#Preventing unfairness of University funds timing

158 messages · Page 1 of 1 (latest)

west pine
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Edit: this is something I've felt since my first WT. It has nothing to do with this cycle or anyone in particular. I was guilty of this when I was PM or ran meteor store the last two cycles.

Background
The University is a huge part of the economy. Its budget should be dictated by a law based on taxes or a steady income.

Problem:
It is common in this cycle and others for the Uni funds to hang at <1000 euros for over 12 hours while the PM or MOE are not online. When they get online they either send in money immediately or wait until someone complains or, even worse, when THEY have the papers they want to sell to the Uni. This means you better be on their timezone or you might never get a chance to sell.

Solution ideas:
I suggest a law that prevents money from being sent to the University directly. Perhaps it can be taken OUT of the uni, but if you want the uni funded, you need to better use federal budgeting.
Or less extreme, require it trickle out from an intermediate fund like "Uni stimulus" where you can only deposit to "Uni stimulus" and every hour 10% of the money from "Uni stimulus" goes to the Uni.

waxen locust
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The problem sounds a bit like an accusation? Otherwise 30% of tax is being sent to the uni every hour, I don't get the point of the extra account where some magic money would come from.

tender pier
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Maybe it's ok to add some context/additional feedback here? Because I have noticed the issue as well even if I definitely don't know anything about the players' potential relationships and am absolutely not accusing anyone of anything.

The pricing on the papers in the university is heavily favoring some professions and less so others. The most inconvient part of that fact is that the papers where the profit is highest are also papers where there is basically limitless supply, just go buy lumber/iron anywhere if you run out. This basically handout of money leads to everyone rushing to the university for their part of the pot instantly when there are funds. I'm adding an image with the current approximate profits on the modern papers assuming 0 vertical integration.

Now very high prices would not be as big of a problem if the budget took that into account and still had money left, but it does not.

This leads to the next issue that Willingo2 brought up, the transfer of funds at what appears to be somewhat random times. This is not the normal budgeting transfers but different transfers between government accounts. There has been multiple times where large sums has been dumped into the uni to go away pretty much instantly, example in image. Now I really don't think anything fishy is going on but I cant blame anyone getting annoyed by it.

I dont have any profession currently that can any papers yet so I don't have a horse in the race, but full disclaimer I have been a bit annoyed by the artificially high prices on the modern papers that the uni buys way to high.

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rose onyx
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I like the idea of a steady stream of funds to the University and avoiding sudden influxes of money that will necessary advantage players who happen to play at the same time as the MoE.

umbral dune
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I don't know if it would matter for this cycle at this point, but I would like to suggest that the MoE set limits on the amount of sales any one individual can make to it to prevent the whole budget draining as orders come up.

I would also like to see MoE conduct work parties for papers and buy more raw goods to allow certain professions to better contribute, but that's probably a much less popular suggestion as a lot if people seem to really dislike wps as a mechanic

west pine
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It you like the idea then thumbs up the post. Or thumbs down if you dislike it.

dim field
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I am not entirely sure why exactly this is being debated here. the MoE is a person in RL as is everyone else. there's a few no-lifers on WT (me included) who expect literally everyone else to do the same they do: no-life the game. there's so many factory going into budgeting the uni correctly. I mean srsly give the guy a break. between a felt 9001 court cases, them obviously having a job and hopefully following some basic necessities of an adult life the uni is funded. however it's happening. we may be behind a little yea... but if you need money, just put down roads or cut logs.

tender pier
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Is that directed at me? I was just trying to expand on the viewpoint to provide context. 100% not trying to criticize a player, but I definitely find the discussions about how the economic system could be improved interesting and unique both to the game and the server. But this might be the wrong place for me to jump in, so sorry about that.

west pine
dim field
west pine
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Let's recenter on the main points of unfairness. If we agree they are inherently unfair, we should attempt to mitigate them.

Three sources of unfairness stemming from the current Uni system.

