Suggestion: delay feeder welcome TGs

[The Free Joy State]

I support Sedge's idea of a short time delay on the welcome TG when a nation founds in a feeder region and think that if that could be achieved with the general throttling of the number of recruitment TGs received at any one time then I think that would be beneficial (preventing overwhelming new players by allowing them the chance to explore which option would suit them best, potentially benefitting UCRs).

I also think that Raovin's suggestion of disallowing a welcome TG from outright telling new players to turn-off recruitment TGs would be a good idea.

[Frisbeeteria]

disallowing a welcome TG from outright telling new players to turn-off recruitment TGs would be a good idea.

That would require Moderation action, monitoring, and possibly punishment. I'm totally against that restriction. I don't think it's possible to effectively enforce it, and I don't think it's fair to enforce it on just one set of regions. Turning off recruitment is always a good idea, and new players need to know about it. It also helps recruiters by not having them waste stamps.

The other is a technical action. Anything that can be automated is better than anything that has to be managed manually.

[The Free Joy State]

disallowing a welcome TG from outright telling new players to turn-off recruitment TGs would be a good idea.

That would require Moderation action, monitoring, and possibly punishment. I'm totally against that restriction. I don't think it's possible to effectively enforce it, and I don't think it's fair to enforce it on just one set of regions. Turning off recruitment is always a good idea, and new players need to know about it. It also helps recruiters by not having them waste stamps.

The other is a technical action. Anything that can be automated is better than anything that has to be managed manually.

For clarity, I was not against players being told turning off the TGs is an option (being made aware of the location and abilities of your TG settings is very useful, especially for players who didn't read all the FAQs and T&Cs first); merely players being told they should block them. It was a wording issue.

[Wymondham]

After Sedge confirmed via discord that this would only affect the feeders and not also the sinkers, I know its in the thread title - but the sinkers have a massive uphill battle with integration as is, I am in full support of this proposal, alongside Elu's proposal. Perhaps it may be a good idea to implement both proposals simultaneously on a 1 or 2 month trial basis to see what impact they have. I also support Veaetmar's suggestion with regards to the Featured region - although I do not know how technically feasible that might be,

[Unibot III]

I have an even simpler solution:

Without fail, these welcome TGs all strongly suggest the recipient to go straight to their telegram filters and block all recruitment telegrams. The West Pacific's one even does this right at the start of the message.

Just disallow this ^.

---

But apart from that, I generally have an issue with how recruitment currently works anyway. New players are overwhelmed by, basically, spam. Half of those regions won't exist in 6 months. And then there are regions like The Invaders that continue to recruit like mad and have new nations join them with an appealing telegram, only to not offer those players any possibilities for engagement and leave them to cease to exist in droves. Just imagine the number of nations that join that region and then leave the game as "boring", which could otherwise have been the next Eluvatar or Evil Wolf or Todd McCloud or Kandarin or Benevolent Thomas or Xoriet or August or HEM etc.; I lose sleep at night over this thought.

The reason feeders advise this is in part retention, yes, but also because it simply makes the game better for new nations. I remember being massively annoyed at the recruitment spam on April 7, 2016 when I was founded; it has not gotten better. And yet, recruitment is important for UCRs, and the good ones put a lot of effort into returns of <1%, of which another single-digit percentage actually stick around for any meaningful length of time. I don't have a solution to this but there has got to be a better way for new nations, UCRs, and GCRs alike.

I think Roavin brings up a great point. The way we've done recruitment in NS has always been crude and overwhelming for newbies.

I remember when I first joined NS, I recieved a half dozen messages about joining various regions - I was extremely confused - like a dazed fish. I ended up struggling through the FAQ to figure out how to create my own UCR (Unibot Town) - made it, moved to it, then realized no one would ever come to the region, so I joined Connecticut, solely because of the name, but realized it was extremely inactive - nothing was happening - so I joined Axis of Absurdity, following some movement on the regional happenings of Connecticut.

