Liberations are now literally impossible

[Dawn Denac]

Moving puppets into your own region is not considered puppet flooding.

Thank you, Elu. This part of the problem wasn't clear in Roavin's OP.

So . . . my question is why wouldn't the moderators broaden the concept of "puppet flooding" to include regions that you've created to disrupt update or otherwise, just mass intentional disruption of update in general?

I mean, if defenders were to plump 1000s of nations into the target-region, it'd be puppet flooding.

But you're saying, invaders can create a region near the the target-region to accomplish the exact same thing effectively as defenders would wish to do but in reverse - and it isn't puppet flooding?

What we're talking about here is puppet flooding by stealth and one of the most egregious cases of it, I've ever heard of or contemplated.

I maintain that this issue should first be considered by Game Moderators before it becomes an administration issue. Is this really how they want to interpret and enforce the rules? It walks all over the puppet flooding rule. Defenders have carefully obeyed the rule for years - but invaders get to stake out a massive exception of it for themselves? Doesn't seem fair and it'll have a demonstrably poor impact on Military Gameplay. The only way I can think of, off the top of my head, to combat this puppet flooding is with more puppet flooding to expand the window and give yourself more time to re-calibrate. This kind of "literal" interpretation of what is and isn't puppet flooding will spiral out of control by encouraging puppet flooding tit-for-tat.

The exception for puppet flooding should be reserved for legitimate uses - honest players who are maintaining a puppet storage region. Not gameplayers manipulating update by moving thousands of nations back and forth at a certain timeframe. It makes a joke of the rules.

Visible confusion

Or....you can have a manual trigger instead of a script? Use a manual trigger who will -sit- and be able to adjust far quicker than editing your script for causing a mass jump. There's a reason we have them. Humans can account better for error than code.

So the Drewpocalypse was also puppet flooding I'm guessing by this logic, does that demand an immediate puppet sweep of every nation involved during that timeframe that was created as well?

I get the whole darkspawn aesthetic we've got going and it's cool and all, but when raiders do something, it's the hearth of evil and rulebreaking and the mods/admins must take action because you find it unfair?

[Dawn Denac]

[quote="Roavin";p="37504971"-Original Roavin post but snipped-[/quote]

Why is the game basically over for defenders? This same thing happened when Drew came around, and it certainly screwed with everyone's trigger timings then. It's not the end of R/D that you missed one liberation. The most the site staff could try at this point is just...what, making update shorter or longer I guess? The landscape/"battleground" will always be shifting and changing. If we don't change it up, it gets stale and then we get threads about people complaining about how boring R/D/ is.

Edit: I can't edit this properly without the game freaking out and quadposting.

[Iris and Metis]

Suppose that admin's response to this thread were another update order reshuffle.

Suppose also that a region, which is a worthy target to mount such a liberation as this one, was placed immediately after The North Pacific with its 9,000 nations all moving about and processing issues.

What are defenders to do in that situation? Whether in a case of the large region being artificially created or not, it seems like a different triggering method would need to be developed to handle that reality. Energy lamenting that current ones are not applicable is simply wasted.

I'm not going to go into details but that would be absolutely fine for us.

There are clearly a lot of people that don't understand this issue from a technical perspective (not directed at you, Refuge). This is quite a critical issue that in some circumstances will mean that defenders simply don't have a chance at winning the numbers game against an active delegate.

We can do enough (and already are) to try and ensure that it's not going to be true of every liberation but its just going to be another big step towards making r/d overly complex, inaccessible, and completely unfairly imbalanced to the point where effort and probability of success just aren't going to be at a workable level for some liberations to be worth attempting.

We can just point natives to the technical forum rather than do anything to help them, but the point i keep going on and on about is that this just isn't a good route for the game. Everyone can keep chucking their unworkable solutions at Roavin and I but noone has yet told me why this is a positive for the game that it worth keeping.

[Mallorea and Riva]

Moving puppets into your own region is not considered puppet flooding.

Thank you, Elu. This part of the problem wasn't clear in Roavin's OP.

So . . . my question is why wouldn't the moderators broaden the concept of "puppet flooding" to include regions that you've created to disrupt update or otherwise, just mass intentional disruption of update in general?

I mean, if defenders were to plump 1000s of nations into the target-region, it'd be puppet flooding.

But you're saying, invaders can create a region near the the target-region to accomplish the exact same thing effectively as defenders would wish to do but in reverse - and it isn't puppet flooding?

What we're talking about here is puppet flooding by stealth and one of the most egregious cases of it, I've ever heard of or contemplated.

I maintain that this issue should first be considered by Game Moderators before it becomes an administration issue. Is this really how they want to interpret and enforce the rules? It walks all over the puppet flooding rule. Defenders have carefully obeyed the rule for years - but invaders get to stake out a massive exception of it for themselves? Doesn't seem fair and it'll have a demonstrably poor impact on Military Gameplay. The only way I can think of, off the top of my head, to combat this puppet flooding is with more puppet flooding to expand the window and give yourself more time to re-calibrate. This kind of "literal" interpretation of what is and isn't puppet flooding will spiral out of control by encouraging puppet flooding tit-for-tat.

The exception for puppet flooding should be reserved for legitimate uses - honest players who are maintaining a puppet storage region. Not gameplayers manipulating update by moving thousands of nations back and forth at a certain timeframe. It makes a joke of the rules.

The point of the rule is to keep players from slamming dozens, hundreds, or thousands of nations into someone else's region. If you're doing it to your own region, why should the mods care? It doesn't harm anyone, and to expand the definition of the puppet flooding rule is to do exactly what mods don't want - put them into the sticky situation of figuring out when it's ok and when it's not.

