Zevari

I think you might be a bit out of the loop in regards to this. People are trying to find ways to close the gap between whales not increase them. Also 50% is a crazy buff, to put it in perspective Telecommunications satellite which provides a 10% buff to commerce cost nearly the same as your proposed costs here. Not to mention we have projects that buff each manufactured resource separately. Basically your proposed buffs are far to high, the cost is far to low and the concept goes against the general trend of the game right now.

Supreme Leader Scritchy I come with grave news! It seems our firewall is not working as intended, our comrades can still view enemy propaganda! I fear the harsh truth of our 'military exercise' might cause some unforeseen problems in the near future.

My only suggestion to add ontop of this would be a 'retreat' mechanic. Basically after someone on the offensive defeats their target and puts them into beige, the defender who just got beiged will be automatically forced to offer all other defensive wars peace. So for example if you have 3 people on a counter, if one beiges the other two can instantly peace out without the pirates concession. However the person they were countering for would not get this peace offer since they were not the ones on the offensive. My idea for this is to allow offensive wars some ability to maneuver around this proposed idea while not undermining the general concept of this beige mechanic.

Damn, that's kinda funny honestly. I assume the reason they need to validate instead of the game just auto sending is to prevent adblockers and scripts from bypassing the watch time. (that or contractual obligations, i've got no clue how ads work)

Wait has this happened before? Or was this something they mentioned when you originally did the ad placement stuff? (I'm curious because i've never really heard/seen anything on this) I'm pretty out of the loop in regards to anything that doesn't directly involve game mechanics or my alliance politically. (although I do look at news servers occasionally to get a brief refresher on things)

To be fair you still make a pretty penny from baseball through tips. Alex isn't necessarily wrong in saying the extremes make a lot of money when the top two have 20% of the overall earned. But this is still quite a small number when split over 6 years, and the added fact that the average player makes quite an insignificant amount. However I feel the problem isn't that baseball provides too much revenue but lack of saturation away game players have, hence why these extremes exist. If instead of having two people with ~25bil earned combined we had 25 people with 1bil earned each the dev team would care a lot less. (I think the big numbers on a couple of people gave them a scare)

I can kinda of understand where you are coming from now the extremes are kinda extreme, however in total they have contributed 50% of the net value to the game. See the thing is though, the net income of baseball from the entire history of the game is worth less than 15 days worth of some top alliances income. (I believe Syndicate and Rose make 3bil, correct me if i'm wrong) So 6 years of baseball = 15 days of a top alliances tax, this really isn't that overpowered. Furthermore, the top earners from baseball have so much because few are willing to commit to the grind they do, if even 2-3 more people were as active as they are you would see their daily income drop by over half due to the laws of suppy and demand. So yes, I admit the extremes are quite crazy, but that seems to be due to the lack of incentive to play away games over hosting 250 and calling it a day. Also thank you for the quick response, didn't expect any!

And the 6mil these outliers make won't really affect that growth, City timers will still exist. Making revenue off what is effectively simulated tourism sounds pretty natsim to me, especially if we consider it's inferior to raiding, market flipping, creating businesses or just joining an alliance for grants.

My main issue with removing city timers would be the fact it could cause way more problems that solutions. I don't particularly see it as a big problem. This is simply because having an extremely diverse city range that progressively gets smaller towards the high tiers isn't a bad concept. If people end up building themselves out of war range like certain past examples it doesn't really affect the game. This is made more prominent due to updeclare mechanics and diminishing percentile increases in military forces when you get more cities. (A c40 vs c45 is easier to fight than a c20 vs c25) While flawed in a sense, I feel like the current system is far better than any alternative I can think of or have seen. Maybe I'm just uncreative so feel free to prove me wrong but I just don't see the benefit of removing city except for players who reset or for specific alliances that want to accelerate growths of certain people. (aka tax farms)

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.

Fair enough then, best of luck against the pirates.

I guess the powerplay of declaring war on pirates and providing them more targets and infra to burn is the best move! I mean it's impossible to just set up counters like the rest of orbis and have an MMR that scares them off.

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!

You got hit by 2 aargh pirates and declared all out war on them? Lets see how this one plays out.

Call me crazy but I don't think this is a problem. New player spam really isn't the worst in the world, you can easily ignore it, plus in my opinion it creates a sense of importance and liveliness to the game (which is rather static at the beginning). I don't think I would be playing today if I didn't get that initial spam that encouraged me to join an alliance and in turn a unique community to play with. (This game is kinda boring and painful to do solo if you don't have the connections and skill to do so) Also the prejudice people have against macros/micros is the real problem in this game. We constantly complain about the lack of new interesting politics, maybe that's because we proactive punish the growth of new alliances and players doing their own thing. Have you considered that most small alliances that are semi casual and don't have full sized governments running everything might prefer these "lazy" players because it fits their nature? Not everyone is a diehard player who wants to follow a set meta, many players just want to forge their own nation and find a place for themselves in the game. Maybe you should considering fixing your alliance Wall of text to actually provide logic behind certain things like warchest, mmr, builds and their benefits, grants, tax structures. You know actually provide knowledge and not common sense shit like "oh you need a military guy to do military stuff and a economy dude to do money stuff". But then again, why should we help new players who want to make their own alliances and delve into their own politics, it's easier to yell disband or call them useless or shit. Thank you for reading my mad rant! This isn't meant as a personal attack but more as my opinion on the community as a whole, which by extension includes me.

