State of Baseball

[Cassia]

15 minutes ago, Ben Zene said:

I think this is a really good point that rarely gets mentioned!

PnW is all about the community. Without the people, the game is boring af especially during peacetime, which is the vast majority of the time. Even wartime isn't that fun either tbh.

Through baseball, I got to know many friends from other alliances. It is a unique mechanic that adds another layer of player interactions in the game, bringing together a bunch of decidated players who don't mind the hassle to earn a few extra million a day (The "normal" figure is probably around $3.5M-$4M, $8M a day is for no-lifers like me. Some data from @Prefontaine would be nice)

I've even exchanged a few million $ of tips with a carthago nation that I was arranging beige cycles for . lol

And cheaters are a no no. Yall, the script does not automate baseball, it just allows us to play 1 game a click which is allowed, and necessary due to how bad the baseball UI itself is. @Mayor

This is a good point as well, it gets a lot of people from different alliances interacting with eachother.

If devs are insistent on nerfing baseball, I think a decent compromise would be capping both home and away games at 250 while also making aways more profitable. That way people are still incentivized to play them and it's possible to make around 5 mil a day from baseball, but no longer possible for anyone to play all day and get 10 million. Ultimately I don't think a few people making 8 to 10 million a day off baseball is a serious enough problem to warrant alienating so many people, most of whom play as intended and use it for a bit of extra cash the same way as rewarded ads.

[Chad]

Going to make another post here since it's that day apparently. I want to keep my point clear the community aspect is good and hopefully whatever happens to baseball it can be preserved and expanded upon. Thats an idea for another thread witch I will be doing tonight. 

[Kan0601]

BaseBall is pointless and useless, if Alex never planned this to be counted as a main part of the game there is no point to having it at all. Just remove the game entirely because if you only nerf it, the discussion will come back again. New players don’t actually play baseball and only a specific amount of old players who abused the old baseball system still use it to this day. You aren’t going to have activity drop from people not playing baseball. Those who actually put time and effort into the game are usually playing the markets and making way more profit there, those who make profit on baseball is usually using a bot since if you actually spend 24 hours on PNW, on your computer, you would know playing the market is way more profitable than baseball is.

So my point is remove baseball entirely or make it only for cosmetics. 

[KiWilliam]

I just can't reiterate enough how much I hate baseball.
Just posting to document my on going hate.
Sorry for taking up your time.

[Basebond]

I understand that Baseball is not intended to be a core mechanic, however I believe that it adds an additional level of complexity that rewards activity, when not abused. 

So, let's make it so it can't be abused! (without practically making it unviable) 

- I propose we make it so that the 250 game limit is absolute, and you can't play anymore after that. Fixes the issue of players abusing the mechanic to make 8m, 240m, etc. 

- I propose we lower the 250 game limit to 50 games, while making the reward from playing each game 5x more. Borg already suggested this somewhere on the RON server, and I think it's a good way to counteract the need to use bots at all. 

- lastly, I propose making it so you can't play baseball while blockaded, and that would fix the issue of people using it as a way to work around blockades. Same with video ads too. 

[Who Me]

8 minutes ago, Basebond said:

Same with video ads too. 

Sheepy will never do that, he makes money off the rewarded ads.

[Basebond]

5 minutes ago, Who Me said:

Sheepy will never do that, he makes money off the rewarded ads.

But I make money off baseball!! Sheep should leave my flying balls alone. 

[matyo]

44 minutes ago, Basebond said:

- I propose we make it so that the 250 game limit is absolute, and you can't play anymore after that. Fixes the issue of players abusing the mechanic to make 8m, 240m, etc. 

I like your ideas BaseBond and im not trying to disagree but this suggestion should be corrected if this would happen it would cut half of the baseball community's earning and most likely more bc no one would like to play aways there is a solution to this get the tips to 50% but that way homes still more profitable i wont write the reasons down here tho bc it would be too long but here is what i suggest instead you would have 250 max games you we should make it that 250 games is only for homes and we should make a absolute cap for aways too wich should be twice as much the home cap is and it wouldnt mix with the games that you played in your stadium i hope it was understable 

Edited June 10, 2022 by matyo08

[Sorra Himguard]

Kill it, It is meaningless.

