Starting this here so it doesn't need to go on announcements

As LI said on the other thread, pay-for-babysitting is a bad idea. But if going down that route, I'd prefer it's a bot 'babysitting' your country, not another player.

Pay for babysitting is the only way to combine any hopes of being effective at war with most jobs and/or living in a time-zone other than the 2-3 most common timezones of EE people. It would be a change that made warring more inclusive. Either that or removing walling/kills.

As I posted in the other thread;

I like everything but the prices. They are a bit steep.

I think the prices are like 3-4 times as high as I would expect to spend on s game like this. You might make more money by setting them lower.

Permanent premium costs 35 dollars a year for instance. It is also kind of a must if you want to compete netting wise in 1a or primary, not for war since stonewalling is so much more important than everything else in being effective at war as an individual. But permanent bonuses are extremely important in long resets.

I think that instead of making it an expensive must-buy for netters it should feel like a bargain for everyone, so that everyone uses it. That way you get probably the same amount of money and people will be happy not to have to bother with the bonus voting. $35 a year is for sure something almost everyone can afford but since its payed in likely in $25 dollar installments its noticeable and frankly it shouldn't be.
Personally I'll gladly keep seeing ads and pay for premium just for the bonus thingy if it becomes significantly cheaper(drop it by ~80%, imo), that solution would bring you more money as well, probably

Use Patron status for Ad removal maybe and keep it as expensive?
Patron should give 1 year premium maybe?

Right now I see Premium as an expensive must-have and Patron as a complete waste of money. This is not really the feeling you want players to have about your shop items. Its not good for the game or for your wallet. But it's a work in progress i guess.

Remember also that if everything is cheap, like taunts, name changes, babysitting etc, people will start buying credits, and the first purchase is the most important one, because after the first one they will almost certainly make a second one. So make it cheap and more people will make that first purchase, and it will feel like far less of a burden.

i will disagree.

If people pay to play your country, babysit, etc, then you are paying to cheat.

This is what i posted before my post was deleted. "Whatever these perks may be should not be things that have been frowned upon/considered cheating or have had wars fought over during the whole existence of the game IMO. I am referring to the babysitting idea."

If you pay and it’s allowed by the creators of the game then it is not cheating.

Then why should a european or asian play to war in this game over games in which you are on an equal footing with americans or other timezone players?

When I war I can sometimes play my turns while at home during the evening, if Im really lucky, but mostly its at night or at work in the afternoon. I always have to wall when Im at work or should be asleep, tho, never fails. Most warchats are inconvienient for me because Im European. I make do; I lose sleep, I try to change my schedule, I neglect friends and family. I can do this for breif periods of time, but I think its utterly sick that a text based game that does not give you cash prices demand this of players from some timezones. And theres no way I will play to war primarily due to this, even tho I can enjoy it for a week or two every now and again.
The normal warchat times are convenient for east coast americans and I guess the time zones close to it. Potentially a few asians live in some sweetspot where the american evening chat coincides with their morning routine and the american morning chat is during their early evening?

Especially with the removal of the restart bonus you have no choice but to wall if you want to play for war.

Nerf walling or make it far less important as I been saying for years now, so people can feel they are effective without waking up in 12 seconds to wall at 3am or changing their work schedule for a warchat in a text based online game with 300 players in. Or the babysitting is most certainly needed.

Obviously, but the view point is what is regarded by alliance leaders as unhonorable behavior for decades, and started wars over because it is cheating (no argue that it isnt) just because you are allowed to pay for it now so its ok is silly.

If a game makes me unable to sleep at night Im gonna be less likely to continue playing it. I don't think I'm unique in this regard. :)

Utopia has that mechanic, everyone uses it and almost everyone is happy with it as far as I have heard. I don't know when they started with that but I do know that babysitting was forbidden before it same as it always have been here. That game is also much more successful and vibrant than EE right now, so I very much doubt that copying good implementations in their game is gonna be bad for EE. :)

There are specific limitations that can be imposed so that its not just a way to play 2 or 10 countries. For instance you can make it so you can only babysit one country and that each country can only have a babysitter for a maximum of say 10 days per reset, only in tagged servers (ofc) and maybe even that the country owner can't login while the country is being sat without discontinuing the sitting 'session'.

Either way I think if kills stay at 5-50 second to execute and no restart bonus I dont see how this game is bareable(at least for anyone who wars) for anyone who isn't retired, unemplyed or in the sweet spot time zones without it.

I completely agree w gerdler and pang has said on several occasions that countries die too easily / fast. Spend a month building => die in 8 seconds is a terrible player experience in any game.

that's the reason why i won't bother to wall.

You can wall if you put the effort in. I completeley disagree with Gerdler. And as for Marshal he doesn't even bother to play.

Says the american in a goldilocks timezone. From a european who walled 2k hits twice; putting in that kind of effort is certainly not sustainable for anyone not in a goldilocks timezone and/or retired/unemployed.

