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Yosodog

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Posts posted by Yosodog

    Recognition of Kwanzaa

    in Alliance Affairs

    Posted · Edited by Yosodog

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    You racist !@#$ haven't recognized Kwanzaa yet. What did the Africans ever do to you?


     


    Anyways, hai Gandalf!


     


    inb4 recognition of hanukkah


     


    After being lobbied by special interests, I have changed this title from Hanukkah to Kwanzaa. I apologize for my mistake. I am a true African but I love the Jews.


    • Upvote 6

    How to Add Tax Brackets: A Picture Tutorial for Sheepy.

    in Game Suggestions

    Posted

    Ok how about this. If you are worried about "inactive farms". 

     

    Simply make it so that gray nations aren't taxed. Problem solved.

     

    Even better, you've just made them even juicier raid targets, AND incentivised alliances to drop inactives instead of keeping them for the tax they provide. Everyone is happy. 

     

    Your move sheepy.

     

    Then I would just stay gray in order to not be taxed :P

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    Freedom fighters.

    in Alliance Affairs

    Posted

    First they came for the neutrals, and I did not speak out—

    Because I was not a neutral.

     

    Then they came for Pantheon, and I did not speak out— 

    Because I was not Pantheon.

     

    Then they came for the GoT sphere, and I did not speak out— 

    Because I was not GoT sphere.

     

    Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.

    • Upvote 23
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    Freedom fighters.

    in Alliance Affairs

    Posted

    Nights Watch would be nearly completely irrelevant in this fight due to being new and having mostly smaller new nations, and while we have many more nations in range to hit you, your lowest member would be #10 in our alliance. While we remain ready to burn for them if they ask for it, or if other parties try and take advantage of this, we don't dispute their calculations. I love SK, its been my home for years and I have a very high opinion of my fellow alliance members but even I'm not so blinded as to think we could realistically go toe to toe with you, much as I think it would be a very interesting fight.

     

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    • Upvote 8
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    Let's Talk About the API Keys

    in Game Discussion

    Posted · Edited by Yosodog

    Obligatory "where's muh perks"

     

    Anyways, let's get started.

     

    Thanks for your feedback. I had asked in Discord a couple of times to talk directly to people who use the API frequently, and didn't get any responses, so I threw together a quick system.

     

    I like the idea of restricting API keys to VIP members. You're probably right, making it a subscription vs. a one-time fee would probably generate more money.

     

    One of my main concerns and reasons for wanting to limit the API to daily requests is that people are using the API to check trade prices super frequently and jump on accidental trades, in many cases before the player who posted the trade has the chance to realize their mistake and cancel it. I've gotten many complaints about this, and how people are "botting" and it's unfair because they don't know how to set up scripts to get that advantage.

     

    My current feelings on the matter are:

     

    I'm sold on giving everyone with a VIP subscription an API key.

    I'm fine with increasing the number of requests allowed.

     

    I'm not sold on making it requests per minute. For your alliance example, I can just change it up so that all alliances are displayed in one page and you don't need to do individual requests for those out of the top 50, and similarly for other API pages in the same boat.

     

    If VIP's were to get API keys, it would be a nice bonus but "leveling up" your API key is a way to milk the players of money. It also adds another aspect of "pay-to-win" because the person who puts the most money into the API key would have an advantage and people who do not know how to setup scripts to get an advantage surely would not invest much money into doing it. The people who will invest money into it already do it and already know how to take advantage of the API. By restricting the API behind a paywall, it's further preventing people to learn how to take advantage of the API and taking away the even playing field for everyone. If the API was only available to VIP members and was just rate limited by the minute, and it was an even playing field for everyone, this takes away the pay-to-win aspect of "leveling up" your API key and allows anyone to use the API to their advantage.

     

    As for people botting to take advantage of accidental trades, it's a really douchie thing for someone to do in my opinion and according to the rules, as long as they don't use a script to buy the resources, they're fine. But this can be prevented in other ways than just limiting the entirety of the API. As Ghux mentioned above, just have the tradeprice API updated every five minutes or one minute rather than instantly. (As a side note, I created a user script that puts the correct PPU in the input for you so you don't make huge mistakes when selling resources https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/22277-politics-and-war-ppu-updater) In short, creating an expensive leveling up API key creates a pay-to-win atmosphere and the people who want to learn how to take advantage of the API would be discouraged to do so leaving a monopoly on API users giving advantages to specific alliances.

