[Proposal] Faction Gameplay

[Reventus Koth]

Think I'm leaning against after trying pretty hard to like the idea.

Firstly, to the suggestions that Koth would make it, no offense to Koth who seems alright from the few interactions I've had with him, but are people seriously suggesting that a player who was subject to a WA ban/lost their main nation for using an illegal script should be given access to the game code? Like, wow.

Get out of here with that crap. 2 years later and I'm still being raked over the coals (this time by another former member of DEN, ha) for using what everyone thought was a legal program written by a rule-abiding coder a couple of times long before Halcones was declared DoS. There were multiple people punished by the admins during that whole debacle that hadn't even ever used Predator, but apparently they should also be precluded from ever touching another line of code. Give me a break. There's plenty of good reasons to criticize me, this isn't one of them.

Second, isn't very well fleshed out at all, but seems needlessly complex and a massive feature for only a small subset of the game. The specific points of the proposal are a lot harder to critique, because it doesn't appear to have much more specifics, and just a general idea. Having ideas simple is a major part of NS.

At least one mod disagrees that it isn't fleshed out enough to merit consideration, but even so, part of the idea of bringing this to Technical was so that I could get everyone involved and help work out the details I was struggling with. I never claimed this idea is ready to throw in the oven. I also have no idea what you're trying to say when you're calling my ideas too general yet somehow also needlessly complex.

Third, half the problems presented by OP aren't problems that need admin intervention. I agree with is the lack of avenues for conflict, but allowing GP regions god mode founders without allowing the WA to take away those protections, and incentives to refound and destroy regions rather than annex and build them is the issue. Gameplay core concepts being simple is good, as it makes it easier for newer players to grasp. Complexity for complexities sake doesn't exactly sound like something to strive towards.

Who says Electors are "god mode founders"? That makes zero sense, they're only afforded protections within the rest of this faction system, not the existing R/D game. And who said the WA couldn't be used to strip Electorship? Maybe instead of dismissing the idea entirely, you could do what practically everyone else with a critique in this thread has done and offer an alternate idea and explain how it could benefit the system. Also, there literally are incentives for annexing and building up regions. This isn't an amazingly complex concept, I still don't understand why you think it's just adding meaningless crap for the sake of it.

Bits of the idea I like, bits I think could be fixed, and bits I think are beyond salvage. Overall though, seems like a massively complex and enormous undertaking for something that imho could be fixed, or at least helped significantly by a mixture of adding the ability for the WA to remove founders/annexation (idea I've loved for the last 3 years and written pages on)/upping ejection costs/making regions that are empty turning off their password and needing to remain empty for a day before CTEing. Basically aiming for more founderless regions and making the path of least resistance region building rather than region destruction.

"Gameplay doesn't need big admin changes to fix the game, it just needs the ability for powerful GCRs to strip UCRs of their Founders through the WA and making the world stage a wasteland of founderless regions that can be exploited for the elitists' entertainment!"

Yeah, okay buddy. Maybe this isn't the thread for you after all.

Also does GP really need this feature ahead of every other community in the game? Not sure what other features are pressing, and I would highly like annexation etc. but I'm not seeing that it's life or death that GP gets something right now vs 2 years down the track.

Can you point me to where I demanded immediate admin action here? Hell, I proposed it with the presupposition that it WON'T ever be implemented at the current development pace. And as Cormac said, we might as well get the discussion done because we've already been waiting years for anything to change so why not pass the time? This whole paragraph just reeks of finding something to complain about for no reason.

[Galiantus III]

Second, isn't very well fleshed out at all, but seems needlessly complex and a massive feature for only a small subset of the game. The specific points of the proposal are a lot harder to critique, because it doesn't appear to have much more specifics, and just a general idea. Having ideas simple is a major part of NS.

You are only saying that because Koth is trying to add things to the basic idea in order to create gameplay around it. The base idea is very simple: regions can be a part of a faction. I don't see what is complex about that. What is convoluted is the power system of impact he brought up. But there is no need to implement that part, and it seems like what people support most is not in fact the additive, but the simple idea of having regions be a part of factions.

[Reventus Koth]

Oh, one more thing: maybe Gameplay wouldn't be such a "small subset" of the game if there were more actual game to play. There's only so much to do right now, I struggle to see how adding some mechanics to flesh out the world of NationStates could be detrimental, especially if it's not overwhelming to new players (which I've talked at length with Kyru about ensuring).

[Flanderlion]

I don't have an issue with Koth as a person/player etc. at all. I just don't think anyone with punishments from the game re scripts, even if they were LoD or Ale himself shouldn't be a techie as it's a bad precedent. I know it wasn't malicious and no one knew it was bad.

