successive donations needed are too high!

[Oregon Taz]

Reed, what is the rationale of making successive donation amounts increase so much?
It makes the rich get richer as they have the extra goods to donate, but the poor have to wait a long time for the amount to decrease enough that we can afford to donate.

[Rama-Seph]

Actually, the method used simply rewards patience. Each donation is 150% of the amount donated previously. If you wait for it to go down an hour (I think the last word from those measuring suggested it drops by about 2/hour) you reduce your current donation by 2 and your next donation by 3. The rich (those with enough resources to be impatient) are actually PENALIZED for donating sooner, since the amount donated jumps so high next time. The poor will wait for it to go down to 150 again, and will never see an escalation of donation needed.

It's actually an excellent way of preventing perma-blessing, which was the state of affairs in developed nomes before the increase in donations was added. Now blessings are intermittent, with the delay between determined by how long you and your neighbors can stand to suffer without it before you trigger it again.

[roboczar]

It works out well too, by drawing out other players who got used to the bonus, but are all of a sudden wondering why it's been 5 hours since it shut off.

Increasing participation in the temple is good.

[Deguar]

Have a look at this thread.

http://www.tiltedmill.com/forums/showthread.php?t=20523

I haven't updated it as the issue seemed to have faded away and I haven't had other player confirmation of my figures.

Nonetheless the definitive number I reached on my last tests were that the donations increase by 150% after every blessing and slowly decays at exactly 2 per hour back down to the minimum of 150.

So if I trigger the blessing at 150, the next required blessing immediately after the 48 hour period would be 225.

225 cooling back down to 150 takes 37.5 hours.

If I get impatient and trigger the blessing at the 225, the next required blessing immediately after the 48 hour period would be 337.5 (not sure whether it rounds up or down)

337 cooling back down to 225 takes 56 hours.

In other words, the higher you force the blessing with successive donations the more expensive it gets and the longer it takes to cool down to affordable levels. A lot depends on number of donators but once you get above 600 or so (for 6 equal donators) you actually start losing more than you are gaining. Trigger it at 600, your next required donation would be 900. For that to cool down to 600 takes 150 hours.

So for maximum efficiency you actually want to trigger it at 150 or every 37.5 hours :)

Deguakay
Hetephinushr of Raka (59N) Sandals and Leather
Rakheben of Amunsesh (49N) Sculptures and Bronze
Rawaset of Setger (80N) Jewelry and Gold

[Broney]

It cools down faster than 2/hr- it cools down around 1% an hour, rounded down.

Our current temple which wants 2429 required perfume drops 24/hr. So that's roughly 95 hours until it gets back to 150 needed.

[Deguar]

It cools down faster than 2/hr- it cools down around 1% an hour, rounded down.

Our current temple which wants 2429 required perfume drops 24/hr. So that's roughly 95 hours until it gets back to 150 needed.

That explains why I could never get my first calculations to work out, I eventually decided it was becauase I had used a combination of server time, forum time and GMT for the decay calculations. Obviously my test was only done at 225...2429 would be a bit hard for me to run as a test ;)

Deguakay

[Rama-Seph]

Thank you, I'd wondered if it were something like this, early on no one could agree on the rate, but since this was right after the increases were added donation amounts were in the 200-300 range. 1% makes the ~2/hour that everyone saw, but couldn't agree on.

The 1% decay rate means we all wait about the same time for the next blessing: new requirement is 150% of the previous blessing, so after about 33.3 hours the amount required is 1.5 * (1-.333) = 1.0 times the prior sacrifice. Richer nomes pay more, and impatient nomes can afford to speed this up if they've become wealthier since the last blessing and are ready to give more this time.

(The sacrifice needed will tend to decline exponentially rather than linearly, so this is an approximation, and not a great one. I'm just too tired to whip out the advanced math to figure out the real numbers right now).

[CppThis]

Actually the idea is that the rich wont get richer as fast. Under the old system, their 10% cost the same as everyone else's but because theyre bigger, they get more out of it. So temple donations just became a daily budget item and nothing more.

The new way isnt perfect, but at least it makes it harder for people with good access to luxgoods to have a permanent 10% bonus.