I propose four things, in order of most-to-least helpful:
1) (Most helpful by far) The prevention of joining a wall while under attack was well-intentioned but no longer matches the current territory war meta. Removing this block will also nullify the advantage of people sitting in attack loaders with those scripts, and since the majority of these come from outside hits anyway on a hard-fought wall, it will make it more likely that people get Early Discharge from that outside assistance, as they should.
2) The Torn attack loader should automatically switch from an error message (e.g.: "THIS PERSON IS CURRENTLY IN HOSPITAL AND CANNOT BE ATTACKED") to the Start/Join Fight button, enabled. This needs to complete in under one second from when the backend begins providing this info anywhere, on a good connection, to nullify the current advantage from scripts.
3) The Assault/Claim Territory button should automatically enable when the territory is assaultable/claimable. As for the Start/Join Fight button, it should be available in under one second over a good connection from when the backend reflects such data.
4) Update the rules on scripting to only allow actions that are currently available to a user on the current page. This may have been somewhat obviated by the added delay referenced in bogie's post above, but I think it is a good rule nonetheless if the above three options are also implemented.
Thank you very much for your attention and for working to make Torn usable for all in the new era of territory warring.
P.S.: With the growth in total numbers of factions and players, a map expansion with a new outer sector might be timely.
At the ripe young age of 3,510 days, I have now capped three stats.
Some details:
First to 500t str at 2,657 days (and still #1 overall)
Second to 500t dex at 3,360 days
Second to 500t spd at 3,510 days
Third in total stat enhancers used with 3,913 (about $1,730b)
First in E spent on training str in the Monarch HQ (nee Relentless) shell (1,481,595)
Third in E spent on training def in the MHQ shell (1,181,535)
Still haven't got the Spaced Out honor (1,939 cannabis taken)
Since I momentarily have a soapbox, there are a few things I want to mention:
1) The top-stat players have already entered the endgame. We will all be able to solo each other, with the advantage going to whoever initiates the fight and has the right equipment. Truth be told, this takes a lot of the excitement out of an achievement like this.
2) If I could choose just one change made to this game, it would be to remove the level 100 cap. Introducing a bit of extra life and a few more honors will not unbalance the game, as shown by marauder armor and the truckloads of new Crimes 2.0 merits. It would introduce a type of competition to the game that is sorely needed among dedicated players and at a fundamental level that is matched only by battle stats. Players would be offered a legitimate choice between paths, because maximizing level means spending as much E as possible attacking and leaving, rather than training in the gym or hosping for bounties and RWs.
3) The latest challenges being added in this game can all be finished too quickly. Don't get me wrong, Crimes 2.0 is much more immersive, complex, and visually appealing than Crimes 1.0. The problem is we run out of goals to chase, as we get to CS100 and all honors long before even the next crime is released, let alone the years it would have taken to get similarly as far in Crimes 1.0. Chasing NNB would be fine, except we get no indicators of our progress between increments and it soon takes a long long time for a single bump.
It's clear people stay hooked on this game because of the social aspect and not the mechanics. Still, it would be nice if the cookie-clicker aspects were built to feel like they're still relevant even after 20+ years playing the game, and not like they'll peter out after five years. If you want us to keep busting after 10k, give us a reason! Each little thing like that causes us to check in that much more often, leading to more player-to-player interactions, and increasing the vibrancy of the game.
And now I can't believe I'm arguing for Torn to be a greater timesink...
Rumors and speculation have abounded for many months now. It is, at last, time to confirm:
We are coming for the island.
March 4th.
Months and months of all sides scheming to reinforce their alliances, undermine the opposition, poach players, build armories, and find their most ironclad strategies will come to a head in two weeks. Whether you think of us as butterflies or behemoths, we are coming for the top territory prize in Torn, and we're bringing friends.
By raw numbers, this will likely be the largest war in Torn history, with thousands directly participating.
