Bart

Yes, and this didn't happen before? Do you really have such a thick skull?

Are you stupid or simply bad at reading? The last link clearly refers to "September 7, 2019". I rest my case...

It would seem you are somewhat salty about VM due to previous events?

Uhm, where below? Please refrain from non-existent references in discussions. Please read my post, I clearly stated moderation should verify if this is the case during a war. Given the unlikelihood of someone falling ill during the small portion of a time they are at war, it stands to reason that the more logical approach is to treat it as an exception. Yes, and if you would have read my initial post I clearly propose a mechanism whereby someone can contact a moderator and verify the situation. I would also like to add that by bring up that this is incorrect usage of the term "OOC", but lets humour you and presume it is valid usage. (A more correct term would be a personal attack.) But let me be clear about this, if you're against my proposal you're currently implying that verification of the validity of a person's claim by moderation is in itself a personal attack. Might just be me, but this sounds like you don't actually have an argument? It's not so much about the time to prepare as it is about the economic damage that's avoided by skipping two weeks of war. And no matter how much you prepare, that's still a major factor. To simplify it into numbers, say a nation has 2000 infrastructure per city and 25 cities, that's approximately 13 million of value per city times, resulting in 325 million infrastructure value. If someone is attempting to escape a war, it is safe to assume that most or all of that infrastructure would be destroyed. At the same time that nation would have an income, which is of course highly dependent on the city configuration. They'd also lose some improvements, potentially their spies, and other assets. If you take this approach to considering the effect of someone hiding in vacation mode, you'll find that two weeks is economically very favourable to continuing the war and losing all those assets. So to discourage people from hiding from wars, the economic loss from going into peace mode should at the very least equate the infrastructure damage they are avoiding, and preferably also a portion of the economic damage they'd suffer. In light of that perspective, extending the the minimum time to 6.5 weeks is really still a favourable deal, but sufficiently long to prevent the person from returning during the same conflict under normal circumstances. As clearly stated, people should be able to contact moderation and explain the situation. But given the rate at which people use vacation mode during conflicts, it stands to reason that either every P&W player has at least lost three grandmothers and five grandfathers, or people are currently abusing vacation mode to escape wars. So depending on what Alex considers fair usage of vacation mode, this issue should be rectified or a clear statement should follow that P&W is switching to a pay to win model. Sadly there are clear economic reasons to do it as I've indicated above. Way to avoid the point of the example... And so we've dropped to the level of personal attacks already? May I recommend a pair of reading glasses? Please reread my initial post. It's very much a grey area, and it's very much being used to dodge wars at the moment. And yet, I keep hearing the statement that it's not against the rules, yet no one so far has actually provided proof of this. Additionally, as stated above: "But given the rate at which people use vacation mode during conflicts, it stands to reason that either every P&W player has at least lost three grandmothers and five grandfathers, or people are currently abusing vacation mode to escape wars. So depending on what Alex considers fair usage of vacation mode, this issue should be rectified or a clear statement should follow that P&W is switching to a pay to win model." Since other measures recently implemented also act on an assumption of guilt, it is very reasonable to assume a similar approach should be taken when dealing with this situation. Please refrain from discussing game politics here, or I will feel the necessity to report you for out-of-context discussions. But if you insist to discuss this, NPO leadership has previously removed people who were having real life problems from target lists, if they were contacted about such situations. Please refrain from discussing game politics here, this is a discussion about game mechanics and the apparent abuse of of vacation mode to escape a losing war scenario. That is exactly what I'm arguing for, the people who are at war with the nation should be able to continue running spy operations on the nation they are at war with. This has nothing to do with bots, it's related to the economics of warfare damage, see a few quotes above this one. It's a very easy way to recover when someone breaks through your defences, as they'll be forced to start all over again if the coming out of vacation mode is well-timed. Well, I personally find that a bit of a weak excuse, I recently moved to a country at the other side of the planet from my perspective, ended up in a hospital there, and I'd rather not continue the rest of the story. But safe to say, I had other things on my mind than P&W, yet I never used vacation mode because I considered it unfair. And as stated above, if you have a valid reason you could request a reduction of that term under my proposal. The war system is flawed, there's little argument about that. Between ridiculous down-declares, the inability to protect money on your nation, the inability to hurt alliance banks, and people using vacation mode to hide from wars it's honestly no surprise that wars last very long. But this is a concrete proposal to fix at least one aspect of it by increasing the expense of one exploit. Preventing the move of alliance banks as is currently done would also be rather trivial using a variety of methods that were proposed. Ground assault based looting of nations should be modified heavily, and there should be a certain degree of underdog bonus to prevent curb stomps. But I'd like to point out that some of the people arguing in this very thread have actively argued against such proposals in the past.

