Suggestion: Faction size cap and other N-day reforms

[Drew Durrnil]

Since N-day has devolved into a competition between megafactions such as The Potato Alliance and Crabs of the Apocalypse, members of small factions are often left in the dust. With these megafactions also having thousands of puppets, giving them lots of extra manpower, N-day has become an unfair event.

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My solution:
Create a size cap for factions so that a maximum of 500 nations non-WA nations total nations and 200 300 non-WA nations (at the start of the event) could be in a faction at one time. This will solve the issue of an ungodly number of puppets being used to give a megafaction a competitive advantage. This would still allow some puppets to be used, but not so much as to take up a sizable fraction of the entire site's nations.

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Edit: Here is a statistic to show how unbalanced N-day has been this year. Three megafactions make up most of the N-day participants. These are the Crabs of the Apocalypse with 14,977 nations, The Potato Alliance with 7,065 nations, and The Catgirl Hivemind with 1,328 nations (however, this faction might not be considered a megafaction considering the scale that they are getting shelled at). The next biggest faction is the Grand Army of the Republic, with 127 participants.
Edit 2: Reppy outlined some of the issues with this suggestion. To help fix this, I propose that factions be linked to regions. A region can link to a maximum of 3 factions, while a faction can be linked to a maximum of 15 regions. In comparison, The Potato Alliance is linked to 28 regions, while CotA is linked to 13 regions.
Edit 3: I have given my opinion on and outlined some other reforms to the N-day system in this post here.
Edit 4: Reppy gave me an idea in her N-day reforms thread here that a "radiation cleanup" feature and a complimentary "environmental specialist" should be added to the N-day minigame. Non-specialists clean up 1% of radiation per every 1 production spent, while specialists clean up 3% of radiation per every 2 production spent. This allows factions to survive longer and finally makes radiation reversible.

[Great Algerstonia]

I like the idea. Could use tweaking though-- perhaps a limited amount of non-WAs instead?

[Lord Dominator]

Capping faction size just forces Horsemen to scatter to some number of factions and mildly complicates their defense.

Limiting non-WAs leaves Crab and Potato still dominant by far, just needing more time to kill anything

[Democratic Yaradan]

Regions can be as big as they want. Why shouldn't factions?

[Hiram Land]

Tomorrow (or later today or whenever this thing ends) everyone (or most people) are going to complain about how two factions dominated the event and made the event more or less boring, and there'll be a long list of complaints and the like.

In all honesty, this idea is definitely a good way to start, though maybe a few tweaking things would definitely help, like the suggestions above my comment.

Hopefully next N-Day will be more competitive!

(Edit: I want to say to make a request via the Technical Forum to change the rules for N-Day, although I think I'm certainly wrong on that front. Here's the link if you want to know how to get there: viewforum.php?f=15)

[The Cordian Isles]

If we combine a cap with factions only being able to shoot down launches by or at their faction, things get a lot more tricky.

[Lord Dominator]

If we combine a cap with factions only being able to shoot down launches by or at their faction, things get a lot more tricky.

That would do it better, yes

[Great Algerstonia]

If we combine a cap with factions only being able to shoot down launches by or at their faction, things get a lot more tricky.

I like this idea.

[Isaris]

I agree wholeheartedly there needs to be a cap. This meta is absolutely disgusting. My faction was targeted within 20 minutes of creation by Crabs. We stood no chance to even begin playing the game at all.

[Qvait]

Regions can be as big as they want. Why shouldn't factions?

Because next year, we will have just one megafaction that merges Crab and Potato and pumps out a bunch of shields that prevents anyone from scoring.

[Bohseon]

Size caps are overrated
Size minimums however? That's something I could get behind

[Picairn]

What's stopping the Crabs and Potato-allied factions of 500 banding together and nuking everyone else again? They are still free to collude and form a duopoly.

If we combine a cap with factions only being able to shoot down launches by or at their faction, things get a lot more tricky.

At least this is somewhat better, it means that defense alliances will be completely negated and only NAPs are allowed. Smaller factions may be able to band together and concentrate nukes on a singular target, and likewise for big ones.

[PotatoFarmers]

I don't really see the point of a cap...since, well, strength in numbers and all. If you really think about it, it is the same in gameplay. In r/d. In absolutely everywhere else. And puppet spam isn't necessarily a good think, because you need to be able to control all of them efficiently in order for the puppets to be useful. And given that this is an opportunity for several regions to bond together to fight against a common enemy, honestly, no comment.

[Sailiopia]

If we combine a cap with factions only being able to shoot down launches by or at their faction, things get a lot more tricky.

This should seriously be something that the admins should consider. It's pretty odd that we can defend other factions, yes mutual defence pacts exist but most of the time the priority should be on defending your own faction. So if there was a cap of about 1,000-2,000 nations, then we would hopefully see less 'ultra-factions' (as I shall now term the factions comprised of superfactions) battling together until one loses and the other one dominates.