It was almost six months from the day I joined NS (May 2008) till around roughly Oct-Nov 2008, when I became aware that the game was actually fairly active, and there were still players actively playing the game! I thought that the game had mostly gone dormant before 2008, and that I was playing on the ruins of an unmoderated anarchy. Which is retrospect, is a bit of a strange assumption to have made, but I actually thought that was the case as a newbie - in part because I had no prior understanding of where the activity was (e.g., which regions, which forums, which IRC channels). I flat out ignored the recruitment messages, because I didn't understand them.

I think what we need is a better mechanism for giving new players an early understanding of what is out there in NS, what's happening in NSGP, which regional communities are especially active, while being fair and competitive for newer regions trying to establish themselves. Vaguely, something like an iframe of the Activity page, comes to mind - so new players are seeing right from the get-go regions that are active and happening. Giving players the tools at an individual level, so they know more about regions when they first start out, will help them make informed decisions about where they want to reside.

The long-standing practice of aerial bombing newbies into residing in x,y,z means newbies just get confused and don't engaged with the advertizing, but it does a disservice to the game in general if newbies move to inactive UCRs instead (which I did), because their perception of the game is then warped around the backwaters they're occupying. A foundered UCR, if it isn't active, is effectively an island to itself - there's very little traffic, very little indication of external activity.

I also wonder if in general, players just need to get over the old stigma of recruiting from UCRs. There's a lot of deadweight UCRs where players are residing, that could be encouraged to be plugged into an active region.

I also wonder if players should be limited from filtering their telegrams until they hit certain pop targets? In the same way that you unlock other features like pre-titles.

And I think there's ways regions could innovate how recruiting is done with soft approaches: where you, the recruiter, try to think like a newbie finding a new region, rather than as a recruiter trying to find a newbie for your new region.

Like I wonder if regions systematically tried to keep their name in a large share of regional happenings in NS, whether that would work as a soft recruitment method. You could scan regional happenings nightly to track the share of regional happenings where your region continued to appear in - and send out teams to keep your name in the happenings abroad. The larger the UCR, and the slower the traffic (Pop/Traffic), the more the overall advertizing value that each happenings poses as an advert market. Lively "networks" of small UCRs (which tend to get ignored by NSGP) would be very high in value because the external movement is low and mostly between one another, but there is a fair amount of genuine activity in these regions that can be tapped as a resource.

I also wonder if there's a possibility for a consortium of major regional recruiters based around the principle of micro-targeting. I'm just spitballing, but I wonder if early nation data could suggest something about the player themselves - like players that create more violent, funny, or radical nations are more pre-disposed to join x,y, or z regions - and if the player skips the intial survey, they're likely of no recruitment value (because newbies don't know they can skip the survey). Analysis of internal recruitment data about what nations are actually attracted to different regions might help UCRs carve out different blocs of nations they want to target, and come to agreements to target only certain groups to limit the number of intial telegrams. For instance, if Psychotic Dictatorships are extremely disinclined to join Europeia, but disproportionately inclined to join The Black Hawks, and vice versa for New York Times Democracy, then there's some internal self-interest at play to try to segment the recruiting pool. I think there’s been an assumption that NS stats are just kind of fun and fluky - but they may tell us something valuable about the player behind the account.

[Altmoras]

Currently the welcome TG will often arrive faster than you can block it so I support this.

[Galiantus III]

The long-standing practice of aerial bombing newbies into residing in x,y,z means newbies just get confused and don't engaged with the advertizing, but it does a disservice to the game in general if newbies move to inactive UCRs instead (which I did), because their perception of the game is then warped around the backwaters they're occupying. A foundered UCR, if it isn't active, is effectively an island to itself - there's very little traffic, very little indication of external activity.

I did an informal test out of curiosity: I created a new nation, and checked out the activity, size, and age of the regions that sent my nation recruitment spam. Very few recruitment telegrams were to inactive or dead regions. If players are going out to inactive regions and getting bored, it isn't directly because of recruitment. It's probably something more like what your first 6 months were.

I also wonder if in general, players just need to get over the old stigma of recruiting from UCRs. There's a lot of deadweight UCRs where players are residing, that could be encouraged to be plugged into an active region.

