[Proposal] Faction Gameplay

[Cormactopia Prime]

I'm really very much in favor of this idea in principle, once the details are worked out. I'm not really a detail-oriented person, but I'm sure others will hash out exactly which details might need some tweaking. I mostly wanted to chime in here to encourage admins to give this serious consideration.

It's no secret among gameplayers that gameplay has become extremely stale, and that the lack of meaningful gameplay is reducing healthy political conflict and contributing to a rise in unhealthy interpersonal conflict. I've heard that same concern from gameplayers of various alignments. I don't know how much of that the admins are actually hearing though, because of course you're not involved in our Discord conversations, etc., though Eluvatar may get a chance to see some of it. So basically, I just wanted to make admins aware that the stagnation in gameplay is a real problem. I think this idea, while unprecedented in its scope, would really go a long way toward breathing some new life into gameplay, and not just for existing gameplayers. It would give more players a path to gameplay participation in a way that doesn't rely totally on R/D and the targeting of founderless user-created regions, and I think this new kind of gameplay would be more fun for the people participating. I really think this could make gameplay much more mainstream for more players.

I'll note that I suspect the biggest obstacle to implementation of this would be the time and energy it would take admins to implement it. I can only imagine how much change to the game's mechanical structure that would take. So I also wanted to note that Koth has technical expertise -- it's literally what he does -- and as a Techling like Eluvatar used to be, he could probably actually help implement this, without placing a massive new burden on the existing admins. So that's something that may be worth considering as well, so the time/energy factor won't prevent this from happening.

[Kawaii Schoolgirl]

I am so in favor of this!

[Chingis]

Scrolled through the stuff being discussed in the Discord and honestly the idea seems pretty sound

[Escade]

Considering the calcfication of gameplay and the various merits of this proposal, I hope admin will consider it.

I'm also glad to see how much discussion it has generated on Discord and that speaks to the kind of energy we could use more of.

[Flanderlion]

Haven't made up my mind on this either for or against. Interesting idea though.

Just out of curiosity, if impact is used to turn the St Abby from ours to the imps, how would St Abby itself be able to change back (or to a third faction)? Like, could the delegate just change it as soon as they're pinged?

So is the impact instead of, or in addition to WA delegate votes? I'd personally prefer it in addition but both scaled down to give individuals more of a say.

[The Great Imperator Jeffrey]

This seems like a great proposal. I hope the admins consider it.

[Imperium of Josh]

I'm also glad to see how much discussion it has generated on Discord and that speaks to the kind of energy we could use more of.

It really has generated quite the interest... I'm glad to see a fair number of people behind something like this.

[Chingis]

Haven't made up my mind on this either for or against. Interesting idea though.

Just out of curiosity, if impact is used to turn the St Abby from ours to the imps, how would St Abby itself be able to change back (or to a third faction)? Like, could the delegate just change it as soon as they're pinged?

So is the impact instead of, or in addition to WA delegate votes? I'd personally prefer it in addition but both scaled down to give individuals more of a say.

From the OP and Discord stuff, the way I think it works is if the St Abby guy wanted to stop the annex from happening he would either have to ask his faction to yeet some impact or spend some of his own to outbid the imps.

Once he's moved, he can move back with ease but in doing so, loses all of his impacts and as such if the imps can keep outbidding the NPO then they can keep getting St Abby until the NPO runs out of impact eventually.

Koth can correct me if I screwed something over here but that was the general theme that I got.

[McChimp]

Perhaps there could be a slider in each region's admin page allowing the delegate/founder to decide how much of the region's total influence goes towards the faction's impact. If regions actually have to expend influence in order to produce impact for their faction, you introduce a balance between regional security and factional power which would have to be carefully managed.

I'd like to suggest that even Electors should be unable to freely move between factions. Perhaps they could create a large discount for another faction to incorporate them by declaring their desire to move to it, but aside from opting out of gameplay altogether they should be unable to move without the faction they move to having to pay for it.

[Jar Wattinree]

Hmmm, sounds interesting, implementing alliances as a gameplay feature. Needs ironing, but I like what I see so far.

[Chingis]

If anything the slider should be in the Chair's menu, so that he's able to flick between taking more and doing the work himself/ spreading the load or taking less and giving a bit of autonomy. Electors have no dangers so there shouldn't be much reason to leave them with anything at all, so they should probably have their own "tax rate".

