__-___-___-__: forum

The TL;DR: Instead of just the last-place team losing a life every 15-minute tick, we stagger it so multiple teams bleed at the same time. To balance the extra damage and keep the event time frame the same, starting lives are bumped from 50 to 100.

We all know the biggest flaw with Elimination right now: The 1st half is boring with very little drama and decided by a few people in the back rooms. For the last three years Elimination has opened with a 10v2 or 11v1 setup. The dominant teams just coast, and the bottom teams get burned down one by one with very little leverage to fight back or negotiate. It makes the first few days of the event incredibly boring unless you're the one getting dogpiled.

Game theory predicts that this early game meta is the most optimal, so hoping it will change and leaders will choose less optimal strategies seems naive. The dominant strategy is to ensure you aren’t last, which directly counters any pressure the dogpiled teams could exert and directly leads to the uneventful start that is becoming the norm.

After having been in several team’s leadership, council, and now a vice captain position I’ve come up with a way to keep the spirit of Elim without creating something complicated that Ched will not implement. Ultimately, the hope is to make Elim more volatile and drama-filled, forcing alliances to backstab each more often by giving those teams being dogpiled more ability to influence other teams and thus create more changes in the power structure.

The Mechanics:

Instead of the bottom team losing a life as it is now, the number of teams that lose a life would scale with the total number of teams remaining in the event: more total teams = more teams losing a life. Teams would also start the event with more total lives to compensate for the greater rate of life loss.

• Starting Lives: 100 per team.
• 12 to 8 teams remaining: The bottom 3 teams lose 1 life per tick.
• 7 to 4 teams remaining: The bottom 2 teams lose 1 life per tick.
• 3 to 2 teams remaining: The bottom 1 team loses 1 life per tick.

Why this fixes the alliance problem:

• Destroys "Coasting": In the current setup, 11 teams can sit comfortably while 1 team dies. Under this new bracket, 25% to 50% of the entire field is always taking damage. If you build an 11v1 mega-alliance, two of your own allies are bleeding out every 15 minutes. Paranoia will fracture these huge coalitions.
• Weaponizes the Bottom Teams: Right now, the 12th and 11th placed teams just die alone. If the bottom 3 are all taking damage, the bottom teams suddenly have leverage. They can threaten many of the other teams: "Work with us, or we'll focus 100% of our hits on you and drag you down into the bleed zone with us."
• Active Mid-Game: Mid-tier teams can't just idle while the alliance goes to work. A bad stretch or risky politics can easily drop a team into the meat-grinder.
• More Dynamic Push Meta: Because the life loss zone isn’t just the lowest tickets/zero/tiebreaker for the bottom spot, it adds dynamism. It is no longer enough to jump from last to second last. The 10th place team may need to pull the 9th placed team down, while the 12th placed team might need to plan a stronger/larger push instead of simply trying to jump up at the last second. Different teams will have to pursue different strategies This would open up other teams as targets of farming beyond the more normative, “safely farm your allies” approach we see today.

The Math (Event Duration):

I ran the extremes to make sure this wouldn't end too quickly or drag on forever. Because of the 100-life buffer and the way the brackets scale down, the Elimination phase is mathematically hard-capped.

• If everyone perfectly meat-shields the top teams (the slowest possible drain), it ends in 6.9 days (nice!).
• If everyone is constantly swapping places and dying at the exact same time (maximum chaos), it ends in 3.8 days.

The average will land right in the sweet spot, but the drama and politics will be an absolute bloodbath compared to what we have now.

Optional Extra: Fixing the Warm-up Phase Snooze-fest

The 1st attacking phase is currently just 24 hours of mostly uneventful farming. Everyone farms the top teams to keep tickets equal and hide their alliances. This works because everyone knows that with the sheer number of attacks that can be done by 10 to 11 teams and the limited number of tickets (1000/team), the team(s) at the bottom can rapidly be switched to their real targets without any real risk.The only real impact of this time is to get an idea of how active and organized the different teams are.

To fix this, we introduce a slow bleed to this warm-up phase to make it an actual warm-up: starting and the end of the 1st hour, the bottom 6 teams lose 1 life every hour. This gives 1 hour of teams to sort themselves out before the 1st life loss of the competition.

