Comments on the Metaverse scoring system

from Stardock Forums
This may be a long post, I tend to be long winded but
I will try this time to be very concise. :)

I recently finished a game that I think demonstrates
some rough edges in the logic for the scoring system.

My score was 23232 using version 1.035. Which is about
10k more then the next highest score im aware of in any
version.

Before I get into how I got this score, I will first
list some balance concerns I have.

Problem 1. It is far to easy to win by influence,the
computer will just roll over and be influenced to non
existence without even once putting up a fight.

Suggested Fixes.
1. Put a cap on the number of systems an empire can
lose through influence before war is automatically
declared(make it depedent on map size). This will
keep influence useful without making it the obscene
steam roller it currently is.

2. Cut in half or even 1/3 the effect influence
resources have. Currently they are way to good for
both the computer and the human. I will come back to
this.

Problem 2. Buying trade goods/wonders/achievements.
It is fairly easy dash to a trade good early in the game
buy it on the long term payment plan, and then trade
it between 4 races for every non military tech I am
missing(which is about 20+ techs at this point, as I
do a super land grab at start and fall way behind in
tech). Then taking these new techs, buy the new
trade goods/achievements/wonders and basicily own them
all and trade them all for obscene rewards. This is
so easy and cheap that it seems highly abusive. I can
even do it so I dont go below -500 funds, by building a
preemptive stash of cash and trading much of this stuff
for cash.

Fix. Simple, prevent buying wonders, trade goods
and achievements. Make sure to slow the computer down
in its own creation of such things to keep it in
relative balance.

Problem 3. Tech victory is worth the most and is also
the easiest way to win. There is some interesting
dynamics that make a tech victory challanging IF the
computer could win via tech. But as it is now, tech
victory should be worth the least number of points, why
it is worth the most, I cant fathom.

Fix. Military worth most, Cultural second, alliance
3rd, tech last.

The first 2 require you to dominate the galaxy, and are
by far the hardest.

Problem 4. Pop calcuation. This is how I got my score
My pop at the end of the game was over 23 trillion and
was still growing at nearly 100 billion a month. I just
got really bored with hitting turn over and over again.
I dont know where the pop would have leveled off at, but
a rough guess would have been about 50 trillion. What
ever time penality there is, it doesnt even come close
to making it worth not running ur pop up(if ur going for
score, for fun, this is not fun).

This was my 2nd masochistic game where I succesfully
took over the galaxy(except 1 or 2 planets left to
prevent the half price military victory) The first
one took me longer(I wasnt as good!) and my pop when I
finally got to the final frontier was 6 trillion.

My 2nd game, I did it quite abit faster and my pop had
just edged past 5 trillion. I went to submit and low
and behold, identical game, but this time I was getting
7k score instead of the nearly 9k i had last time.

I did better(by taking out the galaxy faster and
getting to the tech quicker) but got a much worse score

So I ran up the pop, it quickly became apparent to me
that pop easily dominates the time factor(at least on
a gigantic map).

Crude Fix. Put a turn limit based on difficulty/map
size in which a game can be submitted. This will
prevent running up the pop which is both abusive and
not even fun. It literally takes all the fun out of
competing for good scores.

Better(harder) fix. Try to rebalance the time penality
so is more effective in curbing obscene pops on larger
maps. This can be hard to balance without actually
knowing whats people can achieve(and the reason its
so out of wack right now).

Problem 5. Metaverse is penalizing you for submitting
low point value games. As has been pointed out before,
this is illogical.

If you are scoring every game that everyone ever plays
then you can penalize for bad results because you
penalize everyone. This is how most multiplayer scoring
systems work(the MSN zone, BattleNet, etc) The
metaverse is not of the same type, its a comparision
scoring system for a single player game in which
its optional for a player to submit a game. When its
optional, dont punish people for submitting all their
games.

I am currently ranked 6th with 10 games. If I had
submitted by game on a new alias, I would have been
ranked first with 1 game.

Fix. Several have been suggested, you could simply sort
the scores from highest to lowest and stop
calculating the score when the next game would lower
the overall score.

Ok, back to why innfluence resources are to powerful.

With 3 influence resources built up, I can simply drop
1 billion civillians into a computers home system on
some 12-14 pop world and it will on its own, without
any starbase support, begin converting their HOME
systems.

In my last game I had about 10 influence resources by
the end of the game, it was a joke.

