy is almost always born in the top-tiers of play. The very idea with them is to abuse a single imbalance, bug or flaw in the game to maximize your gain. It is not definitively nooby, but it is certainly not good for the game as a whole, because it develops the meta-game towards maximizing the abuse of the system.


I believe that absolutely spamming a tile-set with sub-par networks, some not even profitable simply to obtain a Company Value is a good example.


edit: On the side, adding a small City Builder GOAL to this would certainly add for a challenge, e.g. 2000 to 4000.

[Batt]

Hello Mr.Fauser 

I like the server idea and I see good reasoning for it. The game length won't depend on the money generated only. This means that there will be no cheesy game play like funding lumber mills on desert map (server 3), where players were achieving nonsense profits over 3 years. Players have to BUILD to get something. CV is required also to get more competition and enforce more profitable rails.

Basically, "Lower CV" addresses the issue when you built your company, but you have to sit on the server and wait extra few hours just to get the required CV and win the game. 900-950 perf. points will require players to work hard, but not as hard as on s4/s5 for example. They have only 2-4 hours. Teamplay will be appreciated also 

Speaking from my TTD experience, there are few problems with performance because it's not configurable and is set to fixed values:
1. Main one: it is easily abused with passenger trains, as they generate enormous amount of cargo delivered. That's most important 400 points (especially for the short game) that are hardly achieved with other cargo types.

2. There is no scalability, it will work only on a certain goal with certain map. For example, trains that go over a long distance will generate profit only every other year -> no profit perf. points

3. Again, profit points. Road vehicles are not profitable, so it will be trains-only server. Then there will be limited usage of the transfer networks, because 100 points of "Min. Profit" are usually what is holding players from achieving high perf. goal.

We have to discuss it more, but idea is good.

[imus]

From my experience with TTD I can tell that ALL goals have their problems.

For CV goals, the most effective way to reach the goal is by creating one big line spanning the entire map and then feed all nearby primary industries to that big main transfer station on both sides ...
On steamer world it's slightly less effective to span the entire map because of the slow trains but the main concept stays the same. After that it's rarely worth it to continue building another decent system so it becomes a waiting game instead especially since having more vehicles reduces the earned n-ice points (to prevent the CV cheating). (Some people do enjoy this tho)

The problem with focusing a lot more on the perf and have a small CV goal in comparison would just shift the powerplay to a different style. Those 120 vehicles don't need to make a profit actually unless if you set goal to over 900, you just need to load/unload something.  So what if I would play a game with a 900 perf and 10M CV goal like this:
- Start with a decent pax/coal money making line or 2 over a normal distance. (Takes about 10 -15 minutes as I've shown on s7)
- When money starts rolling in, build a lot of bus stations inside the bigger cities and run some busses in a circle inside them (to quickly reach the 80 stations and the amount of cargo of the perf.)
- I would then build some truck lines to feed primaries to a somewhat nearby industry and spam trucks just to reach the vehicle number, if trucks are disabled or set really low for some obscure reason, it also works with trains of length 2 for example)

With this (ugly) strategy I get all the perf. things except for the minimum profit (that's why the 900 perf. goal). Building this would take what, 2 hours tops? It's not exactly fun to play like this in my opinion but if it wins the game 3 times faster, why bother not doing it, right?

If you do require a minimum profit (let's say perf 950) it suddenly jumps from super easy to really hard for a lot of players. From what I've seen we got roughly 10 people total who have no problem reaching this goal ... but they don't play every day, all day long, so that would mean you would be lucky if you had a decent player on the same server.
And like Batt said, we can't really customize this setting to do anything about it.

For city builder games the situation is completely different. The positive side here is that you force players into an active build style to keep up with the huge demands for the city. The difficulty lies in figuring out how to make that city grow fast, and even then it sometimes depends on getting the best starting town.  This means that for CB games it comes down to a race to find the better starting town and have the skill to keep it growing and then hoping your town grows faster than your opponents (if there are any).

TL;DR:
CV based goal (perf secondary target) makes for boring inactive play style that a group of players enjoy.
perf based (with CV secondary target) is either super easy to abuse, or too hard for most of the players to reach and would thus be empty most of the time.
city builder: the good thing is that it forces active gameplay for a decent amount of time.  down side is that it's far from clear how to make your town grow fast. The main issue is that it's somewhat luck based.

