The first time I noticed, it was a female player. She was the top player (and she almost always is... she's very good at it). I was the lowest player, had no better cards to use, and played a Beguiling Smoke Devil. No reward is bad. But there are lesser and better rewards. My least favorite is the tokens. I get plenty of those just by playing. But if I wind up with tokens, it's STILL a good reward. Same with the lamps. I'd rather get a huge experience lamp, than a small one. But small ones are good too. Normally, a small lamp will make about 41,000 exp for me, for just a few minutes of play. That's better than hunting all the Penguins on Tuesday, which can take 30 minutes or more.
The bigger lamps are even better. It's all good. Same for the competitive play aspect in the first part of the game. I'm not a very good player. I usually come in last, or next to last. That's okay. Typically, I run through all the rooms I can, collecting the exploratory tokens. Then work backwards and get as many combat tokens as possible. When when the monsters are gone, start collecting resources. Check any unopened treasure boxes along the way.
Pretty simple procedure. Not even a very good one, considering my usual final position. We're all competing for a finite resource. Nobody stands at the door, bows, and says "After you". We all jam shoulder to shoulder at the door, trying our best to get the prize.
So it totally stunned me last night when someone declared in-game that they were "Not going to turn in their combat tokens because Techreader (me) is being selfish." What? What does that even mean? We ALL play selfishly... nobody says "Hey... I want the smallest lamp!" So he spent the rest of the time standing on his head by the drop bank. (Literally- he's using that for his 'resting' animation.) Spitefully crippling the final scores so nobody can get maxed rewards.
I finally realized it's not childish immaturity. It's a specific strategy, designed to anger other players and put them off their game. There was no sudden leap of logic for me. Guess I'm not that smart. Instead, I found it on a forum. (Tip-it, I think.) People were complaining about the occasional 'missing combat totem'. I've always assumed someone was holding them. Either out of spite, or for more time to hunt cards, or some other reason. People often talk about a glitch, but that seemed like a convenient excuse.
Turns out, there IS a consistent glitch in the Sinkholes. One of the signs of it happening is to have an empty room in the northernmost row of rooms. No monsters, no Exploratory Totem, no resources. Just a number of columns. If this room shows up, chances are high that the Sinkhole will be short on Combat Totems. That answered an ongoing question. The rest of the conversation explained the comment about me being selfish. At least two people in this conversation claimed they use that exact (or nearly exact) quote and randomly choose a player to blame. Just to generate tons of mindless rage. It works. I was really bothered by it. Spend a lot of time trying to figure out what I could have done to annoy him.
Oddly enough, I feel much better now. :^)
It's a much harsher tactic than I would use. But it's just an in-game tactic to break someone's concentration. Now that I know it wasn't personal, it's not such a big deal. Moving forward, it won't bother me any more.
Also, I've quite using world 77. There's not always enough people there to get 2 separate Sinkholes in a row. Switched to World 134, the official Sinkhole world. It's overcrowded, and getting in can take a while. But there's always enough people to play.
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