There's no difference between a defender doing this or a raider. If defenders create their own region to flood to counter, cool beans. No one gets hurt by that, no one cares. It's not an issue for moderation.

Whether making this technique more difficult is a good thing isn't something admin can be expected to determine yet.

That technical fix isn't my preferred solution, because it doesn't actually solve the problem.
The game was fine before, theres no negative from just making it illegal. Most of us knew about it before but didn't feel the need to create unfair advantages to get our wins unless it was an operational necessity.

My point is that you assume the existence of a problem that either moderation or admin needs to solve. Of course it seems like one right now, it's unprecedented in terms of scale. Having seen the "Liberations are dead, defending is dead" procession come by a few times, I'm not buying flowers for the funeral yet. Maybe raiders decide it's not worth the effort, maybe fendas come up with a way to counter it, I don't know.

I don't question the ability of the defender sphere to come up with tactics, but I'm not surprised you haven't come up with a fool proof way to beat this yet. It's been what... a day? Calling for admin/mod action already is premature.

[Miss Bad Life Choices]

I don't question the ability of the defender sphere to come up with tactics, but I'm not surprised you haven't come up with a fool proof way to beat this yet. It's been what... a day? Calling for admin/mod action already is premature.

Kind of just going to add onto this if that's okay. This isn't a strategy or idea that the Three Silly Hawkies:tm: came up with in the 12 hours between hitting South Pacific and the following minor. This is a tactic we've had in our minds for a while. We've had time to think about this strategy and how to respond to things defenders do to stop us. I'm sure you guys are going to come up with ideas that'll make us have to entirely re-think our ideas and I honestly look forward to that.

That said -- congrats on all the updaters you got. I really feel like this is going to Technical too early though.

[North East Somerset]

Predictably entitled behaviour from a group, to the extent that they think rather than putting the work in to solve the problem, the easiest solution is to have a good old moan at the admin/mods and demand them to make everything better again! I don't think raiders would dream of reacting like this to what essentially amounts to their own shortcomings. I guess they think maybe that these rants will land on some favourable ears, but I hope not.

I love the dramatic title "Liberations are now literally impossible" - you'd think this was Predator all over again, and as for it's "basically game over for the defender military game" - I guess we can all dream, but seriously come on...

The reality is that its still perfectly possible to do a trigger timing accurate enough to be effective for the purposes of this kind of scale of liberation, even with the "update bending". There are multiple more sophisticated ways to mitigate against the issue, but fundamentally they needn't have completely missed these updates like they did. Scripts are great, but if you understand the maths, which you must have done to write the scripts, then just use a bit of common sense to create some adjustment factors. You could soon "unbend" it just with some rule-of-thumb calculations, on the spot, based on what you could see was happening. This was done routinely years ago, and was often invaluable. And then, stop timing it so damn tight, its completely over the top. Even if the RO/BC Officers can eject 1/second, and its certainly not 1/second/officer, you could have still got a huge amount of units through if you'd been a bit more conservative and left some extra time for the move. Sure it works both ways, if you build in the uncertainty, you might time too early sometimes, and get more ejected than you would have hoped - but at least you won't completely miss, twice in a row! This really is not the impossible mission you are making it out to be at all. You're making it hard with your absurd tactics.

And then the fact that defenders managed to recruit a pool of 90 updaters really just goes to show that nothing needs rebalancing at all in R/D. The potential is there for a successful liberation, it just needs a bit more nous from those involved in the triggering/commanding. Its a learning process, don't make it too easy for them, or they'll never improve.

[Iris and Metis]

I don't question the ability of the defender sphere to come up with tactics, but I'm not surprised you haven't come up with a fool proof way to beat this yet. It's been what... a day? Calling for admin/mod action already is premature.

You're not listening to my point, we can counter this in part, but these tactics exhausted to their limit will result in thousand of nations and regions being created just for this one minor reason - that will impact the game more than it benefits r/d.

This isn't just defender moaning, we can use these tactics, we can use them to our advantage, but noone else seems to be considering whether we actually want that.

If an alternative, admin-led solution isn't seriously considered asap then this will happen regardless but r/d will increasingly become the battleground of script warriors and puppet spammers - which is a negative for everyone else who might like to be involved. The fact that some regions will be near impossible to liberate mathematically is only a part of this.

The r/d game was more challenging and encouraged more cooperation and skill without this. We could just make it illegal and go back to that, or watch as this becomes an increasingly tedious play park for the most dedicated/sophisticated few.

P.S. the sniping from people who clearly have no idea about the technicalities here is entertaining but unconstructive

[Mallorea and Riva]

I don't question the ability of the defender sphere to come up with tactics, but I'm not surprised you haven't come up with a fool proof way to beat this yet. It's been what... a day? Calling for admin/mod action already is premature.

You're not listening to my point, we can counter this in part, but these tactics exhausted to their limit will result in thousand of nations and regions being created just for this one minor reason - that will impact the game more than it benefits r/d.

This isn't just defender moaning, we can use these tactics, we can use them to our advantage, but noone else seems to be considering whether we actually want that.

If an alternative, admin-led solution isn't seriously considered asap then this will happen regardless but r/d will increasingly become the battleground of script warriors and puppet spammers - which is a negative for everyone else who might like to be involved. The fact that some regions will be near impossible to liberate mathematically is only a part of this.

The r/d game was more challenging and encouraged more cooperation and skill without this. We could just make it illegal and go back to that, or watch as this becomes an increasingly tedious play park for the most dedicated/sophisticated few.

