I think that most people in the end-game have figured out that ET has made a few mistakes in how he’s been handling the game balance. He’s turned the defense-heavy troll into an unstoppable brute, beefed up the emokid to the point where it can almost pwn the Geronimo boss thread, and hamstrung the camwhore. Rather than trying to set things up to become more and more balanced as new high-level community forums come out (Remember Ep1 Faux News runs?), he’s living entirely in the now.

Clearly, he needs to be shown the error of his ways.

What I ask will result in you losing out on lemon scoops and vanilla scoops, so if you’re big on domination then you probably don’t want to participate.

Here’s how it works: ET has a script running that aggregates damage information from the player base and distills it into an easy to read form. Telling us how the system works lets us game it to our own advantage. Specifically, since it doesn’t track anything like damage taken, health, or stats, we can very easily change the data it collects.

What we need is for as many people as possible to pay Haxl a visit and get rid of our offense stats, then unequip our offense-boosting equipment. You can put the points in anything you want – defense and upkeep are good choices. After that, just pwn forums as you normally would. If you want to go the extra mile (Probably because you’re bored) then try to do it with only Bash and Drool.

This will result in his damage averages tanking like the fist of north star, and him scrambling to boost clbumes. (Or realizing that his testing method sucks, which is also fine.)

Why it works: It samples 1 in 10 attacks, and averages it into the total. Since lower damage attacks take proportionately more hits to take down a forum, there are more of them to sample. An attack that does 2k damage has the same weight as an attack that does 200 damage, but it takes 10x more 200 damage attacks to get the same total damage. The average damage of one 2,000 damage attack and ten 200 damage attacks is 364 damage. If you go the bash/drool route then that would mean one 2,000 damage attack versus a hundred 20 damage attacks, for an average of 40 damage per hit.

It’s not hard to see why even a few people doing this could drag an entire clbum’s average damage down significantly.

Sadly, the script DOES break things down by level. As a result, this would work much better if players from all clbumes from across the entire 25-35 level range got involved so that we could smooth the damage curve out instead of just having a sharp drop at 35.

I’ve already sent ET a tubmail forewarning that I was going to be messing with his data collection.

“Why do this?”, you ask? Well, because players have been tweaking themselves so that they’re the most capable at taking down forums. By putting everything into offense, players have been able to one-shot most threads. Since they’re one-shotting threads, that means they take no damage and make every stat besides luck and charisma pointless. With the recent adjustments to luck and charisma, a random smattering of .moar files is enough to hit the effective luck and charisma caps.

TL;DR: Offense is the only stat that matters, so that’s the only stat people put points into.

With so many people dumping everything into Offense, it’s completely expected that everybody’s damage has taken five steps past “insane” and into “absurd”. However, since all ET is looking at is the raw damage it’s only to be expected that he intervene to bring things back into parity between the clbumes. As stronger forums come out each clbum’s specialties are going to become more important, and people will pull points out of offense so they aren’t getting one-shotted by forums with 5k pwnage and a base attack strength of 200.

TL;DR: ****’s ****ed. Go to Haxl. Keep Offense low. Use weak attacks. **** gets fixed.

Any takers?