Stagnant gameplay? Excelling above the rest and looking for a challenge?
Where else to push yourself than with the faction family with the highest number of SE takers and high-networth players in torn?
The Strongest Faction in the game, Monarch, is always looking for active, moldable, and strong players for Monarch HQ, Monarch Engineering, and Monarch Research!
Monarch HQ has the highest steadfast perks in all of Torn, and all our factions have 16%+ steadfast perks unlocked. We pay all our PA teams 100% of crime proceeds, we give a significant portion of ranked-war profits directly back to members, we provide mercenary contracts to earn extra money, we offer proven stock investment funds run by your choice of manager to assist members who want to grow their cash passively, and we are building a sizable armory so members can outfit themselves in RW weapons and armor.
Our requirements are as follows: * All factions: 2.5+ xanax per day, active multiple times daily, desire to fight * Monarch HQ: 5b+ stats (contact MagicDust, RGiskard, FidelCashflow, Td3h, loveu2) * Monarch Engineering: 3b+ stats (contact KingLion, Vogel, Byrod) * Monarch Research: 1b+ stats (contact Ekim_, Drachoth, monogamy)
Exceptions for the stat requirements are made for high-activity, high-potential players. If you do not yet meet our stat or activity requirements but are interested in fighting, we may still be able to find you a home. Contact any leader to enquire about joining.
Ranked Warring has been a fun and much-needed addition to the game, a success without a doubt at promoting more warring at all levels. Although a well-designed system overall, we believe there are some necessary tweaks that should be made. We, the leaderships of the top 10-15 HOF factions, have put aside our various differences and grievances to come together and discuss the current flaws and frustrations of the match-making system.
The Problem: Ranked Doesn’t Mean Ranked
As it stands we believe the “Ranked” element of “Ranked Warring” is the complete antithesis of what it is supposed to represent. Based on the requirements for matchmaking, namely the “member stats” parameter, factions at the top find themselves in a tiny pool and largely unable to progress through the ranks. Meanwhile, active low-to-mid tier factions have a much larger selection of factions they can demolish in order to quickly climb the “Ranks” with ease.
While lower-statted groups may have pools of several dozen factions they can match with, factions at the top end find themselves with pools barely reaching 10 potential matches. For the HOF that can win the majority of their limited pool, still cannot fight a war unless:
A member of their limited pool of opponents actually enlists, and
They wait out the “recently fought” parameter for days or weeks on end once they’ve gone through their pool.
For the rest of the HOF, if they are lucky, they will win more than 50% of their limited fights, which means they will also progress - albeit even more slowly. If they win 50% or fewer, they will forever remain in Bronze - despite having the strength and ability to wipe the floor with dozens of factions that will be able to progress through Silver and beyond.
Overly-restrictive matchmaking not only prevents the Ranked Warring system from ranking actual faction power, but it incentivises diluting or weakening factions such that they can more effectively farm caches, which goes against the main thrust of Torn. In a balanced system, there may initially be some lopsided matches as the ranks sort themselves out, but eventually the resulting league table will be a true representation of faction power. Eventually matchups will return to a similar state as they are now, factions will fight those they are close to in strength across the entire spectrum of stats and ability.
Our Suggestion(s)
Currently four parameters are used to locate a match among the enlisted factions, and a potential opponent faction must sit within the range of all four parameters. Our suggestion is to simplify the matchmaking process by reducing this to two parameters: “Rank” and “Recently Fought.” “Battle stats” and “Number of members” would then be used only to find the closest possible match in the event of multiple factions meeting both Rank and Recently Fought criteria. If these criteria are not met, then no match is made. After every 6 hours, expand the rank criteria to include one more rank higher and lower than the entrant’s rank. If more than one faction meets the basic criteria, then match the entrant with the enlisted faction that is closest in terms of stats and member count.
