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Effect of Vacation Mode on Existing Wars


Bart
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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.

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Guest Elijah Mikaelson

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, As for being able to choice when they come out of VM, they are very limited as no matter what they do, the minimum is 14 days, it is not as if they can change if from 5 days to 1 day. What about people who go away for two weeks, not everyone goes away for 45 real life days are you insane. 

You seem to think the mod's have to check vacation mode, the only rule is not to enter vacation mode with a bank.

What you say about the spy attacks also, is counter productive, the whole point of VM is if someone needs to leave the game its bad enough that the wars do not stop but now you want to do even more damage to someone you have no idea why he has had to VM, people enter VM for many reason, only due to you and NPO claiming they do it to dodge wars does not make it fact. In fact it would indeed be an ooc attack to state someone is using VM to war dodge when they leave for an ooc reason.

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On 2/3/2020 at 1:43 AM, Bjorn Ironside said:

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, As for being able to choice when they come out of VM, they are very limited as no matter what they do, the minimum is 14 days, it is not as if they can change if from 5 days to 1 day. What about people who go away for two weeks, not everyone goes away for 45 real life days are you insane. 

You seem to think the mod's have to check vacation mode, the only rule is not to enter vacation mode with a bank.

What you say about the spy attacks also, is counter productive, the whole point of VM is if someone needs to leave the game its bad enough that the wars do not stop but now you want to do even more damage to someone you have no idea why he has had to VM, people enter VM for many reason, only due to you and NPO claiming they do it to dodge wars does not make it fact. In fact it would indeed be an ooc attack to state someone is using VM to war dodge when they leave for an ooc reason.

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.

Edited by Bart
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To be honest, I've seen people use VM as a means of war-dodging before, so this idea does make a lot of sense. Can't tell you how many times I've seen someone enter VM and then proceed to log in EVERY SINGLE DAY. What happened as soon as they came out? They instantly rebuilt and went straight to war. I second this idea.

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I agree it makes sense to enable spy attacks against a vacation mode nation if you are at war with them, however I don't think the minimum vacation mode time needs to be increased as it already gives us a fair amount of time to prepare for a nation returning to play with the 2 week turn countdown on their nation page.

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Guest Elijah Mikaelson

Well not sure about most but I generally spy before I hit anyone to get information, therefore i would have a good idea on what to do rather than hitting and hoping, As to spying when at war, IF Alex codes it that only those who are at war with a nation that enters VM can spy then I am all for that, Now if you are talking about anyone being able to spy when someone is in VM then that will be abused so I partly agree, in terms those who are at war with said nation that enters VM should be able to spy still.

As for the changes of VM I think you are generally trying to punish people who do not have the bots, We both know there are some alliances using bots to keep nations active for tax reasons, even to declare wars, just Alex do not seem to care as long as someone press a button (prove by the bot BK use for banking) So for general people do enter VM to go on holiday or due to IRL reason you now want to punish them and force them to be inactive for 45 days at that point they will most likely just find another game and not come back.

I will go travelling at some point in May, I will be gone for seven days in areas with very poor to no signal at all, but i will still have to VM for 14 days twice as long as im away, and you now want to make it four times as long?

I did say to Alex some time ago and i still agree with the statement i made, The war system is broke, people enter VM to dodge wars due to the fact the war system is so badly broke that they do not get time to rebuild or time to rest, so IF people do use VM to get out of wars or such it just proves how badly the war system needs fixing so players are not held down and players are able to have time to rebuild, the whole point of beige was to give people that, but people found a way around it and abused it to the point it leaves some people no other choice than to VM for 14 days if they are going away for two days during war time.

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You can't spy a single ship, you know that right? Thats not how spies work. It's a 1-5% unit kill rate. Tell me genius, how does a 1-5% kill rate work on... 1 ship? Ah, you damaged part of the deck slightly, well done!

How is Vacation mode pay to win? Anybody can use it for whatever they want whenever they want.

Why would moderation punish anyone? You understand there's no rule being broken right, or are that you clueless/disingenuous? Alex says VM SHOULDN'T be used to dodge wars, not that it can't be or that it's prohibited. You still can, which he's also said, because it's not against the rules, and even if it were he can't enforce it because he can't prove someone had an IRL reason or not.

 

Don't NPO market themselves as the stable, casual alliance where people can have their real lives outside of the game too? Doesn't the existence of VM support a more casual playstyle?

