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Hard caps tied to averages


Tiberius
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Well thread can be locked since there is a lack of support to discuss matters that could be beneficial to the future of the game. Once those active players fall to inactivity, just like CN we will end up with a core base until donations no longer = server costs + profit.

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1 hour ago, Tiberius said:

Well thread can be locked since there is a lack of support to discuss matters that could be beneficial to the future of the game. Once those active players fall to inactivity, just like CN we will end up with a core base until donations no longer = server costs + profit.

Or maybe your idea was not a good one, so you can put the passive aggressive bullshit in the same place you put your terrible ideas.  AKA anywhere but here.

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1 hour ago, Tiberius said:

Well thread can be locked since there is a lack of support to discuss matters that could be beneficial to the future of the game.

Really?

On 2/5/2019 at 1:29 PM, Akuryo said:

I mean you can pretty easily make 20 cities in less than 6 months. Mind you, i made it to 19, with relatively minimal aid from any alliances i was in, while sitting at city 12 on 100/0 for 30 days at a time i could've taken grants, and then putting off buying an actual city for something like 60-80 days (math says i could afford a city by myself every 40ish) in preparing for both Knightfall and making my own alliance.
So according to these numbers i actually could have made it to city 21 or even 22 in 6 months. I don't have any rich benefactor friends who randomly threw 500m at me because "LOL im a whale this is nothing", i wasn't in some immensely rich alliance as some super important player either. Even despite those holdups i mentioned, i made it to city 19 at around 170ish days or so.

Now i like to think well of myself and consider myself at least decently competent, but not so much so that somebody else couldn't easily blow the above out of the water. Growth these days just simply isn't that hard. It took the first people to ever reach 20 cities ingame like 3 years of actually trying, with friends, and lots of alliance support, etc etc. It took me 6 months of just me being me, mostly with just me, so unless base form Akuryo is just that good. *shrug*
Hell, most micros make growth look difficult until you see mine and realize my problem isn't the money to give people cities it's having people to give cities too. My very first member was 3 cities, they're about to go to 12 soon after 50 days, all alliance funded, having been on 100/0 the entire time, while a dozen other people were being built up just the same, while alliance funds were used to fund unnecessary bullying of shittier micros, while i still gave money to my bigger members when they joined to help rebuild (even buying one a city as i promised long ago), while paying back loans, while even paying back about 1 billion i stole long ago as a part of a deal (up to 200m, 20% WOOT), while STILL spending over 250m converting my nation into a farm so they dont have to worry about buying food ever again. and all this during a major war i !@#$ed about strangling the economy and other crap. Now maybe that proves i'm an idiot for !@#$ing, i don't know, but it proves something. 

Whatever the hell it is you and your alliance are doing, maybe it should re-examined, and mixed up somehow. Because coming in (albeit as a reroll), it just isn't that hard. A new player, provided they join a good alliance with the right people could easily match me even without the prior experience, and could even surpass that. It's not impossible to catch up, it's just really fricking hard, which makes alot of sense.

A better solution to is to encourage the whales to pump money back into smaller nations. But... that's a thing that's already done. Most major alliances actually tax their whales little if at all on the condition they invest massive amounts of capital into alliance growth while saving for a city. GoB regularly and discreetly funds projects of all sorts without a word to the wider world (or so they claim, still haven't sent me so much as a complaint letter :( ) and even paperless whales like Odin (Nordland) do by investing into projects like uhh... *checks alliance page* That one. Guy's put in almost as much money into it as i have. ❤️
Besides, 4000 infra is typically a retarded thing to do and i enjoy people being punished for it. Whale-tier cities are less about making money and more about military-capacity and, in the case of some, building as far above the IQ death swarm as possible. Score doesn't mean everything, teach your noobs to aim for greatness beyond nation score.

/akuryorant

On 2/6/2019 at 2:21 AM, A Boy Named Crow said:

This is why I'm downvoting:

What the game really needs to avoid is a bimodal distribution, that is to say, half the players cuddle around the city average (15, 17, 19), another big spurt involves long-term players who've had strong economic support. The long-term players basically end up killing the game; i.e, no one is ever going to reach them, when it comes to war, it'll take disproportionate strength to take them down (see Syndisphere vs Grumpy and Guardian).

