Making new accounts and botting

[Marxist Germany]

I managed to reach #7 before going to sleep and finishing #10. I did this using just 50 puppets, so banning puppets would have taken the fun from N-Day for me.

[Minoa]

I managed to reach #7 before going to sleep and finishing #10. I did this using just 50 puppets, so banning puppets would have taken the fun from N-Day for me.

That would come in the dozens range: It becomes a serious problem on the minigame when players stuff literally hundreds of their puppets into a single faction, even if it is legal this year.

I am happy to reach a compromise on the maximum number of puppets.

[Chingis]

If you believe that removing the ability to add in large numbers of puppets is actually going to do anything to balance the game you are sorely mistaken.

Firstly I would heavily question the fact that the usage of puppets makes the game "not fair" - the usage of puppets takes an obscene amount of commitment and dedication that clearly most of you simply are not putting in. It's a shame, but putting in no effort and getting no reward isn't exactly a hard concept to grasp.

More importantly, however, you are absolutely fooling yourself if you actually for a second believe reducing the puppet limit to x per nation would make the game more fun and accessible to random native on the wider NS sphere. Yes it would kill HotA, there is no doubt about this, but consider the Potato Alliance faction which has nearly 6000 active WAs inside its member regions. You would simply be taking out one extreme for another - now N Day becomes a question of what faction the most WAs are located in.

The usage of puppets allows skilled players to bridge that gap, allowing small UCRs like Lily and TGW to outcompete GCR mega factions. This is where skill and dedication actually do pay dividends. Note that the AA had just as much opportunity to make use of puppets, more active members by a sizeable factor AND used a script to manage puppets to boot but still looked feeble compared to this year's HotA. This is not a disparity in puppet counts, of which the AA has plenty - this is just an on-paper difference in both the level of skill, but more importantly the amount of dedication HotA members put into this event. Every HotA member this year shot down some 50-100 thousand nukes over the course of 13 straight hours of the barrage. While I respect the right of natives of the NS Realm to take part in N Day and have fun too, consider the feelings of the people that actually care about this event to this degree. This is not just HotA members, this is hundreds of N Day players that dug deep and gave it their all this N Day. At some point, a tradeoff needs to be made between the right of a native who was planning on making a nuke or two and sending it into the stratosphere to not be targetted by a puppet and our right to actually have fun on a day that we care the most about, and we put the most effort into, and frankly, I am unconvinced that we should be the ones to step down here.

At the end of the day - it takes me twice the effort to run two puppets as it does a native to run one, but even if we were to limit the usage of puppets, all that would happen is 5-nation factions comprised of 5 real-life people would get stomped by 6000 nation factions comprised of 6000. NS minigames aren't unused to being dominated by GPers, and this is for good reason.

[Baloo Kingdom]

Eh, I know its perfectly legal to use puppet on N-Day, however I can understand that some people would be frustrated after be bombarded by a singular nation's legion of puppet accounts. Just my thoughts.

[Daytime to Night]

Its a game with a leaderboard and thousands of competitors, you get your points from destroying other peoples nations. I can see why people would be bitter but it is a competition won by beating up others or getting beaten up yourself.

The teams that do well do everything they can within the rules to get an advantage, they build alliances and negotiate with people across the game to stand a chance at success. They maximise the resources available to them in every way that the game lets them.

You can be salty about it but Augustin Alliance won because they did just that. They built a large community, and then reached out beyond their normal community to build an even bigger alliance of nations. They built and coded tools to maximise their efficiency. They won because they put in that effort to go the extra mile.

Tim did the same with Potato Alliance, he built it up from a footnote regional faction last year to a multi-regional mega faction by uniting different groups, persuading them to come under that banner and setting up an operations centre where every region was represented in Command and had a say in the strategy. He also stayed up 24 hours to make the biggest impact he could individually, ran as many puppets as he could manage efficiently and delivered more damage per nation than anyone else in the alliance (whether they were running 1 nation or 300).

You can change the rules, but the people who win will still be the people with the most drive to win who match that with effort, organisation, alliance building and manage the resources available to them as efficiently as possible, and they'll win by beating up other nations for points.

Puppets only give you an advantage if you use them correctly, the CAPTCHAs are an absolutely pain, and if you don't get your strategy right and get destroyed then thats worth -100 points with one nation or potentially -10,000 points with 100. You can have fun and finish with a positive score no matter how many people you have, you just need to get your strategy right.

