[Summit #4] Realizing Nirvana [REPS Only]

[Frisbeeteria]

This thread is for statements from Summit Representatives only. There will be a companion Commentary thread for comments by other players.

Reps, you have 500 words to lay out a plan for moving towards your own concept of R/D Nirvana, as described in Summit #2. Don't worry too much about whether it's technically possible, or specific micromanagement approaches - we're really looking for conceptual steps that head us in the direction of a better and more fun game experience.

If you have concrete ideas, lay them out. If you see a path in that direction, define the steps you see, and known obstacles you can't see a way to work around. Feel free to combine this with your ideas in Summit #3 to build this into the Summit Agenda. The next step will be Rep comments on other player's ideas.

As I'm posting this question before everyone has responded to Summit #2 R/D Nirvana, we'll leave it open a bit longer. Let's aim for Wednesday, 19 Dec 2012 as a closing date for this thread.

Summit Representatives

Andacantra
Cerberion
Charles Cerebella
Communist Eraser

Crushing Our Enemies
Frattastan
Lyanna Stark
Mallorea and Riva

Reploid Productions
Sedgistan
Skyrim Diplomacy
Spartzerium

Solm
Xanthal
[violet]
Frisbeeteria (chair)

[Communist Eraser]

I see the following steps to achieving my plan.

1.) Allow a way for founderless regions to appoint founders, something like Mousebumples idea from a while back with long serving and/or high influence delegate + waiting period of not being toppled before becoming founder: viewtopic.php?p=11449432#p11449432

This is the opt out bit. This allows regions who've earned it, a way to opt out. Defenders might want to pre-emptively pile to accelrate the process.

2.) Allow founders (and/or long serving/high influence delegates?) a war option that would deactivate their foundership but grants residents the ability to tie the movement of their nation to that of another nation in the region - something similiar to Topid's idea: viewtopic.php?f=15&t=212813 . As another twist, make it so the delegate of the region must be unchanged at the time of the movement for the any chains to work - So the "home front" is still theirs.

This is the opt-in bit, and tying movements would greatly expand the number of people able to participate in R/D, with the increase in regions opting in somewhat counteracting the reduction in those opting out. The consequence is that opting in exposes your region to being attacked.

3.) Give the deactivated founder the option of expelling the sitting delegate and all their endorsers at any time, at the expense of giving up their foundership and resetting the influence levels of all remaining residents to 0. Perhaps this option should also include a countdown hidden "lock" to give the residents some breathing space, and make plans. (Or perhaps going even further, maybe all newly founderless regions should get an automatic countdown lock)

This allows an opted-in region a process back out again. Tense battles would occur as everyone waits nervously to see when the countdown falls (the countdown timer would be public).

[Xanthal]

I am most interested in pursuing COE's "Allow high-influence natives limited access to regional controls" and Astarial's "Native Resistance of Delegate Power" proposals. Both get at the core of what I want to push for at this Summit: greater self-help capacity for natives. There are numerous good (and bad) ways to implement either or both of these ideas, and even some intriguing ways in which they could be combined- such as allowing natives to control certain regional control tools in a quasi-democratic fashion. The specifics are open to debate, the need to fully consider their merits and details, I believe, is absolute.

In any implementation of these or other ideas to further native participation there are two major obstacles to navigate: defender-native balancing and the post-reform relationship of natives to raiders. The role of natives should be to enable or augment defender and/or WASC action, not make it less necessary; the R/D game should not become a R/N game. Additionally, increasing the threat natives pose to a raider will inevitably alter the way natives are perceived and treated by an invading force. When natives are empowered, some acts currently considered griefing will become acts of legitimate counter-insurgency on the part of raiders. The ways in which native power is expanded will have significant bearing on the prevalence of actions taken against them by raiders who do not grief currently. This demands mindfulness, as the more subject natives are made to these actions the more among them will likely choose not to participate in R/D and retreat to invulnerable regions. A balance between limiting disruption to natives' non-R/D activities and increasing their participation in R/D must be found to maximize the positive effect of changes.

A related concern I wish to voice explicitly is that mobilizing natives who have other priorities within and beyond NationStates can take time- sometimes days. Further, I don't believe the system should require them to take on raiders reflexively: invasions can be fun, and I would like to see tools that accommodate a period of assessment, allowing effective action to be taken when a benign invasion turns to griefing at whatever stage that may occur. This could also help keep natives out of the line of fire of non-griefing raiders.

Finally, I wish to clarify that although my objective is to encourage R/D participation among natives, and I am willing to consider measures that discourage withdrawal, I do not support the absence of a feasible opt-out.

[Cerberion]

The following is excerpts from my first Nirvana statement, with ideas on how to implement them.

First I’d like to see a battlefield where people couldn’t figure out exactly (more or less) when a region was going to update, or were restricted so that they couldn’t switch WA dozens of times a night.

I think adding variance to update time was a bit of a help, though the big problem is being able to have list which basically allows you to know the reset order. While there are multiple ways to establish the update times a good first step would be to sort the region list in the API alphabetically so that aspect can’t be used. Then at least it goes back to trying to figure out updates manually.

I’d like to see a game where everyone could play, rather than just a few that can stick it through updates. I personally find it hard to get through a major update in my time zone and I have it far better off than people on the East coast of the US or in Europe.

So I’d like to see the update roll around the clock, incrementing by one hour per day so that everyone can have a chance to get on the battlefield.

