Scode: people are complaining because they've tried to do the same thing they've always done and found it doesn't work very well (mass killing countries during war, while doing nothing else). Rather then trying something new they've decided to complain that their old methods are no longer effective.

I do not consider that the basis of a valid complaint, at all. Maintaining the status quo and minimizing the degree people will need to change their playing style isn't one of the primary considerations when evaluating a change (with a few exceptions, such as whether the change would require a new playing style that wouldn't be very fun, or would be far too time consuming etc).

It is a slap in the face to bring in changes that they don't like? Games change, sometimes you don't like the changes sometimes you do. The goal is to make a healthy game that can hopefully grow and survive, the goal isn't to just cater to the desires of the current player base and call it a day.

FYI I had no role in creating or implementing the changes that are being discussed :P

>75% is a little to much however. I think everyone agrees on that. 50% or bellow would be "Cool".

thats incorrect, sof has not done things the way we has always have done things and i for one agree with randy.

and tbh if it wasnt for when war broke out i would be laughing right now suiciding laf and i guarantee you guys wouldnt of liked these changes :P

I really think 70% is too high.
The idea is good but it's too high.

@scode: I'm answering the question. This does by no means reflect my own personal views on how I like to play the game :P

how can that be possible?

only a dead country benefits, if your dead its unlikely youve been suicided

perhaps if your comparing to the previous killing system rather than the original with slowed killruns, but its uncommon to run a full warchat to kill a suicider so even that doesnt make sense

and suiciders now are even easier to run multiple times in the same reset

theres so many simple changes that people could have suggested if any input had been sought, heres a few:

1 - cut down readiness regain per day, either turns or regain per turn or cap/day or period
2 - increase readiness loss with frequent hits, thats roughly equivalent to the previous reduced civ losses and not really something i like
3 - restarts must be linked to previous country/tag if they claim bonuses, anonymity could be allowed in tag
4 - deleted or self deleted countries in general should remain interactive, if someone wants to grief they should not be allowed to decide they are done restart and remove all grabbable land and steal-able stock (i think there was a change recently a change to prevent deletion 24 hours after attacking but its silly to force a wait rather than just leave the country interactive, anyone who self deletes obviously would be a new country in protection for full turns with normal turn bonus to start, id argue it should actually be 0 turns)
5 - the more hits on a country the less should be given back not more, even if current formula was kept it should be inverted, if you wall 1k hits it doesnt mean you deserve everything back, you had plenty of opportunity to use it, you should get back 50% instead (although please note i think all this talk of 'how about we make it only 50% or 35%' to be quite silly, its like saying a genocide was only a little bit bad, its still a genocide)
6 - the longer a kill run takes, the later in the reset, the longer since wars been declared, the less refund/insurance should be provided

and a final rant on the meta changes to the game recently

with landtrading still being by far the best way to get the highest finishes almost all countries with a realistic shot at winning will be easily sucidable

anyone who has too much defence will be an undesirable land trade partner because it costs too much to grab them, their networth will be inflated against similar size trading partners and countries will be easy br/ab targets

282 was suicided, with very few hits about 19k acres ab'd, the cost of that is immense, i just dont understand how you think suiciding is weaker now, 752 is 5 days old and perhaps didnt even need to stock to suicide

make GS's be more devastating in some way.. if you want to keep the restart change.. i really don't mind the changes.

i think its awesome if you have to restart.. and i think between the kill run and the reduction a country is pretty much about half as good as it was before.

if anything it leads to more killing... so for everyone saying i enjoy killing.. keep on enjoying it because there is more of it lol.

Invite me to the dev board. Thanks.

P.S. I was not consulted on this latest changes for this set.

As an old player who hasn't played in so many years that I actually gasped when I heard the number, I have a few scattered thoughts:

First... OMG, CARPET!!! *tacklehugs* How I've missed you... <3 <3 <3

Second... Great thread, Randy. Nobody wants the player base to sit down, shut up, and never be heard - this game (in its new incarnation) finally has active admins who are willing to listen to any and all suggestions and feedback, as long as they're presented in a respectable manner. So thanks for starting the conversation.