Elite which is illegal now might have been illegal then too, and I still have no clue despite asking moderation many many times, so it's not like I'm saying he's Frak reincarnated or something. Given I'm just a random player it's just my view rather than anything that will help/hurt Koths chances of being a techie.

I thought the overall idea is too complex - as in fails the simplicity test of being able to explain to a noob. Rethought this though, and I think I might have been wrong with that.

But at present it also needs to be fleshed out. I'm still a bit unsure how after a region is taken over by impact it frees itself (asked three people, got 3 answers). I know the faction who lost the region can spend their own and get it back, but can the founder/executive move the region back?

The comment on it needing to be fleshed out is to the various people who DMed me to get me to support this and other posters here and offsite. Same with the timeframe part.

The bit re god mode founders was me listing what I think the problems with GP are rather than with this proposal - and was exclusively to do with the 4 problems you laid out in the OP.

I've pushed for the shrinking of large regions WA votes/hiding WA totals until after voting, but regard that as a WA issue more than a GP issue. I wasn't advocating for GCRs to be able to strip away UCR founders, but instead for the NS community as a whole to be able to turn founders non-exec to prevent GP regions from hiding behind them. I like the idea of delegate votes but at present they completely drown out individual votes.

I don't have any issues with regions being part of factions, but what would that really change in the game without impact?

Like, the core idea seems decent at first glance and first explore, just seems an enormous amount of work for something that could be helped by a few lower work changes + annex.

[Galiantus III]

I've pushed for the shrinking of large regions WA votes/hiding WA totals until after voting, but regard that as a WA issue more than a GP issue. I wasn't advocating for GCRs to be able to strip away UCR founders, but instead for the NS community as a whole to be able to turn founders non-exec to prevent GP regions from hiding behind them. I like the idea of delegate votes but at present they completely drown out individual votes.

I like your ideas about the WA. This is definitely something that needs fleshing out in other threads. But I have to disagree with the specific idea of putting founder power up to a WA vote. That would place unpopular communities (not just Nazis and Raiders, by the way) in a position to have their founder deactivated, then a liberation passed, and finally a mass invasion. However, I wouldn't mind a system where the more power a UCR accumulates, the less control the founder can wield over it: for example, founders could be required to spend influence once their region is hosting 25 of more WA nations. And as a balance to this, founders would gain influence from every nation residing in their region, as if they were being endorsed by every single one.

I don't have any issues with regions being part of factions, but what would that really change in the game without impact?

I think it would help simplify regional politics, even if it was just a cosmetic/organizational thing with no power structure on top of it. It would be neat to see broad groups of regions sharing common interests actually have a platform for interaction, and I think it would help get smaller regions to connect with the larger community: factions would have an interest in growth, and therefore they would go and recruit smaller regions. Then these smaller regions could see their community as a little corner of some larger organization. Simply put, it would connect more people together, and give the world better geography.

Like, the core idea seems decent at first glance and first explore, just seems an enormous amount of work for something that could be helped by a few lower work changes + annex.

It does seem like a re-brand of annex, I will admit.

[Eluvatar]

This is an interesting idea.

I've not given it enough thought to say more than that, yet.

[Sapitna]

I love this idea, to be honest. The game really needs stuff like this to improve.

[The Pan Pacific]

Sorry if I'm fairly ignorant on the gameplay-side of NS, but what would this change, exactly?

Koth, your main complaints about NS invasion/defense gameplay is that it's too simple, dominated around feeders/sinkers due to their massive population, lacks intrigue and/or anything except invading/defending/raiding, and is fairly stagnant since there are relatively few avenues for attack.

Your solution is to create a third "tier" after the Nation and Region, called a Faction. Factions are composed of regions, which have their WAD/Founder as "representatives." The more WA endorsements and/or WA members a region has, the greater their comparative power in the Faction, with the largest-WA region getting their rep as a Chairman.

Regions in Factions are either Electors, which can't be touched, or Territories, which can. The number of Electors possible is determined by the number of WA members and/or WA endorsements in the Faction, through Impact. Impact is created by Regions as a result of their WA endorsements, and is used to annex regions (adding their WA endorsements and creating more Impact).

So, basically, the entire system is fueled by WA endorsements. More endorsements means more generated Impact and more possible Electors, which means more regions can be annexed and fewer can be annexed from you, which in turn increases endorsements, which creates Impact, etc etc.

The only real gameplay addition I see is what to use WA nations with. Do you keep them endorsing you, and generate Impact? Or use them as raiders or defenders? Either way, the advantage is with nations with a ton of WA endorsements and/or nations, which tend to be feeders, sinkers, and other GCRs. So how will this change the gameplay of NS?

[Odinburgh]

I am intrigued by the idea for factions. I don't know Koth at all but let's put this hate toward him that I see toward him aside. His idea is worth discussing how it could work. We are one big community right? Anyways I think it is good idea to start with in my opinion.