  1. Funds can be low due to not enough % budget allocated to Uni. PM logs on and sends funds to Uni and people deplete the store nearly instantly, preventing people in other timezones from being part of the Uni.
  2. An entire profession's worth of papers can be, and often is, sold to Uni by just one or two people/companies. Again this precludes others from participating.
  3. MoE logs on and begins buying papers. If there are funds, people are waiting to sell all the papers and deplete funds or fulfill the entire order, which ties back into (2)

The easiest of these to solve I think is (1).
(2) could be solved maybe with some sort of law
(3) is likely just unavoidable

umbral dune
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Or also is solvable with a law preventing people from selling more than x% of the MoE's budget at a time

west pine
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or even 50%

umbral dune
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I'm a little interested to see how things would've looked without the tractor as it was. I think that probably made geo moderns and most of the metallurgy papers easier than it would have been

west pine
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I think before trying to solve those 3 problems, it should be assessed whether or not people agree these are unfair parts of the uni in the first place. Agree/argue it is a problem and then find a solution

umbral dune
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I agree that hose 3 are the unfair parts. Maybe a poll would be useful here haha. I've still got a cart parked at the lazer store with ~800 hemp ropes in it hoping I'm around when it has some funds to buy that

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It's like, I get frustrated that some other profession has drained the entirety of laser store or MoE budget, but I'd do the same with ropes if it was available because there's not much movement in anything else tailoring wise rn

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It would feel better if there was some guaranteed ability to sell SOME of the stuff the MoE needs daily. Maybe even just not having the laser store/MoE buy everything it needs all at once, but that would probably be a big logistical nightmare for whoever runs it

west pine
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I'm not sure how to make a poll that wouldn't seem like I'm criticizing the current gov, which I already F'd up on wording above I think.

boreal hill
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This is a server that is online and being played 24/7. That means people will not always be around at the time you need them. This also means that things happen when you (the citizens of WT) are not around. It is the same with releasing skill scrolls. It cant be the right time for everyone.

The Uni is getting a steady stream of income, cause its a percentage. But much like the meteor store, it will need injections from accounts with overflow. Otherwise one account sits on money not being used while the others are empty, which also causes issues with the citizens of WT.

And now comes the fun part. It is also a community issue. Because people camp that store like mad. Even when expensive scrolls are released and the Uni budget gets money from sales, people are already camping it to take back that money by selling it papers.

west pine
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Again, to be clear this has nothing to do with your government in particular

boreal hill
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I think it is fair enough. Much like all scrolls being released while Im asleep this cycle. It just happens, next cycle, maybe someone else has this problem.

It is possible to streamline it more I guess.

Higher taxes creates more money that will go into the Uni. (But people don't like high taxes for some reason)

Limiting how many papers people can sell (But limiting people seems to also be a problem, look at State Oil, people don't like telling them what they can or cant do).

So there is a big chance, by solving this problem (which might not be as big as people think) another problem gets created.

west pine
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Indeed all systems are unfair, but I think we can to mitigate it. Lots of people have told me directly in each cycle that not being able to sell to the government stores due to lack of funds or timing is why they quit. I reach out to players I notice quit. I talk to a lot of newer players.

I think this idea is popular if we polled players earlier in the cycle.

Points (2) and (3) are hard to handle, but (1) should be handled by having a well-managed federal budget. I know I used the transfer powers as a crutch. We all do. That crutch hurts people though.

We have brilliant players. We can solve these problems and mitigate them if we think about it, and I know these issues impact player retention.

If we **agree **it's something that can be improved upon, I think we can find a better solution.

boreal hill
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If more money is going on place, then that means there will be less money somewhere else. Lets say there will be less culture money, less projects. People quit because they can't do projects. So you take a bigger percentage out of infrastructure, now people quit because they can't build roads. It is not just going to be a budgeting issue.

Back in 2022 when I was PM people messaged me they were going to quit if we put in VI tax. Others messaged me the same day they would quit if we didn't put in VI tax.

