My thoughts on bots and a plea to blanket ban all third party automation and develop the tools inhouse

[katashimon13]

how about open source public bots would that be a good compromise???
i have been informed these would have to be hosted by admin for this to matter

i dont agree with alex owned an operated things for.. various time constraint reasons mostly... havent thought that much into it just initially feels wrong

also i think that a like top quality completely easily available to everyone bot would be a detriment to the actual world tbh

this system encourages people to start coding and have a project to work on while practicing and learning who then take those skills out of game and it improves their lives and their families lives

and ... like your point about raiding the incentive goes down if there is already publicly available high quality bots

sorry for this mess that follows

5 hours ago, Mars said:

1 raid war and econ stuff

2 Yarr does no automation

3 Recruitment

1 i mean... alot of this feels like "i suffered so you have to as well"... which is kinda toxic as we have seen in the place we dont talk about
also like... skrew doing math manually a bajillion times

its like... factorio... you build it once and you iterate on it then u save it and copy paste it later.... so you can focus on other things
orrrrrrrr lets say its like the nature of humanity to iterate and improve things and make things easier over time and move onto different problems

2 lesbireal heer... spreadsheets are a level of automation

3 si spam new pplz automatically bad

4 hours ago, Mars said:

1 guess people really love bots.

2 I am wondering though, why does the time and effort that go to making bots not go to making the actual game better. 

3 And why not have an Alex owned discord bot he can get different people to help with.

1 efficiency is just applied laziness

2 players are going to work toward their own "team"'s interest helping everyone is less payoff for the amount of hours put in similar to your gripe with auto finding raid targets
not to mention like.... how admin isnt/hasnt just accepted any one putting any work into the game ... that just isnt something that is going to happen (also pplz gotta get paid)

3 see: people gotta get paid.... but i would be open to say an open source bot that multiple people contribute to

4 hours ago, Bunyip said:

Back in the day, Lordaeron would manually type recruitment messages

did yall tho >_<

even I didnt fully manually type every thing out every time

3 hours ago, Thalmor said:

begin by getting rid of recruitment bots.

yes plz

p.s. yikes

3 hours ago, Mars said:

recruitment, is that recruitment bots? because those are objectively cancerous and should be done away with 100%. Spam is spam

am heavily biased but yes recruitment bots bad and spam bad

1 hour ago, BlackBeard said:

1 putting in multiple hours a day making sure the alliance ran properly. 

2 the game hasn't been that fun for a long time. 

3 Being gov actually meant something you were the few who were willing to put the time into the game.

4...spend a few hours a day ...

1 is this... really a good thing? should we be sacrificing large chunks of our lives to this game specifically?

2 i sort of understand where you are coming from as a former manual recruiter and someone who tapped out at spreadsheets, no offense but... there are other ways to have fun and have purpose simultaneously without... budgeting away so many hours and mental bandwidth that others have moved on to

can confirm blackbeard was good raider xP

3 i do agree with this point sorta i did visit alot of alliances back when i gave like .03 damns and.... frankly alot of it is just very cliquey nonsense and not much strive to better them selves/alliance after a point

4 ok so like there was this phenomenon from some video or article i read/watched.... so when ATMs came out pplz thought that it would lower jobs cause it automated so many things a bank teller would do at the time but after it was commonplace theres a much higher amount of tellers due to the newfound time and ability of the bank to offer more services (here i did a quick google search this was the top result... but not what i consumed : https://blog.acton.org/archives/90693-atms-bank-tellers-and-the-automation-paradox.html )

1 hour ago, Mars said:

limited pool of potential targets that gets shared ... theres less incentive for it.

tbh id rather raiding nerfs get reversed xP

rawr

Edited February 10, 2022 by katashimon13
rawr

[Mars]

38 minutes ago, katashimon13 said:

rawr

how about you dm me your ig and we can talk about things less boring than pnw

rawr

[hidude45454]

All bots that are endorsed by or partnered with PnW officially should be open-source.

Besides that, bots bad and too many nubs who can't function without them (except for my bots which, of course, are the best 😉)

Edit: if I had to give an actual take on this, bots that work WITH the player good, bots that work FOR the player bad

Edited February 10, 2022 by hidude45454

[Frog]

8 hours ago, Mars said:

Recruitment: only thing to say on this is IT IS CANCER. Every new player gets spammed 1000 ingame messages when they first join. Its pointless and an issue as its one of the first things you find out about this game. Bots are spamming you things you dont even understand and thats somehow fine.

