Prohibit Welcome Telegrams in Feeders

[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.

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.

This is patently untrue. The way to start a region that is successful is to come up with ideas that are appealing to others and then get your message out to new nations. You're missing the whole point. Scripts don't make it easier to get that message out, they make it next to impossible. And with welcoming tgs by the GCRs getting first priority in the decision making process, all it would take is for all of the feeders to set up 20 nations each running welcoming scripts and they could instantly fill the inbox of every nation that gets created. This would delay even further the telegram that you send inviting them to your region from making it to their inbox.

I'll repeat my sentiment about growing a region though. If you are so sure that people would like what your region has to offer then you should be willing to do the work required to get your message out. If you don't care how many nations reside in your region, fine, don't recruit. If you do gain a measure of pride though from creating a region that has a large population then I don't think it is asking too much for you to take the trouble of sending out some telegrams. If the scripts were illegal again then you could rest assured that your message WOULD get to the intended target. The system we currently have in place gives you a miniscule chance of reaching that nation with your message before they have decided where they want to reside.

The whole script thing promises smaller regions the opportunity to grow their population by making it possible for them to compete with larger regions, but the sad truth is that it has had a negative effect on all of the GCRs.

[Christian Democrats]

I suggest removing the possibility of setting welcome telegrams in feeders.

I agree with this. The feeder regions already have the advantage of having new nations born in their domains. On top of that, they should not have the ability to send welcome telegrams. Welcome telegrams should be removed in the five feeder regions, thus leveling the playing field.

[[violet]]

Honestly this has just brought to light how broken the whole recruitment system is broken in my eyes. There are a bunch of problems and I'm going to try and outline them:

Thanks; I do think we can do better in this area.

stamps are wasted on TONS of puppets

True, but this is also why stamps are cheap. It's known that many will be wasted. I'm not saying wastage is a good thing, since it's dispiriting to have low success rates, but I don't think you should assume that if you could exclude puppets, you would be able to message 1,000 real people for $1. If that were the case, everyone would do it.

Paid stamps a bad band-aid for a broken messaging system
I know I initially embraced stamps. I now hate them, but not for the commonly cited reasons. The fact is that all use-cases for stamps are better handled by a more flexible system for messaging. Stamps show that there is a big problem with communicating in NS. No amount of band-aid fixes will make these problems go away.

Can you explain this? I don't understand what exactly you think should be changed, or how.

There is no clear guide to starting your own region, and the easiest way is completely pay-to-play. People talk about this hidden thing called an "API Key" and recruitment scripts, but you don't really get what that is, or how to use them, and moderators yell at you when you ask questions in technical. This is all wrong. People wonder why so many nations quit NS... How about an unwelcoming atmosphere, for starters?

No doubt confusion and lack of explanation causes many people to quit NS before they really get started, but surely TG Stamps aren't a prime offender. That's not something new players need to figure out. I wouldn't like it to be common for new players to start buying TG stamps.

Instead of stamps and API recruiting, delegates/founders should simply be able to enable a recruitment TG for new, and refounded nations in their regional control. No more complex barriers to entry and leaving your PC on to run software (as an aside: how much CO2 has NS recruiting software caused as a result of wasted electricity?).

To solve recruitment tg flooding issues, recruitment tg's are in a separate inbox, holding the 10 latest telegrams only. Nations can choose to archive telegrams they wish to save.

I don't really understand this. There are 16,000 regions, and if it all it took were a click, presumably a majority would turn on free recruiting. So how does that funnel down into 10 TGs per new nation? It sounds like 99.9% of recruitment TGs would be deleted before being read.

Welcome Telegrams ARE Recruitment
Regarding welcome telegrams, the game treats them the same as recruitment telegrams, and so they are put in the recruitment telegram queue, and are sent according to the same queue as the rest of recruitment telegrams. This is for all regions, GCR's and UCR's alike. Problem solved.

I'm prepared to do this if Welcome TGs have indeed shifted the balance, and are causing GCRs to grow significantly more than before. But I want to gather some data on that.

