Regional Officers

[Jardenfell]

9 times out of ten we aren't going to be on an even footing come update so we're going to have to resort to cross endorsing. Suddenly the crossfire experienced by your ROs tonight is a distant memory and you can plan to your hearts content - especially when we have to stage well in advance of a jump. Even still, you banned 18 nations before update. That is a ridiculous amount.

That sort of sleeper effort is once every... I don't know say... just short of two years sort of thing? I mean, the last time we were able to make use of such a ridiculous sleeper campaign was also in Asia on the 27th December 2013. Without such a campaign we would have been completely dead in the water and it's not a reliable strategy since we can't count on having a massive sleeper army in every big liberation we come across.

The idea that we can just "repeat" these strategies in future liberations is misleading. We were fortunate that a large number of factors came together to make this possible and we might be lucky if they do come together again in another 1 year and 10 months time. That's especially true if we don't see any further mechanical changes in that time.

[Ever-Wandering Souls]

Is that due to stepping on each others' toes, or due to differing skill on the players' parts?

If the players were equally skilled (and had equal intenet speeds), then I would expect that they would have approximately the same ejection counts, just with that count being lower than what the same player could (hypothetically) have achieved alone.

The large difference between the best- and worst-scoring player suggests that redundant efforts are not the sole factor, even if it's one of them. Which means that if a fifth player is added, I would expect his contribution to be closer to the average of the first four players, rather than the minimum.

I'd say far more stepping on toes. I"m not sure which count is total vs. before update vs wa before update at this point, but we have a ballpark - and the two of us with significantly lower counts tried to eject far more than we succeeded in. I had at least four, if not closer to 6 or greater cases in which I either opened an incoming nation to find them already in TRR, or by the time I clicked banject, got a "nation is not in region" error. Those with better scores (who were marginally faster at getting to these nations) had far fewer cases of failed ejections - those two ran into each other a bit, the two of us slightly behind them ran into both of them a lot more. If we'd all been the same speed, we would have just clashed more equally.

Basically, I'd rate your second sentence accurate, as well as your conclusion that equal players would see equal, if smaller numbers - but would argue that adding another, rather than coming in at that average, would rather add maybe 1-2 net tops and simply lower the average.

[Ever-Wandering Souls]

If such an extensive sleeper network works so well, why not hate me for saying this have more of them? You just said it was effective. I don't see this as an RO issue, or one exaggerated by RO's more so than it was prior to them.

I was serious. You know I have a bone to pick with the lack of publication of defender successes, but that's not an RO issue, or one exaggerated by RO's more so than it was prior to them.

So the RO issue you had with this is that we ejected 17ish people before update, as compared to the perhaps 12ish that might have been gotten by our fastest man without any clashing, yes? (testing would be needed to get a more accurate number on the latter)

[Rivercastle]

If such an extensive sleeper network works so well, why not hate me for saying this have more of them? You just said it was effective. I don't see this as an RO issue, or one exaggerated by RO's more so than it was prior to them.

There's a difference. You raiders only have to place sleepers in the regions you want to invade to circumvent the issue of ROs, but we will have to place sleepers in every founderless region to pull off a similar liberation. Why should we have to put in a lot more effort just to play the game?

P.S. I was the one who got unbanned in Asia.

[Klopstock]

I'll let the hard numbers tell the story. One raider delegate and 3 raider ROs managed to eject and ban 18 defenders in 19 seconds before the update. And, both before and after it, eject and ban 27 of 29 defenders jumping in overall. We had 20 sleepers, nearly 30 people jumping, and went in down 43-40 margin. And we only won 44-43. This would have been a walk under the old rules, but was a coin toss with Regional Officers. It would have been for nothing if the native delegate [had] not come online before the next update.

With all respect, defenders cannot be made to leap over a lake when raiders only have to jump over a puddle. There should be significant influence costs to adding and removing ROs. Or, at the very least, we should adopt the 72 hour delay for appointing and dismissing ROs. Regional Officers will be a paper tiger when it comes to R/D if there's not some limit on dismissing them.

EDIT: two edits for clarity as indicated.

