Pang.

You (and the other admins) have to decide, whether the alliance server is meant for untags to exist. On the one hand, the game server publicly recommends every player to join an alliance. Even the Help forums or Suggestion forums, people suggest for newer players to join an alliance. On the other hand, you want untags to have a chance, to be able to exist and suicide at will.

If the game policy is designed and promoted to reduce the number of untagged countries by encouraging them to join an alliance, then untagged numbers will drop over time when people realize they cannot play untagged. It doesn't matter how many new players we get, we could have 10000 new players, but after 2 resets, 90% would have either quit or joined a tag, and we're back to square one.

The game experience should not be about untags vs tags. It should be about tags vs tags, and formalizing clan wars is a big step towards it. This is one situation where the core design does not match the vision.

pang, either purposefully or not, you're making it more complicated than it should be. I think this could be why there hasn't even been many moves to fixing the issues. I have no political bent when it comes to this - none - I would rather see the game improved than take the easy option and just quit and do something else.

If you take the stance that only 'big changes' are needed, then the enormity of the challenge means nothing gets done. This is simple. It can be incremental. It doesn't require a massive overhaul. Start with tag warfare then proceed from there. This chat about untaggeds clouds the issue - this is not an untaggeds server. We need to grow alliances (more members and more alliances) not untaggeds. There is a blueprint in place, it's called GDI - implement a modified version at alliance level.

You guys haven't changed a game (significantly) that was mostly coded in the late 90s. It feels like you are almost afraid of what could happen. Don't be, you can do it. :)

hanlong, that's possible, sure. But would you hinge LaF's first strike on SOL making sure you don't run into Dragon's country? Any stonewaller effectively means you can't hit another country for 72 hours. Massive deterrent to this strategy :)

Good suggestion dagga.

In my opinion I'm more into making killing harder. Right now it is just too easy to kill a country; like ridiculously easy.

the programmers don't know how to change the game they only know how to cut and paste from old scripts

Now that's a low blow Task1, the current admins have done a lot and put a lot of hours into this. I wouldn't bash them for anything. They listen, and implement things which is a hell of a lot more than we can say from any of the years Mehul or Jolt ran Earth.

It's not as easy as you think, not from a programming aspect, because they have to make sure balance is kept. Make sure this change doesn't ruin the game. Otherwise it is for not. One change can cascade and have other side effects not foreseen or expected.

It's is mighty easy for you to sit back from the sideline and bash them. But you fail to see they are giving us a service for nothing other than our enjoyment, you should show some respect.

yea thumbs up for bringing our beloved game back from the dead, but the only thing I've seen changed is the name.

Open your eyes!

mate, you tell me a change to this game that has made us adjust and change the way we play it's exactly the same.

The admins have made a lot of good changes but the core dynamics are essentially the same. No admin bashing here only admin helping!

I'm not bashing,full credit to them for the resurrection, you yourself had a valid idea I agreed with I'm just saying your sweet idea's won't happen.

doesnt dragon always use the same name?

anyway there are things you can do even if that happens and so what anyway, you can still declare war if you want to or just wait and if they declare war on you it would be odd to make the other party lose stored turns

makinso:

it sort of defeats the purpose of giving bonus turns to just let people hit twice as much for a week or whatever

instead you want to let people get bigger before they can hit then hit the same amount

if you really wanted to give 100(400) rather than 500(0) with long protection then those 400 stored turns should regain 0 readiness

you never want to have a situation where dying/selfdeleting + FA can give benefits in total hits

possibly if a country is so crippled it could be in better shape but it would have to be very crippled, in fact id disallow the bonus turns for self deletion

we had it in express for a while and it was silly

enshula, this thread is not about restarts (which are another vital cog in fixing the game). Keep the lobbying on the place where ideas like yours have to start - formalised decs!

one thing i learned from working at a game company for many years is you can't be too scared of change in the name of balance.

sure you can't do anything too stupid and drastic, but you can change your knobs one at a time and then evaluate and tweak it as you go along. there's literally thousands of knobs, but you don't need to tweak all of it at once. you can tweak one or two and change them for the better. as long as you mean well and fix mistakes that come along the way, the player base will not take it against you and will understand if some things don't work.

one thing i realize is because the EE staff weren't the original designers of this game, they are still figuring out each knob you can tweak and its impact. i think they are worrying too much about it though...

All the guys working on the game have done a great job with it. Collectively they are a scared bunch though. Adjust more knobs!.

you can only learn from mistakes if you make them once =)

Indeed, and game changes can always be changed back.