     

    If you are dead set on making the requests a per day thing, a level 1 API key would really need to be high. Something like 1k requests. 24 hours is a very long time and even those 1k requests would get eaten up by a small user quite quickly. Per minute or hourly rate limits would be exponentially better than daily limits.

     

    Changing the API to show more information is good, but also not exactly what is needed. We'd need control to filter and sort on our own. For example, if I want to get information on every BK nation, right now I have to query the nations API and get all BK's nation IDs, then query the nation API with that nation ID and check if they're an applicant and then do what I need to do with that information. Now, you could just have the nations API give all the information we could ever want but that is highly inefficient. Using Chrome's network stuff, the nations API page is 178 KB and took 516 ms (excluding DOM load time because that doesn't matter) to respond. That's quite a large file and took quite a long time to respond and if you threw all nation info on one API, that would increase the size of the API request significantly and would increase load time and of course server resources. I would want to be able to tell the API "hey, I want all nations with the alliance ID of 877" and it just shows nations with the alliance ID of 877. Now, I'm a big fan of pagination, but if you're going rate limiting us so hard, I'd rather not lmao. And the same goes for the alliances API. If I want to only load the top 25, there's no reason for me to load all 300 alliances.

     

     

    I hadn't heard of any of this before this topic and my only leg in this discussion, is that depending on how it all gets implemented, a side effect may be it killing off my Alliance Leaderboards (https://politicsandwar.com/forums/index.php?/topic/16632-the-alliance-leaderboards/). :(

    If I end up having to get credits or pay for trying to gather the stats for that topic then i'll probably lose interest towards doing it further.

    Currently my program for creating the daily stats calls the main Alliances API once, the main Nations API once, and the individual alliance api for each alliance in the game once to get the info not on the main alliances api (military stats, treasure stats, gdp, applicant and vmode numbers).

    Seems silly that due to people gaining an advantage from the trading api, all others will suffer too even for completely unrelated use cases and for ones that don't really give any supposed "unfair advantage".

     

    I think this is a prime case of someone using the API to make the game more interesting for people and having harsh rate limits behind a pay wall negatively impacts the game. Even though I keep my own statistics, not all people do and the alliance leaderboards has always been an amazing topic to view in-depth statistics on every alliance. The same goes for Woot's post which was super interesting as well. If the API is harshly rate limited, developers will be using their requests to benefit their alliance and will not put any effort into creating cool stats or extensions for the game.

     

    From the perspective of someone teaching himself how to code, I can just about make a few simple tools that utilise the API and even they require a couple of hundred requests to complete. The PnW API has been a great tool to practice coding as it's easily accessible and allows me to make scripts that are actually useful in some way.

     

    I'll happily pay a couple of credits to use it, but if it becomes tricky to access or If access is put behind such a heavy paywall then I'd be put off having to pay a lot for something I might not get working.

     

    Keep learning to code bro. In my personal experience, the PW API has caused me to learn so many more things that I probably never would've learned if it hadn't been for the PW API. I'd like to consider myself now a fairly good programmer because of the PW API. As I've said above, putting the API behind a ridiculous pay wall people who don't know how to make scripts for PW less encouraged to do so and only helps the people who currently know how to take full advantage of the API. On a personal note, Printer, don't get discouraged from learning how to code. It is such a useful skill and I'm so happy that I've spent a significant portion of 2016 learning tons of shit about programming. And now I'm helping a couple people in BK get better at coding. If you, or anyone else who's reading this, have any questions about using PW's API or even programming questions in general, hit me up on Discord.

     

    Which, if anything, reduces the load on the server.

     

    As mentioned above, not making the API accessible or making it too expensive to use will cause people to use the pre-API methods of gathering information which is scraping the site. Please, do not make me do that because I absolutely detest doing it. However, over the API, scraping will 100% be more resource intensive on the server. A call to my nation's API was 115 B and took 115 ms to load. Compared to loading my nation page from the regular website, the page itself was 13.2 KB 160 ms to load (so images, external javascript files, stylesheets were excluded). Then, loading my nation page also has a lot of backend stuff going on, such as loading my resources, checking if I have messages or notifications, making sure I'm authenticated, etc. If the API is too expensive and not accessible, people will scrape the site which will increase bandwidth and increase server resource usage. The API really is a win/win for both the user and you.
     
    I really hope you re-consider. I would absolutely love a proper REST API with oAuth2 and all this cool shit, but all that would be thrown to the wind if it's too expensive and inaccessible to people. If you are dead set on daily limits rather than minute limits, then they're going to have to be increased exponentially to give it value and "leveling up" API keys just makes the API inaccessible and pay-to-win. 
    • Upvote 8
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