Strategy Breakdown

Here is another excerpt from Wikipedias page on PD. (edited to make it shorter)

Although Tit-for-Tat is considered to be the most robust basic strategy, a team from Southampton University in England introduced a new strategy at the 20th-anniversary Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma competition, which proved to be more successful than Tit-for-Tat.

This strategy relied on cooperation between programs to achieve the highest number of points for a single program. The University submitted 60 programs to the competition, which were designed to recognize each other through a series of five to ten moves at the start. Once this recognition was made, one program would always cooperate and the other would always defect, assuring the maximum number of points for the defector. If the program realized that it was playing a non-Southampton player, it would continuously defect in an attempt to minimize the score of the competing program. As a result, this strategy ended up taking the top three positions in the competition, as well as a number of positions towards the bottom.

This strategy takes advantage of the fact that multiple entries were allowed in this particular competition, and that the performance of a team was measured by that of the highest-scoring player (meaning that the use of self-sacrificing players was a form of minmaxing).

In a competition where one has control of only a single player, Tit-for-Tat is certainly a better strategy.

To me, this has 'clans' and '2 boxing' written all over it, and it explains how although Tit-for-Tat is a strong and stable strategy for an individual, if he is a single agent participating in a system with multiple-agents, the multiple-agents can have an advantage.

This is fairly obvious of course, grouping is better than going solo, you can pool resources, have strength in numbers, and perform min-maxing activities together as described above.

With that in mind, I come to a basic framework of strategies grouped by 'level'. though I'm using the same terms, when applying these to a more advanced situation like Darkfall, they are more like guidelines rather than hard and fast rules, and since this is obviously a more advanced game than the classic PD game, I'm going to split tit for tat into two seperate strategies that are similar but subtly different.

I think the eve scams show that 'Tit-for-Tat, but betray if you see a golden opportunity' is a strategy people use a lot. and similarly many people use 'Tit-for-Tat, and NEVER betray first' as their strategy, hereafter I will refer to them as tat-evil, and tat-good.

Always Defect:
This is the scammer level, a person or clan that betrays at the earliest opportunity. even in single player games with 'evil rewards' this is usually a bad strategy, in mass effect for example, if you betray everyone, you miss a lot of opportunities to do really evil stuff because no one trusts you, in that game the next strategy is better if you are really tring to be 'evil'.

Tat-Evil:
cooperate until you are betrayed, then retaliate. betray if you see a golden opportunity, and betray when you think there will be no retaliation or reputation effect.

Tat-Good:
cooperate until you are betrayed, then retaliate. NEVER betray first, no matter how extreme the payoff on a single interaction.

Tat-good is typically the player with a strict moral code, I think this is again a result of the 'reputation effect', some players decide that any short term gain will ultimately be outweighed by the negative consequences to their future interactions and so resolve to 'avoid temptation' at all costs, even in situations where the payoff is extreme. Note that I do not think this makes them a 'better person' for never betraying, it's just the strategy they have settled on as optimal for them. (and indeed it is optimal for superrational players).

Solo

Always defect:
a fun, but ultimately weak strategy, if you play solo, and attack everyone you see, gank or try to scam people all the time, exploit the system etc, then things will be extremely difficult.

Tat-Evil:
A strong strategy for solo play, in addition to betraying on a golden opportunity, the 'evil' would also include being ruthless on most opportunities, and generally trying to maximise your gains while minimizing (but accepting a small amount of) negative effect on your reputation, examples would include price gouging, heavy pk of enemy races (not even considered 'evil' by most people but rather a game mechanic, and easily explained away if it comes to that), probably 'ninja looting' (a minor offense in this game and again can be explained away as an 'everyone does it' type of thing). and ganking at the noob areas, all activities that will help advance your character but probably not attract too much negative attention to you.

Tat-Good:
On the surface this would appear to be a slightly weaker strategy than tat-evil, you would deal fairly in pretty much all interactions, players that res other players instead of looting them are playing tat-good, they are sacrificing short term gains in the hopes of a less tangible future payoff (reputation). You are open to some exploitation because of your tendency to 'give the benefit of the doubt' but for a character looking to join a clan, or build a reputation (a trader or crafter for instance) this is a stronger strategy than it appears on the surface, and with superrational players it is the optimal strategy (but you won't be playing against very many superrational players in DF heh).

