Climbing the Penrose Stairs

[DeletedUser68]

For a concise, programmatic version of this concept, please jump to
https://us.forum.elvenar.com/index.php?threads/climbing-the-penrose-stairs.116/#post-975

We have a unique opportunity. Our World Map could end up being a source of great frustration, or great pride. I'd like to explore a LOT of possibilities for optimizing the location of our cities, on the World Map, and would offer the following concepts to focus the discussion.

I've combined World Map coordinates, Ranking, and Graceful Progression.

Trying to find a "good" neighborhood, on the world map, is going to be an important challenge because the culture in your city, and your trading opportunities, are very much dependent on active neighbors. So if you're in a BAD neighborhood, how do you get loose without getting constantly dumped into a new neighborhood with a bunch of neighbors who are worse than the last bunch? And what's the POINT of this game, anyway?

If you glance at your in-game Avatar Portrait, your ranking is listed. If you click on your rank and then mouseover the smiley next to the Score in the Rankings popup, you can see that the underlying score is composed of:

• Working Population
• Required Culture
• Solved Encounters

Rather than simply sequencing the scores, I propose that the scores be used to influence your position on the world map, as follows.

• Visualize the World Map as a Spiral, with the highest ranked #1 city at the start of the spiral. As indicated in the above chart, it's easy to treat successive rings as a spiral.
• The number of cites contained by each ring is 1^2, 3^2, 5^2, 7^2, etc, which is a nice mathematical progression that's not actually very important, except that the odd perfect squares are always to the North.
• The IMPORTANT concept is that there's LOTS of room at the bottom, and you can approach the spiral from any direction with equivalent results.
• Your rank would LITERALLY be your position on the World Map, with the highest ranked cities near the center and the lowest ranked cities out on the fringes.
• Every few days, perhaps weekly, the system would walk the spiral, starting with city #1, and would consider 9 cities at a time, as indicated by the green highlighting for city #15. The system would REARRANGE those 9 cities so that they are distributed on the 9 selected sectors of the spiral in accordance with their current underlying score.
• If you're doing better than your near neighbors, then your spiral rank and your position on the world map would move closer and closer to the center of the map.
• If you're not very active, you'd gradually drift toward the fringes of the map.

The final result would be a smooth distribution of city scores, your rank would DIRECTLY indicate your location on the world map, and you'd be able to measure your gradual progression as you improved your city.

• New members would start along any edge. If they're really working at the development of their city, then rather than tracing the entire spiral they would actually be able to jump sidewise into the next higher ring, as they rapidly worked their way toward the top of the mountain.
• Your active neighbors would be progressing at a similar rate, so you'd always see a few familiar faces in your new neighborhood.
• Your near neighbors would have a similar level of development and, to a lessor extent, similar levels of trading and cultural support activity, as you'd quickly move past the doorstops.
• Inactive members would drift toward the fringes, and after a few inactive weeks InnoGames would not even need to show the inactive cities on the map.
• If someone returns, after several inactive weeks, they'd simply "rent a room" from the active player who has the next highest score, and that city would be their base of operations until their own city became visible on the World Map, during the next recalc.

What can YOU think of that will allow us to celebrate our World Map?

 

[DeletedUser]

+1 This is accually a interesting idea and would solve most of the inactive problems we have in neighbourhoods now.

 

[DeletedUser]

I am not sure how easy that would be to code, but it does sound interesting

 

[DeletedUser43]

One problem I see with this is it would cluster a lot of the pay players together (the folks who are already paying to play) and would make it even harder for the non pay players to play which might discourage them early on and therefore they might not become paying players. This would be bad for the bottom line of the developers.

Also, rankings are changing every few seconds right now. I can hear a possible ton of arguments as someone has raced to upgrade a building or fight a fight in order to get the right number of points to be in the exact right position when the computer scrolls around to rank everyone and move them. And after a few months, wouldn't the same folks be the ones in the prime position all the time thus solidifying their positions and making it impossible for anyone to break in? They would all have prime trading partners all the time and would be able to soar past the field and stay in the stratosphere.

Third, one of the things I am hoping to do is to get to know my neighbors. So far, I have already met one of them and we are doing a lot of chatting. We are now trading partners and can support each other. I am enjoying the game a lot more knowing someone. I fear if you keep mashing up the neighborhoods, all that goodness would change.

However, I completely agree with the underlying need to have some way to get rid of the inactive players. Could your idea be implemented with only the players who are inactive? That they get moved out in the manner to which you suggested?

Or, I could be completely wrong with my analysis. What do you think about it?