There are three problems here:
1. It's possible to wall 2k+ hits
2. It's takes an extreme effort, such that it is uncomparable to at least any game I've ever played, except perhaps for the professionals playing them.
3. The size of the effort varies to a great deal with which timezone you are in, thus making the game more burdensome for people in the non-favored time-zones.

#2 and #3 would be partially amended by this change, and it would bring money to the devs, thus potentially motivating investment in time and money in this game. I therefore welcome it. But as a european player I think it would be nice to be able to live a somewhat normal life also while warring in a server with tags without feeling that Im letting my online friends down and losing the war because Im not neglecting my IRL commitments/friends/family/sleep.

I’d pay $30 annually for patron if it included premium. However, a new player wouldn’t. And I probably wouldn’t pay more.

Also this will add to the gap of new vs vets. No one new will pay for a babysitter but the vets will. New players don't have access to any of the tools the '1337' do which is a major drawback.

MAYBE try and implement this once your player base actually grows, and give everyone that's been with you through the ups and downs FREE access to patron status with no in game bonuses besides the option to play ad-free.

Don't screw the pooch before you sold his puppies

On a side note the only thing I would ever pay money for is free bonus points, solely because the recaptcha sucks, and the option to use the old UI once it's gone.

The captcha is so bad

For some reason I have to do it for one of the bonus sites every time I’m on the phone and it’s so long.... clicking damn pictures of cars

And fire hydrants. Yeah I guess I'd pay to get rid of that.

So still no limited server?

ads is good

9 points vs 8 is probably ok, it is technically pay to win though

decoupling bonuses from the 24h one is good. i block something or other, javascript or cookies or whatever that makes it see me as a higher risk so sometime i have to go through it about 10 times which gets super irritating. i try the voice occasionally too and sometimes it even says that isnt working. it never explains whether your supposed to pick boxes with a little bit of something either

country names is good, nice largely cosmetic qol thing

on the cost its somewhat unfortunate things cant be linked to server lengths a bit more, if people have it permanently that doesnt matter but sets are exactly 60 days with a 61 cycle so quite often you will have to buy a very partial month (and the very rare feb +jan/mar set where it would be 3 months, perhaps twice ever 60 years not going to check)

one option would be to grandfather premium status on a server when >x% of the set was premium, basically to allow the last few days to maintain premium without requiring another purchase

i dont expect many people to be turning it on and off but it would be a nice way to set it up anyway

price? no idea what proportion of players will pay or whether there will be elasticity. but it also depends on the goal? make money? afford to make improvements either more dev time or things like paid art?

babysitting, not sure, i like reducing entry barrier but thats not really a thing if your paying 4 or 5 usd for a war just to do that

still in favour of changes which make fs less powerful and general lowering of tempo, walling less powerful and offline killing less bad which could have similar effect

not even sure how it would work, only available to clan members? clan admins? nominated forum friends? alerts sent to people who could babysit for you?

would war become about wasting peoples babysitting credits and hurting the other side financially? including griefing?

one good addition to both could be in tandem running other features such as auto shields

when your pop drops below x% of max/current or x amount a shield could be deployed which lasts a certain amount of time or until a threshold was passed such as pop regain or buying up defence or x attacks done/received or x turns run

the shield could either block attacks or reduce damage or increase defence


heres an idea for a potential premium feature:
stats and recaps

recap could be something as simple as
how many turns you ran that set / max turns in the set anyone ran or max or practical
breakdown of what you spent your turns on, cash tech build explore spy sell recall switch fa, comparisons against server
it could also include a turn by turn history
a history of what day/turn you spent your bonuses too
how big attacks were and returns, an example is i have used a spreadsheet to estimate how many of what buildings i grabbed in a set before

and it doesnt just have to be netting things either, war people could have nice summaries of damage inflicted and received

how much readiness/turns was spent killing them, mil they killed and lost
spy ops done! and success rate, and for spy ops in particular either a way to share it or for a tag admin to see it so that people can give out awards based on spying or use it in overall best warrior awards, sofs is called warlord i think for example

then once you have all that stuff tracked you can make either premium/patron display them on peoples forum posts, perhaps allow people to pick one to actually be displayed and let the others be linked through it

could do server stats/recaps as well, but that doesnt have the same value to monetise as individual ones so perhaps just put that out in the open

https://www.eestats.com/alliance/serverstats
eestats does some, but it has limited value with people switching to theo end of set and so on

and youd also have the opportunity to exclude bots from statistics so you could see things like are 99% of the indys on the server bots rather than players, that particular breakdown would work better per acre than country though

Agree.

You need to boil the frog slowly, or it will jump out ;)

+1

You should allow gifting of credits as well.

Wow something I can finally agree with you with.

Thanks for the feedback so far everyone -- been a busy couple of days and I tried to spend game-related time doing work rather than responding so I'm just getting a chance to follow up on this now.

I decided to lower the cost on the credits to start with, this will be the new breakdown (updated on the announcements post):
<quote>
For launch, the cost of Credits will be as follows:
20 Credits for $3.50 USD (down from $6)
50 Credits for $8 USD (down from $15)
100 Credits for $14 USD (down from $25)
</quote>

We'll see how things move longer term, but I'm almost ready to launch this (maybe today), so we'll see how it all goes!