The hard cap suggestion doesn't actually help, because it makes it so that you'll get more and more players accumulated at the 30-40 cities point, until the game turns into TKR-sphere and IQ dominance, i.e, IQ controls the 15-20 city tier, TKR-sphere controls the 30+ city tier, and everyone else suffers. The mechanism is the capping; i.e, you'd assume the people at the 30+ cities point tend to use their economic strength to support lowbies for max RoI, but given that growth essentially becomes impossible for them due to the cap (and it is partially impossible already due to exponential city costs), they have much less incentive for such a project. If they can't expand economically, they can definitely expand politically, which means financing allied players to tier up in the 30+ city point, until they have tier dominance in the God/Whale tier.

====

Imo, the best way to fix this problem is to encourage infinite inflation. That is to say, what is 20 cities today is equivalent to 40 cities a year in the future. The people who are currently whales (Seb, etc) have to keep up their economic growth to maintain their relative ranking, or infinite city inflation will cause them to fall down to the average. If the problem becomes that 100 cities becomes unmanageable, add city classes. Each city could be considered a township, and you can merge 2 cities to form a great city, then a metropolis, a megalopolii, etc... So we'd end up with people with the equivalent of 100 cities, but they'd only manage 25 megapolii.

On 2/6/2019 at 3:04 AM, A Boy Named Crow said:

Well, in other games where similar tiering issues have emerged, the mid-tier / lower-tier (NPO) coalition ended up allying with the top-tier (Umbrella) coalition to destroy everything between them. It turned out that, until the game died, they couldn't really touch each other. And even then, the mid-tier could destroy the top-tier, but the huge warchests accumulated by the top tier meant that they could render the war incredibly prolonged. And the top-tier, were it to go after the mid-tier, would end up triggering the same infinity war that discouraged the mid-tier.

====

We actually should connect this issue with excessive warchest accumulation. Let me put it another way. Why doesn't Seb get a 39th city? Because it's outrageously expensive and adds only a very small increment to his military power (2.6% linearly, 5% quadratically, 8% including ground and air control).

What's the intelligent thing for Seb to do, then? One, he can contribute it to his alliance's warchest. Two, he can help build massive tiering in his alliance or in alliances allied with his alliance. So by capping nation growth, you're encouraging two things that are bad for the game.

On 2/6/2019 at 12:13 PM, Sir Scarfalot said:

Of course the score advantage is held with the players that have played the longest, why exactly shouldn't it be? You want new players to have the opportunity to become the wealthiest player artificially? That defeats the entire point of the concept of a leaderboard if you're just going to GIVE it to people. I'd call that preferential treatment of the worst variety, and it wouldn't solve a single thing to boot. In fact it would cause a lot of needless problems.

Now, if you were talking about military balance, you might have had a point... except that the score range and war slots mechanics ensure that all fights are, while perhaps not fair, at least feasible. Lemme put it this way: Grumpy/Gob doesn't matter to a new player. They don't change a single thing, at all, except for some stuff about color bonuses. So, the old G cannot actually prevent anyone from reaching the highest levels of achievement on any of the non-score leaderboards, and those actually are quite realistically obtainable given sufficient effort. In 2 years, someone that starts within this month could very well be launching their 600th missile, or their 400th nuke. So while the "score" leaderboard is locked down pretty tightly against any new joiners, the rest are potentially anyone's game. We're not out of major achievements to accomplish, not by a wide margin.

I really don't understand why people care about score so much... Low score is objectively the best score, and you all should be familiar with that fact by now ?

