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

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MoP

I'm in

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Thanks Nute

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thanks for all the hard work Nute

We have asked several times to refrain from the publishing of confusing and untrue messages as some new players might take them a truthful.

The profitability of countries is not declining. If anything, it is improving.

Numbers might be lower but pricing is also lower.

so if your profit was 40 B and you could purchase 1000 tanks at 40 million each, your profit now might be at 30 B and you can purchase 1000 tanks at 30 B each.

The average is probably better than that. The exact numbers depend of course on the types of corporations you have and how they relate to shortages or surpluses on the market.
The price of ammunition is down a lot and in fact, the average purchasing power is increased.

On HLWs

The requirements for HLWs have been reduced in the past month to solve the shortages that persisted for a long period.

The reason for these shortages is that when a corporation is upgraded (efficiency), it reduces the number of LLW and MLW and increases the numbers of everything else. The total number of workers goes down by 200 to 400 per upgrade and it depends on the type of corporations.

To alleviate the problem with HLWs we have reduced the number of HLWs that are needed with each upgrade.

In a corporation with 100 upgrades, where you needed 40 additional HLWs for each upgrade, and we have reduced the number to 36, there are now 400 HLWs less needed for a corporation with 100 upgrades.

This was done in several small steps over the last few weeks and indeed, the shortages of HLWs are receding.

We have removed a message from this discussion that claimed that the number of HLWs needed, was doubled in the past month.

As micromanaging of false messages is very time consuming, we request you to refrain from such messages.

The GM might find it easier to remove the entire discussion if he encounters such messages.

Tom if your going to delete false messages, you should start with deleting parts of your response to this thread.

Quote: The profitability of countries is not declining. If anything, it is improving.

Untrue if compared to levels in 11/2008

Miller

Tom Willard,
I will vouch that the shortages in HLW has decreased lately. It seem to be accompanied by a shortage of MLW in my more developed country. I understand that this is partly or fully due to my high education level in the same country with educating too many workers to more advanced skills.

I'm not a great economist and therefore will not commentr on the profitability of corporations.

Since you are the voice of the GM here in the forum, Could you respond to the Financial Services fee imposed on those countries with over 20T. I've taken care of my high cash level by distributing the wealth of my empire throughout my empire and loaning large sums out. I realize that this makes my assets vulnerable to acquisition by other players if I get in a major confict. I was lead to believe that we could stash assets and wealth in our secure country to avoid this from happening but the financial fee makes this unattractive. The option to sell cash for GC and to rebuy the cash with GC if needed is also an unwise option since we cannot sell for the same price we buy.

I make one suggestion. That you, as the representative of the GM keep an open discussion with the players on this forum. I realize that some players can be rude. Unfortunately this is comes with dealing with the public in any situation.

I would like to add that I believe the HLW situation has improved as well.

Miller

The exchange of cash for gold coins will in fact become even more important as there are and will be more thing you can do with gold coins.

we expect new features in several weeks from now.

The introduction of banks and direct exchange will make it easier and faster to exchange.

Gamemaster is removing itself from the cash market and will let the players decide on the value of gold coins.

I would expect the difference between buying and selling to diminish or just depend on offers and requests.

GM will continue to offer game money for gold coins to make sure people can always exchange. These offers will match the declining exchange rate.

We hope that all these measures will improve stability.

we see gold coins as the stable reserve that is usable everywhere and can be used in any asset transactions.

Game money remains of course essential in the 5 worlds but when a country has an income and cost of 100B to 500B per game year, cash levels of 500T seem like overdone.

this is a leftover from days when countries used to have budgets from 1T to 10 T per game year, exchange rates where 10 times higher and even then, these amounts where unrealistic and only a bunch or players had them.

much of this capital is the result of an early model of Simcountry with very different parameters. It was a different game.

we have never taken the money away. we have offered gold coins and we are paying cash to some of these players who understood that this could not continue and took our offer for gold coins.

There are always some who would not understand reason and will not convert come what may.

for them, improved exchange rates will increase the value of they cash while financial services will eat some of it and they will probably break even, although in the long run, I think they are better off exchanging.

Financial services will change too. This was in the game news several weeks ago.

about the hlw worker thing, tom, people have been complaining for as long as i can remember about the worker shortages... close to 2 years???

2 years... thats part of the complaint, it shouldn't take W3C 2 years to fix a problem that players are complaining about. really dude, think about about it.

we shouldn't spend weeks working on something in our empire, just to have an unannounced change, and have 50% of our work wiped away...

yes, you can look at each change individually, and defend them. and over all, the players are willing to except anything, that is over all, but this has gone to far. you have gone to far. and its time that the players, at the least, knew what was going to happen, before it happens.

for instance, not long ago, you increases the numbers of workers in every corp type, and the production of corps, accordingly... but over night, with out warning, many owners of developed countries came back to find worker shortages in the millions... for a change that was unannounced. honestly, if that was it, then then we'd be quiet, we'd complain a little, but life would go on. but this seems to be the way W3C does things... the players can wake up to shortages, with out any notice, and your response is always the same... "it just makes since," shrug, keep this up and you wont have any players.

