Terracore: Devlog #34 - Idle Player Decay & Bot Greif Balancing

<h2><strong>Hello Fellow Citizens! <p dir="auto">I hope everyone had a relaxing weekend and is ready to tackle of a new week in the best way. Today I am coming at you with a short devlog. We had a bunch of community discussion in the Discord this weekend following the latest release and think we have come to a good balance on a lot of the feedback we received from everyone on how to balance and add to the Player Decay check. <h1>New Player Decay Code <pre><code>async function calculateMineRate(engineeringLevel, result) { const nextUpgradeCost = Math.pow(engineeringLevel + 1, 2); const timeToNextUpgrade = 48 * 60 * 60; // 48 hours in seconds var mineRate = nextUpgradeCost / timeToNextUpgrade; // Check if user has last_upgrade_time in the object if (result.last_upgrade_time == null) { result.last_upgrade_time = Date.now(); } //mine rate calculation const daysSinceUpgrade = Math.floor((Date.now() - result.last_upgrade_time) / (3600000 * 24)); let decrease = 0; let decreaseRate = 0.01; // Start with a 1% decrease if (daysSinceUpgrade > 5) { for (let i = 5; i <= daysSinceUpgrade; i++) { if (mineRate * (1 - decrease - decreaseRate) <= 0) { // If the next decrease will bring mineRate to 0 or below, set it to 0 and break the loop mineRate = 0; break; } decrease += decreaseRate; decreaseRate *= 1.5; // Increase the rate by 50% each day } } if (mineRate > 0) { mineRate = mineRate * (1 - decrease); } // For every 5 days, decrease the number of attacks by 1 (Remove Attacks from Players that are Inactive) const weeks = Math.floor(days / 5); if (weeks > 0) { const attacksToRemove = 1 * weeks; result.attacks = Math.max(0, result.attacks - attacksToRemove); } return mineRate; } <h4>Mine Rate Decay <p dir="auto">Here is the new check for the mine rate you can see it is MUCH larger in short we made changes to when and how the mine rate decay starts. It will not only start to decay after 5 days of inactivity have passed ( many users stated that they should not be impacted before they have even had time to do the next upgrade or action... I agree with this.) <h4>Attack Decay <p dir="auto">Attacks will now also start to decay -1 every 5 days.. you might ask why why why, well it's simple, there are some bots in the game that are not doing anything past a certain point, it's not that we are not bot friendly (we actually are) but a bot that is sitting at the same levels and not progressing is a net negative. The largest negative is not what you think... it's actually a grief to the new player experience. When a new player joins and starts leveling they may have 100s of bots slightly above them and that player is now their MAIN target... 100s v 1 its takes longer to level up and they are constantly under attack barrage from the bots. <p dir="auto">I have also added another reset to the activity cooldown, it will now also be reset when you purchase a crate from the store using $SCRAP <h1>SWAP FEATURE <p dir="auto"><span>We have also added a new swap feature using <a href="/@keychain">@keychain new swap service api. This is a 3rd party service and may have fees now or in the future included in the service but we wanted to add it to the user facing interface to make the experience easier for players not as familiar with the <a href="/trending/hive"> #hive ecosystem. <p dir="auto"><img src="https://images.hive.blog/768x0/https://files.peakd.com/file/peakd-hive/terracore/Eo8Kanhsmm9oWFdujnaxVxNCoG14erZpLEu3tAfGt22jEuQqyzac6B1TGKYkoTockHY.png" alt="image.png" srcset="https://images.hive.blog/768x0/https://files.peakd.com/file/peakd-hive/terracore/Eo8Kanhsmm9oWFdujnaxVxNCoG14erZpLEu3tAfGt22jEuQqyzac6B1TGKYkoTockHY.png 1x, https://images.hive.blog/1536x0/https://files.peakd.com/file/peakd-hive/terracore/Eo8Kanhsmm9oWFdujnaxVxNCoG14erZpLEu3tAfGt22jEuQqyzac6B1TGKYkoTockHY.png 2x" /> <p dir="auto"><img src="https://images.hive.blog/768x0/https://files.peakd.com/file/peakd-hive/terracore/23swdkaV6ZW841CXjXAAuifTUCdBaqmDuHgo2Xp8hPTxDNgnAbynXeogWBGGBSAmSzCkx.png" alt="image.png" srcset="https://images.hive.blog/768x0/https://files.peakd.com/file/peakd-hive/terracore/23swdkaV6ZW841CXjXAAuifTUCdBaqmDuHgo2Xp8hPTxDNgnAbynXeogWBGGBSAmSzCkx.png 1x, https://images.hive.blog/1536x0/https://files.peakd.com/file/peakd-hive/terracore/23swdkaV6ZW841CXjXAAuifTUCdBaqmDuHgo2Xp8hPTxDNgnAbynXeogWBGGBSAmSzCkx.png 2x" /> <p dir="auto"><br /> <hr /> <p dir="auto"><em>That's it for today, all the links are below be sure to follow us to here what we are working on and follow the progress!<br /> <br /> <hr /> <p dir="auto"><strong>Play Terracore:<br /><br /> <strong>Check Out our Wiki:<br /><br /> <strong>Follow us on Twitter:<br /><br /> <strong>Follow us on PeakD:<br /><br /> <strong>Come join the discord to learn more:<br /><span> <a href="https://www.terracoregame.com/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener" title="This link will take you away from hive.blog" class="external_link">https://www.terracoregame.com/<span> <a href="https://cryptognome.gitbook.io/terracore/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener" title="This link will take you away from hive.blog" class="external_link">https://cryptognome.gitbook.io/terracore/<span> <a href="https://twitter.com/terracoregame" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener" title="This link will take you away from hive.blog" class="external_link">https://twitter.com/terracoregame<span> <a href="https://peakd.com/@terracore" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener" title="This link will take you away from hive.blog" class="external_link">https://peakd.com/@terracore<span> <a href="https://discord.gg/dgJU6RqMv4" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener" title="This link will take you away from hive.blog" class="external_link">https://discord.gg/dgJU6RqMv4