[BlackAsLight]

9 hours ago, Kan0601 said:

New players don’t actually play baseball and only a specific amount of old players who abused the old baseball system still use it to this day.

You should join our small and fast growing community of baseball players. We’ve had a lot of new members join recently with at least one new member a day. Many of our new members are new people to the game. https://discord.gg/dfmnW2xt7B 

 

Also for anyone interested in auditing the script we use, it’s available publicly on GitHub. Just google DocScripts. As of this moment it’s the one with 15 stars (yes I’m bragging). I’ve also got other scripts there you might be interested in. 

Edited June 10, 2022 by BlackAsLight

[Zevari]

13 hours ago, Isjaki said:

This game is based on skill, and by keeping baseball as a viable cash generator, me and other players who don't have enough time to invest into baseball are being left behind by those who do. 

For a catch up mechanic to be viable, it needs to be accessible to players who have time as well as who don't. Rewarded ads runs in our backgrounds with a script while we are busy doing other things, so no one complains about it, naturally. Baseball is a much more significant time and cash investment.

This is probably one of the worst opinions I have ever read...

So you are telling me that players who can't dedicate time to a game deserve to be equally progressed as those who can? Are you flipping insane buddy? Have you somehow never played games outside of P&W before?
The core of games is meant to be time = progress and even 'idle' games follow this logic...
 

17 hours ago, Prefontaine said:

For those unaware, baseball has several issues in terms of balancing with respect to the game. When used casually it is not disruptive, however there are some who do not use baseball casually. Here are the main talking points

• There are players bringing in over 8M a day playing baseball (240M per month)
• These high end players largely use bot assisted tools
• Recent game disruption (serve crashing) was a result of these tools. 

So I'm just going to break this down 

So first and foremost, If you know the top players are running rule breaking bots then use your Alex gifted powers to ban or punish them. In regards to this, baseball ON AVERAGE even when filtered for only the active players has been show to not even make a 2x return.... For the time invested and the fact that alternative and far more profitable methods exist makes this number look laughably low. 
Where did I get this 2x return? From Alex himself!

It doesn't take much to see the GLOBAL average return is just over 40% of the invest cash... This holds true on the individual averages even when filtered by activity. (Not to mention the data is actually heavily skewed because it includes Pre-nerf baseball income)

The final point is somewhat valid, but I feel the fault here is the backwards UI design of baseball and how easily exploitable that makes it.
I've got some easy solutions
1. Improve the UI to the level of scripts Doc makes. (this raises accessibility and limits the ability of players to break things)
2. Money for each game is pooled then split 30-70 (30 to the away, 70 to the home) by default, reduces server impact by minimizing the need to track games, request trades and message players.
3. Make the 250 home games a hard cap and separate that counter from aways (so away games are infinite and don't affect number of home games played) This directly makes it so players can only make money if people haven't done their games yet. Prevents the spam of low profit home games that some players do.

What does this result in? Well now we have a soft cap on the daily revenue (entirely dependent on how many players exist since home games are capped) and top earners and indirectly nerfed by the "increased" profits of away games. (more players will do them due to the decreased hassle of tracking and requesting tips).

17 hours ago, Prefontaine said:

Some other points to note:

• Baseball is heavily used by some alliances as part of the military strategy for funding nations in blockade, or otherwise down and out in a war. I expect them to have a heavy protesting presence here. 
• Baseball is not intended to be a core, or necessary mechanic in the game.

In our solutions to how to address Baseball problems is that we don't want to burden the players who want nothing to do with baseball to have be essential to growth. An early solution to this was a proposed daily 5M cap that was much easier to reach. 5M per day is 10x the normal max login bonus, 10% of a whales income, over double a newish players income, and would be the largest single source of revenue outside of lucky raids. Anyone who didn't play baseball for this 5M would fall behind easily. 

