NS Cards: Permanent Feature Update

by **Nationstates the Gathering** » Thu Apr 05, 2018 6:48 pm

So with the announcement that NS Cards could become a permanent feature in the future, perhaps some "how would this fit in" type scenario would be appropriate.

Here are a few ideas on how a "Permanent" NS Card game might benefit being different from a week long mini game:

Card Rarity/Levels Updating over Time

Depending on the formula used to generate cards, a nations input and level would theoretically change over time - particularly over the course of years. There are many ways to handle this with varying levels of re-coding. Here are a few

1) When you buy a nations card, you buy its card. If a "Common" card nation meets the criteria to become "Uncommon" in the future at some defined point it simply updates the card to the benefit of the owner, and the update in its status is noted permanently with a date of 'upgrade' on the card page. Any sold/found history would also clearly mark the time which the value of the card changed. You can see this making Uncommon's more 'in demand' as folks might be investing that a cheap card becomes a high value one in the future
2) When a nation reaches the next tier, a new card is added to the deck that represents their new level. At this point, a nation would have multiple cards in the deck which would break the coding of the way the game currently works
3) A nation's level is locked and is only re-considered once a year (January 1). On Jan 1 2018 any nations that achieve (or demote) a level get a new card. Their old card gets "2018" printed in the corner of it and the new one gets "2019" printed on it. For nations created after April 1 that don't have a card, they would be generated as an uncommon card in the game only once they reach a certain level of population (Getting an in-game trading card would be an achievable in game milestone like unlocking the ability to change a nations pretitle)
4) Remove card 'rarity' altogether and let the market set the going rate for a card and re-color it based on the market (this would be most open to abuse) / modify the formula to include additional factors such as market when setting a card "level" (opposed to its rarity - unless these cards are actually more rare)
5) Keep rarity as a card feature but don't lock a single rarity to a card. No (few) cards would have a base rarity of legendary/top level but you could combine (2 epic testnation) cards to create (1 legendary testnation) card. Certain nations would still have a higher base level than others based on the formulas but rarity would not be locked to a card type which would require a new subset on each card - one for each rarity level possible

You could keep the game the same for now (While introducing the 150mil mark for new nations to receive a card) and then introduce any of the above changes for the 2019 card season

"Common" Level cards actually the most rare mathematically in many cases due to the higher number of common cards in existence and the propensity to pull non-common cards from active founded regions. Could be addressed in part if nations <150 million do not get cards in game. Or, newer nations <X population <150 million could get a sub-common classification that is actually a higher mathematical rarity but perceived ICly as "Lower Quality" despite it being harder to acquire and as such has a lower junk value (0.00)

What type of cards exist in game? (Exclusive of rarity levels addressed above)

Timing between Loot Crates / Who is eligible for a new Pack

Timing between new decks should be considerably longer (As high as just one free pack per week) to permit the card system to retain any long term relevance as well as, more importantly, to maintain a more 'level playing field'. Keeping the deck drop rates the same as they currently are will quickly make the card trading game ignored by all but a handful of hyper-active puppet masters particularly as it will no longer be associated with a defined-ending point April Fools mini event.
Two ways to earn/redeem loot boxes - 1) Timer based click and reset (current system, encourages puppeteering); 2) Achievement/Event based Redemption (Store up to X Redeemable packs and redeem at later date)
If the default timing between free packs is one week, then there should be additional (but limited) ways to earn free packs through answering a certain number of issues during the week or achieving other milestones.
Examples:
- Answering any issue during a Sun-Sat week earns you 1 additional free pack.
- Answering >5 issues during a single week earns you a second free pack.
- Casting a Vote on a WA Proposal also earns a free pack up to once per week enabling a bonus for WA members per the more extreme "WA Only" loot boxes solution
- Your nations creation date / birthdate
- A one-time reward for joining the WA
- Accomplishing a specific card-system related milestone (IE: Opened 100 packs, collected 10 of a single card, upgraded a card if that feature comes into play in the future, etc)
You can earn pack credits which you can redeem for packs, opposed to simply making it time based
Only WA members can receive FREE time-based loot boxes; non-WA members would have to purchase packs or earn them through achievements (likely controversial but there has to be some way to prevent some of the puppet armies)

