[General remarks - gamification]

Part of my daily work is building gamification mechanisms. I like Naval Action a lot, however I can see a few problems appearing from time to time. Maybe my advices would be helpful for developers. There's a large chance you already know a lot of those rules.

 

 

Problems I can see:

- many mechanisms are not balanced. Recently it's economy, the same can happen to politics etc.

- many mechanics that are not modelled in the game are being modelled by players in their communities. Some of the new ideas can block or break those player-modelled mechanisms a lot. In general it's safer to empower them, not change.
- some mechanics don't play well with each other - eg. minimum price for goods and inflation creates economy of shortages (just like communism did) and switches one type of currency (cash) to another (mostly labour)

 

 

Advices:

- it's good to define "magic numbers" that tell you how good or bad given mechanics work. For economy it's eg. amount of gold in circulation per player per rank. If it goes up or down, it's generating inflation/deflation and it should be balanced

 

- it's good to have monitoring mechanisms to monitor magic number in real time, as well as historical logs, and tools to compare them in different environments (eg. between nations). This allows you to check how new changes influence numbers. You can think about this as automated tests for game mechanics. It's worth to think about those numbers before every change.

 

- it's good to model tools that allow you to easily tweak results of those magic numbers, which could even change automatically based on results. For economy this could be eg. a price for placing a contract, an average price of goods from eurotraders, fluctuating labour cost, etc.

 

- it's good to model in mechanisms that introduce abstraction layer, eg. by introducing points as a kind of currency. This allows for much easier tweaking of the system afterwards, without having to worry about a few mechanisms working separately from each other. You already do this with XP and gold. It probably should be done with political influence as well, so that you can control it's flow easily.

- it's good to give players a reason to spend a resource that they can get infinitely (eg. cash) on something that don't have value, but gives you prestige, and best only for a given amount of time. This gives them a reason to value cash even after they reach maximum rank, which limits inflation. Time limitation and abstraction layer allows you to control level of influence of this incentive. You could use standard gamification mechanics here (give recognition, unique access, power over others, or mix of those).

- since you have limited workforce and funds (everyone does ), it's probably better to create just frames for players and allow them to fill in those frames themselves. This means defining only basic tools, without strictly defining rules. eg. In clans those rules will define themselves. It's enough to create some incentives and support mechanisms for the start.

 

 

["Such is a lord" - Simple politics and alliances part 1 - HEAVILY MODERATED]

In general I like the direction of changes and your goals. It’s great you want to improve politics. I have a few remarks though.

 

My thoughts:

• it’s good to leave system as flexible as possible, allowing community to define their actions and internal rules. You can’t model everything well enough with hard rules, as balancing this out takes years. Players themselves can fill in this gap. Clans already partly model this. Maybe giving them better tools would make game more interesting, in the same time leaving flexibility and giving the same incentives to players.
  
• it’s good to create a system as simple as possible, which allows for complex interactions. Eg. chess is one of the most popular games since it’s so simple, yet so powerful
  

 

 

 

Suggestions:

 

Voting for parliament members:

• large PvP and PB are solely  a domain of clans. Because of this I think voting power should be mainly controlled by clans. Since clans are an already organised communities, they can decide themselves who is the most influential. This allows for more freedom and more advanced social rules that players can define themselves inside their groups. A one example of how this could work:
  
  • each clan gains X amount of political power based on number of factors. Eg:
    
    • number of active players
      
    • vote of most influential clans, done by other clans in the nation (again, human factor)
      
    • number of ports captured by players
      
    • number of ports defended by players
      
    • number of enemy ships sank by players
      
    • number of gold contributed to nation by players
      
    
    
  • each clan gets Y amount of parliament seats, based on their political power
    
  • each clan gets eg. 5 roles at start, with an already preset influence level. Example:
    
    • 50% - leader (clan creator)
      
    • 20% - admiral
      
    • 10% chief economist
      
    • 2x 10% rear-admiral
      
    
    
  • each clan member with a role defines X people to parliament. Eg if you’re a leader with 50% influence and your clan has 10 seats, you nominate 5 people
    
  • each clan leader can add new titular roles and define their percentage of influence, however with a limit that at least 5 roles have to have influence (to limit power grab of a single person destroying the clan)
    
  • each clan leader can assign roles freely
    
  • clan leader can be voted down from his office by players who won most influence for the clan (requires a separate impeachment system, best if it requires a lot of effort to use and requires to propose another candidate)
    
  
  

 

Parliament:

• parliament can vote for a nation leader for X days
  
• leader can lead for eg. 2 times in a row. After that he has to make a break for one term (to avoid giving too much power to a single clan)
  
• some actions can be taken by a nation leader (eg. trade war), some only by a parliament (eg. war, or taxing)
  

 

Advantages over proposed model:

• it meets the same goals. Players will still focus on getting ports, participating in wars etc.
  
• it’s easy to balance in the future, as you can tweak it easily by adding new actions that influence political power of clans, or changing political power for existing actions
  
• it eliminates some imbalance right away by removing fixed rules and introducing more human factor
  
• it’s partly based on an already existing model that players create themselves within clans (at least in Dutch nation)
  
• if new players are doing well in clan, they can advance their political power. They just have to convince their clan members they’re worth it. This makes game more open to new people and don’t lock them out of political system
  
• if someone is a good frigate captain, or the only crafter in a clan with huge influence but no PvP experience, this system will also adapt to make him influential. He will just force his clan mates to give him better role
  
• it gives more options within clans, improving gameplay
  

 

 

There’s one more problem with proposed system I think:

• capturing ports increases labour, yet labour is mostly used by those who don’t capture ports
  

 

I don’t have a good suggestion here, only a mediocre one:

 

To make it increase labour for a while for a nation capturing it, lower it a bit for a nation losing it, and in the same time increase it a lot for a nation capturing it, and lower it some less for a clan loosing it.