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Reduce Sub 20 City Costs


The Mad Titan
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4 minutes ago, Lairah said:

- Clipped, too damn long -

You can easily get to 20 cities if you continue at the speed you are going.

why would you want the easy way out if you are here to stay. just keep making smart choices and continue to grow, then you will be among the biggest and the best. simple as that.

believe it when we say, getting to city 10 back in the day was a very big challenge and it took a lot of time, thinking and dedication.

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25 minutes ago, Lairah said:

How long did that take? I know how quickly baseball can resolve itself, i don't much like the idea of essentially staring at the page for hours doing that. I'd use a bot, yanno, if that wasn't bannable for incredibly obvious reasons. I have... just under $37 million right now. Since you know how this works, i wanna ask. If, theoretically, i were to invest all of that right now, into baseball, how long does it take to break even. Assume for simplicity i'm able and willing to play it as much as you did. 

All i've ever heard is not to waste time on it, i am genuinely curious.

If you really care as much about playing the core game as you let on, a week for a 37 mil investment is a reasonable time frame. If you have no life and want to kill yourself, I managed 15 mil in a day once. I’ve since then gotten over caring about pixels.

Want proof that Sheepy is terrible? Upgrading your players 1 point at a time is more efficient because it nets him marginally more ad revenue.

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Just now, Them said:

If you really care as much about playing the core game as you let on, a week for a 37 mil investment is a reasonable time frame. If you have no life and want to kill yourself, I managed 15 mil in a day once. I’ve since then gotten over caring about pixels.

....Seriously?

From investing the $37 million i have now? 
It would seem i have been mislead. What uh, is the appropriate way to invest in it? You can DM instead of spamming the thread, Lairah Kerasis#2795
I almost wonder why alliances don't get active people together and organize this. Or if they do, ours doesn't.

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6 hours ago, LeotheGreat said:

-snip-

the economics of the game have become that alliances are discouraged from investing in new players, hurting P&W's over all retention. When noobs see people with 20+ cities, and realize that it takes literal years to reach that level it hurts retention as many noobs get disheartened. City costs at the sub-20 level are simply too prohibitive in their current state to help newer players reach that level, as shown by the numerous graphs showing how most players quit early on.

-snip-

No. Just, no. All that needs to be done to invest in new players is that you need to pony up and pay for it. We've been doing it for a long time and it's been working well. Have some examples:

https://politicsandwar.com/nation/id=65009

https://politicsandwar.com/nation/id=67313

https://politicsandwar.com/nation/id=68506

https://politicsandwar.com/nation/id=80362

https://politicsandwar.com/nation/id=66500

https://politicsandwar.com/nation/id=84758

https://politicsandwar.com/nation/id=94647

https://politicsandwar.com/nation/id=100016

https://politicsandwar.com/nation/id=102184

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34 minutes ago, Sephiroth said:

You can easily get to 20 cities if you continue at the speed you are going.

why would you want the easy way out if you are here to stay. just keep making smart choices and continue to grow, then you will be among the biggest and the best. simple as that.

believe it when we say, getting to city 10 back in the day was a very big challenge and it took a lot of time, thinking and dedication.

The thing is, i don't currently foresee ADM being able to push that. While i've done well for myself so far, i'm also under no impression that i'll be able to pull hard enough that my alliance can help cover only some of it. Just the way it operates, i go fast now because i'm small, and i'm active, and i do things, alot of things, more everyday. As i climb up the city ladder though, my priority will go down. So unless we just stop recruiting and growing right now, more new people will come, and those that stay will be prioritized for that growth over me.


Suppose it's good timing for me to ask Who Me about baseball then, huh? I'm only OK at playing the market, frankly i think my standards for price deviation are too high, raiding is getting sparce and i only produce so much coal. At this point, though, i'm mostly arguing your side for you, oops. It makes sense, what i've been saying applies to your average person, not to me.

Seriously though, if Who me isn't kidding, anybody with experience on how to do it right, i'd love to hear on properly managing a baseball team.

 

10 minutes ago, JtTeE said:

Yeah, definitely seeing what you're saying, especially with this Seph. Good for me to keep in perspective where precisely i'm standing when discussing things as big as everyone in the game.

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Fundamentally with any game like this, the gap between new nations and older nations is always going to grow with the length of the game, as the average age of older nations increases, and the average size of nations gets bigger.  The gap between smaller and bigger nations is to a very large degree driven by the gap in how long those nations have been playing.

