Promitor Elections: Game Design or Exploiting a Flaw

[GuyKid88]

As many of you are aware by this point, there is a new government in control at Promitor. Through a collaborated effort, they were able to secure 3 out of 5 total government seats by having a massive influx of votes within the final hour of polls. Within the first 12 hours of their regime, they raised taxes to the maximum amount and emptied the treasury funds (placing them into their personal account).

It has always been mentioned that piracy is a part of the game. Assuming this group actually had humans attached to each individual vote, they followed the game rules and the above action is allowed in the current game design.

My question is this: How should game exploits be handled?

In more traditional MMOs, situations like this usually lead to one of two outcomes: either the exploit gets patched out, or it becomes normalized behavior that spreads as more players feel forced to participate just to keep up.

But what I love about this game is the community and the collaboration. It’s one of the rare environments where progress doesn’t have to come at someone else’s expense—where everyone can prosper without it turning into a zero-sum system dominated by bad actors.

So the real question isn’t just whether this was allowed—it’s whether this is the direction we want the game to move in.

Where do we go from here?

[Relm]

Any accounts involved in anything that violates the game’s ToS should be purged, the people behind those accounts banned, and the resultant actions undone. The direction of the game and its community should not be determined by those who violate the ToS.

[shagie]

First question - its game design. While I find raiding the coffers and reneging upon previous bills to be signs of poor character, its part of the game. and intentionally so (see Progress Update - Development Log #430 | Prosperous Universe ).

People who didn’t vote and are complaining need to be aware of the impact of the elections and that their vote matters. That is intentionally part of the game (and likely part of the why of the game).

The questionable part that would be exploitive is if the accounts that voted were sock puppets or if they were actual players. If there was account fraud that allowed the vote fraud, that should be addressed and the people who ran it or benefited from it face the associated consequences and the transactions be rolled back. The scuttlebutt in chat seems to suggest that this was the case.

In terms of how much money is going on… For a new player, this is significant amounts of money 25M initially and projections of another 25M to 50M ICA over the course of a month is nothing to turn one’s nose up at (when I was 90 days in, my close trading partner had his PRO license expire and bought a RAT from me for 5M NCC … and that was significantly game changing at the time) … but if you’ve been playing for a while while not pocket change it is closer month’s transactional volume. The perpetrators of this might be able to buy a ship or two or three each with the money or put down a moderately advanced three permit base … or afford a HQ upgrade. That they did it for so little is more of a display that they can rather than the amount that they took.

This game is high trust. Politics matters. About 1 in 10 players on Promitor voted. If another 20 or so players out of 2000 or so (and 132 current votes) on the planet voted to push out the bottom two candidates, this wouldn’t have happened (or it would have made the account fraud more evident).

The “certain corporations use taxes as a piggy bank” was the norm for some planets prior to the politics update - most planets didn’t run with open books that allowed you to see the financial transactions as clearly (all the taxes went into the corporation balance sheet). I’m not claiming that they were bad actors then, but rather that it was fiscal neglect that benefited the corresponding corporations.

In game? We’ve got the mechanisms to handle this. Vote. Your vote matters.

Out of game? Devs should be looking into bans (and tooling to identify) players that have any multiple (even one) accounts that are used for political or personal gain (and multiple accounts in general … but if there are no links between them it is harder to identify). Dealing with election (and account) fraud is one of the learning experiences for all involved.

[raylu]

if we assume all the votes were by real players, the only change I’d like to see is locking in the candidates a few days before elections end. a coordinated group voting at the last minute is within the mechanics, but everyone else was blind to who the candidates could be

a change I’m less sure about is requiring people to be on the planet or in the game for a period of time before voting

[Pomme_de_Terroriste]

@shagie

In game? We’ve got the mechanisms to handle this. Vote. Your vote matters.

We have the mechanisms to prevent this, to some degree. Last-minute sniping is still a concern.

We don’t have any mechanisms to respond to it. If it’s the stance of the devs that this is an internal matter that needs to be handled by the community, then we also need the tools to do so. I think it’s pretty evident from the community response that if a recall election could be held, it would be successful. We haven’t got that ability, however.

Likewise, this is such an overtly hostile act that a lot of the community would cease doing business with the perpetrators, but we haven’t got that ability either.

