Another Person's N-Day Suggestions

[Sedgistan]

I think this is something like manifesto number 4 or 5 for N-Day changes, but whatever -- my suggestions are quite different.

As broad goals for N-Day, we should be aiming to:

• Keep it simple - the basic mechanics of N-Day are what make it a success; we don't want to overcomplicate it.
• Keep it special - conceivably we could run N-Day as a constant process (with some changes), but it works as a rare andrenaline-fuelled 24 hour event.
• Maximise participation - ensure as many people as possible can partake in N-Day.
• Maximise competition - so that more people can play N-Day throughout the day, and there's genuine competition to win it.
• Keep individual players meaningful - so the mass puppeteers aren't the only relevant participants.

I don't think the core mechanics of N-Day require much of a change. We've had one not-so-good N-Day, with this last one lacking competition, but the mechanics worked well at getting competitive N-Days for the previous events. My suggestions are therefore mainly around helping participation and organisation.

• Have a permanent Events calendar page with advance notice of dates/times for events. While it's nice to have N-Day match up with an international day of something nuclear related, I feel this year's specific time - starting at Saturday 2pm west-coast US, 5pm east-coast US, 10pm UK time, 11pm European mainland, and (Sunday) 7am Aussie eastern time - allows for the most possible participation over primarily weekend time. The last weekend in September works well, but if that's going to coincide with a religious something or other that will reduce participation / offend people's sensibilities, then we can look at alternatives. (See note at bottom of page.)
• Allow advance registration of Factions, and advance joining of Factions. Couple this with having a News post go up at the same time - ideally a week in advance. Yes, all the big players can get their thousands of puppets in their Factions in advance, but they were going to do that quickly anyway. This helps the smaller more casual players get their alliances set up early so they have a chance to defend themselves from the start. Too many this time found themselves obliterated by CotA straight away. This also solves the "megafactions" issue - people want a fight on N-Day; if they see that there's no competition coming, players can self-resolve the issue by splitting the massive groupings up -- CotA would not have formed if they'd known what other Factions were (and weren't) turning up this time.
• Make Shields cheaper. The small guys get kerb stomped straight away - they just can't get the Shields produced to save themselves. If they can get some Shields cheaper early on, they can hold out a bit longer. Potentially change so that Strategic Specialists buy them at 1 Production per Shield; others at 1.5 Production per Shield.
• Make Shields less effective when used defending nations in other Factions. This reduces the chance of the Faction "spamming" we saw from CotA this time around. It does however reduce a sneaky tactic of "hiding" your Shield producing nations in your enemy's Faction where they are safe, and can be used to defend your actual Faction.
• Give Factions a message board. Fine, anyone will be able to see it, as anyone can generally join a Faction, but it allows the smaller ones who don't have Discord servers to coordinate that bit better.
• Keep the Catchas. And if any nation can pre-join a Faction (thus evading the Captchas from there on N-Day itself) then potentially we need to expand these so they can appear for launches and/or shield deployments too. EDIT: I'm told they already do. They are an annoying blunt tool, but serve a purpose of slowing down the mass puppeteer script-assisted players.

I've left out "boot nations from a Faction". I think that may actually not be a positive change - it would need a lot more discussion, as there are several N-Day players keen on "Rogues" remaining possible.

Finally, we could consider running this twice yearly - it's popular enough that it wouldn't get tedious doing so. We were even considering monthly after the first N-Day. But if we did twice yearly, then with a 6 month break, you couldn't have end of September/end of March -- that's too close to April Fool's. So that would be better as end of Feb / end of August.

[Durm]

Maybe captchas should only appear to nations in large factions.

(That would cause the creation of more factions like Crabs 91726, though.)

[Flanderlion]

Mentioned offsite, but restating onsite for others.

Agreed essentially on the broad goals.

Events calendar - sounds good. Not really a lot to add to that.

Advance registration/joining factions - think this is actually a great idea. Save leaderboards, reset and set up the factions the week before, players join with nations then (or on the day), then when the day starts the 'Ceasefire' stops, production starts and nukes start flying. Helps with the slower start as well.

Captchas - agreed. Still think NS should take a stance on players with literally thousands of pups, but they shouldn't be rewarded in this event either way.

