Other Ivies team up against Old Nassau in online Risk game

Despite last year’s win, the tides have turned against Princeton during the first four weeks of this year’s tournament. Though Princeton currently has 1,010 players, a force second only to Yale’s in size, it is currently in fourth place after Brown, Penn and Yale.

These failures aren’t necessarily due to poor strategy. Last year’s success apparently spurred the rest of the Ivy League to preemptive action early in the tournament.

“[Princeton] won last year, so everyone decided, ‘We have to try to stop Princeton from the very beginning,’ ” Chintan Hossain GS, who also participated in last year’s tournament, said. “We’re a bit low on territories because on the past few turns all of the schools have been ganging up on us.”

A commander from Columbia, sophomore Henry Zhang, confirmed in an e-mail that the other schools were wary of Princeton.

“Because of the Princeton-Cornell alliance last year, it was pretty clear from the start that these two teams would be targeted,” he said. “Logically, it would have been better to have taken [Princeton] out first, but that required a coordinated effort from multiple teams, which did not happen. As a result, Cornell went from second last year to second to last this year,” he said.

Problems discovered during last year’s tournament demonstrated that some players may try a less honest route to success. Some players took control of multiple accounts to employ strategy more effectively.

“The commanders or some other group took control of many accounts (50+ in some cases) and played the game for those players. It was the most efficient and secretive way to do it,” Brendan Heath ’11, one of Princeton’s commanders, said in an e-mail.

The website administration also reported that someone had run scripts to deliberately crash the site at strategic moments during last year’s tournament. There is now better defense against these kinds of tactics, organizers said.

“Our new system uses an intelligent ‘account flagging’ system that automatically notices and takes action on account abusers, attempts at scripting, and any other illegal automated processes,” Nicholas Selz, a sophomore at Yale and director of this year’s tournament, said in an e-mail.

But some think the game itself this year was set up to hurt Princeton’s odds.

“There are a few ‘special territories’ that give players extra energy, the power to teleport, etc. These territories were placed as far away from us as possible — or, rather, we were placed away from them,” Sakura Takemitsu ’12, another player, said in an e-mail.

This arrangement also appears to have helped the current forerunner of the tournament, Hossain said. “As a result of the special territories, Brown is doing very well for the amount of players [it has].”

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“The medical territories may have had the most impact on the gameplay this year,” Zhang said.

He noted that Brown has benefitted from the territories, which “provide an unbalancing advantage.”

Even having the territorial advantage doesn’t stop in-game betrayal, as when Brown turned its back on an alliance with Princeton early in the game, Hossain said. Despite this, Princeton’s commanders have again extended the olive branch to Brown because this time “[Brown] need[s] help picking on Yale,” he explained.

This move is expected, however, to help the Princeton’s team bounce back in its number of territories and increase its chances of reclaiming the lead before the game ends on Nov. 16.