Zephyr

Looking at the Alliance Affairs forum, the last thread listed was last active on 5th September. That's more than a month ago. It doesn't seem like the Alliance Affairs forum is struggling to keep active threads featured prominently on the first page, so why do you feel it's necessary to relegate "micros" to another category?

I would still like to know what information these moderators will be capable of accessing, as I mentioned in a previous thread... Also, how is access being monitored to ensure information is only accessed for the purpose of moderation and only at the time of responding to specific reports? Players can't tell when a moderator is reading their personal messages or reviewing their bounty history, so you can't just wait till a player complains, you need active monitoring to immediately identify abuse. From who, where? I'd much prefer an uninvested outsider whose interest is getting paid to do a good job applying the rules to their best understanding instead of a player that might perceive political advantages from such a privileged position.

Beige nations don't pay taxes, so the rolled side (presumably being beige cycled) will make little in alliance tax contributions as is anyway. It seems this change wouldn't actually be too impactful, but would make blockade mechanics more consistent.

It does not appear to violate the game rules, but if they're using copyrighted materials in their content they might have other things to worry about on the slim chance the content owners find out they're making money from their content without paying royalties (having said that, there are royalty free image archives out there that they might intend to use for their projects). This is not the sale of in-game goods/resources/etc. for real world money even though the content would be used for in-game aesthetic value. The rule is there to stop whales turning their nation into money printers by selling in-game content (money/resources) on the side for real-world money, and also limit "pay-to-win" as the only legitimate means of turning real-world cash into in-game cash and resources is via the credit system which has monthly limits.

Faulty reasoning/irrelevant argument: "Someone could say something about this other subject, which would be ridiculous, therefore your argument is ridiculous". I didn't make a case about the definition and use of fascism, only communism. It is of no consequence to the definition of communism or my point whether or not someone, somewhere, uses the word fascism improperly.

What kind of information will moderators see that isn't ordinarily visible to players? IP? Email? Some kind of event log that might expose all of a player's spy operations? Bounty placements? Ordinarily hidden inter-alliance bank transactions that might have been used for nefarious IC operations? Dossier? Messages? What systems will be in place to ensure that moderators don't quietly use their role to access privileged information for their own interests? If they do abuse the role, do we get a heads up when our privileged info was accessed by a rogue moderator? Do they get outed to Orbis? I'm really curious about exactly how it will work putting players on game moderation.

Another job for ReactForce? Epi, I expect to see you opening a ticket with us shortly. We can do you a good price for the first contract.

There's never been a communist country, and "communist regime" itself is an oxymoron. Communism is a stateless, classless society in which there is no property ownership but everything is freely accessible as needed. There's no need or use for money; you work and in return receive a fair cut from the collective goods produced to satisfy your needs (the exact details vary depending on your flavour of communism, but they all have the same basic end goal and sound like a silly pipe dream). You cannot have a "communist regime" as communism abolishes the state. You've doubled down on faulty reasoning; the implication that an alternative result is an impossibility because you have not personally observed it in your sampling, however there is no logic that establishes this to be necessarily true. Your argument is further troubled by your sampling of "communist regimes" that are not actually communist.

I assume this is your nation, if so, you shouldn't bother with farms but instead just buy your food from the market. The reason is that food production per turn per farm is calculated by dividing the city's total land by 500 (at least the simple version); the more land a city has, the more efficient its farms' food production is. Therefore larger nations with more land in their cities produce food the most efficiently, and can sell it on the market at a cost that is still less than what you could produce it for as a small nation with very little land. You should also join an alliance as soon as possible, it's not really optional in this game unless you really know what you're doing (which obviously is not the case for you) otherwise you'll get raided endlessly and lose interest in the game whereas this doesn't need to be true if you join a good alliance. Any of the top 5 will be great choices if you're not sure what to pick, and they will teach you how to develop your nation making everything less confusing. Also, please go to your forum account settings and edit your profile to include your leader name, nation name, and nation ID (as is required by forum rules). Good luck.