[Chingis]

Actually while we're at it, thoughts on making faction movement a function of non-exec dels as well as exec ones?

There's no harm done in faction movement and if the region in question wanted an opt-out they would be in Sanctuary anyway. Also as it's the only additional change made to nonexec powers it won't affect anything else in any way.

[McChimp]

OK, I've had a little more time to think about my suggestions.

Tax: a percentage of the influence earned by each member of a region is deducted and converted into impact for their faction. For territories, this value is set by the faction chair within a bracket of 10% to 40%, say, preventing the faction from utterly crushing the region's influence. Elector delegates, on the other hand, could choose how much of their influence to donate of their own accord, setting it to any level between 0% and 100%.

Movement: electors are protected, they should not be snatchable by another faction unless their delegate makes that possible. Making a region into an elector should cost a flat percentage of your entire factional influence (one third, perhaps.) and also on then on top of that an amount proportional to their total size. Should an elector want to move to another faction (due to political change or a raid) then they should be able to do so by giving another faction a claim, at which point the faction they wish to move into should have to pay an impact cost proportional to the region's size to incorporate them as a territory.

In terms of R/D and keeping that relevant, raiders could run high turnover factions incorporating lots and lots of small regions with only a few endos as territories via tag raids or could conduct ops in big, founderless regions and use the delegacy to move them into their faction where they could turn it into an elector, turn the tax up to 100% and try and milk as much impact out of them as possible. Alternatively, Imperialists might try to then rebuild the large region they've roped in, making it a longer term investment rather than asset-stripping.

[Imperium of Josh]

The issue of the impact "tax" (read: how a faction makes use of the impact of its regions) is best approached from a more simplistic perspective, I think. As discussed in the discord, a 3 alignment system along the ideals of "Autocratic; Flat; Progressive" would be a relatively simple yet engaging way to handle the calculations. A faction chair could select the system according to their faction's specific culture.

Here's a breakdown of how they'd each roughly work, quoting Koth:

"Autocratic: The Chair literally pulls the Impact from whichever regions it wants, potentially targeting and bankrupting certain regions in the faction. Autocratic factions would require a lot of faith in the Chair to treat the faction fairly, but can easily be the most efficient.

Flat: Flat tax, all regions get their Impact used equally.

Progressive: Proportional taxes, higher Impact regions get more taken when the Chair expends it."

[The Pan Pacific]

This is a really interesting proposal, that's for sure.

To summarize, your arguments are that raiding/defending gameplay is fairly simple and has become boring due to lack of initiative, as the gameplay has become solely focused around number of WA nations, rather than intrigue. Meanwhile, game-created regions have such a massive number advantage that they're highly difficult to counter by user-created regions.

In solution, you want to create a third "tier" of gameplay beyond national and regional - that of factional gameplay. A faction is a collection of regions, similar to how a region is a collection of nations. You propose that WA delegates and/or founders are "representatives" of their region to their faction, and that the WA delegate/founder with the most WA endorsements will become the leader of the faction.

Factions are able to incorporate regions into electors, which can't be claimed by other factions, and territories, which can. Territories can be claimed by other factions using the system you call "impact," which is created by having regions in a faction and determined by the number of WA endorsements in said region. This "claiming" then incorporates said territory into your own faction, meaning that those WA endorsements now generate impact for your own faction. Alternatively, raiding said region can allow you to forcefully incorporate it with WA officer/WAD tools.

I'm interested to see how this really changes anything. Current nationstates gameplay ultimately revolves around the number of WA nations a region has; more WA nations means more WA votes on propositions and, more importantly, more troops. More WA endorsements grant greater ability for WA delegates to eject/ban people and set passwords. Of course, coordination and/or espionage sometimes can triumph over sheer weight of WA nation numbers in raids or defenses, but still fairly rarely. Coordination definitely works in N-Day over numbers, but not, from my experience, so much in raiding/defending if you're trying to get a permanent annexation, and not just griefing.