Transferring Cards / addressing highly inflated or deflated pricing

It's good to have the market be free but there could also be an argument against dumping or loading onto a card with low or grossly high sales. You could set a sale price floor of 50% of the 'junk' value or even the junk value itself.
Give a user a pop-up warning when selling a card for less than junk value "You are about to sell a card for less than its junk value, are you sure you want to do this?"
Restrict the number of transactions a nation can make in the same week. Say, a nation can buy up to 10 cards per week for free, and then they can buy additional cards at cost - either a fixed cost (ie: 1 bank for 10 more transactions) or a percentage (ie10%) of the sale prices. Or contrarily you could limit the number of transactions between same nations in a given period.
Limit the number of 'buy offers' a nation has outstanding. Currently a nation can put unlimited buy offers so in theory, as long as you have 0.01 coin in the bank you can put a bid of 0.01 on every card in the game. Limiting buy offers to being able to only have the sum of outstanding buy offers equal to the total amount of bank you have, or, to a fixed number (20 outstanding offers) could help folks only put in offers for cards they are trying to buy, opposed to cards they are hoping someone misclicks and sells them cheap
Permit Card Trading / Gifting between users to prevent the need to conduct 0.01 or 1427.xx transactions on the market

Probability of pulling region cards / 4th Card percentages

Usability

Junking, Inflation, and an Auction House

Global Marketplace

Deck Organization

Incorporate the Card Mini-Game into other Mini-Games (IE: Nation Challenge)

Other

What other things can you think of?

by **The Confederate Territory** » Thu Apr 05, 2018 6:53 pm

I really like your idea of cards being able to level up as nations develop more

by **Flanderlion** » Thu Apr 05, 2018 7:05 pm

What if instead of the cards you owned changing, they stayed as uncommon or whatever they were prior, but became limited edition (1st for the 1st change etc.), and a new card of the nation was created.

by **TURTLESHROOM II** » Thu Apr 05, 2018 7:06 pm

How about tying the Loot Box obtaining rate to the Issues rate? Say , you get a new Loot Box every four or six hours?

by **Nationstates the Gathering** » Thu Apr 05, 2018 7:08 pm

Flanderlion wrote:What if instead of the cards you owned changing, they stayed as uncommon or whatever they were prior, but became limited edition (1st for the 1st change etc.), and a new card of the nation was created.

Yes! #2, #3 and #5 specifically include this option. Sorry if it wasn't clear, 1-5 in that section are distinct and separate ideas, not dependant on the others

by **Nationstates the Gathering** » Thu Apr 05, 2018 7:13 pm

TURTLESHROOM II wrote:How about tying the Loot Box obtaining rate to the Issues rate? Say , you get a new Loot Box every four or six hours?

You could, but in my opinion that is WAY too fast.

Right now it works well because its a mini game with a defined end point. Once you make it open ended, having new cards injected at such a high rate will make the market crash very quickly from devaluation not to mention i'm sure there would be additional load on the servers.

I'd say you just take whatever formula they are already using (Presumably # of packs you've opened) and the current 10-60 minute time scale and scale it up to where a nation who hasn't opened any packs gets one new pack a day available to them and a nation who has opened 100 packs gets one new pack a week.

However the problem with this is it could encourage folks to make new nations for the purposes of getting faster decks so i think something better would be one pack a week as a baseline but you can 'earn' one-time additional packs by achieving population milestones, answering issues, being accepted into the UN etc.

In the short term, a solution to this would be to allow existing nations with population >100 million to have a faster rate of new decks if they have opened less than x decks total (like the current system) but grouping new nations (Created after april 1 2018/population <100million) in the same group as nations that have pulled 100+ decks in getting new decks at the slowest rate

I even think one pack per day would be too much of a flood on the market of a game that doesn't have a defined end.

by **Drawkland** » Thu Apr 05, 2018 7:14 pm

If there was a direct trade/gift/swap system, it would also be nice to have a bank swap option too.

