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Reducing Alliance Bank Gimmicks


Alex
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My suggestion to reduce alliance bank gimmicks is that alliance bank operations be prohibited if the alliance has less than 5 members or 51% or more of the members in the alliance are on Beige. Vacation mode members would not count toward the 5 member requirement.

 

Assuming the alliance bank previously had 5+ members and folks left/got beiged, the only operations that would be allowed would be withdrawals to alliance members.

 

This would, I believe, significantly reduce bank gimmicks (creating a one man alliance to store a ton of money/resources in the alliance bank, sending those resources to other 1 man alliances) without reducing the freedom for normal alliance bank use (issuing loans, etc.)

 

Thoughts on this suggestion?

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Why not lock out bank usage for a certain time period after an alliance is created, or unless they reach X amount of members.

 

Seems fairer that way.

 

That's basically what I'm talking about, at least the latter part of your comment. Locking out bank usage until you have at least 5 (non vacation mode) members. Ensuring 51% or more of them are not beige means there are at least 3 members who could potentially be defeated to loot the bank.

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That's basically what I'm talking about, at least the latter part of your comment. Locking out bank usage until you have at least 5 (non vacation mode) members. Ensuring 51% or more of them are not beige means there are at least 3 members who could potentially be defeated to loot the bank.

I don't think locking out banks for alliances under 5 members permanently is a fair solution.

 

Just make it so they can only use the bank after say, the first 10 days after their alliance is created, or when they reach X members.

 

The biege idea is just terrible, when an alliance is bieged, that is when bank access is most important, so they can provide resources required to rebuild and fight back. DO NOT implement that.

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I don't think locking out banks for alliances under 5 members permanently is a fair solution.

 

Just make it so they can only use the bank after say, the first 10 days after their alliance is created, or when they reach X members.

 

The biege idea is just terrible, when an alliance is bieged, that is when bank access is most important, so they can provide resources required to rebuild and fight back. DO NOT implement that.

 

The latter is understandable, I suppose for alliances with 10-20 nations it might be easily feasible that they have more than 51% of their nations on beige.

 

However, I think locking out banks for alliances under 5 members is a good solution, because otherwise we'll just see 10 people temporarily leave, join a new alliance, unlock the bank and then move back. Requiring 5 nations at all times to use the bank should curb most gimmicking, imo.

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How about you remove bank looting instead. It's a shit feature.

 

You'll never be able to prevent bank hiding, not completely, unless you outlaw it completely.

 

The issue is bank looting as a concept in itself. Wasn't bank looting added as a way to stop people from hiding their shit in an alliance bank? Now people just hide the entire bank.

 

Easiest solution would to be to scrap looting, scrap bank looting, and instead, have won wars result in stealing a % of a persons income before tax. Only way that could be exploited, is if said person intentionally reduced their own income out of spite, but that would just hurt them too.

+1

Edited by hadesflames
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How exactly is "reducing alliance bank gimmicks" a good thing?  Bank hiding is one of the few options an alliance or a player that's losing has.  The game is already pretty bad from an underdog situation, so why make it worse? Sometimes RL is used to justify it "The 1 ship would look awful menacing if you didn't have any," but shifting the treasury was something often done in real life. Like I'll be honest, a lot of people have fun raiding, but the whole "You're under constant threat of getting attacked for profit" gimmick this game has is awful for retention. With the individual looting already in place, not really sure how people/alliances that get beiged need to be punished even further. What's the point of an alliance bank when it can't even be used to store things securely? Basically it just functions as a way to send money in a more easy way than 1 food trade offers.

Edited by Roquentin
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The unintended consequence of doing this will be to make spamming fortify over and over even more appealing. Or just as likely to up their game as regards hiding their stuff. Not really against the concept of looting alliance banks as such, but in concert with making looting individuals more potentially profitable and there already being mechanics that substantially favor the side that initiates the war I do question what will really be accomplished. Either people will 1) find increasingly complex ways to hide their stuff, 2) consolidate even more politically to avoid exposure to the consequences of playing the game, or 3) complain a lot and refuse to adapt until they lose interest altogether.

