NationStates Jolt Archive

Is there any scope for changing the influence rules in order to generate activity in the raider/defender side of the game ?

It just seems that since the influence system was introduced that activity has slumped not only in our side of the game but also in the wider game too. Regions come, regions go all the time but what is clear is that many prominent raider & defender regions have imploded since the influence system came in, largely due to boredom & inactivity. Many great players have left for pastures new and one of the reasons frequently quoted is that NS the game has become boring.

Now I know not everyone is keen on the whole region invasion thing, certainly not those whose regions are the subject of invasion - and probably not the Mods either - the old invasion rules were certainly a minefield - but surely the influence system was never designed to kill off one huge aspect of our game and to drive players away ? I'll give you an example. The DEN have been in control of Greater Antarctica for 90 days. And still their point doesn't possess sufficient influence to eject the final native. It's actually getting to the stage where raiders are dying off through inactivity - during raids.

90 days. And still counting. They say a week is a long time in politics. 90 days in an online game is an absolute eternity.

And what hope for defenders ? None. Because if the invaders have a sharp point and the natives are their usual disorganised selves, poor defenders haven't a hope of ever re-taking invaded regions.

Would the powers that be consider change ? If both raiders and defenders could come together (unlikely I know) and play around with some ideas for bringing back some vibrancy to our side of the game - and perhaps the wider game too ?

Just because the raiders haven't spent the time to figure more out about influence isn't a problem with the system.

Of course, one of the defenses of raiding was that it was only supposed to be a temporary thing, like a practical joke. The fact that raiders are complaining that they're timing out because it takes too long to completely destroy a region doesn't exactly fill me with concern.

Cheers for that. But I was really looking for an answer to these ? Is that a possibility ? Not being snide or anything, of course, but I did ask a couple of questions after all.

"Is there any scope for changing the influence rules in order to generate activity in the raider/defender side of the game ?"

"Would the powers that be consider change ? If both raiders and defenders could come together (unlikely I know) and play around with some ideas for bringing back some vibrancy to our side of the game - and perhaps the wider game too ?"

The biggest problem, IMHO, is the difficulty of liberating a conquered region. Speaking as an ex-raider, I enjoyed the challenge of taking a region, but once I had it, there wasn't much the defenders could do to take it back. And that got boring. I'd rather have a good fight, even if it meant I could lose, rather than a boring month-long grind.

This is a discussion forum, so feel free to make suggestions. We'll be happy to listen and see if you come up with something novel. Bear in mind that you're only one component of the game. "People who don't like being raided" make up a much larger constituency.

The main issue I see is that raiding is like playing "King of the Hill". The first guy on top has an enormous advantage. Most every suggestion I've seen has been to increase his advantage by speeding up the rate Influence accumulates, or otherwise making it easier to kill regions. I don't see that happening.

If you want to suggest something, my advice is to look for something that makes defending as appealing (and useful) as attacking. Failing that, we're likely to grant the benefit of the doubt to the non-raider population and leave things as they are.

In my personal experience, a large number of defenders were in the game for a very specific reason: they either had their own region destroyed or saw it happening to a region they cared about. They thus started to counter the invaders, trying to protect anyone and everything from being harmed by them. Both sides grew in numbers over time, and a lot of interregional politics was based on these armies, their conflicts, spy vs. spy, etc...

It is important to note the fights were primarily over non-founder regions. They've historically held politically key positions IMHO primarily due to the simple fact that they COULD be fought over ;)

Over time a few things happened which have altered things drastically:

1) Randomized update sequence.
Before this, the major update was a hectic time. Nations running back and forth, last-minute information being exchanged, and things could change at the drop of a hat. It was possible to plan (and counter-act) things happening during the update, making NS a very lively and active game every major update for about 2 hours straight. The randomization meant all planning went out the window. Pretty much one action could be taken at the beginning of update, the rest was just waiting for the update to hit (be it early or late, no way to tell). This reduced activity a lot, but the armies remained intact, and the interregional politics went on as well. One key item is that this change made the rule of an active delegate much stronger. Since 'native' delegates tend to be much less attentive than invader delegates (who should expect a response to their invasion) this was mainly an advantage for the invaders.
For defenders this forced a change of tactics: trying to retake a region during update became a long shot not worthy of the effort. Instead the region was often just left to the invaders, relying on the gamerules to protect the natives from harm. Then , after a while when the invaders either got bored and left or became careless, something could be done about the situation and defenders could consider moving in again.