World Assembly Matters
Obviously I am leaving out a big use of stamps. WA Missives to sway nations for or against a vote. For WA messages, there should be a separate inbox for WA missives. Only WA nations should receive them, and you can only send 1 message per legislation at vote.And obviously, Only WA members can use this inbox. Since puppets can not be in the WA, intentional spam of WA missives would be impossible.

I'm not sure what current problem/s this is targeting. And I don't really understand why WA should be a separate folder. If that's the case, why not one for Region as well? (And future categories.) And why complicate things by shifting from a model where new messages are always in your inbox to one where you commonly receive new TGs into multiple folders, requiring clicking around to locate them?

10-SECOND SUMMARY

The main change, I think, is that you it to be simpler and easier for everyone to TG everyone else, and free. The two major problems with this are spam and loss of site revenue. You haven't addressed the second one so I'm not sure if you think that matters, but we do need to fund the site from somewhere. The spam issue I don't think you have addressed sufficiently, or at least I haven't understood it. It seems to me that even if everyone followed the rules, there would be many orders of magnitude more messages sent than anyone wanted to read.

[[violet]]

I'd love to see this genie put back in the bottle and have the scripts outlawed again.

I've talked at length about this before--don't have time to dig it out now, sorry, but quick summary: It's not realistic to consider a scenario in which there are no scripts. The choice we face is between making it attractive for scripts to operate in a certain way (i.e. via the API, where we regulate them), or driving them underground, where they do what they want, and we spend a lot of time trying to identify and ban them, which is near-impossible.

[[violet]]

By the way, point of order, Mr Speaker, can TG system talk that's unrelated to Welcome TGs go in the existing thread:

viewtopic.php?f=15&t=222926

[Bruthannia]

The problem with restricting GCR welcome telegrams is that it means GCR retainment is going to go back south compared to where it was before stamps and scripts started. Even if the message is just put in the queue, it's going to be generally buried.

[Vakolic]

The problem with restricting GCR welcome telegrams is that it means GCR retainment is going to go back south compared to where it was before stamps and scripts started. Even if the message is just put in the queue, it's going to be generally buried.

Awww, having your tg buried in the queue would suck, wouldn't it?
That woulb be so harsh if what happened to everyone elses tgs happened to feeder 'stay here' tgs.

[The Most Glorious Hack]

Because this game shouldn't be pay to win.

...win?

[Vakolic]

Because this game shouldn't be pay to win.

...win?

It depends on what you class as winning.
I used to be happy with a small region of people, because I had a decent relationship with everyone in the region.
Then I decided to recruit up to 265 nations. But even though I'm paying, I'm not exactly 'Winning' because their's some things that I've not done yet that I'd like to do, such as to invade a GCR using purely updaters or to convince Max and the admins that we need less strict rules.

[Detective Figs]

Welcome Telegrams ARE Recruitment
Regarding welcome telegrams, the game treats them the same as recruitment telegrams, and so they are put in the recruitment telegram queue, and are sent according to the same queue as the rest of recruitment telegrams. This is for all regions, GCR's and UCR's alike. Problem solved.

I'm prepared to do this if Welcome TGs have indeed shifted the balance, and are causing GCRs to grow significantly more than before. But I want to gather some data on that.

I think the problem here is that free welcome telegrams are something UCRs get too, which most use in an effort to increase retention - just like GCRs want to do.

As things stand right now, UCRs get 1 recruitment TG, not guaranteed to be delivered, and 1 welcome TG, guaranteed to be delivered to any nation that moves into the region, while GCRs get 1 welcome TG, also guaranteed to be delivered to any nation that is founded/refounded in (or moves into) the region. But forcing GCRs to list their welcome TGs as recruitment would strip them of the ability that every other region has to welcome people who do decide to stay, or voluntarily move to join, and it means that if the attitude around GCR recruitment ever changes to make it politically permissible, GCRs won't be able to welcome the people they have recruited.

