Raphael

Give the dev team a few more months

If you're at a loss as to "wHy dO mEaN oWf posters always downvote us" You guys talked recently about introducing an inactivity modifier allowing nations of all sizes to raid inactive nations - thereby allowing higher city counts to participate more if they wanted to be raiders. Then Keegoz posted a thread 25 days ago that got maybe 0.001% of playerbase to respond - without any clear indication as to which direction they really preferred the game to go. 26 people voted no to any beige timers for VMers, 37 voted yes to the 24 hrs. There are 10,000 nations that play this game. This thread is now talking about "wrapping up raiding" by c15 and adjusting raiders into the "main game"... Who asked for raiding to be nerfed (again)? What data was this decision made with other than a random whim? Lmfao. I wonder how many unpopular changes a development team can really pump out before people say screw it and just leave the game. I'd highly advise you start putting polls into the actual game itself so players can actually see and interact with the feedback threads/polls. You guys are going to kill PnW by making constant unpopular changes that don't even address a real gameplay issue.

Since we're so close to its release, we should probably include the MPP in this data. I'm sure many bought one in lieu of a city in the last few weeks.

We must all eventually grow beyond our mentors to achieve the greatest version of ourselves. Congrats on growth, even though I know splitting is probably an emotional choice. Good luck to both parties moving forward.

Some economic changes in no particular order: Nuclear fallout changed to last 8 days per nuke to 10. I don't think the nuclear mechanics in PnW are particularly realistic so won't even touch on that, but I think currently effects should be a bit more devastating than currently. Change raw resource mining output to be inverse to city count, food excluded. With whales being so economically dominant, we need to look into some sort of exchange-based economy to take some of that concentrated power away from the upper tier economically. So the lower your city count, the more raws each mine produce. The higher your city count, the less each mine produces. Remove the ability to build farms in cities with less than 3000 land. It should be higher but I think this will reasonably prevent a lot of extremely bad builds especially with new players. Infrastructure costs daily resource upkeep like every 100 units of infra require 2 of each manufactured resource per day. Infrastructure decays over 3000 at a slow rate. Helps prevent runaway whales a bit. Somehow make pollution matter more than just building hospitals. Somehow make crime matter more than just building police stations. Weekly flavorful decision events that give your nation varying small bonuses based on choice. +1% income here, -1% upkeep there, etc.

Thanks for keeping up with these Minesome. No idea how people can scroll through these and say multi-polarity is bad. Our current system is probably the only thing keeping politics from completely dying in this game right now.

Good luck to both TCW and Bourbon Street, as well as the rest of BackRooms as it dissolves. I think there is potential in a lot of these alliances.