Baseball is proposed to have the following changes:

• Daily revenue from baseball is capped at $1M
• Players age rate is reduced by 25% (retire more slowly)
• Revenue from baseball is increased 25% (makes getting to the $1M easier)

1. Baseball is unavailable during blockades (It's a for of cash flow, blockade should block that)
2. Baseball is an option not a requirement. Nobody is forcing people to spend time playing it, but it is an option to help people accelerate growth or supplement their income. (it also proportionality helps new nations far more than older ones)
3. It isn't essential to growth, just like how raiding, trading and running businesses are not essential to growth. Also there really isn't such thing as a "lucky" raid. You can easily find high value targets using bots or manual searches rather than blindly declaring war. It also isn't particularly difficult to learn how to do so either, go ask @The Whalehow much they were making from raiding alone in their first two weeks of playing the game. 

4. Lets look at your proposed value changes (using Alex's data!) We will adjust global income to predict what this change would do to baseball. I'll even be generous and heavily favor the change by maximizing the decrease in investments and minimizing the decrease in revenue.

Total invested into baseball all-time is: $69,020,062,694.96

Total earned from baseball all-time is: $113,750,636,412.21

Net value added to the game is: $44,730,573,717.25

So lets be generous and just half the total earned cash from baseball (realistically it's 1/5 since cap would be 1mil instead of about 5mil from 250 maxed games)
We are left with $56,875,318,206 earned.

Now lets reduce the total invested by the maximum of 25% (this accounts for the 25% slower aging and even then is generous because of other costs)
This leaves us with $51,765,047,020
Net value of around 5 Billion...
Well would you look at that even with the most generous ratio using your data this went from reasonably profitable to basically losing money on all standpoints.
As a matter of fact this change would essentially kill the profitability for casual players and only players who play baseball on a daily basis would stand to make money... It would be better off just deleting baseball than implementing this change because at least then newbies wouldn't waste money.

Edited June 10, 2022 by Zevari
Didn't mean to send it yet

[Isjaki]

24 minutes ago, Zevari said:

So you are telling me that players who can't dedicate time to a game deserve to be equally progressed as those who can? 

Yes. Time is money. Politics and War is neither a p2w nor a t2w game. One might put in hours trading, but can't really prevent that since it's a market inefficiency they are taking advantage of. Can nerf a game mechanic though.

[Zevari]

6 minutes ago, Isjaki said:

Yes. Time is money. Politics and War is neither a p2w nor a t2w game. One might put in hours trading, but can't really prevent that since it's a market inefficiency they are taking advantage of. Can nerf a game mechanic though.

At this point the game is arguably both pay to win and play to win. With 400 million worth in redeemable credits a month and mechanics like raiding, trading and baseball which all offer higher yields depending on the time invested. 
(plus the fact your nation link leads to a deleted page tells me all I need to know)

[His Holy Decagon]

15 hours ago, Isjaki said:

My apologies for not making an explicit thread and raising a hue and cry about baseball. I sure would have had I known that you would find the will of the majority of the game, which hasn't been explicitly expressed as being equivalent to gaslighting.

Yep, that’s basically how things are supposed to work. I’ll forgive you this time.

 

15 hours ago, Isjaki said:

This game is based on skill, and by keeping baseball as a viable cash generator, me and other players who don't have enough time to invest into baseball are being left behind by those who do. 

So, we should probably remove war, blitzing, market trading, etc? I mean, those all involve a level of time, and it wouldn’t be fair to those who can’t invest as much as others. Again, this baseball “problem” literally generates on average, maybe around 3m a day, with the exception of perhaps 3-5 people that go wild.

(I’m only here to argue with whoever I can find btw)

I agree with the guy above btw; if we’re able to see who is apparently exploiting this to an insane degree, just uh, take action against them, and not use this as a way to kill Baseball. No one here will deny that Pre has hard the biggest hate boner for Baseball for the longest time. Just punish the 3-5 people that are making it such a big and important issue to bring community attention to.