Example: "You have a legendary I want, I have an epic you want. We can trade these cards and I'll throw in 1.00 bank so that it's more of a 'fair' trade."

Also for puppet bank consolidation purposes

free-market · by **VoVoDoCo** » Thu Apr 05, 2018 7:22 pm

I don't want to restrict how many cards I'm allowed to buy.

I don't want to restrict how many buy offers I'm allowed to have at a time. The theoretical ability for me to put a buy offer on every card on NS is absurd:
1. I don't see anyone doing it.
2. Many of the cards will be sold. So even if a buy order on every card was done, the order will be filled eventually, leading to the buy orders ending by themselves.
3. I think it's a good cause to try to get every card in the game.

Imma keep reading your suggestions, but those jumped out at me.

free-market · by **VoVoDoCo** » Thu Apr 05, 2018 7:25 pm

The rest I'm either neutral on or in favor of.

Especially the increased chance of getting cards from regions you have embassies in.

That'd be an interesting dynamic.

by **Nationstates the Gathering** » Thu Apr 05, 2018 7:32 pm

Vovodoco wrote:I don't want to restrict how many cards I'm allowed to buy.

I don't want to restrict how many buy offers I'm allowed to have at a time. The theoretical ability for me to put a buy offer on every card on NS is absurd:
1. I don't see anyone doing it.
2. Many of the cards will be sold. So even if a buy order on every card was done, the order will be filled eventually, leading to the buy orders ending by themselves.
3. I think it's a good cause to try to get every card in the game.

Imma keep reading your suggestions, but those jumped out at me.

Theres no harm in trying to get every card in the game. This particular suggestion is just one way amongst others to provide a response to items like this: viewtopic.php?f=42&t=440246

Where instead of realistically trying to actually purchase every card in the game, user(s) are just placing blind offers 99% below the junk value in the hope that someone either mis-clicks or quits in a fit of rage and they get lucky with a 'free' card.

It's not intended to get in the way of people who are legitimately trying to buy specific cards from placing offers on them. Maybe the number of offers itself doesn't need to be restricted, but you have to have the bank to cover all the offers you make, in the assumption they are all accepted. There are many ways to address it

One thing to consider on this point, however, is that a permanent game would have a completely different flow than this mini game. In this week-long mini game, these "blind" offers are required - there simply isn't enough time in this game to negotiate over cards and work out deals with other users. You just have to place bids out there and see if anyone bites. However, in a permanent game the pace will be much more 'relaxed'. Blind offers where you just stick a price out there and hope someone accepts it sometime in the future may be less important than the actual negotiation part of deliberately picking cards you want and working out a deal for them - particularly if other features like trading and gifting are introduced making it such that blind bidding is not the only form of transaction

free-market · by **VoVoDoCo** » Thu Apr 05, 2018 7:35 pm

Nationstates the Gathering wrote: Maybe the number of offers itself doesn't need to be restricted, but you have to have the bank to cover all the offers you make, in the assumption they are all accepted.

I dig that solution.

by **Great Celestial China** » Thu Apr 05, 2018 7:38 pm

And maybe the cards could be more than just for trading, and become more like Yu-Gi-Oh or Pokemon (sorry if I misspelled) where you can battle other players, and there could be set, like cards in the same region, or defaults and ex-nations.

free-market · by **VoVoDoCo** » Thu Apr 05, 2018 7:39 pm

Great Celestial China wrote:And maybe the cards could be more than just for trading, and become more like Yu-Gi-Oh or Pokemon (sorry if I misspelled) where you can battle other players, and there could be set, like cards in the same region, or defaults and ex-nations.

You can challenged other nations and compete in who has more points of a randomly selected stat.

Perhaps the cards could play a role in that?

by **Nationstates the Gathering** » Fri Apr 06, 2018 3:39 am

I'd also recommend a modification to the region formula that takes length of time in a region into account in calculating the likelihood of getting a card from that region. Any time > 60 days = full value while a nation that had just moved into a region <1 day will have no better chance of pulling a card from that region than they would from the pacific.

