NationStates

Jesus, I'm all for removing the feature now if it means toning down Fenda whining. Seriously, try it out. Administration is not leaving you out to dry, if you stop defending because of this, administration isn't killing R/D, you are.

Hmmm... Defender multi-regional Org with a bunch of big influence members holding RO positions with border control. Use treaties to put agreements in place.

??

Maybe?

Darkesia wrote:Hmmm... Defender multi-regional Org with a bunch of big influence members holding RO positions with border control. Use treaties to put agreements in place.

??

Maybe?

Presumably ROs draw from the influence pool in the region they're using region controls for. If that's the case, then having large amounts of influence elsewhere doesn't help anything.

Ever-Wandering Souls wrote:

Karputsk wrote:So we're going to be forced to spend countless updates throwing our bodies at raider Delegates and Officers with absolutely no chance of success just to prove that the system is broken? Unbelievable.

I don't think you understand that you aren't making things harder for liberators, you're making them impossible, pointless. What's the point of us even bothering? Why should we spend our time proving just how broken this is?

Then why not change tactics? It's been complained for years that libs are rarely effective, and have only become less so. Instead of bashing the head against the wall, why not change tactics? Infiltrate raider region, become an RO on a raid, eject a bunch of low-influence raider support right before update to make a lib possible, especially if some of the pilers infiltrated too.

That'll work. For 15 seconds.

To disperse the apocalyptical talk about how liberations are doomed to fail:

Personally, I'd find multiple points online during update to be bothersome. Too little time to communicate, too much room to make mistakes. You could indeed say that invaders could have a person manning each and every update, but who doesn't already do that anyway?

Misley wrote:

Darkesia wrote:Hmmm... Defender multi-regional Org with a bunch of big influence members holding RO positions with border control. Use treaties to put agreements in place.

??

Maybe?

Presumably ROs draw from the influence pool in the region they're using region controls for. If that's the case, then having large amounts of influence elsewhere doesn't help anything.

I am working from Misley's assumption. Otherwise TNP's SC and the Club of ex-delegates of 10KI are the biggest forces in GP now.

Darkesia wrote:Hmmm... Defender multi-regional Org with a bunch of big influence members holding RO positions with border control. Use treaties to put agreements in place.

??

Maybe?

Regional influence is only usable within the region it belongs to.

Regional Officers can be dismissed immediately the moment an invader is in the delegacy.

Alustrian wrote:I am working from Misley's assumption. Otherwise TNP's SC and the Club of ex-delegates of 10KI are the biggest forces in GP now.

Well, most of us, at least.

Knot II wrote:May I suggest working hard to train and recruit new defenders? These methods, believe it or not, actually work better.

Hello!
Can i interest you in an endeavor called defending? You can spend up to 3 hours a day watching spammers, or maybe you would like to follow them but have minimal impact because they try to cut you out. As a bonus once every three months there will be a big op Top liberate, but we won't be victorious there either because 13 people will be trying to kick you out! I'll tell you what why don't we waste a few hours cleaning up some spam, that sounds fun! Yay!

Don't be obtuse. You can't recruit when failure out boredom is almost guaranteed

Great ideas! We'll just have to burn a different spy for every region that gets raided and we can do jack shit about? Sound impractical yet?

False flag flying you say? Might work for one liberation, if that, and then you'll amend entry procedure as needed and we'll be back to square one. Or, you'll find yourself wondering why you have twenty more endorsements than you might expect and after some digging remove most if not all the nations that are deemed suspicious. Again, back to square one.

The idea that today's Defender commanders are lacking willpower, motivation or creativity couldn't be further from the truth. I don't consider myself one of them at the moment but for a good year and a half I was on at almost every update (minor and major), organising or involved in the organisation of most big liberations and otherwise defending -- it burnt me out. I speak to Defenders every day and I can see the same realisation that what they're doing, what they care about, what they used to enjoy is starting to wear them down. But they still get on at update, monitor the WA feed throughout the day and do what they can. Maybe it's time to realise (as Guy has said) is that R/D is very clearly skewed in favour of the Raiders atm, and giving Raiders free license to ban 25+ updaters with ease isn't going to help.