If we really want to change the game, you're going to have to figure out a radical way to fundamentally change that situation.  It probably has to be dynamic to account for the game getting older.  It seems like every year there is some change to "help new nations catch up with old nations" by lowering costs.  The problem is lowering the cost of infra or cities or whatever doesn't change the fundamental issue, which is the gap between how long different people have been playing.  In a year the gap will continue to grow and people will again be calling for doing something to "help smaller nations catch up".

This also is leading to longer gaps between wars as war chests grow larger and the amount of time people feel they need to become "war ready" again grows.

There would have to be some very fundamental changes to the change to change this dynamic.  Something beyond tweaking prices.

To throw out a couple things I might expand on later:

1) Create a system for capping warchests and alliance banks.  Limiting the amount someone can have limits what they feel the need to have, and limits the economic contribution to the increasing time between wars.

2) Create some kind of system where players control "empires" and eventually new cities spill over into a new nation, rather than simply padding an older nation.  If a nation was limited to say, 10 cities, but after that they started building up another nation (also limited to 10 cities), that gives older players something to do and build while creating more opportunities for old and new players to fight each other.  It would limit so much of the stratification of alliances and nations into different tiers where the stare at each other across the divide of different tiers.

Right now, with 26 cities, I'm basically limited to fighting other players with around 20 cities.  My experience in the war system is almost entirely separate from that of smaller nations.  If say I had two 10 city nations and one 6 city nation, I would have similar economic advantages and separation as I do now, and a bigger overall "empire".  But a team of say 5 players with one 8-10 city nation each could take me down.  New players may not be able to ever catch up with how many 10 city nations I have.  But they could catch up in terms of being able to fight me in wars on equal footing, of having individual nations that are competitive with mine.

There would still be a gap between new nations and older nations that would grow, but that gap would have less meaning in terms of power and interaction.

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3 hours ago, Seeker said:

You're not really seeing it in the way a newer player sees it as which is understandable. 

I stopped after this sentence.  We have literally began recruiting newer players, and we are working with educated them into the economics of the game and how various other mechanics work (Such as city building and planning ahead).

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So there were a few points in this thread where I couldn't quite fathom why people even bother responding; Maybe it's because I don't buy into the grandstanding, political peacock fights, I'm not sure.  Before I even try to touch the meat of the OP content, there's some fundamental things that should be addressed:

1) There's at least one problem presented: retention

2) There's at least one solution presented: cost reduction of cities.

I think we can leave 1 alone, as anyone should be able to understand that it is a truthful issue. That brings us to 2, which hey sure, a lot of people have an issue with. That's fine, except instead of insulting everyone, OP and his lovely mother included, the focus should be switched to "Well that wouldn't work, why not doing X instead?" I'm not a terribly smart or creative individual, but I'm a fairly productive person that can spot room for improvement of the bigger picture. The biggest issues I've seen with retention (personally, as both of these have been reasons that I'm only marginally interested in PnW most of the time) have been the absolute cancerous cyst that most of the community encompasses (no fingers pointed, no alliances spared) and the fact that the type of game is very niche. Most people prefer quick gratification, that's how our society has become over the years. We can't do anything about the genre or scope of the game, but we sure can do something about the community. I think if we start there, we'd probably set foot on the right path to retention.

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2 minutes ago, Ryoula said:

So there were a few points in this thread where I couldn't quite fathom why people even bother responding; Maybe it's because I don't buy into the grandstanding, political peacock fights, I'm not sure.  Before I even try to touch the meat of the OP content, there's some fundamental things that should be addressed:

1) There's at least one problem presented: retention

2) There's at least one solution presented: cost reduction of cities.

I cut out the meaty part of your reply.

The reason why "city cost reduction" isn't a viable solution is because it's entirely based on speculation.  Speculation that, hidden behind the message of "retention", benefits some of the current alliances moreso than others.  Which is why some players are suspicious behind the nature of this topic.

And when countered with "Why don't we make the first 10 cities cheaper instead of the 20?"  It was met with resistance from the OP and those aligned with him, which further raises suspicion behind the purpose of the original idea.

