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Alex, its been 9 months, I think its time to deal with reality.


Sketchy
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2 minutes ago, Alex said:

And they're probably also the ones who don't want to bother with recalculations and are more conservative toward change in general.

The apps are a new stream of players coming in, but the game was pretty stagnant at 1700-2200 active players between Feb '16 and June '17. The apps launch and econ changes largely coincided, so it is tough to differentiate the effects of each, but I wouldn't expect the econ changes to really impact player retention either way. If, however, the game was so good before the econ changes and so bad after the fact now, I wouldn't expect to have seen stagnation (no growth in playerbase) before the changes, and then growth afterward.

Well you're not wrong on the first point lol, redoing our sheets is a !@#$. But I disagree that active players are against change in general. Active players !@#$ about everything, swear to god one of the most spoken phrases in half the discord channels in the game is "Sheepy needs to fix ..... ".

Only problem I have with the changes is you tackled deflation by adjusting supply, not demand. It fixed deflation, but the side effects it caused were worse than deflation. I'd prefer you to revert the changes but then add resource sinks (like buying infra uses cash and steel/ gas/ alum or something, or increase the resource cost of improvements).

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2 hours ago, Alex said:

And they're probably also the ones who don't want to bother with recalculations and are more conservative toward change in general.

The apps are a new stream of players coming in, but the game was pretty stagnant at 1700-2200 active players between Feb '16 and June '17. The apps launch and econ changes largely coincided, so it is tough to differentiate the effects of each, but I wouldn't expect the econ changes to really impact player retention either way. If, however, the game was so good before the econ changes and so bad after the fact now, I wouldn't expect to have seen stagnation (no growth in playerbase) before the changes, and then growth afterward.

It is a valid point that forum users aren't representative of the thousands that don't post, but the reason it was stagnant before was because there was no app and  you didn't have the advertising campaign.  Wars are conducted by a  minority of the overall playerbase that don't  dead end as <5 city nations however, so when it becomes expensive to war, then there's less incentive for people to do it. If you lose a  real war you're set back quite a bit.  For newer players it's also difficult to accumulate the needed resources to effectively fight under the current system. Incentivizing war would make it affordable to do multiple times a year and not be such a big setback. The game disincentivizes war largely by making it expensive and too lopsided in outcomes.  As of now, anyone who suffers substantial damage will not only burn resources fighting but will also lose vasts amount of reserves.

Edited by Roquentin
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21 minutes ago, Alex said:

The argument being made was that "look, no one likes this, why are you insisting on it" and my response is that just because people on the forums don't like it, doesn't mean that no one likes it.

It is not a question about whether someone dislikes the current system or not, it's a question of fundamental logic and simple math. And those two say the introduced system is flawed as a mechanic, and not too far in the future, it will become completely unsustainable. The rollback would be simple and effective, without the need for futher band aides. With the other simple proposal that has been put out here regarding specialisation, it satisfies both the playerbase and yourself. 

27 minutes ago, Alex said:

In any case, I want the game to be fun, dynamic, etc. and I would really like to encourage war and help new players grow and all that. And I am confident we can do these things without rolling back the 'great deflation' update, which I think would be a step backwards. Everyone looks at the past through rose-tinted glasses, but I think P&W is doing pretty well as-is, and ultimately I can't force you guys to fight each other if you don't want to.

Although I commend your wish to encourage war, your current econ setup - is fervently working against such wish. The current economic system is what hurts prospects of wars the most. This will become far more true after the next major war happens. An average mid tier player needs 4 to 6 months to raise a semi-decent warchest. Lets see what happens, as I'm sure it will, when an average time needed to raise a warchest hits 12 months.

27 minutes ago, Alex said:

Nine months ago we had 2,138 active nations and 5,764 total nations.

Today, we have 4,190 active nations and 7,853 total nations.

I've found that the opinions expressed on the forums are in large part those of just the super-dedicated players, which are great; I love you guys. However, there are thousands of players who are not active on the forums and I don't think it's fair to say that forum users are representative of the entire playerbase. For example, I did a randomized sample of player's opinions on the proposed war changes, and you wouldn't know it looking at the forums but ~66% of players were in favor of nerfing Fortify.

There are thousands of players who are not active at all*

 

Wonderful that you decided to do a poll on war changes. Can we get a poll of player's opinions on this then? Although hundreds of players have shown approval of such changes already, I am sure the rest of the playerbase will overwhelmingly support the proposals outlined here by the community.