This also works in reverse, if the computer gets all
the influences resources, no amount of early starbases
will stop him from creaping into my sectors either.
By the time you get cultural palace, this can be
stopped, but thats a rather late game tech.

If your curious about my strategy, I will make another
post after I hit submit here :)

I do hope the developers will address the pop explosion
problem before everyone has 20-40k games where they
spend literally more time hitting turn waiting for their
pop to grow then they did actually beating the computer.

That isnt fun for anyone.





1,540 views 66 replies
Reply #1 from Stardock Forums Top
All of your fixes will do nothing except for people who "abuse" the system like yourself. They've already nerfed cultural influence wins so much that except for truly outstanding cases it's not even worth pursuing.

As an example I won by cultural in a game, got 28 points. Went back to my autosave 6 turns earlier, declared war to prevent the culture win and won by an alliance a a few years later than the culture win and got well over 500 points. Roughly the same tech, same time to victory, same pop, same number of systems, same influence, yada, yada, yada, and a 20 fold penalty for going for culture versus another victory method.

They've similarly killed the point of going for Beyond Human on anything smaller than Huge or Gigantic.
Reply #2 from Stardock Forums Top
To clarify my point: by trying to fix something relative to the "metaverse masturbators" they've really fubed the scoring for the average player.

The only two victory conditions worth pursuing if you don't feel like massaging the game are military and alliance, and realistically, only alliance as the military takes longer on average. The result is that an element of the game (the metaverse) is trashed for 95% of the players because of what 5% were/are doing.
Ashes of the Singularity II
Reply #3 from Stardock Forums Top
Right, my fixes are aimed at the abuses, that was the
point of them..... I used to play test games for a
living, game theory and finding and preventing abuses
comes kinda natural to me.

Anyway, you reference to cultural influence as a
victory condition, which suggests to me that you missed
the point entirely, I am perhaps to long winded for my
own good. The point of nerfing influence isnt to nerf
the victory condition, but to nerf its capacity to
capture systems. Cultural influence is insanely
powerful as a tool to capture systems, which is a prop
upon which you hold your population, which in scoring,
is far more important then in how you win(or when) and
can be used with any method of winning including beyond
human on a gigantic.

If you have trouble taking over the galaxy via culture
then you are doing something wrong, it is very easy.




Reply #4 from Stardock Forums Top
Your 2nd post came after I applied my first response.

We are talking about two different things I believe.

I am talking about nerfing influence within the game, as
it is far to strong, regardless of how you try to win
the game.

You are talking about the scoring system cultural
victory being made worthless due to how easy it is
to win by influence, hence my changes would make a
fairly worthless win condition even harder to achieve.

Your point is valid, but another suggestion of mine was
that cultural victory should be the 2nd most worthwhile
in points(tech being last)

If both suggestions were applied then cultural victory
would be worth alot more(and be more difficult to
achieve)

which is as it should be :)
Reply #5 from Stardock Forums Top
Staffa, to score, it now becomes a game of going for culteral conversions, all the while preventing the cultural victory condition from setting in. And they've got detection stuff for that, but it only goes so far. They didn't nerf down the cultural stuff quite enough.


One thing you didn't suggest, But I think the doubler on the 100% morale should be removed. As it is now, its 54-99% morale, one growth rate, 100% another.

And you seem to use the 100% strategy alot. To me they really really need to introduce diminishing returns so that doesn't happen.
Reply #6 from Stardock Forums Top
An idea I just had for scoring.

Instead of looking at the population, look at the
number and quality of planets a person posses.

There is a direct relation between population and
planet quality the only difference is that population
takes a long time to reach its potential.

Some might argue then that PQ racial bonus would
translate directly into a higher score, but it already
does given that it already directly translates into
a higher pop.

This would almost competely eliminate any point
to upping ur pop for score, which should have no point
as its boring and games shouldnt be boring.

It would have no real effect on anyone who isnt
interested(to borrow Codemonkeys phrase) in metaverse
masterbating, because if you do not abuse pop
then PQ is directly related to population already. If
you can figure out the formula, they can be interchanged
with very little difference in end score.

Its not a simple relation obviously, because you cant
just add the PQ of every planet like you can with pop.

I mean three, 6 PQ planets shouldnt equal a single 18 pq
planet. But its all just math and ratios nothing
a computer cant calculate and a human cant code.

You could subtract 15 from the PQ of each planet(drop
any sub zero results), raise the result to some power
fractionally above 1 and add the results.

