Positive brainstorming

[Seerow]

I don't see anything like a happiness bonus for a specific alliance on a specific color really working out without making alliances a more integral part of the game (ie being able to control who is on your AA). However due to already existing alliances, that really can't be done at this stage of the game short of the admins getting the leadership info from every alliance in the game and making the leader the leader in game, which is pretty much meh.

As much as I'd love to see something worth warring over, be it land, senate seats, color spheres, resources, or whatever else, if it's going to be an alliance wide goal, it requires implementation of a feature we've basically been told "no" on multiple times in the past.

[iMatt]

Adding game mechanics geared towards creating more conflict would also go well with this "easier rebuilding" update we seem close to getting. It would also give alliances other things to fight over than out-of-game reasons (name calling, etc). A tech raid gone wrong or a hostile takeover of a color sphere or other in-game reasons for war are few and far between. I realize this is a general statement; I have no examples of what to add which would help.

But I do have the idea that sanctioned alliances should have more given to them than the gift of having to deal with ghosts. Give them some in-game power not available to other alliances, create more of a reason for alliances to get into the sanctioned list than to say "we're in the top 12".

Edit to admin: you said so yourself, in times of conflict and drama this is when you see an increase in player sign ups. You mention you have no control over when that happens, or how often. This isn't true, as you probably know from thinking about an easier rebuilding update to the game. But you can also create more in-game reasons for war.

Edited August 29, 2010 by iMatt

[Ironfist]

[quote name='Ardus' timestamp='1283015036' post='2433923']
Given the premises you're operating from there are no valid answers. You want to remove the war from a war game. I don't feel obligated to elaborate at length why that's a horrible idea.
[/quote]

... Okay.

Maybe read what I said. But I don't care if you do or don't read it, my point has already been stated and I stopped arguing it ages back.

[Qaianna]

[quote name='Seerow' timestamp='1283056634' post='2434489']
I don't see anything like a happiness bonus for a specific alliance on a specific color really working out without making alliances a more integral part of the game (ie being able to control who is on your AA). However due to already existing alliances, that really can't be done at this stage of the game short of the admins getting the leadership info from every alliance in the game and making the leader the leader in game, which is pretty much meh.

As much as I'd love to see something worth warring over, be it land, senate seats, color spheres, resources, or whatever else, if it's going to be an alliance wide goal, it requires implementation of a feature we've basically been told "no" on multiple times in the past.
[/quote]
Yeah, I don't see any way for alliance leadership to be coded into the game. How long's it been since just being able to have it as its own field been in? I can see poor Admin trying to figure out how to translate all our ways of ru(i/n)ning our alliance. Empires, kingdoms, democracies, triumvirates, quadrumvirates, coups, anticoups, reverse coups, coupe coups (curse you, Sally Carrera!), and so on.

[Ironfist]

[quote name='Qaianna' timestamp='1283061613' post='2434531']
Yeah, I don't see any way for alliance leadership to be coded into the game. How long's it been since just being able to have it as its own field been in? I can see poor Admin trying to figure out how to translate all our ways of ru(i/n)ning our alliance. Empires, kingdoms, democracies, triumvirates, quadrumvirates, coups, anticoups, reverse coups, coupe coups (curse you, Sally Carrera!), and so on.
[/quote]

This seems to be the one drawback from creating a perfect AA system. Every (good) idea turns into: "who gets to have control over the AA button?"

[Ardus]

[quote name='Ironfist' timestamp='1283060319' post='2434516']
... Okay.

Maybe read what I said. But I don't care if you do or don't read it, my point has already been stated and I stopped arguing it ages back.
[/quote]
I just went into detail on a subject that shouldn't need detail with Lord Fingolfin (or however the heck you spell it). I stand by my statements and interpretation of your "idea".

