Pluvius Posted:

It’s not the lack of communication that’s important in this case, it’s the deceit and the issue of payout.

Say that you have a bracket with only four characters which are owned by four different players, and the characters are all in the same Klan. Since there are four characters, at least one of them is not going to get any medals.

Let’s say first of all that despite the fact that they’re technically helping their competitors in addition to themselves, the four go ahead and raid together as usual. They all get hundreds of scoops, and they’re all still competitive with each other at the end of the week. The big expected battle for scoops breaks out and the winners get the spoils, as usual.

Now let’s say that they all agree not to raid. They don’t get as many scoops, but they still compete with each other based on other scoop-grabbing methods, and have the same battle at the end of the week. The situation is fundamentally the same whether or not they raid; despite the fact that some players are better at solo play than raiding and vice versa, it makes essentially no difference in the general case.

Now let’s say that something far more likely happens—they all agree not to raid but one player breaks the agreement. He gets hundreds of scoops and easily wins the round, and the other players don’t get ****. He might get kicked out of the Klan, but so what? There are other Klans out there, some of which don’t know what he did and others that surely realize (possibly through hard experience) that agreements not to raid are a fool’s bargain.

In conclusion, collusion only works when the benefits of colluding are greater than the benefits of not colluding, and the penalties for breaking collusion are sufficiently great to discourage it. In this case of colluding against raiding, neither of these things is true. In fact, in a real Domination bracket agreeing not to raid would actually be worse because the other people in the bracket could more easily beat the people who aren’t raiding.

Completely agreed. It’s a simple matter of Nash equilibrium. All of the raiders benefit from their cooperation with each other, which puts them ahead of their competition. Instead of competing with 8 people, they’re competing with 4.