[Zemnaya Svoboda]

Not sure how "clean jumpers" play a role when we just got anyone who moved in as fast as possible. The chaff certainly plays a role there, those sleepers were certainly a well-played pain in the ass, and that was a trigger worthy of praise - no 15 second gap to eject people in, or 3/4 of the party late today - but I'm not entirely sure how this is a testament to Libs being impossible so much as it's a testament to the fact that those methods work, and could be repeated. Especially if this is publicized as being effective at taking out us ebvul raiders, and next time you show up with more recruits


/me braces for impact

We had every advantage we could possibly have, more or less.

We had a willingness to participate from all the major defender organizations, as well as help from others such as the North Pacific Army. We had more than ten nations long resident in the region join the WA and endorse the native Delegate. We had the natives the invader had endorsement traded with while under cover swiftly move to unendorse the invader. (Rather more swiftly than is usual, in my memory.) We had an outsize updater turnout the very next update after an invasion.

We certainly would not have been able to pull this off, even with the same turnout, even twelve hours later.

With all of these advantages, the victory margin was one single endorsement.

Meanwhile, in California, there is absolutely nothing anyone can do until the invaders get bored, or try refounding it. If even five invaders had moved from there to Asia, Asia would be effectively done for as well.

These are our game mechanics. This is not because Defenders are outnumbered. Defenders, as invaders often say, typically outnumber invaders. Not in every engagement, because invaders have the liberty of choosing when and where to strike or hold nine times out of ten, but we do have the moral high ground which entails some willingness by the broader NationStates world to help out. In this engagement it took the stars aligning, well over twice the defender updaters liberating (to the best of my knowledge, I intend to run some checks shortly to get more definite statistics) as it took invader updaters to invade, and an equivalent number of defenders willing and able to switch in to sleeper nations over the course of twelve hours as invader updaters or reinforcers. It took an impressive fraction of the native WA nations logging in and unendorsing the invader within this one twelve hour window. It took the resurrection of more-or-less stealthy tactics that I doubt the invaders were expecting (this time) combined with distraction plays by non-WA nations (from persons unable to contribute their WA nation).

And it was the closest-possible run thing. If a Border Control Officer had expelled just one more WA nation, that would be it for Asia. If one fewer native resident had checked NationStates today. If Wooosaa had enough influence to ban one more resident nation. There would be no realistic chance afterward, but perhaps for The Black Hawk's habit of not usually destroying regions they invade. Mostly.

I don't think this proves the system is fair.

[Cielonia]

I don't normally wander over to the forums, but this requires some input, from the perspective of someone who does not normally play the raiding game.

Giving border control power to so many officers was almost patently unfair. Even with just four guys, even with a massive unendorse campaign within Asia, even with what looked to me like a tide of outside help, even with Derrak on, Asia was only liberated by a single endorsement - and even after he won it back, the border patrol officers went right on sacking and booting people. That's far too much power to give to people who've only been in the region for twelve hours. People with zero Regional Influence and zero days spent in the region. It simply stacks the deck too greatly in favour of the raiders.

Put another way: How are peaceful RP regions with no experience in the raiding game - regions like the ones I frequent - supposed to ever liberate their regions if the raiders can have six guys on border patrol booting at a rate of one defender per second?

Maybe there should be a threshold of Regional Influence that officers must exceed before they're appointed, or a very high influence ceiling for a delegate to be able to appoint officers at all. Something has to prevent a sleeper raider from instantly stacking the deck with zero-influence mooks who swat down defenders like flies. It's madness.

[Ever-Wandering Souls]

If such an extensive sleeper network works so well, why not hate me for saying this have more of them? You just said it was effective. I don't see this as an RO issue, or one exaggerated by RO's more so than it was prior to them.

There's a difference. You raiders only have to place sleepers in the regions you want to invade to circumvent the issue of ROs, but we will have to place sleepers in every founderless region to pull off a similar liberation. Why should we have to put in a lot more effort just to play the game?

P.S. I was the one who got unbanned in Asia.