Why don't ya hop on that train with the rest of Pacifica, I'm not even from NPO and I did. It's how I run mine, I don't even care if mine VM during war to avoid it a while. Long as they let me know they are and how long. 

 

Maybe people would be less likely to behave the way they are if wars didn't go on for months, 3/4 of a year, with stated goals and terms of crippling and destroying 2/3 the rest of the game. 

But I'm not a psychologist so what do I know about sensible human behavior. ?

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1 hour ago, Sweeeeet Ronny D said:

I agree that you should be able to spy a nation you are fighting if they go into vaca while you are fighting, I assume this was just missed by sheeps. 

As for increasing the VM timer, that is a terrible idea, why punish people that are using it legitimately?

Exactly this.

There should be no reason for people to dodge war using VM. I'm moving across the U.S. via driving. I went into VM after I was beiged and people stopped declaring/attacking me. Now my travel plans got delayed  being rained out and my VM is about to run out. I'm tempted to go back into it again so I can settle down after the move. That's an entire month, so an extra week at least. Having that be longer would be crazy.

Now I have a few more days to finish packing, rearranging, and reloading everything up. I take breaks in between all this, but I don't really have the time to focus on my nation and won't when I get to my destination. I can add more VM if necessary. I'm moving though so I have an excuse, war dodgers do not. So spying on declared VMs should be a thing. If I was declared on by a bunch of people right before VM, I would have accepted it as a loss and moved on because life came first. Extending the time though involuntarily is crazy.

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Guest Karl VII

I don't see why you shouldn't be able use spies on guys in VM with whom you're at war with. Espionage is just another military action and i think every alliance recognizes it as such. Spies are just another military unit like all the others (that's what they're listed as) and of course should always be usable in a war, even though i think there's not much purpose to it if the enemy is in VM tbh. 

 

 

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On 2/3/2020 at 2:55 AM, CandyShi said:

See below, this is a logical fallacy. 

Uhm, where below? Please refrain from non-existent references in discussions.
 

On 2/3/2020 at 2:55 AM, CandyShi said:

Wasn't Bjorn's entire point that you guys are saying anyone in VM is hiding, which is false?

 

Aren't you just proving his point?

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.
 

On 2/3/2020 at 2:55 AM, CandyShi said:

I think his point was that saying: "You're war dodging" in response to someone going into VM for legitimate reasons is an OOC attack. His point was that you don't know who's war dodging, so accusing randomly is automatically OOC, no matter if they are dodging or not. 

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?
 

On 2/3/2020 at 4:12 AM, Zephyr said:

I agree it makes sense to enable spy attacks against a vacation mode nation if you are at war with them, however I don't think the minimum vacation mode time needs to be increased as it already gives us a fair amount of time to prepare for a nation returning to play with the 2 week turn countdown on their nation page.

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.
 

On 2/3/2020 at 7:01 PM, Sweeeeet Ronny D said:

As for increasing the VM timer, that is a terrible idea, why punish people that are using it legitimately?

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.
 

On 2/3/2020 at 8:16 PM, Dami said:

There should be no reason for people to dodge war using VM.

Sadly there are clear economic reasons to do it as I've indicated above.
 

On 2/3/2020 at 6:43 PM, Akuryo said:

You can't spy a single ship, you know that right? Thats not how spies work. It's a 1-5% unit kill rate. Tell me genius, how does a 1-5% kill rate work on... 1 ship? Ah, you damaged part of the deck slightly, well done!

Way to avoid the point of the example... And so we've dropped to the level of personal attacks already?
 

On 2/3/2020 at 6:43 PM, Akuryo said:

Why would moderation punish anyone? You understand there's no rule being broken right, or are that you clueless/disingenuous? Alex says VM SHOULDN'T be used to dodge wars, not that it can't be or that it's prohibited. You still can, which he's also said, because it's not against the rules, and even if it were he can't enforce it because he can't prove someone had an IRL reason or not.

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.
 

On 2/3/2020 at 6:43 PM, Akuryo said:

Don't NPO market themselves as the stable, casual alliance where people can have their real lives outside of the game too? Doesn't the existence of VM support a more casual playstyle?

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.
 