With half the teams bleeding, leaders would have to make hard decisions, while also navigating the low stakes warm-up pushes required to stay out of the bottom 6. Alliances would struggle to perfectly "share" the life loss because random hits from the masses would constantly mess up their margins forcing them to mobilize, thus tipping their hands much earlier.

More Room for Drama:

Lastly, because more teams lose lives through-out the competition, the amount of effort required to change the landscape goes down. This would give more power to rogue groups of players trying to tip the balance.

In the current meta hidden backroom politics really controls everything - which involves a mere fraction of the players partaking in Elimination. These changes could enable dedicated groups of players across different teams to have a chance of changing which teams lose lives.

This change in power balance between leaders involved in Discord diplomacy and regular team members involved in diplomacy by fighting gives real power back to the overall team if they don’t like the leaders plan.

Implementation:

More as an addendum, one of the reasons I like this change is around implementation complexity. Since it doesn't change that much from a mechanics point of view, just the number of teams life loss is applied to, it should be one of the most straight forward changes that could be made to Elimination without needing a major overhaul. Yes, there are some details that need attention like variable numbers of teams that could be simulations eliminated (double elimination at 4th = both team 3rd place merits, or no team?).

(Also - shout out to Kamikaze-Tool who both proofread and edited this, which was something we'd both discussed on and off over the last couple of years)

[image: i.imgur.com]

Arcadia is Recruiting again!

We're a close-knit, active and independent faction with a really sweet discord and the inside track on fruit snack and pringles distribution within Torn. We pride ourselves on giving players the flexibility to make torn work for their own schedule and we set our requirements accordingly.

We're an OC2.0 faction running up to level 9s.

Join us and receive 19% fewer bounties (not an actual benefit of the faction). Here is some personal testimony from players who are definitely not biased at all.

Spalds: Everyone should trust our lead Kamikaze-Tool. He is a very nice and I am under no threat of violence for not writing this.

DonOgne: 10/10 experience. Always say yes to a random person with Kamikaze in his/her name.

Kamikaze-Tool: We might have the worst co-lead in the game, but rest assured everyone else here makes up for it.

But enough about that. You want to hear about the specials, don't you? Here's some you can expect during peace time:


Steadfast

• Strength Training XVII: increases strength gym gains by 18%
• Speed Training XVII: increases speed gym gains by 18%
• Defense Training XVI: increases defense gym gains by 17%
• Dexterity Training XVI: increases dexterity gym gains by 17%

Criminality

• Nerve XL: increases maximum nerve by 40
• Crimes X: provides a 10% bonus to crime experience
• Bust Skill X: increase bust success chance by 50%
• Bust Nerve III: Decreases bust nerve cost by 3 (2 nerve busts

Voracity

• Booster Cooldown XV: increases maximum booster cooldown by 15 hours
• Alcohol Effect X: increases nerve gain from alcohol by 50%
• Energy Drink Effect X: increases energy gain from energy drinks by 50%

Toleration

• Addiction XXV: reduces drug addiction gain by 50%
• Side Effects X: reduces passive negatives from drugs and addiction by 30%
• Overdosing X: decreases chance of overdosing by 30%

Excursion

• Travel Capacity X: increases maximum travel capacity by 10
• Rehab Cost X: Reduces rehab costs by 20%
• Organized Crimes III: Unlocks the ability to spawn Advanced Operations

Aggression

• Speed X: Increases speed passively by 10%
• Strength IX: Increases strength passively by 9%
• Hospitalization X: Increases outgoing hospitalization time by 50%

Fortitude (Rotated In)

• Reviving X: reduces the energy used while Reviving to 25

Requirements

1. 2 billion battle stats OR be a fast growing promising new player
2. Participate in Faction Wars and Chains (We war roughly twice a month)
3. Be active daily and work to complete Organized Crimes
4. Communicate with leadership your preference of Pringles (ignore Kamikaze-Tool's fruit snack stash)
5. Eat Xanax like candy, or don't, see if we care.
6. Join Tornstats.
7. Financially self-sufficient.


Message our recruitment team listed below and apply today!

There already is:

Yes ban (I built one, more details below). Before the details though, I want to say that I've read many of your responses/clarifications 1st, however with so many posts haven't had the time to read them all and everyone else's comments, so forgive me if I incorrect interpreted something.

