[Serious] Do you guys know how this game works?

[JadenStar10]

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The moderation team has been issuing warnings to nations in Celestial who've declared offensive wars against Hollywood with the assumed intent to nuke/missile, but haven't done attacks yet. The warnings in question claim the nations were trying to "benefit from beige". It's been said that this is because they aren't doing attacks, aren't choosing/capable to win the war, and are just wanting beige, but it should be noted that nations who did do attacks have also still gotten warnings.

To provide some context, it's important to remember both these spheres are at war, with Ro$e sphere having lost the conventional war, and has been launching nukes at HW in order to close the damage gap. In case you aren't aware, this happens and has happened in nearly every global since 2018, where one side loses/gives up conventional warfare (due to various reasons, such as not having military units, the enemy having superior tiering/numbers etc) and tries to equalize their damages, sticking to nuking infra and soldier only warfare, at most flashing units.

[Opinion] Perhaps my view on this is skewed, but this seems show how little the admins/mods understand how their game works. Due to the way how the war mechanics work, when your alliance loses the conventional war in a global, you have no viable option other than sitting there and nuking/missiling people. This is the equivalent of nerfing nukes/missiles to oblivion, seeing as declaring wars with the sole purpose of launching them is suddenly against the rules. On the other end of things, beige cycling, which has been a common tactic for years, can now be considered slot filling. In practice, unless it is explicitly allowed, you can report people for not beiging wars that they have won. (i.e, letting a war expire at 10 resistance, which I'm sure most readers have done many times).
https://politicsandwar.com/nation/war/timeline/war=1382085

 

Quoting @Changeup

Seriously, what is this moderation? These are genuine war tactics that have been used for years at this point, and nuking/missiling is the only way to inflict damage on opposition once you've lost the conventional war. IMHO, all these warning issued on Celestial nations need to be repealed, because every single person in this game has "slot filled" that way, and will continue to do so unless this war system is literally scrapped for another one, so we might as well all end up banned in a year or so. 

[hidude45454]

Do you have any examples of wars being manually peaced even when the attacker has done attacks?

[WarriorSoul]

Massive shoutout to the moderation team for manually peacing out the only defensive war I’ve taken since the opening nights of this war. Really appreciate that one, folks. /s

Edited July 18, 2022 by WarriorSoul

[SleepingNinja]

Why did Alex hire a mod that doesn't understand how the rules work..? 🤔

[Alex]

I'm the one that issued all of these warnings, and to be very clear, even any attempt to do an attack I have given the benefit of the doubt on and not issued a warning. It is possible that there were nations who received war slot filling warnings that had wars where they did missiles/nukes, but it would clearly state in the warning that it wasn't for those wars but for ones where they had been at 12 MAPs for at least a couple of days and had not done any attacks.

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It's been said that this is because they aren't doing attacks, aren't choosing/capable to win the war, and are just wanting beige, but it should be noted that nations who did do attacks have also still gotten warnings.

Unless I made a mistake on a warning, this is 100% not true.

It's also worth noting that on all war slot filling violations or multi reports, aside from a few instances, I have been making all of these decisions myself. At some point we will probably get to the point where I feel comfortable letting the hired moderators make these calls, but to date I have been making these decisions personally.

[WarriorSoul]

42 minutes ago, Alex said:

I'm the one that issued all of these warnings, and to be very clear, even any attempt to do an attack I have given the benefit of the doubt on and not issued a warning. It is possible that there were nations who received war slot filling warnings that had wars where they did missiles/nukes, but it would clearly state in the warning that it wasn't for those wars but for ones where they had been at 12 MAPs for at least a couple of days and had not done any attacks.

Unless I made a mistake on a warning, this is 100% not true.

It's also worth noting that on all war slot filling violations or multi reports, aside from a few instances, I have been making all of these decisions myself. At some point we will probably get to the point where I feel comfortable letting the hired moderators make these calls, but to date I have been making these decisions personally.

