As we are carefully designing the whole concept with nations control, one of the primary aspects we are going to need to tweak is port influence.

We think that a periodical decrease is in need in order to slowly get rid of the influence of inactive players, which can be massive in some cases. Good examples are Backstabber and IbeScarface who currently possess a fair amount of influence but are now inactive, thus making Pirates the most influent of all.

Decrease will also be good to keep the fight of port/nation control intense. Moreover, there will be a lot of buffs that ports control will bring with the new feature and these should not come free or from a one time efford; you will earn a lot more from the buffs after all.

We are thinking for a small decrease which will be perhaps weekly. 5% or 10%. So if you got 500k influence on Tortuga, every Sunday you will lose 5% or 10% (25k or 50k) of it. Week 2, 22.5k or 45k etc

I would be happy to hear your thoughts on it.

i agree 200% lol

I was around when you had two servers going at once. It was very expensive to take over a port back then and would likely be the same today. A constant maintenance effort requirement should energize the game somewhat. Does combat success in a port play a role? I have plenty of gold but don't feel that financial supremacy alone should dictate port influence. Reputation might be something to consider when calculating influence. So, a percentage of fame gained by a given player in a given port from trade and romance might play a role. I might make small gains in a port if I traded and had a wife there while I would make more influence by improving its economy by hiring its people or otherwise affecting it's production.

We are leaning towards a 1% loss per day, right after the check for influence totals and daily map creation (it happens some minutes after the daily update).

The idea for fame + daughters affect is not bad and I am not turning it down. Let's keep it in mind ofr the future where influence will play a more important role in the game.

hope it gets implemented so0n. .

I feel it should be more of a hard number that increases as you pass certain milestones in your influence. Because even for me being active, 1% of my total influence would cost almost, if not half of what I currently produce per day in gold. And that's just in one port.

Hellfire wrote:I feel it should be more of a hard number that increases as you pass certain milestones in your influence. Because even for me being active, 1% of my total influence would cost almost, if not half of what I currently produce per day in gold. And that's just in one port.

hmm. .now that i put my thnking cap on. .hellfire's got a point . .how bout .1%/day on the active players. .and 1%/day on the inactive ones. .

M0nkeydluffy wrote:hmm. .now that i put my thnking cap on. .hellfire's got a point . .how bout .1%/day on the active players. .and 1%/day on the inactive ones. .

I really like your thinking cap. Are they being mass produced somewhere or is it one-of-a-kind

All kidding aside, this is a very practical answer. I can't confirm the validity of the numbers but the 10x multiplier for inactive players is very reasonable provided that the definition of inactive is something along the lines of what is used elsewhere in the game to identify inactive players (such as what causes trade routes to stop).

Let's look at the top 20 influential players table:

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#   Character Name   Guild   Total Influence
1    Phill (#2675)   TheSS   14,502,108
2    Zuzik (#2788)   TheSS   11,336,400
3    Zipkeg (#11)      9,252,275
4    BackStabb3R (#63)      8,408,707
5    asdasdaa (#4600)   SYN   8,112,765
6    Captain Dungeness (#3397)   CTC   5,750,793
7    IBeScarface (#4436)      5,639,034
8    lordsiva1 (#5006)      4,815,648
9    Spiderpogi (#3770)      4,071,807
10    Deadnutz (#3753)      3,413,756
11    HellFire (#1903)   PK   2,613,623
12    Sir Henry Morgan (#11685)   CTC   2,090,564
13    Capitan Jimmy (#15)      1,420,142
14    Black Sparrow (#4921)   PK   1,369,470
15    §traw Hat Luffy (#2835)   PK   1,160,625
16    Malil (#1265)      729,683
17    Malekith (#257)      642,489
18    Detritus (#6332)   Red   456,447
19    Retlaw2 (#4276)      444,958
20    Vamps (#3900)      434,477


With the 1% influence loss per day, Phil who leads the chart, will lose (in relative rounding):
Day 1: 145,000
Day 2: 143,500
Day 3: 142,100
Day 4: 140,700
Day 5: 139,300
Day 6: 137,900
Day 7: 136,500

A total of 985 000 influence or a total of 9,850,000 Gold coins

In the same time, Vamps (#3900) who is #20 will suffer losses as follows:
Day 1: 4,344
Day 2: 4,301
Day 3: 4,258
Day 4: 4,215
Day 5: 4,172
Day 6: 4,100
Day 7: 4,090

A total loss of about 30 000 influence or a total of 300 000 gold coins.

Right now, the game total influence is: 89,640,460.
The 1% meter means that it will lose 896,404 influence at day 1, etc.
900k influence totals 9million gold a day.
While only the profits from trading is much more than this.

If you see the bigger picture, influence right now is abnormally high and not relative to what you earn from it. This happened in the past because players had mountains of gold with few ways to spend it. With officers addition, upkeep and ship price soar, people stopped spending the bulk of their cash in influence. This resulted in ports belonging to a few players. It has been like this since then and it is very hard for anyone to compete with the old forces. It is that expensive, that is defeats the motivation of a player, thus rendering the whole feature obsolete.

With the country implementation system and the titles, port control will become much much more important and one of the key figures in the game. Without a recycling method, the same people will always control the ports and there will not be much room for competition.

We also intend to put influence - related quests for when you are trying to gain country ranks. For example, the governor will ask you to enter the top 10 most influential persons in a specific port that your country will be trying to control (this will be controled by default from the engine, unless the country has a king).

Besides the roleplaying affect, there will be the title bonuses which will save a BULK of your cash in compare to today (less hiring crew fees, repair costs, less costy upgrades etc). So one more reason as to why influence should recycle.

Another reason is realism. It is only realistic that the influence of a person will deteriorate over time. But I think we all agree to this anyway, the discussion here is mostly about the amount.

And to here I will focus again; ultimately, influence is something controlled by the players solely. It will eventually balance itself either we want it or not. Why ? Because players themselves will find the right balance.

There is no need to make any special plan for inactive players.
If you find 1% too much, we could start it at 0.5% and then once country titles and the rest is implemented, we can review this again.

This is now active, at 0.5% per day only for ports where a player has at least 5 000 influence.