Comments for announcement on invitations

[Bishop]

Please use this thread to discuss the announcement here

[TheRock]

True or false - you purposely wrote <3 just so we would see it as a heart and love you a little more?

Your shenanigans do not work on me.

In all seriousness, 1 invite after 5 weeks of playing will not solve the issues faced by kingdoms with recruits that they can't bring in. It would make more sense for you to break out inviting players to join a kingdom and to take over an existing province. Letting kingdoms replace players who are leaving is a bigger issue than bringing in new provinces, and allows honest players to continue to play at the level they want without forcing kingdoms to break the rules to continue to succeed.

[Thundergore]

True or false - you purposely wrote <3 just so we would see it as a heart and love you a little more?

This was entirely false (before you noticed this), now that you've noticed it, I've noticed it too and now it's true.

Your shenanigans do not work on me.

:( </3

In all seriousness, 1 invite after 5 weeks of playing will not solve the issues faced by kingdoms with recruits that they can't bring in.

We're most certainly working on a better fix for this (we've quite a few ideas collated already) - we're still open to more feedbacks.

[TheRock]

We're most certainly working on a better fix for this (we've quite a few ideas collated already) - we're still open to more feedbacks.

Here's some feedback - gingers don't have souls.

In other feedback, there's two separate issues that kingdoms need invitations for. To replace existing players and to bring in new provinces. If we aren't given options to take care of the former, we end up stuck with the latter, since players can't quit and leave us the provinces. A rate of 1 new invitation to join the kingdom every month is fine, as long as we get more options for getting new players into existing provinces. Give us 2-3 move codes and 1 new invitation a month and we're pretty much set.

This would also cover the issue of allowing deleted provs to just get invited back, as they'd only get one invite. Really, it only protects existing provinces, which is what we want, right? Let the people who want to play play?

[Bishop]

thats like 15-19 moves/invites an age TheRock - bit much no? An invitation every month, with 3 initially, is 6 an age - you can use them to replace existing provinces with new players, or take in new provinces.

[TheRock]

thats like 15-19 moves/invites an age TheRock - bit much no? An invitation every month, with 3 initially, is 6 an age - you can use them to replace existing provinces with new players, or take in new provinces.

The thing is, it's always going to be better to have more moves than less. At the end of the age, most (all?) kds will have leftover invites, but at any point in time, a kingdom may (will?) need 3-4 invitations. Get rid of the invitations at eoa, make ages 3 months long (as they should be) and you're looking at 6-9 player moves and 3 new provinces brought in every age. That's a maximum of 12 players moving in a kingdom every age. Is that really unreasonable?

[Bishop]

ya, i think it is to be honest - 12 seems too many, thats half your kingdom replaced.

[Palem]

<3 you guys too

Either way thanks (since that hasn't been said yet).

thats like 15-19 moves/invites an age TheRock - bit much no? An invitation every month, with 3 initially, is 6 an age - you can use them to replace existing provinces with new players, or take in new provinces.

If you are burning through half or more of your kd in an age, then there's something wrong with the way you're playing. I think 6 should be enough to keep the up-and-coming kds happy and should be more than enough to replace a healthy number of people who leave kds. If more than a quarter of your kd doesn't want to play with you over an age then you deserve to fall.

[Korp]

If you are burning through half or more of your kd in an age, then there's something wrong with the way you're playing.

Ive recently tried out the ghetto perspective utopia and son believe me when I tell you, 6 moves isnt nearly enough if you are trying to build a "good kd". Its not about wanting to play or not wanting to play its about weeding out the inactives and the ones that arent too active. :(

[Palem]

Ive recently tried out the ghetto perspective utopia and son believe me when I tell you, 6 moves isnt nearly enough if you are trying to build a "good kd". Its not about wanting to play or not wanting to play its about weeding out the inactives and the ones that arent too active. :(

Welcome to my entire Utopian career.