2) Legalizing griefing.
With the introduction of the Influence system, a rather fundamental change was made to the rules: griefing became legal. Before this the invaders and defenders would be in a heated battle over a region, with invaders not being allowed to kick the natives out (note that defenders, by the nature of their mission, wouldn't even want to do that, though technically they weren't allowed to do so as well). The continued presence of natives meant the region continued to be a battleground. It was always worth saving, and thus defending, and would be worth invading again later on. (note: warzones were a failure precisely due to the absence of natives to give the battle any meaning... without natives both sides would be fighting over a meaningless regional name...) Since region griefing has been legalized invaders have figured out they can 'win' the battle by pushing the fight to an end: utterly destroying the region. Example: 00000000000 (11 zeros), a 'glorious' testament to what invasion/defense has become in NS.
On the defender side this meant that 'waiting it out' had become equal to condemning to region to such destruction. Waiting for the invader lead to become careless meant that lead would've gained Influence, and couldn't be kicked out anymore... or there wouldn't be enough of the region left to be worth salvaging. Basically, the only thing defenders had left as option was try and prevent the invaders from getting in power in the first place. And invaders hence became more secretive about operations (longer-term infiltrations instead of open attacks, with the added advantage of building up Influence). Now both sides went into long-term strategies... no conflicts with sudden events, nothing to keep it interesting. Daily events were limited to either watching as regions fell to invader inflitrators, or countering the really dumb invaders who haven't yet figured out they have a strategy open to themselves which pretty much guarantees 'winning'.
It shouldn't be surprising that the ADN has since then collapsed.

These changes, over time, has change the invasion/defense game from an exciting fast-paced adrenaline rush to the level of Why Bother At All? Ironically I've noticed that a bunch of invaders have stopped bothering as well, since without defenders to oppose them it's just not as much fun for them as it used to be. It's hard to pound oneself on the chest for a grand achievement if the supposed 'other side' is barely paying attention and mainly yawns in response to ones 'glorious victory'.

So... what to do now? My suggestions:
#1: Make griefing illegal again. As cumbersome as it was with the rulings, the arguing, and more, at least a lot of people actually CARED about what was going on. It ensured the battles continued with natives present. (to OP: for defenders one native is generally not enough ;) )
#2: undo randomization of the update sequence. This at least would make it possible to take out a sitting active (invader) delegate, even though the odds are still quite in the active delegate's favor.

Ballotonia

Actually, removing the randomization was discussed while we were preparing to introduce influence. I don't recall any opposition to it, though I may be wrong. Perhaps we should revisit that discussion.

To be perfectly honest, as a victim of both a region crashing and a hijacked refounding, I won't mourn the death of the invasion game.

So, uh, I, uh, checked the server, and we, uh, kind of did remove the random updates. Yeah. Didn't you get that memo?

So, uh, I, uh, checked the server, and we, uh, kind of did remove the random updates. Yeah. Didn't you get that memo?

Nope, and never noticed it. Wasn't looking for it either. When did this happen?

Ballotonia

Probably when we introduced influence.

Maybe the solution isn't in changing the mechanices. Perhaps it's time the invaders and the defenders work together to save their part of the game if they care that much about it.

You've gotten tons of nations to be active, work together, and play a part of the game that was never intended. The current engine still allows for it. So why did y'all stop playing.

Start a war. Get a whole bunch of regions to agree to be warzones and make the game about which side can take more of the other's regions, or something similar. It should be relatively easy to get enough unfounded regions, the more the merrier and all. It'll regenerate the need for recruiting and if you got far enough into, maybe you could even find a way to get some kind of game marker to allow you trip a flag of some sort.

The problem with this part of the game flagging is that y'all aren't being creative enough.

[Sorry, I took so long to weigh in, but I just saw your TG.]

Start a war. Get a whole bunch of regions to agree to be warzones and make the game about which side can take more of the other's regions, or something similar.

At no point did a group of friends get together and decide 'hey, you folks be invaders and then the rest of us will be defenders'. The two sides emerged, and it became a part of the game because both sides cared about the outcome of the ongoing battle.

Frankly, looking back at my prior posts, I'm not entirely sure that it's possible to get people to care again after they've stopped caring. In that sense it would be a case of 'damage done'.

