[2021] Discussion: Competitive vs. Collaborative

Originally posted by Cavias

His experience is just the game working.

He wants to create an economic cartel that wields disproportional market power but then views the democratic will of the rest of the server to discourage that sort of economic activity as an abuse of power.

He says that he always plays that way, which means he has never experienced the other side of that 'competitive,' 'just a few friends playing together' scenario. I suspect if he tried playing differently then he would become more sympathetic to the laws that try to keep that behaviour in check.

In the end, learning about those shortcomings of economic systems is the educational side of the game (perhaps it might illuminate why we have laws against cartels/oligopolies). If you stick to just trying one thing over and over again, you are missing the real value of this game, in my opinion. Try different things on each play through and be open to the question of 'am I the asshole' as you are playing those different styles.

Originally posted by Cavias

I was an admin on the official servers for a while, and one of the things we implemented on the white tiger server (after doing it several times on a non-official server) was to massively increase the resource costs for the computer lab which is required to destroy the meteor.

I think it worked well, because in the base game a solo player can destroy the meteor themselves with a bit of effort, and a group of friends can do it easily. We set the resource requirements at a level that would require input from all players across all professions as a sort of 'global effort.' I think it worked both thematically, and as a way to discourage those isolated groups.

I actually think the multiple governments concept was borne out of these 'friendship groups' too. Will be interesting to see how that plays out.