[Ironfist]

[quote name='Ardus' timestamp='1283061781' post='2434535']
I just went into detail on a subject that shouldn't need detail with Lord Fingolfin (or however the heck you spell it). I stand by my statements and interpretation of your "idea".
[/quote]

Fair enough. As do I. No point talking about it anymore, is there? No need to derail the topic.

[Penkala]

Not keeping people at war so you can bleed $70k a day off of a $12m warchest would be a start. Putting rogues into two months of war is also pretty ridiculous and leads to them leaving or taking the safe route and doing nothing interesting in the game.

[shilo]

I think reparations are indeed a problem, as nowadays, they mean you have to use your precious aid slots for months and months to send stuff to your enemies/opponents. Since we are here for fun, I would be so bolt to say that this is not so much fun. Now for anyone who is here for politics, that is something easily to swallow: you know it might be the other way around in the next war etc, there are many other things to do.

Correct me if I am wrong, but the bulk of the number of players here are not really here for politics. They are casual gamers that don't have the time/interest to get involved in the complex happenings here.
But that imho is nothing that has to be permanent. Afterall, potentially those people do have time to play other games maybe once they are home (and play CN at work). So we need to get many of those casual players interested in what CN is really about. And CN is definitely not about nation-building or wars, it's about politics.

So how do I get someone to spend more time here in CN, stay after having created a nation (retention)? Right now, a new nation finds many things that seem far away. It then gets spammed by recruiting messages from alliances (what are they?) to come join them on off-site forums and get huge sums of money.

But how does this appeal to a casual player: - go register at yet another site (more work) for something you have no clue about, maybe first find out what those alliances are before registering there? There you just lost 80% of all casual players. They want to build C&C style a blow stuff up, not register, read CN history, study game mechanics at an academy (hell, most of the players here likely go to school or to college, you think they join a game just to simulate going to school there?)

And this is just the start: the urge of many new players is to then start their own alliance. We all know how that works out.

After this you lost about the half of the remaining 20% of new players.



The learning curve in CN is steep, very steep, and that means we will always have a numbers problem, because we simply won't be able to keep most of the new members interested beyond the first 2 weeks, and due to RL, boredom frustration etc, we will always face quite a lot of long-standing members leaving the game. So the trend is rather obvious for the total number of players.


So what we need is to ensure that casual player a) stays beyond the usual 25 days of deletion of his noob nation b) hopefully slowly catches up with what is really happening here, and then turns from a casual game to someone who actually wants to really play the game of politics here, and maybe plays less WoW instead (and yes, I do believe we have the potential to compete with WoW if you consider how much fun politics can actually be)

Then of course the question is: how can we lessen the learning curve, stretch it out to ensure it's not overwhelming and give the new nation enough to stay here?

- I think we should change advertisement and label of the game: it's not a nation building game. It's a IC political community set around on a rather simple nation building game. That is the real game here, that is why people are here for more than 25 days, so one shouldn't give people false impressions that will be disappointed once you realize the limits of the game, and that as noob you will never be able to catch up to the large nations.

- the community, the politics, need way more integration in the game: give people ingame reasons to start wars, make ingame stuff influence politics heavily - and possibly the other way around
we could have resources that are limited, and actually start wars: imagine what would happen if suddenly uranium were a resource that is scarce and not easy to get by resetting your nation: maybe you need to be in an alliance of more than 100 players to get it (simulating the complexity of digging it out and making it to plutonium) This might get more formerly unaligned nations to work together to be able to advance ingame etc.
If your alliance has more than 200 members, give the alliance administrator (meaning of course there is such a thing) the ability to manage the AA ingame: make it an open, invite only AA? Get the "sanctioned alliance bonus", one that opens access to more wonders?, more improvements, addition improvements? Additional wonders?
If a thread on the AA section of the forum has more than 20 pages, maybe it gets an announcement in the news header of the nation screen (of course meaning there is such one in place)
A team Senator can send team announcements of the blinking and very visible news header to every nation in the team, an alliance administrator to everyone in the same AA.
Make trade guilds: if a large enough number of numbers form them, they get bonuses, bonus ressources, maybe the same rights as alliances? If whole alliances bind together to trade guilds, they can even form ressource oligopoles?