P.S. the sniping from people who clearly have no idea about the technicalities here is entertaining but unconstructive

I'm listening, but I'm also not convinced that anyone has any idea how this will play out over the next day, week, month, year, or 18 years. You might be right - we might sit here at some point in the future and say "Wow, that really did make liberations impossible!" or "Wow, that really made it a race between script warriors and puppet spammers!" This might also be a flash in the pan that y'all cancel out in a week's time after Tim has a drink or two and figures out a way around it.

I don't question the ability of the defender sphere to come up with tactics, but I'm not surprised you haven't come up with a fool proof way to beat this yet. It's been what... a day? Calling for admin/mod action already is premature.

Kind of just going to add onto this if that's okay. This isn't a strategy or idea that the Three Silly Hawkies:tm: came up with in the 12 hours between hitting South Pacific and the following minor. This is a tactic we've had in our minds for a while. We've had time to think about this strategy and how to respond to things defenders do to stop us. I'm sure you guys are going to come up with ideas that'll make us have to entirely re-think our ideas and I honestly look forward to that.

That said -- congrats on all the updaters you got. I really feel like this is going to Technical too early though.

Took us 18 years to come up with it

[Sedgistan]

Predictably entitled behaviour from a group, to the extent that they think rather than putting the work in to solve the problem, the easiest solution is to have a good old moan at the admin/mods and demand them to make everything better again! I don't think raiders would dream of reacting like this to what essentially amounts to their own shortcomings. I guess they think maybe that these rants will land on some favourable ears, but I hope not.

I love the dramatic title "Liberations are now literally impossible" - you'd think this was Predator all over again, and as for it's "basically game over for the defender military game" - I guess we can all dream, but seriously come on...

This part of your post is utterly unhelpful and does not belong in Technical. Smack talk and gloating go in Gameplay. Serious, good faith discussion (which yes, can include saying you don't think there is a problem here that needs Mod/Admin intervention) goes in Technical. The second part of your post (unquoted) was fine. Keep it to that in Technical in future.

[Mingulay Isle]

Greetings,

Core problem is that making it easier for Defenders to Liberate a region also makes it easier for Invaders to invade a region in the first place, and harder for Defenders to defend at the moment of invasion. From a technical perspective, a liberation attempt is exactly the same as an invasion since the game code cannot not judge on reasons and intent.

From a technical perspective maybe. But that overlooks the strategic perspective; raiders are usually the ones trying to run with a tight trigger to evade the opposition, defenders are generally are the opposition, trying to get in within the trigger and endo a native del. If staff commits to it being acceptable we have no reason not to do it constantly; purely to force invaders to loosen their triggers; except that if we did that we can be pretty confident that it would end in a puppet sweep.

[North East Somerset]

Predictably entitled behaviour from a group, to the extent that they think rather than putting the work in to solve the problem, the easiest solution is to have a good old moan at the admin/mods and demand them to make everything better again! I don't think raiders would dream of reacting like this to what essentially amounts to their own shortcomings. I guess they think maybe that these rants will land on some favourable ears, but I hope not.

I love the dramatic title "Liberations are now literally impossible" - you'd think this was Predator all over again, and as for it's "basically game over for the defender military game" - I guess we can all dream, but seriously come on...

This part of your post is utterly unhelpful and does not belong in Technical. Smack talk and gloating go in Gameplay. Serious, good faith discussion (which yes, can include saying you don't think there is a problem here that needs Mod/Admin intervention) goes in Technical. The second part of your post (unquoted) was fine. Keep it to that in Technical in future.

I do think the OP was grossly over-dramaticised, and my response was thus a reaction in that vein, but I appreciate the direction that is not suitable in this domain. I agree though that I certainly wouldn't want that to detract from my fundamental point. Which is that it's relatively easy to work around this challenge, and by engaging in some reasonable tinkering with update timing calculations adjustment factors, and even on the day of these events by simply accepting a degree of randomness/variance through moving a bit earlier, a much more favourable outcome would have been achieved than 80-90 updaters completely missing update twice in a row. Perhaps not perfection, but the point is that a degree of practicality or "nous" is required in this situation by Commanders, rather than just living in a perfect world of perfect scripts and then reacting by posting 'something like this', to put it delicately, when it doesn't work. Thats without doing anything more sophisticated in triggering terms, of which I have heard multiple suggestions which would work, but I think sometimes we try and come up with overcomplicated solutions to simple problems. A smokescreen of technical gibberish and "oh you clearly have no idea about the technicalities" (quoted verbatim from a comment above) - to cover up for the often much more simple reality - tactical operational shortcomings that don't need a grand solution from Technical.

[Devi]

except that if we did that we can be pretty confident that it would end in a puppet sweep.

Let's ease up on the doomsaying, thanks

Moving puppets into your own region is not considered puppet flooding.

[Roavin]

@Roavin: the option I put forth would of course only be needed in case a bender region is created, which is not even remotely every region invaded. Plus there's a way to do that way way more efficiently than you describe (leaving you to figure that one out for yourself), and when I created Kyzikos back in the day it was the very last region, not merely 'close enough'. I also had created quite a number of others which were very very close. By myself, in two days worth of updates, with just a few dozen puppets. Don't tell me something cannot be done when I've already done it

I suspect you phrased this very carefully, but I think I have a general idea about what you may be referring to and it's not too far off from what some of us have pondered already. It's still not a particularly nice solution, though; for the most part, the same arguments I mentioned earlier still apply.

Can we leave the disingenuous arguments out of Technical, please?
Leaving aside Refuge's point that the bending region was a good four regions out, rather than immediately before- which would bring the listed odds down *drastically*, even being merely four regions out is far from guaranteed for any given op unless raiders were to mass-found regions themselves in search of a suitable fit.
You're presenting literally the worst-case scenario here, which straight-up isn't applicable most of the time

I suppose. There isn't much data yet to suggest how close these would be in typical use cases, but in the very few times that I've done it, there usually was a region to be found within single digits before the target.