Rule of thumb for individual wars is to never offer pirates money for a peace offer, they can just attack you again within 12 turns (a day). If you are offered peace in the war it's your choice, you can peace out or continue attacking them for the beige and loot the game will take from them. On a side note, you might want to reconsider your alliance if they haven't explained these kinds of situations and provided some sort of military training.

While that is a valid concern, it's a very easy one to track and negate. (just set a script to monitor any trade deal x-amount below the trade average and have it auto send to the moderation team to check out) I don't think the fear of someone making a second account should prevent the game from developing more dynamic and interesting systems. (I mean we were fine with Alphas existence for how long? They really didn't change much in the grand scheme of things and that was a multi of WHALES)

I quite like the concept of many of the points you make, although it feels like they would need severe play testing to properly balance out. (I feel like this would nerf pirates though. Don't most of them run max military with more slots than infra, you would be crippled within one counter due to mass destroyed improvements) I heavily disagree with this one, Missiles are meant to strategically destroy certain areas of infrastructure. Missiles are not made to be mini nukes, they are made to neuter important structures such as HQs or factories. Nukes might work like this, but the thing with weapons like these is they are ironically not that destructive in regards to buildings. Sure point Zero would be heavily damaged but the main reason you can't said buildings is radiation, the biggest consequence of a nuke is the damage it does to Humans, not the buildings. Most of the intensive damage done in warfare is by ground assaults due to the need to rip apart enemy fortifications. (They would proactively blow up anything that provides the enemy cover or a strategic advantage.)

The thing is, it isn't impossible to produce food in a nuclear wasteland. We already possess the technology to grow food in labs, greenhouses and miles underground with artificial light. That added with most plants can already survive in areas with high radiation it's actually more unrealistic to expect food production to halt when half the world is at war. I did consider the political impacts of war on the food production for non-combatants, but I've yet to see or hear that as a complaint (aside from newbies) so I dismissed that idea. (You do have a fair point here though) The Disease idea @Majima Goro brought could be interesting and possible easy to add, but I feel like it should come with projects/features that reduce nuclear effects for non-combatants. (Because again, no radiation near you = no sickness) Yeah I didn't really think about balance for that. I just considered what would be 'logical' to have to produce this kind of technology. So nukes to research and understand radiation, Green Tech to understand plants in-depth and how to genetically modify them and Clinical because it's quite cheap and literally has to do with removing disease (which can be put under radiation for this games context)

Genetically Modified Organisms Negative modifiers to food production is reduced by 20% or capped at 70%, whichever is lower. Requires Clinical Research Center, Green Technologies and Nuclear Research Facility Effectively this would ensure some degree of food is produced during wartime for players outside of conflict and would negate the affect of seasons during peacetime. (Although odds are with the current meta the radiation will barely be low enough to provide that effect) The logic behind this is nations outside of the War-zone really wouldn't experience that much damage from nuclear warfare and with the right knowledge you could engineer plants/animals to survive in those environments. (I mean have you seen the plants in Chernobyl) Also the 70% reduction means the negative impact can never go above 70% less production of food. Essentially ensuring that you will have 30% of the base production regardless of the radiation index.

The premise of this idea is to effective create repeating trade deals. Essentially players would be given the offer to make a re-occuring trade deal with certain members, these trade deals will activate every x-turns (depending on the players input) and would only cancel if they don't have the funds, manually cancel or are under blockade. The logic behind this is it would allow players who manufacture and those who mine to set up direct logistics between each other, promoting more diverse types of trading. Example. Player A. They mine bauxite Player B. They produce aluminum Player B could offer to trade 50 tons of bauxite a turn for either 3000ppu or 80tons of aluminum. Player A would get an consistent cash flow while player B would ensure a stable supply of bauxite for the foreseeable future. Another trade method that COULD be interesting is adding futures into the game. Essentially players could create "pending" trade deal where someone would pay money for a product they could receive at a later date. (x amount of turns later, with a limit set to prevent abuse) This could make the business side of P&W more interesting as future contracts could make massive potential in the flipping market and provide a more structured systems for many businesses that people make to operate off. The main negative with this trade method is how you would enforce them, you could potentially lock players builds or prevent them from selling the relevant resources until the future is fulfilled but that could be difficult to code. Please feel free to leave any sort of feedback!

Pretty sure the dude is 100% able to nuke/missile you. This just feels like a petty attempt to add salt on his wounds.

Did you just refuse to add my suggestions? I thought they were pretty good.

I mean regardless in this situation you were going to be beaten, so being beiged faster is going to beneficial to you. If the war ends quicker then you can gear back up faster to fight the next round. These are both good points, maybe if the system was based on the time since any resistance damage was done to a nation. So if you are intentionally failing battles when you could win, you would still take the decreasing resistance debuff. Also in regards to the second point, you can always set it up so the aggressor will lose resistance faster than the defender. But if the aggressor loses because of this system they don't get any beige time.

While I do like the mechanic of blockading someone for all 60 turns of war (and think it's a solid strategy) I think there should be punishment for players who sit at max MAPS. The way I view war resistance is the nations desire and ability to continue said war effort. If the aggressor or defender is not actively fighting even with max maps a system like a drain on their resistance to represent public pushback would make sense. Plus it would also force players to put more thought into war and potentially making skill be a factor in wars. (Since co-ordination would be much more needed to prevent unwanted beige time for enemies and to keep them zeroed longer).