If we have no means of counteracting takeovers or hostile players aside from sitting around and waiting, then the suggestion that this is something for the community to address isn’t valid until we have actual mechanisms to do so.

[Tonatsi]

Hmmm, perhaps, if the prospective winning candidate list changes within the 12 hours of the end of the election, the election automatically gets a one-time boost of 12 hours?

This way we don’t have to implement intrusive second-round voting, and we all get an extra time period to counter any sniping.

[Filefolders]

Pomme_de_Terroriste has already said exactly what I came here to say.

While a lot of people have expressed concerns about account duplication, I don’t think it’s the essential problem on display. Euu’s clique has deliberately transgressed the community’s behavioral expectations. While election sniping is a tactic the game’s mechanisms permit, I think it was underhanded, and I recognize the actions taken by the new government to be a deliberate insult to the majority of Promitor’s stakeholders.

Euu’s clique is an enemy of mine, so I have the option to… hide my local market ads from them? I don’t even use the LM. I could abandon faction space to its fate and button up on private fringe planets with maximum base establishment fees… so that they can pay the fee, snipe the election, and then reclaim the base establishment fee from the planetary treasury?

One of the central attractions of this game is that, unlike some other strategy MMOs, it allows the player to plan out his company without worry about midnight raids from the unemployed or people in drastically different time zones. I’m not sure why election turnout is so low, but as disinterested as I am in running a perpetual get-out-the-vote campaign, I’m even less interested in babysitting election progress for a last minute upset.

I think this incident, more than anything else, has illustrated that the government update’s work is incomplete. Most glaringly, there is no mechanism to launch a recall effort. While the electorate obviously was complacent, many people are upset with the result. Some even quit the game in response, as excessive as that might be. I have every expectation that, if possible in the game, a call for snap elections at this point would be successful. Unfortunately, there is no such choice available.

Prosperous Universe players frequently observe how genial the community tends to be, but the current state of the game advantages griefers over the griefed. At present, a great many players enjoy this game as an outer space garden tending game. Some people joke that this is the EVE Online retirement home. This is possible because of a high-trust culture among the players. Allowing low-trust behavior is a legitimate game design decision, but it is only interesting when the game presents players with the opportunity to launch a triumphant counterattack. We have this in a very limited form with LM blocking of known pirates. There is no equivalent for this type of planetary raiding through election sniping. When good natured communities do not have in-game mechanisms to rally against bad actors, griefers will predominate over time and alienate the rest of the players.

[CraftsmanThirteen]

I agree with FileFolders on this - explicit low-trust actions - which this clearly is - can not be allowed to stand or it will damage the player base. A recall election system should probably be added - or maybe allow “no confidence” votes for a specific person in government - and if they get too many they are not only kicked from the government of that planet - but ALL planets and are not allowed to run for any other office for a period of time? I mean the most similar comparison in real life is a politician who absconds with government funds - so highly corrupt - and when they are caught they are pretty much done. Heck in some instance individuals have been banned from using banking networks - banning the player from the exchanges might be too harsh though.

[xa2023xa]

Certainly not pretty – especially for new players just getting to know the game. And for the ‘old’ players, it’s frustrating that 25 million are gone from the government coffers and that more taxes have to be paid. How would you argue if Promitor had set the taxes on POIs and SETs to 0? Currently, a lot in the government aspect of the game is illogical and doesn’t help the gameplay. Many good ideas, but not yet implemented effectively. Perhaps the ‘incident’ on Promitor will help to focus attention on this issue more generally.

Suggestion..

• For starting planets, the taxes for POIs and settlers should always be set to 0 – this makes the initial phase a bit easier.
• Every player has influence in the Global Chamber of Commerce - this should also be the case in the GOV elections.
• And no more than 10 members in the government.
• And goods in the auction houses should remain in the user’s warehouse, just like with contacts. No loopholes for 0 tons/0 m³ in the auction house!

[TikiBaby]

I agree that outcome of the Promitor election was not in the best interest of the greater population, in particular because it is a starter planet and has potential negative impacts to the growth of the player base in the short term.

