Humble Request for a General Game Policy Summit (Little Upsilon)

Greetings and good health to the Gamemasters, Mr. Jozi, Mr. Tom Willard, Mr. Robo Cop, and company.

We Presidents and CEO's of SimCountry are very disturbed from the long train of unannounced changes that have been occurring in this game of SimCountry. However we do want to try Diplomacy. So in the spirit of the diplomatic approach I, Nute Gunray, do approach you with our reasons for peace. I do not pretend to act as an Ambassador but only as a player of this game who is very fustrated with the current trend of changes, who would like to see SimCountry restored to being the kind of game we all would vote for as number one ranked game.

Part I Casus foederis:

This is our Casus foederis. Many of us have strongly objected to the very fact that you have decided to cause us huge declines in our profits. Yet it seems for the most part our complaints and recommendations are being ignored and/or misunderstood. Therefore we the Presidents and CEO's of SimCountry are asking WC3 to consider the following provisions that we the Presidents and CEO's of SimCountry are proposing. This is a new strategy to solve these kind of problems. We believe that we must find a way to incorporate the main new changes that the WC3 wants in a manner that is:
-realistic
-will not harm players
-improves (rather than harms) game play
-is gradual, tested, and pre-announced
-is consistent with what the players also want.

Therefore, we the Presidents and CEO's of SimCountry are requesting a General Game Policy Summit between ourselves and WC3. We can easily do this in these forums. One provision of the summit is that all post will be held intact and not deleted by WC3 unless there is strong language, adult content, defamatory language, or other forum rule violation. The other provision for this summit would be that no one would be banned for normal behavior. We the Presidents and CEO's of SimCountry strongly believe that we should be able to come together and from an agreement with WC3. We are offering the following reasonable set of suggestions that we believe WC3 should be able to agree to.


1. WC3 opens a forum thread for 1 week for all of WC3's new ideas for changes and then conducts a poll on them after 1 week of discussion at Simcountry's Exclusive Voting poll.

2. WC3 agrees not to change anything if 3/4 of the votes are against the proposed change.

3. WC3 agrees to create a "test world" to test new changes before making them generalized to all worlds, and provides coin-free empires and CEOs in the test-world to the top 10 presidents and CEOs of each real world based on their monthy scores, with the Hall of Fame Members getting an invite as well.

4. WC3 agrees to try all new changes on the test world for 2 weeks before implementing them on real worlds, and will agree to allow the implementation to be halted if 3/4 of the members of the test world request the change be postponed until further adjustments are made to ensure it works well and does not create unexpected problems.

5. WC3 agrees to form "open market committees" for each world consisting of the top 6 CEO's and top 6 presidents and allows them to veto with 2/3 opposed any "emergency" economic corrections and adjustments. (thus, allowing the GM to by-pass the normal process for changes if the change is mealy corrective, is needed, and is minor.

6. WC3 agrees to form committees or task teams to assist WC3 by providing specific ideas and feedback on how to correct issues and in helping WC3 make new changes. Thus for each new "improvement" the GM agrees to solicit feedback from 4-6 real players on a consistent basis before proposing the solution.

7. WC3 agrees to update the documentation to reflect changes made.

8. WC3 agrees to take into consideration the laws of physics and other real-world and real-life facts, or to note in the documentation where the game is deviating from reasonable action. (note: it may actually be reasonable to be able to have 10k fighters on a carrier. As long as they are in different units and no more than 2k can fight at any one time, that is actually realistic. A country can realistically fly aircraft from their home country (with air refueling) to their carrier anywhere in the world within a day and thus can easily fight with 10k fighters off one carrier in one day. However, it is also unrealistic to think that low level workers would not simply be promoted to mid and then high level workers as corporations need to fill the jobs. It makes no sense to think that only 30k can be promoted to high level workers in any given month.)

9. WC3 agrees to provide a purpose for economic features such as common markets and public corporations. There should be some advantage (other than just score) for common markets.

10. The players agree to not simply note where there are problems, but to work to find reasonable, accommodating, solutions. It is not enough to stand in the wind and shout NO...we need to accept that some changes are reasonable and others are livable. For the changes we have real problems with, we need to work to find out why WC3 wants them and help find a better way to help meet WC3 and our, needs.

