Woot! Essay buddies!

I agree with the problem, but i'm not sure how much I agree with the solution. Your idea that we have a 200K debt buffer at the start of the game is simply wrong.  As debt increases, stock price falls. The idea of a debt buffer that is dynamically affected by how much debt you have feels odd to me. Ontop of that, I don't think the idea of being unable to buy your own stock is not crippling enough. Once again, as soon as someone buys one of your stocks the stock price rises and they're suddenly out of deep water. They can then defend themselves from the buyout as normal. All it does is give one of the monay other players in the game a 1 stock advantage, which is pretty worthless. The possibility also exists where a person could still potentialy perform their own buyout strategy normally. hold onto a large stock pile of money, and as soon as someone buys you to take you back under the limit you can purchase like 4 of your own stock. Once you do that, no one will want to buy your stock because your no longer seen as a good investment, especially with the new mechanics of only getting the same money out of a buyout as you put into it.

Instead, I would prefer it if it's valued either against the companies buildings, their total assets, or their colony level, which is pretty much the same thing. That, along with your idea of locking them out of purchasing their own stock, would lead to an interesting situation whereby a debt-heavy player needs to race along and keep upgrading to stay above the buffer, spending money that could otherwise be used as investments into themselves for a guaranteed win, rather than saving that money to buy up your own stock.

However this solution still has problems. The advantage someone gets for purchasing into you is incredibly small unless they can complete the buyout, and having the company be bought under multiple people only serves to improve your own position. It's counter-intuitive but interesting that a person who owns none of his own stock can still comeback to win because everyone else blocked each other from taking over.

So, we also need to make the penalties bigger. However, making any new penalities would just further complicate the game, and not in a good way. So, perhaps, the penalty should simply be an increased rate of stock price fall? Wait, isn't that already in the game? hmm, perhaps the simpleist solution is to make everyone else also locked out of purchasing stock in your company, unless it's a shift buyout. That way, people ointop of their game can identify when someone is about to spiral, and buy some of you up before hand so that the final buyout is cheaper for them and not for their opponents. The other players also could not prevent the buyout from taking place and allowing the spiraling player to survive purely because everyone is blocking each other. The only counterplay to this happening though is to either buyout the guy going for a buyout or to use black market to stop him getting the funds to buy you out. Still, in desperate situations it owuld be ncie to see people using the black market more in larger games.

So yes, I ultimatly agree with your premise, but not your proposed solution because your no where near harsh enough

The players didn't pay attention, that's their own fault. The other players had ample opportunity to jump on the depressed stock price and didn't. Ignoring the other players is very common in FFA's. I was in that game, btw, and was playing with myself

The problem is that once the stock is bought, you are stuck buying them for 2x, which makes it really hard to buy someone who tanked their stock price if they can generate cash at that point. Also, the debt isn't transfered over upon buyout. It does create some weird dynamics where you need to pay attention early/mid game to pounce on the person tanking their debt to grow fast.

Three things that will be changing in Beta 4:

- Buying your own stock will have a cooldown as well, so that you can't take advantage of your lowest stock price

- I'm reducing the stock bonus from buying out other players. It's important, but I think I went overboard in this version.

- A new patent (Financial Instruments) now lets you earn money from other players' debt.

Juzzo: The fix adding a delay for your own stock should improve the situation, which I believe is one of debt dive enablers. It's annoying when you start buying someone and they cntrol down and buy spam their stock cheapest forcing you to pay a premium for shares on top of the double to buy them out. I am currently successfully playing a strategy in FFA MP, which produces a ton of cash early/midgame, that takes advantage of players debt diving. Now that I've started looking for it, its pretty easy to spot. It doesn't rely on debt diving.

There should be a learning curve in the game, and timing actions is part of it. Being opportune with cash flow and your stock purchases is one of them. I don't think that there needs to be a cap on the debt since debt significantly suppresses your stock price and leaves you vulnerable if you are not able to cash flow. There are definitely windows where you can jump on someone, provided you are cash flowing. Higher level strategy is good for the game as it engages better players. Zultar is one such player and he's generally ahead of the curve. He'd win whether he "debt dives" or not just because he generally makes good decisions.