Respectfully, I feel like this completely does away with some real misery-mitigation techniques players have been using forever. It is absolutely miserable to be on the losing end of a war like this, and players routinely try and provoke beige so as to be given a chance to simply not give a shit for a few days. As far as I can tell, the point of moderation should be to force players to comply with good and common sense rules, not to force them to grit their teeth and bear arguably the worst part/time of the game.

If you’re bent of following the letter of the law here, I would instead suggest changing the letter of the law to better reflect the way the players of your game have long chosen to play it.

Edited July 18, 2022 by WarriorSoul

[Alex]

5 minutes ago, WarriorSoul said:

Respectfully, I feel like this completely does away with some real misery-mitigation techniques players have been using forever. It is absolutely miserable to be on the losing end of a war like this, and players routinely try and provoke beige so as to be given a chance to simply not give a shit for a few days. As far as I can tell, the point of moderation should be to force players to comply with good and common sense rules, not to force them to grit their teeth and bear arguably the worst part/time of the game.

If you’re bent of following the letter of the law here, I would instead suggest changing the letter of the law to better reflect the way the players of your game have long chosen to play it.

If we don't enforce the rules this way, it sets up a really stupid incentive structure.

If this wasn't war slot filling, you could have alliance A at war with alliance B, and let's say alliance C is allied to alliance B. Alliance C dumps their treaty with Alliance B and declares war on Alliance B en masse and fills all their slots, but does no attacks. That would ruin the war for Alliance A basically.

You could never be a victim of an alliance war, by having an "enemy" (who is actually an ally) "beige bait" you in perpetuity, filling all of your slots. You could have invulnerable, unraidable alliance banks. Letting people war slot fill just doesn't make sense and will ruin the game.

I do agree with you that we could reconfigure the beige system to be better, and we have been discussing that for years at this point. It's near impossible to get everyone to agree on an update to the system. The dev team does have a new system in mind that we generally all agree would be an improvement, and are working on implementing that on the test server so that everyone can play around with it and we can get real feedback before launching it in the actual game. But I strongly disagree that allowing war slot filling would be a net benefit to gameplay.

[hidude45454]

47 minutes ago, Alex said:

I'm the one that issued all of these warnings, and to be very clear, even any attempt to do an attack I have given the benefit of the doubt on and not issued a warning. It is possible that there were nations who received war slot filling warnings that had wars where they did missiles/nukes, but it would clearly state in the warning that it wasn't for those wars but for ones where they had been at 12 MAPs for at least a couple of days and had not done any attacks.

Unless I made a mistake on a warning, this is 100% not true.

It's also worth noting that on all war slot filling violations or multi reports, aside from a few instances, I have been making all of these decisions myself. At some point we will probably get to the point where I feel comfortable letting the hired moderators make these calls, but to date I have been making these decisions personally.

In all fairness, I think there's one nation where forced peace was mistakenly given: https://politicsandwar.com/nation/id=59152

He missiled in his peaced wars (albeit those being against Arrgh), so I think there was a wrong decision made there. That being said, all the other peaces I've seen seem perfectly reasonable -- something that may help clarify these wars is to include a timestamp in the war as to when peace was manually forced, just so people know the difference between when the war was declared and when the war was peaced.

8 minutes ago, WarriorSoul said:

Respectfully, I feel like this completely does away with some real misery-mitigation techniques players have been using forever. It is absolutely miserable to be on the losing end of a war like this, and players routinely try and provoke beige so as to be given a chance to simply not give a shit for a few days. As far as I can tell, the point of moderation should be to force players to comply with good and common sense rules, not to force them to grit their teeth and bear arguably the worst part/time of the game.

If you’re bent of following the letter of the law here, I would instead suggest changing the letter of the law to better reflect the way the players of your game have long chosen to play it.

There are lots of ways you can bait beige including from nuke/missile turreting, soldier suicides, threatening naval beiges, and so on. I don't think this is an attempt at getting rid of any of those -- in all fairness, nations who do get slotfilled without any attacks done against them do take advantage of that by hitting people without them being able to counter because of the slotfill.