Edited June 10, 2022 by His Holy Decagon

[Who Me]

3 hours ago, His Holy Decagon said:

Just punish the 3-5 people that are making it such a big and important issue to bring community attention to.

Are you also going to punish the people that spend hours every day trading and raiding?

[MinesomeMC]

Just bring back pre-2020 baseball

[Potayto]

just add recaptcha for each game that way its a real grind

[Grave]

On 6/9/2022 at 12:18 PM, Prefontaine said:

For those unaware, baseball has several issues in terms of balancing with respect to the game. When used casually it is not disruptive, however there are some who do not use baseball casually. Here are the main talking points

• There are players bringing in over 8M a day playing baseball (240M per month)
• These high end players largely use bot assisted tools
• Recent game disruption (serve crashing) was a result of these tools. 

Some other points to note:

• Baseball is heavily used by some alliances as part of the military strategy for funding nations in blockade, or otherwise down and out in a war. I expect them to have a heavy protesting presence here. 
• Baseball is not intended to be a core, or necessary mechanic in the game.

In our solutions to how to address Baseball problems is that we don't want to burden the players who want nothing to do with baseball to have be essential to growth. An early solution to this was a proposed daily 5M cap that was much easier to reach. 5M per day is 10x the normal max login bonus, 10% of a whales income, over double a newish players income, and would be the largest single source of revenue outside of lucky raids. Anyone who didn't play baseball for this 5M would fall behind easily. 

Baseball is proposed to have the following changes:

• Daily revenue from baseball is capped at $1M
• Players age rate is reduced by 25% (retire more slowly)
• Revenue from baseball is increased 25% (makes getting to the $1M easier)

If you're largely against these changes, please suggest an alternative that follows the concept of not making baseball a pivotal part of the game for income. I'm open to other ideas, but not open to leaving things as is. Baseball has become a growing issue that has more and more been met with a "Lets get rid of it" response. The idea is to avoid that, so a change needs to happen or it'll just go away at this point. 

The reason why a 3rd nerf is being discussed is because the other nerfs dont address the problem. 

All you have done so far, and all this nerf will do , Is make it harder for the average player to use baseball. 

You are not making anything more fair, just limiting the amount of people that are taking advantage 

 

 

The only solution, and the one I've been calling for for over 2 years. Is to limit daily games to under 25, while giving 3-5 per turn , with a 100k per game bonus too only the home team, with an away team being randomly&automatically picked and not rewarded.

 

No upgrades, no retirement 

 

 

Treat it like a modified turn login bonus that requires some in game action to recieve. 

 

 

The reason why more people dont care is because you've already ruined it for 98% of the people in support of baseball, myself being one of them. 

 

I dont really care what you do anymore. 

 

But I wont stand by and ignore the concentrated effort from the dev team over the last two years to move the Overton window on this issue and then act unbiased and pretend you're ignorant of your own efforts to change the overall community perspective on baseball.

 

This nerf will happen , you've ensured it. This offer of discussion is a veil, is disrespectful and you are spitting in your hand before offering to shake ours. 

Edited June 11, 2022 by Grave

[Danzek]

32 minutes ago, Grave said:

The reason why a 3rd nerf is being discussed is because the other nerfs dont address the problem. 

All you have done so far, and all this nerf will do , Is make it harder for the average player to use baseball. 

You are not making anything more fair, just limiting the amount of people that are taking advantage 

 

 

The only solution, and the one I've been calling for for over 2 years. Is to limit daily games to under 25, while giving 3-5 per turn , with a 100k per game bonus too only the home team, with an away team being randomly&automatically picked and not rewarded.

 

No upgrades, no retirement 

 

 

Treat it like a modified turn login bonus that requires some in game action to recieve. 

 

 

The reason why more people dont care is because you've already ruined it for 98% of the people in support of baseball, myself being one of them. 

 

I dont really care what you do anymore. 