I once had an idea for a region that would actively try and gather small regions together into medium-sized communities, but I bailed on it because real life is a thing. It would certainly be nice if players would do this kind of thing on their own, but at this level we're talking about a structural problem with the game that should be addressed by admin intervention.

I also wonder if players should be limited from filtering their telegrams until they hit certain pop targets? In the same way that you unlock other features like pre-titles.

I dislike this idea. That just increases the odds new players get upset with the spam and leave.

I also wonder if there's a possibility for a consortium of major regional recruiters based around the principle of micro-targeting. I'm just spitballing, but I wonder if early nation data could suggest something about the player themselves - like players that create more violent, funny, or radical nations are more pre-disposed to join x,y, or z regions - and if the player skips the intial survey, they're likely of no recruitment value (because newbies don't know they can skip the survey). Analysis of internal recruitment data about what nations are actually attracted to different regions might help UCRs carve out different blocs of nations they want to target, and come to agreements to target only certain groups to limit the number of intial telegrams. For instance, if Psychotic Dictatorships are extremely disinclined to join Europeia, but disproportionately inclined to join The Black Hawks, and vice versa for New York Times Democracy, then there's some internal self-interest at play to try to segment the recruiting pool. I think there’s been an assumption that NS stats are just kind of fun and fluky - but they may tell us something valuable about the player behind the account.

You mean like this? (Look at #4)

[Jutsa]

I know I'm not adding much here by saying this, but full support.

[Unibot III]

The long-standing practice of aerial bombing newbies into residing in x,y,z means newbies just get confused and don't engaged with the advertizing, but it does a disservice to the game in general if newbies move to inactive UCRs instead (which I did), because their perception of the game is then warped around the backwaters they're occupying. A foundered UCR, if it isn't active, is effectively an island to itself - there's very little traffic, very little indication of external activity.

I did an informal test out of curiosity: I created a new nation, and checked out the activity, size, and age of the regions that sent my nation recruitment spam. Very few recruitment telegrams were to inactive or dead regions. If players are going out to inactive regions and getting bored, it isn't directly because of recruitment. It's probably something more like what your first 6 months were.

I also wonder if in general, players just need to get over the old stigma of recruiting from UCRs. There's a lot of deadweight UCRs where players are residing, that could be encouraged to be plugged into an active region.

I once had an idea for a region that would actively try and gather small regions together into medium-sized communities, but I bailed on it because real life is a thing. It would certainly be nice if players would do this kind of thing on their own, but at this level we're talking about a structural problem with the game that should be addressed by admin intervention.

I also wonder if players should be limited from filtering their telegrams until they hit certain pop targets? In the same way that you unlock other features like pre-titles.

I dislike this idea. That just increases the odds new players get upset with the spam and leave.

I also wonder if there's a possibility for a consortium of major regional recruiters based around the principle of micro-targeting. I'm just spitballing, but I wonder if early nation data could suggest something about the player themselves - like players that create more violent, funny, or radical nations are more pre-disposed to join x,y, or z regions - and if the player skips the intial survey, they're likely of no recruitment value (because newbies don't know they can skip the survey). Analysis of internal recruitment data about what nations are actually attracted to different regions might help UCRs carve out different blocs of nations they want to target, and come to agreements to target only certain groups to limit the number of intial telegrams. For instance, if Psychotic Dictatorships are extremely disinclined to join Europeia, but disproportionately inclined to join The Black Hawks, and vice versa for New York Times Democracy, then there's some internal self-interest at play to try to segment the recruiting pool. I think there’s been an assumption that NS stats are just kind of fun and fluky - but they may tell us something valuable about the player behind the account.

You mean like this? (Look at #4)

I think the short version of what I’m saying is recruitment in NS is currently very crudely done — like advertising in a pre-digital era:

• There’s no attempt to microtarget for respondents likely to actually join your region.
• The focus is on a pool of players in GCRs. Overlooking the mass of people in dead UCRs who actually have a historical record of joining UCRs.
• There’s no attempt to advertise in a way where you’re getting your regional name out there in an organic way to the people most likely to actually join your region.