 

The idea is to focus on newer players.  Not give everybody else a big boost.  The majority of the game is centered anywhere from 2 cities up to 14 cities.  Not 20 cities.   10 cities is enough to reach the competitive area of the 14 city inflated area, and they'll have enough of a economic boost to be able to grow on their own (In case they're in poor alliances or whatever other situation where they can only rely on themselves).

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1 hour ago, Lairah said:

....Seriously?

From investing the $37 million i have now? 
It would seem i have been mislead. What uh, is the appropriate way to invest in it? You can DM instead of spamming the thread, Lairah Kerasis#2795
I almost wonder why alliances don't get active people together and organize this. Or if they do, ours doesn't.

Yeah, actually it could take about a week, but usually more. I would have quoted about a month to break even, focusing first and foremost on the stadium to max out quality and seating, which is surprisingly not that expensive, then focusing on the youngest players you have with the money you get out of the baseball. I broke even in about 2 weeks IIRC, with really truly heavy activity. I initially hadn't expected to see profit at all, I was just throwing money at it so it wouldn't get raided right back out of me tbh. But here we are. Baseball games with a maxed out stadium and team can make 20k per game if matched against a lousy team, and upwards of 40k per game if matched with a maxed out team in a maxed out stadium. Considering games can be played at a rate of one every 5 to 10 seconds, that adds up fast.

The trick is teamwork. Baseball discord channels actually popped up at around the time that I started truly investing in baseball, so I would often volunteer for 15-30 minute shifts of just *spamming* away games as fast as the f5 key could handle. Then other people would take over spamming aways while the rest of us spammed home games, and we all ended up making millions. Unfortunately, and predictably, leeches appeared soon after that and the whole thing started to unravel since why volunteer for the away shifts. Still, if you just swap out with a couple guys, and you're not too concerned about feeding the leeches, you can do really well.

Alliances really should organize baseball days for a lil spending money, and not gonna lie, I've wondered myself why the heck they don't.

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7 minutes ago, Ryoula said:

So there were a few points in this thread where I couldn't quite fathom why people even bother responding; Maybe it's because I don't buy into the grandstanding, political peacock fights, I'm not sure.  Before I even try to touch the meat of the OP content, there's some fundamental things that should be addressed:

1) There's at least one problem presented: retention

2) There's at least one solution presented: cost reduction of cities.

I think we can leave 1 alone, as anyone should be able to understand that it is a truthful issue. That brings us to 2, which hey sure, a lot of people have an issue with. That's fine, except instead of insulting everyone, OP and his lovely mother included, the focus should be switched to "Well that wouldn't work, why not doing X instead?" I'm not a terribly smart or creative individual, but I'm a fairly productive person that can spot room for improvement of the bigger picture. The biggest issues I've seen with retention (personally, as both of these have been reasons that I'm only marginally interested in PnW most of the time) have been the absolute cancerous cyst that most of the community encompasses (no fingers pointed, no alliances spared) and the fact that the type of game is very niche. Most people prefer quick gratification, that's how our society has become over the years. We can't do anything about the genre or scope of the game, but we sure can do something about the community. I think if we start there, we'd probably set foot on the right path to retention.

I already provided a counter proposal, and a rebuttal to the fairly weak responses to my counter proposal.

No one has provided any actual substantive proof that this will improve player retention to a large enough degree to justify it, besides random speculation and anecdotes, nor addressed and tried to find compromises with the pretty obvious key flaws in the proposition.

Hell, when people pointed out other potential sources for bad player retention rates, it was dismissed, as if this is the only plausible solution.

I'm still waiting for a proper rebuttal to my suggestion that is relevant to the premise of the argument, or a compromise position, so far its not happened.

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4 minutes ago, Buorhann said:

I cut out the meaty part of your reply.

The reason why "city cost reduction" isn't a viable solution is because it's entirely based on speculation.  Speculation that, hidden behind the message of "retention", benefits some of the current alliances moreso than others.  Which is why some players are suspicious behind the nature of this topic.

And when countered with "Why don't we make the first 10 cities cheaper instead of the 20?"  It was met with resistance from the OP and those aligned with him, which further raises suspicion behind the purpose of the original idea.

 

The idea is to focus on newer players.  Not give everybody else a big boost.  The majority of the game is centered anywhere from 2 cities up to 14 cities.  Not 20 cities.   10 cities is enough to reach the competitive area of the 14 city inflated area, and they'll have enough of a economic boost to be able to grow on their own (In case they're in poor alliances or whatever other situation where they can only rely on themselves).