Edited by Theodosius
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38 minutes ago, Alex said:

The argument being made was that "look, no one likes this, why are you insisting on it" and my response is that just because people on the forums don't like it, doesn't mean that no one likes it. I used the Fortify example as evidence for my point.

Fortify and this econ change are two different ballparks. You'll need to do a new poll to assess the opinion of those who do not voice their thoughts here. You can't just pretend that because they supported a fortify nerf, they'll support the current econ structure over reverting/changing it.

There's no doubt in my mind that if you asked them ''What would you prefer, the current system, or the old system where your improvements produced twice as much per slots, used up less slots, and generated less pollution?'', the popular opinion would heavily favour the return of the old system; those who were here before the changes because they know how it used to be like, and those who joined since because that sounds a lot better than what we have now.

At any rate, I think that you ought to be prioritizing what the people you have around in the dev subforum propose, over anyone else. Many, if not most, know the mechanics in this game inside out and devote a good portion of their time to work on econ stuff (and others as well, but econ's the focus of this so I'm keeping it to that).They know a hell of a lot more than Billy who just joined two days ago :P .

Bottom line, several people here already suggested ways of bringing back the old system in a modified way, so to meet a middle ground between what we want and what you want. We don't want it to be a pain in the ass to produce even the shit we specialize on. You don't want people producing all of the resources at the same time. Sketchy's suggestion of hardcapping industrial improvements to 6 slots max and the lower/higher efficiency ratio on the amount of imp's of the same kind that you have is a good middle ground, so that'd prob be the best approach to the request imo.

Edited by Shiho Nishizumi
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@Alex A few points,

 

The quality of the econ changes in the form being protested in this thread would not have affected active playerbase, this is because the issues being taken largely revolve around how it is perceived to have affected the metagame around wars. You cannot deny an increased price index, which has major implications for how often alliances can afford to go to all-out wars.

 

As we move further and further away from the last war, one thing becomes clearer in the community - these players have been trained to accept those events as the payoffs for months of work. To many people, the social aspect of this game truly shined when it got competitive. Now, I'm not going to argue that PnW is a zero sum game, obviously, but during war times it almost felt that way, which was good because otherwise the only incentive to keep playing is to increase numbers passively, and while it seems like you've acknowledged this with the econ changes you've presented in this thread, Alex, and are attempting to make a more engaging passive growth experience, the idea that those global occasions where a large portion of the playerbase would be affected in one way or another have faded is... Disheartening.

 

Now, okay, we cannot necessarily take this as fault of the econ change, because there were other factors at the time that prevented another war from breaking out. You can argue inconclusive data where you do not know the definitive variables at play. So what decides a war? Well, the people decide a war, specifically, alliance leaders and other influential figures. These people will tell you - they definitely have expressed so in this thread - that the changes have directly affected their decision making towards habits that they don't necessarily desire. This in itself is valid proof that the econ changes had a significant effect on war timings, it's like if the rat you tested a new drug on came up to you and gave you their opinion on how the drugs have impacted them.

 

I would argue that this community was in no small part forged in the flames of war. At least for myself and all of my friends in this game I can say that we would not play this game if it didn't have wars to participate in, at least somewhat frequently. And it's definitely not all because of the econ system, the political dynamic is also shifting, but can you really say that what you did 9 months ago had nothing to do with the unprecedented peace that followed it?

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Just double the production of resources/money, not the perfect way to fix economy but at least you need half of the time to recover from a war

Or instead make updates for economy every hour leaving the updates for wars every 2 hours

 

And new projects would make things easy

Projects for raw resources

Project that makes commercial buildings produce 1% more so you can avoid using supermarkets with ITC

Project that allow to buy tanks with less steel

Project that allow to buy ships using less steel

Project that makes your spies harder to kill

There are so many project you can add, if there are like 30-40 project you can have specialization for that, now we all have the same projects

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9 minutes ago, Micchan said:

Project that makes commercial buildings produce 1% more so you can avoid using supermarkets with ITC

Maybe add a 1% commerce increase per commerce building buff for ITC.