[Alex]

11 minutes ago, hidude45454 said:

In all fairness, I think there's one nation where forced peace was mistakenly given: https://politicsandwar.com/nation/id=59152

He missiled in his peaced wars (albeit those being against Arrgh), so I think there was a wrong decision made there. That being said, all the other peaces I've seen seem perfectly reasonable -- something that may help clarify these wars is to include a timestamp in the war as to when peace was manually forced, just so people know the difference between when the war was declared and when the war was peaced.

Ah thank you, you are correct - I made a mistake here and I will remove the warning.

[Changeup]

1 hour ago, Alex said:

If this wasn't war slot filling, you could have alliance A at war with alliance B, and let's say alliance C is allied to alliance B. Alliance C dumps their treaty with Alliance B and declares war on Alliance B en masse and fills all their slots, but does no attacks. That would ruin the war for Alliance A basically.

That's not what's happening here at all.

[Krampus]

>Dumps their treaty

Thats not how the game works in a practical sense. Even if the treaty didn't have a 72hr clause, if you arbitrarily did that, your alliance would be done for, because no one would want to sign you, lol. But that would be entertaining to see for sure, after all it would be the implosion of an alliance.

[SleepingNinja]

Alex friend.. you are making a mountain out of a molehill and frankly there are much bigger issues right now that need your attention. Let the players worry about moderating actual slot filling and the like. If hollywood players thought there was an issue they'd make a game report.

[katashimon13]

1 hour ago, Alex said:

If this wasn't war slot filling, you could have alliance A at war with alliance B, and let's say alliance C is allied to alliance B. Alliance C dumps their treaty with Alliance B and declares war on Alliance B en masse and fills all their slots, but does no attacks. That would ruin the war for Alliance A basically.

i know this is a reach... but i feel like you would be able to tell the difference even on this "small" of a scale ;3

rawr

[Kaz]

7 hours ago, Alex said:

I'm the one that issued all of these warnings, and to be very clear, even any attempt to do an attack I have given the benefit of the doubt on and not issued a warning. It is possible that there were nations who received war slot filling warnings that had wars where they did missiles/nukes, but it would clearly state in the warning that it wasn't for those wars but for ones where they had been at 12 MAPs for at least a couple of days and had not done any attacks.

Unless I made a mistake on a warning, this is 100% not true.

It's also worth noting that on all war slot filling violations or multi reports, aside from a few instances, I have been making all of these decisions myself. At some point we will probably get to the point where I feel comfortable letting the hired moderators make these calls, but to date I have been making these decisions personally.

Alex, with all respect, I’m going to 100% disagree with you on this.   This is not my specific war, but I am personally coming off of six wars this round. Started with 2 attrition offensives, which were immediately followed by 2 Raid and 1 attrition defensives…so I declared a 3rd attrition offensive.  I can only manufacture 1 nuke and 2 missiles per day = 3 total attacks per day across 6 wars.  So who do I fight?

Now I’ve fought probably close to 500 wars since 2019, if not more, when counting the endless number of time out wars during the 9 month Dial Up/NPOLT global.   When constrained by the number of attacks you can make in a given day, 1 tactic can be that you fight the weakest nations in the group as your priority. Another can be that you spread your attacks around.  Another can be that you fight the highest infra attrition wars as a priority.   Sometimes I concentrate on the 3 defensives if I can get them to fight and it’s the correct war type where it makes statistical sense to focus there.  Everything is situational   

But as far as slot filling is concerned, that has never, ever been applied to the losing conventional side declaring a war and not attacking immediately….because there is no path to attack that leads to anything but utter failure…when you can only make 3 calculated missile/nuke attacks across 6-7 wars in any given day.   It has always applied, to my recollection, to a losing side taking on friendly defensive wars where THEY don’t attack, allowing you to rebuild where you otherwise would not be able to.  