From what I've seen, you've been one of the more reasonable parties in the thread, so no worries brother. I don't entirely agree with the cost reduction up to 20, I just wanted to kind of point out that rather than focusing on the original poster as a person and his proposed solution and the inherent flaws, we should be focusing on the solution to the problem as a whole.. @Sketchy First sentence applies to you as well. ?

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Oh, with that I do agree with.  While the idea itself isn't bad, it's just a matter of "Why 20 cities?"   Because that doesn't make sense at all.

@Sketchy's idea actually focuses on the new player area (The first 10 cities), but has yet to be countered by it.  He also addressed previous times that @Alex has worked on catching new players up (The 5 cities, etc).  Which is actually beneficial for kickstarting players, but perhaps we should boost that up to 10 cities now.

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5 minutes ago, Ryoula said:

From what I've seen, you've been one of the more reasonable parties in the thread, so no worries brother. I don't entirely agree with the cost reduction up to 20, I just wanted to kind of point out that rather than focusing on the original poster as a person and his proposed solution and the inherent flaws, we should be focusing on the solution to the problem as a whole.. @Sketchy First sentence applies to you as well. ?

I mean, what are your solutions to improve player retention?

The issue here is that I don't have the required data to know with accuracy why the retention rate is so low, neither does anyone else. So making major and incredibly sloppy changes just to maybe possibly improve retention maybe a little maybe a lot is not a particularly convincing topic of discussion.

I would rather just see Alex focus on getting the game a higher degree of traffic. If we get 500 people per month, and only 25 people stay, then if we get 2000 a month, maybe we get 100.

Certainly beats proposing half-baked major shot in the dark changes to a problem no one has the exact data to solve.

Hell, the retention rate is 95% now apparently, and this isn't the first "lets make everything cheaper" suggestion we've had implemented in recent times. 

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16 minutes ago, Sketchy said:

I mean, what are your solutions to improve player retention?

The issue here is that I don't have the required data to know with accuracy why the retention rate is so low, neither does anyone else. So making major and incredibly sloppy changes just to maybe possibly improve retention maybe a little maybe a lot is not a particularly convincing topic of discussion.

I would rather just see Alex focus on getting the game a higher degree of traffic. If we get 500 people per month, and only 25 people stay, then if we get 2000 a month, maybe we get 100.

Certainly beats proposing half-baked major shot in the dark changes to a problem no one has the exact data to solve.

Hell, the retention rate is 95% now apparently, and this isn't the first "lets make everything cheaper" suggestion we've had implemented in recent times. 

Considering Sheepy's track history, he should avoid pushing out any large changes to the game at once. 20, 10, whatever. I just see that quite a few people oppose the change on principle or because it's Leo posting. Cost reductions to anything should theoretically decrease the interim between wars and war is inherently more interesting than not war, so that should increase retention.

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1 hour ago, Azaghul said:

Fundamentally with any game like this, the gap between new nations and older nations is always going to grow with the length of the game, as the average age of older nations increases, and the average size of nations gets bigger.  The gap between smaller and bigger nations is to a very large degree driven by the gap in how long those nations have been playing.

If we really want to change the game, you're going to have to figure out a radical way to fundamentally change that situation.  It probably has to be dynamic to account for the game getting older.  It seems like every year there is some change to "help new nations catch up with old nations" by lowering costs.  The problem is lowering the cost of infra or cities or whatever doesn't change the fundamental issue, which is the gap between how long different people have been playing.  In a year the gap will continue to grow and people will again be calling for doing something to "help smaller nations catch up".

This also is leading to longer gaps between wars as war chests grow larger and the amount of time people feel they need to become "war ready" again grows.

There would have to be some very fundamental changes to the change to change this dynamic.  Something beyond tweaking prices.

To throw out a couple things I might expand on later:

1) Create a system for capping warchests and alliance banks.  Limiting the amount someone can have limits what they feel the need to have, and limits the economic contribution to the increasing time between wars.

Unless there's a limit on how big the gap will become, it will grow indefinitely and without limit.  The unbounded nature of growth in these sorts of games is the main thing that kills them in the long run.  It stifles interaction between new and old players and it redirects an increasing proportion of the player base's GDP towards saving for warchests in the short term and towards nation growth in the long term.

