Game Development Discussion: Second New Player Thread

[Keegoz]

Based on both polling results, thread discussion and dev team discussion we have put this together as a more formal proposal on changing new player gameplay. This is following on from the previous thread revolving around changing new player gameplay and catch up mechanics. You can find these discussions/results here:

Below you can see some of our thinking behind each decision.

 

Extended new player revenue bonus

• 100% bonus for C1, decreasing by 5% from C2 to C20 (C2 will have 95%, C20 will have 5%)

We made this decision based upon the thread discussion on the reduction of revenue for each city. That being that if it decreases by 10%, the revenue gained by the new city is wiped out from the bonus drop. If you wish to look at projected income based on the different bonuses you may do so here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1xYJJNs35AQeBvNcHt2L6lQvqaoXJOFMONpMzBVkQUYk/edit#gid=0 

 

Increased login bonus

• Increased login bonus - 3m
• You lose two steps if you miss a day
• Increased login bonus - max daily increase (100k)
• Increased login bonus - max new player bonus 2x (no change)

This is mostly from the poll, with at times us making decisions based upon the middle option between often 'no change' to 'max change'. Losing two steps on log in progress, rather than all progress, was discussed both in the thread and as game devs. 

 

Raiding and inactive nations

• Raiding and inactive nations - C15 and below can declare on any inactives below their score

Didn't want to open it to all tiers as we were concerned that larger nations may actually begin to benefit from this far more than any new player. We're also unsure at this time on how it will play out and want to see it in action in less consequential tiers before potentially expanding at a later date. A loot modifier will be applied to nations as they increase in cities to reduce a c15. Raiding will hopefully supplement nations growth as they move from primarily raiding at lower cities to shifting towards farming if they so choose. It also eases the massive income loss that we currently see from when a c3-5 stops raiding and begins to build up. This loot modifier will have its own mini-thread to determine how this should be calculated.

Inactivity Poll

We want to ensure that we are on the same page on inactivity. We feel it is reasonable for the above to take place if the nation is 14 days inactive. To ensure that people who dip out of VM for a few hours aren't automatically then raided we have proposed a beige timer be placed on people who come out of VM for 24 hours. This however is not set in stone as a decision, please vote in the poll above.

- VM comes with 24 hours of beige 
- Inactive is 14 days

Possible Concerns/Solutions:

This largely came from the thread but also between me/Village reviewing a few things. We have somewhat spitballed some ideas to potentially overcome the issues however it is likely that we will keep these in the back pocket to be used if the concerns play out. Inevitably with changes, we're going to have to 'wait and see' before acting. Creating solutions to issues we aren't 100% sure will occur isn't something we wish to do right now.

The loot modifier however is likely to come with this change and will get its own thread.

Oversaturation
The main concern here was that if we expand raiding that the amount of ‘good’ raid targets will dramatically decrease. Some possible solutions are below:

- NPC nations - Nations specifically designed to be raided and give loot. They may or may not have specific challenges in the war to get ‘better’ loot. This idea would be the one that needs the most tinkering but it would be interesting to introduce and perhaps expand them into other tiers later on.
- Buffed production bonus - New nations have a buffed production bonus at the beginning of the game to provide more loot to raiders.
- Project for lower tiers to grant something for successful raids (e.g. 2m for each successful raid war) - Takes the focus off specific nation loot as much and allows lower tiers to grow despite their targets.
- Loot modifier so the farther down you declare the less loot you get, only applies to nations not normally in your score range.

No incentive to move on to higher tiers
- Loot modifier will hopefully deal with some of that. There are already some incentives to move up anyway but introducing more ‘mid tier’ projects may help to encourage players to move up.
 

Please offer any feedback or ideas. If you need us to elaborate on our decision making further, please ask!

Edited October 5, 2022 by Keegoz
Grammar

[KindaEpicMoah]

City 15 seems like a very arbitrary number, no? What made you decide to cap it off at that point?

[Keegoz]

3 minutes ago, KindaEpicMoah said:

City 15 seems like a very arbitrary number, no? What made you decide to cap it off at that point?

It is where the lower tier projects are currently aimed at. The end of the Resource Production Center and just before AUP.

There is a chance it could be further tweaked but you have to draw the line somewhere and given there is (sorta) one already drawn we went with that.