Faction message board - 100% yes. Not just because it's a step towards global chat, but also allows a better place for natives to chat who don't go offsite. Rn they use their various RMBs, but most factions span multiple regions, so the communication is lacking between factionmates.

I like the idea of running 2 a year. Could be both the same with factions, or as MadJack suggested offsite, one with factions, and one as a FFA without. They don't need to be exactly 6 months apart, having a RL event or something to celebrate/commiserate would be better than just a random date.

--

Now to the more controversial:

Booting nations - I'm against. Think it's great for the players running the factions for it to be gone, but it adds far more tension with rogues etc. and gives so much depth to diplomacy, where they can pretend it is rogues targeting their allies faction until the last second. I've been fairly hands off diplo wise since N3 (as N4/N5 was HoTA rather than Uppercut and N6 RL was too hectic), but 95% of my time then was persuading our allies our rogues weren't us backstabbing them. Removing that removes a whole layer of the diplo side of N Day.

Shields cheaper - don't think this would actually help. It'd make little guys stronger, but they'll get wiped either way as megafactions send more nukes than they can humanly react to, let alone produce the shields for. Doubling their number of shields wouldn't help at all. But it would make it far easier for megafactions to remain with 0 rads. 0 rads I think should be super rare, it's a nuclear war, the message is 'everyone loses'. I'd prefer shields to be cheaper, but them not being guaranteed to shield each nuke. RL interceptors aren't remotely close to 100% effective, and GP wise I think it's better that there is a bit of luck in it. Others strongly disagree though.

Shields less effective defending other factions - I don't think it'll make enough of a difference to bother coding. It happens every so often, but most of the time factions don't bother to shield anyone else as it makes them more vulnerable to backstabs. Additionally, CoTA was just due to an empty leaderboard. It'd be invisible if it was more competitive.

Finally, not in OP, but something also discussed offsite: Reduce chances of hitting with a nuke the more rads a nation has. So if a nation has 0 rads, there is 100% chance of hitting. But if they have 99 rads, there is a 1% chance of hitting. This will mean that it won't be worth killing noob factions, just damaging them, and will allow those players to survive longer (albeit with a reduced production rate etc.)

Edit: Fixed some of the wording.

[Haganham]

I've left out "boot nations from a Faction". I think that may actually not be a positive change - it would need a lot more discussion, as there are several N-Day players keen on "Rogues" remaining possible.

Too bad? Rouges have always been an absurd bad faith tactic. Imagine:
Japan: hey NATO why are you nuking us? we have a NAP
NATO: You are nuking us!
Japan: No that's North Korea they're part of China's faction. We just can't kick them out

stupid

[Sedgistan]

I've left out "boot nations from a Faction". I think that may actually not be a positive change - it would need a lot more discussion, as there are several N-Day players keen on "Rogues" remaining possible.

Too bad? Rouges have always been an absurd bad faith tactic. Imagine:
Japan: hey NATO why are you nuking us? we have a NAP
NATO: You are nuking us!
Japan: No that's North Korea they're part of China's faction. We just can't kick them out

stupid

Oh, it's totally unrealistic, I get that. But it does add some intrigue and spice to the game. I'm open minded on the rogues situation, but leaning towards what seems like the "fun" option of keeping them over the "realistic" option of allowing them to be removed.

[Sailiopia]

So I prefer the slightly-broader changes that Reploid Productions posted in an earlier thread (see my post in that thread for a more detailed analysis of them), but some of these have credit as well:

Cheaper shields would be great. Yes I do see that there is some merit to having more expensive shields, they can make the whole 'total annihilation' concept behind N-day (that almost everyone gets destroyed) a bit more prevalent, but that isn't the priority. The priority should be that smaller regions can defend themselves. From what I heard about the action from the first few hours of the event (while people like me in the UK were asleep), the larger factions that weren't proper superfactions, were totally destroyed with more incoming nukes than shields stockpiled at certain points. This is even worse for smaller regions, and is why most of the people in my faction didn't have a single nation survive the event, me included. So that would be a great idea, however I would prefer a system that varies production relative to faction size (as suggested in the other thread). That would be a more direct way of balancing the game.