Implement research ingame: your nation advances scientifically calculated on the number of technology, schools, universities and wonders. If you build a research collective or are part of an alliance, your research gets done collectively.
And you do need research points to unlock advanced weaponry, not how much tech you own. You need it to unlock wonders etc.

Nukes: nukes are bigger cruise missiles
But what about the North Korea factor? North Korea, a underdeveloped, rather irrelevant and dirt poor country can ensure the attention of the whole world being on them because they have a couple of them. Iran just because they might be developing them.
Why? Because one of those buggers is a hellish weapon, and you don't mess around with them. Since we have them around though, earth never turned more peaceful. Conventional wars occur as often as they did in the past.
So maybe we actually can have more conventional wars, where war itself can be much more fun for all, but where maybe the threat of a nuke might put an immediate end to it?


I know that these proposals are sometimes complex to implement, sometimes have definite issues that they bring along with them, and that ultimately most will dislike them because either they challenge the good position in the current status quo, or they might make it more difficult to get back there.
But I think we definitely need more community integration in the nation building aspect of the game, make cooperation a much more complex, fruitful and worthwhile undertaking, and thus ensure that more gamers want to stay and explore them together, and maybe then even attract in more new gamers to help them maybe form that trade guild, research that wonder faster etc...

[milkmanrox100]

There's a great idea going around in IRC about Peak Nukes too.

Basically, once you fire a nuke, it should be easy to replace, right? If it's damaged by spies, it only takes a little bit to fix it up.

So why not make it so that you can double your nuke buying for as long as you're underneath Peak Nuke count? 2 for normal people, 4 for people with WRCs.

[Un4Gvn1]

[quote name='admin' timestamp='1282963563' post='2433408']
I’ve been following this thread and others like it and I am reluctant to post in any of them as there are always people just waiting to challenge what that I say, but be that as it may, I’ll go ahead and post my thoughts on the subject.[/quote]

Thank you for sharing your thoughts with us, Admin.

[quote name='admin' timestamp='1282963563' post='2433408']
I’ve repeated the story of how CN started many times over the years and it is one that I think a lot of you are forgetting or ignoring. When I created Cyber Nations my goal was to create a game that a few people might like to play for a few months. I didn’t spend much time developing it initially and when I released the game it was extremely limited in features (no trades, foreign aid, tanks, navy, aircraft, etc… OMG!) But I was happy with what I had created so I did a little advertising to get the word out about my new game to get some initial players to sign up. I wasn’t expecting much but soon we had a few hundred players and the server started having difficulty keeping up with demand. I stopped advertising but by that point word of mouth had taken over and soon players were joining Cyber Nations in the thousands. What was the draw to such a simple, feature limited, text based browser game? There were other nation simulators available in 2006, but Cyber Nations was one of the few nation builders that actually allowed players to fight wars with one another which allowed players to engage in politics and to actually back up their bark with their bite. Also in 2006, social sites like Facebook hadn’t yet totally owned the Internet and graphics heavy MMO games weren’t as predominate, so it was a little bit of people having nothing else to do, a little bit of people not expecting much out of their web based games, a little bit of dumb luck, but mostly people were attracted to the political environment within the community here. I began adding new features to the game as the community grew but the primary draw to Cyber Nations has never been about in-game features. It’s the political environment within the community, which interestingly enough, has always been beyond my control and with that the success or failure of Cyber Nations has never been up to me, it is in the hands of the community. Over time the game itself reached a point in development where there was a fear of overdeveloping the game as well as adding new features that would disrupt years of dedicated gameplay so over time the addition of new in-game features has slowed down, not because I don’t care about Cyber Nations, but specifically because I do care because I don’t want to discourage new players and old players alike by adding too many features or throwing a wrench in the existing rules of the game. Besides, I’ve never seen a real measurable influx of new players as a result of any new game feature being added but where I have seen influxes of players, time and time again, was the result of an active political climate especially during global wars. That political climate has been stagnant for years and in direct correlation there has been a consistent decrease in membership during that same period of time. This has all happened despite my best attempts to advertise the game so [b]it is clear that if there is to ever be a resurgence of activity it must come from within the community itself. [/b]No amount of new game features are going to bring back the peak activity of 2007, if anything new game features will only dissuade people from even wanting to sign up for such a complicated and confusing game. Finally, I have never understood all those players that have purchased everything available in the game and leave the community because they say they are bored and let all that time and dedication of developing their precious pixels go to waste because they are obligated under treaties. If you own everything in the game and have more money than you know what to do with then freaking use it. Kick some ass. [b]If more players and alliances would grow a pair and play the game with that kind of mentality, and stop with the insane reparations after wars, then we wouldn’t be having this discussion.[/b]
[/quote]