I think the reason for this is that there has long been a view held by NS Moderation & NSGP that recruiting is dirty and disruptive, and that it’s more important to “protect the sanctity of our inboxes” and stigmatize and limit advertising than it is to promote the growth of UCRs. This has relegated advertising to a kind of unsophisticated state: carpet-bombing GCRs with ineffective messaging.

Back in the 2000s, moderators promoted the moderation theory that regions owned the telegram boxes of the nations residing in their region, and therefore there was no concept of individual consent to receive advertising; in the 2010s, moderators dropped this theory when filtered telegram boxes were unveiled.

I think what would be especially helpful are micro-ad budgets, where regions are permitted to send 10 TGs a day via their delegate or founder, to any nation regardless of whether they’ve consented to mass advertising or not. This kind of small, micro advertising would help mid-sized regions attract the players they actually need to grow in a feasible way. Most regions don’t want to be big mega regions, they just want a healthy sized community that’s all — to do that, you need micro targeting (what we called poaching in the 2010s) not mass mailers.

I think players might be surprised how many GPers are only GPers because someone went out of their way to poach them from a small/deadweight UCR. For instance, I poached Glen-Rhodes from a small UCR to join Dharma — like others like Belschaft & myself, he later joined TSP. But someone had to go out of their way to ask them — “hey, do you want to join my region?” NS moderation has historically tried to dissuade against this kind of organic growth in favour of GCR-exclusive mass spam that is not very ineffective and difficult to sustain and doesn’t match up with the growth plans of a lot of regions. This has gotten worse since the game monetized recruiting — because the game makes revenue off mass advertising and doesn’t get a cut from small scale sponsorship.

[Galiantus III]

@Unibot

Okay I see what you're saying.

The difficulty with micro-targeting is it's not very easy or intuitive to do. There are two main issues I can see:

1. It's hard to know who is a good target for recruitment.
2. A significant number of players have blocked mass-advertising, due to the spam bomb they experienced when they first joined the game.

I'll address telegram blocking first. Your idea here partially addresses #2:

I think what would be especially helpful are micro-ad budgets, where regions are permitted to send 10 TGs a day via their delegate or founder, to any nation regardless of whether they’ve consented to mass advertising or not. This kind of small, micro advertising would help mid-sized regions attract the players they actually need to grow in a feasible way. Most regions don’t want to be big mega regions, they just want a healthy sized community that’s all — to do that, you need micro targeting (what we called poaching in the 2010s) not mass mailers.

This is a good idea, but I see a problem with allowing recruitment through filters that are set to block all recruitment.

Going off your idea, what if there was an a hard limit to how many recruitment telegrams each region could send per day? Suppose each region could only send 100 recruitment telegrams in a day. How might that change their recruitment strategy? Perhaps they'd still advertise to new nations, but they might be more selective and only send to certain nation types, or try and screen out puppets. This could both reduce the spam problem and increase the return on investment. It's an interesting thought experiment.

The other issue is knowing who to target. New nations are easy, because you know you haven't tried recruiting them before, it's not really hard to narrow down who to send to next, and you know they're online. But outside of that there is no obvious way to go about recruiting, even under the current system.

What if more relevant information was readily available to recruiters? I personally think it would be useful to know beforehand if a nation has blocked recruitment, or if your region has already sent them a telegram (and thus would be blocked). There is no need to hide that information from recruiters - they'll be told that anyway after they attempt to send.

It would also be really useful if the activity page could be filtered to show activity only in regions with certain tags. You could, for example, filter out all activity except what was happening in miniscule libertarian regions, and immediately see which nations are currently active in regions with those tags. This could give recruiters a solid way to recruit both in and out of the feeders, to nations that are both currently online and match the region's target demographic.

[Parxland]

disallowing a welcome TG from outright telling new players to turn-off recruitment TGs would be a good idea.

That would require Moderation action, monitoring, and possibly punishment. I'm totally against that restriction. I don't think it's possible to effectively enforce it, and I don't think it's fair to enforce it on just one set of regions. Turning off recruitment is always a good idea, and new players need to know about it. It also helps recruiters by not having them waste stamps.

The other is a technical action. Anything that can be automated is better than anything that has to be managed manually.

