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[Happy]

Thought everyone here should be aware of this new development.
This has been a very HOT topic in the official forums. Should you care to read ALOT more about it enjoy the 50+ page thread linked here. http://forum.smallworlds.com/showthread.php?t=54612   I chimed in around page 30.  SW posted the response in the quote below on page 39.    

For the facts:  
Here is the link to the sticky in the SmallWorlds Forum pasted below (This is same as the message on page 39 in the thread linked above. )

http://forum.smallworlds.com/showthread.php?t=54809

Hi everyone,

Thank you for your passionate dedication to SmallWorlds Missions - and for raising your concerns over the latest revision of the mission cap. As many have already observed, this brings the mission reward cap into alignment with the widget reward cap.

The mission cap as it now stands will enable an honest player to receive rewards for 3 solid hours of mission play at the optimal reward rate in each 24h period (from midnight to midnight SWT).

Remember this is the equivalent of 3 full hours of play spread optimally across the highest rewarding missions - so this is likely to translate to longer hours of rewarding play on standard missions.

We know that some players engage in missions for long hours daily, but we don't encourage this practice from a health and safety (and lifestyle balance!) perspective.

So the daily maximum reward is 1080 XP and 4320 Tokens per Avatar. If you are a genuine mission addict and you hit the cap, that isn't the end of your rewarding activity for the day - you can swap to another avatar on your account and reward that one instead.

Some players reap large rewards from missions by exploiting the huge flexibility of the SmallWorlds Mission and Interaction system. They use this to complete multiple missions simultaneously or sequentially whilst expending little or no effort and offering nothing to the spirit of our community.

We understand that for many of you, this represents a frustrating development. We would rather not cap mission rewards at all. It's not a perfect solution, but one we've been forced to adopt in order to protect the efforts of our honest players.

The vast majority of players will be able to continue working on missions as they always have - and never reach the reward cap.

Thank you for your understanding.

[Happy]

Darren recently added this comment sticky thread:
Link to this post in the forum at smallworlds.com http://forum.smallworlds.com/showthread.php?t=54932

Hey Everyone

Once again we find ourselves in a situation where we have tried to make a change with your best interests in mind, but it has been to the detriment of many of you who spend a lot of time in SmallWorlds. As with similar issues in previous versions, we are listening, and want to work with the community to resolve this as soon as possible.


Why we did it:

Over the past few months, numerous players have been exploiting the fact that you can do up to 10 missions at the same time, by creating mission "bombs" or chains. This gives them the potential to earn XP and Tokens up to 10 times faster than normal. Over the past release or two, we have trialed a number of methods to stop this exploit, but with limited success. We have also tried to deal with the offenders in person, but it has become too widespread to handle this way, so we needed a better solution.


Potential Solutions:

Please believe me when I say we have explored a wide variety of solutions, including:

1. Limit the number of active missions a player can have to 1.

This would make the mission system very limited. If you got stuck on a mission, you couldn't do any other missions until you finished, otherwise you would lose your progress in that mission. It would also not enable branching-type missions which are valid in certain cases.

2. Don't allow interactions to complete multiple mission tasks.

This could easily be circumvented by using several buttons (or several items) to fire off separate interactions that complete one mission each. Ends up being the same thing.

3. Limiting the number of missions in any space to 1.

Can be easily overcome by setting up one missions to start in a space, and then get the player to hop around a chain of spaces, with the last space having interactions that complete all missions.

4. Have some sort of activity sensor (mouse/keyboard) to make sure the player is doing something.

We have no idea which mission the activity is for. They could be just walking around and chatting. It would also mean that missions that required yor to stop and think (or to visit another website and do some reading) would be unfairly punished.

5. Limit the number of missions that can be completed in an hour.

This would potentially limit people who have been working on several missions concurrently, but completed them all at once for convenience. It would also not work for someone who did a large number of shorter missions in an hour.


Current Solution:

In the short term, the solution we thought would work best for a majority of players, was to set a limit on the amount of XP they could earn in any given day. We set the limit based on the average player having to do missions for 5-6 hours solid each day in order to hit the cap. If a player gets the best completion time for all the missions they do (which is very difficult for mature missions), they might hit the cap in 3 hours - but this would be a very rare occurence.

This solution stops mission bombers from getting too far ahead of regular players. It was also a quick solution to buy us more time to explore more technical solutions over successive releases (we would rather be creating new features for you, not blocking exploits).


What we didn't get right:

We didn't take into account the Citizen Level bonus, which is why some of you are hitting the cap after only 1.5 hours of gameplay. We will definitely fix this ASAP.

We may have set the limit too low for some of the more dedicated players (especially those that may do all of the missions in one day of each week). However, if we set the limit higher, it will just mean that the exploiters will potentially be able to get further ahead than the "average" players.


What we did NOT intend:

Contrary to some of the conspiracy theories out there, we did not do this to intentially limit the amount of time you spend in SmallWorlds, or to limit the amount of Tokens you earn (and force you to buy Gold). As stated above, the solution should have only affected a very few "hardcore" players, and not effect most people's ability to earn XP/Tokens.


Where do we go from here?

I propose the following, but would like to get your feedback (constructive please!) on these before we act:

1. Do not count the Citizen Level bonuses when calculating whether a player has exceeded the cap.

2. Extend the cap by another 1-2 hours (this would mean a limit of about 8-10 hours of solid missions each day for the average player).

3. Perhaps we should also consider a weekly limit of about 35-40 hours of missions for the average players to help limit how far exploiter can get ahead over time, but not limit players as much on any given day (for those that do occaisional mission "binges").

4. Reduce the number of concurrent active missions from 10 to 3. This would limit the maximum earning rate for exploiters to 3x the norm (down from 10x). It will still allow basic branching missions to occur (up to 3 branches).

We will definitely do item (1), and some or all of the other 3 (depending on your feedback). Also, if you have any other cunning ideas, we are all ears!


Please remember, there are a number of other Token-earning and/or XP-earning activites than missions (although Missions are by far the best way to earn XP and Tokens for most people), and we are currently working on a few new ones (Game types) that we hope you will all love (I will be posting soon about this).

Once again, thank you all for caring enough about SmallWorlds to let us know what you think. We don't always get it right first time, but we have the community's interests at heart and will do our best to work with you to make SmallWorlds a better place for all of us.


Have fun out there!


Darren Green
Co-Founder