This new factional system, OTOH, still revolves around gross number of WA nations. Regions with larger amounts of WA endorsements get more impact, can have more electors, and therefore can claim more often. Meanwhile, if things turn ugly, they can martial a much greater number of troops to forcibly take this over. It does give more power over to intrigue and/or politics due to how regional WADs/founders can move from faction to faction, but this isn't much - after all, WA nations can freely move from region to region, and regions can move from non-mechanical alliances freely as well.

This would add some complexity, to be sure; but not that much as it would be totally game-changing. The base gameplay of raiding, defending, and invading founderless regions is still there - if your "claim" fails, you can still simply invade the opposing region, so long as it's founderless.

GCR's would still dominate, given that they're still the top nine in population and all have over 500 endorsements for WAD. Since everything still revolves around population, the largest regions will still have the most influence.

[Chingis]

Secondary Update from the Discord Thinkbank:

The founding requirement was tossed up back and forward and the general consensus was that about 0.3 to 0.5 percent of the current WA member count should be the bar for how many WA nations you need in a faction you seek to found.

How it would be done (as a proposal): There'll be a page where the member regions would contribute to their target faction, bumping up its total WA member count until it reached that quorum and slid off the rails into the big wide NS world. Regions such as TNP, for example, could reach quorum alone while tiny regions seeking to join a newer faction would have to jump into one of the currently filling queues/ make their own little queue.

[McChimp]

The issue of the impact "tax" (read: how a faction makes use of the impact of its regions) is best approached from a more simplistic perspective, I think. As discussed in the discord, a 3 alignment system along the ideals of "Autocratic; Flat; Progressive" would be a relatively simple yet engaging way to handle the calculations. A faction chair could select the system according to their faction's specific culture.

Here's a breakdown of how they'd each roughly work, quoting Koth:

"Autocratic: The Chair literally pulls the Impact from whichever regions it wants, potentially targeting and bankrupting certain regions in the faction. Autocratic factions would require a lot of faith in the Chair to treat the faction fairly, but can easily be the most efficient.

Flat: Flat tax, all regions get their Impact used equally.

Progressive: Proportional taxes, higher Impact regions get more taken when the Chair expends it."

I don't really understand why impact is being stockpiled at a regional level. Electors and territories cannot spend impact so they shouldn't have individual impact values. The faction should have a central impact stockpile which regions contribute to according (somehow) to their total influence production.

The autocratic model is only really useful for raiders. It wouldn't appeal to potential voluntary electors and it would therefore cripple anything that was supposed to be a mutual alliance.

There may not actually be a difference between the "flat" and the "progressive" tax. Either the flat tax is a flat absolute (each of the regions pay the same absolute amount of influence towards impact spending) which is utterly impractical, hobbling the faction by preventing it from spending more than the poorest region can pay an equal share of or-if it's a flat percentage-it's identical to the "progressive" model. That is unless the progressive model scales the percentage tax according to region influence production in which case it would be very difficult to maintain a large region and you start to diverge from any semblance of simplicity anyway.

Besides, I think there would be far more opportunities for gameplay if the tax for each region could be managed individually.

[Ambrella]

This is a very cool idea, and I'm looking forward to the continued debate over particulars.

[USS Monitor]

I think NS could also have a war system far in the future that is achieved via crowdfunding.

We have no intention of doing that and it isn't a matter of money.

Carry on with the discussion about the faction idea.

[King HEM]

This is a good idea. I'll leave the details up to others, but I'd support some iteration of this.

[Imperium of Josh]

This is a good idea. I'll leave the details up to others, but I'd support some iteration of this.

Gotta gather all those famous endorsements

There's still certainly things to be hashed out in detail though. I think I'll leave a non-comprehensive list so people can remember where we were and what questions were asked on the discord when they wake up.

-The issue of impact pooling and whether individual regions can use impact is still around.
-"Economic models" idea needs revision as per chimp's points.
-How are electors selected, exactly? All electors having a say? Elector vetos? Simple appointments by the chairs? Impact costs? Hard cap on electors/faction or a dynamic one? How to make sure electors remain a special case?
-How are chairs selected/elected? Elector vote count per update? Periodic elections?
-Where and how would faction updates fit into update?
-Could there be an RO power dedicated to being a region's faction rep?
-How does neutral ground function as a special case faction, exactly? Can one return to it after leaving? Does its chair have the same powers as elsewhere?

I'm sure there's more I've forgotten but I'll thank myself later.