What I learned is you can't please everyone on a server with 100's of people that operates in all timezones.

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Ive seen people say limit the sales of papers to the Uni. Let someone only sell X papers per day.

What about the power players who have enough resources to sell 100's of papers per day. They can no longer play because they either have to many resources to sell to the market and can't sell to their usual outlet, the Uni/Meteor store.

So lets say you limit them anyways. And we forget about the power players for a second that have nothing to do now. That means research will be slowed down. I would actually like that but we need to ask Dennis is he can change the goal of 14 day research to 21 day research.

However that means people who like to build with Ashlar lose a lot of time playing with the fancy blocks. They go from 2 weeks to 1 week. Thats not a lot of time for these projects.

Then we might have to ask Dennis to add another week to White Tiger, so people actually have time for their builds.

My point is: Is this worth it, as the fairness of it changes with each cycle (PM timezone/MoE timezone/ Tax rates/ government budget transfer law).

west pine
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I think papers are too expensive anyway. The uni has too much importance on wealth generation, and lots of new players are unaware and fall behind. We decide the paper/book recipes. We can also mitigate cost by work partying. Papers should not be an extra 50-100% profit from base mats. That disturbs the market when the uni pegs a price, too. Example: brick makers don't sell much brick; they wait to sell the papers.

Power players should play for the economy not the uni then. The hard part of my suggestion is not slowing research down while still allowing everyone to contribute to the Uni. The Uni should NOT be their usual outlet. That's not what the game is about. It perverts the economics.

No one gets to ashlar anyway; by that time there are 8-12 people playing, and there's like 2 people who ever make ashlar buildings.

I think it's fairly simple to just prevent anyone from sending money into the Uni at minimum. If there isn't enough, a new law is passed (or they use the trick to use a gov acct to change values like federal road payouts) that gets money in asap, but it goes in over hours not immediately.

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Maybe instead of research paper-gated research releases that only enrich a select few, we let the economy play naturally and we release things based on certain world achievements: all towns connected with roads. At least 2 countries formed. Each town has a museum. etc.

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Being succinct and trying to aim for one concrete change here: prevent money directly transferring into the Uni account. There might even be a constitutional argument for that. Budget it, which naturally makes money go in over hours and not have a swarm of locusts descend upon the store 😄

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And/or: Uni is too strong. Nerf it by reducing paper needs and time gate otherwise. Have eco be an actual economy game not "how do i get money from the government store before others"

boreal hill
west pine
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Well the workaround would be to OVERFUND the uni and then just pull money out for other accounts.

west pine
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good point about the cheese

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maybe bonds/loans could be done for uni store as well to mitigate any slowdown to research.

boreal hill
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The thing with a bond is. I took a UNI bond and knowing there would be money coming in, I could have immediately sold a lot of papers to reclaim all the money. Its just another cash injection people can "exploit".

But like you say it does keep the Uni on track with research.

west pine
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yeah, yeah it would just be the same thing.I'm just trying to give a middle ground "release valve" of sorts. I guess the "trickle-in" second account is the better solution if that even made sense

boreal hill
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Its good to try new things, just be aware people are smart enough to find ways to exploit most things.

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But don't let that deter you from testing new things. One step forward still helps a lot of people.

west pine
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Thanks. And while that's true, there is at least some integrity 😄 there's still an infinite money glitch by minting 1mil euro and getting 10% as seigniorage, loaning 0% interest loan, minting 1 mil, rinse repeat to turn 1 copper ore into 100 euros

versed ether
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idk man - I get that people have real life hours but for about a week I kept missing the Prime Minister adding budget to the University every time or the Meteor Store and said whatever - and put up my papers for 50 euros each so they would atleast move

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a company purchased them and sold them in exchange for two mechanic papers at the uni at some point for equivalent exchange besides 10 euros profit

safe eagle
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@west pine Revival because I've got the feeling this wasn't solved yet but should. How about the idea of having two MoE Gov accounts, lets call the first one "MoE Budget" and the other one "University Budget". Now the "University Budget" is the one in the university store and will never receive any direct manual budget transfers. But it will receive hourly (by law put up from MPs) 20% of the money beeing in "MoE Budget".
20% is just a example number subject to be discussed and changed, aswell the hourly transfer.

