Bring Back Anonymous News & Unit Trades

arkranox wrote:

I agree strongly that, at least, Anonymous messages should return. Or be given to a players that meet a certain level or requisite. Not to be elitist, but just to make them more traceable in case needed... It's sad but it's not the first time that instead of modifying things to make them work, they throw away it entirely. In the case of Anonymous message, it was an interesting resource and gave diplomacy a deeper meaning. I even faked combat plans and espionage reports with that. It was fun.

Ah HA! Now that this issue has had a good compromise solution offered, let the devs find a way to make it work and we can all go back to posting anonymously, and responsibly.

DoctorDR1 wrote:

I really liked it too. Unfortunately the few people who thought abusing it would be funny ruined it for the rest of us.

Really agree on your modification.

However, there was a little bug that should be mentioned: when filtering messages by enemies or allies, Anonymous messages were filtered. It was a way to know more about who wrote it. Maybe fix it by showing it only in the all window?....

Big supporter of anonymous messages coming back to the paper for sure.

Ranking system perks is cool, just like you can join certain game modes and access more scenarios with higher ranks.

For example:

Rank 70 - get to post anonymous messages

Rank 90- get to post pictures

I guess a downside to that is that Rank 70+ would be figured out through process of elimination

Tribunate wrote:

I guess a downside to that is that Rank 70+ would be figured out through process of elimination

Tribunate wrote:

Big supporter of anonymous messages coming back to the paper for sure.

Ranking system perks is cool, just like you can join certain game modes and access more scenarios with higher ranks.

For example:

Rank 70 - get to post anonymous messages

Rank 90- get to post pictures

I guess a downside to that is that Rank 70+ would be figured out through process of elimination

Um, OK. You've got a very good point about the rank. BUT, there are two reasons why that might not be an issue...at least for most players.

One, newer players probably won't notice or care. The few who do, will see it more as a privilege to aspire to, and less than something to go, "Ah HA!, THAT guy is high-ranking!".

Two, more experienced players are likely either going to rank high enough (depending on what level is chosen), or they are near enough that they are ALSO going to be motivated to reach that rank. And, in the meantime, they might at least figure out the list of possible players and try to be smart about it, using that potential knowledge to their advantage (albeit, a very tiny one, I would think).

Now, there are two ways that could mitigate the guessing. One is to make two threshold levels, the first for Gold spending (a set amount per anonymous message), and the second for higher-ranking, thus you wouldn't know if a high-ranking person used their privilege, or a low-ranking person bought it with a token amount of Gold.

The other way to mitigate the guessing would be to make the threshold not a single number, but a range that randomly sets a unique value for each match...or each player! If the number is random (i.e., in the range of Rank 40 - 80), then only those players who have at least as high as the randomly-chosen rank threshold would be able to post anonymous messages. In this scenario, a player might be able to post in some matches and not in others, until they are high enough ranked to avoid the maximum threshold.

Better yet, there could be two sets of random values within a range of minimums for each match. For example, make a range of 30 - 90 for the minimum threshold to buy anonymous messages with Gold (e.g., 500 Gold per message, and 200 Gold to edit a message), and then also make a range of 60 - 120 for the minimum threshold to post anonymous messages without Gold. This way, a midlevel player might be able to post messages in one account for free, by spending Gold in another match, and then not at all in a third match.

The idea of having two randomly chosen values would really mix it up a lot on the anonymous message posts, and the two random values would be set by the server upon creation of a match. Only Game Operators and higher would be allowed to view the exact value, so even Mods would be able to enjoy the mystery without compromise.

Personally, I kinda really like the idea of making it dynamic (and it'd be a cinch to implement, programmatically speaking), and the guessing game would add an element of mystery to "Who's the anonymous person?"