I would applaud if we stopped doing the war reparations things. Just have a war and when it is over it is over.

Would the leaders of all alliances entertain the idea of having a Reparations Summit with the goal of agreeing to end all war reparations forever?

[Delta1212]

[quote name='milkmanrox100' timestamp='1283110750' post='2434833']
There's a great idea going around in IRC about Peak Nukes too.

Basically, once you fire a nuke, it should be easy to replace, right? If it's damaged by spies, it only takes a little bit to fix it up.

So why not make it so that you can double your nuke buying for as long as you're underneath Peak Nuke count? 2 for normal people, 4 for people with WRCs.
[/quote]
Everyone basically just buys up to 20/25, though. It doesn''t take any time at all to get there once you are nuclear, so it's sort of pointless to have a peak nuke count.

[shilo]

I think it would be way more interesting if nukes were much harder to get, but easier through collective work, and then would be much more destructive. This could definitely give the whole game completely new and different dynamics.

[claphamsa]

[quote name='admin' timestamp='1282963563' post='2433408']
I’ve been following this thread and others like it and I am reluctant to post in any of them as there are always people just waiting to challenge what that I say, but be that as it may, I’ll go ahead and post my thoughts on the subject.

I’ve repeated the story of how CN started many times over the years and it is one that I think a lot of you are forgetting or ignoring. When I created Cyber Nations my goal was to create a game that a few people might like to play for a few months. I didn’t spend much time developing it initially and when I released the game it was extremely limited in features (no trades, foreign aid, tanks, navy, aircraft, etc… OMG!) But I was happy with what I had created so I did a little advertising to get the word out about my new game to get some initial players to sign up. I wasn’t expecting much but soon we had a few hundred players and the server started having difficulty keeping up with demand. I stopped advertising but by that point word of mouth had taken over and soon players were joining Cyber Nations in the thousands. What was the draw to such a simple, feature limited, text based browser game? There were other nation simulators available in 2006, but Cyber Nations was one of the few nation builders that actually allowed players to fight wars with one another which allowed players to engage in politics and to actually back up their bark with their bite. Also in 2006, social sites like Facebook hadn’t yet totally owned the Internet and graphics heavy MMO games weren’t as predominate, so it was a little bit of people having nothing else to do, a little bit of people not expecting much out of their web based games, a little bit of dumb luck, but mostly people were attracted to the political environment within the community here. I began adding new features to the game as the community grew but the primary draw to Cyber Nations has never been about in-game features. It’s the political environment within the community, which interestingly enough, has always been beyond my control and with that the success or failure of Cyber Nations has never been up to me, it is in the hands of the community. Over time the game itself reached a point in development where there was a fear of overdeveloping the game as well as adding new features that would disrupt years of dedicated gameplay so over time the addition of new in-game features has slowed down, not because I don’t care about Cyber Nations, but specifically because I do care because I don’t want to discourage new players and old players alike by adding too many features or throwing a wrench in the existing rules of the game. Besides, I’ve never seen a real measurable influx of new players as a result of any new game feature being added but where I have seen influxes of players, time and time again, was the result of an active political climate especially during global wars. That political climate has been stagnant for years and in direct correlation there has been a consistent decrease in membership during that same period of time. This has all happened despite my best attempts to advertise the game so it is clear that if there is to ever be a resurgence of activity it must come from within the community itself. No amount of new game features are going to bring back the peak activity of 2007, if anything new game features will only dissuade people from even wanting to sign up for such a complicated and confusing game. Finally, I have never understood all those players that have purchased everything available in the game and leave the community because they say they are bored and let all that time and dedication of developing their precious pixels go to waste because they are obligated under treaties. If you own everything in the game and have more money than you know what to do with then freaking use it. Kick some ass. If more players and alliances would grow a pair and play the game with that kind of mentality, and stop with the insane reparations after wars, then we wouldn’t be having this discussion.
[/quote]
praise be to his will!