Groups and Clans

Always Defect:
Although the weakest of the 3 strategies outlined, once in a group setting, this strategy defeats both tat-good and tat-evil when facing a single player. the single player is very unlikely to be able to properly retaliate, so you can treat him as badly as you wish, if a single clan becomes completely dominant on a server then they have no incentive to use a strategy other than this (exhibit A: goonfleet on eve), though of course internally they will be using a mix of tat-good and tat-evil when dealing with each other.

Tat-Evil:
For a clan that is 'in the running', i.e. doing well, but not dominant on the server, tat-evil is kindof a mixed bag, if the right opportunity arises using tat-evil could well result in being the 'winner' of the server, and the ruthlessness inferred by this strategy means you would probably be regularly exploiting any solo/clanless players you can find, as well as picking on weaker guilds that you think will not be able to retaliate properly or have enough influence to tarnish your reputation. It offers a lot of benefits but when a guild acts like this it usually risks 'tipping it's hand' too early, revealing to other powerful clans that it is actually untrustworthy.

Tat-Good:
A solid strategy for a clan, but one that is probably unlikely to lead to being the 'winner' on the server, usually clans like this will have strict rules, probably even some scrub rules that prevent them from maximising their gains as honor is placed at a high priority, however the reputation benefits will generally pay off, and it is a 'safer' strategy since a clan that betrays before it is immune to retribution may be completely erased.


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One example of the 'scrub rules' I just mentioned, comes from my time in EQ. I led a dark team guild on the team pvp server called Warlords of Zek, at one point we were nearly the dominant guild on the server (pretty much all regular 'light' guilds stopped trying to fight us and would leave wherever we showed up, was funny gating into the plane of hate with a group, seeing a who list of 60 people and then 2 minutes later seeing it completely empy).

However, there was a guild more powerful than us, and they eventually 'won', their name was Pandemonium, and there was one crucial difference between the 2 guilds, when I created WoZ, I envisioned it as an evil church/army, and I implemented rules in keeping with that, such as 'no crossteaming (teaming with enemy races)' and even no trading with enemy races.

By the end of our time, the no trading part was still technically in effect, but of course was circumvented by nearly everyone and tacitly approved by me, the no-crossteaming we kept till the end though and that was pretty much our doom.

In EQ, you literally could not attack your own race, you could attack other races, but you could also group with them, and heal/buff them etc. Pandemonium was(is, they still exist on TZ) an ARAC guild (all races), we called them dirty crossteamers etc etc. but the simple truth was that 2 or 3 dark elf clerics along with them made it a 10 times harder fight for us.

We simply could not kill their dark elf clerics, so when fighting over plane of hate they would just stand there and heal their guildmembers while we were helpless to anything about it. Despite this difficulty we were a strong challenge to them (and eventually evolved into our own PD outcome, we start scheduling our raids around each other so we wouldn't be fighting all the time). The simple scrub rule of 'no crossteaming' doomed us to 2nd place (others would probably argue this but it's my article, I know that we beat pande in a few of our encounters when no other guilds would challenge them at all, so we get 2nd).

By the time we wanted (at least secretly) to change our position, our reputation was so entrenched in being a 'dark team guild' that it would have felt like a betrayal of our identity to change it.

So, if you are a tat-good clan, you can succeed but beware of scrub rules!

Going back to the 'always defect' option i want to highlight a couple other things, first the guild 'Les Vaindards' that I mentioned in my previous post is following this strategy, and I'm willing to bet they are never significant on a post like this one.

In that post, you can see the PD relationships evolving between the guilds already, which is what makes this game so fascinating.

Finally, notice this post (how sweet of them) from Awful Company, if you don't know, Awful Company is a guild from the 'something awful' forums, that plays in many games, in Eve they are Goonfleet, goonfleet is fairly dominant in eve, they openly scam players with 'recruitment drives' and other such stunts and basically feel secure in playing always defect.

In this game however, you can see that at least for now, they will probably not be quite as brutal, at least until they are dominant, it is my opinion that they are currently using tat-evil as their strategy.