 

But I wont stand by and ignore the concentrated effort from the dev team over the last two years to move the Overton window on this issue and then act unbiased and pretend you're ignorant of your own efforts to change the overall community perspective on baseball.

 

This nerf will happen , you've ensured it. This offer of discussion is a veil, is disrespectful and you are spitting in your hand before offering to shake ours. 

This thread is basically two changes being proposed

1. Addressing people scripting it (which you could do by reducing the cap, and adjusting the winnings accordingly, like you said)
2. Reducing the earnings because Pre (or alex) dont want baseball income to be in any way relevant. i.e. they don't want it treated like a login bonus that people do every day, as you imply it could be. 

#1 I assume most people are fine with, and #2 is according to Pre, non negotiable, so why bother, and ig not enough ppl care about baseball at this point (I certainly dont care). 

Edited June 11, 2022 by Borg

[Kan0601]

On 6/10/2022 at 6:01 PM, BlackAsLight said:

You should join our small and fast growing community of baseball players. We’ve had a lot of new members join recently with at least one new member a day. Many of our new members are new people to the game. https://discord.gg/dfmnW2xt7B 

 

Also for anyone interested in auditing the script we use, it’s available publicly on GitHub. Just google DocScripts. As of this moment it’s the one with 15 stars (yes I’m bragging). I’ve also got other scripts there you might be interested in. 

Mostly TKR members since you guys promote it to new players joining TKR there is even a guide on it. The percentage out of all the PNW players it’s very low I would think. Now I would give you numbers and stats but that would require Alex to do it.

[Ben Zene]

39 minutes ago, Kan0601 said:

Mostly TKR members

Why even post something that is not remotely true?

The baseball community has a few people from almost every major alliance, making it a great place to meet people outside of your own AA. This image is just those that happen to be online now and have the maxed baseball stats role

Edited June 11, 2022 by Ben Zene
spelling

[BlackAsLight]

44 minutes ago, Kan0601 said:

Mostly TKR members since you guys promote it to new players joining TKR there is even a guide on it. The percentage out of all the PNW players it’s very low I would think. Now I would give you numbers and stats but that would require Alex to do it.

TKR has our own baseball channel in our alliance, yet I still chose to create the Orbital Baseball League discord server and make the script public to the entire Orbis community. Because people in my alliance didn't want to play baseball with me :(((

I have regularly over the months advertised the server in the game's discord server in the #pw-advertisements channel (as well trying to get it a few other servers as well) and pokecord, somebody who isn't even in TKR, chose to fork out the cash to make an in game ad about it. This is by no means a TKR thing.

[Who Me]

How about this. Split baseball into two leagues, Minor League and Major League.

For Minor League you go ahead and do the nerfs you want but for Major League you leave it just the way it is right now.

Minor League would be free as it is now but Major League would be like VIP, 1 credit for 60 days of access. That way sheepy gets paid as well.

There should be 1 addition to both leagues though, a 1 click button to upgrade your players.

Please don't complain that this would make P&W pay to win as it already is when you can make $400 million per month by cashing in credits for cash.

[ynn]

2 hours ago, Ben Zene said:

Why even post something that is not remotely true?

The baseball community has a few people from almost every major alliance, making it a great place to meet people outside of your own AA. This image is just those that happen to be online now and have the maxed baseball stats role

I feel slightly offended that I was left out 😠

[Grave]

16 hours ago, Borg said:

This thread is basically two changes being proposed

1. Addressing people scripting it (which you could do by reducing the cap, and adjusting the winnings accordingly, like you said)
2. Reducing the earnings because Pre (or alex) dont want baseball income to be in any way relevant. i.e. they don't want it treated like a login bonus that people do every day, as you imply it could be. 

#1 I assume most people are fine with, and #2 is according to Pre, non negotiable, so why bother, and ig not enough ppl care about baseball at this point (I certainly dont care). 

 

 

If anything , #1 is the obviously non-negotiable term if proven to be true. 

So #2 being non-negotiable by order of the Devs is just pretending to give us choice, as my entire point is centered around