PLAYERS DEMOCRATIC ACTION COMMITTEE - Lets make positive change!

List of forums -> Main forum of the online business game "Virtonomics" -> PLAYERS DEMOCRATIC ACTION COMMITTEE - Lets make positive change!

Discussions on our virtual business game, your ideas and game mechanics

Topic:

Topic created : 9.06.2010, 14:25

Last time edited : 11.06.2010, 18:42

Honorchamp

I would like to officially open the PLAYERS ACTION COMMITTEE !

The purpose of this committee is to organize to get some of the favorite change ideas of the player body to the admins to get them put into place. There are hundreds of ideas out there, way too many for the admins to handle. I think it would be a great idea for us to put all the ideas together, vote on them and get the top ones we want in place, choose from the final ones and come up with say 3-5 changes we would like made. Then after this rigorous process we present them to the admin team. The admin team will probably allow us to submit a list of say 5 changes or ideas each month, and they will pick ones to implement! Well

This is an exciting idea.

I would like to say let this only be a place of positive comments only, and positive attitude. Negative comments or connotations will be deleted as soon as possible. Please make any comments here either way in a positive or at least neutral tone and not in a negative tone.

Lets get together!!!

Fractal, VLLord, ChrisBerlin, Ixnad, Ksar, please contribute to this you guys!! We are calling for your help! Well

Everyone present the top 3-5 ideas of change you would like to see, lets gather up the list and we will make a vote on them all.

Working Ideas list:

1. AA -Bank loans up to a certain lending limit per player of 50 million only.(since admin is concerned players getting too much early cash will spoil the game dynamics therefore they have for now suspended all banking/lending, yes including mine now.)
2. AA -Warning alert on each page similar to flashing mail symbol that shows when your warehouse is overfull, or your factory is under 100% load due to supply.
3. AA -Addition to the forum rules making it illegal to swear or insult other players, or lie about their actions or claims. This rule must apply to moderators as well. Punishment must be uniform for all engaging in these activities and pre-stated.
4. AA - Publishing of qualification growth formulas showing what is needed in order to achieve maximum qualification growth
5. BB - Changing the subdivision load for offices only so that if you can have 5,000 officers global total, you can put them all into one office instead of having to spread them around.
6. AA - Change the dualing tenders down to only award 3 points not ten when only one person enters. Once two enter, THEN it will award the ten points. Just getting freebie points should not be permitted. (if a player pays 5 and are the only one in, they get 8 not ten)
7. AA -when you get cancelled orders alerts in your email, have the alert be in the topic line so you dont have to open them all. This would save a ton of time, improve gameplay, and not change any game dynamics.
8. AA - In your supply pages, program in a counter that shows how many days the available has been zero. Right now we dont know which orders to delete based on inactive players or bk players quit players etc. You dont want to delete them now because they might be back and fix this in a day or 2 and you have no way of knowing how long it has been sitting idle at 0. The supply pages load time reeeeeeeeely bogs down to a crawl after you have a few orders in there.
9. AA - Change tenders so it is not just about high quality goods/service (which is from high quality goods) /revenue per customer (which is from high quality goods)
10. AA - Have a 'total' function at the bottom of contracts for each good to show total orders, total purchases and total shipments. You have to add them manually if you are trying to optimize things which is pretty silly.
11. AA - Put ALL products in the same order in all functions of the game. = Trade Hall, Supply, Warehouses. Contracts, etc. This makes admin a lot easier and it has been very confusing and incredibly messy since they changed to this new order in stores.
12. AA - Auto lock 100 for the show by 50 or show by 100 feature bottom left. The screens take forever to load in this game and this would save a heap of time.
13. BA - Specialization Bonus: If you make only one product above mgmt 10, you recieve a 50% bonus to quality and 25% bonus to production. for 2 products only you get a 25% bonus to quality and 12% production bonus. 3 products = 12% bonus to qual + 6% production bonus.
14. AA - Autopopulate Certain companies only from orders list. One click list transfer.

1. We group by category - A. Smart admin helper - B. Massive game changer -
2. We group by ease of change/complexity - A. Easy to program, - B. might be hard to.
3. We group by how likely it is the admins would adopt them based on #1 and #2 and whether it would change the game dynamics outside of what they would want.