Nice to see people getting on the same page :)

I'm in favor of this. Although I agree with Pang's concern about putting *more* control in the hands of limited alliance leaders (and perhaps an eventual "federal" system as he describes could ameliorate that), I think the benefits of reducing the effect of the "blindside FS" vastly outweigh the costs.

People just need to be held accountable for their actions.

Someone gangbangs you, you gangbang them back, someone breaks a pact with you, never sign a pact with them again.

As it is there isn't enough "self help" on this server these days. Everyone is always looking to whine on AT about the grand injustices of the world.

I agree with Arsenal.

People also have to be honest when they talk to others.

If someone says one thing but does another thing behind your back, just do "self help" and act on it yourself. Whining on AT doesn't get you too far.

Pang I like the federal government system you described, so if you already have it coded them fire at will (next set), if not then start off with dagga suggestion, I am sure we will see more Farming FS and land wars in that way.

Things we could do:

Countries not at war have an unlimited amount of stored turns, however when their clan goes to war they lose their ability to store turns.

Peace time: 100(unlimited).
War time: 140(no stored).

:3

dagga, makinso brought it up, i replied to him twice

as to your idea im fine with formalised decs, even if there are no mechanics supporting it, but ive mentioned some of my other opinions already

i see everything being interrelated anyway

when hanlong talks about nobs you can tune sometimes one nob will automatically change another one, sometimes changing one will break the whole lot unless you change another

war decs are basically about first strike effectiveness, so you want to reduce kills quickly or reduce impact of kills

to expand slightly on chaoswinds idea, what about not taking away the stored turns while at war but instead making it so they will not be usable until the war is over, makes it slightly less heavy handed i still dont really like it though as all we do is change the initial 1.5 bonus days worth of turns, after that the killing is still at the same rate which i feel is too fast

keep in mind though that if you increase the stored turns limit you create situations similar to express, think mass delayed turns for cash starts for one

Here's the question:

Are stored turns meant so you can hit at ridiculous levels as an alliance for 3 days, or just meant that if you cant play for a few days, you dont lose turns as an individual country?

I think the latter.

If you want to return the stored turns after the war, fine, I don't see a problem with that. Slightly irrelevant to the convo, but that way if you store 120 (120) purposely then you get the turns back after your alliance wins a war or loses a war.

I'm of the opinion that there is no point to store 120 turns unless it is a defensive/protective measure. You should not be able to store turns as an offensive measure. It makes the game really imbalanced.

..also as an addendum I feel the following about kill rates and hits to kill a country:

(this is for another thread, but please let this kill this debate until that thread is made)

- Kills take a perfect amount of turns but occur in an imperfect amount of time.
- Attacks per country should be restricted to 2 per second instead of 10 per second.
- Countries should be allowed to be killed in 2-3 minutes
- Restarts should be given bonuses in line with how good their previous country was..

All that stuff is for another time, but is irrelevant unless we can get the first step done, which is formalise an alliance-level state of war like there is country to country level state of war (using Declare War).

if you really wanted to reduce tempo initially (make fs's less powerfull)

you could cap attacks done on war since time the war started

for example no one could do any attacks until 3 turns had passed then a second attack at 5 turns a third at 7 turns a fourth at 10 turns and so on

(perhaps open up spy ops and missiles at the inverse rate based on gov, or whatever else you prefer)

that would reduce first mover advantage to a breaking readiness gain

leading to if at least not better tactical decisions at least something interesting and new

Why make it complicated? Simple solutions are often the most elegant.

Just kill stored turns for the aggressor alliance. Don't cap anything, no one likes caps. A surprise first strike should come with advantages, just not an advantage that means the aggressor alliance has 240 turns vs the defending alliance who possibly has an average of 60 turns. 120 vs 60 average turns per country is much more manageable and will make the war a lot more about the long term instead of the first 72 hours.

This game does have about 1000 nobs quite literally!

dagga how can you say kills take a perfect amount of turns?

ignoring missiles and SR kills average around 230 attacks

that is 536 turns

each day at war you get about 82 turns, could be a bit less or a bit more, but close to 82 should be close to the average

that is 6.54 countries per kill or 0.1530 kills per country

you should in other words be killing 15% of your country numbers per day

why not change that to 5 or 10%, instead all you are suggesting doing is taking away the initial boost of ~22.4% over 40 hours but leaving the rate at an initial ~25.38% and 25.5% over the next 40 hours

in other words instead of killing 73.28% of our country numbers we would kill 50.88% in the first 40 hours, a reduction of less than 1/3 and you dont want to reduce tempo at all after 40 hours

these numbers are even worse counting missiles and SR

its no wonder even even wars are over quickly when the tempo is so high

people like losing turns more than just not being able to use them?

if you want a higher tempo just set initial cap to 33

"you have 33 attacks remaining on war targets, your next war target attack will be in 40 minutes"

230 attacks per kill is perfect. If you make it more, then smaller alliances suffer. You don't think 7 countries should able to kill 1? A 30 member alliance should be able to kill 4 countries a day at maximum effectiveness. A 50 member alliance should definately be able to kill 7 per day. Given that no alliance operates at any more than 60-70% total effectiveness, these numbers are perfect. Effectiveness is always altered by enemy stonewalling and activity. 7 countries a kill is absolutely perfect.

