Post Reset Cards Recovery

[Fauzjhia]

. . . <snip> I can't speak for all but in general, we big farma players are more respectable than small farma, both with bank, cards and other players. if anything it's mostly people who are outside any card organization you should worry about.

you will never find my preventing or Mikeswill preventing you from buying a card. Also, I'm not sure I would be able to make any progress without big farma selling/trading me my cards. they are kinda essential to self-collectors. to affect the market, cards have to sold. this is why certain pull event did not affect the market, because with 20 new copies of a card, no one want to sell it.

Speak for yourself, Fauzjhia. While you give away cards (thank you for your generosity), I can think of times when MW deliberately bid up a legendary only to slip in with his many multiple cards and took the bid from some hapless player . . . although I noticed a tapering off of this behavior recently. Maybe it's true now but it wasn't true in the recent past.

he has to compete with Koem kab, who buy a lot of legendaries cards.
I don't think its anything personal. I never saw him on my trade, including the cards I bought for others, like Kwaj.

Ideal solution
Restoration using reconstructed trades data is obviously the most ideal, if possible. This has been discussed and I think most people would be happy with this.

Additionally, this should be complimented by other changes to make up for lost time. The biggest flaw is of course is not addressing per-nation pulls and junked cards, but I'll point out that a year of issues answering produces 292 packs, which represents 2-3 legendary cards. The bigger loss is the bank coming from it - I have plenty of puppets that had 40+ bank on them that is no longer represented by the data or retrievable. I have an interesting proposal to address this using the trades data:
1. Find all nations that have gifted a legendary to another nation.
2. For each legendary gifted (max 3), grant a certain amount (5, perhaps) of bank to that puppet. There are a few outlier nations that may stand to gain extra here, but pulling a legendary on average represents a certain amount of other cards that were pulled and likely junked. The actual number can be calculated using rarity odds.

I can confirm I would happy with this solution, its not perfect it won't reconstruct all our perfect decks. but its way better then anything proposed

[Jerzylvania]

I've read the discussions on cards that have appeared on the forums. I haven't tried Discord or any of the alternate sites. As a very small card farmer all I have to say is I don't see why anyone has to get compensated for anything. True, big card pharma has probably lost the most -- but what have they lost? One knows that one is playing an online game. One knows if one can't back up one's collection it can be lost. I assume that each player here is playing of it's own free will. IOW, you chose to play the card game knowing you could lose a virtual stack (OK, plethora if you want) of cards.

Never mind that volunteers have been sweating bullets trying to put this virtual Humpty Dumpty back together again. Now you expect these same volunteers to put in even more BS&T to make you whole again? You've got to be kidding me. You're crying because you lost some pixels on a screen?

Look, I value my card collection as much as the next person. Eleven months of collecting are gone. Quit whining. Don't troll for handouts. Pull up your socks. Get started collecting again when the game is back online. Just my NSHO.

<snip>

Edit: Also, I don't really see the "volunteers" schtick making sense here. At the end of the day, the reason why there was no backup and an ancient server disk in the first place is not really on the staff but on the site owner, who neglected to make such an upgrade or take appropriate precautions. Unlike the rest of us, they do profit from NationStates and it's reasonable to be critical of their failure to protect the site from this kind of issue, knowing that it was certainly a possibility after the December failure of last year.

Don't hold back, NSC. Please let us know exactly how you really feel.

But seriously, i admire your balls for putting it so bluntly. Don't know about assessing any culpability yet. Some people say FDR let Pearl Harbor happen on purpose. Same with Bush and 9/11. Can't say i agree with either of those perspectives. At least this here NS mess is just in a game, at least as far as i know. Maybe the whole universe is a game. Maybe not.

[Il Sonno della Ragione Genera Mostri]

Maybe this situation is the perfect time to make the update about what card game had to be from beginning: one nation per person can pull the cards, all the puppets can't join the cards game.
Something like the World Assembly works.

[Mikeswill]

There is no solution that will make everyone happy. Players like myself who spent hours on strategy and gameplay probably ended up with greater amounts of cards, Deck Value, and Bank than the more casual player. Whereas most of this is probably lost, we will begin anew with the past experiences that probably will give us an edge strategy wise.

