Earth Empires Blog – MMO Browser Game

As all of you know, the bonus system is a relatively new addition to Earth Empires. I feel that we’re coming from a pretty good starting point, but there’s still a lot of balancing work to be done to make bonuses more relevant across different servers and strategies. The changes made a few days ago, mostly on our side, are a big first step in that process. These changes are already live on the Alliance server and will filter down to each server as it restarts, excluding Express.

Alliance players have hopefully noticed by now that all permanent bonuses, except GDI, cost 8 points and the bonus effects have been rounded to the nearest tenth of a decimal point. For those curious about the rounding, we did traditional rounding except if it was judged that rounding would make that permanent bonus infeasible. For example, going from 3.3% to 3.0% is a relative reduction of nearly 10%, so that category may be rounded up instead of down. Players can still exchange bonus points for extra turns at the rate of 2:1, but “boom” events now require 6 points per pair. The Fascist government gets an additional 15% effectiveness for permanent bonuses. For example, if a monarchy spends enough points to get +50% defense, then a fascist would get +57% defense for the same cost. However, the added effects will be lost if the player switches governments from Fascism.

One of the most significant changes was reducing the effectiveness of the decay bonus. For now, we feel that the bonus decay mechanic is interesting enough to continue offering, but only as a reduced measure. Here is our rationale:

1) On the Alliance server, top farmers and cashers generally don’t have large stockpiles during the midset bushel peak. This means that out of the top ten capable countries of the server, only techers will be able to take advantage of the decay bonus. Some of the networths achieved by techers that used the decay bonus are almost at the point of being unreachable for other strategies. This was an obvious balance defect that demanded correction.

2) Since removing the 2 billion money limit, we have consciously tried to maintain the midset Alliance food peak. When a casher stocks a few hundred million bushels and gets the decay bonus, there is a relatively small drop in demand and a relatively small increase in supply. Instead of stocking bushels during the peak, the casher can sell the bushels previously stocked for a profit. The effect is even more pronounced for grabbing techers: a grabbing techer can stock hundreds of millions of bushels, sell them all, and then continue to tech. Clearly there will be a large decrease in demand and a very large increase in supply. If we try to limit the countries that take full advantage of decay to farmers, specifically Fascist farmers, the only effect on the market will be relative small increases in supply. It may also open up another avenue for Fascist oilers, though it’s admittedly difficult to see that working in practice.

3) Countries irresponsibly using the decay bonus can lead to easy access to money and land for griefers, which is something that we want to limit. In an alliance game, one country should not be able to easily ruin many.

One final change was adding spent bonus points to the list of resources damaged by government switches. This should not have a large effect. The main intention is to make strategies like demo techer with decay->fascist techer more difficult to run.

As stated before, the internal changes made to the bonus system allow for easy tweaking of effects and server specific customization. It is now relatively straightforward for us to change which permanent bonuses are offered on each server. For example, the decay bonus probably isn’t very useful on servers without clans. Additionally, the building costs bonus probably isn’t very useful on short servers like Tourney or Express. We are currently seeking ideas for server-specific bonuses. For bonuses that are offered on multiple servers, the effectiveness will automatically vary depending on the length and the number of turns per round of each server.

We are also open to adding more bonuses that are focused on warring, but players should understand that bonuses of that type are difficult to implement and balance. A bonus that is useful for early wars would very likely be too powerful for midset or late wars. In addition, the current political situations make lopsided wars more common than fair wars. That makes adding warring bonuses, in my view, almost pointless.

One final issue that needs to be addressed is blog comments. It’s fine if almost no one wants to comment on blogs, but if that is the case, we are just going to disable commenting to avoid the arduous process of deleting the thousands of attempted spam comments. If you feel that commenting should remain open, you have a week to make your case by responding to this post.

-Slagpit

We recently fixed a few minor bugs related to attacking and the market. These bugs were difficult to fix because they happened infrequently.The effects on gameplay were limited or nonexistent.