Shields less effective when defending enemy factions is also a good idea - it got to a point in the latter stages of the event where CotA was shooting down any nukes that they weren't sending, to prevent factions taking strikes on factions that they could hit and then use to dominate the leaderboard with their puppet factions. So it became a game of defending your own faction, as any hope of sending nukes was quickly dashed. I would prefer shielding to be limited to only your own faction, but I'd be happy with this.

As a non-discord user, I would love a faction message board. One of the joys of last N-day was communicating with others through the ATOMIC RMB, mainly communicating with other non-discord users. We prepared for attacks and counter-attacks, and had a great time chatting as well. So implementing this into factions might be a really good idea.

Keep the captchas - definitely. I'm not sure about how they work technically, but if they mean that a player has to manually click on them instead of using semi-automated scripts (no automated scripts are allowed, they would simply use programs that allow hotkey usage to speed things up, correct me if I'm wrong), then I'm happy. It will hopefully slow the whole thing down a bit. And possibly increase them to being used for converting production, targeting nukes, launching nukes etc.

Indifferent about registration of factions early.

Events calendar and possibly two N-days - sounds good. We don't want to get burnt out by having this event too often, but aside from this year, it's generally enjoyed by the community. It's one of the few NS-wide events that happens. Remember that Z-day is more a collection of region-wide events happening at the same time. So mildly support, although I'm not particularly fussed about it.

[The Python]

[*]Allow advance registration of Factions, and advance joining of Factions. Couple this with having a News post go up at the same time - ideally a week in advance. Yes, all the big players can get their thousands of puppets in their Factions in advance, but they were going to do that quickly anyway. This helps the smaller more casual players get their alliances set up early so they have a chance to defend themselves from the start. Too many this time found themselves obliterated by CotA straight away. This also solves the "megafactions" issue - people want a fight on N-Day; if they see that there's no competition coming, players can self-resolve the issue by splitting the massive groupings up -- CotA would not have formed if they'd known what other Factions were (and weren't) turning up this time.
[*]Make Shields cheaper. The small guys get kerb stomped straight away - they just can't get the Shields produced to save themselves. If they can get some Shields cheaper early on, they can hold out a bit longer. Potentially change so that Strategic Specialists buy them at 1 Production per Shield; others at 1.5 Production per Shield.
[*]Make Shields less effective when used defending nations in other Factions. This reduces the chance of the Faction "spamming" we saw from CotA this time around. It does however reduce a sneaky tactic of "hiding" your Shield producing nations in your enemy's Faction where they are safe, and can be used to defend your actual Faction.

These all seem like good ideas and I strongly support them.

[*]Give Factions a message board. Fine, anyone will be able to see it, as anyone can generally join a Faction, but it allows the smaller ones who don't have Discord servers to coordinate that bit better.

This also seems like a good idea.

[*]Keep the Catchas. And if any nation can pre-join a Faction (thus evading the Captchas from there on N-Day itself) then potentially we need to expand these so they can appear for launches and/or shield deployments too. EDIT: I'm told they already do. They are an annoying blunt tool, but serve a purpose of slowing down the mass puppeteer script-assisted players.[/list]

Ew, Captchas are extremely annoying. At least, I think the reCaptchas should be replaced with the less obnoxious hCaptchas.

I've left out "boot nations from a Faction". I think that may actually not be a positive change - it would need a lot more discussion, as there are several N-Day players keen on "Rogues" remaining possible.

Yeah, that would be prone to abuse, but also rogues are annoying. Honestly don't have strong feelings on this.

Finally, we could consider running this twice yearly - it's popular enough that it wouldn't get tedious doing so. We were even considering monthly after the first N-Day. But if we did twice yearly, then with a 6 month break, you couldn't have end of September/end of March -- that's too close to April Fool's. So that would be better as end of Feb / end of August.

I think that's too often to be honest.

