In fact it's not too different from something I had suggested very early on as a quick fix. My suggestion had been to flag all starting materials as quality -1. -1 quality items could be used in construction but not sold. It's functionally the same thing - you approached it from an explanatory, game-logic kind of sense, while my pitch went directly to how it's coded without bothering on explanation. Either way it still remains an interesting idea.
Yes, it's an interesting idea =)
I originally thought of some way to flag starting mats as unsellable too (much like your own exact same idea of using -1 quality items). The idea evolved towards a tally because while technically the same, flagged mats would not include starting cash. The idea of a starting tally -including cash- would address the entirety of the starting assets. But yes, it's totally the same approach.
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However, as you note this only creates a conversion hurdle, it doesn't strictly stop anything. As a rule I tend to dislike any law that hassles but doesn't prevent. My reasoning is that they annoy the law-abiding, while the criminals do what they do with just an extra step.
I agree with that, but honestly, the game is
already full of such hassles. Throughout the years, I enjoyed playing many online games with my love. But because of the whole no-same-IP trade thing, we don't play Kapilands together. She had a lot of trouble along the tutorial, and eventually gave up entirely when half way through it, we discovered we wouldn't be able to really play "together" in a cooperative mode. And I don't see this "law" bring the number of cheaters down to 0 either.
The truth is some problems just don't have a single "all or nothing" solution. They have to be addressed with multiple half-solutions working together, and organised into something efficient as a whole. Take the fairly close example of network security. You can not make any server hack-proof. But you can add layer after layer of security. With just one layer, maybe you still have a swiss cheese and everyone getting in, despite 10 overworked admins catching only a fraction of the herd. With two layers, it's more complicated, and not undoable, but only more skilled and
motivated people will sucessfully get in. Progressively, you end up with something that is still not unbreakable, but where only the most skilled and creative
could get in, as far as skill go... and where none of them will actually bother going because it's just not worth their time to do it anyway, unless they'd have a very good and strong personal reason/motivation to do so. What really makes things safe in the end, is not the skill of the other party, nor the absolute possibility of doing (or not doing) something. It's that doing it requires so much motivation, that only a few will indeed do it. And then, your 10 overworked admins will not really be so overworked anymore, and will catch close to 100% of these few guys left. In their new spare time, they might even make users' life more enjoyable. Not by typing in their password for them, but by bringing in other features to save them other headaches, or simply to entertain them if such is the primary goal =) A lot of things outside the general realm of security & prevention use that principle as well, like job interviews for example.
I feel cheating in Kapilands is a problem of the same vein. There is no single easy solution that will solve everything and make cheating really impossible. But there's probably a way to work out multiple half-solutions, that will place the bar of risks vs. rewards so high in cheating, that only a fraction of the current cheaters would remain motivated enough to still do it. Raising that bar can certainly be achieved by lowering the rewards -
rather than raising the risks-, precisely like in the -1 mats / tally idea. It's this specific approach that makes its strenght and high interest: even if it doesn't totally prevent people from using each and every possible form cheating, for the most part -
except the most motivated of them- it just stops making it worth their while.
In my opinion, the opposite is also true: if you don't make it difficult to cheat in the first place, tons of people will do it. I don't know which tools exactly are at the disposal of the admins to track cheaters (and it's very good that regular players don't know them in details), but on the whole, seen from the outside, it feels rather easy. Maybe in actuality, it's not easy at all to do it undetected, but what I mean is that it isn't "feeling" hard enough to be dissuasive. Maybe a weekly "hall of shame" would help some ?
The real final terms of the problems are: "how much of a hassle are you ready to put on the law-abiding users ?". Any extra hassle, no matter how light, will eventually deter some people from playing. But which of both will deter the most players ? The cheater-prevention feature itself... or the cheaters (
which said feature could have kept out) ruining their experience little by little ? In the end, it's really a matter of personal appreciation and opinion, but I personally see the tally as a low hassle on players, and a high one on cheaters. This highly positive balance is ultimately why I think it's a good idea.
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Here, all one would have to do is construct a buildng, sell it off, and ship the cash. Considering that there is already a time discount on construction for players with less than 5 buildings, it's barely a holdup of a few minutes. And they could spend those minutes making a third account to cheat with.
That's a very valid point you raise. I totally forgot about that. Surely, it could be fixed by preventing new players from selling buildings to the system when freshly starting. Maybe not delay it to manager either. Simply Retailer would already be enough to prevent immediate reset rinse-repeat, without being too much of a hassle for "law-abiding" users.
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Also I don't think a cash credit would be particularly easy to code or use. You face the very real problem of someone having buildings sitting empty without any real cash to buy inputs, and a bunch of build credits they don't need at the moment. That's frustrating for them, and not a great return for the hassle of writing pages to handle two different types of money.
When starting without the tutorial, people could be given a power plant (and have that much less starting mats/cash, too). Because of the initial input issue, it's all they'd be able to start with "from scratch".
In the start materials, people always think first of construction materials, but I think you also start off with seeds, power and water, so they wouldn't be totally blocked.
Plus, power being always q0, it's strongly suggested to beginners anyway. Right now, the tutorial itself seems to suggest to people to start in plantations and veggie/fruit business. It goes a bit against the fact power, water and stones are locked at q0 to strongly entice newbies to start with that. If they already had it, maybe it would help them not feel so lost when starting out. From there, maybe they can even be given the option, or a system message suggestion, to build well and produce water with their own power, then a mine, to produce stones with their own power and water ?
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For the first day or two you're just an employee: you log in and perform some action to simulate washing dishes or waiting tables or filing papers or answering phones or whatever. Nothing that takes too long or is too tedius, but something that represents earning money. After the predetermined work is done (be it two days real time, 1 hour in-game time, whatever) then you are given your starting credits.
There was such a game in [I'm not sure I'm allowed to say which website, but it's educative games for kids, which many grownups enjoy too, to keep their minds sharp]. It was called Grundo Gym, if I recall right. The principle was to shake your mouse up and down over a circle, to make a lill character on the screen work out =p And believe it or not, it was such a crazy popular game earning people so many points from playing it over and over that they eventually removed it, to keep points balanced with the harder games !
I really like the idea of something like that, which you could return to even at higher levels. For now, while production units are producing, reasearch centers researching, and stores selling, there's not really much to do, aside from looking how pretty they are, or engage into fax wars (very fun, but expensive), and market speculation (which is probably detrimental to the kapilands econnomy in the long run anyway). Market speculation doesn't bring tons of millions of revenues, but it kills time fine, and it's fun. Now, if there was another option even more fun (and bringing something, anything, even if it's not millions), I'm pretty sure it would be a popular activity during the 24 (
or in my case, 48) hours between 2 production batch clicks.
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Always a pleasure to read you =)
But yes, this one involves maybe an extra pannel somewhere in the layout (even if it's only the warehouse's layout), at early levels, to keep track of what's in your tally, so it sounds uglier than most *nods*