What I built, that I tested with several friends for a several weeks, was to fill specific gaps in Torn's casino that I think generally do add to Torn's experience. I would much prefer it was handled in-game by Torn however. I decided against releasing it publicly as 1) I've generally being trying to spend less time on Torn and realized having to potentially provide support to many users was the wrong direction, and 2) It was unclear if my local states laws actually allow it.

It was designed entirely to bet on in-game verifiable events (Ranked War and Racing was initial supported) with design plans partly done for stock movement, player personal stat races, item market values, etc. To avoid concerns of scamming and ideally steer clear of anything predatory it was based on para mutuel with a small house fee (so player vs player, not player vs house). Buy-in was via beers, with the betting currency also being beers. An API-based detected beers recieved to increase balances, and a similar approach for sends to resolve balance requests, with full audit logs retained on bet outcomes and item movements should Torn need to investigate anyone trying to use this as a middleman service. 

Regardless of your decision, I do want to point out a big gap in the API - it to my knowledge (at least ~1-2 months ago) doesn't allow you to query for a players casino status (excluded/not excluded) even given the user's key. I feel strongly that any Torn related gambling site MUST via the rules be enforced to check this status at least daily for a user else it will drive self-excluded users to external services which are likely less interested in player well-being than Torn would be. I did implement a check by requiring the user to have used at least 1 Casino Token each day to enable betting for the day, which was verified by API checks. I think this is important because as I understand it, this type of service would still be allowed, which makes API support to work with Torn in areas of player well-being important. I could see other areas around things like comms (chat/forum) bans also useful so Torn-related services can optionally decided to enable/disable certain things for better community management. 

I'm also happy to share the entire repo with Torn staff in case it's of any educational value on how one of these systems work.

Exactly! Everyone completely misses that when Atari woke up he clarified the big misunderstanding, and...  Oh noes:



PS: Willing to drop bombs people send me on whatever target you want. I get merits, you get anonymity. 😂

The suggestion for Elimination passed 250 upvotes today so posting the required bug. Thread here:  https://www.torn.com/forums.php#/p=threads&f=4&t=16602890&b=0&a=0

The TL;DR: Instead of just the last-place team losing a life every 15-minute tick, we stagger it so multiple teams bleed at the same time. To balance the extra damage and keep the event time frame the same, starting lives are bumped from 50 to 100.

We all know the biggest flaw with Elimination right now: The 1st half is boring with very little drama and decided by a few people in the back rooms. For the last three years Elimination has opened with a 10v2 or 11v1 setup. The dominant teams just coast, and the bottom teams get burned down one by one with very little leverage to fight back or negotiate. It makes the first few days of the event incredibly boring unless you're the one getting dogpiled.

Game theory predicts that this early game meta is the most optimal, so hoping it will change and leaders will choose less optimal strategies seems naive. The dominant strategy is to ensure you aren’t last, which directly counters any pressure the dogpiled teams could exert and directly leads to the uneventful start that is becoming the norm.

After having been in several team’s leadership, council, and now a vice captain position I’ve come up with a way to keep the spirit of Elim without creating something complicated that Ched will not implement. Ultimately, the hope is to make Elim more volatile and drama-filled, forcing alliances to backstab each more often by giving those teams being dogpiled more ability to influence other teams and thus create more changes in the power structure.

The Mechanics:

Instead of the bottom team losing a life as it is now, the number of teams that lose a life would scale with the total number of teams remaining in the event: more total teams = more teams losing a life. Teams would also start the event with more total lives to compensate for the greater rate of life loss.

• Starting Lives: 100 per team.
• 12 to 8 teams remaining: The bottom 3 teams lose 1 life per tick.
• 7 to 4 teams remaining: The bottom 2 teams lose 1 life per tick.
• 3 to 2 teams remaining: The bottom 1 team loses 1 life per tick.

