Edward I

Maybe. If I've read your proposal correctly, you could still organize daisy chains of military aid. (A 30 city nation gives 20% of its military to 25 city nation, which gives 20% of its military to a 20 city nation, etc.) However, if you found a way to stamp out all of the possible ways for friendly nations with significantly different city counts to send each other military units, you'd probably also make the proposal strategically useless. Countering an enemy nation or alliance with 100% of my military is almost always going to be more helpful for my friend than sending him 20% of my military. Tiny nations would ghost a larger alliance to solve that problem. In-game alliance affiliation doesn't dictate de facto alliance membership and, even if it did, this would discourage people from forming small alliances. A coalition made of one 100-nation AA would be more effective than a coalition made of four 25-nation AAs.

Rewarding cheaters is the default here because the resources are already generated and in use. Doing nothing amounts to rewarding them. The only way to not reward them is to remove their ill-gotten gains. This is inadequate and unfair. 1) Your judgment is not arbitrary. Rules that you made were broken and the expectation that you will enforce those rules is entirely reasonable. 2) It is not the community's job to enforce the rules and we are far worse-equipped to do it than you are. 3) Even if we managed to track down every unit of illicitly generated resources and loot them, it still wouldn't change the fact that an absurdly large amount of extra resources were generated and still exist in-game. This is a balance issue, it's a moral hazard, and it's still a reward for cheating. The fact that all of the reward may not have gone to the cheaters themselves is a poor excuse for the rest. That's good to hear. Thank you for listening to the community's feedback. We appreciate it.

This shouldn't be viewed in terms of punishment. The unbalancing effect this has had and will continue to have on the game is massive. If you're willing to overhaul the game multiple times for the sake of economic balance, I don't see why that shouldn't be an overriding priority in your response here as well. Independent of balance issues, your dual stance of presuming everyone is innocent until proven otherwise and treating resource deletion (or city deletion, etc.) as "punishment" is rewarding the exploiters. If people can benefit from cheating just by clearing the ludicrously low bar of not being conclusively tied to it, they will cheat. Other punishments such as banning accounts are probably not terribly effective against people already willing to operate rings of multi accounts. Delete the profits from this exploit as extensively and as retroactively as you are able.

This is a terrible precedent to set because of the inherent moral hazard of tolerating bad behavior in the name of fairness. The integrity (not to mention the economic balance) of the game was corrupted by this exploit. Safeguarding both of those should be a higher priority than shielding possibly ignorant players from any consequences of others' bad behavior. If it is possible to delete the resources or the in-game assets they were used to purchase, it should be done. If it is possible to refund transactions completed by ignorant or innocent players, that should be done as well. Unless you believe the game is now entirely and permanently free of similar exploits, you're setting a precedent that the appearance of innocence or incidental benefit from cheating exonerates illicit in-game activity.

Actually, they cheated there too. Source: http://test.politicsandwar.com/world-graphs/graphID=19

Yes. A perfect fix to the exploit unaccompanied by a removal of resources on the same scale as they were illicitly introduced - via a rollback or another mechanism - would also be half a solution.

Punishment is almost beside the point now. The two most pressing concerns are: 1) Getting rid of as much of the illegally spawned assets (resources, cash they were sold for, and cities/infrastructure/improvements/projects that were bought with said cash and resources) as possible 2) Removing the exploit that made all of this possible in the first place to ensure it doesn't happen again If people were able to do this for weeks, if not months, and be caught primarily because of their stupidity and arrogance, not their failure as "hackers" (for lack of a better word), do you really think deleting or zeroing out their nations will matter to them? If the perpetrators are able to do this again, even on a smaller scale, they can replace any losses from moderation with further gains from cheating. Anyone can look in Shadow's Alliance Leaderboards thread and check the alliance GDPs. It's not perfect, but it does show that 100/100 taxes isn't economic magic. It changes the default place where produced resources and cash are stored from individual nations to alliance banks; it doesn't have any direct effect on production.

Technically you're right, but unless someone blockades a banker seconds after the initial transfer takes place that won't happen. And I'm generally not a fan of encouraging speed-based play that benefits from scripts that frequently access the API.

If you wanted to implement a cap on resource stockpiles, it would have to incorporate both alliance banks and nations. For example, a cap on each resource determined by: max alliance stockpile = (resource tax rate)*(a*(total alliance members)+b*(total alliance cities)) max nation stockpile = (1 - resource tax rate)*(a+b*(total cities)) where a and b are constants. This would be calculated separately for each tax bracket. Alliances' tax rates wouldn't affect the maximum effective warchest they could have between their banks and member nations. If such a system were implemented, I don't see a problem with deleting resources at the end of the next turn when alliances lose members. It's not an exploit because it doesn't benefit the actors (nations leaving alliances), doesn't increase the total potential stockpile (stockpiles would be recalculated when resources are next accumulated at the end of the turn) and doesn't prevent players from forming new alliances (as long as you don't hop alliances 30 seconds before a turn ends, you've got ample time to shift bank resources around). Neither of those things would "fix" offshoring alliance banks. If looting is still impactful enough to matter, offshoring will continue. If it's not, then this would be only marginally different from removing alliance bank looting altogether: few if any people would care enough about it to actively attempt to loot or actively attempt to hide banks. I don't really have an opinion on the potential effect on beiging independent of bank looting right now. A player wouldn't even have to create another alliance before depositing. They could give it to their own nation first and then deposit it, either in an existing offshore bank AA or in the bank of an allied alliance. I think a better way of implementing this would be a per-unit cost to transferring or trading resources between nations and banks. Less simulation, similar effect.

