matt2004

Nice try, the OA clause was used in our MDoAP.

Sticks and Stones...

We may not have made noise out here, but we were at work behind the scenes. While we only recently picked Sanctuary up we're committed to supporting them in their growth.

It's called a treaty - look it up.

We're trying to build something a little different with the new HM. We don't want any single alliance in the sphere to be seen as the leader or to call the shots. Naturally you are going to have alliances be stronger in certain areas than others (IE one can have a really strong FA dept, while another can be really strong in milcom - I'd call these "Anchors", but that's very different from being a leader). Moving away from having de-facto bloc leaders and having more close cooperation vs instruction can be helpful. Having a single "leader" can cause frustration within a bloc. If you have alliances that don't feel they're being listened to or don't feel empowered to speak up within a bloc you're not going to work as effectively as a team as you should be able to. Yes we are the smallest bloc, and we have a long way to go to be a sizable force in the game, but we're working on it. I'd agree creative CBs need to come back. If everyone treats the game as a spreadsheet and war reasons don't add anything other than "Big alliance bad" the life is going to be sucked out of the game. Roleplay and IC character posts too. I'd love to see individual AAs to post more often rather than what seems to be the usual whole-bloc press release (half of which are completely dry and read like something out of a newspaper). Alliances have their own brands and own characters - their own legacies, and as a community we should be putting these to good use. In terms of Minispheres vs bipolar relations, I'd say we absolutely need to avoid going back to two sides. The game needs as an absolute minimum three spheres (not blocs, we should make the distinction here), and we should really be at 4+ for most of the time. IMO 1v1 hits between blocs is boring. There should be some degree of unpredictability on who will work with who, but these should be temporary agreements that become null and void at the end of the wars. I don't view consolidation itself as this terrible thing never to be repeated - the number of standalone blocs should grow and shrink with time as long as it is kept within reason. I'm against no peace terms and no naps at all costs being a thing. These should be there, but there needs to be a consensus of what is deemed sensible, and what is deemed toxic. Meme terms should also be a thing. The same goes with NAPs, I don't think they should be de-facto banned, but should have a consensus on what is an absolute maximum length (Six month naps cannot be a thing again, but a short NAP period can provide a degree of stability)

It would be near impossible to do this IMHO - If the API (To oversimplify that's the feature that allows bots to get most of the raw information they need) was removed, there would be some degree of screen-scraping (that is getting information from the game pages directly). - If screen-scraping was banned, I can almost guarantee that if someone was that determined to cheat to get an unfair advantage, they would find a way to do so. I'm all for the actual website improving (Alliance recruitment for brand new players as the top priority). If there is an official bot developed which does integrate features of a third party bot, even slight changes to functionality can be infuriating. I'd support there being an "Official base-bot" which is open source, well documented and free for players to modify and self-host if they want to, but I'm against removing the functionality for people to tweak something to work the way they want it. I don't think that's going to happen anytime soon. I can tell you going ingame can be an inconvenience for a couple of tasks (After all, we all have things IRL that come up, and if I'm at work and something comes up, I'd rather deal with it in 5 minutes than 10). Let's take counter raids as an example, our milcom can manually login X times a day, check the war page, then manually go through nations for a possible counter. That's easy to do on Desktop when you have a few minutes. With a bot they get automatically pinged on their phone a couple of minutes after the raid is started, and the bot could spit out a list of nations in range, and give a percentage of how militerised they are. That's a convenience factor, but it's not game breaking, and Milcom still need to check who is likely to be awake / available for it to make any difference to the raid war itself. As long as there is some human input required, I don't see an issue (given that there are open source bots available for anyone to pick up), and the fact all of these tasks can be done by people in government who have the time to do so manually. Even with bots being a thing, we in UPN still do a lot of manual work by choice - and use bots for some other things other alliances might not. There are issues with the way things are as they stand, but it would be overkill to turn around and nuke the tools the community have built. Some of the open source ones can be setup for your alliance in minutes (and if you're self-hosting you can tweak them, the foundations are there)

