Prefontaine

Depending on which hard cap is selected, the amount of revenue from putting a game cap would actually likely be lower than the hard caps on revenue. But I'm fine with capping daily games all together. Solves the issue at hand. Maintaining the status quo is not an option currently on the table.

... Couldn't even read the first sentence, eh?

I agree it's not a big problem, but it is a problem. If a nation wants to run a muck in the low tiers with high levels of activity and 10M a day in extra, unpreventable revenue to fund raiding this is where the issue would become. Market interaction is a core concept of the game, nations being active and being able to make sums of money is by design. Raiding/War profiting is also a core concept of the game. Baseball is a fringe element of the game. Small nations being able to increase their income to this extent not something that is to be designed. You wouldn't say that if you were a smaller player constantly being raiding by someone who is also gaining tons of money and ability to rebuy units through baseball. And as for your claim about fixing stuff that's actually broken, this IS something that is actually broken. It's being used in a way that is not intended. This is intended to be a compromise versus the removal of the mechanic. As to your point about this taking away from other content. This is a simple change that requires minimal effort and won't take away from coming changes. As far no one wanting this change, I can promise you that you are entirely incorrect on that.

Recent changes to baseball profits were meant to reduce the amount of created cash to the game through baseball revenue (not tips). These changes largely worked, however there are a few individuals who earn well above the intended amounts due to brute force. During a week revue last month there were about a dozen instances where players made over 6M a day in revenue from baseball. Some of these are the same player(s). Also out of about 1700 data points, these are the only instances of daily incomes from baseball exceeding 6M in that time. All daily revenue from baseball dropped below 1M at around 120, so less than 10% of nations playing baseball are making 1M+ a day and less than 1% are making 6M+ a day. This problem effects a small portion of the player base. To offset these reductions to baseball I'd like to view changing some of the upkeep aspects on baseball. What do heavy baseball players see as their biggest expense to keep things going? Do players retire too fast? Upgrading stadiums is too expensive? Give me those suggestions and I can work on implementing them in addition to these hard caps.

Polling closes in about 30 minutes. I'm going to lock and unpin this thread. Appreciate the feedback, everyone.

In the thread about adding a new tier of Urban planning, people were talking about reducing the cost of the original 2 projects. I don't see that being a likelihood, but we could introduce a project that reduces the costs of projects? Thoughts?

@Adrienne add this to the QoL list, please.

Urban Planning (UP) and Advanced Urban Planning (AUP) are projects focused on reducing city cost. These projects typically have an all resource-based cost and require certain city thresholds to buy. A new version would likely follow this trend.

I'm going to make a poll regarding this, actually. It's been talked about before. Thanks for the reminder! Please move discussion to this thread. Locking this one.

Yes. I used to talk on this point regarding UPN/DEIC how they had been treatied since the start of the game til a few years ago. At some point you just have a treaty for treaty's sake. I like to say you can be friends with alliances you're fighting against and you don't have to be allies with your friends. It's often politically interesting when enemies team up, even short-term.

Best Large alliance (100+ members): Rose Best Old School Alliance: Guardian Best Newer Alliance: Hand of Fate Best Alliance That is no longer Around: Terminus Est (Version ElPinachzo/Pre) Overall: Syndicate Special Mention: Arrgh Note, I don't include Mythic, or the OG Justice Department in any of these ratings as those were less about political warfare and such.

February of current year. 10-ish months before next year. Calling Syndicate DoWing GoB in Late Fall 2022 before "next year".

With the recent threads about a returning to the forums, nostalgia for how politics played out then and such... Perhaps bots contributing to laziness is the real enemy all along.

I've shared this info in the moderation channels. Anyone with evidence or have a statement to make on the matter please contact myself or Dr. Rush directly. Alex is a little busy at the moment but we can compile information in the correct channels for whenever Alex can dig into this.

Main problem with defensive projects/improvements is the increased benefit for whales. To take down larger nations it requires coordinating grinding down of air or ground, typically. If 3 C20-C25s want to take on a C30 or so, typically two will try and weaken one of those unit types and the third would try and gain superiority and get the edge. Giving that C30 the ability to mitigate losses makes it harder for nations below them to take them on. In addition it will typically be larger nations that can afford the extra improvement slots to use towards defense while still maintaining an economy.