There's a fairly small pool of founderless regions with active communities. Less than four pages on the region search, in fact, have >25 pop, soon after that you start hitting tags, and of the 44 non-GCR's that are left, both Cali and Asia are included in, as well as a number of other targets raided in recent memory (reddit nations, canada, equestria, portugal, anarchy, italia, south pacific, space, christmas, japan... it goes on). Excluding the well-secured locked regions (Hell, St abbaddon, etc) lowers that count of 44 more, and further raises the percent of those left that have been hit at least one in recent times. It's not a stretch to say that the next big hit that actually affects an active community of more than 1-2 people is going to be one of those fairly simple to isolate regions. History repeats itself quite often here, as seen by the jokes of our "yearly visit" in South Pacifc.

[Ever-Wandering Souls]

California in it's present state is no more difficult to liberate than it was prior to RO's. There aren't even any RO's appointed there yet. RO's have done nothing to make Cali harder to lib, they've just failed to make it any eaiser.




...I do want to clarify again, as I said a while back, that I do agree with much of what you're saying. I'm here to debate all of it best I can, though, even if that makes you all see me as an ass.

[Flanderlion]

I'll let the hard numbers tell the story. One raider delegate and 3 raider ROs managed to eject and ban 18 defenders in 19 seconds before the update. And, both before and after it, eject and ban 27 of 29 defenders jumping in overall. We had 20 sleepers, nearly 30 people jumping, and went in down 43-40 margin. And we only won 44-43. This would have been a walk under the old rules, but was a coin toss with Regional Officers. It would have been for nothing if the native delegate [had] not come online before the next update.

With all respect, defenders cannot be made to leap over a lake when raiders only have to jump over a puddle. There should be significant influence costs to adding and removing ROs. Or, at the very least, we should adopt the 72 hour delay for appointing and dismissing ROs. Regional Officers will be a paper tiger when it comes to R/D if there's not some limit on dismissing them.

EDIT: two edits for clarity as indicated.

You do realise if there was a delay added to removing a RO - a sleeper op that got RO would be nearly impossible to liberate. The 72 hours should be only for adding a RO, because otherwise a region held for 3 days would become unable to be liberated, or a region that had already been infiltrated for RO privileges beforehand.

[Cielonia]

Locking the region would cost me a ridiculous amount of Regional Influence.

The cost of appointing a Regional Officer with border control should be huge, too. It's not enough to just increase how much it costs them to boot someone when they're mostly booting defenders who have been in the region for six seconds.

None of the invader ROs managed to boot a native. Only the delegate did, and he'd been in the region for months. If you have a delegate with enough influence to sack natives and a flock of invader ROs sacking defenders, the region is effectively invincible to anything except luck.

[Ever-Wandering Souls]

Locking the region would cost me a ridiculous amount of Regional Influence.

The cost of appointing a Regional Officer with border control should be huge, too. It's not enough to just increase how much it costs them to boot someone when they're mostly booting defenders who have been in the region for six seconds.

None of the invader ROs managed to boot a native. Only the delegate did, and he'd been in the region for months. If you have a delegate with enough influence to sack natives and a flock of invader ROs sacking defenders, the region is effectively invincible to anything except luck.

If admin wanted regions to be invincible to raiders, that could have been done long ago. They don't.

[Klopstock]

You do realise if there was a delay added to removing a RO - a sleeper op that got RO would be nearly impossible to liberate. The 72 hours should be only for adding a RO, because otherwise a region held for 3 days would become unable to be liberated, or a region that had already been infiltrated for RO privileges beforehand.

That's one of the (many) reasons using influence seems to be the obvious solution. Your scenario is certainly right -- after 72 hours it would be far harder. However, at the moment it's exceedingly difficult within those 72 hours already.

[Klopstock]

If admin wanted regions to be invincible to raiders, that could have been done long ago. They don't.

And if admin wanted invaders to rule this game, we wouldn't have founders or influence. I'm fine searching for a happy medium. I just think that balance should be 50-50.

[Ever-Wandering Souls]

If admin wanted regions to be invincible to raiders, that could have been done long ago. They don't.

And if admin wanted invaders to rule this game, we wouldn't have founders or influence. I'm fine searching for a happy medium. I just think that balance should be 50-50.

