Air and Ground Scheme Analysis, or; Why to vote no on Defence Donates
Mr Woldy
Air and Ground Player Scheme Analysis, or; Three Reasons to vote no on Defence Donates
Happy Easter, everyone. I hope you have as many easter eggs as you have kills on eRepublik, ground or air.
In my previous article published over two weeks ago I raised concerns over the volume of spending associated with Air & Ground rewards and the several different Bounty schemes, which any god fearing Congressperson would find difficult to justify.
Two days ago in an apparent response to this the government published a puff-piece about it’s programmes that you can find here.
All statistics are useful, and interesting, but we should properly evaluate whether a set of figures actually addresses the question being asked.
As I am often keen to point out, stats are stats, people can interpret them as they please. In official papers people will readily point out that more facts and less opinions are desirable. There are some official papers where even just presenting stats without commentary has been challenged, but perhaps those readers missed this MoD report, which appears to have the exclusive aim of using unrelated data to justify a false premise.
Quick Fact Check
Let’s take a look at some of the spicier claims made and assess whether the data cited can be used to make them.
There’s some dubious suggestions in the text of the article, which appear to be there to misrepresent suggestions made by myself and the criticisms people have of the Government’s approach. The main ones are:
The real clanger here is the idea that people have proposed ‘capping kills’ or a ‘lower cap’, and that this is unfair. The authorship of the article is, in keeping with recent customs, obscured. But whoever put it together has misunderstood (intentionally or not) that the information used to evaluate the current programmes was CC, not kills. Likewise, any caps referenced in those proposals have been based on CC, and not kills. There is a reason for this.
Why CC and not kills!?
When considering that each kill is given a CC or CC equivalent value, then the Gov itself has CC caps - 15k for Air and 10k for Guns. Here’s the big brain bit - whilst any cap exists there is not a pure relationship between ‘1 kill’ and ‘1 reward’, and anyone who exceeds the caps in fact receives a devalued ‘part reward’ for each kill.
This means that understanding how rewards are (or are not) working can only meaningfully be done in CC terms. As such the reward value and the caps are only meaningful expressed and evaluated in CC/Gun terms. It means that the data on kills provided in their article is interesting, but is not a good way of judging ‘fairness’ of the rewards program.
In fact, it would only be a way of evaluating fairness if caps were removed and that would inevitably lead to the cc per kill dropping. If you imagine a world without caps on rewards, and imagine that we paid only 2 cc per kill (air or ground) then the cost of rewards alone in January would have been over 4.8 Mil (with the Govs eligibility criteria). Guess what - that would be insane - and so that’s why we need caps!
As such whilst the Government tries to criticise the idea of a ‘lower cap’ (more on this below) their argument only makes sense as a criticism of any cap. That begs the question, why they use caps, or what percentage of kills they think it is fair to not-reward. When it comes to fairness, the proportion of kills rewarded is a data red herring (it is cool data to compile though, and interesting for other reasons).
How best to understand ‘fairness’?
Rewards have two main levers (without radically changing the approach so that fighting remains incentivised) 1. how much cc per kill (or cc equivalent), and 2. the cap on CC any one player can receive.
The actual unfairness identified by looking at rewards data (in CC, not kills, because the rewards have CC value, not kill value) is the large volume of the UK’s tax-based income which goes to a small number of players. This is the result of political choices made by the Government, and which the Government sticks to every time it decides to pay out without considering whether it is actually fair or not.
Without re-treading the back half of my previous article the really key thing to keep in mind is how few people actually hit the current caps routinely. Lifting caps, as Huey George suggested last year, would benefit only 5-7 players. Raising CC per kill benefits everyone. Conversely, managing costs or managing unfairness by lowering the CC cap whilst raising CC per kill would mean the distribution of public funds across the fighting population would be more ‘fair’, because there would be a smaller gap between those rewarded the most, and those the least.
What was actually proposed
As shown above the Gov has tried quite hard to misrepresent what suggestions have been made so far, but I’m sat on all the data and it is quite easy to take a month and examine what changing caps and cc per kill would do to what people received. If you have an idea you want to model on the data, by all means drop me a message!
In essence though, what has been proposed over the last month is simply for the system to be changed because of its unfairness. The rewards are not the sharp end of mad and unjustified ‘rewarding’ of public money to a chumocracy, you have to look across the different programmes under the bounties banner for that. However! The fact that rewards are not the entirety of defence spending and that higher ranked players should have access to accessible bounties (they need reform too though) means our air and ground program should distribute its funds better. As a reminder, one citizen got over 2.5 mil between December-March.
