Multiple updates for single nations

[August]

Hello, back again with another suggestion for shaking up Gameplay slightly.

The suggestion is this: allow nations to update an unlimited number of times in a single update, with the catch being that they can only increase in population once per calendar day. This does seem like a somewhat obvious one and I know it has been brought up before, but it seems like that was before issues and rankings were decoupled from the update. These days, I think population is the only thing that is not allowed to update more than once per day. Things like Influence and Residency are irrelevant, because they are tied to single regions and updating them in multiple regions would provide no advantage.

Pros:
Countless man-hours saved while conducting military operations on both sides, as well as training new players.
Far, far fewer puppets. The world population will probably drop by thousands.
Possible benefits to the server? Not sure how much strain is created by a couple hundred WA applications/joinings around update.

Cons:
Might be difficult to code. I figured it would probably be possible, seeing as how nations already update at minor without their population increasing, but I am speaking from a position of ignorance.

Thoughts?

[Galiantus III]

I have mixed feelings about this.

The idea is likable because it simplifies military gameplay, thus lowering a barrier to entry, and you're right - it does reduce clutter and the need for jump-points. But that's also a problem, because it removes some of the skill of the game. If your WA nation can only update once per cycle, then you have to figure out how to work around that problem.

Now, if you could come up with something similar that actually added depth to the game, I would feel much more confident in this kind of proposal.

[Mr Conservative]

Can Max afford to lose the revenue of all the stamps wasted on updating puppets?

If you move from region1 -> region2, update in region2, then move region2 -> region1 before region1 updates, are your endos in region1 still valid? Or did you lose all your endos from region1 when you updated in region2?

For my 2c on the matter: The NS world already looks spammy enough with hundreds or thousands of regions out there tagged. This would just let it happen faster.

[August]

If your WA nation can only update once per cycle, then you have to figure out how to work around that problem.

Now, if you could come up with something similar that actually added depth to the game, I would feel much more confident in this kind of proposal.

We already have figured out how to work around that problem. As you probably know, the solution is "switchers," which are not difficult to make or intellectually challenging to use, just time-consuming. Forcing tedium on players is not the same as adding skill.

Posing interesting suggestions that add depth to the game is a great way to get shot down instantly, because nobody can agree on them. I am sure you are aware of that as well. This is not meant to be a controversial idea, because I want it to actually happen.

Can Max afford to lose the revenue of all the stamps wasted on updating puppets?

Maybe that was a joke, but most R/Ders disable recruitment messages for their switchers, and blocked stamps get refunded. This would have little to no impact on site revenue.

In your hypothetical scenario, I imagine the nation would retain any endorsements from nations that a) were endorsing it before, b) moved regions along with it (without updating in separate regions), and c) stayed in the WA. This is the way it already works.

I fail to see how this would lead to an increase in tagging. This helps defenders just as much as raiders. My views on tagging are not a secret--I would not suggest something with the intent of making that practice easier. It seems to me that if you were concerned about how spammy the NS world looks, you might be interested in ridding it of a few bloated puppet storage regions, which this suggestion would accomplish.

[Mr Conservative]

Can Max afford to lose the revenue of all the stamps wasted on updating puppets?

Maybe that was a joke, but most R/Ders disable recruitment messages for their switchers, and blocked stamps get refunded. This would have little to no impact on site revenue.

Huh, you really take the time to do that? I always just never open the TG folder when I create a new nation.

You're nicer than I, I suppose.

EDIT:Jacked up the quote

[August]

Maybe that was a joke, but most R/Ders disable recruitment messages for their switchers, and blocked stamps get refunded. This would have little to no impact on site revenue.

Huh, you really take the time to do that? I always just never open the TG folder when I create a new nation.

You're nicer than I, I suppose.

EDIT:Jacked up the quote

I do not have many switchers, myself, but yes, I take the time to manually disable recruitment messages. Anyway, that does not matter--it is common practice to use the NS++ puppet generator to make switchers en masse, and that tool automatically changes the telegram settings to block recruitment.

