Jozzi Chat, 10th of January

After a long break, the next and first Jozi Chat of 2010 will occur on the 10th of January, a sunday, on Genie's TNN Simnews IRC server. Coincidently, the first Jozi Chat of 2009 happened on the 10th of January as well.

Jozi is the owner and until some years ago he used to read and post around the forum. So, if you would like to discuss and offer suggestions or report bugs in real time, this is the time to do so.

This meeting will take place at:
- New York: 10am
- Los Angeles: 7am
- London: 3pm
- Amsterdam: 4pm
- Sydney: 2am


This meeting will happen in a IRC server and, as such, you will need an IRC client in order to be present. One of the clients you may use is mIRC or ChatZilla.

Once you have one of the client set-up, in the lower bar, type:
1. /server simnews.mine.nu
2. /join #jozichat

If, on the other hand, you are having problems setting this up, you can use the webclient.


Laguna

Good job Laguna.

I'll be sure not to miss this.

bump

I would like to formally request a proposal to be presented at the Jozi chat:


The Proposal:

When offering a direct contract from a corp to a country (not local or common market contracts, you all know the difference), I would like to see an option to sell products "at cost" or some sort of other discount.


The Reasoning:

My reason for requesting this is a result of the impending implementation of quality for weapons and ammunition. Even in the small-scale upgrades I have started on, 250Q has shown itself to be stupendously expensive. Anticipating this, and also anticipating the fact that conditions on the world market will exacerbate the expense of buying high Q, I have started a modest program in my own CEOs to gradually supply myself with high quality armaments. This also anticipates that less will be needed at high Q, therefore it's more feasible to supply one's self.

Nevertheless, it seems that the cost-benefits of arming this way are marginal against the time it takes to actually stockpile arms. A more fitting reward for those endeavoring to arm in this manner, considering the time, effort, and CEO/country corp space it takes, should be achievable. It therefore seems reasonable to have a "sell at cost" or some other discount for direct contracts to countries.


Considerations:

Foremost, you're fleecing the sheep to make sweaters for goats here. While you save money on the country end, your weapon and ammo corps suffer here... so i don't think this creates an imbalance, per-say... other than the fact that large CEOs are able to absorb expenses better than countries, as are their corporations.

Second, this option should be allowed only for countries and enterprises within your OWN account, in order to avoid the abuse of multiple accounts being created to simply supply cheap(er) weapons and ammo.

Third, this option should only be allowed in direct contracts, not the common market.

Fourth, there ought to be an option to directly contract to CEOs... in general. It's silly that you can contract a corp to your country but not to your CEO.

Fifth, this proposal is intended to provide a benefit to people willing to invest the time and energy into this way of self-arming. Those wanting to rapidly arm can do so on the world market, like they always have, and pay more... like they always have.

I'd also like the issue of WP to be brought up before Jozi once again, especially considering the new "peaceful" game levels. There are several suggestions floating around amongst players that would abandon WP (such as all-or-nothing peaceful & war modes), or that would radically modify WP (such as forfeiting WP across your empire by declaring war on another president).

Logs? I somehow missed it.

I sure am slow, the 10th isn't until tommorow lol.

Timezones can mislead easily.

It's still the 9th for me and you, Wendy. My post says the 10th, but it is on CET (Central European Time). The session will begin at 16:00 (4:00 PM) CET. That is, it will begin in 16 hours.

I will post the logs, of course, when the meeting is finished.

One hour.

7 minutes!!! comon now

Dam i missed it too...i thought it was on the 15th.

Did you see the part where we discussed me kickin your teeth in and you not being able to whine about it? I think that would be the most important part for you to consider.

During the last chat, Jozi promised a reaction on the forum on several issues that were discussed.

This is a bit late but we needed some time to review the consequences of all these features and also, Jozi is overbooked and we had some difficulties scheduling a quick meeting on this. I apologize for the delay.

Peaceful countries and protection from war

When players play the peaceful game, one country if always in secured mode and if there are more countries, they can be protected by the temporary protection feature that requires boosters.

The request was to make the protection simpler or actually cheaper.

There are two problems:
1. You can now easily switch between the two modes and be peaceful or not peaceful any time you want. Specific features for one type of players do not make sense.
2. Peaceful players have an advantage as they do not have any army and no workers tied up in the army and unable to work in corporations. This represents a major financial advantage and they can achieve higher scores. There is no reason to add more advantages.

We decided to add a feature that will allow everyone, war players and peaceful layers, to purchase a large number of boosters for a discounted number of gold coins, provided they purchase these boosters for all their countries at once for a long period.

We will add this feature to Simcountry ASAP.