I propose a blanket ban on instructing nations to turn off all their recruitment settings. This can help with turning people away from dangerous groups Max STILL LETS PLAY THIS GAME (for some reason), like nazis/fascists and communists.

[Unibot III]

This is a good idea, but I see a problem with allowing recruitment through filters that are set to block all recruitment.

In my opinion, we should just bite the bullet and allow small, infrequent exemptions/override to the recruitment filters. The good involved outweighs the minor inconvience. If you're getting communication from someone you don't want to hear from - block their TGs.

I mean the WA spams every WA member every week involuntarily!

I think we've designed an advertizing system that is extremely ineffective and disruptive to satisfy the most curmudgeonly of players. It ultimately hurts the game. It obstructs the organic growth of UCRs. Confuses newbies. Disrupts GCRs. It's a bad system - its operating principle is first and foremost to limit the number of unwanted telegrams that cranks get.

We ran into a similar problem in the WA - a small handful of delegates (3-5 cranks) did not want to recieve WA campaign telegrams - and an entire system had to be created to accomidate them. WA Authors originally had to manually look at every region's WFE before reaching out to delegates, because it was a bannable offense to campaign to one of the few delegates who didn't want telegrams.

End the crankocracy. Put the game first, and the cranks second. It's important for regions to grow. It's important that WA proposals get approvals. Otherwise the game - both the development of new regions and the World Assembly - stagnates!

[Galiantus III]

What complicates things is that people are paying for stamps, and lots of nations are just players puppets. As things are now, recruiters are at no loss, because most puppet creating tools automatically set TGs to "block all". If some TGs are going to be let through the filter, my concern is less upsetting people (though that is a concern) and more charging people for wasted advertising. This isn't to say there shouldn't be some way for recruitment to occasionally get past filters, but the frequency of this needs to be carefully considered.

This is why I think giving recruiters more information is the best way to encourage recruitment of older nations and from UCRs. Recruiters want to be sending messages to people who are (or will likely be) online and will receive their messages. They don't want to send messages to nations that are on the verge of CTEing and only have a 25% chance of actually getting to the inbox. Remember, regardless if you are using stamps, the API, or manual TGs, there is some cost associated with recruitment (either time or money). New players are the target of recruitment because (1) there's a really good chance they're online, (2) they are less likely to have blocked telegrams by the time the telegram arrives, and (3) contacting new nations is straightforward (watch the happenings or use tag:new).

Tl;dr: It is significantly easier to recruit to new nations than older nations, therefore recruiters don't recruit to old nations, even though they technically can.

[Lord Dominator]

I would observe that micro-targeting recruitment would require the primary sources of those scripts to put in much more work than they already have to adjust their scripts to collect the relevant data (or one person to try and collect all the data and share it) - combined with either them to crunch those numbers through scripts or people to crunch those manually.

That, and the the low return on recruiting as it is mean the relative gains are almost certainly minuscule, and ruined by just a couple people running recruitment against all nations.

[Sedgistan]

There's some twisted logic going on in this thread, along the lines of "letting regions control their nations' TG inboxes was bad, and it was good that nations gained that control; however being bombarded with TG spam is bad, so what we really need for a solution is to completely remove all nations' ability to control their inboxes so everyone gets TG spam".

This topic is deliberately narrow in scope, making a small tweak to the existing system to correct some of the existing imbalance between feeders and player-created regions, and with the thought that it could be implemented quickly and relatively simply. There are many ways the recruitment system as a whole could be changed, some of those significantly, and they are bigger discussions and involve changes that would take much longer to implement. I would prefer to see those get their own threads.

[Unibot III]

... so what we really need for a solution is to completely remove all nations' ability to control their inboxes so everyone gets TG spam".

Bear in mind, I'm not advocating unlimited spam, I'm advocating regions be given small, micro allowances to work around the filters. Regions wouldn't waste these outreaches on nations they don't think might join their region, and they wouldn't waste their allowance with bad spam messages. Regions would want to use more personable telegrams for their allowances to the nations they think most likely to join their region.

