Soliciting Thoughts on Alliance Barriers To Entry

wow 2 more alliance made today...

	Name	Ticker	Founded	Members	Pop
1	Harmless?	H?	25FEB10	28	6248
2	The White Company	White	08MAR10	42	4300
3	Danger	DA	27FEB10	16	2237
4	Webfusion Coalition	WFC	12MAR10	13	1035
5	Daegutantes	DGTNT	04MAR10	6	778
6	Knights who say Ni	Ni	05MAR10	5	591
7	chartalliance	cae	06MAR10	9	588
8	Illyriads Chosen	Fate	07MAR10	5	412
9	WOLVES OF THE PLAINS	WOTP	13MAR10	5	270
10	Degeneration X	D-X	12MAR10	3	229
11	Saoirse	Sao	13MAR10	2	194

mmm popsize of 1000 is fair?
As requirement?


Edited by Wuzzel - 13 Mar 2010 at 21:20

Wuzzel wrote:   mmm popsize of 1000 is fair? As requirement?

Edited by rescendent - 13 Mar 2010 at 21:51

Wuzzel wrote: He said it on IRC. You should visit there more often :)

Partially because I'm not super-interested in handing out my public IP address to people who might have different agendas.  Not saying anything about this particular IRC channel, it's just that I'm very familiar with the metagame and I'm too lazy to always use an IP anonymizer when I want to chat with the playerbase.

Secondly, I don't want to make the IRC channel any kind of official channel whatsoever.  By all means I applaud (and have done, publically) the IRC channel (and will in the future for other channel, forums, wikis and so on).  But not every player will use them - and so, if people have things to contribute that they want to come to the attention of the playerbase, the GMs and the game dev team, then this forum is the appropriate place to do it.

Wuzzel wrote: The second quote comes from the starting guide part one (tried to find part two, but never saw it haha :)). Doesnt these 2 things contradict eachother?

Of course they do. Which is why this is a change proposal for further discussion.

bow locks wrote: why is wars dragging on good? wars drag on because the contestants enter a 'meh' mode (like we are now, h? vs da). ending the war becomes more of a pain than continuing it, which is odd.  wars are a state of unrest and expense - only entered into at great risk for the chance of great advantage. allowing them to be easy and drag on dilutes this.

I guess I was mistakenly conflating "wars dragging on" with "long wars with a variety of individual and combined force strategies and tactics, out of which someone eventually emerges victorious, feeling elated at the journey that brought them to this point". 

I want the latter, not 'dragging' wars that people see as tedious.

So, it's a fair point, see below. 

username wrote: Diablito wrote: War is pretty f**king boring at the moment. Agreed xx

What can we do to change this from a game mechanic perspective - suggestions welcome!

rescendent wrote: Wuzzel wrote:   mmm popsize of 1000 is fair? As requirement? Would make it hard to start an Alliance as no-one has pop 1000 in town yet, and you can only start an Alliance with 1 town (and then invite others)... But perhaps a penalty based on average population or median population. E.g. if median town pop < 400     vault effects - (400 - median town pop) /400 % So if middle population sized town was a 0 pop inactive vault is at 0% effects      at 200 pop it would be 50% effective etc.

I'm not entirely convinced that making things less transparent and more complicated is the way forward.  Convince me otherwise.

HonoredMule wrote: ... lots of considered and thoughtful stuff... Unless a much more imaginative and flexible system can be worked out, I think we're better off with alliance tags staying as they traditionally are...nothing more than a public statement of allegiance or pride.  Otherwise, it all smells like the patent system.  I good-intentioned idea that's more useful to the parties it purports to curb.

Exactly the way I'm beginning to think now. 

I don't want to introduce complication for complication's sake, and I'd rather cut things we've put in place that are unnecessarily complicated.

So, how about:

• Drop the concepts of War, War Pending and Peace
• Keep NAPs and Confeds
  
• Allow anyone in game (Allied or Neutral) to attack anyone else, whenever they like without prior warning, making it very much each man or woman for his or herself. People who wish the 'protection' of lots of warning can always settle their second cities far away from the centre.
  
• Drop the concept of Escrow
• Drop alliance fees (except maybe a token setup fee)
• Continue with Alliance Forum development and Alliance data sharing to provide some ingame benefit for alliances
• Drop Alliance Taxation, Tax Collection, Alliance Finances
  

ie, return things pretty much to Alliances being a statement of "These are the guys who I hang with, and the game lets us share some ingame data and private thoughts in a forum", rather than trying to shoehorn possibly (and sometimes actually) flawed Alliance mechanics into a workable, non-exploitable structure.

I'm fine with the above (it certainly makes our lives simpler!), and doesn't it clear out all the potential exploits and things we'll fight against constantly?

Whilst we're on it... why exactly do we provide player Capital Cities with protection from being wiped out?  The difference to a particular player who is being a) wiped off the map or b) sieged and leveled every time he or she upgrades a Farmyard to start again is fairly illusory...

Thoughts on a postcard!