Misley wrote:

Darkesia wrote:Hmmm... Defender multi-regional Org with a bunch of big influence members holding RO positions with border control. Use treaties to put agreements in place.

??

Maybe?

Presumably ROs draw from the influence pool in the region they're using region controls for. If that's the case, then having large amounts of influence elsewhere doesn't help anything.

Ah. Yeah. And non-WA nations can't put on enough influence to do any good. Never mind.

Knot II wrote:To disperse the apocalyptical talk about how liberations are doomed to fail:

Personally, I'd find multiple points online during update to be bothersome. Too little time to communicate, too much room to make mistakes. You could indeed say that invaders could have a person manning each and every update, but who doesn't already do that anyway?

Replied on IRC, but this deserves a forum reply as well somehow raiders are telling defenders they need new strategies (and the suggested strategies are nonsense), and you cannot solve this issue? In an earlier conversation today it took me 46 seconds to think of, and type, a solution to your issue (thanks irc log timestamps).

Alustrian wrote:I understand you want us to try with the new rules. Sure, we can try. I am asking how many tries, ballpark? No way I can sell a year of missions that I know will fail.

Fair enough, but it's not as simple as saying if there are X failed attempts at doing things the old way, then Regional Officers will be backed out. The key thing here is that there's ambiguity. Different people have different opinions about what will happen. In time, we'll get less ambiguity and see what's needed.

I don't expect defenders to launch any missions they know will fail.

It's a sad state of affairs when Raiders feel the need to try to point out what their opposition could do better.

Cormac Stark wrote:Did you really just make the argument that since R/D is already almost completely tilted toward your side, this can't be much worse? This is much worse precisely for that reason. It's already extremely difficult to defend, virtually impossible to liberate. Now it will still be extremely difficult to defend and completely impossible to liberate. Why keep doing it? What's the incentive? What makes it fun for defenders at that point? Those are the questions site administration should be asking, but instead [violet] wants defenders to try to liberate raids a few times knowing they'll lose because they'll be helpful test subjects. Defenders aren't volunteer punching bags and guinea pigs for both raiders and site administration, they're players of this game who deserve some damn respect and consideration and currently are getting none.

I personally will neither raid nor defend until [violet] makes changes to Regional Officers that will curb abuse by raiders and restore, at a minimum, some semblance of balance. No defender should defend until she does that. No raider worth their salt should raid until she does that. Making radical changes to the game that the people affected by it absolutely hate needs to stop, and site administration needs to start recognizing that game changes should serve the players of this game, not the other way around. This game is utter crap at this point and it's almost entirely because of site administration's negligence and careless disregard for players' experiences.

But in this case, there's already code ready, waiting. That sets it apart.

My argument was that doing nothing and letting admin see how it goes can't be much worse. Perhaps trying some more interesting tactics might be better?

I'm sure California is glad all the defenders online and whining are on strike We jumped way too early, and saw no opposition at all.

[violet] wrote:

Guy wrote:You'll blink first.

Heh, that's what Ballotonia said, way back. Never underestimate the ability of admin to do nothing.

Anyway, what I'd say is that if you're right about the problems this creates, then please trust us to see that. We all want the same end result, which you can help achieve just by playing it out and giving useful feedback. It would actually be harder to make changes if we couldn't tell which problems were real and which were deliberately engineered.

Bingo. Intentional failures give no real data to admin.

Darkesia wrote:Hmmm... Defender multi-regional Org with a bunch of big influence members holding RO positions with border control. Use treaties to put agreements in place.

??

Maybe?

Yep. Potential interesting tactic: set up a shared nation for spotters with RO positions in a number of high-value potential targets. Log into said nation when spotting. Eject incoming raiders.

Misley wrote:Presumably ROs draw from the influence pool in the region they're using region controls for. If that's the case, then having large amounts of influence elsewhere doesn't help anything.

Ejecting newcomes pre-update requires no influence, and that's the only time it'd be helpful - post update, they'd be removed anyways.

