Primary draw of ANs is for happy jumping with the 10* special
Maintaining a 10* AN requires high work stat employees (in the 10s of thousands) along with EE merits
High work stat employees usually are past the benefits of happy jumping
Suggestion
Adjust specials so that the primary draw of an AN doesn't require the AN to maintain 10* by dropping Party Supplies entirely, shifting the remaining specials down a level, and adding a new 10* special called Euphoric (increase base happiness).
Pack of Trojans, as far as I'm aware, has no use right now, and a very steep point cost. Other than for novelty, I don't see why anyone would use points to acquire this. As such, Party Supplies just seems like space filler.
Instead I propose adding a new 10* special that I believe does something no other companies currently do, and that is increase base happiness. Not sure what would be a reasonable amount, maybe something like 500 happiness.
It reinforces the benefit of ANs being about happiness based training, with the primary benefit being happy jumping, but an extra perk for those who are also at 10*.
TL;DR
Remove Party Supplies special
Shift remaining specials down 1 level (Indecent now 7*)
New 10* passive special called Euphoric that increases base happiness
Lost a star from a missed shipment, should regain it this Sunday.
Looking for a total 15-20k+ combined END and MAN
OR
25-30k+ END and INT
I sell trains for 150k~ per train, in blocks of a week at a time (3 eDvDs). These are signed up for scheduled. I also tax 1 eDvD per month (this may change).
There's a blog post post from one of the civ 3 game designers that talks about the tendency of gamers to optimize the fun out of the games they play.
One line from the quote at the top in particular sums it up nicely:
"Those of us who want games to be fun are fighting a losing battle against the human brain because fun is a process and routine is its destination." - Raph Koster
Kinda feels like life in general has gotten a bit over optimized, tbh.
Not sure how you're trying to implement this but if you consume your event log you can process purchases and sales in order as they happen and just assume older purchases correspond to older sales. Track your purchases over time, and as you come across sales calculate the ROI (you'll know purchase and sale date too) and remove from the tracked purchases (FIFO as mentioned above).
Look into data synchronization and watermarking, Wikipedia article, for how you can handle consuming the event log over time.
One idea for the mitigation mechanic, if it's kept, is to increase the number of tickets rewarded per successful hit during that period.
Maybe enough that it would yield, on average, more tickets. The risk vs reward is that you may get less hits in per attack or sent to the hospital before you get your full 25 attempts to balance it out.
Would provide an incentive on that final push and reward the people trying?
I've wondered if the reason it feels like it's rigged is because the dealer isn't actually drawing cards, but instead, once you've decided to hold, it's determining if you won based on your odds of winning any game at all (based on the slight player advantage).
It's more scalable than keeping track of drawn hands for every user playing.
I assumed it was the same with Slots in that the stops you end on are meaningless because the outcome was determined via random number generation on the server based on the probabilities of each outcome occurring (i.e. they're not determine the outcome of each stop for each reel individually).
I'm saying that trying to make the system more fair/balanced is likely not possible, assuming both sides are playing perfectly. There's just not enough depth for any strategy to exist that doesn't come down to a timing advantage.
This isn't really the core of my argument. Even if I'd said that if hypothetically it provided a perfect defense, my point was that the mechanic just seems to be impossible to balance in the first place.
If we assume that there was absolutely no defense for buy mugging, it would still be mainly a timing game, just one that's entirely in the control of the buy mugger. The mugger gets to determine when to strike.
All of the defenses we have to this right now are also time based. With sellers self-hospitalizing, they're just putting themselves in greater control of when they expose themselves to risk by making them immune to attack while they're inactive. They can med out when they're ready, and quickly deposit their cash.
IM2.0 basically gave buy muggers a tool to automate monitoring sellers in near real time, again, giving them a time advantage by providing them with more accurate information on who to target and when, removing the need to manually monitor individuals.
You have one knob to tune this (as far as I can tell): how quick a mugger can mug you after a sale/how much time a seller has to secure their cash. The line between one side or the other getting a huge advantage seems to be small.
So I'm not saying that IM2.0 giving muggers an advantage isn't a problem (looks to be a potentially huge one), but plugging that hole is just going to swing the pendulum back towards giving sellers an easy way to avoid being mugged.