23 hours ago, Sir Scarfalot said:

Hey now, you don't think Fraggle struggles? Or adapts to the changing metagame? Fraggle most assuredly does on both counts. And do you seriously think Fraggle is the most powerful individual in the game... or for that matter, "powerful" in a meta-political sense at all? Come on man, Fraggle can declare war on like 3 people and is leading an alliance of two. For all the nukes and score, Fraggle isn't as politically powerful as @Roquentin, @Buorhann or @Nizam Adrienne, each of whom I should point out aren't on the score leaderboard by a factor of four. (No shade of course, @Fraggle, we all love, respect and certainly fear you and your amazing, unique nation :wub:)

Fraggle has put in the effort. If someone wants to overtake Fraggle on Fraggle's strengths, then they need to put in at least as much effort as Fraggle already has. Otherwise, we're not merely stripping away Fraggle's achievements, but we're devaluing said achievements themselves in the process. If instead they just want to make a major achievement, they don't need to overtake Fraggle; they just need to find their enjoyment of the game, get involved, and work hard enough to overtake somebody. And lemme tell you: it won't take two years.

Or, alternatively, we could consider that there are more accomplishments to be made than just accumulation of wealth, and encourage a culture that welcomes and accepts achievement in all its many forms. You don't need to be in the top 1% to have fun, which is good because otherwise we'd be sitting here with a dozen players right now.

That's a lot of discussion for PnW suggestions. Hell, major changes Sheepy implemented have sometimes often had less discussion than this. Hell, I had to even condense some of these posts for my own sanity when writing this. It's not that we don't want to discuss the change. We want the game to persist so we can continue to play it. A few people even offered counter suggestions (See A Boy Named Crow's 1st and 2nd posts). However, this change is flawed for these reasons already pointed out:

  • Fast growth is already possible if you focus on growth and play to grow. (See Akuryo's post)
  • Current new player growth is fast compared to new player growth when PnW went live. (See Akuryo's post)
    • For example, I remember back when I was econ in EoS before Sheepy added taxes and alliance banks. We tried to entice (and later make) our members to pay taxes to grow members. That was difficult. Even when people did pay, we didn't have a "whale" by the current standards to give large amounts of money. Granted resource production was much different (search for "The Great Deflation" on the forums), I had to sometimes hold off on selling gas because it was going for less than the cost to produce. Gas is currently averaging over $2000, compared to $700-900. (I'm still mad at the idiots who consistently sold gas under the cost to produce and kept the average there for over two weeks.)
  • Alliances can and will grow members to high levels. (See Akuryo's post)
  • This proposal encourages people indirectly to accumulate around two points, making the current problem worse. (See A Boy Named Crow's 1st post)
  • The current cost of war makes people accumulate massive warchests, encouraging players to not build further but assist smaller nations in their alliance instead. (See A Boy Named Crow's 2st post)
  • The only leaderboard where it is hard to catch up is the score leaderboard. The people there can't negatively influence newer members or stop their growth due to the war range. Any new player can compete in absolutely any other area, including the meta. (See Scarf's 1st post)

It's not that we're against change. We're only against shortsighted change that won't accomplish anything and will (arguably) make the current situation worse. Sorry to anyone if the @ notifies you. I tried to remove it on mobile, but that didn't work.

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You are all basing your discussions on the here and now and not the landscape in the future. What works now won't work in the future, I can guarantee that. In fact I've watched a carbon copy happen in other games. I brought up one change that would assist in keeping the game going in the future, there are many others, but alas people are too resistant to change. I mean I get the point of if it isn't broken don't fix it, but there also learn from the mistakes of the past. There is many things that need looking at with an outlook on the future. 

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You want to implement a hard cap that you have suggested takes about 2 years to hit, in the hopes that it will help retain newer members.  Do you really think telling a person that just joined the game... "hey in 2 years you can be one of the biggest players in this game!" will make them want to stick around?  Not to mention all the old players you are going to alienate by capping their growth.

I have a fun story for you, I bought Destiny 2 about 3 months ago, played it almost everyday.  then about 2-3 weeks ago I hit the lvl cap and I played it for maybe another week, and I haven't played it since.  That is what a cap does, once you hit it, its like... ok now what?

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14 hours ago, Tiberius said:

You are all basing your discussions on the here and now and not the landscape in the future.

Alright, let's look at these points in the future.