/me looks at GCR's
/me looks at majority of UCR's
/me looks at lib
/me looks at one active raid and handful of dead, tagged regions

Looks more like we own a building in a city and a portion of the sanitation department than like we rule the game.

[The Derrak Quadrant]

As the current WA Delegate to Asia which was just raided, the RO system as it is implemented is in need of re-working. With specific regard to the border controls, having up to 12 raiders being able to split the influence cost 12 ways to eject natives and defenders is very broken. A much better solution would be that for a founderless region that just changed it's WA delegate, a limit be set to the number of ROs who can be removed from having number having border controls, and the number of new ROs that can be given border controls controls.

[Ever-Wandering Souls]

9 more BC RO's would have resulted in little more than than nine-ish times the number of errors while trying to eject defenders.

[Zemnaya Svoboda]

EWS, there is the other problem that if we hadn't pulled out all the stops to get you out of there the very first update after the invasion, then you would soon have a sizeable pile and be able to also pile endorsements on the BCOs, allowing them to join in removing nations from the region.

Exactly what kind of chance would anyone have to rescue the region then?

[Ever-Wandering Souls]

EWS, there is the other problem that if we hadn't pulled out all the stops to get you out of there the very first update after the invasion, then you would soon have a sizeable pile and be able to also pile endorsements on the BCOs, allowing them to join in removing nations from the region.

Exactly what kind of chance would anyone have to rescue the region then?

And if any one of the 3-4 people I either physically talked to or know for a fact were online and chose for one reason or another not to take a few seconds to deploy had done so, we'd be having a different conversation right now. Or on the other end, if a surprising number of people hadn't made a last-ditch effort to dig through every contact we had, while stepping around ideological issues, out of date contacts, troops occupied in osi, and so forth, we'd still be down at 29 e and it would have been a blowout as you wish. Both sides pulled out all stops, yours won by a bit this time. Even if this shot had failed, we'd likely have been unable to remove any more nations than we already did, natives would have had more time to get on, our endocount was unlikely to grow much without asking DEN to put Cali at risky levels, and another run or two would have spelled the end in a day. I'd say this was more fair a fight than we've seen in a while.

[Karputsk]

EWS, there is the other problem that if we hadn't pulled out all the stops to get you out of there the very first update after the invasion, then you would soon have a sizeable pile and be able to also pile endorsements on the BCOs, allowing them to join in removing nations from the region.

Exactly what kind of chance would anyone have to rescue the region then?

And if any one of the 3-4 people I either physically talked to or know for a fact were online and chose for one reason or another not to take a few seconds to deploy had done so, we'd be having a different conversation right now. Or on the other end, if a surprising number of people hadn't made a last-ditch effort to dig through every contact we had, while stepping around ideological issues, out of date contacts, troops occupied in osi, and so forth, we'd still be down at 29 e and it would have been a blowout as you wish. Both sides pulled out all stops, yours won by a bit this time. Even if this shot had failed, we'd likely have been unable to remove any more nations than we already did, natives would have had more time to get on, our endocount was unlikely to grow much without asking DEN to put Cali at risky levels, and another run or two would have spelled the end in a day. I'd say this was more fair a fight than we've seen in a while.

Exactly. You guys had several obstacles preventing you from deploying at full strength (California, Osiris) and yet we had every advantage we could have hoped for - and we just managed it, just. You need only look at Cora's news feed in NSGP to realise just how lucky we were in pulling this off.

If either Osiris or California weren't issues for you guys then you would have comprehensively smashed us. I mean, we might have tried the jump because we would have made the margin considerably smaller but with the rate of banjection we couldn't hope to compete without an unrealistic numbers advantage.

We're not saying you guys don't work hard or fight for every WA you get (as we do), but the fact is we need more WAs, at a specific time, on shorter notice, against active and professional opposition. There is no doubting that Defenders have the more difficult task at the moment.