[Benfro]

Nice suggestion and plan regarding beige after VM. Strongly in support. Concerned about new player revenue bonus reaching all the way up to C20. Why not cap that at C15 like all other incentives? Could just go from 25% to 0% or adjust the rate at C10 to be 10% cuts from there. 

[Ripper]

2 hours ago, Keegoz said:

Raiding and inactive nations

• Raiding and inactive nations - C15 and below can declare on any inactives below their score

Didn't want to open it to all tiers as we were concerned that larger nations may actually begin to benefit from this far more than any new player. We're also unsure at this time on how it will play out and want to see it in action in less consequential tiers before potentially expanding at a later date. A loot modifier will be applied to nations as they increase in cities to reduce a c15. Raiding will hopefully supplement nations growth as they move from primarily raiding at lower cities to shifting towards farming if they so choose. It also eases the massive income loss that we currently see from when a c3-5 stops raiding and begins to build up. This loot modifier will have its own mini-thread to determine how this should be calculated.

 

 

On a more serious note, it feels like you introduce a very hard cut-off, that hardly exists right now. Surely, targets decrease as you go from city 3 to e.g., 5, but it's not like you suddenly lose all available options. It's a relatively smooth transition.

Adding a mechanic like what you suggest, adds a virtual wall that many people may decide not to skip at all.

Regarding the voting results you mentioned, I see people were 50-50 about such a change. Is this enough to go ahead with the change?

Edited October 5, 2022 by Ripper

[The Titan]

21 minutes ago, Ripper said:

Adding a mechanic like what you suggest, adds a virtual wall that many people may decide to not skip at all.

Regarding the voting results you mentioned, I see people were 50-50 about such a change. Is this enough to go ahead with the change?

Agreed, this seems like another situation of just pushing an update when results were essentially inconclusive. Similarly, it seems people were against expanding the new player login bonus by a good margin

[Majima Goro]

3 hours ago, Keegoz said:

Raiding and inactive nations - C15 and below can declare on any inactives below their score

I don't think the reason people stop raiding after 3 cities has to do with not having people in range, it is because doing so might cause "diplomatic oopsies"
A mechanic change to make oopsies less likely to happen is a big no from me

Not to mention, the proposed loot modifier is a dangerous territory. It sets a precedent of punishing down-declares which I can clearly see being modified down the line to punish the rest of the tiers(c15+). Besides, the loot takeaway is a 10% anyway. With extreme down-declares, the raid might then not even be worth it, bringing one back to the initial problem that raids above c3 aren't "profitable". 

PS: WTF, when did the theme of the forum change to orange

[Anri]

3 hours ago, Benfro said:

Nice suggestion and plan regarding beige after VM. Strongly in support. Concerned about new player revenue bonus reaching all the way up to C20. Why not cap that at C15 like all other incentives? Could just go from 25% to 0% or adjust the rate at C10 to be 10% cuts from there. 

I'm guessing they don't want to cap it at c15 because of the last paragraph of no incentive for growing to the high tier. If there was an actual drop in your income from c15 to c16 (assuming that one city wouldn't make up for the 25% drop in income between those two cities) I think that would just worsen the situation with people not wanting to move up

 

(Also c20 instead of c15 because that's the option that won the vote)

Edited October 5, 2022 by Anri
added note in parantheses at bottom

[leonissenbaum]

A lot of the detail with the raiding changes rests on the loot modifier, and since there's no detail in this thread, it's hard to give proper feedback on that. A proper loot modifier is important, otherwise the income jump between c15 and c16 would be far too large, and would make people never want to go past c15 in most cases. Not much more to say on this, really depends on the details of the loot modifier. 

The rest of these changes all seem good for catchup, no problem with them.

[Village]

4 hours ago, Benfro said:

Nice suggestion and plan regarding beige after VM. Strongly in support. Concerned about new player revenue bonus reaching all the way up to C20. Why not cap that at C15 like all other incentives? Could just go from 25% to 0% or adjust the rate at C10 to be 10% cuts from there. 

