"We have also removed the tiers of degradation, they now degrade at a flat 1 HP per night regardless of their health."

This change puts people who have multiple BGs at low health instead of BGs at full health in extreme disavantage. In light of this new change, I would request mearging of low trained BGs.

At first glance I disagree with you, Kismu. Now ppl with low health BGs can train them at half price.

Aidan, the upkeep cost has been halved, not the training cost. I am not asking to combine all the BGs with low skills, just the BGs that have less training

For example, If there are Three BGs trained to HP 30, they will now loose three times health compared to One BG at HP 90...

Could we get a reason for this? As keeping money out of the game has always been a major concern of the administration and this seems like it would keep a lot of money in the game, as well as being extremely top heavy.

Sitewide BG Effective Count: 10100

10100 x 12000 = $121,200,000

So by reducing it to 6k a day this could POTENTIALLY be keeping an extra 60mil in the game per day. I realise it obviously won't since alot of these BG's will be at low HP and not lose 1HP per day in the old system, but this system is insanely beneficial to those people who are capped...

Taking 5 Day maintenance from around 14.4mil to around 7.7.

I hope to see a reason for this drastic change.

Kismu, can you give me a worked example of how you think this change is impacting them negatively? I'm not suggesting you're wrong, I just can't see it myself at the minute.

Under the old/current system. A single higher trained bg loses less health than 3 bg's. At a higher cost of healing, this costs the player with multiple bg's a lot more than the single bg.

Under the new proposal, a single higher trained bg loses less health again, but now rehealing the 3 bg's is cheaper. So in reality, it's helping the guy that went for multiple bg's.

The guy(s) with multiple bg's were always 'losing' the way I see it, now they're losing less. The only reason to have gone for multiple bg's in the past, and which remains, is if you wished to never heal them (so retaining multiple bg's on 1 hp) or if you wished to bluff a higher level of protection. I'm not sure where the negative impact you're referring to is coming from?

Let me give a more detailed explaination of why people with multiple low trained BGs are at disadvantage here.

Lets compare two cases. Before and after this new change.

First case, Buying new BGs when your previous BG is trained at 30.
Second Case, Buying new BGs when your previous BG is fully trained.

Each day, lets say, both the cases either train one BG or buy one BG.

So, before this update, in both cases, the health loss per day is 1. Maximum Health = 90, and Effective health is 85.

But after this change, the health loss is 3 in case 1, and 1 in Case 2. So, 3 times more loss.

*DISCLAIMER: DUTCH MATH*

Dear Squishy,

After Kismu's post and the small debate in #dl I decided to run some numbers.
What I did was take the old situation and calculated how much it would cost to heal 8 bodyguards of each 10 HP after 10 days and then how much it would cost to heal 1 bodyguard with 80 HP.
After that I ran the exact same scenario with the new numbers and degredations.

My findings are these:

8 bodyguards at 10 HP each after 10 days in the OLD situation cost $288000,- to heal to full
8 bodyguards at 10 HP each after 10 days in the NEW situation cost $432000,- to heal to full

This is an INcrease of cost of: $144000,-


1 bodyguard at 80 HP after 10 days in the OLD situation cost $108000,- to heal to full
1 bodyguard at 80 HP after 10 days in the NEW situation cost $54000,- to heal to full

This is a DEcrease of cost of: $54200,-

This means that this change is fortunate for those who used the full BG strategy but very unfortunate for those who played it from the below 30 HP side.
In both cases, it was always obvious that multiple bg's had a higher associated cost than a single bg. However, that additional cost in the given example has risen from 266% extra to 800% extra, the reason this change is having a much larger impact on the multi bg user.

Now this example I only went upto 8 BGs cause math wise that's still easy enough to show.
But imagine the impact this will have on people who bought 101 BG's at 10 HP or worse....

I like to suggest to offer those who have "little" BG's to combine them into "big" BG's to make up for their huge loss they get on this side of things.

My math can be found here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0Av465pCfVgv4dGp6RkZRZEpNSktOaldtTTczSjZtQkE#gid=0

Hello, it's me again.

I gave my suggestion some more thought and realised that if you make "little" BG's into "big" BG's you might loose the current "Protected status".
Instead of being IWP you might go to OWP/EWP/VWP because of the decrease in actual BG numbers.

I thought it was handy to point that out since I can guess some people would not be amused by their "Protected status" decreasing :P

A change in the merging of bgs would also impact on anyone who had attempted to game the system, never healing bgs and simply leaving them at 1HP each... but I can't say I've ever had an issue with someone trying to game a system being hit like that so far less of a concern.

Kismu, thanks for that post. I hadn't realised the impact that the tiered system would have on it (wasn't actually aware of the tiers or their associated calcs), so you opened my eyes there.

The one thing I would mention, and a reason to focus this discussion around the later figures given, is that there are some irrelevant data points in your model. Whether someone buys a new bg, trains an existing one or does nothing from this point forward is all a personal choice. In the original model you gave, the person is forced to keep going with their old 'purchasing technique'. It doesn't make the figures 'wrong', but it does add a level of complexity to the figures which isn't actually relevant to main point of your discussion.

The real question is does this change cause a disparity for those with multi bg's? It causes roughly a 3 fold increase in maintenance costs for them when compared against a single bg alternative. So I guess the answer there is yes (but any and every change will impact someone... so, no surprises there).

Is it a large/common/serious enough issue to warrant the huge work required to change it? That one, I'm not sure. I can't imagine there's an easy solution that wouldn't cost countless hours of manual adjustments by the admin team on a player by player basis. Even for the players heavily impacted by it, there are pro's and con's to choosing to have bg's merged that mean it isn't a given.

Thank you Squishy for combining my BGs.