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How exactly is "reducing alliance bank gimmicks" a good thing?  Bank hiding is one of the few options an alliance or a player that's losing has.  The game is already pretty bad from an underdog situation, why make it worse? Sometimes RL is used to justify it "The 1 ship would look awful menacing if you didn't have any?," but shifting the treasury was something often done in real life. Like I'll be honest, a lot of people have fun raiding, but the whole "You're under constant threat of getting attacked for profit" gimmick this game has is awful for retention. With the individual looting already in place, not really sure how people/alliances that get beiged need to be punished even further. What's the point of an alliance bank when it can't even be used to store things securely? Basically it just functions as a way to send money in a more easy way than 1 food trade offers.

 

This raises a fair point. Whenever I've found myself on the losing end, alliance bank usage has actually allowed me to be able to make something out of it, otherwise it's better to just logout and come back whenever the rolling has finished. 

 

Secondly, if you're smart about it, you can actually make players hiding their banks impossible. Work out a strategy where you get a blockade on them from first day to the last. It's possible. You talk all the time about wanting different mechanics to be used and I think this offers that choice. Instead of people just spamming air as of now, they can actually also consider the potential blockade and how to go about it. 

 

As far as the actual alliance banks are concerned, I'm not sure what purpose the banks content hold if everything in there is only for rebuilding. If an alliance player can't transfer into it, and bank can't send it to them, it's as useless as it gets. Let them hide it. It won't help in a war.

 

As far as my final verdict on people hiding bank is, if you use strategy with ships a bit smartly, you can keep a guy blockaded for as long as you want, for multiple rounds.  

 

Also, just another point which came to my mind, you need to leave some incentive for a losing alliance. If they're completely screwed, it will take a lot more time for them to get back up on their feet and be able to war again. If you want to increase the already long duration in between wars, this will be a great thing to make things go stale. 

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Limit bank to target transactions - so you can only send stuff to a player or other alliance once per day. Then you could limit the amount of stuff you can send at a time. That'd effectively restrict bank hiding, although it would impact other legit uses of banks as well. 

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Limit bank to target transactions - so you can only send stuff to a player or other alliance once per day. Then you could limit the amount of stuff you can send at a time. That'd effectively restrict bank hiding, although it would impact other legit uses of banks as well. 

 

A more elegant way of doing this would be to create a daily cap on the volume of cash and resources that can move in and out of a nation via trade and bank transactions and make the cap proportional to the number of improvements (and maybe projects) a nation has. This would effectively act as a cap on bank-to-target transactions and it would stop alliances from being able to move their whole bank around from nation to nation.

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Why not introduce alliance perks? Have people burn their cash and resources to "upgrade" their bank and lessen the amount that is looted, every upgrade.

 

Actually, why not make the bank itself a perk, that costs a decent chunk of cash and steel to build (but not too out of reach of 3-4 new players).

 

The bank at a base level could have to transport the gold physically and you could have "convoy capacity", "time til arrival" and "% lost due to bandits". Further perks could increase convoy capacity and decrease time til arrival and % lost to bandits. Final upgrade would be "electronic banking", which restores the current unlimited amounts, instant transfer, no loss that we currently get. But only to nations in your alliance or to other alliances that have "electronic banking" (otherwise it would have to go by convoy).

 

Also limit alliance banks to be able to send only to other alliance banks or directly to nations within the alliance.

 

That would significantly nerf gimmicks, as nations have to leave their current alliance, create a new alliance, spend the cash and resources to build the bank and then upgrade it.

 

I'm thinking in excess of 100 mill plus resources, in order to max it all.

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You'll never be able to prevent bank hiding, not completely, unless you outlaw it completely.

 

The issue is bank looting as a concept in itself. Wasn't bank looting added as a way to stop people from hiding their shit in an alliance bank? Now people just hide the entire bank.

 

Easiest solution would to be to scrap looting, scrap bank looting, and instead, have won wars result in stealing a % of a persons income before tax. Only way that could be exploited, is if said person intentionally reduced their own income out of spite, but that would just hurt them too.

Good second solution if Sheepy insists on screwing with stuff.

 

If the winning alliance feels like it hasn't gotten the loot it deserves, it can always levy reps on the losing alliance, for the same net effect.