Part II Casus Belli.

We Presidents and CEO's of SimCountry are very disturbed from the long train of unannounced changes that have been occurring in this game of SimCountry. While we realize that WC3 is the game owner. We Presidents and CEO's of SimCountry are owners De facto. This is our game in the sense that we invest out time, our labor, and our real money into it. Therefore we Presidents and CEO's of SimCountry are willing to defend, fight for and make war over the good of the game as we perceive it. Therefore if we cannot have a General Game Policy Summit we will be forced to declare war. This is our Casus Belli.

1) W3C has forced corporations to transfer cash out even if we have profit transfer set at 0%.

2) WC3 has now lowered the maximum amount of cash in corporations three different times unanounced. First from $75,000B to $60,000B then to $50,000B, and now to as low as $45,000B. (WC3 did concede and returned this amount to $60,000B after much heated debate.)

3) W3C has forced our high quality products to be sold at discount prices. No products with over 300% quality will be sold at the price that they should be sold for. This occurs no matter the form of sale. If we direct sell the products or if we have the products sold through contracts, they do not sell for the correct price but are being sold at the maximum of 296% quality. WC3 refuses to admit to this and has tried to mislead us.

4) W3C has forced up the amount of workers in Elementary Schools, High Schools, and Universities.

5) W3C is forcing up salaries in some areas.

6) W3C has forced the reduction of corporation production by about 5% on average for certain corporations. So far the list includes FMU, and most weapon/ammo corporations. No decrease in raw material usage has been made in these corporations, only a reduction in production. This further is reducing profits.

7) W3C is not warning the players about these kind of changes.

8) W3C continues to mislead and even lie about the changes.

9) W3C often refuses to admit their mistakes.

10) W3C is is denying the players a chance to make and hoard lots of simcountry cash. WC3 has imposed an opressive Financial Services fee to force us to buy gold coins whether or not we want to buy the gold coins.

11) W3C does not give the players an even exchange on gold coins. Most of the time we will be losing money if we buy them to avoid the fincial charge and then have to sell them when we need more simcountry cash.

12) WC3 has forced down the nominal value of many countries and CEO's by forcing us to limit or cash on hand, product price reduction, and salary reduction. Currently, players are losing value of their assets, in-game terms and real-life terms. Profits also are continuously going down due to imbalance.

13) The real problem is that many of the new game changes will break or eliminate features of the game that were working just fine. The present trend of game changes are not done in balance. For example the trend of decreasing profits was not balanced with an equal trend of decreasing cost. These kind of changes are unrealistic.

14) W3C allows for the C3's to cheat the market by having C3 state corporations sell 185 quality product from 100 quality supplies/100 quality upgrade, thus undercutting the AQP and AEP markets.

15) WC3 has banned at least 2 Presidents from the forum for their desire to challange the mistakes made in the recent changes.

16) WC3 has been accused of the use of Intimidation tactics against a President who is a full member becasue of his desire to challange the mistakes made in the recent changes.

Thus there are two choices presented here either WC3 attempts to work with the Presidents and CEO's of SimCountry in a diplomatic spirit or WC3 will be faced with all out war.

Posted on behalf of over 30 Presidents and CEO's of SimCountry. All other Presidents and CEO's of SimCountry are encourged to post their views in this thread.

Most humbly,


Nute Gunray the Viceroy

Emperor of UNITED STAR TRADE FEDERATION on Golden Rainbow
Kanzler of Chain Gang on Little Upsilon
Chairman of the United Confederation on Golden Rainbow
Chairman of THE BLUE TEAM FEDERATION ON Little Upsilon
Security Council Member on Little Upsilon, and Golden Rainbow

Amen!

Add my name to the list.

As Dirt said, add my name to the list.

Add my name to the list

/sign

but I'm not holding my breath...

Add my name to the list.

Regarding item # 3 Part I - This should not be a rotating setup. It should be a group of 10 to 20 individuals at most who are 'permanent'. The reason for this is simply to allow individuals the ability to track and monitor changes over a long period of time. A team of beta testers would greatly help W3C implement changes that had a less disasterous affect on the game, BUT they need a dedicated group, not a rotating group.

