Alastor

Am I just checking these at exactly the wrong time every time or are these not working anymore?

>People literally saying "I donated therefore do not remove this feature I like" >People literally changing the game via scripting and bending every rule possible just so they can say "It's technically not cheating" >People comparing baseball to a proletariat struggle against 'the whales who own all the capital' @Alex this thread is the perfect example of blackmail, begging, threatening, crying, and "totally-not-cheating" all wrapped up into a neat little package. How many game rules will be bent over backwards before you take a hard-line stance against cheaters who take advantage of loopholes and technicalities? We've mathematically already shown how baseball can quintuple a nation's natural income. How is it fair that people who hasn't even built their nation up can make more money than most nations in the game by simply spamming a cookie clicker? The debate is dead at this point, there is no further logic to draw out. All that's left is emotional appeals, threats, and blackmail. I hope you see the writing on the wall this time but this is the 10th thread about baseball in the past couple of months, so I'm beginning to lose hope.

1. Notifications get sent when a treasure spawns in your nation. Apparently this isn't something that already happens and I feel like it needs to. 2. City build page that lets you mock-up a city, its infra/land levels, its age, etc. so you can see what kind of incomes you would get from different city builds.

This war just keeps on giving.

You guys came in, wrote your story, and now the ink is dry and you're closing the book. This is what the life cycle of a successful alliance is. Founding with intent, accomplishing clear goals, and dissolving when necessary. Permanence is slavery.

Just pretty much echoing everyone else here at this point as I think my stance is clear. Automated in-game actions should be against the rules. I'm not even sure why we have to have this conversation, honestly. The game is meant to be played by people, not scripts. I also agree with Zephyr about removing the API all together at this point. The only part I'm willing to overlook scripting is with mass messages. I could care less if an alliance has a recruitment bot, that has been a mainstay of nationsims for years.

I feel like you're reaching on this one, good sir. I agree with you that the slot filling rule needs to be fleshed out though. The admin utilizing any communication tool at his disposal doesn't equate to unequal treatment or endorsement of said tool though. It's simply part and parcel for a multiplayer game to talk to one another. Discord happens to be a convenient tool to make quicker decisions with. edit: Let's take this to moderation support though. I'll make a thread tonight unless you beat me to it wherein the community and hopefully admins can discuss fleshing out the slot filling rule.

How is active investigation of every report indicative of haphazard moderation? Sorry an active admin that actually participates in the community upsets you so.

I find it crazy how often I see you post this exact post in the suggestion subforum lmao. I whole-heartedly agree that any change to beige will be devastating for the game unless other concurrent changes are made. I would like to note that I support the removal of beige in favor of the addition of better recovery mechanics. Things like: - Buffs to Daily Troop Buy Amounts if you've just lost a war. - Flatly increasing the amount of units each military improvement allows you to purchase per day. - Some sort of non-VM peace mode where you take a significant debuffs to economy and military capacity. - Reduced casualties - Start wars with 0 MAP's, as Tiberius suggested. I got reported for slot filling when I bought a treasure and raided the guy for it. Alex actually DM'd me on discord about it. It definitely gets looked into, even in questionable cases. Or at least refund the 12 MAP's if your nuke gets shot down by the Iron Dome. ?

tbh I thought we could all just agree that the Commonwealth reviving GPA meant that it was time to gang up on neutrals again.

It is my opinion, and probably the original intent of Alex, that a nation should be able to reasonably produce one manufactured resource self-sufficiently. You *have* to trade for the others as improvement slot limitations and resource distributions per continent won't allow you to produce all the resources in the game. Thus - we need to balance raw outputs with manufactory input requirements.

Given recent events and the reveal of just how deep automation, third party software, and outright botting go within certain elements of the community, I would like to bring up the discussion of whether automation should be allowed and to what degree. It seems to me that utilizing third party software to execute actions within a game (such as automated banking or member management) is the traditional definition of unethical botting. No one is at the keyboard of the account in-use. This then conveys unfair advantage to that person or persons that other people simply do not have access to. A quick example of how quickly something as small as auto-banking could spiral into affecting the entire game: Roberts and Tiberius are at war. Roberts runs out of gasoline, and now has to wait several hours for a government member to come online and send him gasoline from the alliance bank. During this time, Roberts cannot execute attacks with either tanks or planes. Tiberius is also out of gas, fortunately he can automatically withdraw it via software even though his alliance government is also asleep. Tiberius can then execute his attacks immediately and wins the war. Multiply this scenario out within a prolonged global war, now you have entire alliances gaining an advantage in war. Winning wars because they have automated scripts running for them. It doesn't take a genius to see how this impacts the meta and politics of the game. Suddenly we're playing Politics and Bots.

tbh I'm fine with both of these tweaks.

Genuine thanks for your advice, but that's off topic to the suggestion Balance should exist for balance's sake, if nothing else.

To be clear, this isn't my personal vendetta against BK. I think TKR, Yosobot, and all others should be banned from using actions in-game. Information gathering is fine, can't really police that anyway. Using a bot to perform an action through an account while someone isn't actually at their keyboard is the definition of unethical botting. You literally quoted my line. "Gathering information is fine, executing actions within the game are not". @Alex I honestly hope there's some misunderstanding here and you didn't truly allow these people to effectively bot your game. I can't even begin to tell you how unfair that is to players who do things manually. I'm honestly leaning towards the other people here. Where is the line on botting? If it's fine to simply access other people's accounts via third party software, then why can't I make an alliance of slave-accounts that I can access via my third party software? War bots? Trade bots? Why even play this game if the alliances with coders can simply automate and gain distinct advantage? fricking laughable.

To select communities, you mean. Gaming the system and automating functions of PnW should be against the rules. It confers an unfair advantage. Whether there are a "large number" of things relying on unethical exploitation is a non-factor. I don't mind using scripts to collect information from the game, the API is designed for that. Once you begin utilizing scripts to automate functions and actions, I think it crosses a line.

Why isn't this kind of botting against the rules in the first place?

I'm sure this was brought up before, but I can't find it. The system that gives percentage boosts to production has seemingly tampered with the self-sufficiency of nations. I think every nation should be able to specialize into producing at least one manufactured resource self-sufficiently. I believe the intent of @Alex was to encourage specialization. Therefore, my suggestion is to fix the improvements that won't produce enough to keep up with refinement. Right now I can confirm that iron can't keep up with steel if you have the Ironworks project. Others might also be affected and in need of fixing.

Pretty basic suggestion. I think resources should be the limiting factor regarding military usefulness, not improvement slots or RNG blowing up a hangar. Keep everything as-is, but remove military improvements while allowing nations to buy military as if they were maxed out (5-5-5-3).

Again, asking Alex to code in a project so three people could buy it would be silly. If you'd like to raise the bar to 25 cities that would be ok. 40 would be wildly out of the question. I'm fine with renaming it.

oh boy, here we go politicking again! How about we leave the IC where it belongs, in the game, and the OOC (hacks or otherwise) where they belong, in the hands of Administration and BK leadership.

why waste alex's time

Oh shit... Is Noctis making sense in this thread? What kind of world hath we wrought?

That has nothing to do with market speculation

It's so sad that the adults have to take toys away because the kids can't play nice. I support this entirely.