In general, I'm not talking about spam at all. I'm talking about legal advertizing. If you were given 10 telegrams a day to send to anyone - you wouldn't waste it on spam. I think that's exactly what is wrong with moderation's view of promotion - the assumption is it must be spam. When really, if you go to x with a natural sounding pitch about "hey, why don't you join my region?" a lot of x's will actually consider it sincerely - because you haven't approached them in a spammy manner. My experience is if you send those 10 telegrams, 3 will join your region. 6 will say no thank you. 1 player may be annoyed you contacted them. The good of those three players finding a better game experience (maybe) outweighs the bad of the one crank having to delete a telegram (boo hoo!).

How many regions would make use of the allowances? 15-20? Making up to ten special telegrams a day? To a pool of 240K nations? Your chances of being contacted in a year would be about 30%. This isn't how advertizing is typically done in NS, it's on a smaller, more personal scale.

The collective problem at play is that most advertizing in NS is done like a bombing raid and ineffective, nobody wants to consent to it, and we've made it easy to opt-out - with a flip of a button, you can turn off all consent - but by making it so easy to opt-out, you've now got widespread adoption of the opt-out, effectively encouraging regions to step up the bombing in the one watering hole they're allowed to fish in. Which is bad for everyone. A bit of promotion is good for the game and good for the growth of developing regions.

Personally, I don't think what I'm proposing here is something radical, I think what is radical is that we're snuffing out all opportunities for regions to reach out personably to players in UCRs. That's the path to moderate/sustainable growth, especially early growth, for UCRs. You reach to a half a dozen players and say "wanna join my region?" But for whatever reason that's illegal - and bombing the smitheerns out of newbies with spam is a-okay -- it doesn't make a lick of sense. Our priorities are all wrong: we should be trying to make the intial few moments of the game less intimidating of an experience for new players, and encouraging players in stagnant regions to join newer, more vibrant regions.

Truth is, I'm not sure there is any interest in the idea I've proposed so I won't create a thread for it (and I understand that I'm not a particularly popular vehicle for a new idea ), but I've laid my thinking out on it, and I just wanted to share it here (Roavin's intial post got me thinking deeply about it). Sorry about the tangent, Sedge. Cheers.

[Old Hope]

Personally, I don't think what I'm proposing here is something radical, I think what is radical is that we're snuffing out all opportunities for regions to reach out personably to players in UCRs. That's the path to moderate/sustainable growth, especially early growth, for UCRs. You reach to a half a dozen players and say "wanna join my region?" But for whatever reason that's illegal - and bombing the smitheerns out of newbies with spam is a-okay -- it doesn't make a lick of sense. Our priorities are all wrong: we should be trying to make the intial few moments of the game less intimidating of an experience for new players, and encouraging players in stagnant regions to join newer, more vibrant regions.

Whilst this is probably outside the scope of this thread, it is definitely worth thinking on it. Maybe in another thread?

[Sandaoguo]

There's some twisted logic going on in this thread, along the lines of "letting regions control their nations' TG inboxes was bad, and it was good that nations gained that control; however being bombarded with TG spam is bad, so what we really need for a solution is to completely remove all nations' ability to control their inboxes so everyone gets TG spam".

This topic is deliberately narrow in scope, making a small tweak to the existing system to correct some of the existing imbalance between feeders and player-created regions, and with the thought that it could be implemented quickly and relatively simply. There are many ways the recruitment system as a whole could be changed, some of those significantly, and they are bigger discussions and involve changes that would take much longer to implement. I would prefer to see those get their own threads.

