i think being on a differnt village or having the game closed completely makes everything go faster...at least that is how it seems, it oculd be the watched pot syndrome

selecting another village to watch would be the same thing as quitting i imagine since the game is not actively running so everything done would be based on calculation. From my experience minimizing the game is like hitting pause if i remember (dont quote me i forgot my laptop today) the villagers dont move when its minimized. Game running in the background is the same as running in the foreground cept no noises. Fastest is having the game off because there is no slacking on the villagers part, its all based on numbers at that point.

I'm pretty sure that I've seen changes after having the game minimized, so it is not on pause mode. (I'll check later.)

But I've done a rough calculation of how many tech points, building percentage or farming it takes a village to do while watching (ignoring effects like repeating after "kick.") and if I've shut the game off and come back, it seems that not enough work has been done.

I suppose that I can compare the logs for each case, but I was also just wondering what other people have "observed."

If it was the watched pot syndrome, I would expect the opposite... Things would get done quicker when I was not watching the village!

As for minimized like i said dont quote me. But as for the game being on/off. It only makes mathmatical sense that it would get more done offline depending on user skills that are selected, etc. But there is a level of dynamics to the game that i imagine only LDW knows as to how it calculates what a villager who knows 3 skills but has none checked does when the game is off. Logically speaking if you check everyone to a skill, they will accumulate more when the game is off because they wont be doing laundry/swimming/exercising/telling jokes/complaining/arguing/worrying/relaxing/chasing butterflies/etc because its all math at that point. But like i said, there is a level of dynamics to the way LDW calculates the math, that answers the question as a whole.

Yes, logically I agree. But I know that I've been disappointed when I turned the game on and not as much was accomplished as I would have hoped. Maybe I'll do some more research later.

It seems as though the only thing that my villagers like to do when I shut off the game is populate the island. That is why I tend to pause the games I am most interested in when I know I'm going to be gone for more than a half hour.

As for, which is faster. I think they go basically the same. Village Monk is right in the fact that some people may suffer from the watch pot syndrome, and are happier by turning it off and coming back. Then there's some who rather have it close at hand so they can check back at any time.

I have had a scenario where I had a bunch of villagers researching, and my tech points were racking quite slowly. I took several off and put them on farming, keeping only some of my masters. Doing so caused my tech points to make a huge leap as far as the speed they wer racked up goes.