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The Commonwealth Dept of Foreign Affairs “Strength through Growth and Unity” To whom it may concern, At this time tCW has issued our 72hr notice to Mile High Club. We no longer consider our position in MHC to be strategically viable. We wish all parties the best moving forward!

City timers have bugged me for a long time. I honestly not really sure of what the mechanic really exists for any more. It was created when we all had only a handful of cities and in theory new players could instantly catch older ones. This however is no longer the case, a new player is probably never going to catch Fenris at c50 now (which is a problem in itself but not one for this thread). It's quite simply outdated and I highly doubt too many people are buying cities every 10 days after c20 anyway. I also don't like the idea of punishing raiders for spending time actively trying to catch up to then be punished for months waiting for cooldowns. The game already has enough barriers for players to catch up, don't really need this one any more.

An official message from The Monastery As the map indicates, the Monastery hereby activates Article 1 of its treaty of amity with Sunray Victoria. May God have mercy on your souls, Arrgh, 99A, etc. For we will as well. The Monastery hereby declares neutrality, and will be sending SIGNIFICANT and DECISIVE support to our allies in the form of thoughts and prayers. Jehovah Nissi!

If only Rose can find another alliance to ally with, one that has historically used the color green as part of its motif. tbh I'm coming up blank 🤷‍♂️

Polaris gives its 72 Hour Cancellation Notice to the Mile High Club. It is unfortunate that our partnership has come to a conclusion so soon, but the Mile High Club is no longer a viable path for Polaris, strategically nor politically. We wish luck to all members of the Bloc, wherever their plans and future may take them. Polaris Prevails. /s/ Cobrastrike, Emperor, Deja, Minister of Peace, JadenStar10, Minister of Love, Bohemond Hauteville, Imperial Officer of Truth EaTeMuP, Imperial Advisor Kriegskoenig, Imperial Advisor AlmightyGrub, Imperator Emeritus

Today 00:46 (Central European Standard Time) - Multiple reports of gunshots and explosions in several port cities with GATO. Today 00:48 - Multiple amphibious vehicles land in GATO port cities and beaches. Hostile Aircraft enter GATO airspace. Today 00:51 - Gunfire abrupts in GATO port cities, Multiple hostile vehicle and aircraft cross into Sunray Victoria. Border towns and military bases of both nations report gunfire and explosions. Today 00:59 - Hostile Aircraft enter Sunray Victorian Airspace. Major cities within Sunray Victoria bombed. A state of war has been confirmed. TL;DC - Sunray Victoria recognizes hostilities with Arrgh, Ayyslamic Caphilate, 99942 Apophis, and other coalition members.

Will people finally listen to me now when I say Rose is a bad ally?

I want to vote no to hard cap. If someone has no life and can play baseball all day, that's on them honestly.

See title. TLDR of changes that could improve it significantly: - Make it easier to find. It's hidden away and heavily mentioned as an afternote. Working it into the tutorial (after these other changes, also rework tutorial entirely but thats another thread that im sure will come later) will make it more prominent. - Let aas have more characters to describe themselves. -Set up certain community-decided on tags (ie, Raiding Alliance, New Player Friendly, City x Requirement, etc) and a search system alongside that to allow alliances to tag themselves and show them what kind of things players can expect from that alliance, as well as search for specific types of alliances. -Make it look better. This just looks... rough. Again, search system would go a long way and I believe there's a few webdesign people in the community that have already worked on an idea for this specifically. Th I'm sure there's more ideas I missed, but I'm mainly posting this to open the conversation and also bother @Prefontaine about it. Feel free to add below.

For those who don't know, the reason why TCW is dropping Rose is because Rose is signing a treaty with The Syndicate. Hence this quip:

My main issue with this poll is you're going to walk away from it with whatever the result is and say "look, the community wants a hard cap of $X million", yet there's no option to maintain status quo. I see a lot of fuss being made about how this is intended to protect the low tier from people spawning a bunch of money during a raid but that argument fails to recognize that most competent low tier raiders are already making 20-30m per day raiding, so I doubt it's the hypothetical extra 6m from baseball that's really putting them over the edge in any given raid. This honestly seems to me like it could potentially have an adverse result. As someone who started playing less than a year ago, I take issue with any attempt to try to remove/reduce ways for new players to generate active income. This game has existed for almost 8 years now, with some players being there from the start. The only way for new players to hope to catch up to that 8-year head start is by devoting a lot of time to generating active income, whether it is from raiding, trading, running businesses or playing baseball. In many cases all those sources of income combined, despite requiring a commitment of several hours per day, can't even hope to produce as much income as the passive income generated by a large long-term player who might not even log in every day. Since I started playing last year, I've seen people take issue with the amount of raiding income generated by small nations, the trading income being made by active traders, and now apparently the relatively tepid income generated by certain players spamming baseball games. Claiming that any of those sources of income is an unfair way to make money just seems to me like a misguided attempt at protecting the numerous advantages conferred upon long-time players. It seems some people just won't be happy until the only income generated in-game is the passive income generated from sitting around doing nothing. If someone wants to spam baseball games, let them. If it weren't for these few key players playing hundreds of away games every day, nobody would be making any money from home games either.