To use for example 1.2
a 15 pq planet would be worth 0
a 16 pq planet would be worth 1
a 20 pq planet would be worth 5^1.2 or 6.899
a 30 pq planet would be worth 25.782
a 42 pq planet would be worth 52.196

Add these all up multiply by some constant
that approaches what the population would be and
use that number instead of the pop.

Presto, now pop running is worthless but owning
most of the galaxy with very nice planets is very
worthwhile.



Reply #7 from Stardock Forums Top
Actually I don't mind scoring pop but introduce diminishing returns in that scoring. Thus, a great pop with nothing else great, wouldn't get all that great of a score.
Reply #8 from Stardock Forums Top
Codemonkey, I thought you were being a little harsh here. Yes he may've exploited a game mechanic, but he was putting out some potential solutions on how to solve it. I also noticed that the suggestions would at least not hurt the implied normal players.

Reply #9 from Stardock Forums Top
Problem 4. Pop calcuation.
Just don't count any population more than 1000 billions - enough to dominate Gigantic/Abudant.

Problem 5. Metaverse is penalizing you for submitting
low point value games. As has been pointed out before,
this is illogical.

Fix. Several have been suggested, you could simply sort
the scores from highest to lowest and stop
calculating the score when the next game would lower
the overall score.

Scores: 1000,400,400 -> 1000, 990, 1039 -> bad idea

As i already said, better to sort scores in descending order and
Score=Max(Sum(i)/Sqrt(i))
where Sum(i)=GameScore[1]+...+GameScore[i] and i=1..N

~SDC~
Reply #10 from Stardock Forums Top
"stop calculating the score when the next game would lower the overall score"

But what if it´s an EARLIER game that is reducing your overall score? You should not be punished for ANY game you have submitted.
Reply #11 from Stardock Forums Top
To Coffeedragon

Hm? Staffa told //Fix. Several have been suggested, --you could simply sort
the scores from highest to lowest -- and stop
calculating the score when the next game would lower
the overall score.//

So it's not important when you submitted any game. But this will not work good anyway.

~SDC~
Reply #12 from Stardock Forums Top
To ellestar.

In reference to problem 4(pop problem)
Your proposed counter solution demonstrates why such a
solution wont work.

You propose capping the pop calculation at 1 trillion.

In my first masochistic win, I dived straight to beyond
human without even trying to dominate the galaxy and
managed to get almost 1 trillion people in my little
corner, even though by all counts, the 3 incrediable
computers were head(by obscene margins) of me in every
catagory but tech.

When dominating the galaxy, by playing naturally I
achieve around 5-6 trillion, which to me would be a
more logical cap, as it is what naturally flows.

BUUT that assumes you play using cultural influence as
the main weapon and that you play like I do. What that
natural limit is, will vary depending on person and
my change radically as strategies are discovered and old
results become meaningless.

The end point being is that hard caps dont work when
your trying to limit what is really unknown.

As per ur problem 5 suggestion, took me awhile to figure
out what you were saying, but yes, thats a pretty big
flaw :) If I understand your method it would clearly
be superior. If I understand it correctly your just
taking the best possible result of all possible
decending order combinations?

Reply #13 from Stardock Forums Top
1) 1 trillion is enough for win. 4+ trilions is a result of a win. So cap 1 trillion is good because really you don't need to have more population to win a game.

2) //If I understand it correctly your just
taking the best possible result of all possible
decending order combinations?//
Yes. It will be correct in any case.

~SDC~
Reply #14 from Stardock Forums Top
I guess I did not explain my issue well enough.

My first masochistic game, I got 3000 or so for my
1 trillion result where I was the 4th civ on the power
scale. I techinically won, but through a cheap tech
victory and my relative lack of pop was reflected in the
score quite correctly.

My 2nd masachistic win, I took over the entire galaxy
and ended up with 5 trillion people, this took a ton
more 'skill' and effort on my part, and was quite a bit
tougher, and the only difference from a scoring stand
point of this game and the previous was my pop. Which
was 5 trillion. I got almost 9k for this game, again
apporiate for the effort.

My 3rd game, after again achieving domination over the
entire galaxy except one small corner, I again had
a pop around 5 trillion. This time instead of
researching final frontier, I ran my pop up for 10 years
to 23 trillion. This was very boring, but I wanted to
see what would happen. This time I got 23k for my score
even though when I first checked the submition it said
7k would be my score.

