Best Of

Ealix said:

Okay, I've had my bit of a break.

Below is going to be my new proposal. As of the time of posting the proposal, I am not going to look at the forums thread or the Discord thread for a day or two to give you time to process it and ask any questions. After the 24/48 hour period I will come back and answer any questions that may be present on either mode of communication.

Stage One.

The stage one release of alliances will set the foundation for how they are going to work in the future. The steps for forming an alliance will be the same in the original proposal, and will include the bookbinding treaty item. As a recap I've pasted it below.

Alliance Forming:

      - An organization will initiate the alliance with ALLIANCE INITIATE <org>.

      - The organization that has been offered the alliance must then ALLIANCE ACCEPT. This must be done within 12 IRL days or the alliance will dissolve.

      - As the cap for each alliance is 3 organizations, the above two steps may be done again to add a third organization to the alliance forming process from the outset. 

      - Once the alliance has been accepted, a Treaty must be created and signed by all members of the Alliance. This is similar to the treaties that alliances have now, however with the alliance system it will be made into a new bookbinding replica (and accompanying skill) under AB BOOKBINDING TREATY. The treaty will be provided with ALLIANCE TREATY <item number>.

      - Once the treaty has been provided, all organization members of the alliance must ALLIANCE SIGN TREATY. To sign a treaty, the signing member must be within the city/commune council chambers and possess a seal for their organization. The ‘signature’ on the treaty will be the seal’s stamp line.

      - Once a treaty has been signed by all Alliance members, the leaders must then ALLIANCE CONFIRM. Once all members have confirmed the alliance, the alliance will be formed and active. Each city/commune leader will receive a copy of the treaty.

Stage one will provide:

      - Two channels, as per the original proposal

      - AHELPs

      - Alliance Log

      - Writelog Privs for CR6 of each org.

      - Ability to name the alliance (This will not be subject to Admin review when it is set, however if an inappropriate name is used we will have the ability to remove or change it at will)

What is the purpose for stage one?

Stage one sets the foundation for all future alliance changes and combat balancing. Currently, the process for counting people on either 'side' of the game would involve iterating through each player in a city, followed by each clan of that player, and looking for a specific clan. This, in a sense of hard coding, would mean the code needs to be changed every time the clans change, and would use a lot more time and processing power to collect said information. By changing to a hard coded system, it makes that process a whole lot faster by being able to search for the specific alliance members.

Alliance lifetime:

Alliances under this proposal will last until they are dissolved. There are two ways for an alliance to dissolve. The CL's of the org can agree and each enter a command, and once all leaders have entered the command, then the alliance dissolves. Alliances can also be dissolved if there is one org left within the Alliance. For instance:

      - Mag/Celest/Glom are in an Alliance.

      - Glom leaves, and the alliance members are Mag/Celest.

      - Some time passes and Celest leaves. As Mag would be the only org left, the alliance is dissolved.

Leaving an alliance will incur a power penalty of 100K power to the leaving org if they leave within 10 Lusternian years of the Alliance's creation. This is to discourage alliances being made and dropped whenever they are deemed necessary (future proofing for potential changes that could come after stage one) and to encourage longevity between member Orgs.

Future:
There is currently a few circulating ideas for future stage releases of alliances, however the plan is I'll code and release stage one, do some conflict balancing, work on some other projects for a bit (such as econ) and then come back and discuss stage two. 

If there are any questions or feedback on the above please make it as targeted and as detailed as possible so I can respond accurately for questions.

Imo this seems like a better framework to start.  And, as you clearly note, it's intended only as a preliminary framework to build on later.  Importantly I think this resolves my primary concern which is that any proposal must not give more advantage to the side doing well (I assume we'll come back to that point later once we are looking at further alliance phases!).  Seems pretty neutral as far as mechanics go, and - while I might personally like alliances to be a bit more fluid at some point - the cost and rationale for it seems reasonable.  An early break-up penalty that you choose to shoulder is much better.  It still encourages you to be discerning up-front when you are forming an alliance and not form one that feels shaky, but doesn't lock you into it in perpetuity either which sounds like your goal.

I am not sure if you are still planning on the ally/enemy lists, but I really like the idea of config on/off to follow alliances or work of personal lists, that is a best of both worlds solution. So I would support that also being included, or it can be kept for later if you prefer. I feel like it would be useful as we have quite a few new melders in the game, and anything to smooth out their learning of the mechanics is a good idea.


Thank you for your work on this.

I don't think the above comment is necessary, I think it's great for people to work on passion projects, they're more likely to be finished.
 
I do agree with some of the others. I don't think we have a need for the proposed benefits. I do like the idea of a combined aether and newsboard for ease of communication and thus removal of the need to ensure everyone is added to clans/given permissions, as well as a toggle for the enemy and ally lists. While I can appreciate in some respects the thought behind allowing allies to influence/bombard for a nation, I still think it is not needed and potentially in the long run might mean less people bother to learn about how to do these things themselves - as in, it's less important to train new people on how to get to an aetherbubble and bombard if we have allies there who just do it half the time when we're lacking. As it is, there have been many, many instances where an org who only had one person awake at the time was still able to claim a village/bubble because there were allies there protecting/fighting off enemies/calling out shuffles etc. Jumping in to influence might speed things up, but I also think that in itself goes against the spirit of competition. 

I appreciate the thought and spirit going into this but I don't think we need this sort of complexity at all. And a cost does just become a burden, when all most of us really want is an aether that doesn't take a clan slot or need someone awake to induct.

Okay, so here is what is going to happen. 

