HQ Dumping / Property Value Inflation

ScrobDobbins Mon 15 Sep 2014 - 14:04

I wanted to get the official word on whether a couple of tactics that seem to be getting more common are allowed.

The first, "HQ Dumping", involves players leaving a gang, creating Headquarters and then rejoining the original gang in order to boost that gang's points and get more headquarters than that gang would normally be given.

The second involves either leaving a gang, or having a dedicated alt outside of the gang, whose sole purpose is to attack properties of another gang to inflate the value of those properties.

Neither of these things seem to be within the spirit of the game, but they are occurring. If a gang wants to keep up, they would almost certainly need to use these same tactics. But I would like to get the developers stance on the issue because after all - it is your game.

It seems like it would be hard to prevent - because some gangs can legitimately have a large number of HQs if they merged with another gang. The only thing I can really think of is preventing a player from re-joining a gang that they leave, but that probably wouldn't be a popular solution.

I guess the bottom line is that due to the competitive nature of the game and the high value placed on headquarters, people are going to try to get as many as possible. At least if we have the official word on whether or not it's allowed, everyone could be competing on a level playing field. Because as it stands, it seems some people feel like it's cheating or wrong to do and others feel like it's part of the game and is OK to use as much as possible.

DevilsNipple Mon 15 Sep 2014 - 14:13

Honestly I wouldn't say it's cheating. But I would say it's frowned upon. In some cases your second issue is needed. Some of my gang members had to leave me to attack my areas as all of them were 200 men in defence and we were unable to play the game. After it was half and half they rejoined giving us something to play again. The purpose wasn't meant for income raise yet that was still an outcome.

The first issue is the main thing frowned upon buy it's what gets players points. If you think about it. Players still need to wait a long 5 days to place one and in most cases it's actually more of a pain doing it than just going out and attacking.

ScrobDobbins Mon 15 Sep 2014 - 14:23

DevilsNipple wrote:Honestly I wouldn't say it's cheating. But I would say it's frowned upon. In some cases your second issue is needed. Some of my gang members had to leave me to attack my areas as all of them were 200 men in defence and we were unable to play the game. After it was half and half they rejoined giving us something to play again. The purpose wasn't meant for income raise yet that was still an outcome.

The first issue is the main thing frowned upon buy it's what gets players points. If you think about it. Players still need to wait a long 5 days to place one and in most cases it's actually more of a pain doing it than just going out and attacking.

Yeah I understand the issue with having all your squares filled up and having to kill men just to be able to keep doing missions (or having to drive quite a ways to get more turf) - that's more why I said solely for the purpose of inflating value.

Also, I agree that HQ dumping is probably not 'cheating' per se since it's not abusing a bug or anything, it's just gaming the system. But so far, I have refrained from letting anyone in my county do that because it seems a bit shady. It's just seeming like if other people are doing it it might be the only way to remain competitive.

And the 5 day wait isn't really a big deal compared to the reward. If a gang has 5 people do it, they would get 5 HQs every 5 days instead of 1. Assuming the minimum value for a full HQ ($2000), that's $8000 more than they would have normally - every 5 days. At that rate, even the top gang in the game could double their value in a short amount of time if they had enough people do it. So the reward is huge.

I'd just rather see the game be based on who can attack, hold and maintain the highest value properties than who can make the most headquarters. I do like the idea of multiple HQs, since it allows everyone in the gang to have a chance at placing one - but it seems like that has had some unintended consequences.

RexButtercup Tue 16 Sep 2014 - 15:04

Bump! Please answer!

Saturn Wed 17 Sep 2014 - 0:15

ScrobDobbins Wed 17 Sep 2014 - 2:53

Saturn wrote:295k

Please stop spamming the forums with your nonsense. No one outside of your gang cares what your score is, and the only thing it has to do with the topic at hand is if you are using these tactics to get that score.

Just stop.

Bill The Butcher Wed 17 Sep 2014 - 8:27

@Saturn... bro.. really? The pm in game was pushing it but this is definitely not the place.