[Reventus Koth]

Hey boys, girls, and other. I think it's time to bring this bad boy back to the forefront of Technical's attention. I've mocked some very, very basic interpretations of a couple pages for Factions based on the existing World and Region pages, just to sort of demonstrate how the concept should squeeze into the current architecture:

---

Along with this, I want to revisit and clarify some things about the proposal that I went over in the NSGP Discord earlier today.

The first thing to bring up is how a region becomes a Faction Chair. The OP states "The region with the most endorsements on their WAD would become the Chair of the Faction, or maybe they're elected." So let's break this down a bit. We'll call the first method First-past-the-post, or FPTP. This method could be utilized in a faction that either has no assigned Electors or is not allowed to have Electors whatsoever (the previously touched on Neutral Ground faction). However, I believe that applying this method to all factions uniformly takes a solid chunk of possible interplay out of the hands of the players. I believe that in the vast majority of cases, Chair Elections should be utilized to determine the Chair, using a system not unlike the WA that only exists on the Faction level. Changing the Chair would require something similar to a WA proposal within the Faction. I worry that if FPTP was the name of the game across all factions, Chair tyranny would be practically inevitable and there would be very little opportunity for dislodging a Chair that isn't representing their faction well.

Another point to raise is how a faction seizes territory. When I initially proposed Faction Gameplay, I did not have a very fleshed out idea of how this would work. Here's a seizing process I came up with earlier today:
Step 1: Representative from the Faction Chair region targets a vulnerable territory from another faction and navigates to their region page. Let's call the aggressive faction "Red" and the defending faction "Blue", with the target region being "Exampleland".
Step 2: Red places a bid on Exampleland, using Impact. A notice is sent by the game to the regional leaders of Blue alerting them of the bid. A message appears in the "Factional Happenings". A timer begins to count down.
Step 3: Blue either contests the bid with one of their own, extending the timer, or lets the timer lapse. Other factions may be able to place their bids as well.
Step 4: The contest concludes and the game transfers Exampleland to whichever faction won the bid, depleting them of the Impact used to acquire the territory.
Step 5: The game places a block on Exampleland, preventing the regional leadership from leaving their new faction for a certain amount of time.

This is a good springboard for other topics that were discussed. In this example, we see that Red has expended Impact to acquire Exampleland, but we have not established how the Chair accesses this Impact. Since Impact is generated on a per-region basis, I propose that the Chair should be able to access the Impact pools of the member regions based on their status within the faction. Territories, being unprotected and having no representation, are able to have their Impact tapped at any time with no restrictions by the Chair. Electors, on the other hand, are protected and can choose how much of their Impact can be accessed by the Chair at any given time. The representative from an Elector region may decide that the Chair can only utilize 100 of their region's 500 Impact to execute their desires, for instance.

Back to the example. Because Red won the bid for Exampleland, they are now free to indulge in Exampleland's Impact pool until the territory is claimed by another faction after the block timer expires. This incentivizes a few behaviors. A faction will be much more inclined to use their Electors wisely to protect their assets, as well as holding onto a stockpile of Impact from those Electors to use defensively for the purpose of protecting their vulnerable territories. It also incentivizes using the Impact from your territories so that it doesn't become a weapon to be used against you later. It is not an accident that the most ready use of Impact is acquisition of more territory.

So, how many Electors does a faction get to protect their assets, anyway? I think it should be at least partially based on how the endorsements in your faction are spread out among its member regions. If your faction has a high concentration of very large regions with powerful delegates, such as GCRs, I believe this should heavily reduce your allotted number of Electors. You would be able to hold onto those heavy hitting regions using Electors, but your ability to protect Territory would be more limited to how well you can use Impact defensively. Conversely, a faction which utilizes a strategy of claiming a ton of regions with smaller endo-counts on their delegates would be afforded a higher number of Electors to compensate.

Why the focus on WA endorsements and endo counts when it comes to Impact generation? Simply put, it's the only way to ensure this system isn't abused with puppets. The current 10th most populous region in the game, Yuno, is a puppet dump which does not have any significant Impact on GP whatsoever, so I'd hate for them to be represented in this system like some sort of blue chip asset. With that in mind, I should bring up the idea that I imagine Impact generation on a per-region basis to be mechanically limited with a sort of exponential decay.

There would be a soft cap on how much Impact a region could generate before the returns diminish to insignificant amounts, the limit being related to their delegate's endo-count. This means that if a region is nearing the soft cap of Impact and their delegate begins losing endorsements, they would start to actually lose Impact as well. This incentivizes what is already standard GP behavior in regions that seek to be Impactful on the faction level. This also means that a region that loses most of its Impact for one reason or another (tapped extensively by their faction Chair, moved to Sanctuary) would be generating Impact much faster in an effort to reach its soft cap in the updates following its depletion. This improved regeneration means that high endo-count regions will always be good assets, disincentivizing (while not ruling out) hit-and-run tactics and ensuring that impactful GP regions actually remain relevant mechanically.