Sovreignry wrote:

Ever-Wandering Souls wrote:
Then why not change tactics? It's been complained for years that libs are rarely effective, and have only become less so. Instead of bashing the head against the wall, why not change tactics? Infiltrate raider region, become an RO on a raid, eject a bunch of low-influence raider support right before update to make a lib possible, especially if some of the pilers infiltrated too.

That'll work. For 15 seconds.

So send in a bunch. If realm can slip by for a week or two now and then after trying for months and giving us his home IP, I'm sure an organized military can get a few infiltrators in.

[violet] wrote:Heh, that's what Ballotonia said, way back. Never underestimate the ability of admin to do nothing.

Anyway, what I'd say is that if you're right about the problems this creates, then please trust us to see that. We all want the same end result, which you can help achieve just by playing it out and giving useful feedback. It would actually be harder to make changes if we couldn't tell which problems were real and which were deliberately engineered.

Where's the incentive to round up 20-50+ players update after update to try to liberate against not one raider lead but as many as twelve? It's a no-win situation. Games are supposed to be fun; what fun is to be had there? Being your guinea pig is not fun. This entire problem is deliberately engineered by you, so let me save you some time on figuring that one out.

Believe me, [violet], none of us underestimate the ability of admin to do nothing anymore. Max should fire you and replace you with Afforess.

Valrifell wrote:Jesus, I'm all for removing the feature now if it means toning down Fenda whining. Seriously, try it out. Administration is not leaving you out to dry, if you stop defending because of this, administration isn't killing R/D, you are.

That's completely ridiculous. If you stop doing this thing that is incredibly difficult and not at all fun anymore, because administration has designed it to be incredibly difficult and not at all fun, it's your fault the game sucks, not administration's. That's literally absurd.

Darkesia wrote:Hmmm... Defender multi-regional Org with a bunch of big influence members holding RO positions with border control. Use treaties to put agreements in place.

??

Maybe?

In this thread I've seen it suggested that defenders need to recruit more, defenders need to infiltrate raider regions and gain positions of trust to become Regional Officers, defenders need to train people better, defenders need to build a multi-regional org and massive treaty network to protect founderless regions.

Has it occurred to anyone that the reason we no longer have more than a handful of defenders, and are about to lose those, is because defenders need to do all of this while all raiders need to do is a little bit of simple math and click a few buttons? Defenders should not have to do massively more than raiders in order to play the same game.

Ever-Wandering Souls wrote:I'm sure California is glad all the defenders online and whining are on strike We jumped way too early, and saw no opposition at all.

I'll be sure to telegram the natives shortly and urge them to come to Technical to thank Max and [violet].

Karputsk wrote:Great ideas! We'll just have to burn a different spy for every region that gets raided and we can do jack shit about? Sound impractical yet?

False flag flying you say? Might work for one liberation, if that, and then you'll amend entry procedure as needed and we'll be back to square one. Or, you'll find yourself wondering why you have twenty more endorsements than you might expect and after some digging remove most if not all the nations that are deemed suspicious. Again, back to square one.

The idea that today's Defender commanders are lacking willpower, motivation or creativity couldn't be further from the truth. I don't consider myself one of them at the moment but for a good year and a half I was on at almost every update (minor and major), organising or involved in the organisation of most big liberations and otherwise defending -- it burnt me out. I speak to Defenders every day and I can see the same realisation that what they're doing, what they care about, what they used to enjoy is starting to wear them down. But they still get on at update, monitor the WA feed throughout the day and do what they can. Maybe it's time to realise (as Guy has said) is that R/D is very clearly skewed in favour of the Raiders atm, and giving Raiders free license to ban 25+ updaters with ease isn't going to help.

I've never argued that it's not skewed. Just that I've never seen much of this supposed creativity in tactics. And, though it could change, I've always found extra endorsements to be valuable, even if they're known spies. I put them on a watchlist to eject if it becomes an issue.

I didn't say players were making the game worse; no, that's obviously on administration. I was suggesting, however, that this strike only amplifies the problem instead of solving it.