The devs are well aware of this tactic. It has been going on in the French community for a while.
I have been brainstorming and this is what I came up with.
When a player leaves their gang instead of them leaving all the land, they take it with them. If they take it with them they cant retake it to boost the value and then rejoin again. The value of the land should get cut in half if they leave as a punishment. But if they are kicked it should keep its value. The gang they leave will lose the points. In order for this to happen the game would need to track what belongs to each player.
And if a player gets kicked or leaves then they should have to wait 30 days before they can make their first HQ. Then it would go back to every 5 days. This should stop the kicking or leaving for the purpose of building HQs.
The only problem is what about the players that leave a gang because they don't travel much and have taken their whole town already? This must be a problem for players with little completion. And the only thing I can think of is Bots. More bots attacking more often... as often as a real player could. I know some hate bots but they are essential for the ones that don't have competition.

ScrobDobbins Wed 17 Sep 2014 - 11:09

Bill The Butcher wrote:@Saturn... bro.. really? The pm in game was pushing it but this is definitely not the place.

The devs are well aware of this tactic. It has been going on in the French community for a while.
I have been brainstorming and this is what I came up with.
When a player leaves their gang instead of them leaving all the land, they take it with them. If they take it with them they cant retake it to boost the value and then rejoin again. The value of the land should get cut in half if they leave as a punishment. But if they are kicked it should keep its value. The gang they leave will lose the points. In order for this to happen the game would need to track what belongs to each player.
And if a player gets kicked or leaves then they should have to wait 30 days before they can make their first HQ. Then it would go back to every 5 days. This should stop the kicking or leaving for the purpose of building HQs.
The only problem is what about the players that leave a gang because they don't travel much and have taken their whole town already? This must be a problem for players with little completion. And the only thing I can think of is Bots. More bots attacking more often... as often as a real player could. I know some hate bots but they are essential for the ones that don't have competition.

I figured they are aware of it - but I haven't seen anything saying whether it's allowed or not, so I wanted to get the official word. I didn't know that the French version had the HQ thing for longer than we did.. Has that always been a thing? I thought it was only recently that a gang could have more than one HQ and if two gangs merged, the merging gang lost its HQ. Anyway..

I like the idea of the 30 day cooldown before a player that leaves a gang can do a new HQ. I'm not sure how feasable the 'properties staying with the player' would be - as far as whether they've been stamping each property in the database with the person who attacked it - but if so it sounds OK on the surface - I just wonder if there might be some unintended consequences with that as well..

The way I see it, if the player is truly leaving the gang because they own everything nearby/can't travel then being able to kill the henchmans defending that turf (which can already happen) is fine. They already can't affect the value of the property for 48 hours if they leave - which is plenty of time to kill off some defenders and re-join the gang and continue being able to do missions, etc. I can't really support them needing to do more than that because at it's core, this is a geolocated game. If you can't move around in the real word, you aren't going to be as successful at it.

Bill The Butcher Wed 17 Sep 2014 - 13:46

ScrobDobbins wrote:.....but I haven't seen anything saying whether it's allowed or not, so I wanted to get the official word.

I haven't read anywhere in the rules that it isn't allowed. I'm sure the devs haven't banned anybody for it since I know of French gang leaders that do it openly. Although It is frowned upon by most players.

ScrobDobbins wrote:I didn't know that the French version had the HQ thing for longer than we did.. Has that always been a thing? I thought it was only recently that a gang could have more than one HQ and if two gangs merged, the merging gang lost its HQ. Anyway..

Nah... they haven't had it longer. At least not to my knowledge. I was referring to the "tactic" of leaving and rejoing, for the purpose of land boosting.

DevilsNipple Wed 17 Sep 2014 - 13:58

Reading all of this I have came up with an idea.

I like the idea of a long cool down for HQ's but I dislike that it would happen after you left a gang for 30 days. Instead we couldo allow a HQ to be placed every 5 days as usual but you cannot merge that HQ with a gang you previously left until a 30 day cool down.

Bill The Butcher Wed 17 Sep 2014 - 14:22

This is what would happen with your idea.
Someone would leave and create a HQ every 5 days.
30 (days) divided by 5 (days waiting period) equal 6 HQs.
When they rejoined their gang they would bring 6 Hqs with them.
Nothing solved.

ScrobDobbins Fri 3 Oct 2014 - 5:24

Can we please get some kind of comment on this from the developers? And also My proposed solution?

This is really getting out of hand. One player in one gang has been able to add 4 HQs in 2 days using this and has a 5th ready to be transferred in.

This completely ruins the game. I have players in my area that could be taking advantage of this on squares worth 400-500$ meaning I could benefit more than anyone and I refuse to allow them to do it. If this is really what the game is becoming, I think I'd rather just quit than try to game the HQ system to get ahead.