Agree. 110%. 20 automated messages and a soulless home page is how you tell visitors this website/game isn't worth their time. Ads are a good tool to demonstrate the dynamism of this game and new players never encounter them on their journey... but these are topics for another thread.

8 hours ago, Mars said:

Now for my suggestion, blanket ban ALL automations and spam bots and remove any links between discord and the game page that affect the meta in any capacity. 

Arrgh and their raiders feeling nostalgic about their glory days and preferring to not use a bot doesn't matter. IIRC, the api existed and they chose to do things the hard way. It shouldn't be the only way.

Argument for effort and fairness goes both ways. Learning to code and maintain bots takes effort, many people learn/try to code because they want to make bots for this game and that effort would be meaningless with a blanket ban.

Borg and people in his alliances "draining the pool" from other raiders doesn't mandate obliterating all third-party tools. It's alliances looking to exploit the game mechanics/politics to their advantage and isn't a issue with third-party tools.

Not to mention the technically herculean task it is to actually enforce this for a browser game that can be easily scraped if people want. All this would do is make bots private / limited to a close circle of players who then trickle info down to the alliance and you are left guessing if they are using bots or doing it manually.

 

Also agree with an Alex-owned open-source bot development project, except this part:

8 hours ago, Mars said:

with no purpose other than helping manage the community and providing some admitelly needed game to discord information, but always keep it aimed at things that do not affect gameplay or the meta at large. 

Doubt there would be many takes of this deal where they have to put in the time and effort to code not what they want but a wish-list other peoples believe would be good for the game. This is a game, not a job.

Other than that a collaborative bot would be insanely good for the game and quashing any qualms about Locutus being used to manage the game server and unfair advantages to people liked by borg, etc. The new graphql api is already coded by players and vetted by Alex. So this is doable.

PS: For legal reasons, i love arrgh and appreciate them for existing. And for pioneering the path of chaos and destruction unlike other alliances. Pls stay away from me

[Mars]

1 hour ago, Frog said:

Other than that a collaborative bot would be insanely good for the game and quashing any qualms about Locutus being used to manage the game server and unfair advantages to people liked by borg, etc. The new graphql api is already coded by players and vetted by Alex. So this is doable.

agree to disagree on some of the other points youve made in your post, and thats just fine of course. 

What i would like to point out though is there seems to be a consensus on changing things at least a bit, and it seems something like an open source bot  or a bot overseen by alex seems to be common ground and a good place to start.

Another idea that seems to resonate with a bunch of people that dont share a single perspective is to start adding more features into the game as opposed to having them provided by player controlled bots. Easier said than done, admittely.

I think the exact manner on how to address some of the issues the game has right now is a bit of an open ended question, hopefully alex goes through community feedback and develops a mid-long term plan and a general picture of where he wants to be 6months-1year-2years down the line.

I also hope that he finds a way to guide community efforts and talent towards clear common goals that serve the game at large, as opposed to letting everyone do what they feel brings most personal gain.

Edited February 10, 2022 by Mars

[Kosta]

8 hours ago, Mars said:

Also i think im still being misunderstood, im all for making the unnecessary parts that end up being tedious just because of bad game design better through automation, im just against it being done on third party software and think more consideration needs to be given on how those affect the game at large.

I agree 100%. 

[Sweeeeet Ronny D]

Bots that calculate spy odds to determine how many spies you have should be banned.  Totally defeats the purpose of the spy game. 

I do miss the days when all bots did was put together a spreadsheet of your opponents, that was about it, and the rest of your war was determined by actual effort.

At the same time, I run an alliance of 30, its much more manageable than running an alliance of say 130.  That being said, if you do have 130 members you then have a pool of 130 people to put to work, which is what you should be doing, putting your people to work.

 

[KillzBob]

Lets just go back to 2016 days very little bot use

[J Kell]

@Firwof KromwellAre you like leaving the game already or will you keep lurking?