Because I have a rather busy start to my work week and I want to work through this with the player base properly, I am going to take a few days and not touch the alliance system stuff at all so that I can consider things and do more research and analysis into a broad range of things for alliances, and have some more discussions with the admin team. 

I will make a new post on this thread in a few days with a revised proposal. 

Firstly, thank you for the input. I am not going to speak to anything outside of the Alliance system within this thread, as this is what the purpose is here. Any further comments on the thread outside of the Alliance system are not going to be responded to. I acknowledge there are other issues at play within the game, but that is not the purpose of this forums thread.

After reading through a lot of the stuff here, I took a bit of a break to think about it and come up with other things. Below are what I have thought about:

        - Ally and Enemy lists – Instead of having them be automatically assigned to enemy all non-alliance members and ally all alliance members, would it be better if there was a config option? For example, CONFIG ALLIANCELISTS ON would mark all non-alliance members as enemies and all alliance members as allies. At least this way, you can toggle it on when going into conflict, and toggle it off after and your personal ally/enemy lists would remain the same.

        - Power cost – This value was formulated based off the power increase I saw during the 4 month period where I collected the data. In the grand scheme of it, all orgs saw an increase of approximately 600k power over the 4 month period. 155k/600k didn’t seem like a huge number. I understand the organization gold is less easy to obtain, so I am happy to drop the gold cost. There will, however, be a power cost regardless of the outcome. If I was to propose that alliances would last until they are broken, then there would be an up front cost and that is all. I am not putting a figure on this yet, however I will do more research and calculations into the average DAILY power gain per org and find something.

        - Alliance powers – It seems the consensus is that people don’t want to have any kind of mechanical benefit to alliances outside of a few channels and alliance helps. If this is the general player opinion, I’m happy to drop these things. These things can always be added in later if it is something that becomes desirable down the track.

My intention of this entire thread was to get the player opinion on what I thought up for alliances, and to work with the player base to come up with something for you. I have a completely different vision of what an alliance looks like to you. So I built the idea off of things that I would have wanted as a player (Such as cross org influencing in revolts) and it is entirely fine if my vision is not what the player base as a whole wants. Hence why we post about proposals and collect feedback before we put things out there.

We, as admin, talk a lot about remembering that the player is in fact a person behind the screen. I understand and can sympathise with the low morale and burnout that a lot of people are experiencing, however that is a factor that is at play for us as the administration as well. There is only so much we can reasonably achieve daily, and a large number of the code-side changes are not as easy to do on the fly.

With that said, again, thank you for the input. Please let me know if you have any objections or feedback on the above things I have written in this post, and please ensure that you are as specific as possible.

I know it's been the status quo that Gods stay out of politics (for the most part) for a long time. I wonder if having the godroles take a more active role in guiding politics and occasionally shaking up the status quo would be a net benefit for the game. I know it sort of goes against 'player agency', but honestly, complete player agency seems to lead more to stagnation than anything else.

Thanks for posting all of this and sharing a proposal with us before it is being implemented! Throwing my two cents on this:

Alliances should natively provide:
 - ACT for ALLIANCE CALLS TELL and ALT for ALLIANCE TELL for coordination in the same way Shadowlight and Trasto function or IHC and...whatever IHC's non-callout clan is.
 - ALLIANCELOG or ALOG that records domoth, revolt, wildnode, timequake, and flare participation
 - Corresponding WRITELOG privs for CR6 people in each alliance.
 - AHELP with associated edit privs attached to...let's say CL, GLs, and one of the ministries
 - The ability to propose and ratify an alliance name, unless the admin want to come up with clever names for all...35 possible alliance permuations present from the 6 available orgs.
 - The ability to propose and ratify a treaty.

Thanks all for the feedback so far! Responding slightly out of order and instead by theme...

Phase 1 should unlock this! This was one of the benefits that we wanted out of this project.

That idea is definitely on our radar for Phase 2 

Also on our radar for Phase 2

We haven't quite determined the standard for the dates yet. Right now, my focus is on coding the system itself, and then we'll move into a phase of generating all the content. There will need to be discussions about all the standards and norms we want to follow for that content.

You bring up a few good points here. Ultimately, we wanted to build this as a feature of the game for a few different reasons. First, it creates an official record of the histories, which can be edited and maintained by the admin team and which can be made publicly available to showcase the rich stories that fill Lusternia. Second, we feel that the ideal scenario for any game content is to be able to access it in-game and not need to visit a third-party source. This allows players to reference the content in-game (e.g. in GHELP and CHELP files) and makes it more seamless to point newbies towards it, etc. Third, as Qoivhae already guessed, one thing we want to unlock is to have entries and even entire timelines that are thoroughly not public - e.g. specific to an organization or perhaps even 'unlocked' by players. Selfishly, it also allows the admin team to have entries that are not visible to mortals for our own notes and record-keeping. Fourth, the timeline is meant to serve as a hub that can point to other ways to engage with the histories - e.g. referencing player-written books, as Huskii guessed.

There certainly is a good point about the amount of effort to generate the initial content and to upkeep it going forward. As we were evaluating this proposal, we felt that the initial lift for content generation would be worth the benefits above. Going forward, for the official histories at least, our hope is that since an admin will be writing an Events post anyways, creating a timeline entry is a fairly small additional to-do.

Speaking personally, one reason I've kept coming back to Lusternia - and even decided to become an Eph! - is because of the rich storytelling here. For my Eph project, I wanted to work on something that would help highlight those stories and bring a new dimension to that side of the game. Phase 1 alone doesn't hit all of our ambitions for this, but it'll hopefully be a good foundation to keep building on top of.

Please keep the discussion and feedback coming!

-Scout