Related to letting other players "babysit" for you, I will say that the general concept of it being frowned upon was mainly because of it being against the rules. If we're offering a way -- that everyone can access equally -- to do it then I don't see an issue from that perspective.

From a "does it break the game?" perspective, that's something we'll need to consider when we get to that point. It's not something that's on the radar to release right away. My personal opinion is that it would be a nice way to increase engagement for those who are super engaged and allow folks to not need to be available 24/7, especially in war. It's worked well for Utopia from talking to their devs so I'm definitely on the side of trying to flesh out how it could possibly work for us. BUt like I said, it needs more discussion first.

I'm glad folks are looking forward to getting rid of the captchas lol
That was a big reason for this change going out -- making bonus point collection simpler and on a 22hr time instead of 24hrs.

I hope everyone likes what we release and thanks again for the discussion and passion you all bring to this game!

You are a premium user until Apr 17, 2020 17:37pm (0.2 years from now)

maybe best not to list it in .1 years from now? doesnt really matter but seems a confusing way to list something when your buying 30 or 90 days

for anyone wondering as soon as i bought it i got:

0 mins ago
Thank you for being a premium member of Earth Empires! You have been granted 1 bonus point!

Number of Points Expiration Time
5 2.3 days

had 4 points already not sure if it refreshed expiration time or not

Premium Bonus 22 hours Server Alliance
EE Premium Active

so i believe if you had already had your bonuses on cooldown you get your cooldown reset to 22h from when you buy it

so technically i lost about 3.5 bonus points buying premium now, which was something like 30 minutes after it appeared versus waiting until cooldowns where just started since they would have been around about 12h at this point

its possible the best idea is to have them both off cooldown when you purchase and then you might get 9 points immediately instead of 1

also the paypal and apple payment options dont seem to be available

just google and credit card

maybe they are coming though

Oh I had to disable PayPal because they needed me to sign up for a business account and I don't have that setup yet.

But thanks for the detailed feedback -- I'll look at addressing some of those items like the time.

Not sure how best to reconcile the cooldown for purchases though

Give us a free run at babysitting we'll have a server war and see how it goes?

I think he needs to create that infrastructure first. It has not even been properly discussed HOW it should be done, only IF it should be done at all lol.

baby sitting is cheating :P and a bigger risk them betting cleaveland at winning superbowl!

baby sitting is cheating :P and a bigger risk them betting cleaveland at winning superbowl!

Thanks Pang! I wasn't kidding when I said I'd jump on it just to avoid clicking bonuses :)

:)

And yet still goes unanswered

there's another thread on it right below this one lol

I'm getting Automatic Bonus points Tuesday 20 minutes before Express server starts.

This is going to cause the peeps who get them before, to loose a days Bonus points on the server
Then that messes up getting 16 Bonus pts for the Free GDI at the start of the game..

Is there anyway to change getting Bonus points to 5 minutes after the game starts ?

You get them automatically during the first hit you make on the game server -- so just wait until the round starts then login :)

Nice...Thanks

20 minutes is no big deal obviously

but for people who play multiple servers they might have to avoid playing any server for up to 22 hours while waiting for the one they care about to start

previously you could wait to do bonuses until the server you cared about started

perhaps an option to put bonuses on hold until 00:00 that you can click the day before if you want to?

the trade off is less bonus points on other servers obviously

I was thinking about this and wondered about doing a check on country create that goes:

if (premium && last_bonus < 22hrs){
  give_bonus();
}

This is the only game I play. I would voluntarily pay a subscription price to keep things going, but I'm not going to pay to play like this. In fact, this changes the dynamics enough that it makes me want to stop playing altogether.

Changing the dynamics of how bonus points are accrued is enough to make you want to quit?

apart from the 1 extra turn I only see this as a boost to quality of life, in the double sense. If I wanted bonuses as much as I could I would have to set 2 alarms a day, one of which required a captcha to get the bonus, I would have to do that captcha in the middle of the night sometimes right after waking up to that bloody alarm. Now at least if its in the middle of the night I just need to refresh the main menu and go back to sleep.

that wouldnt really change much

youd just want to have cooldown at something like 1 hour when the server started so you could double up on bonus

the only options i can think of that would actually equalise between single server players and multi server players are

1) pro rate the bonuses

if (premium && last_bonus < 22hrs){
give_bonus() * last_bonus/22;
}

assuming give bonus is 9, then it would give 4.5 for 11 and so on, not sure on the rounding

2) unlink the bonuses between servers, this has the effect of increasing micro for some people slightly though

As a multi server player I think the current system is acceptable and I can solve the issues for myself to create parity with single server players I think.

#2 of enshulas solutions would be horrible for all multi-server users imo. potentially setting 6 alarms would be a QoL retrogression.

#1 is acceptable I guess. it should be 1+ round.up(8*(last_bonus/22hrs)) in that case.