Extreme Debt

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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

I watched that game referenced live and am of the same opinion of juzzo,  the game should not allow you to stomp ppl like that, Zultar had massive amounts of debt very early on yet the game rewarded him for it. It is something that I see almost every other game and really it is only inexperienced players that suffer.  It is sad fact that so long as you can make it to HQ3 and start making some decent profit without losing too much stock, then debt is largely irrelevant, No matter how large your debt it doesn't really matter once you become profitable.  The problem is, that is very fine line between crashing and burning and irreverent debt.

Another issue I've noticed is the jump in stock price when you buyout another (failing) company.  I've seen countless examples of ppl in real trouble from debt, stock price of around $6 with the rest at £14+, then they buyout another weak company with crushing debt (like their own debt issues) yet the merger of 2 debt riddled corporations suddenly magically creates a new company with a stock price $37 - double or treble the price of the other profitable corps.  That can't be right surely?  Enron buys WorldCom and suddenly has the share price of Google!!

Debt deffo needs some work on it but I really don't think it can be balanced by changing ratios or the relationships between stock price and debt, I suspect the one way to do it is to reduce production as a proportion of debt.

Oh and can you please fix chat, so many dropped messages, all that effort to type witty insults and then it disappears, tres annoying.

Also, whilst i'm here, any chance of some more info / road map of Beta 4/5/6/7 - seems there is little feedback on non-technical subjects, tell us where your headed i'm we'll provide a load of comments (whether you want them or not )

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.

This actually is a result, wanted or not, of mohawks way of changing the stock prices to be higher early on. It seems it was done by increasing the value of the intiial HQ building, or maybe all the HQ's in general, which leads to ridiculous stock prices like you described. Thing is, debt already takes into account all your buildings and liquid assets and stuff, and as your debt grows higher an extra debt of $1000 changes your stock prices much greater than it would before, so suddenly your companies 'softcap' is valued at double what it was previously, so you effectively gain an entire company debt free, which is like $14.00 of stock price, and then the debt calculation re-adjusts effectively reducing the amount your debt affects the stock price of the assets you had befor the merger. This also seems liek an iterative thing, which is why when a company does a buy you you have to wait like 5-10 seconds before you can start buying again for the calculations to take place. HIghly interesting. If anyone from mohawk thinks any of what I said was wrong jsut tell me, i'd liek some light shed on this stuff if there is somethign internal that i've missed

tl;dr: Yeah, cannot be changed, but the problem is amplified considerably in beta 3.

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.

Thanks for noticing/commenting Soren. I have confidence that whatever solution gets published will be the correct one, but I hope that this discussion has/will be been useful to the dev team. The changes that you propose above will have an impact, though I'm not sure it will be enough - I will continue to push for a much stronger cap in certain circumstances I think - especially as a patent is still a 'complex' solution to the problem, adding a new game element rather than tightening up existing ones. That said I will no doubt enjoy playing through with them to see how things work out.

To address the issues raised by other comments on this thread:

- indczn: Yes, I agree it was the player's fault, see the last section of my initial post. My issue is that the game doesn't help their opponent's enough to realise this. I'd like the game to step in and encourage that person to lose, as the game is very complex, and knowing when to pull the trigger can be hard to figure out. This is why my post tries to focus on how the game can be improved to help people rather than belittling the players for making silly choices -- players should be discouraged from those silly choices by good design in my opinion.

- duelking: I like the idea of locking out someone from buying their own stocks while their opponents are forced to double-stock-price buy them. You seem to have really grasped my problem with the current situation and your input raises some good points - you're right that stockprices don't start at $10.00 so the $200,000 was a lie -- however even if your stockprice falls down to e.g. $4.00 at the start, with my proposal you'd still have a cap of $80,000 at the start of the game... that does seem like a lot of debt to rack up to break the soft-cap unless you're playing (too) loosely. You're also correct that there's a chance that if you only just go over the cap with my proposed solution you could then duck under the cap when someone buys your stock... to my mind this isn't really that much of a problem - I want people to play right on the edge of their debt-buffer -- after all that's how you truly utilise debt to maximise profit -- while making it punishing to go over the line. Having it so that you can walk the tightrope by allowing a share or two of yours to be purchased while you pay off the debt seems appropriate to me.