This would avoid situations like the current "North Carolina Infantry" where someone has created what seems like 100 nations, just numbering them 1-100 and moving them from region to region chasing Legendaries. All of a sudden a card that hadn't been found in nearly a full day was found 25 times in about 90 minutes accounting for over 50% of that cards entire FInds history.

If the formula for determining the likelihood of a card being drawn from the current region took into account the time in days which the nation was in the region as part of that calculation, this over-the-top scenario would not be possible

by **Nationstates the Gathering** » Fri Apr 06, 2018 2:30 pm

Updating the first post with the following ideas:

Global Marketplace

Basra wrote:Personally, I think that we need to have an auction house to facilitate buying and selling. Right now you need to look for a specific card, but if we can browse all cards for sale then it would really help increase sales and level prices.

Die Erworbenen Namen wrote:The second would be a global marketplace, with selective organization (alphabetical, price, rarity, etc) so you can see what the recent trades are, and get a good idea of what cards are popular.

Deck Organization

Die Erworbenen Namen wrote: It would be a lot easier to see which cards you have of that region if there was a sub deck in your own deck labeled as the region its in, showing you x (amount of cards you have) out of y(cards in the region).

Memyselfani wrote:Better trading and information mechanics, the ability to sort my cards into subdecks (keep vs sell, for instance), the ability to sort my wanted/for sale offers and modify them from one page.

Incorporate the Card Mini-Game into other Mini-Games (IE: Nation Challenge)

Reserka wrote:I would like to see something along the lines of a minigame that could be played. Like not on the lines of Magic: The Gathering, but like some sort of iteration of the nation face off thing that we have already.

To build on this, you could have a version of the nation challenge game where instead of pulling stats from your own nation exclusively, you could pull them from a nation you have a card of instead. Perhaps you randomly get a hand of 5 nations from your card deck and those, plus yourself, are the nations you can use in your faceoff. When you use a card (nation) you then get one drawn to replace it.

by **ChungusLand** » Fri Apr 06, 2018 2:39 pm

I like the idea of a card staying it's rarity, but as the nation grows, a new version is printed.

by **The Corparation** » Fri Apr 06, 2018 3:08 pm

Copy and pasted from another thread:

I think 4 things would be useful most of which have probably already been said:
A minimum sell price that's the same as the junk price
A way to gift cards without paying anything.
A trade mechanic, The ability to put down a Nervun and Fris and have someone else give you a Reploid Productions directly in exchange.
A way to sort your cards besides the legendary/rare/common tier. So you could have a "deck" of everyone in your region and another "deck" of all your forum friends.

And adjustment to drop rates might also be nice.

I think anything beyond that would be asking the techies to be putting in more work than they should have to. In terms of finding a card you want and finding a buyer for cards you have, this subforum works well enough for the job and you can always TG people to ask to buy a card from them.

by **Nationalist Gold Union** » Fri Apr 06, 2018 3:10 pm

I want to be able to battle them like Pokemon cards.

by **Nationalist Gold Union** » Fri Apr 06, 2018 3:10 pm

by **Great Celestial China** » Fri Apr 06, 2018 3:11 pm

Vovodoco wrote:
Great Celestial China wrote:And maybe the cards could be more than just for trading, and become more like Yu-Gi-Oh or Pokemon (sorry if I misspelled) where you can battle other players, and there could be set, like cards in the same region, or defaults and ex-nations.

You can challenged other nations and compete in who has more points of a randomly selected stat.

Perhaps the cards could play a role in that?

yeah

by **Odinburgh** » Fri Apr 06, 2018 3:49 pm

Love the bank swap idea.

by **His Excellence** » Fri Apr 06, 2018 4:11 pm

If there were to be a PvP component to the cards, I think it'd be cool to have some mixture of Uno and MtG.

