Prohibit Welcome Telegrams in Feeders

[Vakolic]

The user created regions get.... wait, they don't get anything do they?

They get to steal our nations.

They get to not have their influence tanked by admin experiments designed to make our regions less stable.

They get the stability of founders and passwords.

They have huge advantages over the GCRs in the way they are treated by the admin team.

If anyone should be complaining, it's the GCRs.

As Sedge pointed out, you're perfectly able to recruit from other gcrs, you just choose not to do so.

[Mad Jack]

They get to steal our nations.

They get to not have their influence tanked by admin experiments designed to make our regions less stable.

They get the stability of founders and passwords.

They have huge advantages over the GCRs in the way they are treated by the admin team.

If anyone should be complaining, it's the GCRs.

As Sedge pointed out, you're perfectly able to recruit from other gcrs, you just choose not to do so.

That has... literally nothing to do with what I posted.

[The Blaatschapen]

They can recruit from each other, and it's entirely their fault that they choose not to.

It's foreign relations suicide to recruit from each other. I think your time in TRR, where people are literally kicked to, has muddled the waters.

Irrelevant. It is a trade off. Recruiting from other regions(regardless whether they're GCRs or UCRs) vs. diplomatic relations is the trade off here. GCRs choose diplomatic relations.

This trade off is also relevant for UCRs. Just look at the commotion that happened when Capitalist Paradise recruited in the bigger UCRs.

The old dogmatic view that GCRs are the only recruiting grounds is not valid anymore with the new system. Everybody can recruit from everywhere, choosing not to do that is perfectly fine, but it is a choice regions need to make for themselves how to handle this trade off.

[Vakolic]

As Sedge pointed out, you're perfectly able to recruit from other gcrs, you just choose not to do so.

That has... literally nothing to do with what I posted.

Yes it does.
You can't claim that people are 'stealing' your nations, as if it is unfare, when you can happily steal someone elses nations.

[Corporation de Apple]

That has... literally nothing to do with what I posted.

Yes it does.
You can't claim that people are 'stealing' your nations, as if it is unfare, when you can happily steal someone elses nations.

That's absolute nonsense. This point has been raised repeatedly - if Osiris, for example, was caught recruiting from GCRs, which are more often than not allied and treatied to us, the backlash from the international community would be gargantuan - see the debacle TWP involving a few months ago. It wouldn't even be worth the 2 or 3 new, productive members that we would get from the temporary surge of nations.

GCRs already get a bum deal - we get fucked over influence wise, we don't have passwords and we have delegate instability as an inherent part of the region, and they get their nations, which could otherwise be productive members, stolen by a bunch of UCRs who get pissy when we go ahead and raise a ruckus over the removal of welcoming tgs, which, I'm glad to see, isn't the direction the admin team is leaning.

[Afforess]

Yes it does.
You can't claim that people are 'stealing' your nations, as if it is unfare, when you can happily steal someone elses nations.

That's absolute nonsense. This point has been raised repeatedly - if Osiris, for example, was caught recruiting from GCRs, which are more often than not allied and treatied to us, the backlash from the international community would be gargantuan - see the debacle TWP involving a few months ago. It wouldn't even be worth the 2 or 3 new, productive members that we would get from the temporary surge of nations.

GCRs already get a bum deal - we get fucked over influence wise, we don't have passwords and we have delegate instability as an inherent part of the region, and they get their nations, which could otherwise be productive members, stolen by a bunch of UCRs who get pissy when we go ahead and raise a ruckus over the removal of welcoming tgs, which, I'm glad to see, isn't the direction the admin team is leaning.

Please stop playing the victim. No one is advocating the removal of Welcome Tg's, just that they are treated the same as the rest of recruitment tg's.

[Vakolic]

Yes it does.
You can't claim that people are 'stealing' your nations, as if it is unfare, when you can happily steal someone elses nations.

That's absolute nonsense. This point has been raised repeatedly - if Osiris, for example, was caught recruiting from GCRs, which are more often than not allied and treatied to us, the backlash from the international community would be gargantuan - see the debacle TWP involving a few months ago. It wouldn't even be worth the 2 or 3 new, productive members that we would get from the temporary surge of nations.