That pretty much speaks for itself. Having an update that shifts allow people to play at different times. It might be tough on the principal protagonists that are currently around, but it should allow a whole new breed to get into the fun and games. I have the concept of a 1 hour shift per day, but I’m open to other suggestions. By whatever means though we need to bring more people into gameplay.

I’d like to see people prevented from WA switching so that tag raiding / defending becomes a thing of history. I don’t believe that the majority is that interested in tag raiding and I think it has grown like a cancer in the gameplay world.

The problem here is that I don’t think either the admin, mods, or others share my feelings that tag raiding is simply bad for gameplay, and that it would be better if it simply didn’t exist.
With that said though I firmly believe that once a region is raided, the moment the delegate resigns their WA then they should lose administrative control. This would at least curb the amount of raids as each region would have to be held a bit longer to get the tag up.

[Mallorea and Riva]

My R/D Nirvana can be summed up in a few basic characteristics that I believe we can move towards.

Involving the Feeders/Sinkers
These regions are simply not involved in R/D in any meaningful way. They may engage in limited support roles or take over a warzone, but in my Nirvana they would be vulnerable to invasion themselves. Ultra high influence natives would not simply be able to climb their way back into the delegacy without opposition.
The Fix: make it so that influence does not dominate the feeders or sinkers. Influence caps, drains, or expiration are all viable options still being developed. Along with that, removing endorsement counting scripts from the game could certainly help.

Fixing Influence
A single native is capable in some cases of accumulating so much influence that they become totally immune to the concerted effort of dozens of other players for a vast period of time, creating an imbalance in some cases.
The Fix: give natives a way to "spend" influence on other things, or apply one of the above influence ideas to give foreign delegates a method of countering huge influence blocks.

Intelligence Operations
Older players complain that much of the intrigue has gone out of R/D, such as intelligence networks.
The Fix: Defenders need to actually... try... They never plant spies in our midst despite endless possibilities, so there is never an incentive to really do the same to them. It seems as though Defenders just gave up on this tactic. If they do not want to use it, then I really don't see any technical path to solving the problem.

Tag raiding
Some raiders and some defenders believe that the number of tag raids that are capable of being done in a single update is simply too great.
The Fix: ensure that defenders have a fair chance to defend against these raids through tools such as variance, but other than that if raiders feel like trying to hit a thousand regions more power to them. The more one tries to hit, the harder it becomes.

Liberations become possible
Defenders face regions where the gap between native and raider can exceed 25 players. This makes it rather difficult for defenders to compete.
The Fix: in my ideal R/D world Defenders would learn to work together to counter the raider threat. In my nirvana this would lead to large scale liberations becoming possible, although there is always the logical conclusion that raiders will simply find more nonupdating troops. Defenders should have difficulty with liberations, they should not be nearly as easy as defenses. But if we gave natives the ability to spend influence to negate endorsements on a raider lead, or if there was some bonus such as accelerate influence gain for delegates with fewer endorsements, then piling could be mitigated to some extent.

[Andacantra]

I accept that there are few technical ideas which would in and of themselves work directly towards my Nirvana. Instead, I feel that we'd be better off implementing the suggested changes which would encourage the cultural shift required in order to make my Nirvana a reality.

To this end, I'd like to say that I support those ideas which gives natives some power to fight back. For instance, idea's such as Astarial's for native delegate resistance make the balance between giving natives power, but also not screwing over anybody who wanted to raid on a smaller scale. Ideas which give natives more concrete power are also worth thinking about – but they definitely need more working through from their current states.

Another thing we need to consider is an incentive to peacefully hold a raid, without excessive numbers of people supporting the raid point. This does in fact tie in to native dissent ideas – if griefing means pissed off natives making your life harder, but hanging around for a few days without kicking natives means that they're not going to be as pissed off, then we'll be in a better place.

As a community, we need to not just yell at each other because of grudges, and different points of view.

[Lyanna Stark]

Overall, there are two things I'd really like to see changed and this is how:

1) Fix Influence. Empower Natives. I really would like to explore in detail Astarial's idea, or some combination of it's ideas such as in the Halc/Uni Compromise or Bel's idea. I'd like to see some sort of compromise on both sides with this on how much a "native" can do against an invader delegate like this. With tinkering with influence, I'd like to see a way of getting defender non-updaters involved as well. Perhaps a "stun" or something with native influence, but somehow in a way that wouldn't make liberating ridiculously easy. It's..hard to find the exact balance here, but I really think that the "disapproval" idea with natives should and really must be explored in more detail--it seems to be something that we all agree is a good idea but just don't know a concrete plan of yet.

As a note with this, I also do like the idea of influence caps, but that may be (depending on the level the above is implemented) already be covered.

2. Limit tag raiding. It's excessive. I don't think it should be banned outright, but I would love to see it limited somehow. Preferably in a way that would not lead to more scripts (as I feel making WA requirements to access delegate controls would make it). Perhaps just an arbitrary limit on how many regions one person can tag in one week, or added variance. Oftentimes we end up defending for long streams of time in a row and the detag list just ends up piling on forever.

Overall, it's hard to just find the balance needed here or find out a perfect situation that won't mess things up too badly from how it is now. I also agree with Abbey (and a bit, I guess with Mall with respect to intel) that a lot of the problems we face are cultural. Also the fact that with the prevalence of IRC and the "cosmopolitan" culture of gameplay these days, it's harder to keep an IP clean and might, in some people's opinions, just not be worth it. One can do a lot of damage outside of R/D just under their own names, anywho, particularly in political regions.