Time for a poll. (The subject is abuse)

[silhouette]

lch said:
Given that somebody would have to waste gems and mage time on forging items to send them away, the only possibility I see where this "exploit" would be feasible would be when an extremely important item, for example the Chalice, would get lost in the game and people would be racing to forge it. Somebody might get the idea to fill his opponent's lab with items so that he can't forge it. But then he would either need to have a full lab of junk himself so far, or he would need to draw similarly low quality magic items from his commanders, like const 0 magic weapons, sanguine dowsing rods etc.

Well, don't forget it may happen via collusion of more than one opponent as well. For example, if the leader of an MP game puts up the Forge global, and nobody is in a position to Dispel it, I would completely try to make an alliance of the other players who would each send a dozen items. It's a way to deny the one player use of forging, and it seems like a useful and valid tactic to me. And it is sort of self-balancing: if it's a one on one situation, you would have to commit X% of your lab/forging to deny the opponent the same percent of his capability.

Sill

[triqui]

silhouette said:
Well, don't forget it may happen via collusion of more than one opponent as well. For example, if the leader of an MP game puts up the Forge global, and nobody is in a position to Dispel it, I would completely try to make an alliance of the other players who would each send a dozen items. It's a way to deny the one player use of forging, and it seems like a useful and valid tactic to me. And it is sort of self-balancing: if it's a one on one situation, you would have to commit X% of your lab/forging to deny the opponent the same percent of his capability.

Sill

[lch]

silhouette said:
Well, don't forget it may happen via collusion of more than one opponent as well. For example, if the leader of an MP game puts up the Forge global, and nobody is in a position to Dispel it, I would completely try to make an alliance of the other players who would each send a dozen items. It's a way to deny the one player use of forging, and it seems like a useful and valid tactic to me. And it is sort of self-balancing: if it's a one on one situation, you would have to commit X% of your lab/forging to deny the opponent the same percent of his capability.

Biggest waste of gems and mage time I ever heard of. I'm not saying that this isn't possible, just that it's impractical. You waste gems and mage time to donate magic items to your enemy, however useless those items might be. And you'd have to keep this up for the subsequent turns, too. So, let's see... Lowest gem count for forging an item is 5 gems. Magic lab can hold what, 50 items? So you'd need to send up to 250 gems worth of magic items, per turn, to your enemy. If I'd be that enemy, I'd die from laughter. Gem generating globals, dwarven hammers, clams, Forge of the ancient all have just one goal: To save/generate more gems than your enemies can. If you want to sacrifice as many gems as that for such a dubious plan, then your enemy doesn't have to do anything because you're playing into his hands by digging your own grave instead of, uh, the crazy idea of saving those gems that go into his free items, to override his enchantment or alchemize them to astral gems and dispel it?

[Edratman]

silhouette said:

Well, don't forget it may happen via collusion of more than one opponent as well. For example, if the leader of an MP game puts up the Forge global, and nobody is in a position to Dispel it, I would completely try to make an alliance of the other players who would each send a dozen items. It's a way to deny the one player use of forging, and it seems like a useful and valid tactic to me. And it is sort of self-balancing: if it's a one on one situation, you would have to commit X% of your lab/forging to deny the opponent the same percent of his capability.

Sill

The collusion angle of lab filling does present a whole new aspect to the ploy. I followed the thread (and many others) under the basic assumption that (occasionally) there are players who utilize tactics that the vast majority of players do not consider valid or in the spirit the developers intended because of various reasons. There is general, but not universal, consensus on almost all of these actions.


But when I read that two or more players may unite to fill an opponents lab presents a whole new perspective.

To be honest, I cannot even decide if it makes the ploy more valid or less valid. Previously I thought it would require a significent effort from a single player to forge adequate number of slave collars to effectively fill an opponents lab and block new forgings. But to learn that 2, 3 or 4 players would think that this is a good move and thus each would contribute an easily manageable quantity of items to fill one players lab is entirely different.

[vfb]

I wouldn't want to play in a game where lab-filling is considered a valid tactic.

I mean, what the heck is that? How does it possibly make sense in the reality of the game? Your lab is a fixed size which can only handle so many items, and you've got morons working on your docks, who clutter up your lab with so much junk that when your mage steps in to craft an item, he trips over them and drops all his gems and they spill down the drain some other moron installed in the floor?

It's just abuse of the mechanics of the game's interface, in this case the fact that there's no interface implemented so nations can refuse 'gifts' of items from other nations. It's got nothing to do with mages and spells and forging and research or any kind of fun stuff like that.

Please don't go and assume I'm in the 'Wrathful Skies + SR100% is an exploit' crowd though (though I think that crowd is pretty small). I just want stuff to make sense in the context of the game. I don't think I'm in a minority in that respect either.