Now, your cap would mean that I would have gotten 3k or
for my 2nd game, when I took over the galaxy, much as
I got for my 1st game when I took over practically
nothing. This is fundementally wrong.

My 2nd game should have been over twice as valuable
as my first game, it was many times harder.

My issue is that my 3rd game was identical to the 2nd
game except for the 4 hours of running my pop up which
took no skill at all. And that resulted in 3 times
the score.

Your cap would make my 1st and 2nd game identical when
they are not. The point of the cap should be to make
the 2nd and 3rd game identical. But your cap would
fail at that, as would any artifically created cap.

Cause how people get to the end posistion varies greatly
as will their pop.

My idea on using planet quality alleviates this problem
greatly as all good planets are already inhabitated
and you get them in the natural course of the game.

My suggested scoring method would even not reward a
player much for converting the 10-14 pop planets into better worlds as sub 20 worlds wouldnt be worth many points, Using PQ is a PERFECT method to judge how
much of a galaxy someone controls without depending on
pop which is very dependent on time spent hitting turn.

It also avoids trying to gauge what the time penality
should be which can be very tricky to figure out without
thousands of games played by the better players which in
a few months will have to be changed again when new
strategies and players redefine what 'good' is and break
the system again.

Reply #15 from Stardock Forums Top
Ok it makes sense from this point of view. It's better than pop cap.

~SDC~
Reply #16 from Stardock Forums Top
"Codemonkey, I thought you were being a little harsh here. Yes he may've exploited a game mechanic, but he was putting out some potential solutions on how to solve it. I also noticed that the suggestions would at least not hurt the implied normal players. "

But the normal players are already hurt *severely* by the scoring nerfs designed and failing to stop stuff like he described.

When a normal player gets 1/20th of the score for a cultural victory versus an alliance victory at the same point in a game with the same conditions because he didn't bother to run up trillions of pop to counter the nerf effect we don't need more nerfing, period.

Ditto for the hosing of Beyond Human. At this point in time if you don't go for the "abusive" methods of nursing your score you are penalized severely for your score relative to the currently un-nerfed scoring for military or alliance.

We do not need more nerfing, we need *less* already. What we need to do is put a cap on scores based on map size and difficulty and quit trying to adjust an imperfect algorithm around what the less than 5% of the players do because it's pissing all over the other 95%.
Reply #17 from Stardock Forums Top
You are pissing all over me because you identify me
with those abusers who screwed with the system causing
the developers to nerf some little piece of it in a way
that you found annoying.

This is both unjustified and pardon me bluntness,
ignorant.

You can't claim to not care about the integrity of
the metaverse scoring system, as that is all that you
seem to be able to mention. Actual game balance
apparently has no truck wtih you, that influence as a
means to take over the galaxy is far easier then is
military doesnt seem to matter to you. Regardless of
how you win in the end, influence is the way to get
there. I can win a military victory without ever
killing a single enemy ship or landing a single troop
on a single planet. If I 'convert' the last planet
I get a military win.

Your problem, and it is MINE too, is that instead of
balancing influence to be inline with the difficulty
of doing a military conquest, they nerfed the victory
condition scoring for it. I agree, this was WRONG.
They should have fixed influence, not the scoring
points. Cause again, it can still be used for
any ending victory condition.

We AGREE. You just want to ignore the original problem
and have them give up on their flawed solution to it.

I want to fix the ACTUAL problem. And my fix should
be to your benefit. A cultural victory will be more
difficult, but its way to easy now, and if you do
achieve it, it should be worth more then anything
except a military victory. Isnt that what you WANT?

Lets see, you identify yourself with the 95% without
any real evidence of that.

You state that because previous attempted fixes have
failed(and they have, no arguement) that future ones
will also fail. Thit is your arguement.

To sum up, your arguement is basicily if its broke
dont fix it, cause the last person to try to fix it
just broke it more.

Thats a very defeatest arguement and one I seriously
doubt 95% of the people support.
Reply #18 from Stardock Forums Top
Codemonkey, he wasn't exactly calling for a scoring nerf as you put it. Personally I think from about crippling downward is a bit too easy. I've found tht employing the starfighter gambit and rush buying tradegoods will win you the game just about every time. As of the next patch, defensive ships will also figure into the mix.