I personally stand to lose 1,600,000 DV if the May 2023 date is accurate. There is no way to compensate such numbers. As such, I will accept what works best for the most players.

[Loveable Dogs]

I like the idea of upping card pack spawn rates. Doing this will help with deck recovery.

I also think that the odds of pulling a card from your region should be increased again. That will also help the people who collect their region-mates' cards recover their sets faster. If I remember correctly, back in season 1 the odds were around one region card per pack so this wouldn't be a totally new thing.

[Basque Dominion]

Maybe this situation is the perfect time to make the update about what card game had to be from beginning: one nation per person can pull the cards, all the puppets can't join the cards game.
Something like the World Assembly works.

This.

[Kractero]

This isn't really a place to discuss how packs should be generated, which is something that has numerous forum posts for years now.

[Blab]

Maybe this situation is the perfect time to make the update about what card game had to be from beginning: one nation per person can pull the cards, all the puppets can't join the cards game.
Something like the World Assembly works.

This is the best "solution" I've seen yet.

I still maintain that the GAME owes us nothing. I say let's move on. We can buy, trade and pull the cards we need.

[Blab]

It's a "good faith"' effort on my part to say that Max owes us nothing. We come on his site, some of us are site supporters, and we "have fun" here. The vast majority are not site supporters.

Those that aren't generate revenue for the site via advertising. Every user has a value and it is in the best interest to retain as many of the users as possible to continue serving them ads or to have them become site supporters. If there's a possibility 11 months of gameplay is vanished, and the response is a half-hearted shrug, do you really think many of the hardcore card players who generate a lot more ad revenue than the average user will hang about?

Simply put - if the drive can't be recovered which volunteers are working on - it costs nothing to put in place a compensation package. To the contrary, it costs more not to.

I don't know if the site's owner is enthralled with the stats of the game. Back in the early days I thought not but the more recent
NEWS posts tell a different tale.

I remain steadfast in my opinion that he owes us nothing. I liked the site better before the puppet masters came into play, anyway. If they want to stomp away trailing their vanished pixels behind them, so be it. Whatever he chooses to do I'll be satisfied. But I certainly don't speak for the small, very loud contingent that won't stand down until they get what they want.

[Blab]

Speak for yourself, Fauzjhia. While you give away cards (thank you for your generosity), I can think of times when MW deliberately bid up a legendary only to slip in with his many multiple cards and took the bid from some hapless player . . . although I noticed a tapering off of this behavior recently. Maybe it's true now but it wasn't true in the recent past.

he has to compete with Koem kab, who buy a lot of legendaries cards.
I don't think its anything personal. I never saw him on my trade, including the cards I bought for others, like Kwaj.

Dear Fauzjhia:

Of course he doesn't do it to you. You bid above what a card is worth. As for competing with KK, he had all the time when KK was out of the game. When KK came back and began "competing," KK was a very distant second. He still is.

Restoration using reconstructed trades data is obviously the most ideal, if possible. This has been discussed and I think most people would be happy with this.

Additionally, this should be complimented by other changes to make up for lost time. The biggest flaw is of course is not addressing per-nation pulls and junked cards, but I'll point out that a year of issues answering produces 292 packs, which represents 2-3 legendary cards. The bigger loss is the bank coming from it - I have plenty of puppets that had 40+ bank on them that is no longer represented by the data or retrievable. I have an interesting proposal to address this using the trades data:
1. Find all nations that have gifted a legendary to another nation.
2. For each legendary gifted (max 3), grant a certain amount (5, perhaps) of bank to that puppet. There are a few outlier nations that may stand to gain extra here, but pulling a legendary on average represents a certain amount of other cards that were pulled and likely junked. The actual number can be calculated using rarity odds.

I can confirm I would happy with this solution, its not perfect it won't reconstruct all our perfect decks. but its way better then anything proposed[/quote]

[Card Cleaver]

Whatever he chooses to do I'll be satisfied. But I certainly don't speak for the small, very loud contingent that won't stand down until they get what they want.

