Thoughts on binmat/pvp, because I missed all this discussion 1. Binmat is actually pretty fun as a game when everyone plays fair. There's been varying levels of activity around it, but binm.at was fairly popular for a while. Lots of people never really engaged with it though B. I think part of the problem with binmat is historical - it had a rocky launch which discouraged people from trying it out initially 3. Most of the current problem with binmat as something for people to play with revolves around the issues of sab mechanics. If this went away we'd at least see more binmat bots trying to play it. There's also the sneaking off resources thing but actual PvP eco is beyond me iV. There is no PvE binmat, which means that binmat is PvP only and most people never *need* to engage with it. If sab were removed there'd be a big leap in complexity in being able to do PvP, because now everyone who PvP's is suddenly forced to also binmat at a level better than the existing bots - which will beat bad players. As a potential suggestion, some T1/2/3 with very basic binmat and no locks could see a big leap in engagement while making it fun and accessible five. The technological barrier to entry to PvP is currently very, very high. A player with logs, A5, usac, acct_nt, data_check and binmat is inaccessible to most players, but they mostly don't actually provide any meaningful protection from being attacked otherwise √36. Given the high technological barrier, the pool of available PvP players is much smaller than the pool of PvE players. Its not hard to get engagement for a puzzle from people (although... getting useful engagement out of the shitposting is a different topic heh), but getting engagement for PvP is significantly harder. Personally I think new players and other folks would PvP more if they could do it with less complexity involved, which I think means in practice that the mechanics of defending yourself need to be improved before the technological barrier to entry is lowered, otherwise we'll see everyone doing it and driving everyone insane That's my thoughts as someone that has never done any PvP but has been a lot involved in binmat. In terms of fixing it, this is a set of suggestions that everyone is free to dunk on, each one assuming that one before it is implemented 1. Sabotage as a concept overall in binmat should probably go away in the general case. Randomised attacker/defender traces would solve this, while also allowing for a degree of espionage to spoil high value games, which *is* interesting. This would massively shift balance towards defenders in the current metagame 2. The costs for binmat as a defender are super high, and the scaling in price for T1/2/3/4 users (as well as the limited number of users for most people) severely restricts the financial feasibility of it. Costs should be both lowered and recouped entirely by the winner. People could easily breach me no matter how good my binmat bot is, because I run out of cash, even if i win every game! This seems silly 3. The barrier to PvP is (in my opinion) currently much too high. T3 in the current environment is only really accessible to folks with many users, and getting enough resources to PvP is limited to people with OOG bots. The technical complexity of getting there is also very high, with the reason to do so (beyond the memes) being low. PvP should be a viable way of getting resources and having fun - even as a noob. Personally I think this basically stems from locks never really having worked for PvP So here's my most crazy suggestion, combined with all the above. You already have to binmat to PvP, so make binmat the main form of PvP, and use locks to supplement it. Make it so that (with the existing ruleset on who can binmat whom), you can immediately initiate binmat to start a breach on anyone's loc, without *needing* to hack any locks at all. For every lock you don't hack though, the attacker gets a penalty. Eg, for every unhacked lock, the defender gets [for all locks, extra cards += sqrt(min(lock_rarity, lock_level)]) extra cards to every pile or whatever. If the defender wins, you get a lockout where those specific users involved in the attack can't attack you again for an amount of time, depending on how many locks were unhacked (eg a n00b's user attacking dtr with no locks hacked might only be able to try once per day, but zez solving 95% of dtr's locks would have the minimum cooldown of an hour or whatever between tries) That way, anyone can PvP but defenders get a huge advantage for having better, rarer, and higher tier locks, which means that there's some incentive to horde purps and farm. Even the worst binmat bot would beat a T1 player trying to go after dtr due to the stacked deck, and having some financial cost to losing would stop n00bs from pillaging all the other n00bs in an apocalypse. The lock meta would still be important because it'd significantly soften up your target, but not being arsed to solve usnax is no longer a game-over for PvP This is all still pointless if defenders can siphon off all their resources during a binmat game. You could potentially alter the ratelimit by what % of locks have been solved during a binmat game - 100% locks solved means very low ratelimit, <50% of locks solved means no ratelimit. Combined with cool off mechanics this might be acceptable Anyway that's my bit see you guys later

Lots of people like the "entering riskspace" idea, but I think the only proper way to do that would be if we get new locks in riskspace, ranging from easy to hard, over time.

To be honest, xfers being blocked in binmat calls is a way easier and more straightforward way to block siphoning. It is more brutal, but I feel like that's what we need in these times

The main problem with a straight up block is that if we're encouraging people to do pvp more and are successful, it'll totally destroy defenders' ability to do anything. You could just lock down dootr/whoever indefinitely

True, but because of the amount of turns in binmat, any sort of ratelimit could be circumvented by, essentially, just xferring on every move.

Gonna lock down the thread for now. More discussion I'm sure will happen soon. :)