Suppose also that a region, which is a worthy target to mount such a liberation as this one, was placed immediately after The North Pacific with its 9,000 nations all moving about and processing issues.

What are defenders to do in that situation? Whether in a case of the large region being artificially created or not, it seems like a different triggering method would need to be developed to handle that reality. Energy lamenting that current ones are not applicable is simply wasted.

Our existing methods already cover this case extremely well. That wasn't the issue.

Or....you can have a manual trigger instead of a script? Use a manual trigger who will -sit- and be able to adjust far quicker than editing your script for causing a mass jump. There's a reason we have them. Humans can account better for error than code.

The issue is that a classical trigger approach didn't work here, though, because of the huge region in the way. Adjusting by changing region wouldn't work; and due to the insane variance in early update these days, simple count offs are extremely unreliable. So we used another method that has served us very well over the years .

I'd also disagree on the notion that humans are better than code at this. If it can be broken down to a math problem (and this is one of those cases), correct code beats human every time.

I get the whole darkspawn aesthetic we've got going and it's cool and all, but when raiders do something, it's the hearth of evil and rulebreaking and the mods/admins must take action because you find it unfair?

Why is the game basically over for defenders? This same thing happened when Drew came around, and it certainly screwed with everyone's trigger timings then. It's not the end of R/D that you missed one liberation. The most the site staff could try at this point is just...what, making update shorter or longer I guess? The landscape/"battleground" will always be shifting and changing. If we don't change it up, it gets stale and then we get threads about people complaining about how boring R/D/ is.

I don't question the ability of the defender sphere to come up with tactics, but I'm not surprised you haven't come up with a fool proof way to beat this yet. It's been what... a day? Calling for admin/mod action already is premature.

I suppose I should clarify. The post written this morning was just after the second jump in a row with historic numbers failed for the same reason despite me being up all night working on a way to compensate. It was particularly frustrating because of those numbers — for years some (not all, or even most) on the other side perpetuate the bad faith argument that the pilers needed by raiders are equivalent to the updaters needed by defenders, when that's not the case. We finally just went all out and got the ridiculous numbers (nearly an order of magnitude larger than the other side needs for any of their things), and then they ... fail afterall. So - yeah, I was probably being more melodramatic than I should have been about it.

I've had many wins and many losses in military gameplay, and the failures are just as important as the successes, because those are the ones that give the hard bought lessons on how to improve. The same thing applies just as much to the other side, and despite the fun public shitposting and occasional not-so-fun disingenuous rhetoric in private, players on both sides have improvised, adapted, and overcome against the other side's improvisations and adaptions. This, frankly, is how it should be.

What was different this morning, however, is that for the first time in almost half a decade of defending, an op failed without anything I could directly point to. The problems, both the human ones and the stupefyingly bad luck ones, from the Sunday minor update were accounted for in the past major update (even if I was under a misapprehension initially, I had something to point to as the problem that could be worked against and improved upon). But once the second attempt last major failed for essentially the same reasons, with 90 eager people watching on in silence as the brutality of the bending (combined with just ridiculous early-update variance) killed another jump, there was just nothing I could point to. Absolutely nothing, for the first time ever. And that's basically what brought out this post.

As the day went on, myself and a few others talked about ways to compensate. There certainly still were some human flaws involved on our side that can be improved, but on the other hand the other side hasn't even utilized the full potential brutality of update bending, which I assume they will bring to bear more in the next big occupations. I have a rough general idea of ways to fight against this more, as do others; some that involve a bunch of nations, some that don't. It'll be interesting to see how things go. Most annoying thing is that all of them take significant amounts of effort (proportionally more than the other side), but that's nothing new to us.

So - yes. Perhaps this thread is premature. I'm certainly not arguing for banning the practice, but I thought (and still do) that it's worth talking about update bending for a variety of reasons — even if it paints on me the inevitable badge of "HA HA SORE LOSER FENDA RUNNING TO ADMIN TO CRY LIKE A BITCH" (I'm paraphrasing but the real phrasing from certain places isn't that far off and blisteringly unaware of irony uwu). I don't mind, though.

[The Ambassadors Reception]

Hi,

Are the new "0527..." regions appearing as a result of this tactic?

Thanks

[Refuge Isle]

Hi,

Are the new "0527..." regions appearing as a result of this tactic?

Thanks

I suspect that it is more likely someone is looking for a jump point.

[Mallorea and Riva]

I suppose I should clarify. The post written this morning was just after the second jump in a row with historic numbers failed for the same reason despite me being up all night working on a way to compensate. It was particularly frustrating because of those numbers — for years some (not all, or even most) on the other side perpetuate the bad faith argument that the pilers needed by raiders are equivalent to the updaters needed by defenders, when that's not the case. We finally just went all out and got the ridiculous numbers (nearly an order of magnitude larger than the other side needs for any of their things), and then they ... fail afterall. So - yeah, I was probably being more melodramatic than I should have been about it.

I've had many wins and many losses in military gameplay, and the failures are just as important as the successes, because those are the ones that give the hard bought lessons on how to improve. The same thing applies just as much to the other side, and despite the fun public shitposting and occasional not-so-fun disingenuous rhetoric in private, players on both sides have improvised, adapted, and overcome against the other side's improvisations and adaptions. This, frankly, is how it should be.