I am very annoyed that for some reason my very profitable ceo has dropped score ridiculously for the past month. It looks like many of my corps have broke even or are going under, they were otherwise very profitable for real months now. As I am not a micromanager, I could hardly tell you what may or may not be the problem. All I know is that it sucks, I've added about 100 corps, salaries are good, most of my corps are fully upgraded, so I am assuming that the losses of not selling at correct quality prices are having a hand in this. I will also note that ammunition corps are mostly in surplus now, which isn't a great thing either for profitability. The rate at which the trend reversed is startling, just last night I saw that missile interceptors were in shortage of about 600K, only to log in today and see that they are in surplus along with many other weapon types.

Nute Gunray - I do appreciate your efforts to establish meaningful communication w/ the gamemaster. However, he basically slammed the door in our faces in his first response, then attempted to change the subject in his second response. So I see no reason to spin this in a positive way. But it was a good try.

What shall we do then?

Many of us operate under the illusion that Tom actually reads the messages in the thread before he posts something. Read this whole thread, which has a continuity to it, to Tom's first post, which is a complete non-sequitur. Read the next three player posts, as they respond to what he said...then read Tom's next post. No acknowledgement of those three posts, he just starts talking about gold coins. It's as though he just picks whatever thread seems to be active and posts the messages he wants to post, regardless of the content of previous messages in that thread.

Yup Jojo. Adapt or leave I guess Wendy. That's our BATNA

Well said Pathetic Sheep.

As I keep repeating its very simple.

Adapt or leave.

All the posturing and empty threats by a minority will only have bad consequences for the majority of people trying to enjoy this game.

At least I know who to direct my anger towards when these dire consequences happen.

Reading these threads, while good intended, are a full time job.

This game will always change.

The docs will always be incorrect or misleading(unintentionaly).

The econ side is always very fluid.

I frankly love a situation where information is limited. You need to dig deep and change regularly.

A point of fact...Most of the best war players dont read the docs. They experiment on friends. I hope they keep the war docs inaccurate. Read the forums and practice.

For the econ side, experiment. If we can only sell for 296 qulaity and our CEO are producing 333 quality could we not just reduce our supply quality to a lower number so the CEO products we produce have a product qual of 296ish?

Wont this reduce out supply costs? Seems to me any product with a quality above 296 is just wasted money. (Assuming the 296 argument put forth above is correct, I did not confirm independently, just going by whats stated above)

I can see how this will undermine the AQP market but it frankly has sucked for the past year at least. When FMU came out AQP seemed to nose dive and stay down.

Has anyone run a controlled test with supply quality settings on identical corps?

Pick a corp type that you have 5 or 6 of.

set the supply quality to 190, 185, 180, 175, 170, etc.... Then follow how the produced quality declines and how that relates to your profits. you will need identical salaries and preferably 0% tax corps.

Find the supply quality that gives you a produced product quality of 296 for CEO's. That should give you your optimal setup.

Granted this only addresses one issue of the multitude stated above but its a start.

Beating your neighbor over the head for his shit is not the answer, destabalizing a world or worlds by threatening "all out war" is not the answer. war on whom by the way? each other? that remindeds me of LA riots where people burn down there own neigborhoods because they are angry.

Read. Interesting. I never graduated high school, but have managed to find ways to fix most difficultes, but there are some that I cannot solve and not to many others can either.
Nute Gunray, this is a valiant effort to bring the GM to the table, and I hope for better results than obtained so far.

For what it is worth, you can add my name to the list. I will not hold my breath waiting on the GMs.

Hopefully the GM will actually read the posts...as was mentioned above.

The HLW problem has been improved, but seems to have cause MLW and LLW to become a problem. I now have to add HLW and MLW each month, while my stock of LLW gets bigger and bigger. Depending on how many extra workers I have...I keep the Educational Priorities extremely low, but when I run out of professionals I have to raise them and then I start running into shortages...but all the while my LLW are increasing so I don't want to buy pop and end up with 1 mil LLW!

I will say this for the ump-teenth time...we need better controls for our workers...can you say Trade Schools? Percentage controls that we set? Something...I'm tired of needing to log in every game month every day!

BANKS!?!

This could be interesting. We will have to see if that addresses any of Nute's or creates new ones.


Zeba, John, others,

There is nothing wrong with the program or your workers. You have too many corporations.

Pathetic sheep...so this is a bad thing that industry is high in my country!?! We need a program that can work on a variety of countries with or without a lot of corporations.

So yes there is a problem with the program, obviously it is not working across the board and we need more flexibility to set the exchange rates of workers ourselves (just like the Educational Priorities).

No, it might not be a bad thing. You have a number of workers and a number of corporations. When you increase the number of corporations the number of available workers decreases. If you add enough corporations the number of workers available becomes less than 0. When you have very low unemployment shortages of some types of workers will be normal.

Upgrading lots of corporations can also cause shortages.

Large numbers of workers retiring or getting drafted can also cause shortages.

In each case there is a trade off. Having too many corporations should also mean a lot of profits. Boosting your military can be expensive. Be glad it is expensive for any potential enemies. Workers give you 40 game years of work.

The problem (or feature) has been part of Simcountry since I started. Very similar phenomena occur in the real world. Real world leaders find worker shortages very annoying.

This thread is about cash. The core issue is that many of us had fun hording cash. The rest is about how Simcountry reduced cash levels. Workers are relevant because Simcountry could lower cash levels by increasing the required numbers of workers in government or industry.

I would prefer increased worker requirements in government rather than high financial services. The lesser of two evils IMO.