Ballotonia

I guess many raiders/defenders really in their hearts wish to revert to the old invasion rules and for the influence system to be scrapped altogether. That's what I'd prefer although I'm savvy enough to appreciate not everyone would want that to happen.

What benefits, if any, has the influence system brought to the game ? What did its creators think it would bring to the game ?

I suppose it's brought a certain stability to founderless regions, where natives now are most unlikely to find themselves waking up in the Rejected Realms as a result of some random overnight attack - it's reduced the likelehood that vandals would region crash, eject everyone then disappear & it's probably reduced the burden on the Mods too insofar that they don't have to spend so much of their time chasing up miscreants and delving into the minutiae of the invasion rules.

For regions with a founder I honestly can't think of any tangible benefit that the influence rules have brought at all. Founders can still eject at will, turn R/C on and off as they see fit and in practise it's unusual for a delegate in such a region to eject without the founder's prior agreement anyway, although no doubt I'm about to be told it happens all the time ;)

I don't believe that the creators of the influence system necessarily wanted to eliminate raiding/defending altogether. Perhaps they wished to slow it's pace. And if that is the case there's no doubt they succeeded but at the expense of a significant loss of players and considerable game activity - and I doubt that was anticipated. But if you weigh in the balance the very few benefits brought to the game versus the reduction in activity I reckon it's time to re-visit the influence system and see what if anything can be done to improve it. And not for the selfish benefit of raiders like me, or for defenders, but for everyone across the game.

Jocabia does have a valid point though. Perhaps we're just so set in our ways that we're not thinking creatively. But it's difficult to adjust your course quite so dramatically when you have the weight of regional history directing you one way and the game itself pointing you in quite another.

To that extent, we're trying to get a conference of players together from right across the NS world & raider/defender divide, to see what ideas for game improvement we can play about with. Perhaps we might come up with something that we've never considered before and which we might be able to put to the staff for them to think about. We'll make an announcement about the dates, venue etc once we've agreed the mechanics of it all. Everyone will be very welcome to chip in their suggestions.

it's reduced the likelehood that vandals would region crash, eject everyone then disappear & it's probably reduced the burden on the Mods too insofar that they don't have to spend so much of their time chasing up miscreants and delving into the minutiae of the invasion rules.
I don't think most players realize the extent to which "vandals" (better than my usual description of "UN-multi n00b assholes", btw) disrupted the game. For every complaint we got about "gentlemen raiders", we got ten about mass-ejecting vandals who couldn't have cared less about the posted rules.

It takes a mod about an hour to track down all the multis, clear the passwords and banlists, remove offensive WFEs and RMBs, send appropriate telegrams, and log our actions to the tasklist. Given that we got anywhere from 2 to 20 of these a week (and sometimes found a string of quiet regions in their path that had been vandalized without the natives being around), it was an immense drain on limited mod time. Of course, it was also a major irritant to those whose regions had been destroyed, but we have no reliable way to measure that.

As for a "gentlemen raider" complaint, a single mod could spend up to four hours (easily) chasing multis, checking nativity, and reading relevant logs just to verify that griefing took place. Actually acting on that griefing, plus the inevitable follow-up tasks, could add hours more to that task. Let's also point out that pre-influence, we had no reliable method of detecting nativity. Every case was an educated guess. There's a pretty decent chance that we'd guess wrong at least once in a while.

We've got eight current game mods, and I'm one of the more active ones. I can spare about 20 minutes in the morning, and as much as two hours in the evening, to moderate the game. In that time I can restore about 60 nations, handle 6-8 minor spam, flaming, or adspam cases, and still have time to respond to 3 or 4 forum threads. Or ... I can handle part of one major griefing. The choice from a moderator point of view was a no-brainer.

we're trying to get a conference of players together from right across the NS world & raider/defender divide, to see what ideas for game improvement we can play about with.You may not realize that we did that pre-influence as well, and those discussions were essential in developing Influence. It wasn't a quick one-hour IRC session either - a private forum was set up, and several dozen players from across the spectrum were invited to contribute. Of course it's damn hard to make constructive suggestions when you have no idea how the game is coded, but they came up with some ideas that were adopted. They also came up with a bunch of ideas that couldn't or wouldn't be implemented.

Max, all the admins, all the mods, and a decent group of players spent a lot of time trying to come up with a solution. Influence was the result. I wish your new group the best, but I'm fairly doubtful that you'll come up with a whiz-bang idea that a) we haven't considered and b) works in our code. Good luck trying, though, and keep us involved.