If some portion of other players' score were unknown, it would be hard to form any kind of strategy not knowing what their true, real time score is.
Oh, I probably wasn't clear on that. But, the overall score leaves nothing out, as far as things to calculate. For all intents and purposes the overall score is in fact their "true, real time score" as you would call it.
The data that's currently being kept secret is only the math steps behind how that score is arrived at. It's always been possible to watch the global chat, poke around on EL and piece together the math steps behind someone's score. You could always watch if someone was hunting fish or mining enmatter on EL, and that's how I wanted it to be. I wanted to "reward" peoples' effort and craftiness, because what I'm saying may appear plain as day obvious to some, but not to all.
I don't like "spoon feeding" all data to everyone. Theres certain data that must be made available or it compromises the event, that data is the overall score. You can trust that score and it should not ever be kept secret, which it isn't.
I guess my philosophy and approach was that people needed to be able to see a final score with everything calculated, which they can; but require them to do some work on their own to gain a "leg up" so to speak.
I wanted to provide someone who was at the top the ability to "cloak" their moves without completely broadcasting them so easily. Obviously, their moves would only be "cloaked" to the less observant. Theres probably a lot of people who would have been keeping their eye on the players above them, no doubt, and very well have had 3 or 4 windows open an EL monitoring their competition. But that was the point
that effort was being "rewarded" from keeping the math steps less accessible.
Because, I dont think everyone would have played that way. Hopefully the intent behind my initial decision is being made clear.
Ultimately, that's only a small portion of "strategy" being removed, and there's still heaps of strategy left to take full advantage of.
The score you want to react to, and the score you want to base your moves off of is still the Overall Leaderboard score. Releasing the math steps is only going to show you the steps behind the equation, like 2 + X = 5. X is always 3, and you can figure that out pretty quickly. So when you see 2 + 3 = 5 actually seeing the 3 doesn't change the fact that 5 is still 5, you just know how we got there. 5 in this case, is your overall score.
EDIT:
Sorry
I have two major hobbies, table top board games, and Entropia. I definitely think my love of board games has bled over into this event
and it would be remiss of me to fail and mention MeLoveYou LongTime fivedolla's influence. 5$ was by far and away the very best LA Manager I knew of in game years ago. There were certainly elements borrowed and built upon from his events that are present in Lootius Mayhem. Much respect to what he did for the LA Management scene when he ran Songkra and the bunch.
Some of my absolute favs in case you're curious: Kingdom Death Monster, Blood Rage, Scythe, Food Chain Magnate, Cthulhu Wars, Terraforming Mars, Terra Mystica, Gloomhaven, and so on and so on...