GCRs already get a bum deal - we get fucked over influence wise, we don't have passwords and we have delegate instability as an inherent part of the region, and they get their nations, which could otherwise be productive members, stolen by a bunch of UCRs who get pissy when we go ahead and raise a ruckus over the removal of welcoming tgs, which, I'm glad to see, isn't the direction the admin team is leaning.

That's what puppets are for.
They're easily deniable.

[Cerb]

If the feeders and sinkers have such a problem with retention, someone can explain why they have the biggest populations. If you mean feeders and sinkers can't find a way to get their 3-5K members active in their community, that seems to be a different problem and it is the same problem suffered by UCRs.

The problem remains that UCRs get a bum deal right now. They have a founder? Sure, but what good is a founder if you can not get nations to join the region? They can have a password? I see no benefit of that in recruiting new nations.

A UCR exists by getting nations to join, either by word of mouth outside of NS, or by direct advertising inside NS. To call recruiting from the only existing pool of new nations is absurd.

I echo the sentiments of others. The recruitment and TG system needs to be revisited. If the nation creation rate has indeed dropped, and GCR retention has increased, it is a clear indicator that the welcome message has huge impact. Full inboxes and slow delivery of recruitment TGs is making UCRs less viable, and the sheer number of users sending recruitments is overwhelming.

So my suggestion?
No more automatic sending of welcome / recruit TGs. Let founders and regional officers manually recruit with a built in system.
That keeps people on the game, gives them a clear reward for hard work, and takes away the need for either money or specialized scripting skills.

[Mad Jack]

Automatic welcome tgs are an important part of getting new nations accustomed to NS. Removing that would be detrimental to their well-being and enjoyment in the game. If they're going to be getting 20 tgs within minutes of creating their nation, they're just going to dismiss NationStates as a spam filled piece of crap.

[McMasterdonia]

Retention doesn't seem to have gone up much if at all. The difference now is that there are more UCR regions at around the same level of population than they were before, so it is having a trimming effect at the top. The regions that do grow drastically are not able to maintain that for long as the recruitment is far more spread out.

The stamp system isn't really working and it is sad to see people who previously put a lot of work into their recruitment now suffering because of the cost factor that some people can afford and others cannot.

It is difficult for GCRs to get new people involved in the forum. A lot of the time the response I get to the Welcoming TG is along the lines of "how do I make the telegrams stop?" or "I AM NOT JOINING YOUR REGION" despite the fact that they are already there. The difference between UCRs and GCRs is that a UCR must recruit and then recruit for the forum. Perhaps easier to do when the security aspect of your region is covered and you can focus on that and regional government. GCRs have a wide range of matters to deal with and no back up plan to protect them. Another issue is that some GCRs get so caught up in that, or in internal drama that they do not have the time to spend in integrating new members to the community. Getting more people involved in the forum is very slow, and keeping them there is difficult as well, UCR or GCR.

TNP had a welcoming system before it was added as an in-game feature. It ran according to the normal time limits and we turned it off when we had to use the client key for other purposes. That worked well for us. I do not think banning welcoming is a good idea. GCR's have communities as well and we want to be able to continue to grow them. We do not recruit from UCRs or from each other. There is no competition from us on that front, despite it being perfectly legal for us to recruit if we chose to.

I'm getting a bit tired of this perception that GCRs are big evil bodies that take away from UCRs. The issue here is the stamp recruiting system, which doesn't seem likely to go away. I am unconvinced that prohibiting the welcome telegram would really help UCRs, it would only make getting the few members we can onto the regional forums (instead of simply issue answering) that bit harder and require more manual work, which we would do in any case.

[Cerb]

To reiterate, my suggestion was to simply send the welcome TGs (for every region) through the same queue as recruitment. That way everyone gets a fair crack at the nation.

Getting the first TG to the nation is critical. Feeders get the nation and the first crack at recruiting them (retaining them if the word recruit sticks in your craw).

Considering that the contents of the feeder welcome message is substantively the same as a recruitment message, it seems the same thing to me.