It would be fun for the leaderboard to have stats for individual nations so you can see who did the most with a single nation, but I strongly suspect the same people who went to the effort to build/run winning factions (August, Chingis, Vinny, Altmoras, Tim, Minos, 9003, Sakana, Somyrion) will still be at the top of those individual scoreboards.

[Radicalania]

When was the Captcha supposed to kick in? I was running 9 nations and never got stuck by it, though there was a constant "Protected by captcha" thing underneath. I heard a lot of people had trouble with it, but I barely noticed it.

[Daytime to Night]

It kicked in for me around the 30th puppet I added, and by about 150 it was the most painful thing ever. I'm pretty sure the image cut into nine parts ones were loading incorrectly for me because it never said I got it right a single time so ended up being about five slow loading captchas in one.

In fairness that probably means it affects the right people, but during shielding it took any skill out of the equation and left you to rely on your factionmates entirely.

[Praeceps]

I was mainly affected with it when joining a faction. It got so bad that Google refused to provide me with anymore captchas (I resorted to getting my last dozen nations into a faction on a different browser). Last year, I did not have an issue with captchas when joining a faction. Only difference this year was that I was using containers and more nations (the rate of captchas per nation was still higher for me this year). Out of a couple hundred targeting, I got it maybe only a couple of times?

[Catsfern]

I know i used a good few of my puppets this year, but I was just constantly manually switching between them.

[Altmoras]

ReCapchas were absolute cancer this year. I was getting capchas on pretty much every single action, and oftentimes it wouldn't even offer me a capcha, it would just call me a bot and tell me to get bent. I literally changed nothing about my setup from last year and yet I faced exponentially more capchas.

The sheer RNG slow loading and multi-page ReCapchas introduce is ridiculous. Especially when a slow loader would show up on the incoming page. If admin insists I complete a capcha every 10 seconds they could at least have the decency to make their own capchas like other websites do.

[Dabberwocky]

When was the Captcha supposed to kick in? I was running 9 nations and never got stuck by it, though there was a constant "Protected by captcha" thing underneath. I heard a lot of people had trouble with it, but I barely noticed it.

Same. I used 100+ alts and only did the CAPTCHA five times in total

[Free Las Pinas III]

I used at least 400 puppets during N-Day. AFAIK, they ask you to answer the captcha if you’re going through hundreds of puppets in a row. When I started the event, I was only adding 10 at a time, but when I began puppet flooding other factions with the other 300, I got multiple captchas on specific puppets (but not all of them; every fifth one or so).

So basically, if you were going really clutch, it’s gonna come for you. That’s probably what happened to HOTA, since they were a few people going through a ton of puppets as fast as they can.

Edit: accidentally posted with a puppet

[Noahs Second Country]

When was the Captcha supposed to kick in? I was running 9 nations and never got stuck by it, though there was a constant "Protected by captcha" thing underneath. I heard a lot of people had trouble with it, but I barely noticed it.

Same. I used 100+ alts and only did the CAPTCHA five times in total

I wish this was me.

Towards the end I was getting multi-step CAPTCHA checks on nearly every single puppet.

[Tim-Opolis]

Weirdly enough I actually basically had no CAPTCHA issues after the initial joining period in the first couple hours. I was comfortably rotating 300 with minimal captcha pop-ups.

[August]

-snip-

With respect to my own bias in this matter, I think this post nails it. Everyone thinks their faction deserves to win, because they do not personally see the work that other factions are doing. Small factions think they deserve it because they are not using hordes of puppets, factions without in-house programmers think they deserve it because they are not scripting, UCR factions think they deserve it because they are not relying on GCRs' population bases, and so on. The fact is, N-Day is a great event because there are so many factors that go into a strong performance, and overall, hard work is rewarded. Last year we did not try very hard, so we only got third. The year before, we tried hard in the beginning of the event, but we blew off diplomacy in the lead-up and got crushed as a result. This year, my team and I worked like maniacs to prepare. I was writing code and testing it on every browser and platform I could, DiRito and Emi and I were hashing out strategy, Merit and Azell were running diplomacy in a huge number of allied and member regions, we had a couple guys on intel, and our whole population was mobilized to create puppets. (This is not an exclusive list, either.) Every big faction was working hard. There is a reason there were nearly three times as many nuke launches and nearly four times as many successful deflections this year as last year.