Third... Change happens, as someone said before me (I'm too lazy to find out who). Sometimes it's good, sometimes it's bad - but it's always done with good intent. If you don't like the changes, take the time to detail WHY and present it to the admins (instead of just ranting about how stupid they are and how they've ruined the game), along with a few suggestions on how to improve the game. Obviously all suggestions won't be implemented, but you never know which one might get the game moving in a direction that benefits everyone. But don't just bash and whine and fluff and moan - criticize fairly AND present solutions or suggestions. I promise, you will be heard.

if a 5 day old country can BR you and break you, you should've had more defense

i mean seriously, shirley you can't be serious

Chop down restarts to under 50. 30-45, find a number between those percentages. Take one, adjust a reset later if need be

Imho that would encourage wars to go AB first, then kill. Which would add strategy to it.

I like the idea of having pacts between alliance's integrated into the game itself. I'd go one step further and suggest that it's limited to 3 pacts per alliance that way it would increase grabbing between alliances and cause more friction between Un pacted alliances. If you really wanted to spice things up do away with land:land retals.

EVEN IF PACTS WERE TO BE INTEGRATED INTO THE GAME ITSELF, THERE IS NOTHING STOPPING TAGS FROM COOPERATING IN THE GLORIOUS DIVISION OF EACH OTHER BY ZERO OR UNLEASHING HOARDS OF INFINITE MONKEYS ON EACH OTHER.
THE SOLUTION MUST THEREFORE LIE IN COMMUNAL BARBEQUES AND EXPLOSIONS!

lol well i think your personal views should affect how you answer in future.

My restart was seriously just as great as my original. I was shocked. But yeah this will give a twist and make it difficult to pick who is winning or what ..... And I seem to think that it will basically be difficult to kill either side. I could be wrong. I shouldn't think ;)

Randy.... I never have had a really an input on the changes that go on. I think every once in awhile I will leave notes (which hasn't been in a long time) on how I think some of the changes are going for a clan or war....or just my country.

And I am not sure why anyone said you would be banned for this thread.
Sorry I don't have 1, 2, 3, 4 answers for you. It was too much for me to type. I just brought the dog in from a walk...and it is really really cold out. I should move back west, I have become acclimated I think to the Southern Warmth.

If it ain't broke, don't fix it.

I can't say that enough. This game went from a fun game that you could easily play in a few minutes(even during war) to a political massacre that you have to sit around and wait for hours just to get a kill in.

If you want to improve this game, work on the facebook integration. Earth 2025 was fun, EE is nowhere near as fun as it was. Hell, I don't even play this game because it is getting so ridiculous that netting is actually more fun than war, and I am generally a war type.

Also to add: You guys do not pay attention to suggestions, if so, the FFA community would have what they want.(minus the removal of country limit, glad you are telling those losers who want that to fluff off...)

Just popping in after being told about about this thread and not seeing qz jump in. So here are a variety of quick thoughts, that when summed, is no longer quick. They are in point form for easy criticism.

- tl;dr; -> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fmgbBSuaYr8 that's not really accurate but i love that clip

- no one's banned/deleted for disagreeing with or even criticizing the staff. There's tons of instances all over the forums where it sits without anyone touching it. But we decided to just remove posts and people that weren't capable of operating at a certain level of discourse after allowing it for far too long. we should have never engaged in those sort of troll threads wrapped within a suggestion to begin with as it made us (me especially) look worse in the process.

- bad_carpet is dagga, if that wasn't completely obvious.... (Patience, I'm looking at you :p)

- resistance to change and growth of the game are mutually exclusive things. you can't grow the game without changes. if you want this to be a boutique game developed for <750 user community the community needs to be more cooperative and work together rather than divisive and trying to essentially exploit what we do put out there.

- the growth will come on solo servers. the solo servers should be designed to provide a good challenge to experienced players to "try things out" and/or just have fun while allowing new players to get used to the game in a more sandboxed environment before jumping into a pressure cooker (alliance, ffa).

- the time we (qz at this point, basically) get to invest in changes that impact the alliance server is only a fraction of the time spent doing other things to keep the game functional. so even when we get good ideas that we love it's not like we can implement them at any great speed. that's not an excuse, just a reminder of the reality of running any project like this with a very small team in the context of it being a hobby.

- to the point of this thread, I'm not focused on mechanic changes so I won't comment on what's been done recently (#1,#2,#3); there's too many big picture things to do first to make the game be able to retain users (design, help, wiki, public site, etc...). Sorry if you were hoping I would comment on the restart changes!
But I will comment on:

I don't mind sharing what I do/did when I was actively involved in making changes. When we considered changes, ideas would came from lots of places -- players messaging us, seeing stuff in game by playing countries on regular or test servers, stuff from clans filtering to us, B&S or maybe just an idea we had while riding the bus to work. Back when I was playing and developing actively while idling in IRC I would also chat with random people who messaged me about what I was doing to get feedback if it was appropriate to do so. I know qz and martian do too.