I'm fully in support of capping it at C15, but there's not really a clean solution to doing so without a revenue drop off at some point or another, I don't think it makes sense for you to build a new city and somehow end up with 20% less revenue than before. (See the spreadsheet linked in the forum post for revenue graphs for each of the options in the last vote)

4 hours ago, Ripper said:

On a more serious note, it feels like you introduce a very hard cut-off, that hardly exists right now. Surely, targets decrease as you go from city 3 to e.g., 5, but it's not like you suddenly lose all available options. It's a relatively smooth transition.

Adding a mechanic like what you suggest, adds a virtual wall that many people may decide not to skip at all.

 

True yeah, this isn't targeted at people who will continue to raid through their time growing (like Arrgh), rather at normal players who, due to the meta, are stuck raiding at C3 or C5 for weeks or months on end because their alliance wants them to raid to x hundreds of millions before they're allowed to progress further. Instead, they can continue to raid towards x hundreds of millions of dollars while being able to invest that money back into their nation along the away, making it a far more enjoyable experience. Even though that C3-5 meta will likely move to C15, we believe that it's better off there with a couple weeks of effort to get there rather than stuck down at C3 after only a day or two of "real" progress.

4 hours ago, Ripper said:

Regarding the voting results you mentioned, I see people were 50-50 about such a change. Is this enough to go ahead with the change?

No it's definitely not enough to go ahead and implement it, we have no intention of ramrodding anything through. But 50-50 is enough to create a follow up post to address the concerns of the 50% who voted no (which is what this post is intended as).

3 hours ago, The Titan said:

Agreed, this seems like another situation of just pushing an update when results were essentially inconclusive. Similarly, it seems people were against expanding the new player login bonus by a good margin

See above. Also for the login bonus bit, the majority (about half) was in favor of no change to the new player modifier (2x), which is what we put above, and the majority (about 70%) was also in favor of some change to the daily increase, we picked a "middle ground" number for the change in daily increase.

2 hours ago, Majima Goro said:

I don't think the reason people stop raiding after 3 cities has to do with not having people in range, it is because doing so might cause "diplomatic oopsies"
A mechanic change to make oopsies less likely to happen is a big no from me

It's not meant to reduce diplomatic oopsies, it's meant to broaden the range and make the new player experience better. In the process it actually makes it more likely for diplomatic oopsies since there's now more nations raiding in the higher tiers where such oopsies are more likely to happen. I think more oopsies actually makes the game more fun and dynamic since it encourages smaller scale conflict and things.

2 hours ago, Majima Goro said:

Not to mention, the proposed loot modifier is a dangerous territory. It sets a precedent of punishing down-declares which I can clearly see being modified down the line to punish the rest of the tiers(c15+). Besides, the loot takeaway is a 10% anyway. With extreme down-declares, the raid might then not even be worth it, bringing one back to the initial problem that raids above c3 aren't "profitable". 

It's not really setting a precedent because it only affects the ones outside your current score range, it's simply setting a precedent of punishing extra mechanics and balancing things. Also the loot modifier scaling hasn't been worked out yet, but the goal is to scale it it in such a way so that it's still profitable as you rise in city count, but not so damaging to the target that there's simply no loot left.

2 hours ago, Majima Goro said:

PS: WTF, when did the theme of the forum change to orange

Yeah hold on, we got a new version of the theme so it did change but it should still be red I think, not orange???

1 hour ago, Anri said:

I'm guessing they don't want to cap it at c15 because of the last paragraph of no incentive for growing to the high tier. If there was an actual drop in your income from c15 to c16 (assuming that one city wouldn't make up for the 25% drop in income between those two cities) I think that would just worsen the situation with people not wanting to move up

 

(Also c20 instead of c15 because that's the option that won the vote)

Pretty much yeah, in the end the vote didn't really matter because after graphing the options there was only one that didn't result in your income actually decreasing when going from one city to the next and we didn't want that to be the case. If you guys have other options that work out better please let me know!

30 minutes ago, leonissenbaum said:

A lot of the detail with the raiding changes rests on the loot modifier, and since there's no detail in this thread, it's hard to give proper feedback on that. A proper loot modifier is important, otherwise the income jump between c15 and c16 would be far too large, and would make people never want to go past c15 in most cases. Not much more to say on this, really depends on the details of the loot modifier. 

The rest of these changes all seem good for catchup, no problem with them.

Yeah, my thoughts exactly, the loot modifier thread should help sort things out.