On 2/3/2020 at 6:43 PM, Akuryo said:

Why don't ya hop on that train with the rest of Pacifica, I'm not even from NPO and I did. It's how I run mine, I don't even care if mine VM during war to avoid it a while. Long as they let me know they are and how long. 

 

Maybe people would be less likely to behave the way they are if wars didn't go on for months, 3/4 of a year, with stated goals and terms of crippling and destroying 2/3 the rest of the game. 

But I'm not a psychologist so what do I know about sensible human behavior. ?

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.
 

On 2/3/2020 at 12:41 PM, Bjorn Ironside said:

Well not sure about most but I generally spy before I hit anyone to get information, therefore i would have a good idea on what to do rather than hitting and hoping, As to spying when at war, IF Alex codes it that only those who are at war with a nation that enters VM can spy then I am all for that, Now if you are talking about anyone being able to spy when someone is in VM then that will be abused so I partly agree, in terms those who are at war with said nation that enters VM should be able to spy still.

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.
 

On 2/3/2020 at 12:41 PM, Bjorn Ironside said:

As for the changes of VM I think you are generally trying to punish people who do not have the bots, We both know there are some alliances using bots to keep nations active for tax reasons, even to declare wars, just Alex do not seem to care as long as someone press a button (prove by the bot BK use for banking) So for general people do enter VM to go on holiday or due to IRL reason you now want to punish them and force them to be inactive for 45 days at that point they will most likely just find another game and not come back.

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.
 

On 2/3/2020 at 12:41 PM, Bjorn Ironside said:

I will go travelling at some point in May, I will be gone for seven days in areas with very poor to no signal at all, but i will still have to VM for 14 days twice as long as im away, and you now want to make it four times as long?

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.
 

On 2/3/2020 at 12:41 PM, Bjorn Ironside said:

I did say to Alex some time ago and i still agree with the statement i made, The war system is broke, people enter VM to dodge wars due to the fact the war system is so badly broke that they do not get time to rebuild or time to rest, so IF people do use VM to get out of wars or such it just proves how badly the war system needs fixing so players are not held down and players are able to have time to rebuild, the whole point of beige was to give people that, but people found a way around it and abused it to the point it leaves some people no other choice than to VM for 14 days if they are going away for two days during war time.

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.

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Guest Elijah Mikaelson
1 hour ago, Bart said:

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.

You choice to remain active, when i go travelling I am not going to be active that is my choice and i will use VM, now what I am about to say goes for everyone but lets face it you are in NPO, the damage you take wont matter, you are at 2k infra most and have very slow city growth, everyone else works a lot harder in peace time than i would say 99% of all NPO players, not that i blame you, you are taxed 100/100 there's very little you can do within the game (please not this is within the game not discord or the forums) so when you work as hard as others flipping rrs on the market, doing deals and such to get ahead, you want to vm if you can not fight, why lose what you worked for?

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On 2/5/2020 at 3:33 AM, Bjorn Ironside said:

You choice to remain active, when i go travelling I am not going to be active that is my choice and i will use VM, now what I am about to say goes for everyone but lets face it you are in NPO, the damage you take wont matter, you are at 2k infra most and have very slow city growth, everyone else works a lot harder in peace time than i would say 99% of all NPO players, not that i blame you, you are taxed 100/100 there's very little you can do within the game (please not this is within the game not discord or the forums) so when you work as hard as others flipping rrs on the market, doing deals and such to get ahead, you want to vm if you can not fight, why lose what you worked for?

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

 

 

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9 hours ago, Viselli said:

Those happened after his last post in this thread

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

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24 minutes ago, Bart said:

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

The bank in vm is from this weekend. Bjorn appealed for Alex to give him the money lost in September over the past few days because of Alex initial decision before Alex reviewed it and reversed his decision. These are current events

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10 hours ago, Viselli said:

The bank in vm is from this weekend. Bjorn appealed for Alex to give him the money lost in September over the past few days because of Alex initial decision before Alex reviewed it and reversed his decision. These are current events

Yes, and this didn't happen before?

 
Do you really have such a thick skull?

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Guest Elijah Mikaelson
7 minutes ago, Bart said:

Yes, and this didn't happen before?

 
Do you really have such a thick skull?

I really think you do, have you not deleted yet ?

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On 2/2/2020 at 6:13 PM, Bart said:

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.

What is with these claims coming out of NPO, and what does this have to do with the suggestion at all?

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