Anyway, I DO like what you are trying to achieve but I don't think that perf is the way to reach it.

[Fauser]

Hey,

It's awesome people have some constructive feedback on the suggestion. We would be able to summarise the discussion by taking note of some distinguishing factors to this type of server.

We can choose to look at the shifts in playstyle one of two ways, enhancing; dynamic and variable game strategies or destructive; a system to be abused, but in the end it's purely subjective and each individual will take action as they see fit. We can't assume that each individual seeks to exploit mechanics at the cost of the pleasure and joy the experience would otherwise provide. Some players don't have a complete understanding of the mechanics involved with the system, nevertheless a server with more intermediate structure may be named accordingly so that people can distinguish if a server is suitable for their requirements. The question that should be asked is, why not?

We have all concluded that it makes for a different OpenTTD environment, for better or worse we would all likely ponder. What makes it desirable is this server type would add more variety... the spice of life.

[alex879ro]

Indeed it is interesting. This is why I stepped back from the discussion, to see other oppinions too.

From my part: I still don`t agree to such a server....but eh...it`s not the first thing that i don`t agree in life

If you`re curious, I can set you up a test server in which you can test it with various settings.

Before thinking about implementing to a server, you have to convince me and Batt about it . But we`re willing to cooperate and set a test server if you want.

In this topic, I want to see more oppinions about it, then we can have a talk about it and think if it is phesable or not.

[Fauser]

Before thinking about implementing to a server, you have to convince me and Batt about it . But we`re willing to cooperate and set a test server if you want.

In this topic, I want to see more oppinions about it, then we can have a talk about it and think if it is phesable or not.

Oh, I couldn't agree more.

Definately take it as a suggestion not a demand of any kind. I have no idea what resources go into launching a server and keeping it live, so it's ultimately up to those individuals that are involved in the process. If we look at a game genre such as a FPS purely for examples sake, there are generally a variety of game modes, some are found to be more popular for different applications such as casual, competitive and that which an individuals mood may dictate. It's always good to be able to choose, rather than the decision be made for you simply because there is no variety. I'd like to mention that none of the figures are demanded more guidelines for discussion, my suggestion could be simplified to that of a server with a lower Company Value and a higher Performance Rating criteria for victory.

[alex879ro]

Ofc I took it as a suggestion. That`s what happened....you suggested something and us as admins stated our oppinions. Based on those oppinions, me and Batt as operators have to judge this .

We must add the current situation of the server (Cpu and memory load, other projects that we agreed to implement , stability of the system with another server or the possibility of changing a current server and which would be the impact...etc) and we have given an answer

So my current answer based on all that is : A test server would be proper before any discussions about implementing or not implementing the proposal. (if you agree too)

[Fauser]

A test server would be proper before any discussions about implementing or not implementing the proposal.

Yep,

It sounds good to me, I should have a heap of people online on Sunday afternoon ACST - Australian Central Standard Time, if it's up by then that would be pretty good  .

[imus]

I just wanted to point out what the weakness of the goal was to know what to be careful of when implementing this game type. If there is an easy way to cheat, a few people do tend to use it. (This happened some time ago on the airplane server, where it was just too easy to win fast and get a lot of points, so the top 3 players who abused this had 3 tot 10 times the score of other people). An easy way to get around this initially would be to give the server only a low score so that people wont play it just to abuse it like that and only play it for fun. The more extreme examples for this are the CB servers which didn't have any scoring at all in the beginning and were still the most popular servers, just because the game type was fun.

Like you said, it's good to have a nice diversity in our games so it is at least worth to actually test the type of game to see if the benefits outweigh the problems. So feel free to keep suggesting things, we like it

Now as a last note: if you want to get your idea on the test server FAST (like in 2 days) it would be best to try to find the IRC to find the correct settings for your server. Finding the chat is explained here (chat menu on the main site): http://www.n-ice.org/openttd/contact.php
But don't use the embedded chat, that one is a bit outdated so you wont find anyone there. If you don't have your own client just click the first link on that page to use mibbit (browser based IRC).

[alex879ro]

Sure....so just as Imus said...the best way to get it running is to contact us on IRC whenever u`re ready. The details on entering IRC are on the "contact menu"

Setting up would take about 30 minutes max, but IRC is a faster way to discuss things. So whenever you can, come so we can have a talk.

[Fauser]

I've been on the IRC, I guess due to time zone differences it's hard to get a hold of anyone.