To be fair, your original comment vaguely identified communism to be banned... There are a range of communist ideologies with varying opinion on the specifics of the end goal and how to get there, and they don't all advocate violence. It is defective reasoning to assert that all communists advocate violence due to one's ability to point to specific violent regimes that identified as communist, because not all communists hold those views. As such, I think it's ridiculous to push for an outright ban on communism. It would be more reasonable to ban roleplaying specific violent regimes.

Thoughts on my suggested change... How many times has this happened?

I have not read the rules in their entirety, only skimmed, but I'm wondering if you really need the Screenshot Abuse rule at all. If you modify Custom Content on Nation and Alliance Pages a little (suggested changes in bold), I feel like it would adequately cover screenshots and help reduce the total length of your rules: I've suggested something like "mechanical game ability" as this would indicate that things such as fake achievements are fine as they do not affect a nation's mechanical ability; despite being a deception, they are inconsequential to mechanical gameplay. Also fake screenshots of a nation profile are still covered as they do deceive on "mechanical game ability" if any of the nation's stats are different in the screenshot to the nation's actual stats (more or less military units is a real mechanical difference militarily, higher or lower economic stats is a real mechanical difference economically via trade power or buying power etc., and likewise can be applied to alliance profiles). Also suggesting a less verbose rule title.

Until both your accounts are verified, your nations cannot interact with trades, bank transactions (recipient and banker), or coordinating wars together on the same nations. Once both of your accounts are verified there should be no restrictions, but verification expires and requires renewal so keep on top of those (first renewal after 30 days, second after 6 months, thereafter every 1 year). See this page: https://politicsandwar.com/account/verification/

Exactly, my proposed approach poses no threat to an honestly organised alliance. The only ones that should be threatened are those that describe their relationship with their membership as one of control instead of collaboration in shared interests. None of your post makes any sense to me, I don't think you understand what I'm proposing. I'm suggesting that when an alliance wants to establish an embargo, each member is notified and goes to their embargoes page and clicks a confirmation to establish the embargo from a section listing alliance embargo directives. There should also be an alliance control panel to indicate which members have ratified which embargo directives. It doesn't have to be implemented in this specific way, whatever makes it simple for an alliance to notify members of embargoes to set up and which requires member action to establish. Similarly, nation information sharing should be opt-in, and taxes should have to be approved each time a nation's tax rate changes (and is not 0/0). This would respect the game premise and player expectation that they are the highest authority determining their nation's actions. I disagree. In fact, it is already possible for alliance members to opt-out of sharing information with their alliance's gov and yet the sky has not fallen. If a member refuses to share their nation information or establish an embargo directed by the alliance, either they may decide to find another alliance that better aligns with their values or the alliance gov may determine that it's a deal breaker and remove the member. In neither situation is there a monumental destruction of order as you suggest, you are exaggerating the situation. If communicating with your members is a nightmare, you're doing something wrong. It's not an interpretation, it is a nation sim. The fact you'd even dispute this or pose it as an opinion is quite ridiculous. I'd wager you would even describe it to others as a "nation sim". If your game experience itself hasn't already made this abundantly obvious to you, we can simply review the home page which clearly establishes the game premise: I would be curious what part of the game description confuses you. In fact, there is no explicit mention of alliances in the game description and it quite clearly promises that the player determines their nation's actions. Even the third sentence, which presumably alludes to alliances, describes cooperative play and not authoritative rule over other players. Your opinion is clearly at odds with the facts. Why would you expect your members to refuse? As you seem to recognise here, they can already refuse to share nation information if they so choose. I've run an alliance before and encountered a few members that had disabled nation information sharing, but after simply explaining the feature use I believe we resolved each instance without problem. It sounds like you have a communication problem with your membership, but that's just a responsibility of running an alliance. The solution isn't to ask admin to mechanically remove aspects of their autonomy that inconvenience you. It's not my premise. It's the game premise, it is a nation sim. The entire appeal of nation sims is that you rule your own little nation and determine what it does, and the game even describes itself as such. I don't understand the talk about it being a job. Are you not already communicating with your membership? How, under this scenario, is the workload increased considerably enough that you'd describe it as a full time job? Zero mechanical governance? I'm not suggesting removing any of the current alliance features, but only that a nation must consent to share their nation information, agree to pay taxes at the rate requested by the alliance, or confirm alliance embargo directives before they establish the embargo. A nation is a separate entity operated by another player with their own autonomy, it makes no sense that their treasury would permit you to march in and steal a bunch of resources without their leader having consented to that arrangement. If your member does not consent, then obviously you should not be capable of taxing them. At that point you can try talking to them about the issue, or you could eject them from your alliance. You could even go to war with their nation to steal the resources you were trying to steal using a bogus game mechanic that permits theft at no personal risk. An alliance is a collaboration. If your member does not want to collaborate, whether this be in tax contributions or embargoes, then the game premise would dictate that should be their right. I only advocated for alliance features being opt-in where they presume action on a nation's behalf, so no you wouldn't have to ask every single member. Unless you're really bad at recruitment and catfish a lot of players, the workload shouldn't be any more significant. The only way it wouldn't work is that you are recruiting people whose interests don't actually align with your own, but that would mean you're bad at recruitment. You should not have direct control over other nations without their consent, this is perfectly consistent with the game premise and player expectations. Your entire argument seems to ride on how inconvenient nation autonomy is to you who feels entitled to control others, but unwilling to exercise actual responsibility by communicating with your membership. If you believe your membership would decline paying taxes, establishing your embargoes, or sharing nation information, then your alliance has major miscommunication problems between membership and government. If it resultingly fell apart from my proposed changes, it would be doing its membership a favour. This is weird. Democratising but you'd expect it to fall apart if members opted-in to alliance features? Doesn't make sense to me, but good luck.