Usually when there is an idea that someone feels strongly enough about to share with the group it gets posted on a game dev forum and discussed more thoroughly -- all mods have access there too. Sometimes it's a discussion about a problem looking for solutions, sometimes it's just an idea, sometimes it's something to improve. Back when Slag was still active he would usually do a bunch of math to figure out how to balance it, which was awesome. One aspect of the discussion is usually how to build it (if it requires building) or what aspects we want to tweak to achieve the effect. A few folks usually try to poke holes in the logic/math so we don't create exploits or unintended consequences. Usually some irc convos between ppl too.

Once a change is added it's tested out on the test servers (alpha servers) which I believe qz opened up a few months ago for public testing. Those servers allow us to alter parameters (turn rate, units, turns, etc) without impacting production servers. If we like it, it goes out. If not, back to the drawing board for tweaks. Hopefully we get to deploy it in a changeset that rolls out across the servers as they reset. That's at least the ideal flow for testing -- not everything gets that sort of treatment or goes that smoothly.

So if you want some of my actual thoughts on making changes...

- qz is nearly done with the AI updates (making what I did a year or two ago work with the new changes he made to the framework...) so there will be a way to create AI elements for the game.

- I favour big, bold changes that shake things up and are a challenge to create correctly over balancing things in a cat-and-mouse game of optimization versus players. i've been focused on non-mechanics for so long that my head is completely in the new concept world.

- I posted this on the dev board a few days ago, but IMO the solution to killing is to simply remove the concept of killing. a possible way to achieve that is that instead of dying and starting a new country you just keep your existing country and enter an occupied state where you effectively run the insurgency against those who attacked you, opening up a new set of options to the "killed" player. the mechanic I mentioned involved the players who attack you occupying some portion of your country (weighted toward breakers) being forced to pay occupation costs (troops need to stay to quell the resistance & maybe cash/food costs that you can choose to pay (not paying makes the insurgency stronger)). Your clanmates can liberate your country by taking it back over or via "killing" the folks who are occupying a country. this sort of mechanic would allow users to keep the same country and keeps the users playing the whole time. it also stunts FS's by creating additional costs to overextending. anyway, it's a skeleton of a concept that may be worth fleshing out.

- an additional idea I've been floating for a while (and have probably posted on AT) is for the clan mechanic to be expanded for this server -- not just with allowing pacts to be in-game entities but for clans to effectively be a federal level of government and for countries to become states. then the clan leaders who want a deeper experience can run the federal stuff for the clan. again, this is still a sort of skeleton concept but that opens up a lot of new options.

- both of the above points only work if we do them correctly. I don't want features to feel tacked on or ruin the overall spirit of the game. but at the same time, moving the game forward and making new, challenging aspects sounds more appealing than trying to make what everyone is sick of more palatable.

- any changes we make don't solve the underlying issues with the community -- which generally revolve around the maturity of this community. by mature, I mean that only the most hardcore and dedicated players remain here after years of widdling the community down (via the game's lack of evolution & the community's nature). everyone is highly dedicated. nothing bothers anyone anymore, nothing is new or shocking. when we catch people doing obviously horrible, horrible things the first reaction from some folks (often leaders of major alliances...) is that we are doing it as part of some kind of political agenda against a clan we don't like. there is way too high of a portion of people that think qz or I read their messages/posts because we're super evil. if we delete/ignore troll threads, it only validates the troll's content. when those sort of posts occur on the forums and the collective response isn't "stfu you stupid troll" it leaves me feeling like we can't engage the wider community in any sort of public consultation as the conversation gets so polarized and negative so quickly.

- so to sum it up, if this community (alliance server) wants an admin team that is responsive to their needs, engaged and active I think this community needs to do more to create the environment conducive to us wanting to be engaged. We can make code changes but the biggest obstacle is getting positive changes and contributions from the community or any code changes are for naught. I've said this dozens of times and all I get for it is flamed.

TLDR: Pang hates you all because you are immature stinky heads. The sooner he can get rid of you the sooner he can replace you with 20,000 teeny boppers.

http://www.youtube.com/...eature=youtu.be&t=46s

that's not an accurate tl;dr; :)

if I wanted 20,000 teeny boppers I'd make something new.... and use canvas! :p

I recommend cats!