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9.06.2010, 18:34

Deira

Nice one Honorchamp

We are just players, keep in mind this, and although our feedback is important for the devs, we shouldnt swamp them with ideas. I am sure they are regularly checking the forums, so no need to submit them anything.

Rather we should come up with ideas and discuss things which improve the game, but not change the main mechanics.
And there is absolutly no need for voting, at best 20-30 people vote out of the few thousands who plays the english realms, so it really wouldnt be representative.

Regarding your ideas:

Banking: I think I said elsewhere, that I dont see a real need for banking. The main constrain for development is hardly ever money, but rather knowing what you are doing, and Quality levels.
Of course with bank loans you can fasten the development of a company, but in the first few RL weeks you can grow 10-20% daily, which is HUGE, and there is absolutly no point to hasten it even more with loans.
On the other hand, if you cant make decent profit from you operation, then you surely wont do so with loans neither.
So simply no point to have bank ingame.

Warning system: Well, its not that important IMO, organize your bussinesses well, and deal with the problems. And it would be annoying to get 100-200 warnings and check them all one by one, if there is some problem. 99 out of 100 you know what is the problem without warning.
It may have a point in the first month or so for new players to get to know the game, but later its just more annoyance than helpful.

Forum rules: I really dont know why you bring this up, there are already clear forum rules applying to everybody. I dont see the point. Its already solved.

Q growth formula: The devs dont post any formula, so I dont think they will do so with this one. And besides, its known more or less, how can you improve your Qs. Utilize the field of a given Q as best and high level as you can. Figure it out, thats the beauty of this game.

Office load. Your proposal goes against the very core of Virtonomics, ie. balanceing a lot of constrains and resources. If you dont have to care about office load, why is office load exist in the first place?

Tenders: It needs tweaking, and not only the awarded points, but rather the whole system, because its out of balance, because mostly the winning based on Goods Q and Commerce Q, which is very hard to obtain, so a privilege of a few people.

My suggestions

I think some game balancing issues are in need of adressing, namely - as discussed a few times before - , that the game is seriously under-produced and over-retailed, and at the end of the day this makes almost mandatory to produce as much as you can, and be more or less self suffiecient, because there is no point for selling ouside of the company. Either production per employee should be boosted seriously - 3-5 times - or retail per emloyee should be reduced 60-80% or the combination of both.

And in my opinion there should be some mechanic to encourage people to diversify, because right now, everybody produce, make agriculture, retail and research. Because there is no downside of it.
If people would be encouraged via game bonuses to specialise, then it would greatly increase the intercompany trade and interaction between players, which would be wonderful both for the game and the players.
After some time spent in the game, its very easy to make money, mostly through high quality goods. There is simply too high premium price for high Q goods. It should be solved, simply that the quality/price curve should be flattened considerably.
This would benefit new players, as they would compete more easily with low Q goods, and for the more established players it would mean less, and harder to get money.

9.06.2010, 22:28

Ixnad

Here's some of my suggestions:

1, Partnership/Mentor system: A way to make this game more sociable and more exciting/rewarding for both new and experienced players. Please check this thread out in the suggestion forum for details.

2, What Deira and other suggested many times: A way to encourage specialization in one area. For example full producer, full retailer, etc. There could be numeric bonus that make both specialization and diversification attractive choices. If you do everything, you will have a good return, so will you if you do just one thing.

3, Closely related to the above: Balance the retail market and the wholesale market a bit more. As of now the retail market acts as an irresponsible central bank that carelessly prints money constantly. It could spell disaster on the whole game.

4, Clearer, more concisely translated interface and thorough notices: For e.g. the text from technology/license sale page and the tender description could use some improvements. Also when players just start, a good notice summering up what's happening around them would be really nice. For e.g. they can be sent a notice describing clearly the contest for manager, as suggested in this thread.

5, I wish the Virtonomics team a happy and healthy life, and thank you very much for this addictive gem! Ridiculously

9.06.2010, 23:00

VLLord

Golden Empire

Only one suggestion: increase "power" of top3 in production!
(for example, double max number of workers at all factories)

10.06.2010, 05:04

Last time edited : 10.06.2010, 06:08

VLLord
Only one suggestion: increase "power" of top3 in production!
(for example, double max number of workers at all factories)

0mg, I bow to you my Lord. That is one single most important change the creator could have made to relieve the astronomical demands on all realms right now.