tbh I'm a little hazy up until the end of Quack bc I also faded out of existence for a bit after NPOLT - because @Buorhann decided a year-long NAP was somehow a great idea and it made a lot of people basically log off for a year. I'm going to bold all the key pieces so you can quickly skim and get the gist. So we had a year-long NAP and basically very little happened. Some IQ-Remnants like NPO's last few members or GOONS got rolled til they too quit. BK disbanded but then reformed back under the leadership of Yoso and LordStrum. ShiftyStranger had multiple big OOC fallouts with various women in PnW resulting in him receiving a ban. Obviously several coalition A alliances never recovered from NPOLT and disbanded for various reasons including the Golden Horde. [insert a fuzzy time skip bc I was in Arrgh and not fully paying attention] The game collectively decided that it was time to give something new a try. This part is subjective. The idea was to try out "minispheres" - an idea that Kayser and others had been floating for awhile - I believe the idea was everyone would be grouped up in similar-sized spheres similar to how Chaos was structured (if you remember TKR's bloc from pre-NPOLT). The implementation was more accurately a multi-polar world. Something I would contend is just as good as minispheres but the difference between the expectation and implementation of this new political meta basically defined the next few years of PnW politics. So Coalition A splintered but maybe not quite the way people expected or wanted. Again details are fuzzy through time, so I won't go into overt detail. Basically t$ and their satellites combined with TKR and our close partners and formed Quack. Rose saved Camelot from absolute destruction by signing them right after NPOLT ended and formed the core of a new sphere there. Fark, The Immortals, and others formed the Swamp. There were other spheres but I don't remember them. Obligatory Arrgh wrecked the Swamp during this time period and then TKR wrecked Arrgh bc Sheepy deleted Beige from the game for a month. Quack was probably a 2.5:1 (ish) ratio in size to any other given sphere. This is where you begin to see expectation vs. implementation of minispheres start to cause friction. Many called Quack too large, and Quack I think rolled a sphere or two then got coalitioned by the other spheres (Duckhunt). Quack fought a last war together before disbanding (The Last Ride) where we rolled the Swamp iirc. Post-Quack then split into two main spheres: Blackwater (t$ and satellites, most notably Nexus: CTO, OWR, Legion, HS) and Hollywood (TKR, Grumpy, Guardian, Children of the Light, Error 404, Black Knights, Name Withheld, and friends). Camelot departed from Rose roughly right before this and Rose was the smaller of the three "main" spheres during this time. Swamp also splintered. Hollywood attracted a lot of flak because, again, people took issue with the size of a sphere during an era of "mini" plus Grumpy+Guardian's dominance of the upper tier. Blackwater similarly attracted some, but not as much, flak for also being huge. HW and BW were both maybe 1.5:1 size ratio any other spheres at this point. So really we were moving towards a more even meta but not quite there yet. Hollywood fought some wars, Blackwater fought some wars, Rose fought some wars, basically a big back-and-forth between the three. Here is another very subjective piece so I'll word it politely: t$ had a crisis basically where they were finding themselves repeatedly on the losing side of wars so they made a change along with Rose: T$ signed Rose and merged spheres to create Celestial, a new bloc. A lot of political shifts happened here: CotL+E404 merged to form Cataclysm which formed its own powerful sphere called Clock. The Immortals joined Hollywood to replace e404+cotl. Disgruntled former Syndicate allies formed a new sphere called the Back Rooms. And there was also Haunted Mansion (basically the worst remnants of Swamp no one else would take) and Johnsons (a meme sphere of micros) but neither of those are relevant to warrant me bolding them. Celestial being slightly larger than Hollywood was now the recipient of relatively equal criticisms over sign as HW - I guess it depends on who you asked. People felt like that was a step backwards but others felt it necessary to somehow defeat Hollywood. Fortunately, Hollywood would go on to defeat Celestial and then disband itself. So now we're basically at the "modern day": TKR/BK/NW split into their own true minisphere hitherto unnamed, GGO split into their own true minisphere. Eventually Celestial and Clock would split up with Cata+t$ forming Wayward and Rose+Eclipse forming Oreos (delicious cookies). Midgard also formed post-Hollywood/Clock/Celestial from many different pieces. So the game has decentralized itself pretty heavily since NPOLT. There are a lot of moving pieces now, a lot of new combinations of alliances, and generally more content but, in my opinion, the content has typically been more shallow.

cOnGrAtS oN PiCkiNg uP tHe mOsT uSeLeSs trAsh thAt wAs lYinG ArOunD.

Yes good... good...

This is a pretty cool concept, I'll be interested to see how it pans out. Happy birthday!

When a city is not powered, have it be highlighted in red on the city screen so you can quickly identify it. When buying or selling military units, provide a screen showing how many barracks/factories/hangars/drydocks you'll need averaged per city to support whatever amount you're attempting to buy or sell to. Or provide an option to buy or sell to X barracks/factories/hangars/drydocks per city. So if you're coming off a war, have an option where you can sell down tanks to whatever will leave you with 3 factories per city worth of tanks, instead of leaving the player to do the math.

As Hwan mentioned, I don't think the economy needs more free cash injections for older players. We just need more catchups. Another useful thing would be to somehow get the city cost reducing projects into the hands of newer players faster/cheaper.

I called out Krampus and Jaden (both Blackwater allies at that point) for posting dismissive one-liners on a serious post - You can try to twist and worm your way away from the facts but it won't help you when you're literally posting the logs supporting my consistency. I called for better content then, I call for better content now. You, as usual, are throwing your own implications onto my words and spinning like a helicopter to try and dodge the fact that Syndicate threw a huge fit when confronted about their bad behaviors and rather than acknowledge and improve, you yourself admit that many t$ posters would rather take their ball and go home. It's not about my dictations of what should or shouldn't be posted, but it's not crazy to ask for a serious response to serious posts. Pretending that saying that is the same as telling you never to post is honestly astounding levels of spin on a post aimed at trying to encourage the community to look at its own trends. Stop making this a t$ thread.

Basically admitting the only way t$ can refrain from toxicity is by not posting at all isn't the burn you think it is. Wana's been posting a good share of WoT's though so it's really not t$ causing the problem.

I discussed this at length in DM's with some people today after my own thread recently bombed, but you guys really should start democratizing the development process. It's very clear that the dev team has no direction and the leadership is entirely inactive (Prefontaine, Alex) from an input perspective. I would rather let this subforum be a direction-giving tool than have every random thought be pitched as a new potential update and mass-downvoted repeatedly.

I explicitly wasn't only calling out Rose here - I stated TKR, t$, etc. are also culpable -- but all three of us are still better than the groups who post nothing.