And this, sir, is a marvellous piece of false reasoning, it's not because there's no rule against it that it should be used to that effect. See for example the changes made to baseball because it was being used for something that wasn't intended. And you are carefully gleaming over the conditional statements in my original text in regards to moderation. So before you wish to continue this argument, may I recommend you carefully read a post before responding? I hate having arguments based on false pretences, and it makes you look like a bit of a !@#$ when you argue in this manner. With that out of the way, my first question is, do you have any actual argument against the proposed spy change? You can already continue the war, so clearly the original intent of the system is to let the war finish. Hence, limiting the spy features does not make sense from a logical perspective, you should be able to conduct the war to its full extend or not at all. Furthermore, I was unfairly banned for posting negative reviews. But to get to the point why vacation mode to escape wars is a favourable deal: two weeks of forced vacation mode versus having a nation destroyed, that's a pretty easy choice if you turn it into actual numbers, two weeks of income versus losing more than twenty thousand infrastructure. I'm going to assume you know the value of that infrastructure and the average nation income in that period. With forty five days you're not even going to break even, it'll still be advantageous to go into vacation mode, but decisively less so than beforehand. And to address your other statements: Currently there's no incentive to end a war if you can hide in vacation mode at will, removing that ability would increase the risk of continuing a war, hence lead to quicker peace agreements. I specifically stated that moderation should be capable of removing the negative effects upon a request from the player with proper reasoning. The added advantage is that they'd have a few minutes of work to return, giving them ample time to think about if they're already able to return or not. Avoiding the pogo-leaving you see in many other online games. I'd rather not include the current war in this discussion, since this is an important discussion for game balance. It significantly changes the rate at which wars can cause damage to nations. Calling out potential abuse of game mechanisms is an out of context attack instantly? May I suggest you part your personal predicament with what's best for the game? All we can state is that people seem to be having a statistically excessive amount of bad luck while their nations are at war, no matter which side of a conflict they're on. Additionally, calling the out-of-context card is a bit flawed after this line: "Well first of all there is no rule against using vacation mode to avoid wars as Alex has clearly stated a few times, so no mod would need to punish anyone for doing so," Please come up with actual arguments or suggestions instead of turning this into the n-th thread discussing the current in-game conflict. I believe there are specific sub-forums for discussing the issues related to that one, and this one isn't it.

The current vacation mode system has a rather peculiar flaw which should be addressed. If you are at war with a nation and they go into vacation mode, it becomes impossible to spy on them.While you can still run the attacks using the remaining MAPs, you are unable to run spy operations, which can be a significant portion of your war effort, for example you might want to determine how much money the person has on hand to determine if a ground assault is the favourable option or destroy the last remaining ship using an espionage operation. The solution to this problem is quite simple: add a secondary check which allows you to execute a spy operation on someone if you're in an active war with them, no matter if they are in vacation mode or not. This might also discourage people from using vacation mode to escape wars, since it leaves particular assets (e.g. nuclear weapons) open to additional spy attacks. Making this modification would definitely help strengthen the message that the game doesn't wish to operate on a "pay to win" model as currently seems to be the case to a certain degree. However, the core of the problem still stems from the fact that vacation mode can currently be used to escape from wars, and not for its original purpose: providing a break from the game in case you're unable to play due to real life circumstances. This concept is especially accentuated by the recent changes to the activity system. Currently if a large nation its military is broken it can simply enter vacation mode. They'll be forced to take some damage, but they control the moment when they leave vacation mode, protecting their infrastructure and resource production capacity, which would otherwise be destroyed permanently if new wars were declared after the ones that ended. To summarise, vacation mode significantly limits the permanent damage done to a nation if used correctly, which I believe was not the original intention of the system. Since it's unlikely moderators will be able to correctly judge the situation and punish abusers, a more elegant solutions that dissuades people from using vacation mode to escape war damage might be preferable. The first one would be to set a rather long minimum length on the vacation mode if it's used while a nation is at war, with no option to cancel it earlier. If someone is forced into vacation mode for at least forty five real life days, the system becomes significantly less attractive as a quick means to escape a war. Alternatively, and what might be more effective, is to increase the pillage rate for a nation in vacation mode: let the victor of the war loot half the the resources the nation in vacation mode has on hand and increase the infrastructure damage to ten percent. This would strongly dissuade the use of vacation mode as a quick "get out of war cheaply" button. Implementing the first proposal, enabling spy operations, is fairly logical I think. Since the war continues, it only stands to reason that all measures to conduct that war should remain available. The second proposal would mostly depend on how Alex chooses to understand the reason for vacation mode to be in the game, if the purpose is to enable people to take a break for real life issues, then the proposed solutions would definitely reinforce that interpretation of the system. Furthermore, people could always contact the moderation team to undo the negative effects if a proper real life reason exists, such as a family emergency. This approach would also significantly reduce the burden on the moderation team to determine if vacation mode was used properly, since the amount of abuse - when using the interpretation that vacation mode serves the purpose of attending to real life matters - appears to significantly exceed the number of cases where proper reasons exist.