The first bug relates to attacking results. Under certain conditions, no killhit would be flagged in the news if a country was killed very quickly. This is no way affected gameplay; it only affected statistics. Fixing this bug caused another bug which made all killhits have a return of 10A, 5C, 10C, or 25C. This bug was also fixed. The game’s database was updated to retroactively fix the bad data. Unfortunately, I did not track which news items were changed, so there isn’t an easy way to push out those changes to news hosting sites. It may yet be possible to fix the news shown in third party sites, but under the best circumstances it will be up to each site maintainer to manually correct the data.

Two bugs related to standing orders were fixed. The first market bug was that standing orders did not necessarily respect the “first in first out” public market principle. The second bug was that if a standing order was canceled due to lack of money, other standing orders for that good would not necessarily fire. This led to the market price and the asking price being identical for a few minutes.

We apologize for any inconvenience.

-Slagpit

Hi,
I just wanted to take a second to address the tragedy involving Jared Loughner and his time playing Earth Empires.

As a community, we are absolutely horrified that someone who had been part of our relatively small group could be involved in such a horrible act. We’re all shocked and saddened, and our hearts go out to the victims and their loved ones. The majority of us had little to no interaction with Mr. Loughner during his time here, but he did play various incarnations of the game off and on since high school, according to several of his former clanmates.

While he has not been an active member of the community since June of 2010, he does have a digital footprint which consists of well over 100 posts on nearly 50 distinct topics, nearly 30 of which he himself started. It came to our attention that some of these posts were shared with the media by one of Jared’s former clanmates against our wishes earlier this week.

After a great deal of discussion, we’ve decided to make the entirety of these threads he was active on available to provide proper context for many of the quotes that have been surfacing in the media in recent days. As a warning, many of these posts contain explicit content and readers should exercise discretion when deciding whether or not to read them. Jared Loughner’s screen name within these posts is “Dare”. We have cleansed these posts of personal information for other posters to protect their identities, but the threads are posted in a complete manner in order to provide context for many of Jared’s posts and responses.

The posts can be found at the following URL:  http://www.earthempires.com/jared-loughner-arizona-shooter-posts

Please send all further inquiries on this matter to earthempires2025@gmail.com

Thanks
Earth Empires Staff

We’ve added a few features for tag admins. Tag admins can now send a message to all members of the tag with a single click. FFA players may receive up to 16 copies of these messages, but there is a convenient option to delete all of them at once. Simply click on the “delete all copies” instead of deleting the messages one by one. This option is only available to ffa players who receive multiple copies of the same ingame message.

We’ve also removed the need for spamming recruitment messages to all countries. This can be done automatically through the clan page. Tag admins can activate recruiting mode and set a short recruiting message on that page. All untagged players on that server are able to few these messages under “recruitment notices” on the CLANS page. In addition, we’ve made it possible for players on other servers to see these messages. Players who don’t opt out of this feature will randomly receive messages reminding them of opportunities on other game servers. These messages will appear on the bonus turns page. Players who don’t wish to receive these notifications should go to the preferences page and uncheck the “Allow cross server recruiting” box.

In short, all Earth Empires players who are open to recruiting will be able to see your clan’s recruitment message. Therefore, recruiters should focus their efforts on getting players from other communities. We ask that you obey the rules of other communities and not to post spam mentioning earthempires.com.

Finally, we’ve selected a winner from the design competition. Thank you to all who submitted entries. The new header and other updates are coming soon.

-Slagpit

We recently expanded the functionality of the mainffa page (the “portal” that FFA players use to manage and login to their countries). We’ve added a few new pages to facilitate tagging up and automatic upload of spy ops. An “economic” tab was added as well to help players keep track of what each country has on the market or when goods are sold. FFA players can look forward to more improvements of the portal page in the future. For example, we plan on adding war stats and a tool to ally up many countries at once soon.

The RELATIONS page has also been completely redesigned. It is now possible to send multiple pacts at once, cancel multiple pacts at once, view all available information for an alliance, and to easily discern and drop dead allies. In addition, for the team and alliance servers, we added dropdown menus that suggest potential allies. For defensive and offensive pacts, the ten closest countries to you in NW also in your tag that are shown. For research and intelligence pacts, the ten closest countries to you in land in your tag are shown. For trade pacts, the ten smallest countries in your tag are shown. Countries only with an open pact slot are shown.

