Board Thread:Game Discussion/@comment-11128765-20131024181240/@comment-9890645-20131024191919

Ran, you are inquiring about requests sent to offline players? This has been a problem forever in this game. A few of my seeds escaped this event, and I knew they would as soon as I saw that all my powerful allies on the call were Asian/Australian players and it was 3:00 in the afternoon here in NYC... It's always at the top of most top players' list of things they would fix if they could. ;) As far as we know, the selection of allies and randoms on help requests is thoroughly random, outside of the Deceptirob glitch a few months ago.

Also, I have noticed a small bias towards brand new allies in both sent and received seeds. I wouldn't be surprised if it's built into the game as a subtle confirmation of, "here's your new ally, see what he can do." It's hard to say, though, how much of that is actually small-list bias.

My ally list is nearly full, and it's large - I believe I have 186/187 allies at this moment. Of them, nearly all are T1 and T2 players. Most of the T2 players are from this chat and other forums I frequent. I could pare down my list at the end of episodes, but I don't, because I value all my allies and what they contribute, especially when they are active. This leads to two issues: One, I get so many ally seeds on the last day that I don't get to seed much; and two, people see seeds from me sparingly because they are competing against so many others for them. This is why I'm planning on doing some ally math during the next two weeks. I need to know how this distribution works in order to optimize it. Anyone who wants to collaborate on this would be most welcome, especially since, as I always mention, my Excel-fu sucks and it seems to be a limiting factor for me when I get these grand ideas in my head. ;)