1) polls on boxcar

2) reset stats counter (a page that shows how many buildings you've ABed/BRed, civs killed on GS/BR, total acres gained, number spyops done, number of spyops failed, total resources killed via spyops, missiles defused, ect ect) basically a page to again measure our epeen versus alliance mates/friends/whoever.

3) restart % rate down to maybe 40-50%

4) moar cats

and i'd be happy with a earth boner in my pants

Alana would love more cats!!!

Why stay the same? Because this is a war based game. Even if there are netgainers they buy "military" to finish high in the set with. We want to be able to kill our enemies in war time where killing them actually matters. Not this crippling silliness. I mean if we are going to keep crippling let us build new buildings like hospitals. OH! and then medical tech can now do and be worth even more! But seriously, we want to kill and have that full of joy moment in our warchats when you get a kill and the chat floods with comments like, "nice kill!" As warring players we enjoy KILLING our enemy but it loses a lot of enjoyment when they just come back with 70% of what they just had.

Also ABing FS's... it has been a joke here on AT for as long as i can remember. Why? Because we do not think highly of it. Mainly cuz kills were far more valuable and we like killing. It's a match made in heaven.

Now one thing to think about: Now if the game keeps the crippling changes in hopes of getting new players interested in coming to the game and playing. Do you think you can collect enough new players to support the large amount of old loyal players who will become frustrated and bored with how the game they have played for many years has change so drastically (in the warring part of the game)? Sure many people play for the community in the alliances. But for people like me who always come back to play this game based on their love and addiction to this game(even tho i'm not so good at it) we are gonna get frustrated and bored with what happened to the game we used to love.

So a small changes thought: Have a country only come back with 20-10%. Even 20% seems way too high to me. But that's just one guys opinion.

Please just dont kill the game i love.

You say that you wanted to weaken the FS but you didn not change AB's in any way so what happens if a clan AB FS's another clan and has 3 quarters of them AB'd to the ground???
Also did you know it takes 300 hits to BR a country flat while it only takes 150 hits to AB 1 flat and that while BRing you loose less CS's then ABing, how does this improve things?

So lets consider a 25 mbr clan with 120(100) turns prepared for a FS that makes 3000(2500) while it takes 150 turns to AB a country flat you get to AB flat 20 countries flat in the 1st part of the FS and another 20 in the second part which that if a 25 mbr clan FS AB's another 25 member clan they win the war in the 1st day how exactly can they mount a CS and how exactly does it help with number 4) To not have a tag completely knocked out of a war in 2 days and the entire tag effectively stop playing for the remainder of a reset (could be 4+ weeks) when it's basically the same thing?

well, to be fair, the 5 day old country is a restart, so he had >80% of his old country's military/tech/buildings to start with. If he died with 1m jets on hand, he restarts with 750k on hand and in 5 days can easily double that and suicide on just about all the traders in the game right now.

"the solution to killing is to simply remove the concept of killing. "

- Pang

This is the line that is driving all the game changes related to war. It would be a huge mistake.

Why would this be a mistake? IMO it would fix a lot of problems. Grinding a country down and feeding on its land once it is incapable of defending itself would be glorious! The only "kill" available in the game should be the landkill, and any restart should start from scratch!

Self deletion should also be banned. The only way to remove land from the game should be with nuclear missiles. It's the only thing that makes sense.

Also, this way both warmongers and netgainers would have something to gain from warring!

if a country gets too crippled to be playable, then the would probably just quit playing until the next set, assuming that they remember to create a country whenever the set is scheduled to start. probably would result in a loss of players.

Change is good.. keep changing.. their will be critics and supporters. just take what the critics say into account within reason.. and keep marching forward.

Most of the players still here are here for the people anyway.. they will stick around/return.

thats the entire point that the change is stupid

because a country comes back with so much stuff that it can repeatedly suicide without stocking

Apparently it WASN'T completely obvious that it was dagga, otherwise I wouldn't have been so happy to see him. :p

And now I'm sad. Thanks for ruining my day. Bastard. lol

This comment makes absolutely no sense to me. Once again you are relating warring to killing. Only in this game is this considered a 1 for 1 analogy. Even real world wars aren't about killing, they are about the occupation and/or control of territory.