We are aggressively moving forward with design changes. If something looks wrong, try doing a force refresh of the page (control+F5 for most browsers). If you have any suggestions about how a page should look, please let us know. We are currently aware that very long country names break some pages. That was part of the reason for redesigning the relations page.

We’ve added a few ingame tools. On the market page, players can now do ingame searches to view information about market trends. The search page is located under “History”. In addition, we’ve made it possible to view clan information on the “topclans” page, even from previous sets. The search window for ingame news searching was also expanded to a proper three day interval in all cases.

We’re going to be adding more ingame tools soon. One of the main benefits will be assisting new players in learning the game. For me personally, it requires a little bit of motivation to think up ways to accomplish this. After all, the community is used to being provided with the bare minimum of information from the servers. The developers often look at tools from the perspective of clan site coders. One of our priorities was to implement proper market feeds so players wouldn’t have to run market bots ingame. I feel that we did a good job with that, but ingame tools kind of fell to the wayside. It’s important to remember that the average new player is fairly removed from tools in hosting sites.

As an example, a new player would probably have to pick a clan server, then create a new forum account and ask to be recruited, and then create another account at the clan site. The clan site itself may be outdated or in disrepair. We probably won’t be implementing anything too extreme or game-changing: just a few informational pages which provide players information to make better choices.

Speaking of providing information, the project we implemented a few weeks ago to reduce query times has been a large success, barring a few mishaps. The main benefit to the players should be less pages that hang because of a slow or delayed db query. There was a slight market bug that was active between the 24th and the 26th of May. Sellers did not pay market tax on goods sold on the public market during this time. We deeply regret the bug and apologize for any inconvenience, but events like that are one of the consequences of active development. We hope to provide the community with more of the benefits of active development very soon.

-Slagpit

–New game rules–

We’ve added significant changes to the ffa server: each player can now play up to 16 countries and the 2 billion dollar limit has been replaced by the corruption mechanic. If a turn is played with over 2 billion cash on hand, 0.1% of the cash above 2 billion will be removed from the country. For your reference, the same decay rate is applied to bushels.

The other changes will apply to all servers as they restart. These changes are designed mainly to discourage certain forms of abuse. They will not affect 95%+ of players. The changes are:

-We added a readiness loss multiplier for Standard and Planned Strikes, based on relative gains to the attacker’s land, so hitting a far larger opponent for a significant portion of your own land will increase readiness loss.
-You may not drop below the amount of land you grabbed in the last 72 hours.
-You will be able to self-delete in preferences. This allows self-deletion rather than dropping of land.
-You must stay out of vacation for 24 hours after leaving it.

Further information can be found in this thread: http://forums.earthempires.com/Forum.php?forumset=Earth&forumid=&threadid=1559

Please note that it is not correct to say that these changes “favor netting over warring”. The second and fourth changes make it easier to kill countries. For the first change, countries which have been nuked down to a low acreage will not be able to recover as quickly as in the past.

–News search–

We’ve drastically improved ingame news searching. Changes:
-can search up to three days in the past instead of two days
-has correct ingame tags instead of current ones
-correctly handles situations where one part of the search returns no results
-allows searching by clan tag
-maximum results increased to 1000; also allows user to specify max
-faster load time

Let us know if you have any problems or find any bugs.

–Design competition–

The deadline is June 30th. For more information, read here: http://forums.earthempires.com/Forum.php?threadid=1637&p=1274723104&z=open-design-competition-for-new-ingame-gfx

That’s all for this week. For those of you interested in statistics, we recently passed the 25000 country mark.

-Slagpit

Hi everyone,

We just added a few features to the game to facilitate communication between players and ingame moderators. We regret that it took so long to get a system like this in place. However, first up is a note about an update to the game rules and privacy policy.

The game rules have been updated and can be found at http://www.earthempires.com/rules. There shouldn’t be any surprises in the rules to anyone, but if you have any questions or comments, feel free to start a discussion topic about them. In addition, we added a privacy policy: http://www.earthempires.com/privacy.