The Bahamas don't really have winter, so not sure the Syndicate would care much.

That sounds exactly like what an imposter would say. Who are you really, "Buorhann", where's the real Beerhoe, and when will the KT-TGH-Pantheon bloc be announced?

You caught us, it's actually the next generation of secret treaty: an MADP written as an ODoAP just to trick everyone.

Yes

Like the narrative that TKR "broke up" a sphere by turning a bunch of traditional treaties into secret treaties and sanctimoniously criticized other people for having too many treaties? It's good to see TKR has started making substantive changes to its foreign policy by turning a traditional mutual defense treaty into a secret mutual defense agreement. Let's not get ahead of ourselves.

Please, if anyone can tell you getting a name change to stick is a futile, Sisyphean task, it's Leo.

Some people drop their opinions by declaring wars.

"Completely boring and terrible" is a matter of opinion, as is the nature of a "promising player". There isn't a single type of player, so there isn't a single "good" type of alliance. Mass recruitment alliances are essential for games like these to function because of the economies of scale inherent in their structure. They allow players to maintain nations at low or inconsistent activity levels, which is a democratizing feature that is provided primarily, if not exclusively, by large alliances. Similarly, there isn't a single type of micro. Micros are good if they don't represent an obvious opportunity cost to the metagame. They don't have to be special or unique and they don't have to play by the rules of the current meta, but they should at least interact with it in a way that adds rather than subtracts. More players or a greater diversity of communities and alliances is good; social isolation from the main community is bad. The fundamental question here isn't what kind of alliances are good; it's what kind of players are good. If the only people we want in the community or in the metagame are those who prefer smaller alliances, then large alliances are detrimental to the game. If incorporating new players of all stripes into the existing metagame is a priority, then micro alliances that make little effort to be a part of it are detrimental. If an alliance - micro or otherwise - facilitates a style that's "good", or at least acceptable, then it helps PW. If not, then it's harmful.

Perhaps he should have talked sh*t about someone smaller then.

Yeah, I agree. Jokes aside, 100% taxes circumvent the consequences of most proposals like these.

There's one too many steps in there...

1) Add the "Back a Page" and "Forward a Page" arrows that are already at the top of all list pages to bottom of all list pages as well (nations, alliances, trades, etc.) 2) Remove alliance descriptions from all alliances pages except Information (e.g. don't load custom images or text for alliance control panels, banks, member lists, etc.) 3) Remove fields from alliance info pages that aren't changed from their default values (e.g. if an alliance's forum link points to https://politicsandwar.com/forums/ ) 4) Add a PW wiki page field to alliance info pages 5) Turn the current color bloc names in the Color Trade Bloc Leaderboard into links to each color bloc voting page 6) Turn the number of nations column in the Color Trade Bloc Leaderboard into a series of links to all nations on each color (e.g. the number of nations on olive should link here)

The difference is that in our case the war was more or less a stalemate. Your alliance members, however, have resorted to zeroing out their militaries and resources and largely aren't even fighting back anymore.

The acronym for Grumpy Old Bastards is GOB. It's a common misconception. It's not a separate war, just a separate peace. This has been explained already. Stop asking Frawley to pad your stats.

I'm not sure which wars you're referring to, since as far as I know you've always been in Guardian, and this is the first war in years where Guardian hasn't fought in a coalition with overwhelming upper tier superiority. If the only terms you're talking about are reparations, then you're right. The Great VE and Silent Wars were lost by the aggressors, and are the only instances I'm aware of in which anyone received monetary reparations. But peace terms in general have definitely not been restricted to losing, aggressive coalitions. And, in the sense that these terms are designed to address things that can't or aren't being addressed purely by war - terms to deal with VM usage, secret treaties, etc. - they actually represent a continuity, not a break, with the past terms you brought up.

Pretty much everything you're talking about is the result of bad mechanics. The ability to grow forever, the ability to build massive warchests, the long wars and the even longer war cycles aren't the effects of peace terms. They are the result of nations' ability to grow forever and to stockpile resources and money forever. If you want to remedy this, hard ceilings on growth, warchest sizes, or both are necessary. Your proposed solution is to diminish wars and, by extension, politics, to a glorified game of king of the hill. The point isn't that the material effects of peace terms are marginal compared to the destruction caused by wars; it's that wars are about more than doing damage to your adversaries. Many of the terms proposed now or accepted in past wars have no material affect whatsoever. You said that the only peace term you didn't mind was an admissions of defeat, but admitting defeat has been a sticking point in past wars. Poor mechanics aren't a good reason to suck the life out of other aspects of PW.