New players are always going to be taken advantage of, since they just don't know the game. They don't turn off buildings that are unprofitable. They don't plan ahead based on what players are building. Even I, even Zultar makes mistakes. I see a lot of new players build single buildings foregoing the adjacency bonuses. This is somewhat non-obvious too. They don't build the right buildings to promote growth. Should that be fixed? Where does the line get drawn?

Leveraging debt isn't inherently good or bad. A player shouldn't just lose because he leverages debt to extreme levels to growth fastest. The stock price reflects it. Perhaps the increase in stock price for growing is a bit much in beta 3, since you can grow your way to safety, since more claims generally means more cash flow, which is protection from buying your stock.

Debt or no debt, cash flow is king in this game. Limiting debt via a cap isn't going to change that, and new players aren't going to likely know that.

Another thing is that jumping into 8 player FFA's is actually the hardest place to learn the game. 1v1 is much simpler. The more players just muddy's the cause/effects in play.

I think we should wait and see how the debt dive plays out once the changes Soren mentioned are added. I think it'll be fine.

I strongly disagree with the game ever specifying that someone to perform a certain action at a certain point, especially an action that may or may not be the best thing to do at that time, which is what you are suggesting.

I mean, I get it, and I appreciate the need to learn and its important to take advantage of situations, but this is a very subjective situation. It's a decision on how to use cash and i can say with certainty that its never a clear cut situation. Do you upgrade, buy stock (yours?/theirs?), buy resources, use the BM. I've played many many matches and I can't say its always the right decision to buy someone, and I think that the game leading on players to do a certain thing is misleading. Information that is necessary to make decisions should be presented, and debt presentation is a weakness, but that presentation shouldn't influence the decisions.

It hasn't been that long since beta 3 was posted. Beta 3 is the first patch where the stock prices predominantly grow, obfuscating the debt dive mechanic. Before, if you debt dived, your stock clearly went down. Currently, debt hides under growth.

How about this: Have the stock prices be red or green based on whether they are rising or falling second to second? A subtle notice instead which makes it more obvious when someone is tanking their stock since growth often hides the debt. If not that, something should be added. I think there is more room to nuance the debt structure by increasing interest rates or similar actions than the proposed solution. Or change the rates at various debt level. Just have to be careful it doesn't snowball uncontrollably.

Removing options from a players arsenal at an arbitrary point is not a good mechanic. It'll make it so you can't defend yourself after you cross that threshhold. Being in a situation where you can't defend is far a more frustrating, un-fun situation which will frustrate new players. Advanced players will know to avoid that threshhold, which leads to the same problem you are trying to prevent. Overall, to me, this is more confusing/complicated to learn than just buy someone when their price is low.

Overall, I agree that that presentation should be improved, and that with said improvement, the need for specific instruction to buy players should go away along with the artificial caps soft or otherwise.

I strongly disagree with the game ever specifying that someone to perform a certain action at a certain point

To be clear, I'm not suggesting the game would force opponent's to buy your stock, or to ever perform any action. Nor am I suggesting to "remove options from a players arsenal at an arbitrary point" -- I don't think there's anything arbitrary about values you know the definitions of in advance or could display in the UI just under your current actual debt level.

I hadn't considered something like higher interest rates for higher debt to make it escalate quicker which is an interesting way of coming at the problem, and I used to be worried it would be too easy for people to associated red = bad, green = good if you coloured the stock prices but when I think about it now you may be right that could be enough depending on how playstyles continue to evolve.