Alongside this change, we propose a reductive multiplier equivalent to the “underdog bonus,” whereby if a very uneven matchup is won by the clear favourite, the rewards are significantly reduced in the same way they would be increased had the underdog won.
At first I thought this idea is strange, but then I thought about how much I'm shaped by the current meta. And I don't love the current meta.
The first Elimination, I went hard, super hard, and my team (Pirates) were eliminated first. Why? Because we were the scariest team (not because of me, I was still a small fry in 2016). That year, and every year after it except for the now-fixed issue that led to Pink Power in 2017, made it clear that the meta in elim is entirely about alliances until the last 2 or 3 teams remain, with activity being a distant second, and stats being an almost non-existent third.
That was a very disappointing thing to learn.
Every team goes rah-rah about how hard their players worked, people donate significant funds to incentivize people and make the competition more fun, and of course people spend so much E and cash on boosters instead of training.
Shouldn't that be more aligned with what it takes to actually succeed?
Because, in reality, the only thing that matters in the current meta is that your leaders have maneuvered in such a way to get enough other people to agree that you should stay in so that, hopefully, you end up in a 1v1 where, finally, activity is the deciding factor.
I would support an idea like zuni's because it gives a highly-active team a chance to stay alive in a way they definitely cannot do now, at least in a 3v1 or 4v1. It would also raise the importance of a team's ability to communicate orders and stay on the same page.
@Maks Don't send me thread dividends, you'll need it to catch up to me.
Congrats on four years and growing faster than 99% of Torn. I have a feeling SEs are in your not-too-distant future. Come talk to me first.
A bigger achievement is your work raising Leviathan. Building a successful faction is way tougher than cookie-clicking your way to money and stats, and you're doing outstanding.
Now if you really want to prove that you've built a serious faction, you got to beat me in a group attack. 😉
To start, it's worth noting that this suggestion has 335 R+ and 0 R-, so, at least in the community's eyes, it seems to be universally preferred over the current system.
About friction, I think it's good if it enforces a particular gameplay outcome that makes the game more interesting in some fashion. There is definitely some difference in gameplay that comes out of it, but is it of any use?
Are any of the factions that haven't reached the 10% goals rotating their steadfast settings? Every case I've heard of from people directly or in faction descriptions makes me think they all just set steadfast as high as they can and increase it as soon as they can, never on a rotating schedule.
Similarly, I've never heard of a faction that specializes in a single stat. Factions are too holistic, and recruit status severely discourages doing things any differently, including in this case, because you lose 6 days of steadfast AND toleration to leave your home base and come back.
The gameplay difference in factions with 11%+ is that people wait on books until the right steadfast comes around. They also use it to decide their schedule for balancing/rebalancing stats, such as with special gym ratios or preparing to use stat enhancers or trying to stay balanced. There are also people who have a good reason to train a stat that is currently not in rotation, and they just take it on the chin or leave for a temporary faction to train in.
All that does add a little bit of flavor, but only a little. It doesn't achieve diversity, because no faction chooses to specialize and no individual chooses, in the long run, to set up their stats differently. It certainly doesn't add anything extra to strive for, and instead lowers the total amount of respect you need before you max out your important upgrades.
I think choosing not to censor f**k anymore cost more flavor than this, in all honesty.
It's good work and interesting and gives people something to work towards.
I voted to remove racing skill, though really what I think is you should weight all three of those as 1/3 so that, together, racing is equal weight to other categories that measure only one area of the game.
It just doesn't make sense that racing is more important in any power/prestige ranking than every other central thing like attacks, level, networth, stats (I know that wasn't included due to spy issues), crimes, etc.
I've always looked at these elite/prestige/hof rankings as if what I'd like to see is how prestigious the playerbase would think a person is given the whole aspect of their game.
That's a silly argument, that honors are bad because they're hard to reach.
The whole point is to give people things to strive for. Pretty much every update to this game for a long time has been focused on giving players something to do that they could complete in 5 years or less, while the game is designed to hook you for decades.