The attack spamming destroys walling and is the only thing that needs to be fixed. Anyway, that is not what this thread is about and detracts from the first step. Talk about hits to kill a country is pointless if war is conducted in the cowboy state it is currently conducted.

thats why weve discussed multiple times ways to lower tempo without making it so there is a hard cutoff

the simple version is change walling to be inefficient at low pop

the actual problem is timezones and time commitment, quite often you will see a small alliance able to make kills during the first 2 days when they have stored turns but as the turns run out and they have a higher proportion of their own countries unable to attack they can completely fall apart and do things like dropping back to only 1 warchat a day

i do not think kills should be allowed in team at 5, in alliance at 5 (or more) it could be tuned for you to be able to get some kills in 1 run/day and require a second/third day, with the amount you can kill exceeding the amount of pop that can be regained (this assumes people hitting every few hours and the enemy walling inbetween, there will always be a point at which it would become very slow to wear down an optimal waller, perhaps give a penalty for being constantly below max pop or just require more coordination)

edit: removed maths i sidetracked myself a bit

if you want to reduce tempo you make it so more countries are required to kill a country in a given time period, if you just want to bring advantage to small groups you only need to make it so they can get a kill eventually

but if you reduce tempo too much without doing the other you increase the cutoff point when factoring in entry barrier

i argue current walling destroys the ability to balance the game with a lower tempo

and removing stored turns only changes the initial tempo not the prolonged one

i think a lot of you guys are oversimplifying game design btw.

this is why it's actually a career =)

you need to plot out the game trees and figure out by changing a leaf on this branch what effect it changes on the others. there's two types of categories, one is completely formula based imbalances (mathematical ones) which is the easy one, and the other is logic trees based on known user interaction patterns based on user response to changes (this is the hard one, since you have to predict what users will do with these new changes beforehand). without plotting these out, you have no idea what changing one of these knobs will effect on this game.

what i was trying to refer to in my earlier posts was once you understand on the big picture what you are changing, you can do small tweaks on the knobs on matters you know aren't going to work from the logical and mathematical standpoint. what i'm specifically referring to about the admins not making mistakes is that they might not see all the userbase responses at once, but as long as they try their best and fill them all in, the player base will forgive you. i would definitely be bothered more if they can't see the formula based knobs and how they effect each other, since they should have plotted that all out already...

too many people suggest changes emotionally. when a game studio sees changes suggested from fans, they know its all emotionally charged. doesn't mean they aren't good ideas though, typically they love listening to their fanbase and any logical changes their fans suggest they would explore to see if it makes any sense. i believe dagga's change is worthy of pang/qzjul to seriously consider going through this type of review process.

that's why sometimes these changes are made and sometimes they arent.

^^ this.

and that's a key reason why I want to make BIG changes rather than small ones - the big ones shake things up enough that it makes a new equilibrium and allows us to push through smaller changes we want to add in as well. this is a hobby, so we're obviously not making robust tree structures or undertaking major user experience testing (I need to keep food on my table and EE won't pay the bills). just reshuffling or "expanding" the current mechanics usually results in complaining as we try to address specific problems. these problems very often have a political bend to them, and I say that if it's a political problem, it needs a political solution. I mean, after all, that's what I was flamed about for a year or two :)

let the political problems stay political.

I agree; many suggestions are too big; we need to start simple.

disagree!

we spend all our time muddling around doing nothing because everything we do is so nitpicked -- both by staffers and the community. go big or go home. i'm tired of sitting at home.

and i've worked in the game industry at 2 game studios as a software engineer (one of them is pretty famous, blizzard entertainment) and seen countless of game designers and how they work (namely because i worked closely with them), and attended god knows how many conferences at GDC and the like about topics like this over the years.

i'm trying to give you guys some insight of what i know about the gaming industry which i think is directly applicable here.

i'm just hoping the fans (us) will continue providing logical suggestions and the admins (qz/pang) are going to continue to explore them and implement the ones that pass through all of their processes to determine its balance.

from reading pang's response i'm getting some hints that he thinks:

