WarEagle

Join Date 03/2006

My "problems" on Metaverse

Some reasons why I don't like it

Hi, only some lines on the Metaverse and why I don't like it the way it works at the moment.

Started games don't count
When you create a Metaversegame you can restart it as often as you like, you can play the position you find ideal for your game, so huge bonuses, near planets and so on. If you don't like the postition, you can use ctrl-n to recreate everything.
Now why is this bad? Because for me it's some kind of cheating, the games are run at optimal conditions, you have advantages about the AI and so on. Put the number of created games into the list, it hasn't to be calculated within the score, but list it, so others can see how the games where run. I would like something like "minus 100*(NumberGamesCreatedSinceLastTransmit-3)" so you can restart three times before it gives you a malus.

Losts count too much
Noboy uploads lost games, why not? Because they would ruin the total score. Together with the uncounted restart ability (see above) everyone is mostly a winner.
Take the lost games out of calculation, list them but don't take them for caluclation of the total score. Users would upload the lost games more than at the moment, shure there will always be users thinking "hey, I'm the best, the greates, anyone should see I could have lost a game!", but there would be more users than at the moment.

Store password
After every gamerestart you have to enter the password again.
Please add a button "store password" which stores the encryptedpassword in the prefs.ini so you don't have to type it in everytime.

Userhighscoreposition
Ok, stupid topic, but I didn't know what to write. The problem is, it's hard to find out how may points you need to get some places.
Please add something like "show my position" and then list the user with 10 highscoreplaces before and after him, something like this:
Position Score Username
990 10 Smith A
991 9 Smith B
992 8 Smith C
993 7 OwnUser
994 6 Smith D
995 5 Smith E
996 4 Smith f

Show the settings
Sometimes it would be nice to see how the users got such scores.
Please put in the custom settings of the game, planets, techspeed, anomalies and such.

That's all for now

WarEagle

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I just want to know how high scores are calculated.

I've had identical games (as in, setup) end up with totally different scores and have no idea why.

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Losts count too much
Noboy uploads lost games, why not? Because they would ruin the total score. Together with the uncounted restart ability (see above) everyone is mostly a winner.
Take the lost games out of calculation, list them but don't take them for caluclation of the total score. Users would upload the lost games more than at the moment, shure there will always be users thinking "hey, I'm the best, the greates, anyone should see I could have lost a game!", but there would be more users than at the moment.

I second that and maybe another score could be calculated, giving an overview of the lost games scores. That way, one could become "Best looser ever" and such ...

However, lost games counting into the total score prevents keeping players (including me) from posting them, although I like to finish even games I'm going to loose, because the end fight sometimes means a lot of fun.

Edit: Maybe the average score of ones lost games could add to the total score. It won't be much, but a few hundred points are better than nothing and that way, it would make even more sense to post your losses.

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I second all suggestions except the first one about restarted games. That's something we simply have to cope with, I think, Crtl-N is a game feature for good reasons (even though I'm not using it much personally).

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I totally agree about the Losing games. I upload a handful and a feel like a dork since no one else does. The way I do it is that if I lose and I was really into the game (working hard, trying to win), I'll upload it. If I'm just playing casually while watching TV, I consider it no big deal and don't upload.

I think we would get a much better picture of how people play if everything were uploaded. Heck, maybe even the current game you are playing gets uploaded too (Year 2, current score=xxx).

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get rid of saving to your pc and most of this becomes mute. If when you logon you save to metaverse (1 file per person) then when you start a game and leave you come back and cannot start another until you finish the last. This way all scores count. As to control n I never use it. Bad start, too bad. Personal option if you want to use it. As to the settings I think you should be able to pick what type of galaxy you want. I do agree it would be nice to have the settings available to view but I would rather you the server space for a save game feature to make all games count.

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doesn't matter if you record the ctrl N if i got a bad position its MY GAME and i'll do what i want with it. If the Ctrl N thing counted i would just quit and start again. After for me the metaverse isn't about can i beat the crap out of someone else. Its about tracking how well i am doing and comparing that to my friends. Honestly not everything in life has to be some gigantic competition.

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Honestly not everything in life has to be some gigantic competition.

Unfortunately there are a vast number of people to whom everything in life is.