Even if everyone made their R/D puppets manually and left recruitment enabled, I disagree that intentionally wasting players' money is a good reason to not make a technical change.

[Vincent Drake]

I strongly support this as a military gameplayer who routinely has to lead and train newbies on ops that require frequent switching, sometimes over 60 times. Switching can be difficult to understand and only a handful of players can do it quickly. I also have 92 switchers and there are days when I have to spend all of them.

There is no skill in creating and maintaining switchers. You can literally let a script do most of the former and all of the latter. The need to use them is a massive time burden, both during and outside of update. Prepping all of them and moving all of them around can take half an hour. Switching and recrossing are just a pain and don't add anything of value to military gameplay. The skill is in identifying what to do, the nation you do it on should be irrelevant.

I manually disable recruitment TGs on all switchers, wouldn't want my own regions' stamps to get wasted on them.

For my 2c on the matter: The NS world already looks spammy enough with hundreds or thousands of regions out there tagged. This would just let it happen faster.

Not having to switch would benefit both sides. Raiders could go for a lot more targets and defenders would be able to keep up with more jumps. To be perfectly honest, reductions in the time it takes to do things favor defenders more than raiders. If it takes a defender longer to restage than the raider interval, common with newbies, they won't even make any jumps! I couldn't say for sure whether more or less regions would get tagged. I know my people would be more effective at defenses and more motivated to detag, especially the newbies, but raiders' willingness to raid is beyond my control.

Also, if you consider tagged regions to be spam and are bothered enough to complain about it, why not do something about it? Come with me on a high speed detagging run and experience the pain of switching. You'll need to make at least 50 nations, prepped and in SD, and re-prep them twice a day There's kind of a reason why detagging is not a popular activity...

[Galiantus III]

-snip-

Alright. You sold me. I support.

[USS Monitor]

Even if everyone made their R/D puppets manually and left recruitment enabled, I disagree that intentionally wasting players' money is a good reason to not make a technical change.

I don't think intentionally making people waste money is going to be a decisive factor. NS is run by people who actually like the site, not a bunch of money-grubbers that just want to milk it for money any way we can.

The original comment about wasted stamps was probably a joke anyway.

As for your suggestion, I'm not sure how it would affect the site from a player perspective and I don't know whether it would be good or bad. I mostly hang out on the forums and keep my nations parked in the same regions, so this wouldn't affect me as a player to the extent that it affects other people.

From a mod point of view, it would probably cut down on the clutter that game mods have to wade through behind the scenes when we're looking for bad custom fields, or working on certain other things.

[Moctezuma]

I think its a great idea. While I'm not involved in R/D, yet, this will help mobile users a ton I bet. They would be able to keep up with the computer based players a lot better, and it would cut down the 40-60 second switch time .

[Galiantus III]

As for your suggestion, I'm not sure how it would affect the site from a player perspective and I don't know whether it would be good or bad. I mostly hang out on the forums and keep my nations parked in the same regions, so this wouldn't affect me as a player to the extent that it affects other people.

I don't think it would affect the site much from the perspective of an average player. The only effect this might have is raiders and defenders will be able to do about 50% more in an update than they do now, so we'll end up with more tagging than before, but on the flip-side, defenders will be able to detag more effectively, so this should balance out.

[August]

The only effect this might have is raiders and defenders will be able to do...

Those of us who like region-building will have fewer jump points to compete with. That is the largest benefit I would personally see from this, though it is not why I made the suggestion. Also, as I mentioned in the OP, there could be a minor drop in server load without all those puppets and WA application emails.

[Lenlyvit]

I really agree with this whole thread. Having nations update more than once in an update won't only help R/D as a whole, but the NS servers too like August stated. It'll allow R/D operations to proceed not only at a faster rate, but more accurately than ever before due to being able to watch triggers earlier instead of switching. Less jumps will be missed, with more tags/detags happening to keep people interested in military gameplay.