From the Game Development Thread - July: It seems an opt-out solution is coming, but I'd prefer an opt-in solution; add a section to the top of the nation embargoes page listing alliance embargo directives, each time the alliance adds an embargo notify the player and link them to the embargoes page to approve and establish the embargo. Nations shouldn't perform actions that their leader hasn't specifically elected, such as agreeing to pay taxes to their alliance at specific rates, applying embargoes, and sharing privileged information about their resources stockpiled or their spy count. This is consistent with the game premise, new player expectations, nearly every actual nation game mechanic, and the game's thematic presentation. We play as supreme leaders to our nations but there are players that insist on removing our autonomy, as nonsensical and inconsistent with game world logic as it is, because they find it personally inconvenient applying the effort of communicating and coordinating an alliance. I would expect most forum users are either in gov, have been, or are temporarily embarrassed; so I wouldn't be surprised if the forum responses were overwhelmingly supportive of this alliance centric view on what constitutes an acceptable game change consideration. Though I wonder how many alliances would actually even use an alliance-wide embargoing power if they had it. I've asked a few alliance leaders over the years and they didn't seem too interested, dismissing it as not really beneficial to start embargo wars and complicate trading options. It's also worth noting that it's not like alliances can't actually do this already. Many alliances manage to coordinate and enforce war chest requirements and minimum military requirements without the ability to personally stuff member nations with appropriate military units, relying entirely on individual member efforts. If an alliance wanted to they could establish similar methods to coordinate and enforce an embargo list of their own, and compliancy would arguably be even easier for members than building an expensive war chest as it's just a few one-time clicks for each embargo. So I suspect the interest just isn't actually there. No, just make an actual point. Useless babbling. Noncontributory gossip. It's actually not, it's perfectly aligned with the game premise. What would be counter intuitive is direct control of other nations. Not unless you are incapable of communicating with your members. This just reads as, "It limits my ability to control my members". I won't comment on what they "should" do without knowing the details of their situation, but either they can leave or the alliance can remove them. These are both things that are already possible, so there's no change here to be concerned about. This isn't actually true though, alliances can and do change in many ways; from policy changes, through to their gov line up which can affect internal dynamics and foreign relations. If your members know what they're signing up for, then it won't be an issue for them to approve the tax rate you set for them. Your objection implies that you may not be entirely honest with prospective members and expect this to cause problems, but that is just a communication deficit you need to work on and part of the responsibility of coordinating an alliance.