EDIT: forgot to keep NAPs and Confeds :)


Edited by GM Stormcrow - 13 Mar 2010 at 22:52

rescendent wrote: I think capital city protection should still be in force;

But why...? in practical terms there is no difference between a perma-sieged city and a destroyed city.

rescendent wrote: GM Stormcrow wrote: Drop the concepts of NAPs, Confeds, War, War Pending and Peace Allow anyone in game (Allied or Neutral) to attack anyone else, whenever they like without prior warning, making it very much each man or woman for his or herself. People who wish the 'protection' of lots of warning can always settle their second cities far away from the centre.  I quite like the in-game formal acknowledgements of states and enforced non-attack etc; if people use exploits to get round it - that one thing and may cause the Alliances to go to war. Dropping it altogether however is just means you can achieve the same without exploiting... :-/

Sry, I amended my original post whilst you were making this one.  There's no reason why we can't have formal "states" of war and peace. They just take effect immediately.

And, as amended above, NAPs and Confeds could remain as is.

You do your side of the pond credit, Stormcrow, by giving serious consideration for ideas contrary to your own and not falling victim to "not invented here syndrome" or "the engineer's solution" (just add complexity/details).

Of course I'm just one of those insanely nit-picky people, so naturally I have more to say.

GM Stormcrow wrote: So, how about: Drop the concepts of NAPs, Confeds, War, War Pending and Peace Allow anyone in game (Allied or Neutral) to attack anyone else, whenever they like without prior warning, making it very much each man or woman for his or herself. People who wish the 'protection' of lots of warning can always settle their second cities far away from the centre. Drop the concept of Escrow Drop alliance fees (except maybe a token setup fee) Continue with Alliance Forum development and Alliance data sharing to provide some ingame benefit for alliances Drop Alliance Taxation, Tax Collection, Alliance Finances

On points 1 and 2:
 - I'd like to still see the in-game ability to announce loyalties and enmity...i.e. show non-aggression/defensive/offensive pacts and war declarations, as you do now.  They would just be for informational purposes, except that pacts should still prevent non-secret military attacks, again as they do now.  Making war declarations auto-propagate to a party's offensive pacts (barring a conflict with other pacts, which should just nullify both) would be a nice touch, and might prevent them from being taken lightly.
 - A system that does not prevent any interaction with any player not labeled an ally by some connection should still be safe from exploitation.  But there's value in maintaining some protection from people who label themselves your friend.  No one should really be able to expect security from effective strangers, but that's why we engage in diplomatic relations.  Then, having forged friendly relations, we do hope for some sense of security at least within those relationships.  Most of us can never be truly sure of our allies, and the game would be a lot less fun if we all were.  That said, forcing the dissolution of pacts to require an early announcement (like the current 24hour war system) alongside inability to openly attack each other would invest just a little bit of commitment and prevent them from being entered into lightly.  This would in turn inflate their value and make everyone take diplomacy just a little more seriously.  As alliance leaders, such structure also helps make sure members toe the line to some degree, lest meta-game forces have completely free reign to undermine positive relations.

On point 3:
 - Yup, I agree.  Escrow really looked like a novel and beneficial idea to me at first, but now I don't think it can very easily be made to work at all.

On point 4:
 - I'm in favor of a token fee, if only to encourage isolated players to engage others and at least get up to their ankles in the meta-game.  Players who never look outside their city walls are really missing out.  (And I'm a very anti-social person who's saying this.)

On point 6:
 - Alliance taxation is already optional, so I have no problem with it being included so long as the protection of all funds gathered remains limited by some factor that scales appropriately...such as the sum of all alliance members' vault levels.  To be honest, I really liked the idea of taxation because it encourages a player to invest into his relationship with the alliance, forging a bond and possibly a genuine symbiotic relationship.

----

While we're talking about exploits, there are a couple other points I'd also like to raise.
 - Settlers require population, and I'm under the impression that winning a battle against a non-founding city makes it automatically change hands.  The population required for the next settlement increases substantially for each next city.  But what about conquering cities?  What if one player is being seeded by several others?  The others each found a new city...and the beneficiary just conquers them all and becomes a super-player just like that?  Will there be a population requirement to conquer a city?  Will there at least be a cooldown before conquered cities contribute to that population?  I see huge opportunity for a multi scam if these details are not handled carefully.

 - The second is of far lesser importance, but I want to mention it anyway.  It's the ability to send "unauthorized" attacks.  This adds a lot of welcome nuance to the game, but players can just follow attack on the map back to their home or at least to see their direction of departure and start sleuthing from there.  Players would usually be able at least to see the attack did not originate from where it claimed to originate.  This deceptive capability would be much more powerful if two features were later added, perhaps as new research items:
a) the ability to take a roundabout route--takes longer, but direction of departure is intentionally misleading.
b) the ability to hit on a schedule--leave now, wander about but stay within range of the attack window, land at the specified time (likely alongside others' scheduled attacks as well) but from a non-deterministic direction.
In both cases, the target's ability to recognize the party as hostile could depend upon variable factors such as the presence of scout units occupying the surrounding countryside.  And in both cases, friendly forces are away for longer--potentially much longer--so the attacker who really wants privacy takes his chances.


Edited by HonoredMule - 13 Mar 2010 at 23:54