We must remember that N-day was not originally meant to be a lasting part of the game - originally it was an April Fool's feature, which was turned into an annual event. So it was designed to work when no-one expected it, meaning that superfactions weren't able to be created (apart from AA, which existed in the first place as basically a collection of regions all under one banner).

This would also prevent the domination of R/D puppet-holders and card-farming operators who can seriously boost any faction they join.

[Lord Dominator]

If we combine a cap with factions only being able to shoot down launches by or at their faction, things get a lot more tricky.

This should seriously be something that the admins should consider. It's pretty odd that we can defend other factions, yes mutual defence pacts exist but most of the time the priority should be on defending your own faction. So if there was a cap of about 1,000-2,000 nations, then we would hopefully see less 'ultra-factions' (as I shall now term the factions comprised of superfactions) battling together until one loses and the other one dominates.

We must remember that N-day was not originally meant to be a lasting part of the game - originally it was an April Fool's feature, which was turned into an annual event. So it was designed to work when no-one expected it, meaning that superfactions weren't able to be created (apart from AA, which existed in the first place as basically a collection of regions all under one banner).

This would also prevent the domination of R/D puppet-holders and card-farming operators who can seriously boost any faction they join.

Well, no - the same kinds of superfactions would exist, we’d just spend more time on diplomacy or fighting each other. All other factions still wouldn’t have a great time.

[Side 3]

If you ask me the best way would to be institute a nation cap and require WA participation. While it wouldn't exactly cure the megafaction problem, it would greatly help to alleviate it by excluding puppet nations.

[Cerdenia]

Well, introducing a faction size would theoretically mean a faction could get flooded by puppets from other faction, as such filling all of the spaces and just generally ruining the faction.

If there were to be faction sizes they would have to be pretty generous (probably in the thousands, I would say something around 8~ to 10k would be fair), and you would also need to give the faction power to kick off members (which I'm personally against, since that ends rogue nations, which are one of the most fun way of making use of megafactions if you don't want to join one).

[Brototh]

Introducing a faction size cap will mean we just have people splitting up into ten different factions, and we will end up with the same problem as now, one faction flooding the leaderboard with puppet factions and owning all of the board. The only legitimate way to do this would be to enforce a rule that all nations in NDay must be in the World Assembly at the very start of the event, but that will ruin half the fun of the event imo.

[Huosheng]

I'd oppose any decision to exclude non-WA members from N-Day. All WA policies are progressive and social democratic, so if you're rping any nation that doesn't fall under that category (such as mine), then being in the WA breaks rp. I've also heard it can affect stats. There's those and many more perfectly legitimate reasons someone would not want to join the WA, not just because they're a puppet. I don't think these people should be excluded.

[Side 3]

I'd oppose any decision to exclude non-WA members from N-Day. All WA policies are progressive and social democratic, so if you're rping any nation that doesn't fall under that category (such as mine), then being in the WA breaks rp. I've also heard it can affect stats. There's those and many more perfectly legitimate reasons someone would not want to join the WA, not just because they're a puppet. I don't think these people should be excluded.

Just join for the day and then leave. You don't even have to vote in their resolutions or follow them.

[Huosheng]

I'd oppose any decision to exclude non-WA members from N-Day. All WA policies are progressive and social democratic, so if you're rping any nation that doesn't fall under that category (such as mine), then being in the WA breaks rp. I've also heard it can affect stats. There's those and many more perfectly legitimate reasons someone would not want to join the WA, not just because they're a puppet. I don't think these people should be excluded.

Just join for the day and then leave. You don't even have to vote in their resolutions or follow them.

Kinda nullifies the idea of WA only then. I'm sure it's fine though, we'll just have an influx of hundreds of nations joining WA on N-Day, then leaving 24 hours later.

[Brototh]

Kinda nullifies the idea of WA only then. I'm sure it's fine though, we'll just have an influx of hundreds of nations joining WA on N-Day, then leaving 24 hours later.

Yeah, totally. Or we'd end up with a massive influx of WA Multiing on the day, probably both. It would probably be a nightmare for mods

[Side 3]

Kinda nullifies the idea of WA only then. I'm sure it's fine though, we'll just have an influx of hundreds of nations joining WA on N-Day, then leaving 24 hours later.

Even so, it would curb the use of puppets, which if you ask me have been the true bane of N-Day for a while now. Nations with a hundred puppets easily dominate the board; forcing them to use just one nation would make N-Day into less of a war of attrition against puppet nations.

Yeah, totally. Or we'd end up with a massive influx of WA Multiing on the day, probably both. It would probably be a nightmare for mods

I don't foresee people risking getting banned just for N-Day.

[Comfed]

Yeah, totally. Or we'd end up with a massive influx of WA Multiing on the day, probably both. It would probably be a nightmare for mods

I don't foresee people risking getting banned just for N-Day.

Multiing is against the rules, N-Day or no N-Day

[Roavin]

If you look at the results from last N-Day, the biggest faction ended up finishing in last place.