What was different this morning, however, is that for the first time in almost half a decade of defending, an op failed without anything I could directly point to. The problems, both the human ones and the stupefyingly bad luck ones, from the Sunday minor update were accounted for in the past major update (even if I was under a misapprehension initially, I had something to point to as the problem that could be worked against and improved upon). But once the second attempt last major failed for essentially the same reasons, with 90 eager people watching on in silence as the brutality of the bending (combined with just ridiculous early-update variance) killed another jump, there was just nothing I could point to. Absolutely nothing, for the first time ever. And that's basically what brought out this post.

As the day went on, myself and a few others talked about ways to compensate. There certainly still were some human flaws involved on our side that can be improved, but on the other hand the other side hasn't even utilized the full potential brutality of update bending, which I assume they will bring to bear more in the next big occupations. I have a rough general idea of ways to fight against this more, as do others; some that involve a bunch of nations, some that don't. It'll be interesting to see how things go. Most annoying thing is that all of them take significant amounts of effort (proportionally more than the other side), but that's nothing new to us.

So - yes. Perhaps this thread is premature. I'm certainly not arguing for banning the practice, but I thought (and still do) that it's worth talking about update bending for a variety of reasons — even if it paints on me the inevitable badge of "HA HA SORE LOSER FENDA RUNNING TO ADMIN TO CRY LIKE A BITCH" (I'm paraphrasing but the real phrasing from certain places isn't that far off and blisteringly unaware of irony uwu). I don't mind, though.

I don't blame you, if I pulled that many updaters and lost due to some clicky bois in an unprecedented use of this tactic I'd be losing my mind. Horrific luck on your part. It's always good to discuss the ramifications of new tactics on gameplay and whatnot. I just don't yet buy the thread title

[Unibot III]

The point of the rule is to keep players from slamming dozens, hundreds, or thousands of nations into someone else's region. If you're doing it to your own region, why should the mods care? It doesn't harm anyone, and to expand the definition of the puppet flooding rule is to do exactly what mods don't want - put them into the sticky situation of figuring out when it's ok and when it's not.

There's no difference between a defender doing this or a raider. If defenders create their own region to flood to counter, cool beans. No one gets hurt by that, no one cares. It's not an issue for moderation.

That is not entirely the premise of the rule.

For instance, if invaders are in the process of griefing a region, it's got 0 nations left, the natives are desperate for help, and a defender were to pump the region full of 100s of nations in the last minute to block a grief . . . that too would be puppet flooding. . . even though the natives probably would appreciate the help. So it's not directly about getting the approval of ownership of a region.

Defenders have, by in large, respected this rule and don't mass flood regions that are being griefed (Note: Unibot was deleted for a case like this, I actually didn't know at the time that "puppet flooding" extended to these cases).

Similarly, defenders have also respected this rule in relation to moving non-WAs to add cover (sticking to a strict one-to-one ratio).

Let's be clear here though, the people maintaining this puppet region are not just managing an innocent little puppet storage, they're moving nations en masse at a specific point in time to manipulate update. It's against the spirit of the puppet flooding rule.

Bear in mind, that puppet flooding a "near update" region could cause problems for a region just as much puppet flooding the region itself. It could obstruct the region from refounding itself (just like puppet flooding). It could obstruct the region from defending itself (just like puppet flooding). It can nuisance a region by manipulating their update time back a forth (just like puppet flooding is a nuisance). Allowing this loophole to the rule allows players to puppet flood a region and nuisance a neighboring region in similar or analogous ways as traditional puppet flooding.

It's just it also has a bad Gameplay impact - by encouraging players to farm for regions (spam), double up on puppet flooding to combat puppet flooding, and encouraging more script-assisted triggering . . . you're creating a slippery slope on top of not enforcing an existing rule.

The easiest answer here is for game moderators to just rule it's puppet flooding, because it is puppet flooding - they're blasting a region full of puppets to create a nuisance in a neighboring region.

Moderators have to recognize that creating a nuisance in a neighboring riding through puppet flooding is effectively very similar, or identical in spirit to puppet flooding in the region itself to create an unwanted nuisance. Especially when the intention of the participants is clear: these folks know what they're doing, they're not sincere puppet hoarders, their intention is to manipulate update full stop and cause problems in the region next door.

[Dawn Denac]

@Roavin: the option I put forth would of course only be needed in case a bender region is created, which is not even remotely every region invaded. Plus there's a way to do that way way more efficiently than you describe (leaving you to figure that one out for yourself), and when I created Kyzikos back in the day it was the very last region, not merely 'close enough'. I also had created quite a number of others which were very very close. By myself, in two days worth of updates, with just a few dozen puppets. Don't tell me something cannot be done when I've already done it

I suspect you phrased this very carefully, but I think I have a general idea about what you may be referring to and it's not too far off from what some of us have pondered already. It's still not a particularly nice solution, though; for the most part, the same arguments I mentioned earlier still apply.

Can we leave the disingenuous arguments out of Technical, please?
Leaving aside Refuge's point that the bending region was a good four regions out, rather than immediately before- which would bring the listed odds down *drastically*, even being merely four regions out is far from guaranteed for any given op unless raiders were to mass-found regions themselves in search of a suitable fit.
You're presenting literally the worst-case scenario here, which straight-up isn't applicable most of the time

I suppose. There isn't much data yet to suggest how close these would be in typical use cases, but in the very few times that I've done it, there usually was a region to be found within single digits before the target.

Suppose also that a region, which is a worthy target to mount such a liberation as this one, was placed immediately after The North Pacific with its 9,000 nations all moving about and processing issues.

What are defenders to do in that situation? Whether in a case of the large region being artificially created or not, it seems like a different triggering method would need to be developed to handle that reality. Energy lamenting that current ones are not applicable is simply wasted.

Our existing methods already cover this case extremely well. That wasn't the issue.