Why this fixes the alliance problem:

• Destroys "Coasting": In the current setup, 11 teams can sit comfortably while 1 team dies. Under this new bracket, 25% to 50% of the entire field is always taking damage. If you build an 11v1 mega-alliance, two of your own allies are bleeding out every 15 minutes. Paranoia will fracture these huge coalitions.
• Weaponizes the Bottom Teams: Right now, the 12th and 11th placed teams just die alone. If the bottom 3 are all taking damage, the bottom teams suddenly have leverage. They can threaten many of the other teams: "Work with us, or we'll focus 100% of our hits on you and drag you down into the bleed zone with us."
• Active Mid-Game: Mid-tier teams can't just idle while the alliance goes to work. A bad stretch or risky politics can easily drop a team into the meat-grinder.
• More Dynamic Push Meta: Because the life loss zone isn’t just the lowest tickets/zero/tiebreaker for the bottom spot, it adds dynamism. It is no longer enough to jump from last to second last. The 10th place team may need to pull the 9th placed team down, while the 12th placed team might need to plan a stronger/larger push instead of simply trying to jump up at the last second. Different teams will have to pursue different strategies This would open up other teams as targets of farming beyond the more normative, “safely farm your allies” approach we see today.

The Math (Event Duration):

I ran the extremes to make sure this wouldn't end too quickly or drag on forever. Because of the 100-life buffer and the way the brackets scale down, the Elimination phase is mathematically hard-capped.

• If everyone perfectly meat-shields the top teams (the slowest possible drain), it ends in 6.9 days (nice!).
• If everyone is constantly swapping places and dying at the exact same time (maximum chaos), it ends in 3.8 days.

The average will land right in the sweet spot, but the drama and politics will be an absolute bloodbath compared to what we have now.

Optional Extra: Fixing the Warm-up Phase Snooze-fest

The 1st attacking phase is currently just 24 hours of mostly uneventful farming. Everyone farms the top teams to keep tickets equal and hide their alliances. This works because everyone knows that with the sheer number of attacks that can be done by 10 to 11 teams and the limited number of tickets (1000/team), the team(s) at the bottom can rapidly be switched to their real targets without any real risk.The only real impact of this time is to get an idea of how active and organized the different teams are.

To fix this, we introduce a slow bleed to this warm-up phase to make it an actual warm-up: starting and the end of the 1st hour, the bottom 6 teams lose 1 life every hour. This gives 1 hour of teams to sort themselves out before the 1st life loss of the competition.

With half the teams bleeding, leaders would have to make hard decisions, while also navigating the low stakes warm-up pushes required to stay out of the bottom 6. Alliances would struggle to perfectly "share" the life loss because random hits from the masses would constantly mess up their margins forcing them to mobilize, thus tipping their hands much earlier.

More Room for Drama:

Lastly, because more teams lose lives through-out the competition, the amount of effort required to change the landscape goes down. This would give more power to rogue groups of players trying to tip the balance.

In the current meta hidden backroom politics really controls everything - which involves a mere fraction of the players partaking in Elimination. These changes could enable dedicated groups of players across different teams to have a chance of changing which teams lose lives.

This change in power balance between leaders involved in Discord diplomacy and regular team members involved in diplomacy by fighting gives real power back to the overall team if they don’t like the leaders plan.

Implementation:

More as an addendum, one of the reasons I like this change is around implementation complexity. Since it doesn't change that much from a mechanics point of view, just the number of teams life loss is applied to, it should be one of the most straight forward changes that could be made to Elimination without needing a major overhaul. Yes, there are some details that need attention like variable numbers of teams that could be simulations eliminated (double elimination at 4th = both team 3rd place merits, or no team?).

(Also - shout out to Kamikaze-Tool who both proofread and edited this, which was something we'd both discussed on and off over the last couple of years)

EDIT: This is a little awkward after admins deleted the prior posts, which was the player (multi) consequences screaming to be fedded.

And to think RAPY was just saying what a swell dude he was too...

I'm here to bring you this breaking controversy direct from Eliminations. Nine Lives finds it self squarely in the center after appearing to advocate racism as a strategy to win.