- kingmorgan: I agree with your analysis that debt is essentially irrelevant once you're profitable. I'm intrigued by your idea of reducing production as a proportion of debt but think it would be almost too punishing, and also very complex for new players to be able to understand. It would, for example, make tooltips even more packed with information than they already are. That's why I support a solution which could be easily to explain, and simple for a player to see even using the existing UI (though we know that's getting a much-needed revamp soon).

The more debt-dive games I see, the more I'm convinced strong action will be needed so that bad play in the early game isn't inadvertently rewarded in the late game. Perhaps the stock bonus reduction will have an impact on this too as it will make the miracle comebacks harder, though I suspect this one might need a few iterations to get spot on

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.

There should be a learning curve in the game, and timing actions is part of it.

Completely agree with this. I'm not attempting to remove the learning curve, simply make it more obvious to players where the steps up are. At the same time, removing 'bad' play which can be abused to a player's benefit later. Good play should be rewarded at the mid-late game, not poor play. Note that I'm not talking about a hard cap, but rather a soft one. This is why my suggestion isn't as harsh as duelking's is when it comes to the price that should be paid for going over the cap, because I expect good players to constantly be on the borderline of it.

debt significantly suppresses your stock price and leaves you vulnerable if you are not able to cash flow

I think the whole point of this post is to argue that debt doesn't significantly suppress your stock price enough and either the escalation needs to continue past 5x or there needs to be in effect some sort of soft-cap. It's fine that you disagree with that premise, but others agree and I'm interested in exploring possibilities. I really don't like the answer "just wait until players have 6+ months of experience and they will be fine", or even as describing this as "higher-level play"... because most players won't bother playing for 6+ months to get that experience if the game doesn't hold their hand somewhat, and they don't see bad playing being appropriately punished.

Limiting debt via a cap isn't going to change that, and new players aren't going to likely know that.

Again, the main point of this discussion is so that new players - when they arrive in their droves when the game is actually released/in a better state - can learn the game at a reasonable pace without getting disheartened. By teaching them "this is when you should attack", "this is when you defend" you will see a lot less player dropoff as they will be improving/learning with each mistake. A lot of the mistakes in OTC are non-obvious because of the complexity of the game (especially in 4+FFA). As a RTS it's going to have a steep learning curve. The proposal outlined here is to help people to learn the game via the game teaching them, rather than a bunch of players getting continually stomped by players like us. Players learn things like adjacency bonuses because the game tells them about the bonuses.

The game tells you very little about the debt mechanic, or when your opponent is weak. Heck, in a game with Zultar in where he just used this tactic live we had MohawkGames saying "MohawkGames: for crying out loud, someone buy Zultar!" but because the game hasn't trained people to do that they weren't. I don't think a dev should have to explain when to do something in their game to their players if it's obvious enough.

I think we should wait and see how the debt dive plays out once the changes Soren mentioned are added

I agree - as I said above, but as I've mentioned and - in fact from watching games today where the same tactic is being used by basically everyone at this stage in Beta 3 - I am somewhat skeptical whether that will solve enough of the problem.

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

If you bother to do the math, the cost to buy someone is ~16-20% of their total asset - debt value, which means buying them gives you much more than their (non-debt) value in cost, than the 5x you get in value from paying off debt, not to mention doubling your own production.

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

I think the value of the HQ needs to be a lot less. I think the value of HQs is far too arbitrary, that the base stock price should be assets (buildings, resources & cash) / 10 (or whatever the number of stock is) and this imo will work out 100% because HQs won't have such insane values anymore.

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.

We are having this great convo over debt and maybe for corporation sized business then yep its debt funded business model, but any SME knows that cash is king.  Maybe the game should reward a positive cash balance more highly, reward the players with zero debt.    Come on now, at the moment the only winners are colony banks taking their daily cut of the debt interest.

Reward the fiscal conservative and punish those deadbeat debtors.

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!

I dont know if you saw the stream today

Catching up on the video now. Debt changes as described by Soren sound fantastic. Can't wait to see how they play out!!

Shame about the AI taking over the second player to found in those matches though!

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