What I thought he was proposing was rather intelligent. None of it amounted to a scoring nerf. He was proposing stiffening of the time limit for winning (hardly what I call a scoring nerf). He was proposing that culture victory at some point be placed as number 1 on points with conquest behind it. I like those ideas.

But you were kind of hard on him for what he was trying to do. He was politely making suggestions about improving the game and you called him a "metaverse masturbator" in return. I'd certainly find that offensive if you did that to me
Reply #19 from Stardock Forums Top
Look, I'm not here to win a popularity contest. I have had it up to the top of my head hairs with people who seem to think that the metaverse scoring needs fixing based upon extreme behavior of game masturbators.

I play the game as a "regular player" and have watched my score go from 1000s to double digits in some cases as a result of their "fixes". So while someone like forceinfinity still manages to get 23K out of the "fixed" algorithm, the average player is getting shat upon in a failed attempt to stop people like him.

So, no, I don't give a crap about any of the suggested fixes because they're designed for the minority of people still getting multi-thousand point scores while the average player is left with *one* still decent scoring condition and a second largely inferior one.

The flaw as I see it is not that people are going to find whatever the loophole in the scoring algorithm is and run it as far as they can to be in the top slot, but that they have already hosed the casual type player in their quest to nerf those people. That is the flaw, and that is my beef, and I see requests like the one in this thread as further lessening of the fun for the casual player.

This has been my position since version 1.01 when I started, and it will continue to be my position as I've already seen my predictions come to pass.

Take victory condition completely out of the scoring equation and put a reasonable cap on it. Anything else is as doomed to failure as the current farce of a scorign algorithm which did nothing but give us a week or two without 20,000 point games until someone figured out how to do it anyhow.
Reply #21 from Stardock Forums Top
Code Monkey, quite frankly you make no sense.

Ratings exist to rate people, you either care about
the ratings or you dont. Either way of looking at it
is valid and what I would determine as casual would be
those that fall into the ranks of those who don't give
a damn about the rating systems. They play the game
for fun. That to me is the majority of people.

You talk like such as they do, but all you talk about is
how your rating got hosed, so clearly you DO care about
the rating system. Yet the rating system in its old
form was clearly not 'rating' people accuratly
its also clearly not doing so now.

If the system exists to rate people, and its NOT rating
them accuratly, its a BROKEN system and needs to be
fixed.

Either you care about the rating system and agree its
broken and should be fixed, or you dont care, and then
why do you care so much?

I hate to say it, but you are just starting to sound
bitter without any real points.


Reply #22 from Stardock Forums Top
"I hate to say it, but you are just starting to sound
bitter without any real points."

That's far better than never having had any points like yourself.

And I am bitter because the exact same small percentage of the people who play the metaverse algoritm versus the game are going to be at the top no matter what Stardock does. That's the simple truth of the matter. If it turns out that you get more points from winning militarily with a huge influence, that's what the metaverse climbers will go for. If it turns out that you can do it by nursing your score by getting tens of millions of pop, that's what they will do. There is no such thing as a perfect, or even nearly perfect, scoring system - all there is IS a system, and the people who want the highest scores will play that system for the highest scores possible.

Meanwhile, everyone else is forgotten by an algorithm that is supposed to be a fun element of the game and it's already anything but. They normalised the scoring relative to the people who were making 10K with their pop and influence on gigantic maps and now the average player find thats on anything other than a huge or gigantic map there is no point whatsoever in going for cultural or tech wins because your score is a fraction of what it is for going for an early military/alliance.

So take your head out of your ass and try to think about someone beside the 25 people sitting on the first page of the metaverse. There are probably a few thousand by now and between Stardock's failure to recalculate older scores and insistence on chasing a phantom of a scoring sytem that can't be abused, no one else is ever going to have a chance of seeing their scores anywhere even in the top 250 without adopting "playing the scoring algorithm instead of the game" which is objectively what Frogboy said they were trying to do with the changes.

Companies that cater to trying to fix a ladder because of what a bunch of no-lifers willing to sit there and hit end turn endlessly do wind up hosing the scoring for those of us who just try to play a game. I hate that my choice of how to win a given game is now taken from me if I care moderately about my score because of fixes designed to stop players like you (and clearly didn't). The next fix will just hose some other issue in an endless cycle until we all just get 1 point for playing a game and they call that fair.
Reply #23 from Stardock Forums Top
I didnt make the different victory conditions worth
silly non logical amounts, its one of my major beefs
with the system. Its one of the things I want changed
back to something more normal.