Absolutely no one is suggesting fighting should not be supported and promoted!
Policy examples provided/proposed have focused predominantly on consolidating the two programmes into one with a single cap, and specifically Betafoxtrot also proposed a Universal payment of 5k to everyone to supplement fighting rewards of 10 cc per kill capped at 10k a week. This would have seen only 8 people worse off by 10k or more, and only 15 people worse off in total. That’s over 100 people who would have benefited from such a reform. Does that really sound unfair to you?
A call to action!
Credit it where it is due, Spygon, AMD, and Alexander J. Burrell all recognised the need to vote no on donates to a greater extent, and sooner, than I did!
However, interpreting the Government article as digging its heels in rather than openly engaging with the debate (and noting a great many questions being ignored from the articles on the topic), I encourage my Congress colleagues to vote no on donates for these programmes.
Plato gives us the decision on donates. It is the game mechanic by which you can approve or not of spending. This is a democracy, people should vote how they please. I know that will be difficult for some based on party, but let's put our money where our mouth is rather than wait for ‘longer term’ changes preferred by the Government. It is our choice what to fund.
If it helps, you can determine a magnitude of rot that can inform your approach to donates:
So take your pick, if you feel strongly about one of these programmes, this helps you determine where to place your no vote. I believe they should be voted on, so have included them in my proposal for a donations schedule.
When Congress has queried as to how rewards are paid for when the spend far-exceeds income and donations for this purpose, no answer has (yet) been given. As such we can safely assume reserves or funds requested for other purposes are used. This presents a challenge to transparency, and so send a clear message about that I shall also occasionally vote no on Bank of England donates.
We need to defund these programmes to properly fund the eUK!
Thanks for reading!
Mr Woldy
P.S. - A quick cock-a-snook to anyone who has commented recently that ‘left or right wing economics don’t mean much in eRep’ you are looking at an example of when they do!
Comments
Not enough pictures in this one, sorry all
I am certainly most displeased
I'm for policies that benefit everyone. I shall be voting no until the government takes action.
“This is a democracy, people should vote how they please. I know that will be difficult for some based on party”
stooop it, everyone here votes freely…
I think there's been another proposal to bar anyone who votes against donates from getting gov support lol, you can be a democrat if you are happy being poor!!
Soviet af
This is slightly interesting.
In the Netherlands we have rewards but they are only for creating an epic battle.
To reach that cap of 2500 kills one needs on average 2500*30/(24*7) = 446 energy regen per hour, or +44.6 regen.
That is the average of a normal week for me. Therefore, we can say that the cap is only there for heavy hitters and for during special events.
Epic raising awards is something we have talk about too but nothing implemented yet. Germany has a good system.
Raising ground epics will become easier when accounts reach VIP Shop 10 as you will be able to acquire 150% ground damage boosters and also PP boosters
Very true, htb. More regular ground epics for the UK would be great for growing everyone's military rank. Get some more legend XX players into our ranks sooner \o/
We've got our target set for the amount of VIP points we need to get to!
https://www.erepublik.com/en/article/vip-shop-level-10--2777761/1/20
". . . When Congress has queried as to how rewards are paid for when the spend far-exceeds income and donations for this purpose, no answer has (yet) been given. . ."
I did post this to Congress yesterday - ". . .Our income from the Monetary Market is variable (so not too be overly relied on) however since October has helped covered the spend . . ." in regards to spend on our reward and bounty programme
The latest MoF https://www.erepublik.com/en/article/-mof-budget-donate-law-proposals-186th-congress-of-the-euk--2777794/1/20 has a link to full details of money transfers used published 2 days
You may have missed it so happy to repost o/
It's good you've expanded your analysis and thinking from just beyond the money although agree it's the headline grabber so I can see why you've remain focused on it.
If you would accept a suggestion on where to go next with your thinking?
I'd suggest thinking about the nature player support schemes which encourage rank growth optimisation they should better reward those who are making a committed effort to grow their rank as it’s their design. In addition what are the benefits of promoting / highlighting even rewarding those who are very active in account development via good energy pool management, battlefield management and regular interaction with our military newspapers in a 'good light'?
