minimize early surrender
So I've been thinking about this a while and let me start by saying I really don't care about points and levels. That being said I wonder if you could get people to play longer and not surrender if there was a certain amount of points won for being "2nd" place or even "3rd". It gives players an unfair advantage if the person next to them surrenders and they get undeserved territories where if the player who surrenders has an incentive to fight on it would make the game more challenging. you could make it a progressive point system and have a minimum number of players for it to go into effect.
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Gus Squared commented
An easy implementation of this idea would be to allow draws to be declared, and to keep a tally of such draws. Implementing a draw feature would be straightforward -- the code for Vote To End could be recycled with minor modifications such that if all active players (not surrendered, booted, or eliminated) agree, the game is ended with a draw being registered for each of the players.
Players stats could then be modified to display Wins/Losses/Draws ( Percentage (Wins/Total Games) ).
Adding draws would add another dimension to FFA and multi-team games. In particular it would encourage the 2nd and 3rd place players to cooperate to prevent a win by the player who is winning. As well, it would encourage smaller players, who are in a strategic position, to leverage their location to be included in any possible draw.
There is a downside to the draw feature. From what I have seen in the game Diplomacy, most games end up in 3-way draws. This occurs because once there are three players, it is very difficult to try to eliminate someone without opening yourself to being eliminated by the third player. The same might occur here in FFA, although very skilled players would still have many more solo victories to brag about.
Draws would be a fun feature.