[Sedgistan]

So I prefer the slightly-broader changes that Reploid Productions posted in an earlier thread (see my post in that thread for a more detailed analysis of them), but some of these have credit as well:

Cheaper shields would be great. Yes I do see that there is some merit to having more expensive shields, they can make the whole 'total annihilation' concept behind N-day (that almost everyone gets destroyed) a bit more prevalent, but that isn't the priority. The priority should be that smaller regions can defend themselves. From what I heard about the action from the first few hours of the event (while people like me in the UK were asleep), the larger factions that weren't proper superfactions, were totally destroyed with more incoming nukes than shields stockpiled at certain points. This is even worse for smaller regions, and is why most of the people in my faction didn't have a single nation survive the event, me included. So that would be a great idea, however I would prefer a system that varies production relative to faction size (as suggested in the other thread). That would be a more direct way of balancing the game.

I'll explain my reasoning a bit more on these changes. A lot of the initial reaction to N-Day 6 and its megafaction dominance was a knee-jerk "we need to nerf megafactions". But megafactions are mainly the result of people recruiting and organising well for their faction -- and those are things that we should want to be rewarded with higher potential of success. It's counter-intuitive to tell factions they've recruited and organised too well and that we therefore need to nerf them.

The angle I'm approaching this from is not to bring down the megafactions, but primarily to bring up the smaller factions, by giving them recruitment and organisational assistance - dates well in advance for N-Day, joining factions in advance, and message boards. Together, they close the gap a bit, to give the smaller factions more of a fighting chance.

Now, none of that helps if we have one all-conquering gigafaction like CotA this time, and that's where the pre-joining gives a second benefit - we've heard a lot from players in that faction who have said they wouldn't have formed CotA if they'd known how the other factions would shape up -- they wanted more of a fight. This lets them see how things are unfolding, and put their money where their mouth is by not forming some 10,000+ nation faction. The resulting more diverse field of factions gives the smaller ones a better chance of surviving late on.

[Doge Land]

-snip-
Ew, Captchas are extremely annoying. At least, I think the reCaptchas should be replaced with the less obnoxious hCaptchas.
-snip-

If you think hCaptcha is less annoying than reCaptcha, then you've never had to vote for minecraft servers in 10 different places all using hCaptcha. We had a nickname for hCaptcha- shitCaptcha

----

Overall this looks like a bunch of great ideas. Maybe expanding captchas wouldn't be the greatest but I don't use 500000 puppets so I'm not the best person to talk about that. Better than the ideas presented in the Vault 41 forum during N-Day.

[Altmoras]

I like these a lot more than the other thread, if admin is going to continue to rely on capchas to slow players down though they should make their own like Torn has instead of relying on the RNG that is recapcha. If a launch isn't shielded because some poor shielder spent 3 minutes solving a grainy, multi-page capcha with the thing where it fades to white for 15 seconds between each selection nobody is happy.

I think faction ejection and increasing the cost of shielding factions other than your own would be redundant and one or the other should be chosen, otherwise N-Day runs the risk of becoming like Z-Day and giving far too big of a toolkit to leaders with which to control insurgent players.

Biannual N-Day is awesome and something I was going to suggest myself, I think it would alleviate a lot of the over caution that there is in the current meta. Right now you only get one shot per year so everybody does what they can to make it count.

[Lord Dominator]

Something I’ve been wondering about is the possibility of allowing for nations to never truly be out - I’m reasonably sure that’s been a small faction complaint in most of them (in that they get squished and done by some large faction).

My initial thought is something like 100 rads only dropping production say 50% (or any reasonable number between that and say 90% - but I don’t know how to balance that in scoring or anything.

[Haganham]

Too bad? Rouges have always been an absurd bad faith tactic. Imagine:
Japan: hey NATO why are you nuking us? we have a NAP
NATO: You are nuking us!
Japan: No that's North Korea they're part of China's faction. We just can't kick them out

stupid

Oh, it's totally unrealistic, I get that. But it does add some intrigue and spice to the game. I'm open minded on the rogues situation, but leaning towards what seems like the "fun" option of keeping them over the "realistic" option of allowing them to be removed.

I don't think they add that much intrigue, since there's no counter to "I'm deliberately attacking your allies and you can't stop me". It would be much more interesting if they had to pretend not to be rouges, or if factions would have to be really good at policing them to kick them before they get targeted by someone in the faction they're provoking and move locked.

