Merconitonitopia wrote:On atrophy
I'm not too thrilled about this atrophy idea.
This would punish less active players. A less active player might find that his stats are decaying faster than he's feeding them. Is a player going to be happy about putting time in when he's only breaking even, or even declining? Then his options are to quit the game or put more time in. Or one might decide to brush the dust of an old nation, only to find that it has fallen into disrepair.
NS is a game that you should be able to play at any pace you choose, whether that's playing every day for years, or playing weekly, or going through episodes of activity and inactivity, etc. Less active players are already 'punished' in the sense that they will see slower progress proportional to putting less work in; why penalise them on top of that?
I really don't understand this idea of giving new players a hand up. Ranks are a zero-sum game, so the only way you can pull up newfriends is by pushing down old-timers; by punishing their hard work and devotion. You might think I'm just pleading my self-interest, but I can't see how this would be fair.
tl;dr: it would be discouraging to less active players (both old and new) and unfair to old-timers.
All of my thoughts have been expressed here, atrophy is not a good thing. Sometimes I just don't feel like answering issues and let my nation sit for weeks at a time, answering again when I choose. Having that be penalized is counterproductive.
I'd rather see things like Population, Influence, Endorsements, and Residency removed from the Challenge game because they give an unfair advantage to nations who are either older, in endorsement happy, and/or non-Influence decaying regions before this "atrophy" thing is implemented. But isn't that the whole point of stats? You are getting an "unfair advantage" over everyone else when you specialize certain stats, which is why there are nations that have ludicrously high stats that poor and puny 5 million pop nations can never hope to achieve within the very first day of their founding...
...and two or three years later those same 5 million pop nations are sitting at the top of the leaderboard in some stats, for example
Darths and Droids, which admittedly is only 1st in the world for Welfare because the now 2nd in the world guy decided to slash his stat by 5k, but I'll stress the differences of their age. DND is almost five years old, and
Blogotopia is sixteen years old. And just a year ago, DND had unintentionally reached
3rd in the world for Welfare
purely because of dedicated Issue answering for almost three years prior to that.
Now people say that's unfair to others, but, c'mon, excuse me? It takes time and effort, and endless patience for screwups ("
Is this a government or a shanty town?!? Slash all funding!!!"), to reach these thresholds. And if the current leaders decide to self-sabotage or just not answer issues for a good while, they will just stay at their current level, or even Cease to Exist, meaning there's a lot less competition. Stat-decay... works against it, and is counterproductive. You may not know the feel of dopamine by seeing a stat increase by mere decimal points, but neither will you know the feeling of satisfaction when you look on your
stat bar and see all of the progress that's made.
Imagine coming back after a while and seeing, for some inexplicable reason, all of your stat bars just going
down. With no kind of activity to indicate otherwise. I can't imagine what it'd be like to see these bars when you've CTE'd and then revived your nation. There's nothing to be gained by punishing players who don't put the time in to keep answering their issues. Might as well set it to where
no nations have any sort of stats whatsoever except their Residency, Population, Influence, and Endorsement stats and they only gain or lose them by answering issues. Now isn't
that a fair thing? It'd keep all of the R/D puppet nations and inactives (e.g. sleeper nations) from bloating the census rankings, and thus
some measure of equality can be reached.
Speaking of stat decay, it'll be bloody hilarious if Population, Influence, Endorsements, and Residency can also suffer from this atrophy thing. There's no bigger sign of "
unfairness" than seeing a 39 billion pop nation with 100k influence, 500 endorsements, and 6000+ days of sitting in a particular region, next to the 5 million pop newbie. How dare they.