This way we got a frequent stream of budget increase for the university which can be influenced passively by increasing % transferred or amount in source budget.

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Same could be done with the meteor store.

jagged cedar
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I a good idea. Not sure if we can devatw it. Unless this is an overall opportunity to change the core. MPs are allowed to do what ever they want with the budget. If they want to create a new one or automatically create some sort of complex system. They can, nothing that is here prevents you to do so.

@west pine I think the argument of elmeye is why do we need to prevent anything. The MPs already have the control to do what they want.

The other thing is thar people have a hard time creating systems or new things as they take a long time.

Kyoke took time to test their stuff within their town first. Nothing stops any of us to test new things.

Just need to make sure what ever you are doing that you are clear and other mps support it.

It's easy to talk about new ideas, it is harder to create the system.

Responsibility is whatI believe is the topic spoken here. Fed gov is important but we are also gamers. We are limited to what we consider as fun. We just need to make sure things are done in a way that makes it also fun to others.

That's how I found the best way to introduce stuff.

wary smelt
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For the context of this cycle, I had a healthy balance most of the time I was MoE, so this shouldn't have been an issue for a majority of this cycle.
When I did run low on funds, I was at the mercy of the PM/MPs for more funding and did not receive adequate funding to fill those gaps. If the PM/MPs aren't able to get funds on request for the MoE, I doubt they are going to implement a bureaucratic law to space funding either.
If they do have the time to implement a bureaucratic law, why not just fund the gov better to begin with?

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Seems like you are suggesting a complex system to stifle a symptom, when there are easier methods to resolve the root cause I think

bright wolf
wary smelt
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Yes there were several solutions presented by myself and others that were not implemented that would have been easier than a separate bank account and transfer. It just didn't happen, but we still made it through just fine

bright wolf
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Yee, a lil slower then normal but i contribute the main cause of that to the reduced player count. None the less, seems like this could be solved in game without feedback but im cool with discussing law means to solve issues :P. Already been combating issues by expanding the budget law myself. Anyone else can explore those options too.

wary smelt
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To be clear, I think Willingos idea is fine and could work well. I just think it's a lot of work when there are easier solutions

bright wolf
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What is/was his idea?

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Ah nvm i see

wary smelt
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To make a bank account that is a holding account and then have a law transfer percentages at a time

bright wolf
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Thought this was the thread to request two "MoEs"

wary smelt
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So a direct transfer from a PM doesn't allow one company who is online to sell all the papers at once

bright wolf
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I mean

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Remove the ability for PM's to just move other peoples accounts and most of the issues should be solved by the players being forced to find a solution. I think the PM has only been transferring their own gov account funds hopefully so their budget could be reduced and aimed at the Uni instead.

fair basin
bright wolf
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Either every 24 hours or every change of the budget law, all government money would be pulled back into the treasury account and be redistributed at the new budget percentage. This would have allow williams to push out MoE stuff a lot quicker cause he went broke 2ish times this cycle. Another solution was tieing several caps to some accounts and pulling the money back over that cap but meh

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Also wanted to get in caps for the state-town budget section else on a more active cycle way more money would get pushed out to them. I left government before any of that got resolved.

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Caps were used back in pre 10.0 to limit how much money the state gov would have, forcing them to use the funds they already had or not get anymore. Helped not put funds into accounts that would go unused.

jagged cedar
# bright wolf Either every 24 hours or every change of the budget law, all government money wo...

When I was talking about "limiting" budget to 15k. Was mostly trying to speak out my interest of looking into it deeper. I think the budget should always be flowing.

If it needs to be a redistribution every few hours or day. I can't find that a bad thing.

If the parliament is active enough could even create more budgets money flow in and out.

The budgets that get empty out means they have activity and should be supported.