This is completely spurred by conversation I've been having in the Orbis Debate Forum discord server, and I realized that there is a trend worth discussing: Wars in PnW for the last year or so have been almost completely devoid of In-character discussion or importance. I write this while reflecting on my own involvement with TKR and Hollywood DoW posts, reflecting upon t$ or Rose posts, or the usual lack of anyone besides the top 10 posting anything at all on the forums in-character. I can't really think, beyond some vague references to revenge, of any IC content that has been posted regarding global wars. Almost exclusively, DoW's have been memes, jokes, or thematic to the sphere - but generally lacking In-character elaborations. This reflection began when I saw that GGO getting hit immediately spurred several threads to "name the global war", "global war propaganda", etc. and I couldn't help but notice that GGO has less than 100 people in their entire sphere. Rose+Eclipse are two pretty large alliances, but probably less than half of them are actually fighting since it's an entirely-upper tier war. So my initial question was: Does 200 or fewer people fighting equate to the same thing as NPOLT? Should this go down in the wiki as a great battle of political significance? Which has lead me into another question: Does GGO getting hit have any political significance? It may have consequences, GGO might seek to join another sphere after this for safety. Rose and Eclipse might sign a treaty now that Celestial is dissolving. Does the war itself have political significance though? If so, what is it? Petty revenge for actions in Hollywood? Disdain for whales (while TEst is involved on the aggressor's side)? We could never really know. Rose posted a birthday cake picture, which was admittedly funny, but not really much of anything in the way of an in-character explanation or statement of what's going on or what the goal is. Eclipse posted a meme about erections. So this "global" war does not involve the vast majority of the globe, does not carry enough political weight to apparently warrant a serious post, and overall I haven't seen much discussion on the war itself in public areas like these forums or RON or elsewhere. Meanwhile, for a dichotomous example, Hand of Fate raided TKR on a whim with effectively no CB other than thinking we'd put up a better fight than other targets - yet they had almost a page worth of forum replies (plus the original post) entirely of In-Character roleplayed responses and reasonings. I've always been a person to look for a reason why, even while in Arrgh I would make long posts about paperlessness, democracy, and freedom to play as you want - I personally think this game shines brightest when you have a purpose or at least a character to play. So I'm not here to hate on Rose or Eclipse or HoF, but to simply ask: What kind of political world are we, as leaders and players, creating and working towards? What is the point of Politics and War if no one will engage in politics?

I know it's surprising to many, but I can actually read and see "there are way more votes in the categories that aren't in favor" even if they're split. This isn't designed to trick the community nor is it a vote on what to do, it's just to garner opinions. I hope you guys realize I'm an unpaid volunteer posting this just to see where the community officially stands on an issue. Wish y'all would mellow out but I am committed to at least giving you guys a venue to express your thoughts - despite mass downvoting me. lol. I'd respectfully ask that you, especially as someone on the dev team, not make comments like this. You know very well downdeclares have been an ongoing discussion for months prior to HoF hitting TKR.

Unfortunately, the mechanical reality is that there is no such distinction. Unless we somehow create one. A whale knocked down and raiding for the next year is mechanically the same as a whale that got knocked down an hour ago -- in terms of score, war range, the relevant stuff re: down declares. There is nothing absolute about it, thus the poll. This isn't a forced issue per se, but it's definitely one which the game admins have an interest in ensuring there is a balance.

Looking specifically to begin public discussion and feedback BEFORE the dev team spends six months debating things. The background here is that the dev team is seeing 15+ city down declares as an issue that impacts and ripples through the entire meta. Whales, the top 0.00001% of players, are dominating the meta and honestly preventing the bottom 99% from being overtly relevant. In a sandbox political game, this is not an ideal situation, so we are regularly discussing ways to balance this without completely destroying the point of being a larger nation. In the spirit of public feedback and some of the recent calls for better transparency, I'm posting this thread. Keep it civil, keep it safe -- if you have good ideas for how we could balance this specific issue please post it here.

I don't disagree with your exact point -- If you're not large enough to entertain having your own offshore and you don't have a trusted government team then I highly urge any micro to look into alternative options (mergers, disbandment, protectorates, etc). The issue I take, and the elitism I call out, is the absolute notion that any given thing defines a competent alliance. There is a metric tonne of gatekeeping in the PnW community surrounding the term "competent" given that this is a text-based browser game. I've said it before and I'll say it again: You can take any given group of active people and turn them into a "competent" alliance through basic organizational skills. The gatekeeping often leads to suppressed new alliances or random wars against existing alliances for no reason other than perceived competence. Often, these perceptions are warranted but I think it detracts from the game to constantly harp about getting good or outright disbanding -- the political game very clearly suffers from a lack of participation especially outside the top 10. Most people avoid the forums due to toxicity, they avoid places like RON due to toxicity, etc. This community needs to be open to allow for engagement rather than rabidly attacking any perceived weakness in my opinion.

I disagree tbh. Having a trusted offshore is an asset. It's just elitism to say you need your own to be good. Especially in the age of most AA's having like 2 working gov members tops.

the age of aquarius, truly Good luck t$!

gg