Oh, I agree the daily update is ridiculous, the caps should be reset 24 hours after purchase, that way it's fair for everyone.

Uhm, who gives a damn about the daily turn over? There's no significant difference between that one and the update that happens every 2 hours from a programming point of view. And you very much do have the politics & snore screen every two hours, and it's a major disadvantage for folks with slow connections. And giving it a set time span, as the above gentleman o' fortune suggests, only worsens the issue, since that then means you can queue up tabs to launch attacks at a given time and just count down.

Uhm no, you're grossly misrepresenting a fake solution that worsens the issue. The entire point of this proposal is to avoid the Politics & Snore screen, giving people a chance to fight on equal ground. Right now you can queue tabs and hit submit as update comes up if you have a good connection. Also there is no "rush" to update, this proposal is entirely transparent to the user and it's only effect is levelling the playground for everyone. Off-setting politics & snore simply shifts the issue over time. This method would also allow the game to grow and use multiple servers.

For queuing you can use something like this: https://www.rabbitmq.com/queues.html

Operating on the presumption that P&W currently tries to calculate update for all nations at once I'd propose the following system to fix the lag at update. Add two fields to the database: Last update cycle (i.e. long int): Hold a number indicating which update cycle the nation is currently in. Active since last update (i.e. boolean): Holds a flag to indicate whether the nation was active in the last update cycle (user logged in, was attacked, etc.) As you hit update and the cronjob/timer runs the update script, you instantly update all nations which were active since the last update. These are folks who are most likely online or to be attacked and should be a few hundred nations at most. This will most likely cause the server to choke up for a few seconds as it currently does but should process fairly quickly. Now wait for a minute or two as folks run their attacks, the server will see heavy load and you'll be queuing up a lot of user-induced DB operations. In the meanwhile, if a nation which is still in the previous update cycle sees a "hit" (login, someone views nation page, etc.) you instantly run the update queries for that nation and present the updated page, this should be fairly limited and avoid heavy throttling as currently occurs. About 5 minutes after update, you make a list of nations still in the previous update cycle, and you queue up update for them in batches of 50 or 100 and run them at a steady pace (i.e. 50 nations per 15 seconds) that's quick enough to get through all nations but slow enough to avoid excessive server load. Advantages of this system: P&W stays available throughout update. Peak load on DB server is minimal. Almost no one will notice any side effect other than maybe an increased page load time if they view a non-updated nation. The need to update "inactive" nations on first view will throttle the speed at which users can run blitz attacks at update, making it fairer to people with slow connections. Disadvantages of this system: More back-end logic. Slight overhead by requiring checks. Might need more frequent integrity checks (i.e. once a day) to see if no one is left behind in an older update cycle. Large batch API calls might be tricky to combine with this sort of system around update.

And there you go, insulting people again... Is it that hard for you to keep a civil conversation? And it's still quite different, but of course that doesn't fit in your story. Unfairly banned for posting negative reviews.

You're assuming your nation and your alliance, stop generalising based on that. Try again...

I paid it through daily bonus and baseball, so yeah, then it is a big upfront cost, and so did many others.

Eight people? More like one by the looks of it. On the other hand, mirror, mirror, on the wall...