Recently shared with me by an anonymous source Nine Lives chat featured "WE WILL TRY SOMETHING DIFFERENT THIS TIME", a statement that many initially dismissed as cryptic, until fellow player dipsy responded with a pointed comment "racism is not fucking okay"



The image that link leads to: 



The exchange, now widely circulated in this post, has ignited a wave of criticism from players who say the statement leaves little to the imagination. "It's clear what was meant," was one comment, "You don't just say something like that and expect people to think it's innocent"

I reached out to Torn's premier forum cat and laser pointer connoisseur and got this reaction:



Nine Lives leadership has yet to issue a public response, and it remains unclear whether the message was meant as a joke, a provocation, or was just unfortunate timing of unrelated discussions. Regardless of the truth, I'm sure many are going to have theories on what really went down here.

What's your reaction?



Update on the cat conspiracy:

It sounds like he was placed on the wrong team.

Ready for Elim now.

#2

12:03:25 - 05/09/26 You joined the Conspiracy Theorists team in the Elimination competition

Time to expose some previously unknown information about the last Island War. I successfully faked the Territory Map that ended the war, was used by Uncle in his C3 SAVES SUMMER thread and was pinned in various alliance's discord as the reference as to what the territory boundaries where.

Oh, it was also picked up by sugarvalves for the newspaper and even emailed out to every in the "Torn Newsletter - Spring 2024" newsletter:



Yes - that infamous map was created by me. It has 8 differences overall, with one of them being the inclusion of my profile picture at the time. I was one of the CRyPTo leads in the discord server where the secret deal was done. While I've long since left, any of the leads who are still in there can confirm this map came from me.

Roughly how it went down was both NS and IBB noted that the in progress version of the map created by Monarch still had incorrect territory boundaries around Sector 7, however with everyone exhausted from the negotiations no-one was putting forward a fixed map for us to agree on. FidelCashflow and I made some jokes about just publishing a troll map to the forums. Eventually with nothing happening, I took it upon myself to fix the map and post it back to the group for approval. With the S7 issues fixed, no-one checked anything else and everything moved forward quickly.

Rumor has it that people from the Secret Torn Cabel were involved in the alternations, and it was even discussed in in-real life meet ups between leaders of 2 alliances.

Anyone - it seemed the right time to expose this as an achievement. Is it the biggest hoodwink in the last 5 years of Torn? Maybe not, but it was fun. What the alterations were, what their impact was, and for what purpose is left as an exercise for the reader.

If I'm on AUX's team and you feel like voting for AUX, vote for me instead. I'll do whatever they said they'll do, but with more attacks done along with more memes and GIFs.

Did jordnn just play the greatest Uno Reverse card in Torn history, or am I just bad at grenades?

https://www.torn.com/page.php?sid=attackLog&ID=265d950004faafa7c4bbc2fbe631a628

starting a petition for you to rename as -gLOVEz-

[image: media1.tenor.com]

Chain Reaction, head of YABA alliance currently running a clinic vs Monarch HQ, head of Westworld Alliance. How stale has Ranked Warring got that there isn't even a thread for a real fight?

With MHQ sporting 2x top 10 juggernauts (RGiskard & BodyBagger) while CR has one of their own (Tim), it's still early doors in this battle of the giants.

Who's going to take it? Did MHQ know it was a real war and did they remember to take Vico?

1) I had nothing to do with this.
2) You can have complete freedom from me for the low cost of $5B. No game changes needed.

I think it's time to just skip straight to consequences., KT.

It's been awhile, but with Ched's weird desire for fighting naked overseas being the new meta it seemed about time by simulate the Top 100 fighting each other to see who really is the top dog in outside of Torn.

You can see the previous posts from 2024 (Top 10 - Final 2024 Fight! & Top 10 - July Fight! & Top 10 - Fight! ). That's right, this time it's not just the top 10, but the full top 100.

This time around using the old fight simulator was easy because everyone was forced to leave their fancy weapons and armor at home. This time around, it was full on Melee only in the Cayman Islands, with everyone getting a decent roll for a Naval Cutless (64.5 DMG, 54.5 ACC). Full Faction, Education, Property, Merit, and Experience perks but no jobs, no temps, and no drugs. Since I was doing 10K different combinations, this time I had everyone only fight each other 100 times.

Before I going into more details for the results, let me start with a colorful grid that shows both the overall results and the scale of the comparison this time around:

Green = Win, Red = Lose, Something in between is some combination of mixed results and/or stalemating. Names on the left are the attackers (and a number), numbers on the top are the defenders, and are in the same order as the names on the side. The diagonal line of black bordered boxes are where it's the player attacking themselves. No, I don't expect you to be able to read that - here's link to it so you can zoom in to your heart is content.