This subject came up in the sheep's discord feelers. This is by far the best solution, but he doesn't like it because you can fund a war off loot that way. Which is stupid imo because your never going to make enough to do that.

 

 

23:38 Skable that's why we don't want Rose involved, so we can take the m all for ourselves

23:39 [] but Mensa is the cute girl at the school dance and she's only dancing with us right now to get our friend jealous

23:39 [] If Rose comes in and gives Mensa what she wants, she'll just toss us aside and forget we ever existed

23:39 zombie_lanae yeah I do hope we can keep having them all to ourselves

23:40 zombie_lanae I know it's selfish but I want all their love

 

 

6:55 PM <+Isolatar> Praise Dio

Pubstomper|BNC [20:01:55] Rose wouldn't plan a hit on Mensa because it would be &#33;@#&#036;ing stupid

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You'll never be able to prevent bank hiding, not completely, unless you outlaw it completely.

 

The issue is bank looting as a concept in itself. Wasn't bank looting added as a way to stop people from hiding their shit in an alliance bank? Now people just hide the entire bank.

 

Easiest solution would to be to scrap looting, scrap bank looting, and instead, have won wars result in stealing a % of a persons income before tax. Only way that could be exploited, is if said person intentionally reduced their own income out of spite, but that would just hurt them too.

+1 

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If the winning alliance feels like it hasn't gotten the loot it deserves, it can always levy reps on the losing alliance, for the same net effect.

 

In the Silent War, at least 150 billion damage got done in infra and lost steel/aluminum. And a lot of that is because the war dragged on for an extra week or two because of a long and bitter struggle over whether NPO would pay something like 0.8 billion in reps or 0.5. Reps are nothing like war damage - people don't make the calculations in the same way, for whatever reason.

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In the Silent War, at least 150 billion damage got done in infra and lost steel/aluminum. And a lot of that is because the war dragged on for an extra week or two because of a long and bitter struggle over whether NPO would pay something like 0.8 billion in reps or 0.5. Reps are nothing like war damage - people don't make the calculations in the same way, for whatever reason.

 

Woot is right here on people not calculating point. So many times people refused to pay large amounts to get out of a raid and then lost it's 3x in infra. But at the end, it costs those people more. 

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I don't see how punishing new or micro alliances would benefit the game.

The blockade feature already prevents nations from sending and receiving money. There is no need to make it obsolete for a non-realistic feature that would only affect a target group of alliances that are already struggling to stay around. It benefits only a very specific group that many have dubbed "hegemoney."

If we argue real life. Many nations have many assets in many other nations to keep them hidden and safe. Having a small nation or alliance does not disqualify you from making foreign transactions, some of the smallest countries in the world are the largest participants in this international banking process. Costa Rica, Switzerland, and Panama all hold, hide, and protect more money than most countries see in a decade.
 

Edited by James II
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"Most successful new AA" - Samuel Bates

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I don't see how punishing new or micro alliances would benefit the game.

 

The blockade feature already prevents nations from sending and receiving money. There is no need to make it obsolete for a non-realistic feature that would only affect a target group of alliances that are already struggling to stay around. It benefits only a very specific group that many have dubbed "hegemoney."

 

If we argue real life. Many nations have many assets in many other nations to keep them hidden and safe. Having a small nation or alliance does not disqualify you from making foreign transactions, some of the smallest countries in the world are the largest participants in this international banking process. Costa Rica, Switzerland, and Panama all hold, hide, and protect more money than most countries see in a decade.

 

 

I think it has more to do with multis and being able to track and report suspicious multi activity which is near impossible when you have two nations with their own alliances sending untraceable (by normal players) money through the two banks.

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I think it has more to do with multis and being able to track and report suspicious multi activity which is near impossible when you have two nations with their own alliances sending untraceable (by normal players) money through the two banks.

I don't see the benefit in punishing half the game because a handful of players exploit the game.

"Most successful new AA" - Samuel Bates

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I would suggest just let the other players/alliances dictate how to "punish" these types of tricks.  We all have a general idea of what alliances have and if other alliances want to obtain those resources they can do so in surrender terms or other means ingame.

 

The alliance bank and tax system is one amazing feature of this game.  Don't mess with it, it's working great as is.

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