famous3u: disable team management

[trollfactory]

Hello all,

i'm actually playing the game famous3u.
The conditions are last man standing and no communication.

There're strong indications that the players Jayden and Ulprus are playing as team and coordinate their orders to a high degree.
This is, for my understanding, in a game with last man standing and no communication simply against the rules.
Personally i call this cheating.

I therefore suggest for games with the option no communication to completely disable the team management module.
Even if two players know each other and want to play together against the rules to their advantage,
it is not supported this way.

Rainer

[trollfactory]

I see.. such a topic is of no interest really...

Rainer

[drwr]

Oops, I'm sorry--I didn't mean to ignore your post. In fact, in my mind, I thought I'd already replied, and then I forgot to check back. My apologies.

Still, I'm not sure that disabling the team management would do much to reduce cheating--the cheating part is the planning strategy together. You can still do that even if you have to explicitly disable auto-ambush at all of the worlds your friends will be passing through. Making it a little more inconvenient to work together as a team isn't going to have much effect on this kind of cheating, because frankly, it's already pretty darn inconvenient. (The game server automatically changes all the world and fleet numbers, and the other player names, for each player, so you have to work pretty hard to coordinate strategy through this obfuscation.)

On the other hand, cooperation itself is not actually against the rules in a no-communication game--in fact, I would say that such a thing is encouraged. To do this within the rules, you only need to express interest in working together, which you can do any number of ways: for instance, by giving a valuable world as an unsolicited gift, or by withdrawing a fleet instead of attacking, or by dropping useful metal on a neighbor's world, or some such non-verbal overture. With this kind of action, you can forge useful alliances with your neighbors even if you can't work out precise details of strategy together; and with that kind of a relationship, the automatic team-management tools are absolutely essential.

So, I think disabling the team-management features in the non-communication games would probably do more harm than good.

David

[trollfactory]

Hi David,

thanks for your reply!

I think you're right here: For my taste, both players here (johnboy/Dirk and Matthias Boedler)
are fully aware of the game conditions and played against it.
As said, i call this cheating and would set them on my personal black list,
if it is not simply the same person.

Is it possible to see which players already signed up for a new game?
After such negative experiences, i simply could avoid games where i see the players they simply spoil the fun of a game.
Perhaps they should play single games with themselves so they're sure they will win the game under all circumstances.

Rainer

[drwr]

In the past, I have avoided making it evident who has signed up for a game, so that you could have the fun of playing anonymously if you wanted to. But I see that there is some value in listing the players in a game as well.

I will make this a game option: whether to list the players signed up, or not. Maybe I will combine it with the anonymous-finish option.

David