Income tax settings

We plan this feature some time ago. It will be great if you could set your income tax levels. The feature in itself is easy to add. The consequences of low levels or very high levels are more complex.

The feature depends on the capability to compute the purchasing power of net salaries and the possibility that very high taxation could cause hunger while very low taxation could bankrupt the government (this is already in place).

Once the consumption capability is done as part of the spending feature, we will add tax level flexibility.

Quality considerations when purchasing products

The quality of products purchased by corporations is obviously important as it influences the quality of the products the corporations make. The quality of products for the country, are less obvious. There is some influence on the welfare index and this influence will increase. The higher the average quality of products purchased by the country, the higher welfare will become.

The welfare in the country is influencing the production levels in corporations.

The quality of military related products which represent a very large group, is now important because the quality is influencing the base quality of the military units.

Shortages of High Level Workers

We had this problem before and we have solved it. The increase in size of corporations probably brought some of this problem back but certainly less severe than before.

In the mean time, in the past two weeks, we have made two rounds of corrections and we assume that the problem disappeared. We will make another last round next week.

Quality of the Navy

We are getting closer to the final implementation of the military units quality and the question was about the quality of the navy.

The feature should of course include the navy but the initial release will cover only land and air units.

We will however move forward with the process of turning navy units into regular army units. This change will normalize the navy into smaller units, will add the supply part of the navy with supply ships and regulate their speed when they are heading for their targets.

It will also bring us closer to landing ships that will be able to transport military units and materials to long distance targets.

Share Trading and promised Automation

We will try to move this feature forward. We are currently working on the "Now What" feature that is aimed at new players and we do want to complete the space trading features.

Battle World

The idea here is to create a world that will be restarted once a month to two months and where players can register and compete for a limited period, fighting others and trying to dominate.

The idea was discussed before, on the forum and within W3creative.
We think that it can add a lot to the game.

We will estimate the work that is involved in such a world and come back with a planned implementation.

The Welfare Index

We promised to write a description of the welfare index and publish the parameters. We will do so ASAP on this same place in the coming week or two.

To prevent long discussions about what it should be instead of what exactly it is, this description will not go into the exact numbers and formula but will describe all the factors that are involved in this index.

We will wait and see how this works out and may continue with more details and other indexes.

wo0t! a 'real' war world....

thanks Tom

Tom - This stuff sounds great for the most part...thx for listening. I'm hoping we can influence one more change to war protection...if not on all worlds then at least on FB.

Currently players are able to keep all of their valuable countries in war protection while using 'worthless' or worth very little c3 countries to cause damage to other people's countries which are not in constant war protection. These c3's can be quite effective because weapons and ammo can be transferred into them from the big/valuable countries quite a bit more quickly than they could purchase themselves. The end result is wars dragging on for real months and months while players 'hide' in war protection waiting for their enemies war protection to drop and then declare on them with c3's.

I'm sure you have heard about this scenario previously but it is really a poor part of the game that causes people to not be willing to negotiate peace treaties because they can continue attacking without risking any of their own assets and act poorly in forums/msgs/chat towards other players because they do not fear any retribution. Myself as well as some of the others big players on FB are working together on possible solutions but I was wondering if you had any thoughts on this matter?

I would appreciate it.

WB

The HLW bugs still have not been taken care of no matter how much you think they have been.

I'm thinking you have never embarked on a mass C3 mission WhiteBoy. It takes commitment, patience and more important, Time. Some of us have no intentions of spending loads of money on this game to compete/defend against those who either have more money than sense or those who just have loads of money. C3 warfare is one of the only ways people like me have to hold our own against VISA Warriors.

The retribution is the amount of time spent implementing C3 warfare. As you said. It can take months.

Nix - It is absolutely ridiculous that you believe it is good for the game for people to hide in wp risking none of their assets while destroying other people's assets and hide behind the 'well they spend more money on the game so I'm justified' argument. Plus, wp itself comes with a cost, on most worlds it's the equivalent of ~$460B per real DAY PER COUNTRY on most worlds and $690B for LU...that's alot of GC being spent by people hiding in wp.

Perpetual wp creates the kinds of situations that just occurred on GR and have been going on on FB for months and months now, wars lasting forever with no real purpose other than to destroy other people's countries and assets, waste people's time and keep people from coming to meaningful peace agreements.

As far as what I have or have not done, I was an extremely active participant in the 3M vs NV wars on FB that are still quasi going on today coming up on what 8-9 months now and have been nearly all c3 wars for maybe 75-80% of that time? A large part of that time I did exclusive c3 fighting and I used them to take large, wealthy countries from some of the best fighters out there and they returned the favor when I let my wp slip. I'm not someone who doesn't know about the use of c3's or the purpose behind it, I am someone who has done it, experienced it and to be honest took more countries than I lost from c3 wars, so this isn't a 'Oh, cry for me and change the rules' gripe, this is an honest gripe about fairness in the game and people exploiting (although within the rules) a system.