9 hours ago, Prefontaine said:

With the recent threads about a returning to the forums, nostalgia for how politics played out then and such... Perhaps bots contributing to laziness is the real enemy all along. 

IMO it didn't help, but at this point you cannot pull it. I would have years ago proposed an almost complete ban of bots, but we are past this point. Bots are so synonymous with gameplay that it would alienate way too many people and additionally people who do not use bots would probably get caught in the crossfire and banned even though they didn't do anything and there would be others that fly completely under the radar. I agree with others in this community that think access to bots and resources in building bots should be made more readily available, as this is the more realistic solution to problem at hand.

Edited February 10, 2022 by J Kell

[Adrienne]

3 hours ago, Sweeeeet Ronny D said:

At the same time, I run an alliance of 30, its much more manageable than running an alliance of say 130.  That being said, if you do have 130 members you then have a pool of 130 people to put to work, which is what you should be doing, putting your people to work.

This. And you have 30 experienced players as well. We have over 150 players of all skills and experience levels and, as demonstrated by the size of our gov, we do put people to work. It's still a lot. However, if we can automate some of the tedium and make the lives of our gov and our members easier so that we can spend more time teaching them or working with our protectorates or any number of other things instead of doing responsibilities that could be handled by a bot instead, that's a better use of our time.

I downvoted your post @Mars because your "solution" is naive and because blanket banning third party bots is ridiculous. No one overarching bot can handle every alliance's individual needs and doing so discourages creativity and innovation. I also think it's likely a pipe dream that such a bot will ever exist. I do, however, agree it would be a good thing if there were a basic suite of tools available for any alliance to use. But alliances shouldn't be restricted to those if they have the skills, abilities, and desire to do more.

I agree with the general sentiment about discouraging over reliance on bots. You should not need the bot to do basic tasks and should know how to do things without them. But ironically, for many alliances, bots are a crucial tool in that they allow you to actually have the time to be able to teach your new members so that they can be independent thinkers within this game and learn how to play. Not to mention, they help you have the time to actually be able to spend time with and enjoy your community. And furthermore, leveling the playing field for casual players isn't the worst thing. This game would be a whole lot smaller and more boring without them.

Edited February 10, 2022 by Adrienne

[Hodor]

I just learned this war that bots can almost immediately identify improvement swaps and notify of militarization before anyone even purchases units. That struck me as incredible and stupid. Bots of that type make a lot of this game into the equivalent of playing a game on easy mode with cheats on. There are other bots, as others have said, that make running an alliance so much easier, but that don't dumb down the game to enormous degree. Those should be used and encouraged as they lower the barrier to entry for the game initially and help foster healthy communities.

Also are we not going to talk about how Thalmor used a criticism of bots to segue into an anti-porn rant?

Edited February 10, 2022 by OttoVonBisbark

[Firwof Kromwell]

39 minutes ago, J Kell said:

@Firwof KromwellAre you like leaving the game already or will you keep lurking?

And is it not like you were lurking at first when you came back as well in-between now & then, even w/ the given for the amount of time you were gone? I have eyes & a well (overcaffeinated & sugared) wrinkled brain that tends to overthink n express thought (it gets smoky in the head at times, just like everyone else). I explained a bit of my past month in the other thread, you do you w/ the info you wanna take in & use althou you might not get far in some cases dependent on the difference between ones & another's perception as well how they express it.

Edited February 10, 2022 by Firwof Kromwell
anyways, I can see both sides of the aisle for bots & anti-bots. Did a small diddy in OCN about it if ppl wanna see it. But I have nothing much else to add than to watch & observe while commenting when I please.

[Mars]

1 hour ago, Adrienne said:

@Marsbecause your "solution" is naive and because blanket banning third party bots is ridiculous.

i appreciate you pitching in, its really what is needed and the main goal of this thread is really to bring the topic up for discussion and get an idea for what the different alliances or cultures around the game think about it as i feel its a good time for alex to have feedback on the issue.

As a side note, a downvote 5 seconds after posting a wot, where you clearly didnt even read past the first sentence doesnt really convey good faith but maybe thats just because of me being as loveable as i am.

I understand why my post can come off like that though, or is that, but to throw it back at you, i think youre being naive if you think bots make or break this game. And it applies to alliances as well.

