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Different Update Times for Each Player


Lu Xun
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Executive Summary->


-Make it possible to change in the Accounts page once every 60 turns the update time for an individual nation, as long as it's 12 or more turns later.

-Questions about how this might change the nature of PnW warfare and intrinsic fairness.

-Questions about whether fast update time switches might fix the problem.

-Discussion about whether just giving players a free double buy every 60-120 turns might be a better idea.

 

I'd like to make a separate thread for Alex's suggestion. I am infinitely aware of multiple players who dislike war for the reason that they have to be up at absurd times. I'm quite familiar with that, in other games, I was on at 1 am every bloody night for 4 months fighting a joke war that took forever (FOR DAVE!). To solve this, let me build upon on Alex's suggestion.

 

In the Accounts Page, there should be an option for "update time", which allows you to set an update at any given turn-change as long as it's at least 24 hours away. Default, of course, will remain 0:00 Server (GMT). You're limited to changing this option once every 60 turns, to limit update time abuse.

 

The questions about details are more about transparency. For instance, I think it would make sense for an in-game statistics page to have a chart showing anonymously the update time of ALL PnW players, so we can have an idea of who's updating when. The update time has a tactical use; for instance, the optimum update time would be 1 turn after your opponents have updated, making it so that you have a double buy and they do not.


However, more questionable would be whether we'd post this on the nation page. If it were public and well-known, we'd have people using update time abuse to optimize their strikes. The game already has a strong slippery slope function, wherein dogpiled players have a very hard time fighting back, and if you're in enemy control tiers, you're essentially stuck launching suicide plane warfare or missiling and nuking away.

 

On the other hand, hiding update times may not be precisely possible. I am aware of even some notoriously bad alliances that have scripting support to monitor opponent activity times. Not exposing update times would give strong alliances greater advantages over weak ones, but weak ones are unlikely to be able to exploit this anyways. One remaining compromise would be to reveal the update time on espionage, but that's not much different than making update times public.

 

And lastly, publicly exposed update times would also give away an impending blitz. That would be far from desirable as well.

 

One final way to handle update times would be to make it so that switching is possible more often, to encourage players to constantly switch their update times. 24 turn update times switches might be useful for travelers, and it'd have trade-offs of, first, allowing you to switch to optimize vs your opponents, but also creating the problem wherein switching constantly causes you to lose militarization per day rates. This is way more abusable, however, depending on situation, and gives even more favor to the attacker.

 

Another option might be to unlock the update time switch to 0 turns ahead; i.e, you'd always have a double buy available if you haven't bought today, but you'd be limited to 60, 84, or 120 turns per switch. Giving players instantaneous and one-time access could also further upper tier supremacy issues, which would cause further game health problems.

 

What do players think about the transparency problem and the tactical uses of update time switching? Are there any suggested improvements to update time switching?

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I think that update as a concept should be done away with, rather military is incrementally gained every turn. This means someone would gain 1/12 of their daily buy every turn, “saving up” to a full buy. 

This totally opens the strategic landscape and would reduce the drain on the server. 

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If we go this route people should probably only be allowed to buy each unit type 1-3 times per 24 hour period. The biggest problem with this when it was implemented on the test server was hyper-active people logging on every two hours to buy 1/12 of their daily military cap, which meant less active people couldn't count on military rebuys only happening sometime after update. Basically, the game became too demanding to support a large or semi-casual player base.

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19 minutes ago, Edward I said:

If we go this route people should probably only be allowed to buy each unit type 1-3 times per 24 hour period. The biggest problem with this when it was implemented on the test server was hyper-active people logging on every two hours to buy 1/12 of their daily military cap, which meant less active people couldn't count on military rebuys only happening sometime after update. Basically, the game became too demanding to support a large or semi-casual player base.

Maybe you can set an automatic buy at every turn

Or for X number of turns you can save your buys and then do them all together

If for example I can buy 1 ship per turn, before midnight I select 6 turns of saved ships and after 6 turns I log in again and I buy 6 ships

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1 minute ago, Micchan said:

Maybe you can set an automatic buy at every turn

Or for X number of turns you can save your buys and then do them all together

If for example I can buy 1 ship per turn, before midnight I select 6 turns of saved ships and after 6 turns I log in again and I buy 6 ships

I'm not opposed to automatic buys as long as the total number of daily purchases allowed is fairly limited. Otherwise you still run into the same issue of hyper-activity being unduly rewarded. Every time an opponent buys a little more military, it weakens the position of whomever they're fighting a war against by making that person's attacks harder. The game still needs to accommodate people who can only log in once or twice a day.

And if this were implemented, the rebuys should only be able to happen up to 24 hours after a login. No auto-buying planes while afk for days.

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Variable update is untenable, the combat system needs a total overhaul to be less dependent on the double buy. Doing away with the day change altogether and making it strictly turn reliant, with the goal of moving towards a real time system eventually, is the best way forward.

That being said, nothing will change so don't hold your breath.

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11 hours ago, durmij said:

Variable update is untenable, the combat system needs a total overhaul to be less dependent on the double buy. Doing away with the day change altogether and making it strictly turn reliant, with the goal of moving towards a real time system eventually, is the best way forward.

That being said, nothing will change so don't hold your breath.

Specifically, why would variable update not worth?

I suppose you're talking about having military production pool per turn, with a max being 12 turns worth or 24 turns worth. Players then do get a choice between pooling military production or building as soon as the military production comes online.

 

There's also the issue of espionage caps; for instance, if you were to suddenly vary your update time, your espionage cap would reset, and you'd lose another 10% planes.

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