You failed to explain why killing is a necessary characteristic of a war dynamic, you just went on assuming that it MUST be, which is exactly what I'm saying the problem is for most of the complainers. Think outside the box, warring != killing, that is an EE construct based on old formulas that caused killing to make the most sense as a method of waging war. It no longer makes sense, so get used to it?

Let me start off by saying I don't mind the changes and have a pretty good idea of what was intended. Here are a few of my thoughts on them...

1. 70% is slightly too much to come back with. I feel like 60% would be better, it would make a kill just as significant as crippling a country and a second kill would put a country down to 35% of it's original value (not counting what was taken/destroyed). Not making it totally useless but seriously hurting its warring output.

2. The "floor" on values for restarts are too high. If you invest hundreds of millions into a BR break that offer no defensive help in the future, the country shouldn't come back with 160+ CS. There are times when killing a country would actually be helpful to it's owner. And that seems like bad game design.

3. These game changes don't really make a big enough dent in the power of FSs for my liking. I still maintain that a "Declare War" option should be put into the game between Alliances. Taking 24 hours to take effect. Once in effect the returns on special attacks would increase so kills would take less turns to complete (compared to if a state of war was not in place). This makes suicides less effective and gives alliances a choice between a less effective surprise FS or a fully effective FS but with the enemy aware. Or maybe something in between. The more options, the better!

Double post -.-

i'm still waiting for an answer from 1 of the admins for my AB question meanwhile i'll try and catch qz in irc and tell him some ideas i think might work nicely with the new changes i like the declare war idea

To some degree. Part of what the most recent set was for was to make it so you don't lose "all your hard work" in a few seconds.



Yes, if time allows. I need to fix the server



Improving!



Well, I'd like to implement a formalized alliance framework, and a war scoring system.... but that will be after a number of other things =(



All of the above!

ive been hearing changes lately have had less feedback than previously

including someone stating so on this thread

the problem is when a mistake is made that sometimes you cant fix it mid set, like this one its not 100% it would have been the right decision to roll it back mid set because it had already messed up wars and plans

It's interesting to point out here, that the most rabidly followed MMO that is about 90% based on PVP, EvE online, makes you lose your property when you die. Including things that can cost months and $1000s.

And the most successful mmo of all time, WoW, is the opposite. Interesting.

You realize eve is incredibly niche, just like this game

Why wanger would ever be a credible source for war changes is beyond me.

Despite the fact he'd rather get FAed into the Top 10 than war, he does have the dubious distinction of being hanlongs right hand man while he perpetrated the biggest spying and cheating EE had ever seen.

He knew nothing though..

Seems legit.

i can't play that. i had problems dealing with the deaths of my Diablo2 hardcore characters.

oh how i miss my titans revenge javazon

70% is far, far too high. It needs to be much lower (think 30%), that then ramps up to 60-70% if you take the time to defend your country.

As a hardcore EVE player, I do still prefer the old system though. This just seems like a cheap alternative to other methods (you mention you don't want people to lose their countries in 30 seconds - so make changes that reinforce that, rather than just massively boosting the amount you get on country restart to stupid levels).

I don't usually engage dagga when it's not just telling him to stop being a tool.... but....

you think h4 and hanlong are close? hahahahaha

hanlong talked fluff about h4 more than pretty much anyone else in LaF. he even talked fluff about h4 to me and people know that's generally a non-starter discussion for me. hanlong's always seemed somewhat bitter about h4's legacy in LaF.... for whatever reason.

leaving aside the pettiness that only people like dagga engage in, h4's general background as a tax policy analyst makes him quite well suited to discussing changes and seeing both sides of issues in general.

I hope people are starting to remember why we ban/delete dagga on sight now. h4 talks about changes, dagga makes up fake stuff as part of a character assassination attempt.

*talks fluff about h4 randomly* :P

As an aside, why would the strongest players necessarily be the best source for game changes anyway?
For example, if we were to make a netting formula change, why only ask the people who place top 10.

They've been trying multiple times to slow down kill runs. It has only been marginally successful

Yea; it turns out to actually be really difficult to get people to change their KR habits by adding bonuses/penalties &etc &etc. We also don't want to do something like limit an attacker to X hits per second or something, because that sort of system tends to favour large clans, because they simply have more members doing X hits per second, meaning they kill faster. Restarting with more was the logical route after the last years worth of changes back and forth with KR penalties/bonues &etc.

We will adjust the current system though. I'm a big fan of the Monte Carlo method =D (okay, we're not *that* random...)