[Flemingisa]

This is a really interesting proposal, that's for sure.

To summarize, your arguments are that raiding/defending gameplay is fairly simple and has become boring due to lack of initiative, as the gameplay has become solely focused around number of WA nations, rather than intrigue. Meanwhile, game-created regions have such a massive number advantage that they're highly difficult to counter by user-created regions.

In solution, you want to create a third "tier" of gameplay beyond national and regional - that of factional gameplay. A faction is a collection of regions, similar to how a region is a collection of nations. You propose that WA delegates and/or founders are "representatives" of their region to their faction, and that the WA delegate/founder with the most WA endorsements will become the leader of the faction.

Factions are able to incorporate regions into electors, which can't be claimed by other factions, and territories, which can. Territories can be claimed by other factions using the system you call "impact," which is created by having regions in a faction and determined by the number of WA endorsements in said region. This "claiming" then incorporates said territory into your own faction, meaning that those WA endorsements now generate impact for your own faction. Alternatively, raiding said region can allow you to forcefully incorporate it with WA officer/WAD tools.

I'm interested to see how this really changes anything. Current nationstates gameplay ultimately revolves around the number of WA nations a region has; more WA nations means more WA votes on propositions and, more importantly, more troops. More WA endorsements grant greater ability for WA delegates to eject/ban people and set passwords. Of course, coordination and/or espionage sometimes can triumph over sheer weight of WA nation numbers in raids or defenses, but still fairly rarely. Coordination definitely works in N-Day over numbers, but not, from my experience, so much in raiding/defending if you're trying to get a permanent annexation, and not just griefing.

This new factional system, OTOH, still revolves around gross number of WA nations. Regions with larger amounts of WA endorsements get more impact, can have more electors, and therefore can claim more often. Meanwhile, if things turn ugly, they can martial a much greater number of troops to forcibly take this over. It does give more power over to intrigue and/or politics due to how regional WADs/founders can move from faction to faction, but this isn't much - after all, WA nations can freely move from region to region, and regions can move from non-mechanical alliances freely as well.

This would add some complexity, to be sure; but not that much as it would be totally game-changing. The base gameplay of raiding, defending, and invading founderless regions is still there - if your "claim" fails, you can still simply invade the opposing region, so long as it's founderless.

GCR's would still dominate, given that they're still the top nine in population and all have over 500 endorsements for WAD. Since everything still revolves around population, the largest regions will still have the most influence.

We did think about this over on the discord thinktank. One of the proposed ideas was to use a ratio of WA nations in the total region divided by non-wa nation’s. One example would be a region with 100 WA’s and 200 Non-WA nation’s would have a impact of 50 maybe. That could potentially make it so that GCR’s will need UCR’s in order to maintain a good amount of impact generation.

Of course this is only one idea but it’s one that I remember

[Klaus Devestatorie]

I like it too. It's the first thing I've seen in years and years that might contribute towards breaking up the old school Raider/Defender purist lines.

[Bears Armed]

I'd rather we didn't screw up the WA voting system more than it already is.

This.

[Helseth]

I'd rather we didn't screw up the WA voting system more than it already is.

This.

and pray tell what is going to stop the potential of multiple voting blocs similar to WALL from happening? Nothing but region's interests inn being more involved inn the WA. As it is now, I have heard of 3 to 4 possible blocs forming. I imagine a UCR bloc that can't get anywhere near WALL or larger UCR blocs ability, would just recruit in more smaller regions to make up for it.

Though I can't see really much more than 3 or 4 (including WALL) being very successful, but it's entirely possible and would cause ramifications in the WA. Sometimes, things change. You have to adapt. Gameplay has been doing exactly that for a long time. For better and worse.

Even with this idea, it won't stop proposals and campaigns. Whether it's easier or harder in the first place depends on the author, the proposal, the campaigning.


How about, let's think of it this way:
What compromises and ideas can GA and SC regulars think of that may make Koth's proposal more balanced or at least more easier to stomach for those who dominate their time in those sections of NS? Maybe there is none, maybe some people just will outright not accept anything, or maybe there is something that can be agreed on.

Sometimes we need some change, and additionally, this would probably take a good time to even implement. At least come up with some constructive help or some constructive criticism rather than "if it effects the WA at all noooooo!".