Remove Relative Influence Designations

[Custadia]

>words like "squire" and "sprat" mean nothing to anybody without looking at a table and knowing how much influence all of the other region members have-this is particularly difficult to do retrospectively using the daily dumps, which as far as I can make out contain only the relative designations where really the raw scores would be much more useful
>the absolute influence scores aren't a secret-the WA census graphs/bar charts tell you them anyway and they can be obtained using the API
>if the server didn't have to convert between the raw scores and the relative designations, its workload would be reduced and simpler-maybe it would be less likely to throw tantrums during update

So why not just remove the arbitrary designations altogether and always use the raw scores?

[Kaystein]

Not A bad idea. It's not useful and an eyesore on my nation page. Expand my country sidebar; add it there on one line. Remove the box.

[The Sherpa Empire]

I doubt if that would have much impact on the server load. The server hamsters going on strike is a problem caused by labor unions and too much coddling during childhood, which gives them an unrealistic sense of entitlement.

[Ballotonia]

The WA Census shows the SPDR values, which is a measure of the influence a nation has in the entire game. Only for nations which reside within one and the same region for a long time, the SPDR is an indication of the influence the nation holds within that region.

These are not the same values.

Ballotonia

[Eluvatar]

Also, most of the work the server does during update is saving every nation and region. Recomputing influence ranks is a negligible fraction of the total workload.

[Marxist Germany]

I agree here. Replace tge text with the number of influence in the current region or maybe use the raw data.

[Flanderlion]

The 'arbitrary designations' are some of the things that make NS unique. It feels kinda weird to say, but they're the flair etc. that differentiates NS from other sites that just do numbers.

Glancing at them, they easily tell you who has the influence in the region and who doesn't, and whether a nation is alone in the region. They also make influence into a rank rather than just a number.

Functionally they're not hurting anyone, and we've just had 2 admins post that the stats are different and are negligible on the total workload. Seems like a change for changes sake, rather than for any real reason.

[Kaystein]

The 'arbitrary designations' are some of the things that make NS unique. It feels kinda weird to say, but they're the flair etc. that differentiates NS from other sites that just do numbers.

Glancing at them, they easily tell you who has the influence in the region and who doesn't, and whether a nation is alone in the region. They also make influence into a rank rather than just a number.

Functionally they're not hurting anyone, and we've just had 2 admins post that the stats are different and are negligible on the total workload. Seems like a change for changes sake, rather than for any real reason.

I want the aesthetic change! I think it would look better in my sidebar, by making my sidebar one line bigger.

Instead of changing it outright, can we be given an option in settings to pick where the box goes on our nation page? Whether it's included in the nation sidebar or is left on it's own.

It's negligible on the total workload, so what I wrote is something that can be added, right?

[The Sherpa Empire]

Why though?

[Aclion]

Could we keep the names and use a tool-tip to display the regional influence? That way we get the best of both worlds.

obvs mobile reader would need this to work some other way

[WayNeacTia]

Functionally they're not hurting anyone, and we've just had 2 admins post that the stats are different and are negligible on the total workload. Seems like a change for changes sake, rather than for any real reason.

A solution searching for a problem more like it.

[Custadia]

The WA Census shows the SPDR values, which is a measure of the influence a nation has in the entire game. Only for nations which reside within one and the same region for a long time, the SPDR is an indication of the influence the nation holds within that region.

These are not the same values.

Ballotonia

Thanks for clearing that up, I hadn't thought about the way that it's a sum of your influence in all regions. Presumably hiding the raw single-region score was a conscious decision with gameplay in mind and is intentionally inconvenient.
I couldn't find the cross-regional SPDR influence score in the nations dump-was I just not looking hard enough or is it not there? If it isn't, could it be included in future?

Also, most of the work the server does during update is saving every nation and region. Recomputing influence ranks is a negligible fraction of the total workload.

Oh, well. Any reduction in workload would only have been a bonus anyway.

A solution searching for a problem more like it.

No. The problem is the inconvenience of the non-numeric designations and the inaccessibility of the raw single-region scores (and possibly the cross-regional scores retrospectively in the dumps). It's just that this inconvenience is intentional.

The 'arbitrary designations' are some of the things that make NS unique. It feels kinda weird to say, but they're the flair etc. that differentiates NS from other sites that just do numbers.

Glancing at them, they easily tell you who has the influence in the region and who doesn't, and whether a nation is alone in the region. They also make influence into a rank rather than just a number.

Functionally they're not hurting anyone, and we've just had 2 admins post that the stats are different and are negligible on the total workload. Seems like a change for changes sake, rather than for any real reason.

I'm going to respond to this one as if it hadn't been explained to me that the two scores are different:

Flavour's nice but I'd've rather had the functionality.

The game serves regional percentiles for all of the other WA scores, so that could equally have been used to compare a nation's influence with the rest of the region, probably with better resolution.

It's impossible to work with the titles-they're not numbers, you can't calculate anything with them alone (for example anything to do with influence costs). If you don't have a bunch of other information they're practically meaningless-like an ATM that won't tell you your balance, only that you have .00001% of all of the money in whatever continent you're in so you don't know if you can afford to go out for dinner or not.