Ive played hundreds of games, took part in esports and i cant think of any title where anything even remotely like this situation occured, the playerbase becoming so reliant to 3rd party botting software as to where they feel their game would die without it.

In fact i think if you take a step back and think about it objectively like you never played this game before, it all gives strong stockholm syndrome vibes. But again maybe thats just me.

For what its worth, if you delete all the bots tomorrow myself a bunch of other people and groups wouldnt really care, in fact we would enjoy the game way more. But of course people who actually play the game through the website and want time investment and skill to amount to better outcomes are not important, and whats important is to cater to the people who dont want to do any of that but have the same outcome.

Name me one ingame activity right now that knowledge and time investment cant be matched or surpassed by a bot command in discord.

In fact the more i read the more i have a feeling that if someone incorporates the 10mbs of game into a discord bot, alex can pretty much delete pnw.com

Also i dont understand the whole fixation on catering to bot makers and holding them in such praise, while completely downplaying raiders with thousands of wars and competent players that dont need a bot. The first display creativity and innovation while the latter are just dumb for not waiting for locutus to be scripted.

Well im sure you can channel that coding creativity and innovation to a coding game or whatever, theres tons of us who know nothing about code are here to play pnw, on the pnw website. We want a better pnw game, not better borg bots. 

You can streamline any game or software by being 'creative and innovative' around it, just that most if not all will just ipban you if you do.

In any case, at least we all agree there needs to be some adjustments on how bots interact with the game, to some arbitrary degree, but please take into account that some people get satisfaction from grinding a game and having to use their brain to do it to get ahead of those who dont and they count at least as much as those who dont want to do anything but still not get left behind.

sorry if i came out a bit aggressive in this rant, it wasnt really directed at adrienne just a rant.

Another important note, i think discussions on the topic would work better if focused on specific examples. General statements like bots are bad or bots are good easily fall apart in some scenarios and make complete sense in others. They also seem to sometimes lead to what can be pretty confusing statements both from myself and others.

Edited February 10, 2022 by Mars

[Mars]

For the sake of this thread being more then a circlejerk, and the discussions here leading to some meaningful observations to better informed changes, i think there should probably be some future threads on specific aspects of what bots are used for and if they are desireable or not. General statements do give an idea of where different people stand relative to the issue at large but hardly provide indepth insight or suggestions that can be directly applied or used to create new guidelines.

Apart from recruitment bots, i think theres more or less a consensus that spam is bad.

[WarriorSoul]

13 hours ago, Kosta said:

I find it hard to accept that in order for an alliance to be successful in this game they need a full time programmer to run a bot that does almost every task for their alliance.

the pro move is to have a handful of part-time programmers :serious:

Edited February 10, 2022 by WarriorSoul

[Talus]

If you want a game where those who have the luxury to sink hours a day finding targets reign supreme, go play Cyber Nations. Politics and War is unique in that it enables those of us without that kind of time to also thrive in a nation sim game.

If there are concerns about some bot abilities taking away from the spirit of the game, bring that up to the API team and they can consider making restrictions. A blanket ban on bots and all this techno phobic ranting is not in the spirit of Politics and War. If they did not want to allow automation, they wouldn't have added an API. 

[Adrienne]

37 minutes ago, Mars said:

A downvote 5 seconds after posting a wot, where you clearly didnt even read past the first sentence doesnt really convey good faith but maybe thats just because of me being as loveable as i am.

I think you can clearly see that I read past the first sentence. Instead of trying to trivialize my response by making assumptions about whether or not I read it and am simply having a knee-jerk reaction, we can continue with the conversation? 

37 minutes ago, Mars said:

I understand why my post can come off like that though, or is that, but to throw it back at you, i think youre being naive if you think bots make or break this game. And it applies to alliances as well.

Ive played hundreds of games, took part in esports and i cant think of any title where anything even remotely like this situation occured, the playerbase becoming so reliant to 3rd party botting software as to where they feel their game would die without it.

In fact i think if you take a step back and think about it objectively like you never played this game before, it all gives strong stockholm syndrome vibes. But again maybe thats just me.

For what its worth, if you delete all the bots tomorrow myself a bunch of other people and groups wouldnt really care, in fact we would enjoy the game way more. But of course people who actually play the game through the website and want time investment and skill to amount to better outcomes are not important, and whats important is to cater to the people who dont want to do any of that but have the same outcome.