Outside of matches, nations setup their deck of 4 suits with 13 cards each. At the start of a match, players choose which of their suit(s) to add into a shared deck that will be drawn from, with each player having a cooldown between choosing, so everyone can put their fair share in but someone sleeping at the wheel doesn't completely stall the game.
Maybe even matches of different sizes, with more than four suits.

Players would then take turns putting down cards that share some face value stat with the previous one; if they're the same rarity, region, political compass category, or share any of the three badge stats, it's fair game. But instead of trying to reduce your hand to one card, you draw every turn, and having/choosing to discard (or running out of time, thus passing your turn) costs health. Dying drops you out, last player standing wins.

Winning matches could award a card drop or points toward one, with a stalemate (all cards played/discarded, more than one player remaining) giving larger rewards to all players, adjusted to deck size.
Though I assume that to avoid card inflation, a new point that is used to buy small drops would be the best route, so there's a less than one rate of cards:wins

I call it "Peaceful Resolution" :lol:

by **No Worries** » Fri Apr 06, 2018 10:19 pm

If I may add some ideas to the future of cards system:

1.box looting might be connected with trading; for each one buy/sell you can open box with 6 or 7 new cards. This will retain the market dynamics.

2. Auctions: once a week or so, there could be public bidding for cards that haven't appeared yet or are rare in numbers; players could also add their own cards to the bidding system. Highest price wins.

3. I would suggest adding an option that the players can categorize their own deck according to whatever characteristic they wish to do it; not only by common/rare etc.

4. regarding the prices, I would leave a free market option (if someone wants to buy extremely pricy, let them), but add taxation to sellers who sell their cards for e.g. 500% more expensive than the junk price.

by **Galiantus III** » Sat Apr 07, 2018 12:38 am

Buying/Selling Cards
I don't like the ideas for creating very many artificial limitations on how people can buy and sell cards. I would much prefer a system like was proposed here:

Nationstates the Gathering wrote:Maybe the number of offers itself doesn't need to be restricted, but you have to have the bank to cover all the offers you make, in the assumption they are all accepted.

Junking, Inflation, and an Auction House
With junking, we currently have a very fast track for cash to enter the economy here, but no easy way for that money to leave. We currently have a very nice system for cards to enter and leave the market, but there are no major exit points for bank. This suggests that in the long run, inflation could be a problem. But at the same time, the more inflation there is, the less benefit is derived from junking cards, so the inflation can only go so far.

In reality, junking is a necessary mechanic for giving cards intrinsic value. So we can't get rid of it. Instead we must look for other ways for money to exit the economy.

My idea is an outgrowth of this idea here:

No Worries wrote:2. Auctions: once a week or so, there could be public bidding for cards that haven't appeared yet or are rare in numbers; players could also add their own cards to the bidding system. Highest price wins.

The auction house would serve two functions. First, players could put their cards up for auction in similar fashion to ebay, where they could set the length of the auction and the starting price.

The second, perhaps more vital function, is that the game would periodically reintroduce previously junked cards for auction. The key here is that the auction house would only sell these cards back into circulation after the card has sat in the junk heap for a few weeks, and the auction house would burn unsold cards for good. Bank spent on auctions of junked cards would essentially disappear from the economy. This would combat inflation by providing an outlet for cash to be changed into cards, as opposed to the current system where there is a one-way road from cards to cash. This would also ensure that the only way for a card to truly leave the system is if no one actually wants it.

by **Aclion** » Sat Apr 07, 2018 2:04 am

I think the best way to handle it is to make it an annual event and release a new batch of cards each year. That way you don't having people getting bored of it like challenges and CaH, you don't need to update existing cards(they just become first printing) and you don't need to manage the economy as much, since there's not a constant influx of new cards, and the new cards that are created in each event will be distinct from the old ones.

The Corparation wrote:A way to sort your cards besides the legendary/rare/common tier. So you could have a "deck" of everyone in your region and another "deck" of all your forum friends.

I actually requested that a few days back, As someone whose collected their entire region I'd like it a lot, but it didn't really take off. viewtopic.php?f=15&t=439529

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NS Cards: Permanent Feature Update

NS Cards: Permanent Feature Update

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