I understand your points and I'm coming from a fairly agnostic angle (I mostly just buy cards to junk, so the only thing I lose in the scenario of an 11-month rollback is a statistic). Putting my more cynical money mind into the situation, more ad impressions by users with all these puppets which don't have Site Supporter is a good thing for revenue - they're clicking more pages and also generating more cards that go to market to serve more ads.

Taking it as a purely transactional point, yes, the players are owed nothing - but goodwill goes a long way to keep such ventures sustainable. In the event of large outages and data impacts, you can probably count on one hand the games that told users to kick rocks entirely when it comes to something as severe as this. It's a harmless (and beneficial) action to provide Some Form of Compensation when so many players are affected. Whatever that may be, but to go "you get nothing, you lose, good day sir" would be, frankly, a little bizarre.

[Entropan]

[*]

This, daily, for the next 7 days would be great.

peoples are going to abuse this,

submitting 5-pack collections of morover, chan island, and varanius s2 on every one of my >600 puppets

[Basque Dominion]

Those that aren't generate revenue for the site via advertising. Every user has a value and it is in the best interest to retain as many of the users as possible to continue serving them ads or to have them become site supporters. If there's a possibility 11 months of gameplay is vanished, and the response is a half-hearted shrug, do you really think many of the hardcore card players who generate a lot more ad revenue than the average user will hang about?

Simply put - if the drive can't be recovered which volunteers are working on - it costs nothing to put in place a compensation package. To the contrary, it costs more not to.

I don't know if the site's owner is enthralled with the stats of the game. Back in the early days I thought not but the more recent
NEWS posts tell a different tale.

I remain steadfast in my opinion that he owes us nothing. I liked the site better before the puppet masters came into play, anyway. If they want to stomp away trailing their vanished pixels behind them, so be it. Whatever he chooses to do I'll be satisfied. But I certainly don't speak for the small, very loud contingent that won't stand down until they get what they want.

Also very, very much this.

[Kractero]

snip

I don't know if the site's owner is enthralled with the stats of the game. Back in the early days I thought not but the more recent
NEWS posts tell a different tale.

I remain steadfast in my opinion that he owes us nothing. I liked the site better before the puppet masters came into play, anyway. If they want to stomp away trailing their vanished pixels behind them, so be it. Whatever he chooses to do I'll be satisfied. But I certainly don't speak for the small, very loud contingent that won't stand down until they get what they want.

It is very interesting and cool to know that you don't stand for the "loud contingent" asking for compensation. Sadly, the first inklings as far as I can tell regarding compensation for this event that nobody in cards asked to happen, not even the bigger ones which you seem to carry a ton of animosity for, was first brought up by Aav/United Calanworie. I do not understand where this fixation with Max is coming from.

[Osheiga]

Maybe this situation is the perfect time to make the update about what card game had to be from beginning: one nation per person can pull the cards, all the puppets can't join the cards game.
Something like the World Assembly works.

If we instituted this and the way packs were generated didn’t change, it would kill activity in the cards community. I would guess that 95%+ of trades have a puppet/farming nation involved in some way (either by pulling the card, gifting it, selling it, etc). Not to mention r/d players don’t have their WAs on their main account and would basically be barred from playing.

I think a better way to limit puppet spam is to change the way packs spawn in the first place instead of having a flat-out ban on non-WA players participating. Something like the kakuro minigame from the wonders event is a good proof of concept here since you were able to grind a lot of resources on one account without having to use a horde of puppets. Something like that makes card farming puppets obsolete, solves the issue of unfairly excluding players who don’t have their WA on their main account, and makes it so the current rate of finds/market activity can continue.

But I think the focus for now should remain on rebuilding the cards database, deciding on what compensation should look like (if admin feels compensation is necessary), and getting the game online in the first place rather than coming up with new features for admin to code. (Plus, I think decoupling issues from cards/disincentivizing puppet spam has been discussed in other threads in this forum before).