It would also cut down considerably on military puppet nations throughout NS, eliminating the switchers that number in the *thousands*. The update would proceed faster, the servers won't be getting loaded with WA applications/admits/resignations, and it'll give a better representation on *real* regions that aren't full of puppets.

[August]

It would also cut down considerably on military puppet nations throughout NS, eliminating the switchers that number in the *thousands*. The update would proceed faster, the servers won't be getting loaded with WA applications/admits/resignations, and it'll give a better representation on *real* regions that aren't full of puppets.

This is an excellent point that I actually had not thought of. How many regions exist just because someone left their switchers behind instead of moving them back to their jump point? There may be thousands of regions kept alive only by tag puppets, their natives having CTE'd long ago. This creates a cycle where truly dead regions get tagged again and again as the used switchers pile up. Killing switchers does not just shrink the big jump points, it prunes many of the "deadwood" regions (to borrow an old term).

[Roavin]

I like this idea in principle. Still, though, here are several potential problems I can think of:

• Tag runs continue to be triggered typically by nations freshly moved into regions. So an invader setting up a tag run will still have 30-60 nations moving around to set triggers for.
• Do we want nations to pick up influence in each region it updates in? As we know, the SPDR score is a combination of all influence scores a nation holds in all regions. I don't know how this is calculated within the game, but I presume that when the SPDR score is calculated, it doesn't actually open every region to check a nation's influence there, but rather stores the influence in each region per-nation. If the game has to query the region for calculating that, would having influence in 100+ regions be significantly slower than in, say, 3-5 for frequently used military switchers?
• What happens to endorsements? As it is now, an endorsement on a nation is cleared when the nation updates and the endorsing nation has updated already in another region. A nation that misses a jump coming from an already-updated region; would that nation's endorsement of another nation that did make the jump then disappear?
• .... more as I think of them

[August]

"Tag runs continue to be triggered typically by nations freshly moved into regions. So an invader setting up a tag run will still have 30-60 nations moving around to set triggers for. "
I am out of the loop, admittedly, but I thought the Last WA Update thing killed the practice of triggering with nations. Why use a nation, which is time-consuming to place and could be detected by defenders, when you could just refresh an API shard?

"Do we want nations to pick up influence in each region it updates in?"
Should not matter. Influence decays fast enough that nations would lose their influence in previous regions as soon as they gained in the next, unless they were doing a tag run with ten nations for some reason. Regardless, it would decay every time the nation updated, which could be hundreds of times in a day.

"would having influence in 100+ regions be significantly slower than in, say, 3-5 for frequently used military switchers?"
Doubt it. Still the same number of regions, just spread among a different number of puppets, right? In fact, it would probably be faster with a smaller number of nations because it would decay so quickly, and before long they would have no influence at all in most of the regions.

"A nation that misses a jump coming from an already-updated region; would that nation's endorsement of another nation that did make the jump then disappear? "
Seems like it would, yes.

[Galiantus III]

"Tag runs continue to be triggered typically by nations freshly moved into regions. So an invader setting up a tag run will still have 30-60 nations moving around to set triggers for. "
I am out of the loop, admittedly, but I thought the Last WA Update thing killed the practice of triggering with nations. Why use a nation, which is time-consuming to place and could be detected by defenders, when you could just refresh an API shard?

So far as I know, most people are still using manual triggers. If we're going to be making a change like yours, though, then we might as well also make it even easier to detect when a region updates, as that really is the core mechanic of triggering.

[Raionitu]

"Tag runs continue to be triggered typically by nations freshly moved into regions. So an invader setting up a tag run will still have 30-60 nations moving around to set triggers for. "
I am out of the loop, admittedly, but I thought the Last WA Update thing killed the practice of triggering with nations. Why use a nation, which is time-consuming to place and could be detected by defenders, when you could just refresh an API shard?