Edited by AwesomeNova
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1 hour ago, Roquentin said:

It is a valid point that forum users aren't representative of the thousands that don't post, but the reason it was stagnant before was because there no app and  you didn't have the advertising campaign.  Wars are conducted by a  minority of the overall playerbase that don't  dead end as <5 city nations however, so when it becomes expensive to war, then there's less incentive for people to do it. If you lose a  real war you're set back quite a bit.  For newer players it's also difficult to accumulate the needed resources to effectively fight under the current system. Incentivizing war would make it affordable to do multiple times a year and not be such a big setback. The game deincentivizes war largely by making it expensive and too lopsided in outcomes.  As of now, anyone who suffers substantial damage will not only burn resources fighting but will also lose vasts amount of reserves.

Just to back up Roq's reply here.

The vast majority of alliances consist of a handful of players who are actively "playing" (The politics side), whereas wars involve everybody to play.

Pretty sure if you ran trafficking stats, you'd have a much bigger activity during moments of conflict.

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2 hours ago, Alex said:

The game isn't for everyone. Does everyone you know IRL play text-based games?

Yes. It's one of the first things I ask people. I'm going to miss my Mom and Dad, but they were in my way.

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Slaughter the shits of the world. They poison the air you breathe.

 

~ William S. Burroughs

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20 minutes ago, Micchan said:

NPO should like that right?

 

averageshitposter: "See? TKR wants to sign NPO!"

Why would that help us and what does that have to do with this discussion? My understanding was this was a discussion about game mechanics that would apply to everyone.

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9 minutes ago, Buorhann said:

Just to back up Roq's reply here.

The vast majority of alliances consist of a handful of players who are actively "playing" (The politics side), whereas wars involve everybody to play.

Pretty sure if you ran trafficking stats, you'd have a much bigger activity during moments of conflict.

And that is why the major blitz's break the server, every time.

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2 hours ago, Alex said:

Nine months ago we had 2,138 active nations and 5,764 total nations.

Today, we have 4,190 active nations and 7,853 total nations.

I've found that the opinions expressed on the forums are in large part those of just the super-dedicated players, which are great; I love you guys. However, there are thousands of players who are not active on the forums and I don't think it's fair to say that forum users are representative of the entire playerbase. For example, I did a randomized sample of player's opinions on the proposed war changes, and you wouldn't know it looking at the forums but ~66% of players were in favor of nerfing Fortify.

In any case, I want the game to be fun, dynamic, etc. and I would really like to encourage war and help new players grow and all that. And I am confident we can do these things without rolling back the 'great deflation' update, which I think would be a step backwards. Everyone looks at the past through rose-tinted glasses, but I think P&W is doing pretty well as-is, and ultimately I can't force you guys to fight each other if you don't want to.

Correlation does not imply causation smh.

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2 hours ago, Saxplayer said:

Correlation does not imply causation smh.

This.

Also, changes being popular or unpopular do not necessarily correlate to whether or not they're good mechanically. Us on the forums are the ones using math and experience to back up our points, while @Alex you're just falling back on a randomized sampling of unconsidered opinions.

If you asked a bunch of casual players in TF2 if they'd support spawn delays being removed, you'd get a strong positive response, but that doesn't mean it would be remotely a good idea to actually do it. Unofficial servers often do remove the spawn delays, and this diminishes the game experience for everyone on those servers. Even the casual players feel that it is worse, even if they don't understand or care why, despite supporting the odious change in the first place.

 

Edited by Sir Scarfalot
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10 hours ago, Micchan said:

Just double the production of resources/money, not the perfect way to fix economy but at least you need half of the time to recover from a war

Or instead make updates for economy every hour leaving the updates for wars every 2 hours

 

And new projects would make things easy

Projects for raw resources

Project that makes commercial buildings produce 1% more so you can avoid using supermarkets with ITC

Project that allow to buy tanks with less steel

Project that allow to buy ships using less steel

Project that makes your spies harder to kill

There are so many project you can add, if there are like 30-40 project you can have specialization for that, now we all have the same projects

I can already hear the whales wooing for this. As they got enough infra and/or cities for all of those...
 

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If you are now into specialising things Sheepy perhaps finally you'll look at my proposal for actually doing something for those bored at 25+ cities and adding an actual resource sink into the game.

 

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[11:52 PM] Prefontaine: But Keegoz is actually bad. [11:52 PM] Prefontaine: He's my favorite bad leader though.

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11 hours ago, ArcKnox said:

Someone plot those 4000 ACTIVE PLAYERS on a graph by number of cities

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