2023-06-18
He also likes OpenTTD and recently held an event where community members could participate in a match like no other.
The game had (it's just been removed) a system for buying shares from other companies. This was rarely activated in multiplayer games because of how broken most players found it. In this case another community member had modded that system and much more of the code to allow for an experience never before possible in OpenTTD.
In a normal multiplayer game there can be up to 15 different transport companies, but this time the limit was 500. We managed to find 64 willing players, myself included. The game was initiated in a paused state where all players could found their companies. As soon as the game started this was no longer possible: the founding companies were the only ones. I named my company Soylent Tea is People.
The shares system had been overhauled so that shares could be bought in 10% chunks instead of the usual 25%. The company owner could also see which players had bought their shares and most importantly buy them back. If a company went bankrupt it was out of the game. If a company was 90% bought out by other players it went bankrupt.
8 in-game years passed before the first shares could be bought. After that it was an economic blood bath. A deadline for the game was set and whoever had the highest company value when it was reached won a much coveted price (i.e. we had no idea what the price would be).
A video summarising the event has now been released, and I am proud to say that I did fairly well.
For a while.
-- CC0 Björn Wärmedal