Or....you can have a manual trigger instead of a script? Use a manual trigger who will -sit- and be able to adjust far quicker than editing your script for causing a mass jump. There's a reason we have them. Humans can account better for error than code.

The issue is that a classical trigger approach didn't work here, though, because of the huge region in the way. Adjusting by changing region wouldn't work; and due to the insane variance in early update these days, simple count offs are extremely unreliable. So we used another method that has served us very well over the years .

I'd also disagree on the notion that humans are better than code at this. If it can be broken down to a math problem (and this is one of those cases), correct code beats human every time.

I get the whole darkspawn aesthetic we've got going and it's cool and all, but when raiders do something, it's the hearth of evil and rulebreaking and the mods/admins must take action because you find it unfair?

Why is the game basically over for defenders? This same thing happened when Drew came around, and it certainly screwed with everyone's trigger timings then. It's not the end of R/D that you missed one liberation. The most the site staff could try at this point is just...what, making update shorter or longer I guess? The landscape/"battleground" will always be shifting and changing. If we don't change it up, it gets stale and then we get threads about people complaining about how boring R/D/ is.

I don't question the ability of the defender sphere to come up with tactics, but I'm not surprised you haven't come up with a fool proof way to beat this yet. It's been what... a day? Calling for admin/mod action already is premature.

I suppose I should clarify. The post written this morning was just after the second jump in a row with historic numbers failed for the same reason despite me being up all night working on a way to compensate. It was particularly frustrating because of those numbers — for years some (not all, or even most) on the other side perpetuate the bad faith argument that the pilers needed by raiders are equivalent to the updaters needed by defenders, when that's not the case. We finally just went all out and got the ridiculous numbers (nearly an order of magnitude larger than the other side needs for any of their things), and then they ... fail afterall. So - yeah, I was probably being more melodramatic than I should have been about it.

I've had many wins and many losses in military gameplay, and the failures are just as important as the successes, because those are the ones that give the hard bought lessons on how to improve. The same thing applies just as much to the other side, and despite the fun public shitposting and occasional not-so-fun disingenuous rhetoric in private, players on both sides have improvised, adapted, and overcome against the other side's improvisations and adaptions. This, frankly, is how it should be.

What was different this morning, however, is that for the first time in almost half a decade of defending, an op failed without anything I could directly point to. The problems, both the human ones and the stupefyingly bad luck ones, from the Sunday minor update were accounted for in the past major update (even if I was under a misapprehension initially, I had something to point to as the problem that could be worked against and improved upon). But once the second attempt last major failed for essentially the same reasons, with 90 eager people watching on in silence as the brutality of the bending (combined with just ridiculous early-update variance) killed another jump, there was just nothing I could point to. Absolutely nothing, for the first time ever. And that's basically what brought out this post.

As the day went on, myself and a few others talked about ways to compensate. There certainly still were some human flaws involved on our side that can be improved, but on the other hand the other side hasn't even utilized the full potential brutality of update bending, which I assume they will bring to bear more in the next big occupations. I have a rough general idea of ways to fight against this more, as do others; some that involve a bunch of nations, some that don't. It'll be interesting to see how things go. Most annoying thing is that all of them take significant amounts of effort (proportionally more than the other side), but that's nothing new to us.

So - yes. Perhaps this thread is premature. I'm certainly not arguing for banning the practice, but I thought (and still do) that it's worth talking about update bending for a variety of reasons — even if it paints on me the inevitable badge of "HA HA SORE LOSER FENDA RUNNING TO ADMIN TO CRY LIKE A BITCH" (I'm paraphrasing but the real phrasing from certain places isn't that far off and blisteringly unaware of irony uwu). I don't mind, though.

The majority of my darkspawn quoted post was towards Uni's thing, not your original post. I can see why it's potentially frustrating, but looking back, I'm sure you or some other minds can find creative ways to go on. The battleifled, as I said is constantly shifting. If we don't do some stuff new, even if the practice is already known to exist, then it just gets kinda stale, y'know?

[Raionitu]

From what I can see, it was a combination of the bending and high levels of variance. I'm gonna be honest, does anyone like variance? What purpose was it created to serve, and what purpose is it serving now? Outside of cases like this bending, both sides can still get very accurate triggers, variance is a lot more stable late update from what I hear (I haven't been out at update for awhile), but early on makes everything ridiculous.

So why not reduce/stabilize variance, or just dump it all together? It would make triggering more accessible due to simplifying it, make bending tactics useful but not over powered, and really, would anyone miss it?

[Mingulay Isle]

except that if we did that we can be pretty confident that it would end in a puppet sweep.

Let's ease up on the doomsaying, thanks

Moving puppets into your own region is not considered puppet flooding.

First off, this isn't a technical question. It's a moderation question.

Puppet flooding is one of those nebulous rules that's hard to define.
...
It's situational. Stay out of situations where people complain, and you're fine.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯ This is a situation where people are complaining, maybe we should review if puppet flooding your own region *for the specific purpose of affecting other people's regions* isn't, in fact, fine.

[Red Maw]

One technical solution is that refounded regions dont get the same place in the order, accompanied with a reshuffle - but without a ban it wouldn't prevent this from happening any way (or us creating the aforementioned region boom). Again, this is going to annoy farr more people than just 'lets not do that pls'.

Jump points can also be created by using the same technique Dakota and others used to refound this particular region. The other way to get a jump point would be to found as many regions as you can and hope for the best, which encourages carrying around an army of puppets - the very thing you said you did not wish to see.

The r/d game was more challenging and encouraged more cooperation and skill without this. We could just make it illegal and go back to that, or watch as this becomes an increasingly tedious play park for the most dedicated/sophisticated few.

I thought the problem was that this tactic made liberations too challenging?