I don't know if that's horribly bad or tremendously good, though it's almost certainly somewhere in the middle. What's essential, though, is to preserve the symbiotic relationship between GCRs and UCRs. The vast majority of players are raised, in a sense, by UCRs, and the ones with the skill and the drive to do so frequently go on to have productive (or destructive, I suppose) careers in GCRs. It is quite a bit rarer (though of course not unheard of) for new players to start out in GCRs and rise to a high position. Many have an oversaturation of talented players, and it requires a real commitment to catering to new people to overcome that. Some UCRs have a similar problem, but not many, and serious cases tend to kill themselves off. Given this relationship, it may not be such a bad thing for GCR welcome TGs to be treated the same as UCR recruitment TGs... but at the same time, that does make it more difficult for GCRs to create and maintain a truly native identity (and not one tied up with their members' pre-existing outside commitments and loyalties to other regions).

[Cerb]

First you need to have a nation for the UCR welcome TG to be useful. They aren't going to ever see it probably because they have been effectively recruited by their place of birth.

It doesn't seem like such a huge ask to have every welcome message, UCRs included, run through the same queue / delivery method for recruitment. If that does not help things become more balanced then it should be easy to roll the change back out.

[Mahaj]

I'm prepared to do this if Welcome TGs have indeed shifted the balance, and are causing GCRs to grow significantly more than before. But I want to gather some data on that.

I think the problem here is that free welcome telegrams are something UCRs get too, which most use in an effort to increase retention - just like GCRs want to do.

But for the UCR welcome telegram to be executed, the player has to make an effort, by moving to the region.

For the GCR welcome telegram to be executed, the player doesn't have to do anything, in fact they don't get a choice!
So they're really not equivalent.

[Mad Jack]

Because this game shouldn't be pay to win.

...win?

The entire point of recruiting at its most basic level is to get as many different players into your region or organisation as you can.

The more you get the more you win.

[Mexar]

Does the initial GCR Welcome TG make that much difference? A typical nation will have 1 NS TG, 1 GCR welcome, and 18 recruitment TGs.

[Vakolic]

Does the initial GCR Welcome TG make that much difference? A typical nation will have 1 NS TG, 1 GCR welcome, and 18 recruitment TGs.

Yes. The 'stay here!' tg comes in first...and timing is key.

[[violet]]

Does the initial GCR Welcome TG make that much difference?

Well that's the key question, for mine. The moral virtues of recruitment vs retention and who deserves what are all debatable, but if the Welcome TG feature has caused a significant tilt toward Feeder growth and away from recruitment, that's an objective change in the balance of the playing field.

Total # of nations has been pretty steady since mid-August (just before Welcome TGs were introduced), staying between 105k-110k nations, while the top 20 regions have done this:

TNP up 6%
TP up 8%
TSP up 7%
TWP up 5%
TEP up 7%
Lazarus up 4%
Osiris up 7%
Balder up 3%
TRR up 1%
10kI down 29%
Europia down 9%
Cap Para down 16%
Spiritus up 19%
Epogennick up 15%
Mordor up 8%
TBR down 13%
Spectrasonic steady
TLoK&E down 36%
Albion up 5%
GNoI up 580%

That does look like a fairly consistent 5-ish% gain by Feeders & Sinkers. In some cases, the upward trend appears to have pre-dated Welcome TGs, but in others it seems to correlate. It's hard to know for sure, but if there's a real 5% tick towards Feeders, I think that's a legitimate concern, since that 5% of total nations is probably a much higher percentage of genuine real NS players (as opposed to puppets).

[Mad Jack]

The Osiris gain can probably be traced to recovery from the coup, surely?

[Hileville]

TSP's gain would be for the same reasoning over the last several months. We are still about 600-800 nations less than we were before Milo couped.