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That is the point! If you can restart a game and load it when you run into trouble how can you compare anyone. Everyone should be able to win at any difficulty. It may take longer and more reloads but the end result is you will win. The metaverse is to allow us to have a comparison between different players. How can you have a comparison when everyone can get whatever result they want. This is why I really want them to consider the saving on the metaverse. When you start a game it generates an autosave that is sent to the metaverse. During the game it sends the autosave to the metaverse. The idea here is that if there is a crash they have a fairly recent save. When you want to quit you logoff and in the code it makes and sends an autosave to them. When you login after leaving a game it goes back to your autosave and will not let you restart or go back to start another game. IF this can not be done then I do not see the metaverse providing any comparison. That is too bad as I like the idea of the metaverse.

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I lost interest in playing galciv1 due to the screwed up way they are doing the scoring. With Galciv2 its far worse IMHO you have so much more to do with the sequel taking a lot more time to play the game. If you play small maps no biggie but the huge and gigantic how I play takes around 1 week to complete and I end up with around 12-20,000 for my efforts. I play on normal and I hear its not much better then any higher levels.

Why would I want to play for the metaverse with how it is now? Simple I don't want to play and I shall stop playing after my next game as Stardock for some odd reason does not understand. Its being called a riot will start, like it has to be done and oh well. I say listen to the fans and fix the damn thing before the interest level falls off totally.

Also while I am at it the deal with the expansion, simply make the damn thing and publish it like normal and I it will sell like hot cakes. If the metaverse is not working like we want then multiplayer will be the only chance for the game IMHO other wise no Mods or expansions will do a thing to increase the players.

Make the metaverse reward the player as they should be. Those who want fast games on small maps completing hardly anything reward them less. Those like myself that play as empire builders should be awarded for the things they accomplish not get the low scores being given now. Max scoring should be around 250,000 IMO.

The ctrl-N feature I feel is a good idea and should stay its not a cheat its a way to start a new game. I do feel there should be something to entice players to submit loosing games along with winning ones. Fix the metaverse and watch the new players come in. Leave it as is and word of mouth with slowly kill this game off making the community as a whole loose interest.

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I like the idea about forcing the post of all Metaverse games. How about this:

There is a "current game" listing and score that is added when you LOAD a save game?
That would still allow you to load a previous game w/o a "cheater" flag to correct a serious mistake.
But then you couldn't start a new game until you either Retire, Win or Lose.
(This might even work with multiple saved games.)

This forces all Metaverse games to be counted into the score.
I agree that there then should be some system to mitigate the damage caused by "losing" games.
Maybe a small add (score/1000 or cube root) instead of putting them into the average of "winning" games.

Finally, I think that a "losing" game, hard fought, should be worth more than winning a cakewalk.
No ideas on the calculation of that, though, except maybe an "area under the curve" sort of scoring.
How long times what odds maybe in a military defeat?

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I like the idea of any Metaverse game you start is saved on the Stardock systems and thus 'has' to be reported, win or lose.

Don't really care about the CRTL-N, say as long as you use it in the first year of game play. That should give you plenty of time to decide if you want to stick through the game.

There should be bonuses for playing harder levels, etc. But I guess part of this is somewhere along the line, the whole Metaverse scoring system should mean something. Like the top 25 players having their names added to the game as a 'person of reknown' or something like that.

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Man! The stardock server are already struggling just with the submission of games and you want everyone to save our games on it too? It recalculate our metaverse score every 5-6 games! Why not everygame? Are the servers so hardware limited that they cannot do this?

Seems like they need a database master over there because i don't understand how slow they are even with all the people active in the metaverse. We are not uploading scores every minute at 500 000 scores by minute, so how can it be so slow?

My guess is they didn't design the metaverse very well and they do not have people with good database/web skills. I personnally work for a company where we use 2-3 databases (postgres) linked together and we receive data 24/7 every second. The amount is on the order of 1-2 MBytes by second total. Our frontend application is web based too. And we don't have any database experts, but we learn a lot as we tune it to be faster. It is a lot faster today than it was 2 years ago so it takes time to become good at such a task. Database are pretty complicated stuff when you digg into the performance improvements.

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