[Discuss] Activity (was: The state of the game)

[Timothy Collett]

On Jul 10, 2006, at 4:10 PM, Thomas Dalton wrote:

>> Or you could add an option to "misdirect to Region A while  
>> actually moving
>> to Region B".  That makes late-turn cancelling irrelevant.
>
> A good system for working out if a suggestion is a good idea is asking
> yourself this: Is there any time I wouldn't use this option if it was
> available?  If the answer is "no" (which it is in this case), then
> it's a bad idea.
>
> There would need a be a serious disadvantage to using it if it was
> going to be balanced. (Adding 50% to the journey time, prehaps - if
> you're taking a round-about route to hide where's you're going, it's
> going to take longer).

That actually sounds like a very *good* idea--not only useful and  
balanced, but also a way to negate a lot of the advantage of late- 
turn loggers.  The exact amount of the travel time penalty might need  
to be fine-tuned, but the general idea seems sound to me.

Another idea, that could be either instead of or alongside that,  
would be penalizing misdirecting for several hours, then cancelling  
that misdirect.  After all, to look like you're going toward Region  
A, it would seem that you'd have to actually make some progress  
*toward* Region A, wouldn't it?

Thus, I propose making cancelling a misdirect it cost you a number of  
hours proportional to the amount of the turn you've spent that way  
(still with the current 1-hour minimum).  Which sounds pretty  
confusing, but just means:
If it takes 8 hours to travel from Region A to Region B, and you  
start misdirecting to Region B four hours after sunrise, then cancel  
that misdirection two hours before sunset (thus misdirecting for 6 RL  
hours, or half the turn), you lose 4 hours, rather than 1.

This way, even if you can log in late in the turn, if you misdirected  
early in the turn, you'll pay a price for it if you want to change  
your mind.  In the above example, if you instead started the  
misdirect 10 minutes after the turn, and cancelled it 10 minutes  
before the next turn, you'd have lost the whole 8 hours.

It should really apply to regular travel, as well, to prevent people  
clicking "travel" instead of "misdirect" to circumvent the penalty...

I can foresee *very* rare circumstances when this would bite someone  
who *wasn't* trying to make a late-turn redirect, but I think that  
the penalties are realistic and reasonable enough that it shouldn't  
be too much of a problem.  However, I'm sure there are aspects I've  
missed...

Timothy Collett
Anaris Family

--

"So we went to Atari and said, 'Hey, we've got this amazing thing,  
even built with some of your parts, and what do you think about  
funding us? Or we' ll give it to you. We just want to do it. Pay our  
salary, we'll come work for you.' And they said, 'No.' So then we  
went to Hewlett-Packard, and they said, 'Hey, we don't need you. You  
haven't got through college yet.'"
--Apple Computer Inc. founder Steve Jobs on attempts to get Atari and  
H-P interested in his and Steve Wozniak's personal computer in 1976.