Obviously making sure the minister aren't just emptying their budget with bad management

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One thing to note is that the more we make things complex the harder it is to understand. A new player wanting to join a gov body might be overwhelmed

boreal hill
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Sometimes people will just be out of luck with the MoE and thats alright. Anything in a game that runs 24/7 the timing for people might not be perfect. Not sure you need an entire system that ties people down to certain playstyles and schedules is the way to do this.

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Not letting the PM send money to accounts is a mistake since changing the budget takes more time and wont instantly fill the MoE budget.

Now I hear you say, why not make a budget so nice, that you dont need to send money. Well you dont know what will happen during a cycle. More people might leave because of bugs, tests, new games, CoD double XP weekends.

west pine
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I forgot about this thread. Preventing transfer is indeed a but much, but we can probably agree that most of the money should be from the budget so it trickles in, not from budget xfers

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I need to stop proposing solutions to start a convo and instead bring up a think tank session with a problem.

fair basin
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A bigger issue is the jump in cost from advanced smelting -> advanced cooking / baking

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That’s why it goes broke so fast

west pine
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This thread wasn't meant to address it being broke. I wanted to address the situation where the uni/meteor is broke for 22 hours out of the day and gets a huge transfer in the 2 hours someone logs on. It's entirely unfair to other people.

fair basin
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Sorry for the partial cutoff - sheets doesn’t work so well on mobile - it’s like triple the cost, book price and then scroll price

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fair basin
west pine
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I suppose, but if it came from budget it would be broke continually not in a flash. Can't get around the situation where new papers are added when MoE logs on and causes it to go broke though without some bureaucratic time limiting of papers that could be sold

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I feel like a lot of the arguments to "we don't allow gov to mint money as they wish" apply to "gov shouldn't be able to xfef money in lieu of a proper budget"

boreal hill
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The right percentage in the budget will become the wrong percentage when more people leave than anticipated.

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Thats when you need transfers and it can be unlucky timing for some, but thats just what it is, unlucky.

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Last 18 months weve had an absurd number of US MoE's which means Scroll releases between midnight and 3AM for me. Thats just unlucky and will eventually be different during other MoE runs, doesn't mean it needs a fix. Sure others get a head start, sure I might be behind, but it is what it is.

bright wolf
boreal hill
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Same thing with people lending money to the government, sudden influx in the meteor store, and guess who sells instantly to the meteor store, the people providing the money through the loan.

fair basin
bright wolf
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Shouldnt need books by that time if just getting release windows down

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But yes, not all powers are shared

boreal hill
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All Im saying is, not everything is as bad as people make it out to be and sometimes things are just "fair enough"

west pine
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Well I know of a cycle where the uni was broke for 22 out of 24 hours of the day and only had funds for the two hours that the PM and or MoE were online together. That was for the first ten days or so. People set their clock to when the PM/MoE got on, and that's not right

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Maybe it wasn't every day in ten days, but most days

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What's the recourse for that when half the people can't ever interact with the store?

boreal hill
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Dont vote for that PM next time

west pine
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I mean it happens every time, and there was a lot going on in that cycle. I had this thought for a long time

waxen locust
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Managing accounts is way more involved than just making a budgeting law and assuming that will keep each account topped up enough, you cant easily plan for the volatile spending in any government department.

waxen locust
bright wolf
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I honestly dont remember what your budget law is/treated as

waxen locust
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I prefer with the support of the house to have a larger percentage go to the executive account then check every account has enough at least twice per day.

west pine
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Budgets are hard. It won't be perfect as PJ says. Hopefully there's ideas to make it easier or automate things.

Merging ceelish idea and kyokes might be nice. A slush fund that gets auto dispersed to accounts that need it and monitor that to reassess budget allocations

bright wolf
boreal hill
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Thats how its been done for years

waxen locust
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But working out how to manage the budget is a cycle by cycle challenge the government must overcome

bright wolf
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I treat, or at least see, the PM account as discretionary funds

waxen locust
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same

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MoE lets the House know what they need and when and the House makes sure they have it on time

boreal hill
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Thats how I did it during the December 22 Science Victory and noone had a problem with it.