I can answer that. Simply put, priorities. Additional content often takes a back seat to fixes to problems, investigations in exploits and bugs, and moderation issues. Combine that with the holiday season recently and that this is not Alex's only job, some content takes a back seat. A large portion of Alex's time has been taken up by moderation issues, forums, game, and discord included which is why there are now paid moderators. Specifically the alliance roles change has taken a lot of coding and add that in to the above information, that's why it's taken so long. Part of the reasoning behind increasing the Credit cap per month is an attempt to bring in more revenue to invest more into the game to keep content rolling.

I can't speak to the future, but we can look at the past. It's been what, 5-6 years or more since credits came into being? As far as I can remember it's always been 10 credit caps. The $ amount has gone up for in game rewards but has been at 20M base for quite a bit now. I think the city idea Kan just posted isn't bad, but I'd have to check with Alex on the analytics of how frequently new players buy credits, then also a number of cities that makes it worth while versus just cashing in the credits. The biggest problem with credits is the impact on lower tier warfare. Players can very easily declare wars and massive city counts with credits after having their defensive slots fill. Limiters like not being able to cash in credits above 10 while in an active war could be something. What do people think about a trial period? A couple months of allowing higher credit caps and we can monitor closely the use them and if the result is as bad as people fear?

Bugs get handled in a timely fashion. New content is slow, sure, but we don't want the rushed changes of years gone by either. You state your main problem is that this is a cash grab, even calling it scummy. I've also stated that money which has been made has been increasingly invested back into the game, especially over the last two years. You state that credit value should be increased, but you yourself state you don't think that'd actually do anything to generate more revenue. You mention cosmetics so that older players will buy them, but if I wanted credits I'd simply buy them off the market and have since they were sold on the market. What alternatives do you suggest that would actually work? An alternative that I don't like is removing them from purchase in game, or make it so they're only purchasable at a market mark-up. Players only make 25% of what a credit goes for on the market, this means to get 25M for selling a credit on the market it would go for 100M on the market. If there is to be better coding, better moderation, better servers, better advertisements to draw in players something needs to be changed to increase income into the game. I'm all ears.

Game Dev Team is now: Prefontaine Adrienne Justinian Magnus Zephyr Lucianus Hidude45454

I'm going to address the Credit related concerns in one go. First, lets look at the math. Credits if exclusively used for in game money go from 20M - 25M each, using 20 a month for a whole year nets the player 4.8B - 6B, or ~13M - ~16.5M a day. This is less than the daily cash-only income of a 30+ in many regards. Alliances and players boost up nations all the time, this method just doesn't required an alliance funding the player or knowing someone that's been around. Second, this game is two things, free to play, and is the primary income for its creator. Over the years I've seen many comments that are along the lines of "Alex isn't great, but he's engaged with the community and he tries. He's better than most admins in these games". Alex listens to feedback (these days :P), and tries to give you what you want. He also has hired a coder, independent moderators, increased advertisement (which has increased game activity https://politicsandwar.com/world-graphs/graphID=0), and upgraded the servers which didn't crash in the last couple blitzes. All of these things cost money while little has been done to increase revenue. Obviously the increase in players does increase the likelihood of a donating playing joining the fold, but the amount of players that donate is staggeringly low. Which is fine, but these are the players that make this game possible for people to play it for free. While this increase will benefit those players, the game benefit isn't breaking and still has a ceiling. There's a growing number of C40+ nations who's income is 22B+ a year, or around 60M - 70M a day. If a player was already max donating for a year, this change merely increases the ability to duplicate a C40+'s income from 11% -> 22% The trade off boils down to are you willing to have players able to gain more money, that's still a fraction of what the larger nations make, by spending real money in exchange for better functioning servers, moderators that aren't bias from being players themselves, more frequent and better coded updates, more advertisement that hopefully continues to grow our player base, or not?

Lets see if this clarifies. You have 9/10 project slots but want to buy both bauxiteworks and clinical research center. That would put you at 11/10. However if you buy the research dev center you now are at 10/12 project slots and can buy both projects you wanted.

Correct. You net a project slot. I takes one project slot itself, and gives you two in return.

Correct. I'll clarify the OP.