[Evil Lord Sauron]

TNP up 6%
TP up 8%
TSP up 7%
TWP up 5%
TEP up 7%
Lazarus up 4%
Osiris up 7%
Balder up 3%
TRR up 1%
10kI down 29%
Europia down 9%
Cap Para down 16%
Spiritus up 19%
Epogennick up 15%
Mordor up 8%
TBR down 13%
Spectrasonic steady
TLoK&E down 36%
Albion up 5%
GNoI up 580%

Interesting list. So UCR recruiting is definitely down, while GCR is up. Epogennick and Spectrasonic are both puppet dumps, with only Spiritus, Mordor, Albion bucking the trend (just), while GNoI took a completely different method and blanket recruited the entirety of NS. Any further attempts at a similar recruitment will have diminished returns. Be interesting to see stats on newer regions since stamps/welcoming TGs have been enabled.

For myself, I do not have a problem with GCRs being able to welcome the nations in their region. But they shouldn't be able to send 10 seconds after creation while UCR tgs have to wait a further 50 seconds, especially when those welcoming TGs describe how to block recruiting telegrams. I'm unsure how big an effect that is having and whether people/nations are blocking telegrams as a result of the welcoming TG or another reason.

[Cerb]

Seems to me the numbers support the argument. I'm sure each feedr and sinker can provide some kind of rational explanation, yet the numbers don't lie.

New nations are sticking where they are much more than they did, and the overall average UCR populations are decreasing.

I continue to advance the proposition that all welcome telegrams get sent through the recruitment queue system. Not just feeders and sinkers, but all regions.

That is completely fair.

[South Pacific Belschaft]

I'd take a different interpretation from the statistics. The gains of Spiritus, Albion and Mordor range from 5% to 19% - I would hardly call this just bucking the trend. The GCR's gains vary from 1% to 8%, with a mean 4.6%. GCR populations have always fluctuated but with discernible simultaneous rises and falls across all nine of them; the current modest gain in GCR population could be easily attributed to increased participation and retention in the aftermath of the summer lull, in keeping with historic trends. Further, and as Hileville and Madjack pointed out, several of the GCR's continue to have depressed populations from their traditional norms; for most of 2012/early 2013 TSP was, for example, the second largest region after TNP and whilst it has been consistently rising over the last few months it is still behind TP. TNP in turn previously used to have well over 5000 nations in it, and is currently far bellow that level. GCR populations across the board remain depressed compared to 2012 and early 2013 levels.

Now, there is no question that a number of the larger UCR's are experiencing declines in population, most seriously in the case of 10KI. 10KI has the additional issue that a number of their key members like Eist and Wordy have departed, and they seem to be experiencing problems from this. More generally speaking, the decline appears to stem from one cause; the simple fact that a much larger number of regions are recruiting via TG. Previously they had to do it either by illegal script or manual effort, which limited it to a small number of larger, established regions. Now that there is more competition they are getting less recruits. It as simple as that. This was already occurring before the welcome TG was introduced, and would still be the case without it. This is a knee jerk reaction to try and limit competition for new recruits in any way they can. Has the welcome TG increased GCR retention rates? Of course it has. That was the point of it. We wanted to get more people involved in our regions. It is not, however, the cause of the problems the UCR's are having.

[South Pacific Belschaft]

I continue to advance the proposition that all welcome telegrams get sent through the recruitment queue system. Not just feeders and sinkers, but all regions.

That is completely fair.

Nonsense. Complete, utter, fatuous, hypocritical nonsense.

Only in GCR's are a vast number of recruitment telegrams sent, if any for that matter. In UCR's welcome telegrams would continue to arrive almost instantly and in all cases. In GCR's they would not arrive in the vast majority of cases, making it impossible for us to actually welcome people arriving in our regions.

[Cerian Quilor]

I'm prepared to do this if Welcome TGs have indeed shifted the balance, and are causing GCRs to grow significantly more than before. But I want to gather some data on that.

I think the problem here is that free welcome telegrams are something UCRs get too, which most use in an effort to increase retention - just like GCRs want to do.

As things stand right now, UCRs get 1 recruitment TG, not guaranteed to be delivered, and 1 welcome TG, guaranteed to be delivered to any nation that moves into the region, while GCRs get 1 welcome TG, also guaranteed to be delivered to any nation that is founded/refounded in (or moves into) the region. But forcing GCRs to list their welcome TGs as recruitment would strip them of the ability that every other region has to welcome people who do decide to stay, or voluntarily move to join, and it means that if the attitude around GCR recruitment ever changes to make it politically permissible, GCRs won't be able to welcome the people they have recruited.