HAHA! My thread reguarding GM's threats didn't last long!

That is some excellent work, Nute.

sign me! nice analysis you are all right, rigth now the real economy is gettin slow, its no good idea attempt to rise rates at this moment just because certains ammo and weapons,i think now cost less.

Great Stuff Nute, sign me up!

me too

I am a relatively new player and still finding my way in some aspects of the game - the negative changes you have highlighted forced me to cancel my countries and I am now just focused on running an enterprise. Hopefully, this will provide a gateway to a better gaming experience for all of us and from a personal point of view, make me want to run countries once again in a less oppressive environment.

I concur fully with the nature of this thread and wholeheartedly pledge my support to what you are doing, Nute.

I'd settle for listen to Laguna/John R.

I'm in. Add my name.

/signed

sounds good. Sign me up.

Extra input is always good. Signed.

X (my mark)

Signed on the line.

I think the GM has made some improvements and concessions in the last day or two, but the consensus is that we the players need to have more input in the game.

I strongly endorse the need for the GM to consult a group of players in each world before making changes and I suggest that the Security Councils be given this honorable position.

Bugs still need to be fixed so that we can take a day / weekend off from the game without coming back to a worker or debt crisis. More automated features with better player controlled features.

Thanks for your hard work Nute!

Good on you Nute.
They can take our profits. Thay can take our Navies. But they can never take our voices................Ok maybe they can. But they can't take all of them.

Signed.

Awe ****, no stamp on this forum, that stinks.

I agree to the very well thought out info above.

W3C, this has to be answered, it is well thought out and reasonable. We are not attempting to run this game, that is your business. We are simply trying to help you understand your customers point of view.

Thanks Nute,

ATG

Signed.

I approved this message!

I have to express a dissident few.

I like cutthroat gaming. It does not matter how much pretend money I have. All that matters is that I end up with more than someone else.

If someone quits a game because elementary schools have 52 teachers instead of 50 it is quite likely that he/she would have quit soon anyway. Everyone still playing Simcountry accepted and enjoyed a game with a useless documentation. Less than 10% of Simcountry presidents can accurately calculate war engine battles. I regularly see people fail attempts at taking over a CCC. The game masters shouldn't bother telling us about housewife investment plans. They should write a coherent guide to the game.

Realistically I am sure the gamemasters would accommodate Zeba. Offer them a membership in exchange for naming a computer controlled country after you. In February 2009 I left home to stay with a relative in the hospital. I set my countries up to run without my help for about 2 to 3 weeks. Only the strategic corps would have necessarily imploded after 3 weeks and that is not a bug. Strategic corps should be tricky. Workers are following an almost identical routine that they were when I started playing the game (August 2008). After a few annoying worker and debt crisis I took the time to learn how to avoid creating a crisis if I didn't want it. If you want a simple interactive game try tic-tac-toe or battleship.

The biggest change since September is not in the programming. The change is in the forum culture. Last fall confused/pissed off people came to the forums. They would then usually be ignored until someone who new a solution explained the solution. Now we have new players facing more or less the same problems that everyone faced when he/she was new to the game. Instead of helping them along we just tell them that programmer is trying to make the game impossible.

Banning people from the forums is not good. But the crew at W3C is probably tired and very frustrated. Banned people can start harassing them again in one week.

There have always been Simcountries that lose money. There are currently Simcountries that make a lot of money. You can compare them and learn from that comparison. IMO a text based financial strategy game should require an understanding of high school mathematics. If you remove the need to figure things out the game is not interesting.

"A coherent guide to the game" is essential.

In the five months I've been playing the game, I'm astonished that the documentation isn't clarified or up dated on a regular basis.

It is taken for granted that we have to develop our own methods and strategies within the documented criteria, but so much time is now expended trying to figure out what the " coherent guide to the game" is.

The essence of the game programming should be expressed in the guide to convey the limitations of the game at any point in time.

Eg.....what are the mechanics of worker movements, and when/why do they take place?

No player should have to rely on trawling the forums, the game news and experienced players for a coherent guide.