 

[DeletedUser68]

The folks who enjoy climbing mountains will always be perched at the top. Regardless of the rules, they simply LIKE being on the top of the heap. The subtlety is how easily they can be knocked off of their perch if they lay back and try to rest on their laurels.

I think that one of the important things about the spiral approach is that you WILL be able to maintain your friendships. Your friend won't suddenly be a hundred sectors away because of some weird optimization algorithm. They can't move more than a couple of rings per week, and there's an excellent chance that you'll be able to move together.

But no, I don't think you can do just the inactives. If you move inactives down, then you move actives up, OR if you move actives up, then you move inactives down. It's all one piece.

 

[DeletedUser43]

It may be that the folks on top (who are already spending money) would want to spend more money to stay there. So, maybe your idea would make more money for the game? idk. I think whatever is best for the developers will be best for all of us, because if they are making money, then we must be happy!

This idea would still make me sad to be moved from my one current neighbor. But I have to say, I am also unhappy to see that a lot of people around me are already appearing to be inactive. Because an inactive neighborhood is the worst. So maybe this would be a great thing.

 

[DeletedUser]

There are 4 other players that are below 1000 in my area, one of which is 22, I have made it to 134 in just a few days,

 

[DeletedUser70]

I like to play as hard and stubborn as I can and sometimes break down and pay for something, but I for one would not be opposed to the ranking gap and differentiation between pay to play members and freemium players. Its a matter of pride to muscle through and earn lvls with time but having new shinies and power leveling is often tempting. The fact is as you move on spiral or graph like that you are bound to meet others moving at the same pace (as Missanthropy mentioned in bullets) and in time move beyond the fringes. My concern is more along the lines of the fringes getting full at some point. This space is measured and has its limits.

 

[DeletedUser61]

Judging by FoE, InnoGames simply opens another world when a server is approaching its capacity, whatever that means.

From a guild management point of view it's a hassle, because you can all too easily end up with a bunch of touch and go members. But from the company's point of view it allows them to reuse early age content over and over again, and that's pretty good business. I wouldn't expect the Elvenar model to be any different, and especially so because folks will want to play as both and Elf and as a Human.

 

[DeletedUser70]

As I look at my map now, however (not to complicate the matter), I "discover" my neighbors. Trying to visualize what the rotation would look like here to the player. Would new neighbors move into those discovered spaces to shake hands with? It must right?

 

[DeletedUser61]

The recalc would either leave your city exactly where it is, OR shift it to one of the 8 nearest city sectors based on your underlying scores. The highest scores would end up with the highest rank sectors. So most players would watch the hotshots disappear up the hill after a recalc or two, the doorstops would slide down the hill, and the core group would proceed along the spiral at pretty much together.

And yeah, you'd hopefully move closer to the edge of your discovered area during each recalc, so "where you've been" would become more expensive, but "where you're going" would become less expensive.

The subtlety is that you can move up or down into an adjacent RING, so somebody who is aggressively managing their city could head straight up the hill, rather than making the entire circuit.

Similarly, somebody who deleted most of the buildings in their city would slide downhill pretty fast, as they would drop down a ring during the first pass, and the drop another ring during the second pass, etc.

The top down approach means that you only have a couple of opportunities to climb up, but you can fall a LONG ways.

For the most part the median players will wobble back and forth between the current and next upper ring, and the over all effect will be that they'll pretty much follow the entire spiral, until they can't keep up with the crowd any more.

 

[DeletedUser]

would be great, but how often would the ranking shift the players?

 

[DeletedUser61]

I'm assuming once per week, although you might want to sweep the entry level areas more often than that.

But how we DO the sweep, and how OFTEN we do the sweep are actually independent of each other. My own instinct says that once per week would provide a nice balance between the frustration of being stuck in a bad neighborhood, and the chaos of constant change.

There are plenty of mathematical measures of the smoothness of the distribution, but the important test is whether the players feel that their efforts are appropriately indicated by their rank.

 

[DeletedUser43]

What if instead of doing all this, they just make fighting easier and training quicker? That way people would expand a lot further out from their own town and would find better trading partners? If it would throw the research tree off too much, then you could always lower the amount of kp you get per winning battle. But, wouldn't this solve a few problems....give people battles to play more often (which would be fun) ....and expand our worlds.

I think that the difficulty in battle and the inability to get far from your own town is what causes most of the trading problems. Plus, thinking farther down the line...if they ever give us the ability to search the world map easily, then you might have real life friends that you would want to eventually gain access to, and you would want players being able to traverse the world, wouldn't you?