I think calling the discussion there "twisted logic" is a bit of a strawman. It's worth reiterating the history of why Feeder Welcome TGs even exist:
- Recruitment started out as a manual affair, much the way Unibot is describing. This lasted for many years.
- Open source browser user-scripts arrived on the scene ~2008-09, were combined with the 'newnations' API call made sending large numbers of telegrams quickly, made accessible to nearly everybody
- NS disallows the above
- NS updates telegrams feature, adding stamps and mass-telegram capabilities
- Mass telegrams can be marked 'recruitment' and get put into a queue for new nations
- GCRs unable to compete, ask for a way to send 'welcome' TGs to new nations
- NS adds Welcome TG feature, which is effectively used by GCRs as a recruitment tool (this is literally how we strategize what our Welcome TG says). Worth noting that when mass TGs were implemented, [v] said that there would be arguable cases where 'welcome' TGs could be counted as recruitment: viewtopic.php?p=12827024#p12827024

And now we're kind of reversing course and saying GCRs are out-competing, so we need to nerf Welcome TGs. I think it's very predictable that we'll end up in a cycle of nerfing and beefing up Welcome TGs, because that's not actually the issue here. The issue is recruitment via mass TGs, which is what Unibot is trying to get at. Mass telegramming created a ton of externalities in the spam department, which triggered NS to basically subsume and officialize it. That way they could throttle the TGs, which is an incredibly simplistic spam control. But that itself had a serious externality of effectively banning old school recruitment, because all forms of recruitment have to follow the rules that were written for mass automated recruitment TGs.

disallowing a welcome TG from outright telling new players to turn-off recruitment TGs would be a good idea.

That would require Moderation action, monitoring, and possibly punishment. I'm totally against that restriction. I don't think it's possible to effectively enforce it, and I don't think it's fair to enforce it on just one set of regions. Turning off recruitment is always a good idea, and new players need to know about it. It also helps recruiters by not having them waste stamps.

In terms of feeders, you would have to monitor 5 recruitment TGs of game-owned regions. It's very strange seeing the Mod team act like that would be a massive pain. If it would impossible to do that for the existing Mod team, then that invites a much bigger discussion you probably don't want to have.

[Sedgistan]

Your 2013 self made some compelling arguments here for there being an issue with these feeder welcome TGs. Would you still agree with the points you made there?

And this is the issue that I'm looking to address here, feeders having an undesirable advantage in "recruitment" which should have a small tweak to rebalance things between feeders and UCRs. I'm deliberately not looking at the big picture, as I see this as a chance to make a positive and immediate change to the game, and in such a way that it can be very easily tweaked in the future if needs be. Bigger changes require a lot more thought, and a lot more admin work, and I don't see a significant overhaul of recruitment being likely any time soon (note - that's just my judgement on the situation, not based on any privileged insight from admins). So I'd like for us to tweak what we've got so it works better rather than pinning hopes on something that might never come.

[Sandaoguo]

Your 2013 self made some compelling arguments here for there being an issue with these feeder welcome TGs. Would you still agree with the points you made there?

I would say I still agree with what I wrote here: viewtopic.php?p=16715178#p16715178

And this is the issue that I'm looking to address here, feeders having an undesirable advantage in "recruitment" which should have a small tweak to rebalance things between feeders and UCRs. I'm deliberately not looking at the big picture, as I see this as a chance to make a positive and immediate change to the game, and in such a way that it can be very easily tweaked in the future if needs be.

I can appreciate the "hotfix" approach, but I disagree that this is a fix. It's a nerf, sure, but not really a fix. That's why I can see a thread a year from now, or however long you want, saying that this change led to GCRs being unable to compete... and round and round we go.

The biggest issue here is relying on mass TG recruitment, instead of coming up with a better game design during nation creation. But if we want to set the bounds of the discussion to what can be implemented fastest, I think it's much smarter to ban GCR Welcome TGs from telling new nations to turn off recruitment, or otherwise serving as recruitment TGs in and of themselves. Instead of trying to change game code, just change game rules. I get that Fris and other Game Mods are going to complain about having to do the work, but frankly it's 5 TGs to review from time to time.

[Altmoras]

This is still a good idea and should still happen.

[Sedgistan]

It is, and I believe it's on a coding to-do list at present. I don't have an ETA for when it may arrive though.

[Altmoras]

It is, and I believe it's on a coding to-do list at present. I don't have an ETA for when it may arrive though.

So long as it isn't on Ballo's front burner.

[Eluvatar]

Oh right, I was going to do this.

I should at least be able to give a timeline update by Tuesday.

[Eluvatar]

I can do this tomorrow, probably. I'll just need to add some tricky extra conditions to a query.