[General Halcones]

So my suggestion?
No more automatic sending of welcome / recruit TGs. Let founders and regional officers manually recruit with a built in system.
That keeps people on the game, gives them a clear reward for hard work, and takes away the need for either money or specialized scripting skills.

Completely agree. Those regions manually recruiting the most are the regions active enough to integrate new players into the game. Now players can be barely active at all, and still have 1000s of recruitment telegrams sent out for them, by paying real money. New players join a region where there is no one to properly talk to them - they just receive auto messages which are pretty meaningless. This is bad for the active hard-working players in the game, and bad for new players too.

In the long-run, all this may have a catastrophic effect on the game. When the advertisement profits drop, you'll know why.

[Vakolic]

The only way I can recruit, because I don't have stupid amounts of time, is to take advantage of the amazing exchange rate at the moment between the dollar and the pound, and stock up.

I see no reason why feeders deserve the first tg, when I'm paying for some of my tgs to not get delivered.

[Mad Jack]

Because this game shouldn't be pay to win.

[Mahaj]

That's not really a good reason, madjack.

[Mad Jack]

That's not really a good reason, madjack.

It's an excellent reason actually.

The admin team have repeatedly stated that these new pay options are not about making NS pay to win. GCR Welcome TGs not being treated as recruitment tgs is exactly the kind of thing the admin should be doing to back those statements up.

[Cerb]

I do agree that coughing up cash is not the answer, nor should it garnish benefits over hard work.

I won't rehash points I've already made but I found this response from Violet in the API thread significant to this discussion.

I can't even begin to imagine just how many TGs the system must be receiving if it takes more than 30 minutes for a message to proceed through the queue.

It's not a simple first-in, first-out queue. All recruitment TGs sent to new nations go into the same pool and each time a slot opens up, one is randomly selected. So you might be TG #1 or TG #15. Also, there is an exponentially increasing delay on recruitment TGs to new nations, such that a new nation targeted by more than two dozen recruiters at once won't receive the last recruitment TG until perhaps two or three hours later.

So, not only does the GCR get first crack, but a manual recruiter who jumps on a new nation with a TG in the first couple of seconds gets fed into the queue and may never have their TG delivered. The GCR's always get their TG delivered, no matter how many TGs may be pending for the nation.

They may have paid for it, they may have sent it via the API, or they may have been working their butt off trying to send the message manually.
Whatever they did, their effort is almost completely futile.

The welcome TG being sent by the feeders is just the frosting on the cake.

[Vakolic]

My problem is simply that they get sent first.

Feeder recruitment tgs should go into the same queue as everyone elses recruitment tgs.

[Ballotonia]

Thousands of dollars are wasted on puppet nations.
Because NationStates has never set up an adequate puppet nation system (please don't tell me it's fine, because my 2k NS++ users say you are wrong) stamps are wasted on TONS of puppets. I know for a fact certain nations who will remain nameless have created lots of new puppets for the purpose of wasting paid-for stamps. This massive waste is a problem and discourages nations from using the system the way it was designed, and encourages abuse.

... and at the same time you're claiming that there's a growth in Feeder population while assigning that growth 100% to Feeder welcome telegrams existing.

But, either way, it's good to know you're keeping close track of what NS++ users are doing.

EDIT: increased amount of the quoted post, context matters.

Ballotonia

[Mahaj]

I know for a fact certain nations who will remain nameless have created lots of new puppets for the purpose of wasting paid-for stamps.

... and at the same time you're claiming that there's a growth in Feeder population while assigning that growth 100% to Feeder welcome telegrams existing.

But, either way, it's good to know you're keeping close track of what NS++ users are doing.

Ballotonia

I think he's getting that not from NS++ but from IRC conversations instead.

[South Pacific Belschaft]

Stop calling them recruitment TG's. They are not recruitment TG's. It is physically impossible for us to recruit someone already in our regions.

The welcome TG is a means of communication between government and resident in any region; ergo, it is an internal matter. I would like to invite the UCRites to but the hell out of GCR internal matters and stop trying to make it harder for us to communicate with people.