War protection began so that people could secure their assets while on vacation, etc. and has changed into this permanent state for players that like to fight wars, destroy other people's assets, waste other people's time and don't want to put up anything to risk of their own. It's BS, it's unrealistic and it should be changed for the good of the game...pure and simple.

I have to wholeheartedly disagree WB. Forget the reasons why you attacked several prominent members of the LU community. Lets forget about whatever the justifications were.

Lets focus on why removing the war protection is dangerous. Many people would counter your argument that some players , regardless of how, have amassed nice war slaves and nice assets to fight with. No matter who the victim is, they would would be jumped if they could ever give a good challenge to certain players. With that in mind, now you go and take out Alarich, after 3 of you softened him up. Regardless of how he fought, he would have lost, and if he ever appeared to be able to defeat you, certainly he would have been jumped on by more than you. Then you went on to Aqua who had nothing to take to begin with. Again, this weekend, one player was deprived of an entire empire, by more than three or four players. The excuse was inactivity, but you have made clear in other posts that is not the case. We know it is further not the case when he mentions being away for 3 days. Now let us be thankful that this guy didn't want to quit as did Alarich, and Aqua is one big happy punching bag lol. But sooner or later you guys are gonna stomp the wrong person, and it is gonna rub someone the wrong way. Unfortunately for the players who have enough stones to stand up to that crap, the other players who are needed to make it meaningful have their tails tucked. So WP is not just for vacation or downtime, it is for those who don't wish to fight, Nor have their junk ambushed and snatched from them after working on it for real months.

So yes, I actually feel that C3 is the only valid weapon of deterrence against groups of warlords like yourself, who don't know when enough is enough. For example I have nothing to take and that is proly the only reason you guys won't attack me. And If I had a few assets worth grabbing, the only reason you haven't attacked me is because you don't want to fight a c3 war.

It is not like you guys are taking one country to prove a point to someone acting an ass, you are taking whole empires. Comon wtheck is that? Can any reason for war be that serious. I don't think so, I think it is a personality problem. We get it WB, You kick ass okay . Try waiting for someone to actually provide you guys a challenge instead of stomping weaker players. It just smells bad.

First, I have no issue with people who want to play the peaceful game and have lobbied heavily on their behalf and believe that I am one of the main voices that has the gm's acting on extended wp for such players...I don't remember a whole bunch of other people arguing for them...not even themselves for the most part. The issue is not peaceful players, I'm all for them enjoying the game in their own way and have declined to go after any of them, I was asked by a long time vet yesterday to hit up a clearly defenseless econ empire for assets...the person was active and I said no...I don't hit active people who are defenseless and minding their own business enjoying the game in their way.

Second, I'm offended by the implication here. On FB I was beat up pretty badly by 3M for the most part, I got in a few licks but I took a lot too...so I'm assuming that's not what you are talking about. On LU, Beast (EO) and I were looking for a war...a big war...and a war where we would have been outmatched both in personnel and in assets...that was against BC's fed. We dec'd on Daelin expecting a big fed war with all kinds of counter decs, only to discover that Daelin (although he was quite good at defending himself) was actually an econ player that had weapons only for that purpose, then BC bailed...and Alarich talked smack then ran away...myself and EO realizing that we weren't going to get the fight that we wanted made a deal with Daelin that he was happy with and we didn't destroy his entire empire as we could have...we actually left it perfectly intact minus some weps and ammo and to this day Daelin and I are actually good buds who talk on a regular basis on MSN.

Next there was Alarich, who as I said talked a bunch of smack during the spat with BC's fed and then ran away and I'm sorry but he had it coming to him. He talked way too much and proved after the fact why he deserved it by continuing to call me out even after I had sent him in game msgs with offers for peace if he would agree to retract the lies he spewed and apologize for them.

Then, Aqua, I'm not going to defend myself much on this one...I had my reasons and he had alienated and pissed off almost all of the SC community...the only reason u didn't destroy him on LU yourself is because he made peace with John L...but I was even nice enough to offer him his countries back as well...he said no and thought he could take them back by force...so it wasn't my fault that I took his latest one...he decd.