One particular rule which may be important in the short term is the one about bugs and exploits. We are aggressively developing the game. We try our best to find bugs before updating the code, but to progress at a reasonable pace we can’t always test everything we write fully. If you find a bug, please report it right away. Recently, a few countries abused a glitch and went on an attacking rampage. The countries which purposefully abused the bug for their own gain were deleted. We thank the players who were deleted who took their deletions with grace.

About appealing deletions: as all of you know, the game staff works extremely hard to ensure a fair gaming experience for everyone. To accomplish this goal, we have to delete countries which violate the rules. Deleted countries can be restored if the owner has a good explanation for the infraction. The most common reason for reinstatement is that the owner wasn’t aware that he needed to be on the safelist. Remember: our system cannot tell two legitimate players on the same computer apart from one player running two accounts. If you play on the same network or computer as another player, please send us an email at earthempires2025@gmail.com explaining your situation. There should be additional information on the game boards about the safelist as well.

If your country is deleted, the “create country” link on the main page will be replaced with “create or appeal”. On that page, players will be able to appeal deletions and see the status of their appeals. Moderators will email the player personally and discuss the deletion with them. This is the preferred method of appealing deletions. Please do not send emails about deletions unless it is an exceptional case.

One of the best ways of catching cheaters is through community enforcement. If you see suspicious activity ingame and believe that someone is breaking the rules, please click on the “report cheaters” link to the right of “preferences” on the main country page.

-Slagpit

Hi all,

Not a lot to report this week. We coded in everything that we needed to get tourney working. If you find any bugs, please let us know asap. For now, the game rules work like this:

1 upper level game (A)
2 lower level games (B and C)
all games share a market
top 50% of game A stays in A, top 25% of B and C go to A
all new players start in either B or C

When each round ends, players will be given an option to recreate a country with the same country name and to keep their game rank, but only if they restart within the first seven days of the new reset. They can also create a new country and start at the bottom if they wish. This seems like the best overall system to have, although it’s a little bit limited in value considering the number of players currently interested in tourney.

We removed all ingame alliances in tourney to make grabbing easier and we shut off news feeds for the tourney server. We’re also looking for ways to make the experience more competitive and fun, especially with a smaller number of players. If you have any ideas, please go to the tourney forum and have your voice heard!

For the primary server only, we’ve raised the humanitarian limit from 1/12 to 1/4.

I know that we promised an update for facebook, but Pangaea has been really busy with work. Hopefully we’ll get to hear from him soon!

Last week we asked the community for help. I’m happy to report that we received quite a few mod applications. We’ll be interviewing some candidates and keeping everything on file, so if you aren’t interviewed or accepted this time, be patient. As the game grows and our needs change you may get a chance to help out.

Many players have been curious about facebook progress. Pangaea has been spending nearly all of his ee development time working towards this goal. He might have more to say about this soon, as well as something to say about other aspects of game redesign. I don’t know any of the details so you’ll have to wait to hear from him.

We’ve also been working on putting up a comprehensive page of game policies. There shouldn’t be anything too surprising, except perhaps a clause about maintaining the spirit of each server. Individual servers are designed for individual play. To make the game fair for all players and accessable to new players, players in the primary, express, and tourney server should not engage in any outside of game organizing which gives them an advantage over what can be accomplished through normal, ingame diplomacy.

As an example, finding out which countries your friends are running and allying them is fine. Sending ingame messages to your allies and fighting in wars is fine. However, taking part of your alliance from another server and organizing kill runs on irc is not fine. It should be obvious why behavior like this is bad for the health of the server. We are going to start issuing warnings against behavior like this, and in extreme cases, deleting the countries involved. These rules will be clarified in the upcoming page on game policies and will begain to be enforced as the individual servers restart.

Speaking of individual servers, all of those servers are restarting soon. Express offers a fast-paced game with no two billion dollar limit. If you’ve ever wanted to play without the limit, check it out. We’ll be splitting tourney up into several games next reset. We’re also considering experimenting with the rules in tourney to make the gameplay experience more enjoyable. The rules that may have worked for thousands of players probably aren’t ideal for smaller games.

I’m also going to sort through all of the spam comments submitted to the blog so we can start accepting player comments again. See you guys next week!

-Slagpit