I don't think this is nearly the problem you make it out to be. 6m extra a day for that much effort is genuinely nothing when you can do simple buy low/sell highs on the market for significantly less effort and more money. I'd rather time be devoted to things that are important rather than trying to fix a nonexistent problem.

This is inherently flawed logic, as a dev team you should be committed to improving a game and maximizing player retention. Why are you instead trying to reduce player interaction? Also you can't say baseball does not include core mechanics as many high tier players will actively embargo people and even entire alliances during war to prevent them profiting and to avoid loses. This is literally an example of Politics and War through the influences of baseball, not to mention some players also refuse to remove embargoes unless paid off, which is more politics then we see in our current peace treaties. So please elaborate how your proposed changes would positively influence the game? If you can't think of any besides what you have already mentioned you might want to question the purpose of this "patch". Okay, lets assume this isn't a flawed point. (Despite the fact the whales are growing faster than ever as well and most small players are growing due to that increased tax/revenue alliances have spare for grants) Baseball is one of the few options in the game that allows you to play to win. I know most modern developers view this concept as alien but it's a very important part of games, especially for those that are free to play. The more you reward people for actively playing, the more they are willing to stay playing. This in turn gives you more time to convert them into real customers. What's with the dev team and this rather authoritarian approach to the game? If you are dead set on changing something don't bother with these stupid posts, you clearly don't want real player input. (I've seen this trend over and over again on the forums) If you actually want real player input your post should of been discussing the potential of changing baseball and a poll to determine if it was wanted and a secondary to determine the route the change would take. Instead you skipped all this and said "we have an solution to a non-existant problem, please vote and allow us to make a confirmation bias!". Step 1: add a captcha every 5 minutes and allow people to stay on the "host game" or "play away game" menus after they press the button. Step 2: Stop acting like Stalin. We all know it's possible that people cheat, but you can't just start shooting features because of this. In theory the entire game could be just one dude with an elaborate bot system running VPNS, random log in schedules and pre-defined activities. Pretty sure a certain thing exists in most countries of the world called innocent until declared guilty. If something is suspicious investigate it, track these players activity, log in times, the delays between captchas appearing and being completed, the consistency of their ability to play baseball. You already showed us that most this information is logged and tracked so use it to your advantage. Did you not hire an independent moderator team for this purpose? Didn't expect to write a damn WOT but here I am ffs, I don't even really play baseball, maybe ~300 games on record.

Rose and t$ to their allies:

Right? I've been trying to breathe life into VE's corpse for hours, but no luck. Guess I'll have to do some more thinking.

I think this is a really important point. Baseball adds an interesting niche of international politics rather than alliance-alliance politics. The political interactions I've had have actually been a lot of fun, even despite me playing baseball pretty casually. The solution to me is very obviously to make the feature more accessible so more players can be involved with it, rather than trying to curve an income inequality (which reminder: there is already a giant income equality between old and new players). The solution is to let newer players make more money from it, rather than to stop older players making as much.

And for those who are wondering: yes Alex has approved a script to automate rewarded ads, and yes you can freely get it on github as a tampermonkey extension.

I'm fine with that, though I don't know that a "math" captcha is secure enough. I agree on this point; I was sympathetic to this argument in the past (it's a tool for losers to recoup) but I agree that with Rewarded Ads, you can still achieve this but without baseball. Plus, if you can find a way to effectively bot rewarded ads, the only person you're defrauding is the ad company, so it's a non-issue.

Damn thalmor, no foreplay? The anticipation is like, half the fun.

I'm so glad this doesn't foreshadow anything! Congrats on the move, interested to see what's next.