Beyond the issue assbackwards ranking of the different
victory conditions, you seem to have no actual points
that matter to me, my issues and anything I care about
at all.

And in the case of the assbackwards ranking of the
different victory conditions, we are in total agreement

So while you keep looking back and fuming over their
screwing it up because of some kind of reaction to a
player like me, I look to the future where we can both
be happy playing a game with a rating system that
makes sense.

I have been playing online games for 10 years, I have
no life as you so equantely repeated the tired old
cliche for the millionth time, and from my experience
no system is perfect, but there are such things as
good systems that cater to all types of players
including you, and including me, and it is very
possible to get there from here and we are obviously
not there yet.

So stop crying about the spilt milk, stop throwing
dirt in my eyes and lets see if we can get some
constructive feedback ok?
Reply #24 from Stardock Forums Top
Codemonkey says
>

Geez Codemonkey, maybe you need to get a life if you're going to get your shorts in a wad over something like this. I've submitted roughly the same amount of games as you have, but have a much higher metaverse score. Does this mean somehow that I have no life as your statement implies?

If we're playing a game, and the rules (albiet unwritten) state that the game gives the most points for a high tech win, then is it wrong that people will shoot for that as a victory condition?

I hate to tell you this Codemonkey, but that scoring algorithm has *ALWAYS* favored the tech victory/high population gambit. I honestly think the AI has never been that great now that I've played about 10 games, because its so easy to fool the AI into thinking you're too powerful militarily (read: AI doesn't analyze what you have so well, and doesn't take risks apparently). So in playing against the AI, knowing that I can win using the above against the AI, am I somehow wrong for suggesting that the AI get fixed?

Instead of resorting to personal attacks as you have done, why don't you stop your whining and post something constructive? If you're so blasted bitter, isn't that maybe a hint that you should walk away from the game for a while, take a deep breath and calm down?

I'm not sure if you played MMORPG before, but I can offer up a couple, Everquest and Dark Age of Camelot. They are always making updates to their system, alot of times attempting to rebalance the system. Why? Because of a certain group of power-gamers that exploit some loophole in the game to gain an undue edge? Why care about what those gamers at the top do? Because they could ruin the experience for a population as a whole. This metaverse masturbating has somehow ruined yours. And as I stated before, I saw nothing in Staffa's original suggestions that would've adversely affected the casual gamer, unless of course your typical tactic is to shell up and culture bomb to death. And you certainly exagerate the metaverse being normalized to one. Honestly if it game to that, Stardock would probably eliminate the ladder, nobody sees how their scores compare to one another. Would you like that? Probably not.

If you're so worried about you or others cracking the top 250, maybe you should 1) play a slightly larger map and 2) play a higher difficulty. I earned my way to where I am without having to 1) submit too many games and 2) selecting the gigantic map. Now if you want to blindly accuse me of having no life, then I submit to you that you maybe need to get one of your own because you couldn't be more far from the truth. Staffa was trying to make a suggestion that would enable people to probably more easily make the top 250 because the field would be leveled between the tech winners, the culture winners, as well as the others.

This board is about making constructive suggestions, not making personal attacks....sheesh.



Reply #25 from Stardock Forums Top
"This board is about making constructive suggestions, not making personal attacks....sheesh."

I post "nothing constructive" because my position has been from the beginning that *any* attempt to make a balanced scoring system will fail and cause more problems than it solves because I have seen it time and time again with other games. Their attempts so far have done exactly that: still left loopholes for "abusive" scoring while shutting the door on normal playing.

All I want is a *flat* scoring system with or without a cap. Any attempts to decay or balance or take victory conditions into account are doomed to failure because they're aimed at humans who will always attempt to manipulate whatever system you give them. If you don't find that a constructive position, that's your problem with seeing that it is a valid position. It is my position and it will not change, and I will continue to make it so long as there are people who continue to whine about how the metaverse is broken and keep trying to fix things with methods that will almost certainly cause more problems then they solve.

It was far less broken before they tried to fix it, and it's only going to get more broken the more they try to fix what cannot be fixed.

As for your own version of the personal attack, your score is higher because all your games are on huge and I've been sampling all the map sizes lately (the metaverse ate all my huge games when I upgraded to Drengin and it will be a while before I get around to playing them again). It's a given (and it should be a given) that bigger maps = bigger score - it has nothing to do with my play skill or lack thereof.