Something I’ve been wondering about is the possibility of allowing for nations to never truly be out - I’m reasonably sure that’s been a small faction complaint in most of them (in that they get squished and done by some large faction).

My initial thought is something like 100 rads only dropping production say 50% (or any reasonable number between that and say 90% - but I don’t know how to balance that in scoring or anything.

I think that would combine well with fris's radaway idea.

[Lord Dominator]

Oh, it's totally unrealistic, I get that. But it does add some intrigue and spice to the game. I'm open minded on the rogues situation, but leaning towards what seems like the "fun" option of keeping them over the "realistic" option of allowing them to be removed.

If you want intrigue let people kick them. Then they would have to at least pretend not to be rouges, or factions would have to be really good at policing them to kick them before they get targeted by someone in the faction they're provoking.

The big factions are already good at policing them when we don’t have the ability to kick them - they have no ability to hide.

[Haganham]

If you want intrigue let people kick them. Then they would have to at least pretend not to be rouges, or factions would have to be really good at policing them to kick them before they get targeted by someone in the faction they're provoking.

The big factions are already good at policing them when we don’t have the ability to kick them - they have no ability to hide.

Good. Then it will also level the playing field for smaller factions that aren't.

[Sailiopia]

Something I’ve been wondering about is the possibility of allowing for nations to never truly be out - I’m reasonably sure that’s been a small faction complaint in most of them (in that they get squished and done by some large faction).

My initial thought is something like 100 rads only dropping production say 50% (or any reasonable number between that and say 90% - but I don’t know how to balance that in scoring or anything.

That could be a good idea, but I'm unsure. It prevents only one or two factions surviving, however it doesn't do anything to balance the competition - for that I think that rebalancing production, shielding etc. might be a good idea.

My main gripe with this is from experience - I was operating 5 nations on N-day, not really a puppet army, just nations that I use/have previously used for various reasons. One of them was on 97% for several hours, until being knocked out at the last minute. During those few hours, I got next to no production from it - maybe 1 or 2, but nothing else. So it was essentially dead to me, I couldn't use it for anything. So this would require radiation rebalancing - maybe give less of a disadvantage to radiated nations?

[Cereskia 2]

So I prefer the slightly-broader changes that Reploid Productions posted in an earlier thread (see my post in that thread for a more detailed analysis of them), but some of these have credit as well:

Cheaper shields would be great. Yes I do see that there is some merit to having more expensive shields, they can make the whole 'total annihilation' concept behind N-day (that almost everyone gets destroyed) a bit more prevalent, but that isn't the priority. The priority should be that smaller regions can defend themselves. From what I heard about the action from the first few hours of the event (while people like me in the UK were asleep), the larger factions that weren't proper superfactions, were totally destroyed with more incoming nukes than shields stockpiled at certain points. This is even worse for smaller regions, and is why most of the people in my faction didn't have a single nation survive the event, me included. So that would be a great idea, however I would prefer a system that varies production relative to faction size (as suggested in the other thread). That would be a more direct way of balancing the game.

Shields less effective when defending enemy factions is also a good idea - it got to a point in the latter stages of the event where CotA was shooting down any nukes that they weren't sending, to prevent factions taking strikes on factions that they could hit and then use to dominate the leaderboard with their puppet factions. So it became a game of defending your own faction, as any hope of sending nukes was quickly dashed. I would prefer shielding to be limited to only your own faction, but I'd be happy with this.

As a non-discord user, I would love a faction message board. One of the joys of last N-day was communicating with others through the ATOMIC RMB, mainly communicating with other non-discord users. We prepared for attacks and counter-attacks, and had a great time chatting as well. So implementing this into factions might be a really good idea.

Keep the captchas - definitely. I'm not sure about how they work technically, but if they mean that a player has to manually click on them instead of using semi-automated scripts (no automated scripts are allowed, they would simply use programs that allow hotkey usage to speed things up, correct me if I'm wrong), then I'm happy. It will hopefully slow the whole thing down a bit. And possibly increase them to being used for converting production, targeting nukes, launching nukes etc.

Indifferent about registration of factions early.