Also you've mention looking elsewhere in Erep for inspiration, this is another good place to explore your thinking further. What are other countries doing, when it comes rank growth for their players? What should the strategic outcomes for a country the size of the UK be when it comes to developing our active player base? What is making the difference on the battlefield in a game like Erep which the importance/influence of the military module which can also extends deep into the political module.
Keep up the challenge and don't get too disheartened. I am reflecting and considering your suggestions although I will say we aren't aligning on our notions of fairness and what is equitable and I'd challenge a few things you've stated a "factz" (through-out the article)... are they really facts? and is there a fundamental difference between a kill cap and a cc cap?
It's good to express our views on things o/
I have never known you to express a view, maybe we can try doing it together o/
- 'has helped cover the spend' is not a clear or thorough answer, please work on a clear income and outcome report. You've cited the following: https://i.postimg.cc/W4GJ8vnZ/image.png If the %'s you've given did not include MM income then they are not correct. Presumably what has happened is income in months where the programmes have been cheaper has been used to cover it over the past 2-3 months but for some reason you've not wanted to say as much.
- I have not published anything to 'grab headlines' nor be dramatic as you suggested last time, but firstly to show everyone they're being ripped off and secondly in response to efforts by the Government in a Government paper to misrepresent it's critics (presumably those are paragraphs some other author contributed).
- I'd suggest thinking more about the nature of Government income and whether it is reasonable to pay hundreds of K's to your mates. Anyone can devise a reward scheme, blindly following a schema outlined 3 years ago is a colossal failure of governance. It is entirely in your gift to use a design-deploy-review model, or suspend or alter any part of the schemes - but that would be too much like leading for this gov!
- The eUK has no strategic plan or desired outcomes. 'Optimising rank growth' is not a strategic aim if you cannot tell me why you are doing it. Regardless, if you think the current crooked rewards are the only way of achieving it then you are pottier than a garden shed. There are many other suggestions which have been made already but I suspect you're too concerned with optics to take them seriously.
- The factz are factz. You published an article about 'fairness' of rewards which made no reference to the sums people receive and wholly relied an looking at % of kills rewarded, so shouldnt I be asking you what the difference between kills and cc caps are? If you think caps are unfair come out and say it, but you refuse to express a view on whether you think its justified that one player can take 2.5 mil of tax income home in 3/4 months, and haven't to my knowledge set out any justification of how so much public money can be given to so few people. What's the expenditure of the new players office been like over the past few months btw?
Don't worry about the corruption disheartening me, it's the dodgy accounts and mystery votes that show up on election days that bother me more. And keep in mind I may be level 67 but I didn't sign up yesterday!
I see Huey is trying to “just asking questions” his way through as usual. The responses seem more and more bot like each time. Is ChatGPT running the eUK?
(I recall a similar tactic also used recently)
If our country is affording the payout at present I see no reason to change. Recalling Wingfields argument the money is not all rewards, it goes to make up production.
I would be making a loss without the extra bonus.
Only having a modest industry is somewhat a bonus but there are producers that employ multiple workers.
There is no bounty for industry!
There's two big points to make there, sensible fighting rewards would free up cash for support for manufacturers. This is exactly way Betas manifesto suggested.
Next is its pretty dubious as to whether it is affordable, it would be possible to fix the cost which would help make it affordable and fairer. But I don't think these ideas will be embraced.
Imagine how hard it must be for others to compete economically without getting loads of cash to help each month!
you sound like a man that just wants everything done your way.
I know we aren't used to our e-politicians answering questions and actually having discussions but this is what it looks like!
you sound like a communist
Excellent article, thanks as ever for the interesting data collection and analysis.
And thanks for the name check o7
On a more fundamental point - and hopefully I am not speaking out of turn - we simply don’t have the necessary respect for this government to think its policies are worth funding.
You flag every reward as "rotten". When I could not even make 1 Mil on ground there were NO rewards at all.
Saying there is less reward for ground is correct because there are many ground boosters. Air boosters are few and far between and without bending a card or spending tons of cc they are not given out so readily.
Therefore I support the current balance.
Select - every current reward is a poor use of finite public funds. There are other ways of doing it that would be better. The current approach is not the only way rewards can be done...
What we need then is a comparison list to plainly see any differences?
I've got one, hmu if you wanna see it 🙂
VOTE SUB GOOD LUCK 🙂
Big vote!