I guess my problem is that I like the rate at which debt affects you in 'normal' play, but think in the extremes you should be punished by the game more severely and I hope that I've highlighted the use-case in which it's most detrimental to the game. The idea isn't that everyone zooms over the threshold and suffers the penalties, but rather that the penalties are kept in reserve for people that DO zoom when everyone else is playing 'normally'. I don't think that only 'advanced players' would be able to avoid the threshold as I'd hope it would be communicated in a clear and simple way "Hey, try not to accumulate 20x your shareprice in debt or bad stuff will happen" should be clear enough for most players, and of course I'm assuming some UI work would go into expressing the ideas. Most players debt in most games never approaches the 'threshold' that I've been talking about in this thread.

This kind of debt-diving was (fairly) infrequently seen until the last month or so, though that said it has been a tactic used (notably by PB and Zultar on streams, though I've done it myself a fair few times) through OTC's life so far. You're right that Beta 3 has exasperated the situation; especially with the value-jump granted after a purchase but even before then I think that this type of tactic was "wrong".

You're right that if you can make a 'soft-cap' by simply affecting their stockprice significantly enough (ie a lot more than it does now) via debt to drop it very quickly into the 0.10 cent range you'd also entirely resolve the issue I'm muttering about but I've tried to open discussions about that and no-one seemed to care very much when I did (admittedly only on Twitch and not here) whereas the idea suggested here got better feedback/discussion going.

I hinted to Soren during my visit that it seems strange that buying someone out is usually the much better move than paying debt.

That's cool, I hope that we see something good come of it and it's nice that other people are thinking there's issues around this area (even if not specifically the issue I'm concerned by).

Fingers crossed we can continue to have interesting points raised in this thread and other means and the next beta iteration may address this

It sounds like we agree that current presentation is lacking and that we agree that debt isn't quite right atm. You know what would be useful? A stock, debt and resource chart that could be viewed in game, like the one at the end of the game. A lot of trend information for stock/debt/resources could be displayed nicely through charting which would help better decision making too. Could be a better option if they can include it with the new UI they are creating. The current inability to see trends over time obfuscates whats going on during the game. Clarifying those would likely help.

Debt-diving has been around a long time, although its popularity waxes and wanes depending on the effectiveness. IMO it varies mostly with the ability to raise cash in comparison to stock price during the midgame. Debt diving is popular right now for a few reasons. It's easy to drive debt by ignoring power (fuel to a lesser extent), and certain buildings are massively power hunger (steel). It's also very easy to raise alot money during the midgame right now either through food/electrolysis or glass production (sometimes steel), which for allows purchasing your own stock. Once your stock is purchased, your are then pretty safe until endgame. So, through rushing upgrades to 3 or 4, its quite easy to drive a ton of debt, yet still be able to raise a ton of cash. Prior to 3 or 4, it is difficult to raise the cash necessary to do any purchasing due to claim shortage.

So... The debt drives growth, the growth drives cash flow (first mover advantages + more claims), and the cash flow buys the stock, and the purchased stock is defense, at which point the debt doesn't matter. It's very difficult to overcome the required double cost that is needed to buy someone out at that point in the game, so there's very little incentive to not debt dive right now due to the growth and safety it provides. 

Somewhere in that chain of play should be a weakness, but there isn't right now. The player who increases their claims fastest grows their cash flow fastest since they get resources for upgrading cheapest, and they get first mover into highest price resources.

Addressing the spam purchasing slows down the stock buying, which is a good start. Tweaking the stock price growth and debt weighting (rates?) should affect the "safety" provided by currently outgrowing your debt accumulation. Maybe the purchase multiplier to acquire already purchased shares can be adjusted downward for under-capitalized (excessive debt) players. Maybe the cash flow vs debt should be looked at, although the tighter debt mode seems generally disliked.

Presenting information better should enable players to make better decisions.

well, I dont know if you saw the stream today, but apparently debt is getting a rework.  No idea exactly how, since the new build had "AI 'assist'", so everything was dumb and stupid, but. Things are changing somehow, which will make things different!

Based on the omen's I gleam from my crystal ball I am cautiously optimistic about the future changes to debt.