[D34th]

Reparations is part of the war procedures, I don't like to see it gone, what would be health for the game is limit reparations to a certain limit of time on it like: "No alliance should pay reparations for more than 3 months" or increase the aid cap, with current reparations taking nearly an year to be paid make thing even more boring.

[Un4Gvn1]

Would the leaders of all alliances entertain the idea of having a Reparations Summit with the goal of agreeing to discuss war reparations?

[Titus Pullo]

[quote name='Swanfield' timestamp='1282845392' post='2431866']
People like you are not helping the situation while we are all waiting for the proverbial !@#$ has hit the fan after we are down to something like 10,000 players and admin decides to pull the plug. We need a revolution in this game and soon before this game dies a slow and painful death.
[/quote]

I ignored the rest of the thread because it's just not worth my time. However:

Why not have a huge end-war? People get together and pick the sides and we just fight it out until we're at ZI. The rule of the endwar is that once you reach ZI/ZM you delete. Eventually everyone in CN will be deleted or destroyed and then Admin can go ahead and pull the plug without us caring.

[The Reccesion]

I didn't read any of this except page 1.

Youtube video would be a good idea.

NSO and their theory of having less alliances would help as well, there are too many alliances and they have their own little problems with others. If lets say CnG was one alliance, SF was one alliance and like VnV or PnL was one big alliance, the game would be funner and people wouldn't get confused into all the drama. They would learn faster on the history of the game and what not making them want to stay. I know this isn't being very clear but it is what it is.

Another good thing for those people who play other games is to advertise CN.Like lets say you play Runescape, Mafia I or II, World of Warcraft and those type of games and you use certain forums, like these of CN. Why not invite people to play? Let them check it out and help them. It will make your alliance a lot stronger that was as well, by getting active members.

Cutting down on raids would help a lot as well, it would end making people run away from the game because they got beat down and they don't know how easy it is to grow back up at their little nation strengths.


Those are somethings we as community members can do to help out the game, but it also is on Admins shoulders as well.

Admin should put in some irl money to advertise the game or something.... like they sell things to make money and they sell donations and what not. But why not put a little bit of your income into the game so it lasts longer and you help others enjoy it. But it all comes down to the admin as well because he is the only one who can change the game and the mechanics.

[chris8967]

Admin could abolish all cash and tech reps after a war. They could also level the playing field. Example, CM's for lower NS nations, bio-chemical weapons next, then atomic weapons, and finally nuclear weapons. This would make it a more level playing field for those nations that get attacked from nuclear nations that have dropped down into their range due to war. It discourages newer nations from playing when war breaks out and a nuclear nation attacks them and they basically can't due anything except sit there and take it. IMO, that's why newer nations don't stick around as long as they use too, they get discouraged and quit playing.

[Vanilla Napalm]

In my opinion their are several things we need to do in order to secure the future of cn.