You stretched the timings by 1 min 22 seconds at last minor and 2 mins 30 at major. Jumping before that 'bending' just isn't going to be a viable option against an active raider delegate with that much delay.

Most raider delegates take about 6/7 seconds to get their first ban in but then quickly ban at around 1 nation every 3/4 seconds if they are competent - speeding up as defender forces get into the region en masse. That would give them the time to ban 24/25 nations before update at minor (assuming the first takes 7 seconds, the next three take 4s and the rest take 3s) and 47 nations at major. Certain raider leads will be significantly faster once in a rhythm.

A minor raid is likely to be piled to 60 endos by major, and with bans would be requiring a minimum of 107 WAs (arriving on time) for an instant liberation. A major to minor liberation would still require a minimum of 85 WAs. The former has never been achieved in my memory and the latter occurred yesterday for the first time any of us have seen - with many non-regulars taking part and unable to be relied upon for future operations.

I'd love this to be a viable option but it simply won't be on most occasions. Pulling 90+ WAs involved a major recruitment effort with independent/feeder support over a week. For every BC RO the required number potentially increases commensurately. If your recruitment to the cause takes 4/5 days then you're contending with five BC officers ready to ban at the same rate, as well as a far bigger pile (which could be up to 120 from recent experience). At minor, a 120 endo pile with four BC ROs would require a native endorsement count plus updater count of 220 WAs to liberate on an early jump with the maths above.

This is inaccurate. Are you saying defenders have never heard of tightening triggers? If so, perhaps it is time to look into ways to do so, no? You're taking the worst case scenario, which is unlikely - defending is not stupid. Before long, they'll come up with new tactics and strategies, countering this one and others.

---

Personally, I think this is good tactical thinking on TBH's part. If you know you can only ban 1 defender every 4-5 seconds due to bad internet, lack of experience pointing, etc., you're left with very little options. If you have 20 endorsements, and defenders have 30, defenders can simply tighten their triggers and make it so that you've already lost. Something like this can work around bad pageloads or other such issues for a pointman, catching defenders off guard and giving inexperienced raider points a bit more of an edge. It's a semi-creative way of using game mechanics to beat the other side - as R/D has always done, and always will.

I refuse to believe that defending's greatest minds have no option but to sit and stare in defeat. I have not been around for very long, but I am pretty sure such things happened often enough in the past - one side invents a new tactic to give them an edge, the other learns of this tactic and counters and comes up with new strategies themselves. This is the first time this particular tactic has been used on this scale, so it is not completely surprising defenders do not immediately have a plan to work through it. Give it time, and they will.

[Unibot III]

I refuse to believe that defending's greatest minds have no option but to sit and stare in defeat. I have not been around for very long, but I am pretty sure such things happened often enough in the past - one side invents a new tactic to give them an edge, the other learns of this tactic and counters and comes up with new strategies themselves. This is the first time this particular tactic has been used on this scale, so it is not completely surprising defenders do not immediately have a plan to work through it. Give it time, and they will.

This isn't a "new" tactic, defenders hypothesized about "bending" over nine years ago. There's not much you can do to adapt except try to script-assist your trigger formulation more to make a quicker re-calibration, or bend update further to buy time. I'm very sympathetic to the defenders that have been handed this crap sandwich and trying to make something out of it.

The expectation back then was that if invaders tried to mass bend update, they would be rule-breaking because puppet flooding was strictly enforced and nobody was allowed any kind of script-assisted movement of nations (making it difficult to move 1000s of nations in and out of a region quickly). At that time, it was assumed that extreme update bending would be infeasible due to administrative factors. I suspected at that time that we might see update bending on a minor scale and hypothesized that invaders might split a smaller batch of nations to distribute to the nearest neighboring regions to try to "covertly" bend update - the sum of the nations collectively would introduce enough variance to obstruct a liberation, but it wouldn't be enough nations to be easily noticeable. It was never on our radar that moderators might allow what effectively amounts to an update singularity.

I don't understand the position of Mall here, it's puppet flooding because you can flood a neighboring region to create a similar/analogous nuisance in the region you're targeting - you can still interfere with their defences, you can still interfere with their refound process. To say, you're allowed to flood your own region, without limitations, ignores situations where flooding your own region can disrupt the game for a neighboring region. And when you have a clear case of an intentional nuisance like this one, it should be closely evaluated.

I'm not a huge fan of an administrative solution (like reshuffling update) because I think the admins want to add randomness and stochastic processes, over a skills-based approach to Military Gameplay. I never liked the idea of artificial variance, for instance. I think it was a proposal that was born out of an anti-gameplayer and paleo-gameplayer attitude ("make it harder to do anything!" & "things are too precise these days"). Randomizing move-times eliminates some degree of skill from gameplay to the sole advantage of incumbents. My expectation was artificial variance would disproportionately affect liberation teams, where the stakes are highest and the need for accuracy is the greatest because you're facing a live delegate. (I've written about how tech changes impact liberations here.)

[Numero Capitan]

Jump points can also be created by using the same technique Dakota and others used to refound this particular region. The other way to get a jump point would be to found as many regions as you can and hope for the best, which encourages carrying around an army of puppets - the very thing you said you did not wish to see.

As I've said before, it isn't a perfect solution but you need significantly less puppets to get a reasonably usable jump point (or there are plenty of other ways of getting one) than you do to change update lengths and you can let the puppets die if they don't get you one - whereas presumably update bending puppets will be retained and reused.

I thought the problem was that this tactic made liberations too challenging?

Not the problem. The problem is that, if used to its full potential, update bending could effectively make some occupations liberation-proof if raiders hold the perfect update bend region (which again, they have the advantage in terms of securing it). I'm not aware of any other game mechanic that has the potential to give one side a guaranteed win, and combined with BC ROs it is even more OP.