One more thing. For anonymous matches, I think it would add more mystery to return anonymous messages for all players (regardless of rank) to anonymous matches since the nations are already not known. And because players have to pay Gold to join (usually), they are probably less motivated to use anonymous messaging to violate TOS. Also, since these matches have anonymous nations, I would think the issue of reporting bad posts really wouldn't be changed by adding anonymous messages since you already don't know who each player is. But not even knowing which nation is posting an anonymous message would add a lot more mystery and fun to these messages, in my humble opinion.

whowh wrote:

Tribunate wrote:

I guess a downside to that is that Rank 70+ would be figured out through process of elimination

Well that would make it a bit easier to catch people breaking the ToS

It wasn’t an issue of people. Like I said, it had to do with compatibility with recent backend updates, which prevented anonymous articles from being properly processed by GOs.

IF it is fixed, they MIGHT, with stress on the might, come back. Don’t take my word for it though.

Unfortunately unit trades have basically no chance of coming back.

Well that's a solid conclusion. Close this thread?

Agree

DoctorDR1 wrote:

It wasn’t an issue of people. Like I said, it had to do with compatibility with recent backend updates, which prevented anonymous articles from being properly processed by GOs.

IF it is fixed, they MIGHT, with stress on the might, come back. Don’t take my word for it though.

Unfortunately unit trades have basically no chance of coming back.

Unit trades were a key part of diplomacy, and very helpful in a pinch, and especially against heavy gold users. That said, I thought the idea of making a secondary market — a "black market" of sorts — could be the place where less-than-savory trades happen…things like…

List of Black Market Trades:

• All resources are traded
• Manpower is traded
• Mercenaries are rented (per day?)
• Units are traded (like commodities)
• Spies and/or spy info is bought and sold
• Technology achievements are bought and sold
• Diplomatic relationships can be overridden
• plus whatever else can be conceived of, to make the game more interesting

…and all at a stiff price. The Market has a fee for all transactions. The Black Market could have a very stiff fee for transactions, as well as other specialized costs, i.e.:

• All Resource trades come with a 50% markup, paid only by the buyer (sellers never pay to list on the Black Market).
• Manpower trades have a minimum cost per unit in addition to the traded resource.
• Mercs come with a per diem (seller chooses resource type and amount per unit per day while the buyer has to payan additional 1000 cash per unit per day to the Market).
• Technology trades would not only cost whatever the seller chooses, but they also cost the buyer what it would be to research the tech yourself (sans the time) — plus 50% of each resource added on as a surcharge fee.
• Spy trades (like Manpower) have a minimum cost per spy in addition to traded resource.
• Spy data trades also have a minimum cost per transaction.
• Diplomatic relationship changes (interference) are supremely expensive and it forcibly switches a player's relationship with another player up or down one degree (i.e., up from War to Cease Fire, or down from Shared Map to Right of Way, or even down from Embargo to War. Of course, players can resolve their differences, but by the time they do, some damage may have been done, and not every player will want to simply restore the disrupted relationship to what it was before. Thus this could be a very powerful weapon…with that very stiff price.

Note that all Black Market trades are done completely anonymously. And, to further spice things up, the AI should be allowed to use the Black Market to buy/sell resources, rent out mercs (not "in"), buy tech (not sell), buy/sell units.

Mercs for hire and Diplomatic Relationship changes require a nation to be targeted. All Mercs must be treated as stealth units and controlled by the AI while rented, and there must be a minimum waiting period for them to head to a nearest province or naval unit of the targeted nation before the Mercs can be revealed (i.e., 12 hours).

Suna232 wrote:

I Agree

Tribunate wrote:

Well that's a solid conclusion. Close this thread?

I've read your canvas compromise, and it seems pretty good (of course, the devs have the final opinion on this). However, a compromise here won't bring it back. Canvas was removed because it was outdated, and bugged. Unit trades were removed because of abuse. Again, it's the few who thought it would be a good idea to have multiple accounts and trade their armies away who ended up ruining it for the rest of us.

Perspective: If trading units were allowed (I remember when this happened) people would be on the forums complaining about the abuse of trading units.

Instead of posts about bringing it back, there'd be threads and chat complaints about eliminating it.

I think that tradeing units is not realistic at all. Myb if some sort of military equipment or Technology were part of the game that would be tradeable buth imagine 1 country giveing his army away...

Buth tradeing provinces needs to be bether then it axually is.

I have closed this thread.