 

Thank you guys so much for the feedback!

[Velekk Hemlock]

Imo most of the proposed changes around new players are pretty good except the raiding changes
Inactives should not be opened up. Raiding works fine now
It's a give and take
You give up passive income so that you can make more money
You give up more money, so you have higher passive income
It allows different play styles to be efficient depending on the amount a player wants to engage with the game. Opening up raiding destroys that system entirely and also heavily nerfs raiding for the same reason why raiding at c10-15 is inefficient. Over saturation. If players don't want to delay gratification for more growth in the future then they can join an alliance that doesn't have a program that does that. More engaged players that also are generally of higher patience and understanding of the game's mechanics are fine with raiding inactives, it's more fun than passive income generation and lower c-levels are a wild-west where interesting things are allowed to happen. 
Nothing mechanically stops raiding at c15. In fact, you can make almost as much money at that level too if you're lucky and willing to do dangerous things. The problem is that the demand exceeds the supply of raid targets. The solution to this isn't to change war mechanics and cater to one play style over the other. It's okay that there isn't a perfect equality between player incomes and new player experiences. 

*Adding
I think npc nations are a great idea to address inability to raid or regularily engage with war mechanics without overriding existing mechanics. 

Edited October 5, 2022 by Velekk Hemlock

[Avatar Patrick]

Overall these seem like good changes. Catch up mechanics are good for the game as a whole since it means more targets for the upper tier (and more engagement). I especially like the NPC loot idea. That would be really neat if it could be implemented successfully.  My biggest issue is allowing nations that exit VM to have beige. It seems rather pointless and if you're choosing to leave VM for any reason, the understanding is that you open yourself up to the possibility of getting raided. I still think the inactive raiding should be opened up to everyone. There's probably enough inactive nations out there for everyone to get some if they want. Not sure if the server could handle it though lol

[Zevari]

10 hours ago, Keegoz said:

• Raiding and inactive nations - C15 and below can declare on any inactives below their score

 

Was there any particular reason why this isn't implemented both ways? (So anyone below c15 can hit inactives up to c15) It seems a tad unfair to reduce targets in the lower tiers because even with a decreased loot modifier larger nations will still raid the high loot targets, they don't care if they are getting half the loot a smaller nation would. I mean heck, look at how many people destroyed cities to be in range of that nation rose sent a ton of resources to by accident, if they could have hit for less loot but not needing to destroy any cities they would have any day of the week.

4 hours ago, Village said:

See above. Also for the login bonus bit, the majority (about half) was in favor of no change to the new player modifier (2x), which is what we put above, and the majority (about 70%) was also in favor of some change to the daily increase, we picked a "middle ground" number for the change in daily increase.

Is it just me or are the majority of people who are against new player bonuses whales? They are perfectly happy for you to boost their daily bonus to 3mil+ but don't even think about giving those newbies a chance to catch up! 
Anything that gives newer players a chance to catch up to older but lazier nations is a good addition in my opinion.

10 hours ago, Keegoz said:

- NPC nations - Nations specifically designed to be raided and give loot. They may or may not have specific challenges in the war to get ‘better’ loot. This idea would be the one that needs the most tinkering but it would be interesting to introduce and perhaps expand them into other tiers later on.

While this sounds cool I feel like it would be better suited as a type of event. Something like a raiding competition which would reward players based on loot, kills and damages. Would add some nice activity to the game (and give the devs an easy stress test for the servers when needed xD)

[Anri]

Since the city revenue new player bonus is supposed to be for new players why not make it expire after the nation is a certain age? It could be at 180 or 360 days old for example.

Edited October 7, 2022 by Anri
clarified message

[Zevari]

35 minutes ago, Anri said:

Since the new player bonus is supposed to be for new players why not make it expire after the nation is a certain age? It could be at 180 or 360 days old for example.

It still works like the old system, just numbers are inflated.
Currently new players can have a login bonus of up to 1mil for 60 days after they make their account. This means they are getting a 300% increase just like the normal player base.
Additionally I believe there already is a revenue modifier for lower city counts, something like 100% ending at 10% on c10 so it's only extending that bonus to the c20 range basically a buff across the board except for c1 nations.