This is inaccurate. Are you saying defenders have never heard of tightening triggers? If so, perhaps it is time to look into ways to do so, no? You're taking the worst case scenario, which is unlikely - defending is not stupid. Before long, they'll come up with new tactics and strategies, countering this one and others.

Not sure if you're deliberately missing the point here. The whole point was that tight triggers are unusable and Refuge was suggesting defenders should jump before the update bend region (i.e. use super-wide triggers). Its not a worse-case scenario per se, its assuming that raiders will refine this tactic to a greater extent and considering what that progression looks like in terms of r/d gameplay.

In those circumstances we're considering all possible options that come to mind (and noone has suggested anything that hasn't already been discussed and/or implemented on some level). The fact of the matter is that triggering would become so unreliable that the best tactic for liberations would just be wild guesses - which isn't an option a defender culture built on refinement and improvement would embrace.

Probably not a perfect analogy, but its like us telling you that if you don't like how fast we have got at chasing, maybe you should jump into regions outside of update and hope we don't spot you.

The idea that liberations should need a trawl through 18 months of data dumps, with the potential for it to be fruitless, and individually moving thousands of nations just to get a TRIGGER, is ridiculous. All time that takes away from the need to recruit a large updater force than raiders ever need to use too. If they do it right, Raiders can do the first two steps in their own time, find the perfect region and make it impossible for defenders to counter. I'm sure every single raider has zero issue with that, but that's not got any enjoyment in it for me or anyone else.

Personally I won't be training any new officers to do all of the above, I'll be training them to infiltrate and sabotage because it will have a higher chance of success.

[Mallorea and Riva]

I don't understand the position of Mall here, it's puppet flooding because you can flood a neighboring region to create a similar/analogous nuisance in the region you're targeting - you can still interfere with their defences, you can still interfere with their refound process. To say, you're allowed to flood your own region, without limitations, ignores situations where flooding your own region can disrupt the game for a neighboring region. And when you have a clear case of an intentional nuisance like this one, it should be closely evaluated.

What nuisance is the region experiencing? A shift in update time? I suppose we'll have to agree to disagree that a shift in update time is comparable to flooding regional happenings. I understand that's the analogy you're drawing, but I'm not buying it. I'm unaware of the rule ever having been enforced in such a manner.

[Unibot III]

I don't understand the position of Mall here, it's puppet flooding because you can flood a neighboring region to create a similar/analogous nuisance in the region you're targeting - you can still interfere with their defences, you can still interfere with their refound process. To say, you're allowed to flood your own region, without limitations, ignores situations where flooding your own region can disrupt the game for a neighboring region. And when you have a clear case of an intentional nuisance like this one, it should be closely evaluated.

What nuisance is the region experiencing? A shift in update time? I suppose we'll have to agree to disagree that a shift in update time is comparable to flooding regional happenings. I understand that's the analogy you're drawing, but I'm not buying it. I'm unaware of the rule ever having been enforced in such a manner.

So let's say a region wanted to proactively refound their region. Typically you'd wait until update, then eject the lot.

If I were to flood that region with a 100 nations just before update, I'd be interfering with the region's ability to refound. This is a traditional case of puppet flooding. You'd be using a mass number of puppets to nuisance the delegate.

(Full disclosure: "Unibot" was deleted from NS for this exact offense. I was trying to stop a Nazi refound.)

If I were to flood the neighboring region with a 1000 nations just before update, again I'd be interfering with that region's ability to refound by encouraging the delegate to eject themselves and any regional mates prematurely. As far as I'm concerned this is puppet flooding via a neighboring region.

Let me be clear too that I don't think update bending per se is unlawful, I think mass update bending should be interpreted as a puppet flooding violation. I'll explain ....

Puppet flooding is -not- just about cluttering up a regional happenings, as you say it is, Mall. All military gameplayers routinely clutter up regional happenings. Usually gameplayers clutter up a regional happenings to prevent a nation from being "bannable" or create "cover" (delegates might confuse non-WAs with WAs and eject the non-WAs) or (superficially) hide movement. These tactics are used all of the time and military gameplayers typically respect the one-to-one ratio. That is to say, if defenders are going to traffic through a regional happenings to clutter things up, they do it with one nation per player. That was always the understanding. The puppet flooding rule did not prevent a regional happenings from being cluttered at all, it only prevented players from doing so without group cooperation (i.e., one player on their own with ten puppets can't clutter up a regional happenings, you need ten players).

The joke is I could have stopped that Nazi refound in 2009 lawfully if I had just asked a few friends to help me. I didn't know the rules, so I puppet bombed illegally instead. The ethical difference between these two scenarios is if I had asked for help I'd have been relying on the cooperation of players versus one player nuisancing a region disproportionately.

I think that is a good standard to extend to update bending. If you've got a boat load of invader updaters who want to toss a non-WA nation into a neighboring region at the same time to bend update, go for it - that seems legitimate to me - but the update bending we'd be talking about would be on a much smaller scale and it would be more difficult to organize than one bloke moving 1000s of nations around. We'd be talking about delays in terms of seconds or half-seconds, not minutes. Presumably what an invader might do to bend update on a bit larger scale than they could do lawfully with updaters would be to encourage their pile army to move a single non-WA to the neighboring region and then eject a random share of that lot to bend update in reverse. Again, I'm cool with that: everyone would still be respecting the one-to-one ratio which defenders have always tried to keep to. It'd still allow for the strategic manipulation of update, but on a smaller scale that respects the fact one player shouldn't be able to use non-WA puppets to overwhelm a force of ninety players.