I never said they make or break things or that we would die without them. I said they add to the enjoyment of the game by leveling the playing field and by allowing gov to be able to spend their time on more important tasks and with their community.

I have played this game seriously since 2017 and in some capacity since 2015. I have played this game without all the tools that people are blessed with now. I've seen bots evolve and my own alliance evolve and seen tasks, such as monitoring safekeeping, which I used to spend hours upon hours doing every week or two, now be completely automated. 

And as for the reliance bit, I think you must have ignored half my post so let me tell you again: I agree with the sentiment regarding an over reliance on bots. You shouldn't need them and you should know how to do things without them still but they do make life easier and there's nothing wrong with that. Having a calculator doesn't mean you shouldn't still learn basic math but it makes life easier.

No one is stopping you from playing this game without bots if that's what you want to do. But bots as a whole are not the big bad evil your initial post appears to be portraying them as and you shouldn't be dismissive of them and calling for all bots to die because you don't understand what all they do and think it's better to raid old-school style. I see you in this thread learning more about them and softening/altering your stance. Keep learning and maybe next time, do that before calling for the death of all bots? You might find that once you do learn more about bots and what all they actually do, we're a bit more in agreement than you think we are currently.

Edited February 10, 2022 by Adrienne

[Mars]

19 minutes ago, Adrienne said:

by leveling the playing field

sorry, i realize i came off as a bit of an &#33;@#&#036; in the last part and went on a tangent, i dont want to be unfair and i look at this as a common effort, even if it is in a sense a battle of ideas.

i think we actually might agree on more things than we disagree on, just would have different ideas on where to draw the line, and thats just fine. I dont want bots completely gone, just very critical about the need for them in a lot of instances and how they affect gameplay, and youre not the bot advocate my last post seemed to be directed at but do appreciate when bots make up for poor game design decisions.

i will ask this on the leveling the playing field comment though, can we use tkr bot?

Edited February 10, 2022 by Mars

[Adrienne]

1 hour ago, Mars said:

i will say this on the leveling the playing field comment though, can we use tkr bot?

Well, it's coded for Slack so logistically, not something that would work

But jokes aside, our stuff is individualized to our alliance and we'd have to make changes to things to make them work elsewhere. In my first post though, I did say I thought having a basic suite of tools that all alliances can use would be amazing. I just don't think we should be limited to that.

It might also surprise you that it's long been a dream of mine to have us make an open source suite of tools that any alliance can use. I know how difficult it is to develop tools for your alliance. We've struggled on the tech front too, despite being such a large alliance and having a larger pool of people with various skills. We have had some very talented individual coders throughout our history but over the last few years, we haven't really had the capacity or the manpower to focus on improving our tech to the degree we needed to to keep up better with other major alliances really until recently. We made do in other ways, thanks to our awesome gov and their dedication, but the truth is that we did fall behind on tech compared to others. I can only imagine how difficult it must be a smaller alliance. It is truly luck of the draw whether you'll have someone either with the ability to code or with the time and interest to learn. That's @Kosta's complaint and I totally understand and sympathize with that frustration. 

For the suite though, that's my dream. I would love to see it happen. I'm not sure we're in a position to do that currently as we're still catching up on our own game now that we do have a more solid team of people and it isn't my call really as I don't run the alliance anymore and I don't know how to code myself but maybe that is something we can do given some time. It's something I would like to see happen, at any rate, whether we do it or someone else does or Alex makes something.

Tl;dr? If I could, I would. And I hope someday we can.

Edited February 10, 2022 by Adrienne
Clarifying

[Krampus]

I 100% support the idea of an offical, endorsed-by-the-game bot. If we had some sort of standardization like that, it would at the very least level the playing field of alliances who have competent coders vs those who do not. As things stand, micros and generally small scale alliances without coding departments are disadvantaged by the major alliances being able to do wacky stuff. And believe me, they are absolutely amazing tools out there, with debatable legality.  

Unfortunately, this would not happen in this decade. Alex has very limited time for pnw as it is, seeing as how it takes an entire year to implement the smallest feature and/or push changes live to the api v3, even the notion of Alex putting together a team to have them make a bot sounds overly optimistic at best and downright unfeasable at worst, given his preoccupation with other things.  