As far as I know, even the folks at the top in beta can't get all that far from their own town....maybe 10 or 12 outward, if that?

It just seems to me that would solve a lot of the problems we are having.

What do you all think?

 

[DeletedUser61]

Think in terms of inactive players, who are unlikely to ever return. There needs to be SOME way of removing inactive players and filling in the holes. If we leave the map static, we'll end up with neighbors who are at wildly different levels, and most of them will seldom play.

So I do think there needs to be SOME way of clustering players who have similar playing styles. With the proposed spiral neighborhood system, so long as you and your friend were at a similar level of development, you'd be drawn together.

There are several other ways to solve the Trading Problem. One obvious possibility is include more and more undiscovered neighbors as your Trader (or Bazaar) is upgraded.

Judging by FoE, where we have 5000 or so players on each server, plus 2 relic rows per city, and that would take a map that's 124x124. That's a HUGE map. Reaching out 10 or 12 sectors would cover less than 1% of the map.

 

[DeletedUser68]

Here's a concise, programmatic version of the concept.

Category: Elvenar World Map and Neighborhood optimization.

Relevance: This proposal addresses a critical issue, and suggests an approach that is uniquely suitable for Elvenar.
Feasibility: Not trivial, but it should be easier than most of the other approaches for optimizing neighborhoods and dealing with inactive players.

Synopsis: Starting with the highest #1 ranked player, and proceeding in a clockwise spiral, walk the cities in descending rank order. Sort each city on the rank spiral, 9 at a time with the current city at the center of a 3x3 array, such that the highest underlying score is placed in the highest of the 9 ranking slots, which would be #3 in the following example with the other cities ordered accordingly. The city with the lowest underlying score would end up with the lowest rank, which would be #35 in the following example.

Current System

While it's highly probable that there are already plans in place for optimizing cities on the world map, the details have not been shared with the Elvenar user community. The Group Merge approach that's used in FoE would be disasterous.

Details

Placing cities on the World Map, and then discovering them, is a fundamentally good idea but, given the importance of Polishing and Trading, inactive players will seriously detract from the player experience.

The proposed "spiral neighborhoods" approach would allow dedicated players to move directly uphill toward the top of the heap, while inactive players would slide downhill. The majority of the players would follow the spiral, and would approach the top of the heap at a slower pace.

As a programming convenience, note that the rank spiral locations can be hard coded. During the initial few passes there's no need to "chase" the current player with the highest underlying score. Simply start the spiral in the center of the map where the city with the highest underlying score SHOULD be ranked as #1, and after a few iterations Voila! that's exactly where they WILL be.

While the underlying score drives rank, and while there will be a very high correlation between rank and the underlying score, they are NOT the same thing. The rank of a city is LITERALLY its position on the World Map. Note that the northernmost rank in each ring is the perfect square of an odd number.

As folks moved along the spiral they would have convenient access to a different set of relics, and a few new neighbors, but by and large active players would remain near their current neighbors as the entire group proceeded along the spiral at a similar pace.

Inactive cities should be removed from the map. If the player returns they could "rent a room" in the city with the next highest score, and they would use that city as their base of operations until the next recalc, whereupon their own city would appear on the map.

Abuse Prevention

There will be all sorts of opportunities for players to use timing and the support of their local acquaintances to improve their ranking. But it's a matter of optimizing your efforts, with predictable results, rather than abuse.

The player who just got bumped into a lower ring might not see it that way, but the suggested approach is eminently fair.

Visual Aids

The intended result of the suggested World Map optimization will be that cities are smoothly distributed on the World Map, with the highest ranked cities near the center of the map. New players would start on any edge of the map, at the end of the current spiral most likely, and low activity players would drift toward the fringes of the map.

Conclusion

Physically locating cities on the World Map will either be a wonderful idea, or a disaster, depending on the perceived fairness the neighborhood optimization algorithm. The suggested approach should be a straight-forward programming challenge as the algorithm is fairly local. From the players' point of view, they'll move toward higher ranked areas in a smooth, predictable way, and there's an excellent chance that their new acquaintances will move with them.

We DO NOT want Climbing the Penrose Stairs to be a frustrating experience for our Elvenar players.

 

[DeletedUser43]

Reaching out 10 or 12 sectors would cover less than 1% of the map.