[Jerzylvania]

There is no solution that will make everyone happy. Players like myself who spent hours on strategy and gameplay probably ended up with greater amounts of cards, Deck Value, and Bank than the more casual player. Whereas most of this is probably lost, we will begin anew with the past experiences that probably will give us an edge strategy wise.

I personally stand to lose 1,600,000 DV if the May 2023 date is accurate. There is no way to compensate such numbers. As such, I will accept what works best for the most players.

Now that's a display of maturity.

Maybe this situation is the perfect time to make the update about what card game had to be from beginning: one nation per person can pull the cards, all the puppets can't join the cards game.
Something like the World Assembly works.

This idea came up a few years ago. I think it was Fris that said it's not possible to determine on the tech end.

[Fauzjhia]

There is no solution that will make everyone happy. Players like myself who spent hours on strategy and gameplay probably ended up with greater amounts of cards, Deck Value, and Bank than the more casual player. Whereas most of this is probably lost, we will begin anew with the past experiences that probably will give us an edge strategy wise.

I personally stand to lose 1,600,000 DV if the May 2023 date is accurate. There is no way to compensate such numbers. As such, I will accept what works best for the most players.

Now that's a display of maturity.

Maybe this situation is the perfect time to make the update about what card game had to be from beginning: one nation per person can pull the cards, all the puppets can't join the cards game.
Something like the World Assembly works.

This idea came up a few years ago. I think it was Fris that said it's not possible to determine on the tech end.

good players will simply switch WA nations all the times.
this idea is only backed by a (DOWN with puppets) ideas, but it forgots that without those puppets, the number of cards in existence would be much lower.

we, big farma, create cards. There is no going around this.

[Richardian Savoy]

Hello everyone-

As someone whose sole presence on this site is the card game, and who was hovering right at the edge of the top 100 recently, obviously the potential for losing 11 months of work is a bummer to say the least. But, whatever the outcome, as long as cards aren't retired (which does not seem to be the plan), I will be here to rebuild what I can - the first go round was a fun challenge and the second will be, too.

Since I'm a lurker and not involved in the social aspect, outside of a stray telegram here and there, I'll share the two cents I do have here.

Of all the suggestions about "compensation", I like the expanded deck size one that Giovanniland posted the most. The hardest collections to rebuild will be the Legendries and the CTEs, and that one seems to best accommodate both of those concerns. I had my S3 Leg collection down to only needing 5, all of which were CTEs. I'm not terribly concerned about bank, as that IMO is easy to generate.

Secondly, I understand why people feel that puppets and big farmers are "unfair". But as Fauzjhia points out, they are the reason many cards exist. The more nations that are pulling, the more chances for hard to find cards to come into existence in the first place. Considering how few Moreover/Chan Island, etc cards have generated since the start of s3, even with thousands of farms going, it's easy to imagine that eliminating puppets could make certain collections virtually impossible to achieve. If only one person had ever pulled a Chan Island, for example, there's no incentive to ever sell it for any amount because they could be basically certain they'll never get it again.

Anyway, glad the site is back up in general, cheers everyone.

[The Scandoslavic Empire]

Post 69, nice.

Anyway, going to post here just to keep this bookmarked for further use.

[National Park Service]

I remain steadfast in my opinion that he owes us nothing. I liked the site better before the puppet masters came into play, anyway. If they want to stomp away trailing their vanished pixels behind them, so be it. Whatever he chooses to do I'll be satisfied. But I certainly don't speak for the small, very loud contingent that won't stand down until they get what they want.

How does the presence of puppet masters hurt your experience on this website? In the case of cards, many are very generous and enhance the average card player's enjoyment.

[Basque Dominion]

I remain steadfast in my opinion that he owes us nothing. I liked the site better before the puppet masters came into play, anyway. If they want to stomp away trailing their vanished pixels behind them, so be it. Whatever he chooses to do I'll be satisfied. But I certainly don't speak for the small, very loud contingent that won't stand down until they get what they want.

How does the presence of puppet masters hurt your experience on this website? In the case of cards, many are very generous and enhance the average card player's enjoyment.

This sounds to me awfully close to a set of overlords graciously distributing alms among the poor, which might be the reason why some people don't agree with the current system.