Edited October 6, 2022 by Zevari
I suck at writting

[leonissenbaum]

2 hours ago, Zevari said:

Was there any particular reason why this isn't implemented both ways?

Didn't notice this in my first reading, this is a great point, should be implemented in both directions.

[Keegoz]

Just to give a bit of an idea of what the loot modifier would could look like, this is something Village came up with:

Came up with a modifier for beige and ground attack loot based on relative city count, it'd only apply for the folks who're only in range because they're inactive. In essence, the modifier makes it so you make less money as your city count increases, meaning you're not drying out targets so much and you're also not going to have such a drastic falloff from C15 to C16, meaning there's still a benefit to building mod = max(min(1 - (your_cities - enemy_cities) / 15, 1), 0.2). The modifier is minimum 20% of loot you'd normally get, decreasing as your city difference changes.
Other possible formula is max(min(1 - (your_cities - enemy_cities) / your_cities, 1), 0.2)

[Village]

22 hours ago, Velekk Hemlock said:

It's a give and take
You give up passive income so that you can make more money
You give up more money, so you have higher passive income

Yeah, which is 100% the way it should be in higher tier, but at the moment the meta isn't constructive or kind to new players, requiring weeks or raiding at C3 in order to advance in the alliance. While yes people could definitely join another alliance, but that simply doesn't happen and there's no real way for the game to suggest that to people. Plus, even those who are more engaged shouldn't need to stunt their growth at C3 simply so they can raid, they should still have the opportunity to grow and maintain an income, as their massive income increases they naturally make slightly less money raiding on the same (depending on the proposed modifier). That's the whole point, that new players aren't forced into that unhealthy meta anymore and rather can continue to grow, get more engaged in the game, and become invested, thus giving more new members to alliances and encouraging a better experience for all new players.

18 hours ago, Avatar Patrick said:

Overall these seem like good changes. Catch up mechanics are good for the game as a whole since it means more targets for the upper tier (and more engagement). I especially like the NPC loot idea. That would be really neat if it could be implemented successfully.  My biggest issue is allowing nations that exit VM to have beige. It seems rather pointless and if you're choosing to leave VM for any reason, the understanding is that you open yourself up to the possibility of getting raided. I still think the inactive raiding should be opened up to everyone. There's probably enough inactive nations out there for everyone to get some if they want. Not sure if the server could handle it though lol

The VM change is meant to help those who set a VM timer for two weeks but might not be online at that exact turn, rather than immediately being open to being jumped on and raided they have a short grace period to log in.

18 hours ago, Zevari said:

Was there any particular reason why this isn't implemented both ways? (So anyone below c15 can hit inactives up to c15) It seems a tad unfair to reduce targets in the lower tiers because even with a decreased loot modifier larger nations will still raid the high loot targets, they don't care if they are getting half the loot a smaller nation would. I mean heck, look at how many people destroyed cities to be in range of that nation rose sent a ton of resources to by accident, if they could have hit for less loot but not needing to destroy any cities they would have any day of the week.

That's an interesting idea, we'll definitely bring that up!

18 hours ago, Zevari said:

While this sounds cool I feel like it would be better suited as a type of event. Something like a raiding competition which would reward players based on loot, kills and damages. Would add some nice activity to the game (and give the devs an easy stress test for the servers when needed xD)

Oooo! I like that idea! I'd love to get some competitions and other engaging things going on in-game.

17 hours ago, Anri said:

Since the new player bonus is supposed to be for new players why not make it expire after the nation is a certain age? It could be at 180 or 360 days old for example.

The income bonus? That's an interesting idea, would solve the city modifier balancing issue completely. The buff to login bonus is already based on nation age.

 

Thanks again you guys!

[Tartarus]

The new player bonuses and the VM changes look really good and I think they will work for the better. I’m not sure on the raiding aspect. I agree raiding does need to be altered but I’m not sure… this is the way.

[Anri]

11 hours ago, Village said:

The income bonus? That's an interesting idea, would solve the city modifier balancing issue completely. The buff to login bonus is already based on nation age.

Yea, this:

Extended new player revenue bonus

• 100% bonus for C1, decreasing by 5% from C2 to C20 (C2 will have 95%, C20 will have 5%

 

[Nonna]

The more loot , the better ,  a few of us of just wanna take our take while growing.