I don't know if that's horribly bad or tremendously good, though it's almost certainly somewhere in the middle. What's essential, though, is to preserve the symbiotic relationship between GCRs and UCRs. The vast majority of players are raised, in a sense, by UCRs, and the ones with the skill and the drive to do so frequently go on to have productive (or destructive, I suppose) careers in GCRs. It is quite a bit rarer (though of course not unheard of) for new players to start out in GCRs and rise to a high position. Many have an oversaturation of talented players, and it requires a real commitment to catering to new people to overcome that. Some UCRs have a similar problem, but not many, and serious cases tend to kill themselves off. Given this relationship, it may not be such a bad thing for GCR welcome TGs to be treated the same as UCR recruitment TGs... but at the same time, that does make it more difficult for GCRs to create and maintain a truly native identity (and not one tied up with their members' pre-existing outside commitments and loyalties to other regions).

Even as a dyed-in-the-wool, die-hard userite who, in his more whimsical moments, thinks GCRs should just be like train stations, I have to agree with Detective Figs/Alstariel here.

[Whiskum]

Does the initial GCR Welcome TG make that much difference?

Well that's the key question, for mine. The moral virtues of recruitment vs retention and who deserves what are all debatable, but if the Welcome TG feature has caused a significant tilt toward Feeder growth and away from recruitment, that's an objective change in the balance of the playing field.

Total # of nations has been pretty steady since mid-August (just before Welcome TGs were introduced), staying between 105k-110k nations, while the top 20 regions have done this:

TNP up 6%
TP up 8%
TSP up 7%
TWP up 5%
TEP up 7%
Lazarus up 4%
Osiris up 7%
Balder up 3%
TRR up 1%
10kI down 29%
Europia down 9%
Cap Para down 16%
Spiritus up 19%
Epogennick up 15%
Mordor up 8%
TBR down 13%
Spectrasonic steady
TLoK&E down 36%
Albion up 5%
GNoI up 580%

That does look like a fairly consistent 5-ish% gain by Feeders & Sinkers. In some cases, the upward trend appears to have pre-dated Welcome TGs, but in others it seems to correlate. It's hard to know for sure, but if there's a real 5% tick towards Feeders, I think that's a legitimate concern, since that 5% of total nations is probably a much higher percentage of genuine real NS players (as opposed to puppets).

Those figures certainly highlight the impact of stamps on the populations of those large UCR regions which have not paid to use them.

[Cerb]

I continue to advance the proposition that all welcome telegrams get sent through the recruitment queue system. Not just feeders and sinkers, but all regions.

That is completely fair.

Nonsense. Complete, utter, fatuous, hypocritical nonsense.

Only in GCR's are a vast number of recruitment telegrams sent, if any for that matter. In UCR's welcome telegrams would continue to arrive almost instantly and in all cases. In GCR's they would not arrive in the vast majority of cases, making it impossible for us to actually welcome people arriving in our regions.

And I call nonsense on your cry of nonsense. The welcome TG for the UCR would be in the queue behind the huge number of recruitment TGs and would probably hit inbox full long before it was delivered.


The growth rates according the pacifics are up an average of 6.6%. There is no rational reason for that increase other than the welcome TG. If they continue at that growth rate The Pacific alone is looking at another 269 nations.

I'll speak one time about the comment on the loss of a couple of significant members of the 10000 Islands. To point at that is utterly absurd. Neither of these members were involved heavily in recruitment in the last year or more, so new nations have no clue that they even existed. As recruitment efforts have continued at pace any claim that the 10Ki reduction in size is simply ridiculous.


@Violet while the percentage numbers are interesting, why not post the actual number net gain for the feeders / sinkers vs the UCRs? It would be even more interesting if you posted the net gain of WA members in the feeders vs UCRS. That will be an even better metric as it will eliminate puppets.