Banning all bots and all automation would be total overkill. Placing some limits in the game's terms on what a bot can do, and limiting how often an individual can query the game API (which already happens) is reasonable however. I agree on what some others have said about recruitment bots being overused. I think one of our most recent joiners got over 30 messages in the space of 10 minutes. The data I've seen from SmartURL for people clicking the links in our messages (as a percentage of messages sent) is very low. In fact the message read rate is low. I think most nations will click Select All -> Delete. So what could replace mass-message recruitment spam? A combination of player ads and an improved alliance recruitment page ingame, but that page needs A LOT of work to be effective (Something for us to discuss or design as a community maybe and feed back on, I think we can all agree reducing the number of newbies deleting is good for the game) I do think that bots being able to estimate spy counts is overpowered and should be prevented. You don't absolutely have to be a coder to play the game or have an entire team of developers to run an alliance. There are some good bots which are open source and completely free for anyone to download. Some can just be invited to your Discord (hosted by others) and others have self-host options (where they run on your own box - ours are running on Oracle Cloud and MS Azure free tiers). Let's be real here, it can give you an advantage to have someone who knows a little about this sort of stuff on your team, but you don't have to start from scratch. The open source bots are great out of the box if you don't need customisability, and honestly once you're at the size where you need specific features adding in to suit your particular use case, the fantastic thing about open source is the building blocks are there for you. From our view in UPN we've had a few tools over the years, including bots in Discord and web-based tools, but we've been less bot reliant than some other AAs. The API is great if you aren't a coder too. Some AAs heavily used Google Sheets back in the day that pulled from the game (I'm a heavy user of Power BI myself) - and tools like Microsoft's PowerAutomate can take in an input, and do something with it without you having to write a single line of code. I'm against there being a single "official" P&W bot, but I would support if as a community we do have better documentation (that is in plain English) of what bots are, directions to some popular ones that are open source or widely seen as "safe" to use, and better support for getting started. _________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ TL;DR: Bot's aren't this evil all-automating game destroying issue. Minor limits would be welcome, and as a community we could come up with a quick-start guide for those that choose to use them. You don't have to use bots, but it makes your life a little easier for tedious / repetitive tasks. Plus Open Source = Good.

[SpAnkY] Oh god whatd you do lok Now i gotta hear this. Borg did something as dumb as me and I feel honored. [borg] Promise not to tell anyone? [SpAnkY] Ofc bb [borg] ok, I hacked in 150B and framed npo [SpAnkY] You absolute savage lmao Bruh you never got caught? [SpAnkY] Lmao thats comedy asf fr Bro I cannot believe you'd do that lmao I couldnt image Imagine* But damn bro what a savage Why npo? And did the 150B get returned [SpAnkY] Well deleted out Ah Lame Free monies is the best monies Ah I see Good cop bad cop works like a charm eh? Thats crazy though [SpAnkY] Funny but damn I never saw you do something so savage haha So whos whild idea was that lol bc borg I always imagined you too friendly lmao

There are a couple of things to take note here. Regardless of if this is a compromised server / stolen bank or a joke post that got leaked, there are some basic security principles to apply - Never give a bot the administrator right on a Discord server unless you know *exactly* what you are doing. Permissions exist for a reason - Lock down channel permissions. Does the bot really need to see leadership channels? - Make sure you trust bot authors, both for Discord bots and anything that runs on your local PC (IE recruitment) The only closed source bots I allow to run on the UPN server have nothing to do with P&W. Anything that ties to P&W is either in a separate sandbox server if it's closed source, or locally hosted and run on my own box if the code is available to review. People have been warned about this sort of stuff before.

Rude. We run Server 2008 thank you very much.

This is fake news.

A quick check of Arrgh V Sanctuary war history shows this is NOT the case. Sanctuary are entitled to counter raids on their members.

I thought I told you to stop stealing my ideas

The United Purple Nations has completed our election cycle and is pleased to announce our new government lineup: Executive: Prime Minister - Cora Mcstrap Chief of Staff - Cameron Axley Minister of Internal Affairs - Hansarius Minister of Foreign Affairs - Malichy Minister of Finance - Cameron Axley Minister of Defense - Sealteam6 Minister of Communications - Matt2004 Minister of Education - Noreen Elected Senate: Matt2004, CoraMcstrap, Sealteam6, Noreen, Cameron Axley, Hansarius and Malichy Alliance Elders: Altheus, Hansarius, Matt2004, Jared95 ,Malichy, Noreen and Sealteam6

FAKE NEWS

The taxman is investigating reports that a foreign-domiciled entity is attempting to gain an unfair advantage in the marketplace. Retaliation is expected to commence shortly.

We use Single Transferable Vote, so there isn't a traditional vote count per person.

Politics and War presents: All Stars 18

Just happened to me with https://politicsandwar.com/nation/war/timeline/war=944022 I launched attacks approx three/four minutes after the update (three open tabs in Firefox. Attacks fired off one after the other). The game failed the attacks and gave a generic error about a redirect. The game was *crawling* when loading the page with just under 600 players logged in. Trying them again worked and the attack went through but MAPS weren't removed (attacks went through slowly at 6, 7 and 8 mins after update) I did sit on my MAPS for about 23 hours on this war

I mean when the server looks like this it's a wonder it can even run the game at all

As those rose petals fell, Hollywood realized they may be in trouble...

Moments before a murder happened...

Orbis hereby welcomes the Swamp to the fallen Bloc hall of fame.

I fixed the bloc flag