rangerBlog

06:15 am - Macroeconomics of Autobots and Decepticons (with apologies to Lawrence Lessing)

Recently I've been playing Battle for the Allspark, a free online game created as a glorified promotion of the upcoming Transformers console game. (more information) In it, players choose be either Autobots or Deceptions and battle across 20 geographic battle zones. The side with the most wins has the zone (tracked live,) and the faction with 11 zones has control of the mythical "Allspark."

Simple game right? Whichever side tries harder wins, right?
Maybe not.

Holding Out for a Hero

Players choose between 7 robots of varying strength, speed and armor. And at registration, they're presented with a choice: Autobot or Decepticon?

Both sides are perfectly balanced, there is no advantage to choosing one side over the other.
So, naturally, players chose the Autobots over the Decepticons at a 2:1 ratio, after all, they're the good guys!
(I chose the Decepticons. Not to be contrary, I think Megatron had a good argument for the unilateral reallocation of foreign energy sources in the depths of a fuel crisis.)

So now, you have two armies that are prefect equal... except one it big, and one is small.

Small is Beautiful

Fighting in Battle for the Allspark isn't a massed battle. There are has 20 battle spaces in each zone, to fight an opponent, you simply step onto his or her square. Autobots may battle Decepticons, and vice versa. No internecine fighting allowed. This is really more organized dueling with team scores.

As a consequence of this setup, since each match was between one Autobot and one Decepticon, the Autobots advantage of numbers was completely negated. They could not rack up twice as many wins in a zone with all their extra Autobots- in fact half their army had to wait and take turns at their less-numerous opponents.

Militarily, the two sides were perfectly balanced... at first.

Experience Matters

The Game has a ranking system. At 20 wins you become a Lieutenant. At 60, a Captain and so on. And the points that you earn by winning against opponents boost your stats- making you stronger, faster, and more armored.

This is where the size of the Autobot army proves its downfall.
With twice as many Autobots as there are Decepticons, the Autobots were competing with one another for experience.
In 100 soldiers fight 1000 battles, 66 of them are Autobts, fighting an average of 15 battle each and winning 7.5, and 33 of them are Decepticons, each fighting 30 battles and winning 15.
Decepticons gained experience twice as fast as Autobots, because of their own relative scarcity.

Day of the Decepticons

For the first month of the game's operation, the rank system was inactive (read: not ready,) and the Decepticons enjoyed a slight but noticable advantage. Without ranks and the high-level attacks that came with them, the results of their higher score were harder to see.

But once the ranking system did go online, the game changed, almost literally overnight. 90% of the zones fell to the Decepticons, with the remaining Autobot strongholds being eroded until, about a week into the new regime, the map turned entirely red, and the Decepticons conquered the world.

Rank also brought a marked change in tenor to the game. Players who had dabbled before took to the fight with a deadly earnest, and a palpable psychogeography emerged. Where before players wandered between the zones at whim, often choosing whichever zone they lived, now they charged into zones into contention (and often charged out again, leaving it to be retaken an hour later.) The conflict had become personal, and a new phenomenon emerged: cheating.

In a world there the Decepticons hold the advantage, which side needs to cheat more?