[National Park Service]

How does the presence of puppet masters hurt your experience on this website? In the case of cards, many are very generous and enhance the average card player's enjoyment.

This sounds to me awfully close to a set of overlords graciously distributing alms among the poor, which might be the reason why some people don't agree with the current system.

Right, I guess people don't need to give their cards away at all. Perhaps we should just all get the same set of cards and stare at them for a while. You also fail to address why puppet masters are such a bad thing in any understandable manner besides gesturing wildly.

[Basque Dominion]

This sounds to me awfully close to a set of overlords graciously distributing alms among the poor, which might be the reason why some people don't agree with the current system.

Right, I guess people don't need to give their cards away at all. Perhaps we should just all get the same set of cards and stare at them for a while. You also fail to address why puppet masters are such a bad thing in any understandable manner besides gesturing wildly.

Understood. If I slightly contradict you, I'm "gesturing wildly". If I underline the potential abuse, which has been in some (many? I don't know) cases FRIGGIN REAL (one of these gracious overlords took exception once at my bidding in some auction they considered 'private' and blocked ALL MY BIDS for two days, until they got bored of playing with mice), I fail to address why puppet masters are such a bad thing in any understandable manner (besides gesturing wildly). Come on! There even exist resolutions condemning abusive players!!!

But don't worry: I get it. you are one of the gracious and benevolent overlords. Not one of the abusive, unhinged, entitled, and capricious ones.

The system as it is today is an open door to market manipulation, distortion, and abuse. Even if all great puppet masters were 'good' and played nice, which is not always the case, the potential for abuse would continue there.

[Riemstagrad]

The system as it is today is an open door to market manipulation, distortion, and abuse. Even if all great puppet masters were 'good' and played nice, which is not always the case, the potential for abuse would continue there.

Ever considered that the system is designed to facilitate exactly this? It's a game after all. In the early years of cards it was considered very much part of the game to play the market system and try to steal good deals while dumping bad deals on others.
As habits and collections were more established, the cooperation in the game increased with collectors helping eachother out with cards they needed. That includes giving eachoters bank-transfer-cards back. A result of these established manners is that when someone messes with it, there might follow angry telegrams and retaliation and often an invite to cooperate in the cards-discord.

More market power for the rich is not bad. If you want to play the game good, you invest time and get richer and you will increase your market power. If you don't want to do that, don't expect to gain the market power from nothing. I fail to see where that is bad game design.

[Basque Dominion]

The system as it is today is an open door to market manipulation, distortion, and abuse. Even if all great puppet masters were 'good' and played nice, which is not always the case, the potential for abuse would continue there.

Ever considered that the system is designed to facilitate exactly this? It's a game after all. In the early years of cards it was considered very much part of the game to play the market system and try to steal good deals while dumping bad deals on others.
As habits and collections were more established, the cooperation in the game increased with collectors helping eachother out with cards they needed. That includes giving eachoters bank-transfer-cards back. A result of these established manners is that when someone messes with it, there might follow angry telegrams and retaliation and often an invite to cooperate in the cards-discord.

More market power for the rich is not bad. If you want to play the game good, you invest time and get richer and you will increase your market power. If you don't want to do that, don't expect to gain the market power from nothing. I fail to see where that is bad game design.

I fully understand (and agree to it) that investing more effort deserves more and better results. That’s true here and in RL too.
I am not convinced the current system works like it does because it has been designed so, but for the moment now it is what it is, and everyone that plays here either accepts it or goes away. That’s clear and fair enough. Still, I think the current system is unbalanced and distorts the game… (Also, I fail to understand why some people takes this view that much personally.)

In that respect, the communities that have grown around the current system are a nice and positive parte of the current game. But I think this is but a workaround, and not a feature of NS.

Anyway, that’s just my opinion. I acknowledge, and thank, the positive and generous role played by many players. But that doesn’t mean the current system is beyond criticism. When I see hundreds, thousands of NS named “cards farm 1”, “cards farm 2”, “cards farm n”… I feel a puppy is dying somewhere.