"one is completely formula based imbalances (mathematical ones) which is the easy one, and the other is logic trees based on known user interaction patterns based on user response to changes"

the first one is completely game dev controlled (which is really no contest here)

but pang thinks the second should be more user controlled instead of game dev controlled, while dagga wants the devs to control this more.

is this correct?

i personally think user interactions should be considered as part of the balance to make it a deeper and more meaningful game.

but this is already a game design religion debate that no one can agree one. there are successful games that care about both, and some that care only about one, and i can't say one is always is better than another. this is more personal preference at this point =)

I come from a user experience background, I always try to let the user opinions influence the decision making process while keeping our loftier objectives in mind.

pang has got himself in a hole because he thinks that the only way to fix the game is to make massive sweeping changes. He is in a hole because getting a consensus from the community on his "grand plan" will be nigh impossible.

So the status quo remains and nothing will get done.

Do you really think adding a feature that lets tag admins declare their tag in a state of war is a big change? Do you really need 'development trees' and in-depth user experience surveys? Seriously. We are not putting a giraffe on Mars here.

You could make this feature in half a day of work, max. It doesn't even have to impact the game. Make the in-game declaration have no benefits at all. Make it optional for a set. Make it so that all it doesn it announce in a clan news feed that xSINKx has officially declared war on xFRIDGEx.

Use a simple table structure. Add one table to the DB that tracks current wars and looks like this;

[WAR_Declarations]
PK: WarID
ResetID
ClanID_Attacker
ClanID_Defender
Date_Declaration
Is_Active

Add a feature that lets tag admins click a button, confirmation screen, Declare War. Entry goes into DB, clan news feed announcement, done. Don't overcomplicate.

PS. A bit more on this 'user experience' argument.

If you choose to be in an alliance in the Alliance server, your leader decides when you go to war. Not many democracies where everyone sits around taking votes on who to hit.

This system formalises the leaders decision in-game. The individual loses no rights from this point at all. They still have the same choices - either join in on the war or don't and get booted from your alliance. Kind of a wierd argument pang because it seems it should be more suited to discussions on the individual servers.

"but pang thinks the second should be more user controlled instead of game dev controlled, while dagga wants the devs to control this more."

The devs don't 'control' anything more with this idea. What do they control? The ability to tweak 'war' like they tweak 'netgaining' is what they control - and they should be able to control it. Should the admins not be able to tweak diminishing returns or the $2b bug? Of course they should. War is not an entity at the moment so you can't tweak it. We have a situation at the moment where it needs major tweaking because the current incarnation of Alliance war is destroying the server.

i believe your ideas should be explored and done. i'm just trying to show you in game design why pang is being hesitant.

if i was him i'd already plot it out and make sure it's okay, and then test it with the community assuming there is no obvious gaping holes, since i don't believe its a game breaking change to have a formal war declaration.

some of the specifics on losing turns if you dec war, and how long it takes to accept etc... those actually require game trees and stuff to make sure it's balanced. and those would need more time.

putting in just formal war dec ingame while keeping everything else the same can probably be put in first though. it just saves a AT post for most leaders ;P

hanlong and dagga: speaking for myself and not my alliance, I agree that the first step should be a totally option and non-game mechanic change. This does, however, to Pang's point, give the user's new flexibility.

For example, if a formal war dec is added in-game, that can be used in FA work. Alliance might not put you on War DNH (or keep you their) if an in-game "formal" war is not declared. Also, terms could be different for an FS that occurs without a formal in-game war dec versus one that does have it.

A few resets with this "optional" system might yield some interesting discussion.

I only read the OP but it's a really nice idea.

might need some tweaking, but I think it would be a step ni the right direction

There is no question the game needs to be fixed, but I don’t see this changing things. Lose of stored turns only affects day 2 and 3 in a war and would mean alliances just FS sooner. An alliance like LAF could still kill 11 countries in a FS (ignoring missile kills) with 360 hits per kill (assuming DR is increased by 50%).

Next, this doesn’t stop gangbangs (LAF+Rival vs EVO), unless you limit it to one war partner. In which case you will see conjoined tags like FOG.

good point mapleson. community initiated measures are also critical in solving this problem (hence my whole prearranged war only idea that a lot of people still don't seem to want =/)

i was pushing it because i feel like it will end this endless grudges and let our community heal.

but i was shot down again and again.

the thing is i don't want to sound hypocritical (since LaF is initiating some wars), but like every alliance who wars, there's for a purpose, and i've believed i've always made mine clear.

we're doing the sweeping changes :p

sorry :p

Gotta keep in mind, sweeping changes also keep the game fresh. Don't you think it gets old playing the same thing for 10 years?