In that link there are a few different table/charts so let me quickly explain the different tabs:

• Attacker Score - Left side attacks top side. 3 points for a win, 1 for a stalemate, 0 if they lose. 100 attacks, result is % of max possible (300 points)
• Defender Score - Left side defending against top side. 3 points for a successful defend, 2 points for a stalemate. 0 if they are defeated.
• Top 25 Caymans H2H Results - Just the top 25, but shows portion of Wins (Green), Stalemates (Blue), and Losses (Red)
• Fight Rankings - Top 100 rankings by attacking, and defending effectiveness. Also shows the delta compared to their total stats rank and also Battle Stat Score rank

So - who's the best?

A lot of familiar names there, with RGiskard and Shaz1 still top of the group. Some big notable changes from the last time I looked (and with the whole naked in Cayman change) - with Tim jumping up high, as well as Akenomics. Notably missing from the top 10 is realistassasin and Zachjuv. who aren't really into naked sword fighting.

The Perfect Build

A term made up by me in prior posts, I define "The Perfect Build" as the stats required to have everyone else in Torn be strictly lower than you in all 4 stats. With the perfect build, there is no scenario where someone else might perform better. This perfect build could only ever be held by the top stat person in Torn and is always increasing (unless #1 gets fedded).

the new perfect build total has jumped up to 7.765 Quadrillion. As of the end of 2024, to be able to claim the perfect build in Torn you would need a stats total of 5.12 Quadrillion.  With all 4 stats of the perfect build being above 1 Quadrillion each, it seems like this total is going to grow much more slowly than over the last 5 years.

The stat breakdown to get the perfect build as of last week, which is +1 the highest of each individual stat, is:

Unique Builds

Since #1 today still doesn't have a perfect build, that leaves open "Unique Builds" - defined as a stats combination that no other player in Torn has all 4 stats greater than. By definition, the #1 strength (still RGiskard), #1 in speed (now Xanty), #1 in defense (now Zachjuv), and #1 in dexterity (still Consequences) all have unique builds. #1 total (shaz1) does as well.

In addition to these 5 players, we also have another 3 (bringing the total to 8, up from 7 last time) the full list of Unique Builds being:

• shaz1
• Penicillin (more Defense than Shaz1)
• deft (more Dexterity than Shaz1)
• xanty (most Speed)
• Zachjuv (most Defense)
• RGiskard (most Strength)
• Tim (more Dexterity than deft)
• Consequences (most Dexterity)

What's your prediction for the end of 2026?

Will Zachjuv continuing rocketing Defense to #1 in Torn to be realistassasin 2.0?

Will RGiskard be the 1st to cap all 4 stats and keep a hold on #1 naked fight effectiveness?

Will there be new names in the top 10, and if so, who's going to drop out?

Here's the top 10 by each stat. Arguably BodyBagger (only player with 4 in the top 10 and all 1T+) and Shaz1 (3 capped, ~355 SEs closer than Def for 4th), are the front runners (except for a dark horse, but I'll leave that to you to work out):

Let's go back to Autumn 2021, the update to the top 100 that Proxima dubbed 'Tangy Cheese'. This is what I'd consider when the top 100 really started to get shaken up. BodyBagger finally lost the top #1 spot (He's dropped as low as #11 now, just taking back #10 when this update happened) to Shaz1 who weighed in at 520,982,176,344,357 (would be 15th by today's rankings). The entry point to the top 100 was a paltry by today's standard 16,022,525,937 total - anyone not in the top 100 could absolutely change what their stat balance was by today if they are in the top 100 now.

48 in today's top 100 weren't in it now, so < than 16B stats ~5 years ago. Of those 48:

• 21 are Def main
• 18 are Dex main
• 9 are Str main

Still def, but Dex much closer. Now if you look more recently, so taking _Scofield_'s April update last year, it is 15 new people:

• 9 are Def main
• 5 are Dex main
• 1 is Str main

13 of those new people were also new from the Tangy Cheese update (1 def - Charger, 1 dex - madbuns are old school top 100)