Panagrammic
Booty Grab Gold Curve
Long dev notice. TL;DR: Booty Grab gold grants are changing.
Old Method
Previously, as both an anti-bot and gold scaling measure, we would keep a count of a) the number of games you played, and b) the number of games from your IP. As you played more and more games, we would start biasing your player count up and up, and if you exceeded the number of players in a game, we wouldn't allow you in, even if the tank wasn't full.
As an example:
This had a number of disadvantages:
New Method
Here's the new method:
Why did we pick 150k as the upper bound? It's the top 1% of users. Ostensibly this will lead to a 2% reduction in the number of plays, but it's hard to predict the actual impact because a) the top 1% played a larger proportion of full tanks (i.e., presumably the slot would have been filled by someone else), and b) the top 1% tended to bump much less frequently than lower earners.
We're a little worried about removing the IP limits, but we'll have to keep an eye on it. Please note that using multiple mules in an attempt to work around the 150k daily limit is going to flag you as a bot.
Gold Balancing
We've also slightly reduced the player bonus, since tanks are now easier to get into. We'll be doing further adjustments over the next few weeks to try and get BG and zOMG into approximate parity, both on a gold-per-hour and maximum-per-day basis. Some of the gold that is being diverted from BG will be redirected into other flash game grants. (Although we're still discussing internally, other possible ideas we're considering are a) ramping up CAPTCHA levels as people play more games, or b) requiring a bump every nn tanks, or c) requiring low-level tanks to be played every nn tanks, as well as some others.)
Long dev notice. TL;DR: Booty Grab gold grants are changing.
Old Method
Previously, as both an anti-bot and gold scaling measure, we would keep a count of a) the number of games you played, and b) the number of games from your IP. As you played more and more games, we would start biasing your player count up and up, and if you exceeded the number of players in a game, we wouldn't allow you in, even if the tank wasn't full.
As an example:
- Your first game of the day? You can be the 1st player or the 34th -- you're still in the game.
100th game of the day? You have a +20 bias. If you try to come in as t
he 20th player, you're not allowed into the game (since 20 + 20 = 40, which is greater than the number of players allowed into the tank)
This had a number of disadvantages:
- emphasis on number of games meant that users would go only for the high-tier tanks
it was an invisible bias, so the user had no idea when they were getting scaled
penalized people on the same IP (usually families)
New Method
Here's the new method:
- No penalty until you hit a certain gold amount (currently 150k)
Afterwards, you are prevented from playing anything except low-tier tanks
Low-tier tanks never count against your daily limits
Messages in the tank window that tell you exactly what is happening
Why did we pick 150k as the upper bound? It's the top 1% of users. Ostensibly this will lead to a 2% reduction in the number of plays, but it's hard to predict the actual impact because a) the top 1% played a larger proportion of full tanks (i.e., presumably the slot would have been filled by someone else), and b) the top 1% tended to bump much less frequently than lower earners.
We're a little worried about removing the IP limits, but we'll have to keep an eye on it. Please note that using multiple mules in an attempt to work around the 150k daily limit is going to flag you as a bot.
Gold Balancing
We've also slightly reduced the player bonus, since tanks are now easier to get into. We'll be doing further adjustments over the next few weeks to try and get BG and zOMG into approximate parity, both on a gold-per-hour and maximum-per-day basis. Some of the gold that is being diverted from BG will be redirected into other flash game grants. (Although we're still discussing internally, other possible ideas we're considering are a) ramping up CAPTCHA levels as people play more games, or b) requiring a bump every nn tanks, or c) requiring low-level tanks to be played every nn tanks, as well as some others.)
Is it me, or do they sound like a buncha dictators?