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Still have my notes from it even

west pine
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I guess the question comes down to:
What is the recourse to those who login for days and there is never any funds in the uni or meteor store?

bright wolf
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There may have been issues this cycle was a PM not being around first week and Kat being busy the second week so the funds could have been sitting around doing nothing

waxen locust
west pine
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I really don't want this to be seen as a target to any specific cycle. I'm sure it happened with mine too, just to differing degrees 🙂

west pine
waxen locust
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Pass

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I will say however that I've a possible drastic change that I hope will solve the uni issue

boreal hill
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Its also a community issue as during my PM cycle I had people complain about empty Uni, but when the Uni dude took bonds or it got topped off they delivered such an unholy amount of papers it was empty, and thats not just 40 papers, 100s upon 100s. Which then becomes well that person doesnt want to share, cause no kind of budget can work against that.

bright wolf
fair basin
boreal hill
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Its also an AU issue where the Uni buys papers for AU0 prices sometimes then mech gets released (paper and such too) suddenly there are AU4's before the MoE gets online to change prices

boreal hill
fair basin
waxen locust
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Yes

bright wolf
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c:

waxen locust
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I want to make some feedback threads soon so keep an eye out for those

fair basin
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How far out is implementation? Soon or still in development?

waxen locust
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I want to go for the new year but it depends on work for me.

fair basin
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Oki

bright wolf
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it would be a wild thing to implement v:

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ready for the fallout

fair basin
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Out of curiosity- will the feedback threads have details or will we get warning or is it a surprise - here’s the changes, adapt xD

waxen locust
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details

fair basin
waxen locust
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I want to get some feedback on what I feel like the community wants before I move past the planning stage.

west pine
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Sounds great Elmeye. I look forward to it!

west pine
boreal hill
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Preventing people to sell papers has the negative effect of the hardcore players not being able to sell what they make. (Not saying thats bad, because equality and whatever, just a side effect)

west pine
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True. Good point.

Instead of preventing players, it would just prevent the balance going down too quickly, perhaps with two accounts where one is the balance and another dispersed funds over 24 hours. I need to think it out a lot more.

waxen locust
wary smelt
boreal hill
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Thats the way its always been only you as MoE put in more effort than people usually do.

waxen locust
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Thats the ideal yeah

wary smelt
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Most govs are good at reacting to Uni being broke

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But the great govs will realize they need to send the money before and not react

bright wolf
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🫠 😦

waxen locust
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It was very important on the pallace cycle, even half a day with no funds would have set us back alot

boreal hill
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That is not always possible though, cause you need the funds to send it, not require the funds somewhere else. Cause the Uni could be selling cheap or buying expensive. Or could be unreasonably rushing tech.

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Just because a minister says I need money doesnt mean they deserve that money.

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Might cripple infrastructure.

wary smelt
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Well yes

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But hopefully you hash that out during that 1 day in advance period

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And either delay tech

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Or reallocate funds

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Either way, uni isn't sitting at 0 euros 95% of cycle hopefully

boreal hill
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Yeah true. Doubt many Uni's are 95% unfunded but I get your point.

wary smelt
boreal hill
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Yeah true but people do like to exaggerate. Example: During my PM cycle people said the uni was always empty, yet I was online 8-10 hours a day and plenty of time there was money. Just not huge amounts or at all times.

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Not saying it didnt happen, but I find 22 hours hard to believe for a 10 day period and then voting back in the PM and perhaps the Moe and MPs 😄

west pine
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I didn't say it was your cycle PJ and it doesn't matter whose cycle it was. People are going to complain about this each cycle to varying degrees.

22 hrs and 10 days is an exaggeration and I shouldn't have used hard numbers, and it was too long ago but I remember checking several times over the first week or two and seeing it funded perhaps twice while I played.