As a side note….Am I the only one seeing irony in a BK nation complaining about slot filling while being on the the dominant conventional side in this conflict….when that same alliance literally sat on the entire game along with NPO throughout all of 2019 and into early 2020?  This is the same thing they did back then in using moderation as a weapon, to which YOU made a new game rule against at the time.  You can’t make this stuff up.   Why do I still play this game when the war metrics are this badly broken and the moderation decisions are completely arbitrary?

EDIT:  I’ll tell you what. My nation number is 160467.   Please look up my active war log. One of my defensives declared on me 4 days ago.  There was a brief volley on the 14th before my military fell across the 5 open wars I had at that time.  He then only attacked once on the 15th and didn’t attack me again until today…3x coincidentally right after I made this post. I haven’t been able to do anything to him at all to this point because I had other higher value priorities that just cleared up this afternoon.  Is he slot filling me in that situation?  Or maybe that makes me the slot filler because I didn’t have the resources to fight until now?  

This makes absolutely no sense. 

Edited July 19, 2022 by Kaz

[WarriorSoul]

6 hours ago, Alex said:

If we don't enforce the rules this way, it sets up a really stupid incentive structure.

If this wasn't war slot filling, you could have alliance A at war with alliance B, and let's say alliance C is allied to alliance B. Alliance C dumps their treaty with Alliance B and declares war on Alliance B en masse and fills all their slots, but does no attacks. That would ruin the war for Alliance A basically.

You could never be a victim of an alliance war, by having an "enemy" (who is actually an ally) "beige bait" you in perpetuity, filling all of your slots. You could have invulnerable, unraidable alliance banks. Letting people war slot fill just doesn't make sense and will ruin the game.

I do agree with you that we could reconfigure the beige system to be better, and we have been discussing that for years at this point. It's near impossible to get everyone to agree on an update to the system. The dev team does have a new system in mind that we generally all agree would be an improvement, and are working on implementing that on the test server so that everyone can play around with it and we can get real feedback before launching it in the actual game. But I strongly disagree that allowing war slot filling would be a net benefit to gameplay.

Once again, I do think this supposes something that has thus far never occurred and, as Krampus mentions above, likely would result in pariah status for such offenders. In such cases, I would expect the community to effectively moderate in place of administration-enforced penalties. Building a moderation policy upon the most extreme potential infractions, then using it to police the more banal ones seems relatively ill-advised, especially when the functional difference between what is an offense and what is permitted is a single missile attack.

[tojoky]

7 hours ago, Alex said:

If this wasn't war slot filling, you could have alliance A at war with alliance B, and let's say alliance C is allied to alliance B. Alliance C dumps their treaty with Alliance B and declares war on Alliance B en masse and fills all their slots, but does no attacks. That would ruin the war for Alliance A basically.

You could never be a victim of an alliance war, by having an "enemy" (who is actually an ally) "beige bait" you in perpetuity, filling all of your slots. You could have invulnerable, unraidable alliance banks. Letting people war slot fill just doesn't make sense and will ruin the game.

There will always be a "what if" @Alex. If all it takes is is a ground attack with the minimum number of soldiers to drain your MAPs, then you still could construct a "what-if" scenario where alliances a,b,c  can do some back room slot filling scheme. The actual difference between your benefit of the doubt worst case scenario and your "$&!# hits the fan" scenario is so insignificant it doesn't make it worth making the distinction. If you want to decide minimum solider attacks isn't enough then what about half force? If that's still not good enough why aren't you fighting your wars to completion? Enforcing war to the death would be bad, and there doesn't seem to be a good line to draw that isn't arbitrary and open to abuse.

Beige cycling evolved as the best strat to pin a losing side of a war. They "take up a slot" as evidenced by the fact that right when a war ends a new person jumps on the attack. It is how the game is played and good beige discipline is a good indicator of the fighting know-how of an alliance. Testing that discipline is 100% in the same spirit. If you really want to "enforce the rules as written" then look at beige cycling and read the rules with the the same stick up your.... same stick in your eye as you are reading it for these warnings.

Beige is broken, has been for ages, people don't agree how to fix it. So: don't moderate the work arounds players have been using for years to deal with the broken system. 

Edited July 19, 2022 by tojoky