[violet] wrote:

Alustrian wrote:I understand you want us to try with the new rules. Sure, we can try. I am asking how many tries, ballpark? No way I can sell a year of missions that I know will fail.

Fair enough, but it's not as simple as saying if there are X failed attempts at doing things the old way, then Regional Officers will be backed out. The key thing here is that there's ambiguity. Different people have different opinions about what will happen. In time, we'll get less ambiguity and see what's needed.

I don't expect defenders to launch any missions they know will fail.

<3 (my bold)
Let us know when enough time has passed on this stage of the experiment and we can get back to something-approaching-fair.

Cormac Stark wrote:Max should fire you and replace you with Afforess.


In this thread I've seen it suggested that defenders need to recruit more, defenders need to infiltrate raider regions and gain positions of trust to become Regional Officers, defenders need to train people better, defenders need to build a multi-regional org and massive treaty network to protect founderless regions.

Has it occurred to anyone that the reason we no longer have more than a handful of defenders, and are about to lose those, is because defenders need to do all of this while all raiders need to do is a little bit of simple math and click a few buttons? Defenders should not have to do massively more than raiders in order to play the same game.

Ever-Wandering Souls wrote:I'm sure California is glad all the defenders online and whining are on strike We jumped way too early, and saw no opposition at all.

I'll be sure to telegram the natives shortly and urge them to come to Technical to thank Max and [violet].

Yes, let's have staff that threatens to blackmail people. Great idea.

Because that describes all the fun I have infiltrating, gaining trust, building relations with other aggressive regions, and trying to find pilers. Yep. A little math and some buttons.

Be my Gest.

And of course, concerns about the relevance of this to anything other than the griefing and bullying game get ignored.

Trotterdam wrote:Founders don't need influence, and should be able to delegate their not-needing-influence ability to regional officers if they want to. Because for regions with an active founder, regional officers aren't necessary for security anyway, only convenience. Plus influence is almost impossible to accumulate at useful amounts for non-WA nations.

If the founder ceases to exist than regional officers would lose their not-needing-influence ability (if they had it) until the founder returns. And delegates wouldn't be able to grant it even if they can appoint officers (more generally, delegates probably shouldn't be able to grant any abilities they haven't been given themselves).

In a region with an active founder, officers are just a timesaver so you don't have to keep telling the founder about what needs to get done. Influence was a patch introduced for the sake of people who like to abuse the WA system and just ruins things for normal players.

Having more than one person able to keep the peace would be useful for a large region, and with the upcoming zombie apocalypse being able to kick out zombie exporters quickly even if the founder isn't on would be useful, but I'd never bother if I can only use it once or twice before permanently depleting years worth of influence accumulation.

In my opinion it seems as if raiding has really taken over the whole game, and that has hurt the whole RP side of it. The whole discussion on this thread demonstrates this quite clearly. Oh well I suppose we shall just have to continue with the status quo, even though it's quite obviously not in the interest of a large segment of the NS community.

I'm giving all the powers to everyone in my region. Everyone is equal and everyone will have fun in the western isles

Saxe-Wittenburg wrote:In my opinion it seems as if raiding has really taken over the whole game, and that has hurt the whole RP side of it. The whole discussion on this thread demonstrates this quite clearly. Oh well I suppose we shall just have to continue with the status quo, even though it's quite obviously not in the interest of a large segment of the NS community.

Oh please, we don't specifically target you. The supermajority of players are more than likely safe from raids, we aren't going to kill regional RP any day of the week. Yes, not even on Tuesday.

Saxe-Wittenburg wrote:In my opinion it seems as if raiding has really taken over the whole game, and that has hurt the whole RP side of it. The whole discussion on this thread demonstrates this quite clearly. Oh well I suppose we shall just have to continue with the status quo, even though it's quite obviously not in the interest of a large segment of the NS community.

There are doubtlessly thousands of players on here with no idea what raiding even is. Founderless regions are only about 2000 of about 18000 regions, a minority. Nations that merely answer issues don't give a shit about raiding. Gameplayers are merely vocal in the forums in many cases. Many of the large invasions recently haven't even been in regions heavily populated by roleplayers. BS.