[Ever-Wandering Souls]

And if any one of the 3-4 people I either physically talked to or know for a fact were online and chose for one reason or another not to take a few seconds to deploy had done so, we'd be having a different conversation right now. Or on the other end, if a surprising number of people hadn't made a last-ditch effort to dig through every contact we had, while stepping around ideological issues, out of date contacts, troops occupied in osi, and so forth, we'd still be down at 29 e and it would have been a blowout as you wish. Both sides pulled out all stops, yours won by a bit this time. Even if this shot had failed, we'd likely have been unable to remove any more nations than we already did, natives would have had more time to get on, our endocount was unlikely to grow much without asking DEN to put Cali at risky levels, and another run or two would have spelled the end in a day. I'd say this was more fair a fight than we've seen in a while.

Exactly. You guys had several obstacles preventing you from deploying at full strength (California, Osiris) and yet we had every advantage we could have hoped for - and we just managed it, just. You need only look at Cora's news feed in NSGP to realise just how lucky we were in pulling this off.

If either Osiris or California weren't issues for you guys then you would have comprehensively smashed us. I mean, we might have tried the jump because we would have made the margin considerably smaller but with the rate of banjection we couldn't hope to compete without an unrealistic numbers advantage.

We're not saying you guys don't work hard or fight for every WA you get (as we do), but the fact is we need more WAs, at a specific time, on shorter notice, against active and professional opposition. There is no doubting that Defenders have the more difficult task at the moment.

Granted. Now why should RO's be changed so radically as to reverse that position?

[Cielonia]

Some more food for thought here, from the perspective of a native. Bear in mind, I don't play the raid-and-defend game. I only react to it when I have no choice.

Asia had three people with border control, but against a sleeper raid, none of us had any clue it was coming, much less any chance to organize a defense against it.

When the defenders came flooding into the region, the raiders knew they were coming and had four people whacking away with kickbans a mile a minute. What is being missed here is that when the raiders came flooding in twelve hours before, none of the people with border control had any inkling it was coming. There was no opportunity for myself, Derrak and Qudrath to sit there like Wooosaa did and pick off Black Hawks one ban at a time.

The RO function is interesting, but against organized sleeper raiders, unless natives have a network of spies in every raider region or somehow know, omnisciently, who in their region is the sleeper delegate, it's effectively useless to natives as a defense tool. Its reliability depends on sitting there at the update and knowing there's going to be a wave, and praying you can get all your guys on at the same time. Raiders can do that because they're well-organized and experienced. Natives can't. By the time I found out about this, I'd already been demoted. So now I have two choices: I can either sit there at ridiculous O'clock at night or in the middle of my shift, waiting on NationStates every day, constantly paranoid that there are raiders coming and refreshing the page furiously, or I can get raided and never be able to dislodge the raiders because they can appoint five guys with kickban powers.

The result is that, unless natives are going to live their NS lives in a constant state of paranoia, RO positions are totally useless as a defense mechanism. Completely useless. Outside of discipline issues within a region, RO positions are literally only useful to raiders who know a defender wave is coming. It's like you've given their side laser-guided ballistic missiles and given me a pointy stick and told me we're equal because we're both technically armed.



Maybe border control should be limited to one person. If the delegate gives it to an RO, ONLY that RO can kickban.

[Kazmr]

I would also add that, beyong the ridiculous ban rate, this also removes cross endorsement as a tool for defenders in its current state. Had we crossed ahead of time it would have been easily possible for the individuaps with Bc to, say, divide the jumpers up ahead of time to significantpy increase efficiency.

Problem with that is that cross endorsing is essentially the only way that we can sustain multiple-update operations, meaning that without it we cant actually do anything to 'close the gap' and rendering it virtually impossible to liberate anything after the first update.

[Ever-Wandering Souls]

Divvying up spotted defenders doesn't actually work out at well in practice - for the same reason pre-opening their nation tabs doesn't work great for a single point. It's easy to get an unlucky streak. You refresh a tab, nation hasn't jumped yet, switch, click, f5, no jump yet, switch, click, f5, oh hey he was first in, eject him, boom, update's here. It's far more efficient to eject people as they come in - they're 100% guaranteed to be in the region, and opening a new page and scrolling to the bottom doesn't take that much more time than refreshing a tab.

[Kazmr]

Might not work well with one person but if half a dozen or ten people only had to concentrate on a few defenders each I imagine it would be quite practical.