6 moves/age is enough as long as you're bringing the right people in and not wasting them on people who are going to play for 5 weeks, get bored, and quit.

[TheRock]

ya, i think it is to be honest - 12 seems too many, thats half your kingdom replaced.

Two perspectives

From a top kd, that's replacing 3-4 at new age, 3-4 over the course of the age and a few for emergencies, leaves a couple left over. As I said, you'd rather have the ability to bring in more players and not need it than have more players who want to play but can't, right? Why shouldn't we do whatever we can to get people who want to play in?

From a smaller kd, if you want to build, you need the ability to bring in friends and replace people who don't want to play. Ghettos lose provs and players all the time, they need a way to bring in more than 1-2 people an age. Based on our current rate, they can bring in 3 at eoa and ~3 per age. If they lose 3 players an age, a core of 12 players will take FIVE ages to fill up with a strong kingdom. That's way too long.

It is much better to err on the side of "you guys can bring in your friends, here's EXTRA trades" than the side of "NO DAMMIT WE DON'T WANT MORE PLAYERS SO NO TRADES".

[Korp]

6 moves/age is enough as long as you're bringing the right people in and not wasting them on people who are going to play for 5 weeks, get bored, and quit.

But it's hard to know who the right people is, but lets for an example, my current ghetto i would kill of about well at least 10-15 of them, those 6 invites per age wouldnt reach far then. But lets say I have 6 invites, I invite 6 potenial people that perhaps will be good, so there is still 4 to 9 randoms that would be needed and we all know how randoms are useless and probably need to be killed off as well. etc. Its better to have a bit too many than having too few

[AquaSeaFoam]

From what I understand, when trading was made legal, the initial reasons for limiting the trades were:
1) Limit the potential of a cheater easily controlling a kingdom full of provinces to use for harming others. With unlimited invites, a cheater could get monarchy in a ghetto and quickly invite himself into more accounts after killing off other players.
2) To limit "instant superkingdoms" where a new kingdom is instantly made into a super kingdom by trading or inviting in a whole new group of players.

While some may want to prevent 2) from occurring, I think that 1) is the more critical concern. Invites of new accounts is the biggest factor for both of these concerns. Trading of existing accounts requires the existing player to give up their account which generally occurs when the player quits on their own free will or in already established kingdoms.

Therefore, New account invites should be limited to control cheating and "harmful" aspects of these invites. A total of around 3 per age is a reasonable level for these new account invites. Starting with 3 and adding one per real life month for the first two age months only (total of 5 per age) is also within reason.

Trading a new player into an account of an existing player who is quitting is less of a problem since this requires the player to give up their account on their own free will when they could instead choose to delete or keep playing. if a player does give the account up for trade, there aren't many good reasons to limit the ability to trade in a new player. Therefore, as therock says, more of these trades is probably better than less. If there is no or very little harm in having a high number of such trades but there is real harm in having too few (players sit waiting to join and not playing, or get bored of waiting and leave utopia completely), then why place heavy limits on these?

In summary:
Separate trading into two categories: new province invites and existing province trades.
Limit new province invites to 3-5 per age.
Either completely remove limits on existing province trades, or increase the limit to a safely high number.

[Sweetiepie]

The really annoying thing for me is that Catwalk is not around to see the full fruiting of his rotten idea.

[PP the Looney]

ASF>> lol that's a funny "reasoning". It's the ONLY way to make sure that the top kingdoms keep their spots, make sure they keep their big provinces at all times. All those words wasted to not say what you really want... must be frustrating ;)

Do it the other way around instead. Limit the invites into existing provinces to max 3 per age, and keep no limit on invites to new provinces.

1. is... well quite unlikely to happen with the new anti-cheating setup as proxies are prohibited and IPs and so on are logged.
2... well are you so afraid of instant "super" kingdoms being formed anyway? Don't want the competition? You'd think Absalom could use more kingdoms to feed legit of.