Sorry if this seems like a shotgun spray of ideas and concepts, I'm mainly just rewording IMs into a somewhat cohesive post. I'm itching to get the ball rolling on this idea again, so let me know what you guys think of all of this!

[Hesskin Empire]

After reading this and talking to Koth on discord I've actually become very much in favor of this.

I hope it gets implemented!

(I'd also love to see other little mockups of stuff)

[Bormiar]

I like the idea, but I'd like to hear what you think about current treaties between regions. Two regions with similar culture, let's say TSP and TNP already have a connection via diplomacy.

How would it affect this, along with embassies?

[Lord Dominator]

I like the idea, but I'd like to hear what you think about current treaties between regions. Two regions with similar culture, let's say TSP and TNP already have a connection via diplomacy.

How would it affect this, along with embassies?

Treaties & embassies would be entirely unaffected by Factions (outside of FA drama that may occur due to Factions)

[Odinburgh]

So how does the founding of new factions work?

[Reventus Koth]

So how does the founding of new factions work?

My original suggestion in the OP is that it would take a region, or a group of regions, 100 endorsements on their delegate(s) to be able to form a faction. I think this is a good target to aim for, but to make it a bit more futureproof Kyrusia and I had settled instead on a system not unlike the one used by the World Assembly's proposal queue: a certain percentage of the world's WA nations would be needed. Kyru and I agreed that a proportion somewhere between 0.3% and 0.5% would be best, with 0.4% as the sweet spot.

For reference, there are at the time of writing 24,613 member nations in the WA. 0.3% of that is roughly 74, 0.4% is roughly 98, and 0.5% is roughly 123. This has stayed surprisingly consistent since we last talked this over in November, so I think 0.4% is a safe bet moving forward. As an aside, at 0.4% this would cap the number of possible factions in the game at a maximum of 250, which is only taking into consideration the most improbable possible scenarios. Reality would soft cap the number of factions at a way lower number.

Anyway, this is how I imagine it would work out mechanically:

1) Red, Green, and Blue decide to form a faction. If any of the three of them have greater than or equal to 0.4% of the world's WA nations endorsing their delegate, that region can create the faction immediately. otherwise, proceed to Step 2.
2) One of the three regions creates a pledge to form a faction if they attain the requisite delegate endorsements. Each update, the game checks to see if the pledge has been satisfied. If it has, then the faction is created.
3) The other two regions join the pledge. If their delegate endorsements meet the threshold, the faction is created with all of the pledges as member regions.

A quirk of this system is that if a faction dips below the initial conditions, the game could have some interesting penalties. I suggested early in this thread that one solution would be to have any faction that dips below 0.4% of WA nations endorsing faction delegates quickly lose their accumulated Impact on a faction-wide scale. If they failed to get back up to the initial conditions before the collective Impact of the faction reached 0, then the faction would be disbanded and the member regions sent back to Neutral Ground. This would ensure that factions could not sit on their laurels, there could be no "dead" factions like there are hundreds of dead regions.

[Kurnugia]

I think I have an addition to make. A minor one though: Factions should like have their total stats from nations within that faction counted together and have their own leaderboards. That way you could have like resources to fight over.

A further suggestion: each day one stat gets picked all WA-nations within that faction would get a card pack.

But that's more of an on the flight suggestion. I will add more thoughts to it later.

[Cataluna]

I like this idea and don't think anything else should be added to it. It is cool as-is.

[Armaros]

I love this proposal, and I hope it gets implemented. I love it how it is currently and think it's a wonderful and much needed addition to GP. All I have to say about it.

[Th Empire of Wymondham]

This proposal is amazing and I hope that it is implemented into NationStates

[Alvero]

This is a great idea and it seems like a natural fit into the game. I hope we see it implemented.

[Reploid Productions]

We just need a chance to corner [violet] into taking a serious look at this one- at least a few of the mod team thinks it's got some serious merit and would probably be worth the techie time to figure out. Besides being a really cool and well-thought out idea, it's also a fantastic example of how to go about making a technical suggestion.

[Recuecn]

Glad to hear this is actually being considered (to at least some extent)... seems like a great idea to me

[Imperium of Josh]

Oh awesome, I'm glad this is getting consideration

[Rockina]

I'm also glad this is getting noticed.

[Cormactopia Prime]

We just need a chance to corner [violet] into taking a serious look at this one- at least a few of the mod team thinks it's got some serious merit and would probably be worth the techie time to figure out. Besides being a really cool and well-thought out idea, it's also a fantastic example of how to go about making a technical suggestion.

I'll never complain about NS admins or moderation again if this is implemented. Bless you.