Last WA update tells you when it updated last update. Just the fact of major versus minor means that that is not an accurate depiction of when to jump. Add in the existence of variance, and anyone trying to trigger off of that is either not going to make it in at all, or be so early fendas can take their jolly time getting in and still block them.
To address the "problem" you were replying to, that's the way things already are. So that's not really a problem with this idea, just something it doesn't cover. This changing wouldn't add anything onto how much work triggers already do. (Well, theoretically you could keep moving the same trigger nation and have it keep updating to track update as you went, but that's a whole 'nother can of worms)

[Flanderlion]

As in, why do you need a trigger nation to tell you when the region 10 seconds, 30 seconds etc. before when the game actually tells you? Placing trigger nations seems not only pointless, but actually risking the op unnecessarily.

I don't like the idea, I like switching, I like making switcher lines, I like having nations that have already updated throwing a spanner in the works and having to get some random to quickly switch their nation before an op. But that is my personal opinion.

For NS in general, having less nations is less server load, but players are less likely to try out the game if they see it has a small amount of nations play the game vs a large amount. Not to mention, more tags in the same time period, which isn't exactly ideal. Also tags are more likely to hit active regions because some of regions being constantly tagged are made out of R/D pups that have forgot to move back.

Seems like it'll be a lot of work, for a small amount of players, which overall wouldn't have much more impact than a slightly reduced server load and likely will be at the expense of other players.

[August]

So far as I know, most people are still using manual triggers.

What part of this is not manual?

Last WA update tells you when it updated last update. Just the fact of major versus minor means that that is not an accurate depiction of when to jump. Add in the existence of variance, and anyone trying to trigger off of that is either not going to make it in at all, or be so early fendas can take their jolly time getting in and still block them.
To address the "problem" you were replying to, that's the way things already are. So that's not really a problem with this idea, just something it doesn't cover. This changing wouldn't add anything onto how much work triggers already do. (Well, theoretically you could keep moving the same trigger nation and have it keep updating to track update as you went, but that's a whole 'nother can of worms)

I was not suggesting that people trigger directly off Last WA update. As Flanderlion said, it makes a lot more sense to refresh the shard to tell you when your 1-, 10-, 20-second window starts than to do the same thing with a nation. It is the exact same thing, triggering one region by watching for an earlier region to update, except one method is less time-consuming and less detectable.

I don't like the idea, I like switching, I like making switcher lines,

Nothing about this change would prevent you from switching.

"players are less likely to try out the game if they see it has a small amount of nations play the game vs a large amount"
Relatively speaking, this is not a terribly large game. There are games with player counts in the millions. I doubt anyone will be turned away if NS has 175000 nations instead of 185000. Otherwise, it would have died back in 2009/2010 when there were only 50000 living nations. That happens to be when I started, and it had no effect on me.

Also, when you first arrive in NS, it says "five million nations created" or something to that effect. I have met players (not brand-new ones) who believe that is the number of currently active nations. People are going to think whatever they want to think.

"Not to mention, more tags in the same time period, which isn't exactly ideal."
Not really. This helps defender speed just as much as it helps raiders. You can expect a lot more hits to get blocked.

"Also tags are more likely to hit active regions"
How many "active" regions get tagged in the first place? In general, regions that are active have at least two people in them--ie, they can elect a delegate among themselves. Right now, I count 1761 founderless, non-passworded regions, 1655 of which have no delegate. Even assuming that number gets cut in half by the removal of dead regions kept alive by switchers, why would anyone target one of the 106 regions with delegates (including the GCRs), when there are 827 completely defenseless regions out there?

[Fauxia]

I like this idea, though I don’t know much about the technical stuff

[August]

No new input, just bumping this, as it appears to have been forgotten.

[Frisbeeteria]

as it appears to have been forgotten.

Or deliberately ignored. Absence of staff posting often means, "nah".