[Aersoldorf]

I fully agree that GCR telegrams should be treated the same as a recruiting tg from a UCR. After all of this discussion though, I don't see where anyone has raised the actual issue that has gotten us into this mess to begin with. Why are we having to play the lottery in effect just to get a telegram sent? Because of the rule change that allowed scripts. In my opinion this was an ill thought out decision which has directly led to the mess that we have today.

In the good old days, when scripts were illegal, all recruiting had to be done by an actual person. The work is boring, and largely thankless. Some may argue that this benefited the larger regions at the expense of the small ones. I disagree. The purpose of choosing a region is to band with others who are like minded and offer a community that you want to become a part of. The UCR's who were the largest at that point in time were those who had a long track record of offering something that a large number of nations found appealing. That system didn't prevent someone from a smaller region from sending out a telegram outlining what their region had to offer. The whole difference was that back then very few regions actually had recruiters who were willing to sit there and send out the messages. I could create a puppet nation and after 12 hours I'd still have only about 10 or 12 messages in my inbox. Allowing scripts changed everything, now all a region needs is one person who can figure out how to set up a script and they're in the mix, contributing to the overload we see today.

I'd love to see this genie put back in the bottle and have the scripts outlawed again. If you have a region that you feel is so great that others should move to it, then you should be willing to expend the time and effort to manually get your message out.

[ErasmoGnome]

I fully agree that GCR telegrams should be treated the same as a recruiting tg from a UCR. After all of this discussion though, I don't see where anyone has raised the actual issue that has gotten us into this mess to begin with. Why are we having to play the lottery in effect just to get a telegram sent? Because of the rule change that allowed scripts. In my opinion this was an ill thought out decision which has directly led to the mess that we have today.

In the good old days, when scripts were illegal, all recruiting had to be done by an actual person. The work is boring, and largely thankless. Some may argue that this benefited the larger regions at the expense of the small ones. I disagree. The purpose of choosing a region is to band with others who are like minded and offer a community that you want to become a part of. The UCR's who were the largest at that point in time were those who had a long track record of offering something that a large number of nations found appealing. That system didn't prevent someone from a smaller region from sending out a telegram outlining what their region had to offer. The whole difference was that back then very few regions actually had recruiters who were willing to sit there and send out the messages. I could create a puppet nation and after 12 hours I'd still have only about 10 or 12 messages in my inbox. Allowing scripts changed everything, now all a region needs is one person who can figure out how to set up a script and they're in the mix, contributing to the overload we see today.

I'd love to see this genie put back in the bottle and have the scripts outlawed again. If you have a region that you feel is so great that others should move to it, then you should be willing to expend the time and effort to manually get your message out.

I would entirely disagree with this. Recruiting is thankless and boring work, I'll give you that, which is why scripts are so essential to the game nowawadays. No one wants to recruit, it isn't fun, and that's what NationStates is about. Why reimplement a system that ruins the fun for a group of people just to make their region larger? It's self-sacrificial, which is noble and all, but not the point. The people who actually want to have fun with the game are stuck either joining a region that already has some recruiters or joining the ranks of the bored people going click.... copy... click... copy... click. People who are in the game to have fun with it are left with no way to start a region that will be even remotely successful.

[Vakolic]

[quote="South Pacific Belschaft";p="16973796"]Stop calling them recruitment TG's. They are not recruitment TG's. It is physically impossible for us to recruit someone already in our regions.

The welcome TG is a means of communication between government and resident in any region; ergo, it is an internal matter. I would like to invite the UCRites to but the hell out of GCR internal matters and stop trying to make it harder for us to communicate with people.[/quot

OK, let's call them 'retaining tgs.' Does the same affect, says which region someone should be in.

[ErasmoGnome]

Stop calling them recruitment TG's. They are not recruitment TG's. It is physically impossible for us to recruit someone already in our regions.

The welcome TG is a means of communication between government and resident in any region; ergo, it is an internal matter. I would like to invite the UCRites to but the hell out of GCR internal matters and stop trying to make it harder for us to communicate with people.

Bel, you got mad when GCRs were excluded from the Arnhelm Declaration, which was specifically created for UCRs. Please don't talk to us about butting out of GCR business, especially when anyone with eyes can see the welcome TGs the GCRs have cooked up are all dedicated to making sure as many nations as possible stay.