Your first suggestion is an excellent idea.  If both caps were tied to the number of nations rather than nation score - a warchest cap that isn't increased by nation score and an alliance bank cap that is tied to member count and not alliance score - then they would at least partly solve the problem.  There would be a hard limit on the amount of cash and resources that could exist at any one time in the game.  There would be a de facto limit on how large nations could become.  Nations wouldn't be able to fund growth after a certain number of cities because they wouldn't be able to hold all of the cash necessary to buy another city in the first place.

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4 hours ago, Vladamir Putin said:

So by trying to lower city costs in an attempt to raise player retention will do nothing and misses the point. 

 

Indeed, maybe if we didn't ban the people in the game who made it fun and posted cool threads that caused everyone to stop and comment we wouldn't be here.  Maybe if we encourage more RP we wouldn't be here...  Maybe...  Maybe...   

Talk to me, Talk to me, Talk to me.....  When we're all played out...

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 An early member of Roz Wei in 2015, J Kell went on to stay within the paperless world of Empyrea before signing with Soup Kitchen while scoring a record deal in 2019. J Kell went on to release multiple Orbis Top 40 hits. In 2020, J Kell took a break from Orbis. He's back.

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I'd support this change but there needs to be some way to compensate older nations who had to work hard to build up their cities and paid the much higher cost. How about, if this change was implemented, existing nations would get say a 2.5% gross income bonus per city for each existing city they have. That way it'll be much more fair and the nations with lots of cities would recoup the $4bil difference in cost over the next year or so. This should help retention of older players and not make it seem like all the hard work they put into building their cities was a waste.

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1 hour ago, Them said:

Considering Sheepy's track history, he should avoid pushing out any large changes to the game at once. 20, 10, whatever. I just see that quite a few people oppose the change on principle or because it's Leo posting. Cost reductions to anything should theoretically decrease the interim between wars and war is inherently more interesting than not war, so that should increase retention.

Making everything free would decrease the interim between wars too, doesn't mean its a good idea. Not a strong argument.

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1 hour ago, Edward I said:

Unless there's a limit on how big the gap will become, it will grow indefinitely and without limit.

While this is true, this game doesn't have mechanics that scale disproportionately quickly based on city numbers. The gap will grow, and continue to, and inflation will continue to exist... and there are myriad mechanics that mitigate how bad this actually is. There could be more, but the gap alone isn't the actual problem.

1 hour ago, Edward I said:

The unbounded nature of growth in these sorts of games is the main thing that kills them in the long run.  It stifles interaction between new and old players and it redirects an increasing proportion of the player base's GDP towards saving for warchests in the short term and towards nation growth in the long term.

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That is absolutely not true. It is not unbounded growth that kills these games; what kills these games is unbounded imbalance. Thankfully, mechanics such as score ranges and war slot limits prevent the top whales from fricking over everyone until they quit. There are real balance threats, and Sheepy has been happily removing the features that keep the game from dying, but it's not the existence of whales that will kill anything.

I've seen over a dozen of these games die, and it has always, always, always happened in the same way: People are afraid of war, they consolidate, they give themselves every advantage and fight as hard as they can to preclude anyone from ever becoming a threat or challenge to them, then they get bored because they've successfully removed all possible gameplay for anyone including themselves. Then they b*tch about it and desperately deny how they themselves sh*t the bed, move onto a different game, and sh*t the bed again. For years I've done everything possible to break this cycle of retardation. I've fought this war a hundred times, and for all that no-one has ever managed to get a satisfactory result, as they are too busy screwing themselves out of good games.

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Ahoy ye Scurvy Dogs
Join Arrgh!
You will be Rich!
Suck it Econ. Arrgh won the game without you.
Arrgh needs no bullshit econ. We train people to fend for themselves.
Many people who want to get more cities still come to Arrgh just to raid for their monies.
If you want more monies, join Arrgh!

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If this implemented as it is, to me it wont be a fair game anymore and basically we wasted our time and money.

If the point is to make the game more fun, then:

1- You should refund the extra money that anyone paid to make it equal for anyone!

2- You mush have a plan to keep the game interesting for all at the 20+ cities.

Basically, the game is fantastic until you get to the hight range . when you get to 24-25 cities the game is almost over as you already have all the projects ,you are at the optimised level of infra and land, not much is happening at this level and finally the cities are too expensive that requires months of saving. So basically nothing to do other than buying a city once every few months.

 

 

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