Wednesday, January 11, 2012

Proof of concept: raise the PVN to around 350

Anyone want to join me on this? I need 8 other players to make it work, but messing with the dynasty by making the PVN unreasonably high would be loads of fun. Teach ais a lesson for trying to avoid daily actions =) Someone could probably figure out how to make it work with less, but this one is nice and symmetric. (We easily could get away with six by clearing your own list, but it would reduce the amount we can raise the PVN per round by to 9 maxing it out at 45. Fewer than six, if even possible, probably would’nt leave much room for PVN increasing)

Here is how it works:

Nine players, named A1, A2, A3, B1, B2, B3, C1, C2 and C3.

A1 and A2 work to clear A1’s list, A2 and A3 work to clear A3’s list, A3 and A1 work to clear A3’s list. Same for Bs and Cs.

Now each *1 works with himself, and the 4 other 2s and 3s to hack the computers, raising the PVN. Each *2 works with the 1s and 3s, and each *3 works with the 1s and 2s.

This will result in 18 pairs and 9 singles, for a total of 27 added to the PVN. As long as a square is hit, everyones heat goes back to 1. Then A1, B1 and C1 can clear each others lists (effectively becoming the new A1, A2 and A3) and the same for A2, B2 and C2 and A3, B3 and C3. We are back to where we started, so can increase the PVN by 27 again. We can continue to do this as long as all nine people can stay munging with the GNDT.

Growing the PVN by 27 each time, the first time we’d miss a square is getting it to 351 which doesn’t reach 19 squared. But at that point, jailbreaks cost 7000 firework and reporting costs 3500 respect.

So yeah, I’ll be on IRC tonight if enough of you want to help me out. =D

posted by Clucky at 11 Jan 2012 20:36:33 UTC Comments (7)

Comments

Kevan: he/him

11-01-2012 21:25:34 UTC

If you need eight accomplices to make it work, you may as well, under current quorum, just make it a proposal.

Clucky: he/him

11-01-2012 21:41:47 UTC

I’d argue there is a difference between simply making “lets mess with the dynasty” proposal and working together to abuse the ruleset even if the final outcome is the same. The later is a much more nomicy approach towards getting stuff done.

Plus ais could always veto the proposal. no stopping this =)

southpointingchariot:

11-01-2012 21:47:11 UTC

why would anyone want to do this? I thought nomics assumed reasonable self interest…. this is just screwing with things to screw with things.

Clucky: he/him

11-01-2012 23:22:09 UTC

which is the whole point of nomics

omd:

12-01-2012 02:42:44 UTC

for  for  for  for  for

ais523:

12-01-2012 06:49:13 UTC

Sure, nine people can band together to try to lock up the game. That’s the sort of thing that’s totally valid strategy, and sometimes useful as part of a scam. It’s rare for people to do that without an end in mind, though, especially at BlogNomic.

I’d say that in basically every dynasty, a quorum of players cooperating can damage the gamestate beyond the abilities of the remaining players to repair it, even without using proposals, unless there’s almost no interaction between players. (Imagine eight players each donating all their assets to a ninth. It typically only actually takes four or five people doing that to win a dynasty.)

Besides, if you did that, all the people involved would end up more or less screwing themselves out of actions for the rest of the dynasty, whereas the remaining people could get enough stats for jail manipulation merely via waiting. (Not to mention, the potential of other mechanics being added via the rules.)

If you want to find a nomic where it’s hard to screw things up permanently even with the help of a moderate-sized alliance, I recommend Agora. BlogNomic isn’t designed to stand up to that sort of thing.

Klisz:

14-01-2012 05:59:37 UTC

@ais: Yup, four-player scams are common (though not as common as they used to be a couple years ago). Oftentimes, one player (usually myself) doesn’t even do anything but vote on proposals to manipulate the queue, without even knowing exactly what’s going on.