Personally, I think the mechanic is just fundamentally flawed as it is, and no amount of delays, access to recent information, etc, is going to fix it.
The fact people have to self-hospitalize and ghost trade is a hack/workaround. As a seller, doing that effectively negates buy mugging entirely. Aside from forgetfulness, it's a perfect defense against it. There's no strategy around it other than to remember to do those two tedious things and you don't have to worry. This isn't exactly compelling game play.
There's a bit more strategy with buy mugging, but scripting is basically destroying that through automation. Since success is going to be based on speed and accuracy of information, the only way to compete is going to be to use them, too. There doesn't seem to be a good answer to this that isn't going to be complex to implement, such as tracking/correlating API use with web socket streaming and mugging, make it easier to avoid buy mugging entirely, or negatively impact the UX of the item market for the vast majority of players opting out of this style of play.
I'm NOT against the idea of a mugging as a feature, but I don't see how it's current implementation can ever be balanced in a way that doesn't give one side or the other all or most of the cards. Sellers don't know when their items will sell. They have no recourse other than the above hack or selling to traders who are just going to use the above hack. It's easier for muggers to just monitor sellers, or even actively buy the items themselves, giving them control over the timing, but are completely locked out of that option, also with the above hack. It's basically a game of tic tac toe, where if both players know how to play, no one can win.
I don't really think there's any way to balance mugging. It either becomes too easy for muggers to farm sellers or too easy for sellers to avoid being mugged.
I see people mentioning that you should be self-hospitalizing and ghost trading if you don't want to be mugged. Hypothetically, if everyone did that, mugging would basically be dead outside of less predictable or less lucrative options.
It's also terrible game play. It's all tediousness and workarounds. Muggers rely on scripts trying to time attacks as accurately and as quickly as possible, and sellers going through stupid hoops just to avoid it.
The feature is like a person on their death bed: crying in agony for everyone to let them go, but we keep fiddling with their medication to keep 'em around just a little a bit longer because we're too attached to let them go. We think we can save them, but we can't.
Personally, I think if we want a way of stealing resources from each other, it should be at the faction level. Every territory could provide a source of income based on a dividend of the wealth of the territory, i.e. protection rackets of the businesses in that territory. Factions could raid each other's territories to steal a percentage of that territory's wealth all at once, lowering the income for the owner, or take it outright to get the income for themselves (think strategy games when you take a city). It would liven up the map, and introduce more reasons to PvP. Might even make certain sectors more valuable over time, instead of the island being the best. Perhaps factions could even invest in their territories, improving their ability to defend them, increase profits, boost OC chances, manufacture items, etc.
Perhaps, but wouldn't that might make ANs too good? With the current price of EDVDs a 10* AN employee can already make around 2m a day in income. Although I could see your suggestion lowering the price if it floods the market, so maybe it just balances out.
I figured the benefit of a 9-10* would be a decent source of income for higher stat players, while a 7-8* would at least be able to facilitate happy jumping for younger players.
At least for me, the most important change is to correct what I think is an imbalance in how ANs work today. I'd like to be able to hire lower stat employees, help them build up both their work stats and battles stats, and it not be the end of the world if I lose 10*. I felt like this was achievable 3-4 years ago, but hasn't been since the market became overly competitive. The company effectiveness update may have also played a role in that.
Not sure if this has been mentioned with a more specific example, but with regards to OPs mention of filtering, as a reviver it would be nice to be able to filter a factions member list by activity, status, and also if they have reviving enabled.
I'm sure other attributes to filter on would be useful for others. I'm on mobile most of the time now using the Android app so scripts aren't an option.
I could see it maybe driving prices up a bit, but also those people who would be selling their EDVDs (or banking them in anticipation of happy jumping) will now be consuming them instead.
I think it would also put pressure on EDVD taxes, as it would be harder to justify taxing players to maintain a higher ad budget for the happy jump benefit when it can be used at a lower star level, and I'm not sure a 500 base happiness bonus is enough to justify the hyper competitiveness.
ANs are kind of in this weird spot where they are good for a range of players, but the players who arguably benefit the most from the 10* special are often the players that make it difficult to maintain a 10* AN because their stats are too low. Feels a bit backwards, to me.