Exactly Katwijk, that is why I was suggesting that fighting and training shouldn't be so hard and so long. As it is now, 10 or 12 sectors out is the best anyone can do...in other words, the best they can do is cover 1% of the world map. But, if you made things easier and more fun in the fighting arena, and then made training times shorter as the fights get harder, people might get 20 or even 50 times out from their inner city...maybe the top players could even have discovered all of the map...or at least have that as a possible goal. If everyone did that, then dead zones wouldn't be an issue at all. You'd have a thousand neighbors you had discovered not a hundred. No one would have to move. People who came back wouldn't feel upset that they got moved because of a death in the family or something. But, it would solve a few issues at once....it would make the game more fun (if you like to fight bad guys) and it would make dead zones less important.

I just think this moving people thing is going to cause a lot of upset. But, if that is how the game is played from the start, then people might get used to it. idk. I was just trying to come up with a simpler solution that also solved the "fighting is too dang hard" issue. (At least as you get to the top levels in beta fighting isn't fun anymore. It is too hard, and training takes too long. I doubt anyone here is at that level yet, so they probably don't know what I mean yet.) I don't disagree though that something should be done.

And this is just a thought....but it could be that those of us who played beta are particularly fearful of the dead zones because it is a huge problem on beta. However, beta is different in that it took people months to get beta keys so by the time they did, people may not have been as interested to play any more. Or like me, they didn't check that email account for a long time and didn't even know they had a key. Whereas here, as soon as you want to play, you do, so we have more players here who are interested in playing. So possibly, maybe, dead zones won't be as much of an issue here??? idk.

 

[DeletedUser61]

I actually think you're dead on. If you've been playing FoE, you'll already be aware that fully half of the pissing and moaning in the forums is about neighborhoods. FoE uses a group cluster approach, of some sort, that everybody complains about.

• The first screaming is about being attacked by "some bully" who steamrolls your city, and plunders you every day
• Then folks realize that you can only trade with your Neighbors, Friends, and Guildmates (which are the only trades that have no fee)
• Then folks realize that they're not getting any visitors, although FoE does suppress neighbors who have not logged on for a week or so.
• Then they start to realize that they DO have access to advanced goods and advanced blueprints, but by then they've already decided that they hate the neighborhood optimization algorithm, and they're not about to change their mind.

Just as a general rule of thumb, folks prefer to be clustered with other players who are at a similar developmental level, so that if they work a little bit harder they gain ground, and equally if somebody is NOT matching their efforts, they can leave them in the dust. So I think that we MUST have some sort of neighborhood optimization algorithm, the real question is if it's perceived by the players as being fair and useful.

Although FoE doesn't have a physical representation of your city's location on the World Map, the spiral optimization approach would work just as well over there. It's a general optimization problem that I've been thinking about for a long time.

 

[DeletedUser409]

+1 This would greatly increase the value of neighbors as they would be of similar game progression and activity level.

I am unclear on one thing though. A player must always land on the same ring of tiles. If a person is surrounded by marble, magic dust, elixirs, planks, crystals, and scrolls on the first ring then they must always land on a tile that is surrounded by those resources. The way a person expands is directly related to the boosts that they have and the tiles that are around them.

For example, if they reach out to the fourth ring to get marble relics while skipping out on some second and third ring tiles to save resources then after the relocation that fourth ring tile must still be marble. The resources a person has unlocked cannot change after a relocation.

If this implementation is going to take time then it would be simpler to just relocate active accounts down the spiral (reverse order to which the cities were created) to fill in where inactives have been removed. If I am not mistaken, ever 10th player tile around the spiral is identical but I am not sure what happens at the corners.

 

[DeletedUser61]

There's a 9 relic bar that tessellates all over the place. The way it works out is that there are only 9 unique city+relic combinations. And while I do agree that your relic boosts are determined by N,SE,SW in your initial city location, I'd be very surprised if there was an on-going dependency. Every city has access to ALL relics in either the 1st or 2nd ring, and exploring two rings takes most of what, maybe 3 days, and then you're much further afield.

3x3Grid.png

If they ever optimize the neighborhoods, it would be strategically interesting if the unexported sectors in front of you became a bit less expensive to explore, while those behind you would become a bit more expensive if you "forgot" to explore them while you were nearby. I'm assuming that explored sectors and discovered cities would stay that way, until some other owner inherits an inactive city, but even if the now distant relic sectors were to fade away, you'd just have to go find a few more sectors to get your high boost back, which is no big deal.

Except for the noon position, where you "jump" to the 1 o'clock position in the next ring, the corners are "rounded" so all the relationships stay the same. At the noon position it's harder to climb, but easier to fall, so there's no need to treat it as a special case. Also, I very much want to allow folks to avoid going around and around and around the spiral. Going straight up hill can gain you 30 or so ranks. Likewise, low activity players would drift toward the fringes of the map sooner if they can fall directly downhill.