DevilsNipple Fri 3 Oct 2014 - 10:35

@Bill

My point was that players would need to leave their gang for a month just for benefits of the HQ, it's not something I'd want to do for a few extra points.

There is really not a lot to be don't other than extending the time fie HQs maybe. Of you make players unable to rejoin a hang shot will go wrong.

Way I see it. As much as I hate the idea you could make HQ's loose like 15% value daily instead of 7.5 so players need more upkeep. If they leave them they end up with a HQ only worth 200 points.

ScrobDobbins Fri 3 Oct 2014 - 16:29

DevilsNipple wrote:@Bill

My point was that players would need to leave their gang for a month just for benefits of the HQ, it's not something I'd want to do for a few extra points.

There is really not a lot to be don't other than extending the time fie HQs maybe. Of you make players unable to rejoin a hang shot will go wrong.

Way I see it. As much as I hate the idea you could make HQ's loose like 15% value daily instead of 7.5 so players need more upkeep. If they leave them they end up with a HQ only worth 200 points.

There are already players that leave the gang and wait a month to build up 6 HQs to transfer back in, so while it might deter a few people, it really doesn't address the core problem. The only way to do that is to prevent HQs from transferring to the new gang.

Losing extra value also wouldn't help much because the minimum HQ value is 2,000. It can't go any lower than that, and a good number of the HQs that are being transferred around are already at minimum. And even if they weren't at minimum, the fact that it can't get any lower than $2,000 still makes it very profitable for a gang to do it. In other words - why bother leaving the house and going to collect 100 $20 properties (the minimum value for a fully defended normal square) when you can get $2,000 points without even leaving the house.

That's the main problem I have with this. The game used to be about going out collecting and defending and maintaining properties. Now it's more profitable to just sit at home and make HQs - by far. And I just find that unacceptable for a game that's supposed to be about geolocation.

Let me put this into perspective. My crew here in my county have never used this method to gain a single HQ. Every HQ that we have was placed legitimately every 5 days (most of the time it's well over 5 days because we allow people in other areas to place them as well). The HQs I can reach from my house alone would be the 21st ranked gang in the country. If we used this method to gain HQs, we could become the number 10 gang in the country without going more than 1 block in any direction from where we live. Maybe I have it wrong, but I don't think that's what the developers intended when they made a geolocation based game.

DevilsNipple Fri 3 Oct 2014 - 16:54

On this subject. We could make it so players HQ's turn to a normal area when they join a gang and the area value will stay at what the HQ was but go down the usual 7.5% daily.

On a different subject. My HQ's in my area are way below 2000 income? They don't seem to go over 210 income when I do money missions. And your saying they should all be 2000? O.o
That's a piss take...

DevilsNipple Fri 3 Oct 2014 - 17:26

Ignore my last confused 2000 income question. I just realised. Players aren't getting 2000 gang points per HQ like your saying. There getting 200 points only if the HQ is maxed out. The 2000 points is money income. And since money income per gang is capped at 3000 then this issue isn't as bad as everyone thinks. Every 5 HQ's only give 1000 points to the gang if fully defended. It's not as major issue as we're all thinking.

RexButtercup Fri 3 Oct 2014 - 17:45

You are seriously underestimating what happens when a whole gang uses this as a strategy. Even a gang with 12 members, imagine if half of them have an extra device laying around the house, and these 6 players use that device to be in an independent gang, where they make an HQ every 5 days, join the player's main gang with the HQ, then leave the gang again. So instead of this one gang of 12 people having one HQ every 5 days, they can essentially place one every day. No matter how you look at it, any gang would love the ability to multiple one property of their choice' value by 10 that much more often, but to do it in this manner seems contrary to the spirit of the game.

Still, it hasn't stopped a gang that started just over 2 months ago from having an inordinate amount of HQs, and no one has been penalized, with no word from the devs on this issue, so I'm left to assume that if you want to compete in this game, you have to find ways to exploit the system. Just like Scrob said, that's not the game I enjoy playing. So hopefully this will be fixed.

DevilsNipple Fri 3 Oct 2014 - 20:31

I guess I just can't see why people bother with it for such small profit. And where I live we own it all with full defence. So even if one of my members leaves it takes a good week just to gain enough land.

There really isn't a lot to be done tough other than putting it back to 1HQ per gang. And I don't think now anyone would like that. Or do what I said previously and make HQ's turn to normal land when players merge again.