I would trade almost anything for the TOP production manager's power capacity to double or even triple.

10.06.2010, 07:43

globeballa

Investors Corporation

I agree Lord. I think it is really hard to contain the workers numbers when a single factory can sometimes be at 10k workers. My max at the moment is 50k. Thats 20% right there. So it would be nice to see.

I am not sure if this is bad or good. If the maximum amount of workers increase, or doubles, that means double the factories and such. Therefore creating more and more products. I don't really know where I'm going with this. But would prices around the game lower much? I know it is up to the stores to set prices and dictate whether they rise or fall, but if production increases by 2x or 3x there is a lot of excess product in the market. Then factories will start selling their products for cheaper prices. I wouldn't want that because majority of my company is based on producing goods. Does anyone else see where I'm going?

I also realize that with more products in the market, more stores will open up. And there may not be necessarily an excess number of goods being produced, but rather goods that are currently scarce in the market may thrive. For example leather gloves. Thats just one of the many many products that are always sold out in the market.

So good and bad things?

-globeballa

10.06.2010, 09:56

Last time edited : 10.06.2010, 10:01

Honorchamp

I dont agree with increasing the production of factories. I see this akin to eliminating the limit on office workers per office, although much much worse. This would mean every company would just explode massively, especially the older bigger guys in the game, giving less parity in the game and only severely disadvantaging newer players. There has been a ton of new supply coming onto mary in very rapid fashion. Many goods are constantly stocked and this keep growing, even at these levels. If the market gets suddenly flooded with goods like this, every good will look like milk, and severe deflation will insue and even more so disadvantaging the little guy. I think the levels are great where they are and that some goods are scarce. I dont find a problem with the in game market at all, I think its a masterpiece really. As Diera said, it will ruin the dynamics of the game. If you guys would be for something so radical as doubling or tripling the volume a fact produces, you should certainly be for a sensible change like tossing the office limit. Keep all the other office functions normal and it works great and doesn't kill any game dynamics. Although this one isnt high on my priority list any more.

I think ideas like things that would make this game more efficient in terms of time management, and be more like real life business, are ones that we should go with.

the alert for supplies being missing in your factories is an important one, and impossible to detect unless you manually go into every fact which is a severe pain in the ash as these windows take a long time to load and arent like surfing the web. It also makes sense that every factory manager would call you up and let you know when there is an issue. As it is now you have no way of knowing if your factories have what they need, you have to check ALL of them every turn practically. There isnt a lot of realism or sense or efficiency there. A CEO doesn't have to physically walk into every factory and check up on all his inventory managers to make sure they have supply. People would get fired if that was the case for pure stupidity. Information goes up and doesn't have to be searched for except maybe in a computer interface and a phone call - Alert - is made if there is an issue like this.

some more:
7. when you get cancelled orders alerts in your email, have the alert be in the topic line so you dont have to open them all. This would save a ton of time, improve gameplay, and not change any game dynamics.
8. In your supply pages, program in a counter that shows how many days the available has been zero. Right now we dont know which orders to delete based on inactive players or bk players quit players etc. You dont want to delete them now because they might be back and fix this in a day or 2 and you have no way of knowing how long it has been sitting idle at 0. The supply pages load time reeeeeeeeely bogs down to a crawl after you have a few orders in there.

10.06.2010, 15:31

Company 2.0

"the alert for supplies being missing in your factories"
I'm fairly certain this has already been earmarked for introduction. Possibly one of the June updates.

Game balance issues are tricky. The state of play now could use some tweaking and adjusting to even things out, but a situation in which the realm becomes "full" would require completely opposite tweaks.

I think a specialisation bonus would be my biggest wish in the game. Aside from the social element already mentioned, it would also add a strategy element instead of just going all out in every industry.

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List of forums -> Main forum of the online business game "Virtonomics" -> PLAYERS DEMOCRATIC ACTION COMMITTEE - Lets make positive change!

List of forums -> Main forum of the online business game "Virtonomics"-> PLAYERS DEMOCRATIC ACTION COMMITTEE - Lets make positive change!