Good evening, dear readers!
 
Recently administration made a Hail Mary attempt at reviving the pretty much useless weapon and tank markets and companies. The change, although (I hope) had good intentions behind it, in reality harms the game much more than gives benefits to it. I`m talking, of course, about the infamous change in the 10 day challenge(XII Challenge) format.
 
What started out as a nice motivator for players to be more active, now is trying to fix things that it does not have any business fixing. The switch from simple damage or hit requirements to certain amount of hits with a certain weapon has turned this event from player activity booster to pay to participate event.
 
To get to 20% you need to make 200 or 400 hits, depending of what is the target set for the event. Right now, even the price of Q1 weapons hovers around 45G per 1000 units, so to reach that milestone, you have to pay around 10-20G. And that is the price of Q1 weapon, the most useless form of weapon there is in this game, Q5 tanks cost much more.
 
The 20% milestone was selected for this example, because reaching that target gives you the right to vote in elections. You now have to pay for your rights to vote.
 
It also gives additional side effects, that, even though are hard to prove or quantify without proper data, are definitely present in this game. Making players fight in certain type of battle(land or naval) with certain types of weapons does tamper with the battle outcomes. I`m sure we all have caught ourselves fighting in battle we have no business or interest in fighting just to deal some irrelevant hits for the XII Challenge, and asking players to fight under or over their financial and damage capabilities are simply irrational and irresponsible.
 
We now have an event that benefits few wholesalers, but harms everyone else. We no longer have a free market economy, the markets are crippled, because administration forces all of the players to use certain type of weapons. Yes, the prices have increased, but there is no freaking way in that a Q1 weapon with 1.2x damage coefficient is as valuable as Q5 helicopter, which gives you 4x damage.
 
And worst of all, the only benefit – the increased price of certain weapons for 10 days – will be gone by the first company promo. I`m not retarded enough to buy 1000 Q1 weapons for 45G when I can build 5 Q1 weapon companies for 50G and get the same amount of weapons in 10 days.
 
Forcing players to buy weapons for finishing a challenge is not the solution.
 
The solution is making those weapons and tanks worth something. The obvious choice for that would be altering Missle production. First of all, having a certain damage number for missle is irrational in a game where strength and rank constantly grows, each day your missles becomes more and more useless and irrelevant. If you would give those missles really good damage multipliers(Q1 10x; Q2 15x; Q3 x20; Q4 x25; Q5 x30), but increased the requirements to build those things(and they could be built only with weapons/tanks), then players would have interest in buying those things. Before you say “bat x30 is nutzzz, dats too mach damages”, remember that x30 damage is 30 hits condensed in one hit, basically it is 300 energy condensed in 10 energy. Building Life Kits requires no energy, and you can turn no energy into up to 1400 energy. I have played around a few ideas how to make lower weapons worth something, but for sake of the length of this article I will not talk about them.
 
But the main problem for the economy modules in games like these is that you can not make a proper market economy simulation, because with only few company types, pretty much unlimited energy to work in them, and everyone being able to make everything, what you get is subsistence economy, where everyone produces everything for himself. Logic dictates decisions the player makes, and being self sustainable by producing everything by yourself is by far the most logical decision one can make. Excess can be sold only if there is demand – either if there is constant increase in active players, if administration frequently introduces ways in which those weapons can be spent(that has as high or higher value than fighting with top weapons in this game), or if self sustainability in all areas is not an option.
 
As for XII Challenge, personally I think that variety within this event would be much better than variations of this event. The target points for this event should be from 2000(usual hit target) to 2400(max hits possible with food fights in 10 days without houses). The amount of points you make per one hit varies by what weapon you use. For example, helicopters and warships could give 1 point per hit, tanks could give 2 points per hit, and fighting bare handed or with weapons could give you 3 points per hit. No one is forced to go over his budget for a dumb event, no one has to fight beyond his abilities, no tampering with battles, and there are incentives to use lower quality weapons.
 
Let me know what you think!
 
Best regards,
Skazideli