That has been the extent of mine and EO's wars against active players on LU. Rampage? Hardly...not knowing when to stop? Not at all...we had nothing to do with the DTA thing except for me afterwards trying to protect Hordo's remaining country by telling him not to bring it out of wp. I have settled most of my personal issues with people with just one remaining and those decs have been sent as you know. I will make the same offer to that person as I made to Alarich and I'll do it before even taking a country or firing a shot: Apologize for the disrespectful comments you have made and agree that in the future if you are going to call me out then you will pull your empire out of wp and we'll go at it one on one...do that publicly and I'll let the decs expire.

Third, war is expensive and people that lose '1 country' are far more likely to come back after u...only on their terms. Taking down Alarich's air d took something like 50k bombers add that to however many it took to take out garrisons...plus the ammo...and he stripped out the assets from all of his countries except for the defense that he needed...one country was not going to make up for the assets spent and the time it took to get the air d down. Again, had I stopped at 1 country (which we only took 3 total anyway...he still had 10 or so left then he dereggd 2) would he have just said, 'OK I understand and I'm not going to use all of these assets that you left behind to attack you?' We know the answer to that one...

So, with all of that being said...who exactly have I attacked that was supposedly a 'weaker' player? The people that I have gone after and continue to go after have high ranking slaves and from their own mouths claim they can fight better than I can and speak to me in a very disrespectful manner...I forgot that you are known for accepting that kind of stuff from people (oh wait...Wendy stands up for herself )

As far as why we haven't gone after you, it has nothing to do with your lack of assets or the fact that you'll c3 fight, it has to do with you, myself and Beast having a pretty good relationship and you've done nothing to provoke such a fight.

I will do nothing but encourage players out there who have an issue with me or my fedmates to unite and fight back against us...I've said that multiple times already and will continue to say so...we are always interested in a challenge, which is what we thought we were getting when we decd on Daelin from the FED.

But if that happens I'll remember that you think it's perfectly fine for all of us to just go ahead and throw our empires into wp and then c3 gangbang all of them until they are gone...c3 fighting isn't only limited to those who are 'weaker, out-manned or out-experienced. That is the problem with the system.

All I am asking for is a rule that says if you dec on another player you can not have countries in wp, this will not affect the econ players because they don't dec on other players...

Sorry this is way tooooooo long...sorry if I'm coming off dickish...I like you Wendy and I don't think what you are saying is fair but I'm not trying to be an *sshole...

'All I am asking for is a rule that says if you dec on another player you can not have countries in wp, this will not affect the econ players because they don't dec on other players...'

Sounds fair enough.
What happens if someone attacked my slave, and then sits back and waits for me to not be able to attack one day, which risks the dec running out, allowing them to hide back into war protection?
#cough#Booboo#cough
What I'm saying is, if I'm dec on, would I be able to keep the dec going with another slave and still be able to keep war protection on my main?

I think it is perfectly reasonable to have a 'main' in wp on FB, all other worlds your main is secured anyway and I wouldn't want any changes to those rules. To be honest I could completely see the argument to make this rule for FB only...I'd accept that resolution as well. I would even be reasonable enough to say that any country with a def index less than 200 could remain in wp so that people can protect their econ slaves from war. It really isn't unreasonable when you think about it.

Alternatively, what if air defense in war protected countries could not participate in air defense and you were not allowed to transfer weapons from countries in wp to countries that have active war declarations?

The Welfare Index - promised during the Jozi chat

We have promised to describe the welfare index in more details.

The welfare index depends on several other country indexes and will in most cases have a value range of 50 to 130. In some cases it can have an even higher value.

The welfare index, along with the salary levels is an important factor in the productivity in corporations. The productivity index in corporations can vary by up to 14 points as result of changes in the welfare index and our intention is to gradually increase its influence.

The welfare index depends on the minimum value of the health index, the education index, the transportation index, the employment index + 40, the supply index + 30, the social index + 10 and the salary index. All these values are taken with a minimum of 50 and a maximum of 130.

In addition, the welfare index also depends on the number of population sales by the empire. If the empire is disposing of its population, this has a negative influence on the welfare index. This factor will reach up to 10%. The factor is diminishing in time, if no additional population transfers take place and will disappear. Adding population to the empire will also negate the influence of past transfers out of the empire. The lower and upper limits of the welfare index as described above will not stand when population transfers are taken into account.

Changes in the welfare index are never sudden and there are no quick changes. The process is automatically delayed over a period of several days and if nothing will change, the index will stabilize gradually to its target value. The changes are faster at the start of the change and wane gradually in time.

To keep your corporations at a high production levels and substantially above 100%, we advise you to make sure all these indexes remain at a high level and refrain from major transfers of population out of the empire. High salaries will increase the cost of the corporations but have a good effect on the production levels.

Check some successful countries to find out about their production levels and related index and salary levels.