On 2/7/2019 at 12:58 PM, WISD0MTREE said:
  • Fast growth is already possible if you focus on growth and play to grow. (See Akuryo's post)
  • Current new player growth is fast compared to new player growth when PnW went live. (See Akuryo's post)
    • For example, I remember back when I was econ in EoS before Sheepy added taxes and alliance banks. We tried to entice (and later make) our members to pay taxes to grow members. That was difficult. Even when people did pay, we didn't have a "whale" by the current standards to give large amounts of money. Granted resource production was much different (search for "The Great Deflation" on the forums), I had to sometimes hold off on selling gas because it was going for less than the cost to produce. Gas is currently averaging over $2000, compared to $700-900. (I'm still mad at the idiots who consistently sold gas under the cost to produce and kept the average there for over two weeks.)
  • Alliances can and will grow members to high levels. (See Akuryo's post)
  • This proposal encourages people indirectly to accumulate around two points, making the current problem worse. (See A Boy Named Crow's 1st post)
  • The current cost of war makes people accumulate massive warchests, encouraging players to not build further but assist smaller nations in their alliance instead. (See A Boy Named Crow's 2st post)
  • The only leaderboard where it is hard to catch up is the score leaderboard. The people there can't negatively influence newer members or stop their growth due to the war range. Any new player can compete in absolutely any other area, including the meta. (See Scarf's 1st post)
  • Fast growth is partially possible due to wars becoming increasingly expensive and from higher tier players funding lower tier players. As more players reach whale status, it stands to reason new players will grow at increasing rates. Limiting whale growth will only hinder the rate at which new players can grow.
  • It took over 2 years for the first nation in the game to reach 20 cities. Many new players can reach that in months due to whales funding alliances to buy them up. In the future, there will be more whales and larger whales, increasing growth. Limiting infra would limit this effect, limiting growth.
  • Alliances are providing grants up to over 12 cities. That number will grow as they can fund more from whales. Limiting infra would limit this effect, limiting growth.
  • A Boy Named Crow's 1st post addressed this issue in the future very well.
  • Wars have been increasing in length and intensity, as a general trend. Assuming this continues, war will be even more expensive. This actually helps new players in two ways:
    • Whales will fund warchests for newer players as cities won't be as beneficial.
    • Sheepy designed the game so new players make raw resources, mid-tier players make manufactured resources, and whales use commerce. The price of war materials will increase, helping new players and mid-tier players at the expense of whales.
  • Over time, yes, leaderboards and firsts are naturally claimed. However, we still have a large abundance of new things to do. I don't see this ever becoming an issue in PnW and suspect the game will die from other causes before we run out of titles to claim.

As for the rest of your post:

14 hours ago, Tiberius said:

In fact I've watched a carbon copy happen in other games.

I brought up one change that would assist in keeping the game going in the future, there are many others, but alas people are too resistant to change. I mean I get the point of if it isn't broken don't fix it, but there also learn from the mistakes of the past.

There is many things that need looking at with an outlook on the future. 

Majority of players involved in the game's meta have watched other games similar to PnW die. However, every game has their own set of rule and features. Therefore they aren't carbon copies and what will fix one game may break another.

As I said earlier:

On 2/7/2019 at 12:58 PM, WISD0MTREE said:

It's not that we're against change. We're only against shortsighted change that won't accomplish anything and will (arguably) make the current situation worse.

Yes, there are many things that need looking at with an outlook on the future. Implementing a change that has half a dozen standing points against it ensures we won't reach that future easily.

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I think the login bonus/etc. should be a tied to global income, and/or cities under the global average (bar noobs/inactives) should be discounted, so as the average city number increases, the ease to get to that number should also increase. 

I don't think caps should happen. In fact some of our caps currently are dumb, e.g. recycling centres etc.

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On 2/15/2019 at 7:19 PM, Flanderlion said:

I think the login bonus/etc. should be a tied to global income, and/or cities under the global average (bar noobs/inactives) should be discounted, so as the average city number increases, the ease to get to that number should also increase. 

I don't think caps should happen. In fact some of our caps currently are dumb, e.g. recycling centres etc.

I disagree about recycling centers.  It adds a dynamic element to pollution and makes it less profitable to do more resource production after a certain point because you have to use hospitals and/or not cancel out the pollution.

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