Events calendar and possibly two N-days - sounds good. We don't want to get burnt out by having this event too often, but aside from this year, it's generally enjoyed by the community. It's one of the few NS-wide events that happens. Remember that Z-day is more a collection of region-wide events happening at the same time. So mildly support, although I'm not particularly fussed about it.

Yeah, I would agree with cheaper shields.

I would also suggest faster production rate after a nation joins a faction, so that one can Stockpile Nukes or Stockpile shields.

[Lord Dominator]

Something I’ve been wondering about is the possibility of allowing for nations to never truly be out - I’m reasonably sure that’s been a small faction complaint in most of them (in that they get squished and done by some large faction).

My initial thought is something like 100 rads only dropping production say 50% (or any reasonable number between that and say 90% - but I don’t know how to balance that in scoring or anything.

That could be a good idea, but I'm unsure. It prevents only one or two factions surviving, however it doesn't do anything to balance the competition - for that I think that rebalancing production, shielding etc. might be a good idea.

My main gripe with this is from experience - I was operating 5 nations on N-day, not really a puppet army, just nations that I use/have previously used for various reasons. One of them was on 97% for several hours, until being knocked out at the last minute. During those few hours, I got next to no production from it - maybe 1 or 2, but nothing else. So it was essentially dead to me, I couldn't use it for anything. So this would require radiation rebalancing - maybe give less of a disadvantage to radiated nations?

Well that’s what I am proposing - production scales by radiation you have, so in the 50% proposal no nation would ever drop below half production. Just depends on how much penalty we want to apply.

[Durm]

[*]Keep the Catchas. And if any nation can pre-join a Faction (thus evading the Captchas from there on N-Day itself) then potentially we need to expand these so they can appear for launches and/or shield deployments too. EDIT: I'm told they already do. They are an annoying blunt tool, but serve a purpose of slowing down the mass puppeteer script-assisted players.[/list]

Ew, Captchas are extremely annoying. At least, I think the reCaptchas should be replaced with the less obnoxious hCaptchas.

I agree with this.

[Mancheseva City]

Why don't we just limit the number of nations in a faction? Clearly if the Horsemen can just load a faction with puppets and annihilate everyone, and the Crabs can protect them with their puppets, something is wrong with that. Just limit the number to 5k or 3k and be done with it. Probably would mean that ejection would have to be implemented too to avoid puppet flooding of rival factions - but the "rogues" would still be able to do what they do, it would just be harder for them

[Merni]

Why don't we just limit the number of nations in a faction? Clearly if the Horsemen can just load a faction with puppets and annihilate everyone, and the Crabs can protect them with their puppets, something is wrong with that. Just limit the number to 5k or 3k and be done with it. Probably would mean that ejection would have to be implemented too to avoid puppet flooding of rival factions - but the "rogues" would still be able to do what they do, it would just be harder for them

This would just lead to Crabs creating 10 factions each with 4999 or 2999 nations and actually being commanded by the same people.

[Jar Wattinree]

Clearly, the solution is to ban Discord and IRC, or any other Instant Messaging service, so these clearly superior “mega factions” cannot communicate or coordinate. Better scrap scripts too, those are unfair.

[Durm]

Better scrap scripts too, those are unfair.

This tbh.

[Great Algerstonia]

Scripts honestly should be banned from N-Day. They're greatly unfair, exclusive in who has access to them, and do not benefit N-Day at all.

[Gonswanza]

On the whole captcha thing, I never encountered one, plus people who were joining the megafactions never had to fill a captcha either... Along with puppets and even newer, "barely a few weeks old" nations tailor-made for such an event. So perhaps the site should employ captchas or recaptchas en mass to lockout script kiddies and their thousand or so puppets along with having captchas for faction creation as well (to avoid the whole problem of spamming factions to fill up space on the leaderboard.

And finally, when a faction is "destroyed" (all players in it are destroyed) or empty, that faction should cease to exist to free up space on the leaderboard so we don't have the top 5 factions being 4 empty groups and one megafaction.

[Sedgistan]

Scripts honestly should be banned from N-Day. They're greatly unfair, exclusive in who has access to them, and do not benefit N-Day at all.

That's not a feasible option for staff to be able to enforce.