Krilcov's predicament got me thinking. What if you could balance cabals not only by their total numbers, but also by time of day?

Depending on how it's done, this might place too much information in the hands of a mortal leader, but the idea would to empower the inductors with the ability to see how a prospective member's time-of-day "trends" mesh with the overall trends for his cabal.

I'll use the Hunsobo/Waserax/Ktaar days as an example. Suppose Empire has a decent number of members who consistently play the same hours. In this case, late evenings. Let's suppose that, generally speaking, Empire presence is "light" during the early mornings (relative to the other cabals). When you're considering whether to induct someone, maybe you get a command "comparetime" that gives you output like:

Wannabe's presence in Thera would bolster our power when we most need it.

(if the guy consistently plays when Empire is weak)

Wannabe's presence in Thera would bolster our power when we need it least.

(if the guy consistently plays when Empire is strong)

Wannabe's presence in Thera bolsters our power evenly during times of weakness and strength.

(if the guy consistently plays when the Empire is "average" compared to other cabals, or if his playtimes are all over the map, falling in both times of strength and weakness)

Basically, when considering whether to induct someone, a leader could be much more "picky" for a guy whose playtimes fall when the cabal is already strong, and maybe less picky for folks whose playtimes fall outside that period.

Useful, or too much work?

This is tough.

There's been a pendulum effect as long as I've played. I think it can probably be broken into three primary phases. I'll use Empire/Fort as an example throughout.

There's a low-frequency pendulum (Empire is in power now, so people roll up Fortressites. Two months from now, Fortress is in power, and people roll up Imperials).

There's a high frequency pendulum (Empire is in power from 10am to 4pm. Fortress starts logging on and plays 6pm to 10pm.)

There's a third, more irregular pendulum too (I'm playing my Fortress noob, but when I see the Emperor log on, I log off and log onto my Imperial. My other Fort buddies don't want to fight alone, so they log off and go do something else.)

Ultimately, your solution assumes that a leader cares about the fun stick for opposing cabals. If the leader cares, then yes, extra induction information would be very helpful. If the leader doesn't care about cabal balance, then why would they care? Worse, couldn't they use the same information to make the cabal even MORE powerful at the power times?

But how do you fix that? The Imms would have to police cabal leaders and provide feedback in a more substantial form than "Tres lame" on a pbf. They'd have to watch the cabals in power and...and what? I'm at a loss here. How does Enlilth have heart-to-heart with the Emperor to tell him to maybe be nicer to the poor Forties? Why would Shokai pull aside the Marshall and tell him to maybe not kill so many evils after 7pm? Imms play hands-off the cabals, mostly, to let the players direct the game - and that's a good thing.

Where am I going with this? The problem, as I see it, isn't so much the pendulum swing. It's what the cabals do with the pendulum swing when it happens. If you're the type who would multikill, full sac, and vulture loot at level 11, you're probably the type who would use the pendulum swing to get together with three or four of your favorite buds and hunt down the lone PK in your range; and then do it again when they unghost. And again. On the other hand, if you're the type who wants to make sure that even the opposing cabals have fun, then you'd probably take their item, defend the counter, and then go exploring or eq gathering or something instead.

So I guess my point is that the pendulum has always been here, and will probably always be around. More information for leaders won't help if the leaders don't care about balance to begin with. Imms don't police cabal leaders or other players for good sportsmanship. Should they? Yeah, cause they're not busy enough as it is. I'm back to square one, then.

Now, what an Imm could do, if they see an obvious imbalance at some particular time, is run some sort of short term NPC questy thing. If Empire is in power, bring some opposing empire from across the sea in for an invasion/occupation. If Fort is in power and has nothing to do, bring a demon to start laying waste to innocents. This is an indirect way to readjust the focus of a pendulum swing, while maintaining an interesting plot for the players to enjoy.

But, it's all theory and stuff. Full of assumptions and whatnot. Presented in a rambling stream-of-conciousness sort of way.

>Useful, or too much work?

Way to much work, especially since we have no good way to track this (sure it's in the logs, but nothing in the player file). And we haven't even begun talking about the trending to find the times.

On the bright side you probably wouldn't have to do it from the CF application. You could have a cron job or background service that checksum's or stores entries every time a file's modified stamp changes. Trending out the times would be a simple matter of clustering those. Basically set up a MySql database and just dump a new entry every time the timestamp changes on the file. Then round them to the nearest hour and if you get a cluster greater than X % and Y quantity (to rule out new characters) dump into a summary table. Rerun that job once a week. I'm assuming that the pfiles don't get modified until the player starts playing though or at least, if it was something like an imm dropping comments, it'd be too rare to have an impact.

That's not to say I agree with the idea, just my thoughts on how to do it without putting all that processing demand onto the server app.

That sounds like even more work than what I had in mind.

We already have the "users" command that shows a nice pretty graph. I was thinking you could do one of those for each cabal, then do some statistical analysis to identify the "strong" and "weak" periods.

For individual players, yeah, you'd have to examine some record of their login/logout times. That might have to run as a separate task. But I'm thinking a DB is overkill.

I'm talking about for individual players. I mean, you don't need to use a DB but I believe they already have one on there so may as well take advantage of it. At least, I would, because that way you let it handle the processing without needing to implement that yourself.

Create a cabal with self-reliance as it's core philosophy. With no single written purpose their powers destroy groups/cabals but do nothing against individuals.

- Open to anyone.
- No rules. You may kill cabalmates.
- Effectiveness of cabal powers are decided by a character's Gank-o-Meter and not having too buff a set of EQ. A/B/S whoring nukes cabal powers.

Powers
- Supped up anti-ganging defense.
- Auto-ability to cutoff enemy from their cabal item.
- Have an ability to sense where groups with a high Gank-o-Meter are.

Cabal would be wide open RP-wise. Maybe an alternative to Nexus.

Just an idea.

valguarnera@carrionfields.com

You could just let balance forces play themselves out. Right now, there's signicant benefit to selective timing. This is because having a good set outweighs any marginal chance you have for getting rewarded for being ballsy. If you upped the rewards for being an underdog, to the point where it outweighs holding onto your set, the problem would go away.

I tend to think high end, highly limited sets make too much of a difference. I'm more in favor of guildwars style gameplay where equipment has a smaller impact contrasted with tactical choices. "I have X gear versus your Y gear therefore I win" simply encourages hording, prep-whorery, etc. I'd like to see people more interested in improving their gameplay by becoming better PK'ers than by learning how to avoid risk and more effectively transfer information to their AIM clique.

It's not all gear though. Just thinking about current scary characters, two of them certainly owe a lot of their effectiveness to gear. One is a paladin, one is a non-dexy warrior. However, there's also a dexy-warrior who gets a lot of mileage out of his legacy choices and cabal powers, and a non-warrior who also greatly benefits from his choice of class + cabal powers. Neither of these two have what I'd call "crazy" gear. Though, one of them at least makes heavy, heavy use of preps.

To address your larger argument, though, about creating incentives for people to be ballsy...I'm not sure that would do it. That would certainly benefit the one guy whose play times coincide with his enemies' "strong" times, but I'm not sure it would necessarily create balance. With what I proposed, when a cabal is "crowded" during a particular time slot, that cabal's leader can simply stop inducting people who play primarily in that time slot. That forces them to pursue other character angles that put them in a different cabal. One that is possibly in opposition to the cabal that usually "owns" that time slot.