People stay engaged in the game after they reach the easier-and-easier targets only because there's a community, but it won't last forever. Most long-running factions, including yours, are seeing lower and lower activity because the game stops providing purpose to the continued cookie-clicking. Medals and honors all run out.
Also, more and more people are reaching 1q in a stat. The best they can do is make a forum post, otherwise it's like... yay, go buy yourself a cupcake?
In this game, the ultimate goal for a single battle stat can be said to be either 500t or perhaps 1q, due to the SE gain cap of 5t. Anything beyond that is just coasting in the endgame.
I suggest an honor for each stat that reaches 500t or 1q. One could argue 1q is the better choice because it's a rounder number, and one could argue for or against 500t being the better choice due to its exact correlation with having reached the SE cap. I would recommend 1q, personally.
Possible names: Unstoppable Force (str), Immovable Object (def), Inevitable (spd), and Transcendent (dex).
As many of you already know, a longtime member of Westworld departed from us yesterday morning when TNL dropped their tiles and left WW servers.
TNL was an integral part of WW for years and a key component in our side's Island War 2.0 victory. There was generalship from Andrew_616 who tirelessly grew TNL to what it is now, all-around leadership and organization from Lunartemis, and powerful technological tools from Omanpx.
Sadly, it became more and more apparent over the last year that our two factions just could not work together. We tried to work it out, and in fact the very screenshots released in their document (written by people currently in fed) *were* us trying to come to a solution that would calm us all down.
Aquagloop had gathered data so he could tell his side of the story, but, rightly or wrongly, I counseled him not to post it. When Aqua was instead put into 30-day fed, his greatest lament was that he never got to speak up. Knowing that his story would expose some bad activity by TNL, I and others tried to mediate a solution that required only that Oman apologize for spearheading a smear campaign based primarily on an unrecognizable version of events. Ultimately, we were rejected, and they left of their own accord.
Personally, I don't think any of the people involved truly understood they were breaking the rules, and I am sad to see anyone lose so many years of work from being wrong. We've poured our lives into this game for pixel stats.
I wish TNL well, regardless of which side they're on. We're all playing a game together, after all.
Since so many people here now weren't even playing almost four years ago when this all started and others are justifiably foggy on details, here you go: Batman and Monarch | Faction Discussion | TORN
As bogie said and you can see, he eventually gave back the faction shortly after telling us someone messaged his sister. I asked around about it and nobody fessed up, and if they had we would have kicked and reported them. What happens in this game should stay in the game unless all people involved choose otherwise.
He then became a forum troll, alternating between his imagined righteous warrior persona and falling back on his troll persona whenever he inevitably got called out for lying. He engaged in a campaign of trying to convince people via DMs that he was the good guy, but that didn't last since he couldn't stop harassing people and got his forum and chat bans.
When he relinquished the shell, he did pay back members for their balances and gear he stole, but he never paid us back the faction money or our DB, and he attempted to taunt us with it until the very end.
Still, it's just a game. I wish him well, personally, and I hope he moves on.
It feels like ages ago when Nihar and I first spoke. It wasn't until years later he came to join us and we shared our time. He was a good man, part of the fabric of our faction and of Torn, and I will miss him.
For the Average Joes gym, the gain for defense trains is shown in the UI to be "Defense Gains 2.7 out of 10" and the progress line has a 27% width.
I did one defense train in Average Joes with 5,470,555,599.51 def, roughly 4750 happy, 10% steadfast, 2% property perk, and both 1% education perks. Based on Vladar's extremely accurate calculator, I should have gained around 10,605 def, but I was surprised to see the gain was 10,998.15, which corresponds exactly to a 2.8 multiplier.
![[image: i.imgur.com]](https://i.imgur.com/Ocrg997.jpeg){kind=link}
![[image: i.imgur.com]](https://i.imgur.com/i15rWM7.gif){kind=link}