Where to start, where to start? 1) Instead of focusing on something you admit affects a very small minority of the players the dev team should fix things that affect 100% of players? Things like ships have 0 defenses against air attacks or the fact that you can lose all your spies in 1 reset and that it takes 3 weeks to rebuild them even if they aren't all killed every other day. 2) Because the away player can only earn a maximum of $850 and that only if they win the game. The home game player can earn up to $25,000 per game depending on the level of both teams. Since you only earn 100% revenue for the first 250 games you play each day, home or away, players can no longer play both home and away games and expect to make any money in an efficient manner. If two 100 level teams play each other the home team can make around $5 million from the first 250 game that they get 100% revenue from before any tips are calculated. It cost roughly $45 million to fully level a team from scratch. After a player retires it costs roughly $3 million and 150 clicks to level each new player. 3) Perhaps we could get a dev team that actually plays the game in an active manner instead of just sitting back looking for things to screw up. 4) Sheepy and the dev team are always saying they are trying to make it easier for new players to catch up to older players, baseball allows them to do that because even the small amount of money they make playing baseball, even with a low level team, that money means a lot more to a small nation than it does to a larger nation. So by attempting to nerf baseball once again you are hurting the small nations more than you are the larger nations that play baseball.

@Prefontaine you say it’s not a core mechanic, or at least not intended as a core mechanic, however tell that to the hundreds of folk who use it during war allowing them to play the game to its fullest capacity. This change could cause instability and power imbalance in the gameplay elsewhere IMO. Also $6mil extra daily being earnt by such a small percentage of players, even if it were bots, is such a piddling amount hardly able to unsettle the broader Orbis economy. Honestly @Alex I think there are bigger fish to fry. i don’t support a hard cap at all, though if one is coming anyway, then it should be the highest amount possible.

No one wants this change, fix stuff that is actuall broken and make changes that have been promised (but not implemented). If some dude can make a few million extra by selling his soul to spamming baseball, so be it. Good for him if thats how he stays active, grinds for money, and enjoys the game. What are we going to do next, ban trading cuz its too profitable? Ban banks for their interest rates? I would turn this around and say that Baseball should be restored to its pre nerf status.

VE's soulless husk is starting to look fresher than ever! I think we might be able to make this work, after all. 😌

So can we have the global rate of return on baseball? You know, the extended playerbase and not just a few outliers. I would quite like to see how profitable baseball is compared to the money the global playerbase has sunk into it. Also, can we see the sunk costs of these players? I feel like just going "This guy made an extra 6mil but spent 5+ hours doing it is bad" is a horrible approach." Plus it's also these players that tend to keep baseball running since they allow less active players to quickly do their baseball games instead of having to wait extended periods of time. If you guys really find it a problem why not just slap some paid ads all over the baseball page? This way you can line your pockets and advertisers will be happy with those high view rates!

Baseball is already extremely inaccessible. The UI for it is quite obtuse and time consuming, and it takes absolutely forever to make any money whatsoever. Baseball is fun but it's also extremely obtuse in a way that makes it inaccessible to many players. Baseball is already extremely inaccessible. The UI for it is quite obtuse and time consuming, and it takes absolutely forever to make any money whatsoever. Baseball is fun but it's also extremely obtuse in a way that makes it inaccessible to many players. To add onto the UI aspect, hosting a game should not kick you out of the menu. You should stay on the hosting a game and be able to host games as they finish. That would make it 100% better. Same feature for away games. Some rebalancing of costs and benefits would be great as well. I understand that you don't want to make baseball a "must have" for nations to be successful, but as it is now, it's just a pain in the ass to use.

Like probably most players, I have never made back the money I have invested in baseball bc I’m bot sitting at my computer/phone for several hours a day. Revenue per game should really be balanced for the away team and the overall revenue for a game could be probably like doubled. You don’t have to make it a cash cow just enough to help people get by. With how brutal being beige cycled can be a decent revenue from rewarded ads and baseball combined keeps the player bc they don’t feel like there’s no point. The amount of people who just give up in gws bc it’s just hopeless is way to high

@Adrienne if you want to add an in-game alliance recruitment page to the QoL, please link directly to this thread in the OP of the QoL.

So what we learn from this is that sheepy is fine with scripts that make him money but hates baseball because it doesn't. What a lovely attitude.

The amount of time that sheepy and the dev team have put into nerfing baseball over the years instead of focusing on truly game breaking flaws in the game is just astounding. The dev team and pre in particular have had a hard on with baseball for years, they just need to give over and focus on fixing the things that really matter to the vast majority of the game.

I think the biggest issue here is it's not clear that people are "no lifeing" baseball. They could very well be cleverly using automated scripts that are either somehow able to evade the captchas, or they are just doing the captchas themselves every 15 minutes. Does that change anyone's perspective? Are you still okay with people generating free money just by turning on a script rather than actually sitting and clicking a button? EDIT: And I'll add, because I'm sure the response will be "just ban the cheaters" - it's basically impossible to tell how you're clicking a button. If you want us to just ban the people who make these crazy outlier amounts in baseball, we can do that, but there's a real chance we end up just banning some actual "no lifers" too.