That raises another question. What features would you @Mars want such an "official" bot to have? There are already some great open-source bots out there, like Rift (despite it being written in Python 🤮), that cover all the basic functions already, such that anyone with a little bit of coding knowledge can yoink the code and put together something functional.

On that note, i would like to point out the unfeasability of enforcing your blanket ban proposal. Even though Alex can take down the api(s), scraping a webpage or submitting a login form is like 5-10 lines of code at max. There is no way for Alex to prevent others from finding a way around, assuming the coder knows what he's doing. At most, you will make it (somewhat/much depending on the situation) harder for people to gather data for graphs and etc. 

Even if you somehow found a way to ban all such third party automation, what then? As someone else pointed out earlier, there is a big portion of the game who don't want to spend more time than the absolute bare minimum in the game. You might have 5-6 hours a day free to spend on finding targets or doing other stuff, but there are people who don't have that luxury. Alex would run the risk of losing them from his already shrinking/stagnating playerbase, which from his point of view woud be shooting himself in the foot.  

 

Edited February 10, 2022 by Krampus

[Mars]

1 hour ago, Adrienne said:

-

but you do understand how taking what i asked to its logical conclusion illustrates everyone is in fact not on equal footing at all since how you interact with the game and timecost of doing ingame actions is directly dependent on your access to third party tools that have little to no admin oversight most of the time?

since you only type a command in slack to do something it would take me a few minutes to do unles you have access to the same tools?

in any case, i think thats the issue, and theres def levels to it.

you have random player with no discord, through random players with discord in small alliances with no bots, alliance leadership with access to simple bots up to borg who who had access to tools reserved for him and his group, it seems. none of those distinctions have anything to do with the game, and the experience is wildly different.

my idea is that instead of having your experience depend more on your access to tools and less on your actions ingame, to flip that on its head and i honestly feel thats common sense.

you brought up a great point and is what i pitched right in the title, inhouse tools. you called them 'open source suite for tools', i think we mean the same thing. and thats good.

now, what i also advocate is an eventual phasing out of all third party tools and democratic access to standard tools curated, compiled and verified by alex and staff. it doesnt need to be now, ive mentioned before he should consider a 6months-1year-2 year plan with certain goals. 

the reason for this is i hope directly apparent, it would be highly beneficial to the game to be able to address any automation directly, nerf it, buff it, remove it game wide and discord wide. of course this could be possibily done by basically reaching out to all the bot makers and their code out there, and centralizing wanted features in a single bot that has access to the api block access for everything else.

people would be able to submit new functionalities for the botand they can be debated upon and development can go forward as a two pronged approach because of how discord and bots affect gameplay and meta so much, and the actual alliance page.

now i think blanket ban on third party software and developing inhouse tools isnt such a big devil. imho 

two things i would also like to point out off the bat is 1 alex gets no access to discord channels through this and cannot perform moderation based on it, and alex or staff wil have to show real tact and have a very conservative approach to what features they add and their impact on meta and experience at large.

so please for the love of god, dont make it another locutus, strip it back.. a lot and maybe put your own twist on it that works to give depth and drives involvement, not mindless automation like there is now.

Edited February 10, 2022 by Mars

[Charles Bolivar]

6 hours ago, Sweeeeet Ronny D said:

Bots that calculate spy odds to determine how many spies you have should be banned.  Totally defeats the purpose of the spy game. 

I do miss the days when all bots did was put together a spreadsheet of your opponents, that was about it, and the rest of your war was determined by actual effort.

At the same time, I run an alliance of 30, its much more manageable than running an alliance of say 130.  That being said, if you do have 130 members you then have a pool of 130 people to put to work, which is what you should be doing, putting your people to work.

 

This.

If anything, bots have led to a situation where govs are becoming increasingly smaller with little need for extensive lower and mid level layers of gov being present within the alliance itself. This essentially allows a few players to completely set the direction of the alliance which is not necessarily a good thing when it comes to alliance engagement and participation.

[Adrienne]

21 minutes ago, Mars said:

but you do understand how taking what i asked to its logical conclusion illustrates everyone is in fact not on equal footing at all since how you interact with the game and timecost of doing ingame actions is directly dependent on your access to third party tools that have little to no admin oversight most of the time?