ScrobDobbins Sat 4 Oct 2014 - 5:17

DevilsNipple wrote:I guess I just can't see why people bother with it for such small profit.

It's not a small profit - that's the thing. It adds up to hundreds of thousands of points for the top gangs.

One guy in one gang was able to get over $10,000 points for his gang in just over two days without even leaving his house. It drastically changes the nature of a game that used to be about going places and taking properties. When people use this "strategy", it's impossible for people who are actually playing the game as it was originally designed to compete.

More perspective:

You would have to capture and fully defend 250-500 normal properties to match what that one person was able to do without leaving his house. Assuming a person never sleeps and gets 3000$/hr, it would take a person over two months to do that. During those two months, the person mentioned above who was just using their alts to place HQs would be able to place 60 more HQs, totalling at least another $120,000 points.. It's way out of balance and not a "small profit" by any means.

DevilsNipple Sat 4 Oct 2014 - 12:13

How the hell do you explain 1 guy getting 10000 points in 2 days without moving when you can only get about 16 areas max around your area of reach, it takes 5 days wait for a single HQ and even if you didn't move and made all areas a HQ after so long your still only gaining 200 points or a few more per area so your maxing a total gang points of about 3200-4000 after 5 X 16 days for the HQ placements.

It is gang points your all complaining about and not player mission points right...

DevilsNipple Sat 4 Oct 2014 - 12:21

Doing the math of 200 points per HQ and only waiting 5 days for placement you would need a total of 50 people leaving a gang to place 1 HQ each.

If you made it a wait time of 25 days per person to place 5 HQ's then that would make a gang need 10 players leave and wait all that time.

The second option is more likely but still not as bad as everyone is saying. And definitely not 10000 in 2 days.

RexButtercup Sat 4 Oct 2014 - 15:59

A well placed and we'll maintained HQ can easily be worth over $4000. One player with a phone, a tablet, and access to either a parent, sibling, or partner's device(s) can be chief of as many gangs as they have devices. If they are running business missions constantly, the territories will be worth more. So say they have access to 4 devices...placing an HQ per device every 5 days, it would only take 20 days or so for all 16 squares they can touch from home to be turned into HQs. If they max out defenses on them, then that one person has generated a MINIMUM of $32000 gang points without even leaving home. Now imagine multiple people in one gang, in different parts of the country doing the same thing. I'm really not sure how you are not understanding this.

DevilsNipple Sat 4 Oct 2014 - 16:11

Your saying a HQ can be worth 4000 gang income and yet no matter how hard I try my HQ won't even go above 250 income. If I get it to 250 income then money missions no longer appear to increase it further.

I get that this is a problem and that people that are so lazy and so stupid spend countless hours just for some points in a game. But that income your stating is not as high are you say. I have never seen nor herd of a HQ having more than an income of 300. I have asked gangs in social and all of them say there's are about 200 as well. Where in earth are you getting 4000 from...

Igoring the number though, players can and do gain points fast with multiple devices and such and that's just a problem that happens in games. I have given 2 ideas that would seem to work well to stop this happening as much.

Also while I'm on the subject. Nicorr himself told me to split up my gang and fight amongst ourselves because there is no competition near us, at some point we joined up again then split up and so on. So without specifically saying we should farm points Nicorr gas implied it. And we have had to to actually be able to play.

On a last note, until one of the Devs slips his idea into this conversation we are practically just arguing over numbers. Weather high or low it's still an issue and I'm not denying it is one. But we can't exactly do F all until a Dev decides to do something.

ScrobDobbins Sat 4 Oct 2014 - 17:47

DevilsNipple wrote:Your saying a HQ can be worth 4000 gang income and yet no matter how hard I try my HQ won't even go above 250 income. If I get it to 250 income then money missions no longer appear to increase it further.

I think what you aren't understanding is that the income of HQs is multiplied by 10. So your 250 income square is actually worth $2,500.

I have several headquarters worth over $4,500. At the end of the day they approach $5,000 because of missions. You can definitely increase them higher than $250.

ScrobDobbins Sat 4 Oct 2014 - 17:48

DevilsNipple wrote:The second option is more likely but still not as bad as everyone is saying. And definitely not 10000 in 2 days.

The $10,000 in 2 days is not a hypothetical. It actually happened. The total is actually a little over $10,000 because some of the squares were worth $2,200 and $2,400.

So yeah. It can, did, and does continue to happen.

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