What's the point in polling the community then if you've basically already decided the outcome? I notice the rest of my post was just ignored, but I'll restate that I strongly feel the dev team is going in the wrong direction by focusing on ways to reduce active income that actually keep people engaged with the game. Someone who logs in once a week shouldn't be growing at the same rate (or possibly even faster due to their size advantage) as someone who plays for several hours a day.

Poor HS is France? What a kick in the nuts.

Welcome back to the game

Be bold! Restore the Neutral Menace! D:<

I’m pretty sure we’re not the only ones. Anyway given the initial and ongoing investment required to keep earning an appreciable amount when playing baseball during times of war, I think it reasonable to allow it to continue to be unaffected by blockades. Given TKR was on the receiving end of the worst of NPOLT, and as a baseball player (amongst many) grateful for it as a source of income at the time, I fail to see how nerfing baseball could be a good thing from this perspective. Baseball isn’t taxed afaik so how could a farm benefit an alliance by playing it? (a farm being illegal in the first place). I really think the core of the agenda is the noisy minority who don’t play trying to disadvantage their active opponents who are willing to put the effort in to not be trod on; high city count , high infra pixel huggers if you like! I think the bot thing has been poorly sold as an argument in your favour given the trifling amounts in question. i remain a staunch opponent of this measure! I remain a staunch proponent of measures that target bot users and other rule breakers.

Something funny about baseball is that I have seen so many posts seeing it is broken and needs changes over the years, and that while it has so few mechanics. That being said, if it causes this much problems maybe we should just consider deleting it / reworking the whole system so people who spend 4 hours playing baseball can go do something usefull instead 😛 (and botting is not a concern anymore).

No to hard cap. One suggestion is that i should get to kick baseball players, and buy a new on for some money so that i Dont have to spend money on maximizing my team by upgrading older players.

On avg, it takes around 15s for a game to be played and to get the next game going. A game gives you around 15k. To make 15m, you'd need to play 1000 games, waste 15000s = 4.2 hours. Maybe more, maybe less but 4 hours a day on avg spent of a browser game(not on discord, mind you) really makes me question their mental health more than it would make me question their daily earnings. Edit: Note that earnings fall off after reaching 2.5m or so to 1/10th. You'd need to give way more hours to this than 4.

You don't actually think they will bestir themselves to investigate a couple of people that may be using a bot do you? It's much easier to punish the many for the sins of the few.

Question goes back to my first comment on this thread, you don't recognise hostilities from people who aren't being hostile to you, unless of course GATO is your extension, @Grey_wall could clarify. The way "for allies" thing works is you do a DoW in defense of your ally on the aggressor, not do an RoH and act like the poor defenders when you were not even hit in the first place. The "scattered wars" is again literally just one guy declaring two odd wars lol, if you are recognising hostilities from him, sure I guess.... I'll let him know.

Good luck getting anything out of the dev team that doesn't fit sheepy or pre's narrative

What alliance is going to dump all that cash into a noob they just met? If they want to throw that much cash away on players that won't stick around than by all means be stupid.

Minesome rn:

When I once left politics the only game feature I'd login for was baseball I'd literally play it for like 2 to 3 hours relaxing and bored but with peace of mind. I'm sorry to inform you but when most players big and small are telling you it's not a problem it's largely not I have long since found the argument about small nations catching up to larger nations a problematic argument because people don't have a solution for it and the only correct approach is often made by a competent econ person who no one will allow to give them what they want to accomplish said task and a extra 6mil a day achieved by 10% of all baseball players is not a game breaking matter Its also insulting to some players as ive had a player who would work long security shifts and we'd ping games back and forth out of boredom and chill. Fact is simple this game is political and again some of you forget it's a game if catching up on cities is a problem there is a variety of ways to do exactly that Now with this said if I want to spend hours of my day tired and spamming baseball falling asleep over my desk why is the fact I'd enjoy doing that to myself being stripped from me like im sorry why not solve the fact people can murder 20 spiez In a single spy op. Why not fix the fact ships are easily murdered by planes with almost no defense. How about we add a thing where ships can do a tiny amount of damage to planes. How about the fact when I want to watch a rewarded ad the ad company refuses to send me an ad so I can't drain my soul away And the most important take from this is Alex said we can scam the ad company to get a overwhelming advantage but I can't spend 5 hours playing a mini game he made inside of his game that I have to wait literally hours for things to happen in. Also yes I intend to spam ads now because Alex literally gave permission and I may as well use a chrome extension

Paragon is Paragone. unless...

I didn't know Grumpy historically used green as a part of it's motif 🧐.

They must have found the Wei.

Could be doable.