Of course I do. When I said leveling the playing field before, that was in reference to my first post and had to do between hard-core and casual players. I talked in the above post our difficulties with tech too and how it is luck of the draw to get someone who knows how to code. I get that. That's why I shared all of that.

But I also don't believe you should effectively punish alliances for having those abilities to make things better/easier for them. Hell, one of our coders we have now has never coded before. He learned for this game and he is doing an incredible job. So this isn't something that people can't pick up if they truly want to.

I want a common set of resources to level the playing field. I just fully disagree with the solution being to level the field by taking rather than giving.

3 minutes ago, Charles Bolivar said:

This.

If anything, bots have led to a situation where govs are becoming increasingly smaller with little need for extensive lower and mid level layers of gov being present within the alliance itself. This essentially allows a few players to completely set the direction of the alliance which is not necessarily a good thing when it comes to alliance engagement and participation.

Hasn't decreased our gov or staff size at all. That is very situational and would hint at a different problem imo.

Edited February 10, 2022 by Adrienne

[Charles Bolivar]

3 hours ago, Adrienne said:

This. And you have 30 experienced players as well. We have over 150 players of all skills and experience levels and, as demonstrated by the size of our gov, we do put people to work. It's still a lot. However, if we can automate some of the tedium and make the lives of our gov and our members easier so that we can spend more time teaching them or working with our protectorates or any number of other things instead of doing responsibilities that could be handled by a bot instead, that's a better use of our time.

I downvoted your post @Mars because your "solution" is naive and because blanket banning third party bots is ridiculous. No one overarching bot can handle every alliance's individual needs and doing so discourages creativity and innovation. I also think it's likely a pipe dream that such a bot will ever exist. I do, however, agree it would be a good thing if there were a basic suite of tools available for any alliance to use. But alliances shouldn't be restricted to those if they have the skills, abilities, and desire to do more.

I agree with the general sentiment about discouraging over reliance on bots. You should not need the bot to do basic tasks and should know how to do things without them. But ironically, for many alliances, bots are a crucial tool in that they allow you to actually have the time to be able to teach your new members so that they can be independent thinkers within this game and learn how to play. Not to mention, they help you have the time to actually be able to spend time with and enjoy your community. And furthermore, leveling the playing field for casual players isn't the worst thing. This game would be a whole lot smaller and more boring without them.

I'm not so sure I agree with you in regards to bots being necessary in order to free up time so as to teach new members the knowledge required to play the game effectively. Back before your time we did pretty well with just forums and IRC 😂 

Sure it helps, no doubt about that at all. Especially when it comes to the mind numbing tedium associated with a few tasks. But when I think back to say tS' first year and so of existence, we didn't have any bots ( or even really a functional milcom for that matter). Instead we just had a knowledgeable base of active members who learned the game mechanics and worked together in a manner which cemented tS as a military powerhouse. No bots at all. Indeed, the sole technical innovation might have been going from IRC to discord during that first year.

 

 

[Mars]

26 minutes ago, Adrienne said:

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i dont think its worth sacrificing game health and the benefits of having something like an standardized inhouse bot or series of bots and tools overseen, verified and distributed by the game admin just so you can accomodate people that want to learn to code with full access to this particular browser games api.

i totally understand what you say but cant that person maybe just code and submit it for verification and integration if its required? or do something for the test server? in fact cant alex post some stretch goals and features he wishes to see implemented in the future, and people can just develop those or pitch in for everyones benefit? there are certainly other ways to go about it and there will certainly be at least a few bored coders with nothing to do lurking around.

i cant play pnw anywhere else yet there is tons of other motivations you can find to learn to code. i honestly dont see how that aspect would be a priority over having a good game and i see the advantages of standardization, oversight and ability to align bot/tool development with game design as too valuable to even consider letting go just so people can randomly develop bots that automate and have all manner of  intended and unforeseen impacts on the game.

but there is probably degrees to it, like you could let some features be public for everyone else to use, maybe the very harmless ones and people can still use pnw as a motivation to learn to code. my two cents it should be very very simple elements with little to no game impact.

Edited February 10, 2022 by Mars