1. Put a PERMANENT stop to all tech raiding. Tech raiding just pushes new nations out of existence

2. Outlaw all exorbitant monatary/tech-based reps following wars. They just result in further stagnation

3. Outlaw all war. It's clear that it results in the destruction of nations and of alliances, often for petty/no reason. Alliances that engage in any offensive behaviour should be reprimanded.

4. Outlaw IRC. Communication and subsequent disagreements between alliances has been a constant means for pointless destructive war. Communication is therefore counter-intuitive for the enjoyment of new and old nations alike

5. Outlaw Alliances. The clear cause of all major conflicts, its logical that removal of these hegemonic entities will lead to a greater development of the game by smaller parties

6. Outlaw all interaction between nations. The transfer of aid, tech, soldiers and most importantly knowledge between nations clearly lends itself to unfair developments. The forums and messenger system should be disabled in order to secure the continued success and prosperity of planet bob.

I do not see how a conclusion without any and all of these conclusions lends itself to developing a more popular and entertaining... thing.

[Tygaland]

[quote name='Qaianna' timestamp='1282972014' post='2433596']
Hm. Think we should have some way for losing to be 'fun' somehow? Some way of having someone lose a war and have things be along the lines of 'Terribly sorry, do try again' instead of 'HAHAHAHA! KNEEL BEFORE ME INFERIOR WORM! NEVER WILL YOU REAP A BENEFIT OF THIS WORLD AGAIN!'? Remember, I'm not sure how well a good scrap feels to the established, but the newbies might feel differently.
[/quote]

Losing can be more fun than winning. noCB was the best time I have had in Cybernations and my alliance got reamed. What made it fun was that we knew we'd lose and didn't give a crap about our stats. The membership of my alliance (and I'm sure in others in our position) became much closer and more determined during that time and the interactions within the alliance and with other alliances was the most interesting since I began playing the game.

The issue for me is that I'm happy to get my arse kicked in war if the cause is there but most people just want to start a big war over nonsense. If there is no political or even cultural inspiration to fly your nation/alliance into the ground then no one is going to go for it. Less so when after each major war the flood of treaties linking blocs to blocs starts and most alliances do that to give them an out or a foot in both camps if war does come around.

War will come if politics becomes part of the game again. Despite the Karma War the political stagnation remains and until that stagnation ends then there will be no wars other than the occasional curbstomp like we saw with RoK and Co, against the NSO. With two large blocs of alliances politics is all but dead and has been for a while.

[Swanfield]

[quote name='Peggy_Sue' timestamp='1283143706' post='2435498']
Would the leaders of all alliances entertain the idea of having a Reparations Summit with the goal of agreeing to discuss war reparations?
[/quote]
I doubt it to be honest, there are far too many selfish leaders for this to happen.

Edited August 30, 2010 by Swanfield

[Denial]

There is one very easy way to begin fixing this game and alleviating the boredom that current players face. Give alliances an in-game [i]reason[/i] to fight. Something finite, tangible and desirable. I say desirable because, let's face it, something as useless as alliance sanctions won't change a thing. If you think about it, in a world absent of resource scarcity and with no in-game reason for alliances to exist other than to prevent all-pervasive raiding, it's a damn miracle that we have experienced as many wars as we have. A base solution to this key problem, which could be built upon, could be as simple as increasing the importance of land and simultaneously capping the amount of overall land available to all nations.

[Voytek]

hm yase as self-appointed Moral Crusader of the Cyber Nations i would like to suggest geting Eternal Peace between all NAtions and Allainces. Siting around buying Technology forever is my Ideal of this Great Politics which means its yours to!

[Vanilla Napalm]

[quote name='Voytek' timestamp='1283158150' post='2435626']
hm yase as self-appointed Moral Crusader of the Cyber Nations i would like to suggest geting Eternal Peace between all NAtions and Allainces. Siting around buying Technology forever is my Ideal of this Great Politics which means its yours to!
[/quote]
Buying technology from other nations? I'm shocked at the amount of reverse-raidism that's prevalent throughout this community.
For shame, game killer.