On the assumption that the winning voting bloc did not violate the ToS, then the victory can largely be attributed to voter apathy. I think the conversation should focus on how the democratic process can be made more robust. There are a few areas I think should be focussed on:

Voter Apathy / Election Barriers

The more people voting, the more robust the result will be and the less power minority voting blocs will have.

I suspect voter apathy boils down to:

• New players not knowing about voting
• Long-term players not paying attention to results because the results rarely vary
• As the number of bases you manage increases, so does the number of elections you need to monitor

In addition, finding the status of each vote can be a couple of clicks (depending on your screen setup). Understanding the platform that a candidate is running on is difficult at best, it might be in somewhere in planet chat, a discord or nowhere at all.

Finally, the “in-progress” results shown on the election screen enables two key items:

1. individual players assume the final outcome and not monitor the race
2. voting blocs know exactly how to distribute votes to execute a “snipe”

Overall, I’d like to see improvements to campaigning to enable both some kind of advertising of candidates positions, a streamline voting interface and hiding the election tallies until the vote is over.

Holding governments to account

Once a government is elected, we should have some capability to hold our officials to account. The suggestions in this thread around a no-confidence vote are reasonable, but I think the method of implementation will be challenging.

• Triggering a vote - can anyone raise a motion? How much support does it require to trigger a planet wide vote? You don’t want to be spammed with alerts by disgruntled election losers.
• Passing a vote - How many votes to pass? 51%? Two third majority? - with the current voter turn out, none would ever pass.
• Time - how long should the vote last for? Elections are currently 7 days. That would be a quarter of the election term. The vote could end early once the threshold had been passed.
• Outcome - What happens when passed? I would think the government would be dissolved and a new election run. Should the members of the government have some kind of record against their user that future voters can easily find?

This feature has a lot more complexities to implement, trying to strike a balance between giving players power to hold officials to account, while preventing the feature from being abused.

I think that a focus on improving the robustness of elections should be the priority, which should reduce the need for features to hold bad governments to account. After all, there is another election just 29 days away.

[Filefolders]

Thanks for mentioning making vote tallies invisible. I think that would be of immense benefit in frustrating future attempts to snipe elections. However, that would also make it more difficult to support a parliamentary bloc. It seems to me that a combination of invisible tallies while voting is still in progress plus a ranked choice voting system would allow bloc voting without facilitating surgical takeover attempts.

[CraftsmanThirteen]

Also, one thing to keep in mind with this is that I think for the vast majority of players, the government mechanics could be removed from the game and their enjoyment of the game would not change. For most people, they just want to run their bases and trade with each other and not have to worry that a group of parasites will start stealing money (ie taxes higher then needed) from them.

I am part of this group. So for a truely radical solution to the whole problem - remove the whole government/taxes aspect from the game and then there is nothing to steal. No need to add more functions to avoid people doing naughty things. We can still have a ‘resource sink’ in the sense of treating POPI refiles more like COGC refills (in the sense that they automatically increase/decrease with the population size) - and I am sure we can come up with a way to force POPI building increases as well.

This is also the underlying reason for voter apathy - they aren’t interested in that part of the game. Same reason why the majority of people don’t vote in real life.

Maybe instead of forcing more people to play the game in a way that doesn’t maximize their enjoyment we listen to the player base and keep the game focused on what they want to do.

I know, personally, this is always more of a chore for me and I get no enjoyment out of managing the planets that I run. I do it because I have to - but if I ever leave the game the overhead of planetary government management would be why I left.

-Craftsman

PS: Yes, I know there are other things that would need to be fixed like Gateways - but I would let corporations actually own a gateway and be responsible for running it. Maybe they can set different prices in-corporation and out-corporation.

[Archiel]

Maybe the upcoming faction system will have a way to hold a trial and garnish a player’s income

[molp]

Just a quick update from our side. The time I have available for work this week is almost over, so I’ll do a quick post here. A longer update will follow with the next devlog.

As we have stated in the current devlog, we think that overtaking a planetary government and even emptying out the treasury is within the game’s rules. It is in stark contrast to what we are used and the community has every reason to be upset.

After going through a lot of data we noticed, that many accounts that cast their vote in the election are inactive and seem to have been created only for the purpose of voting. This is behavior that is clearly outside of what’s allowed and in violation of the rules and terms of service. We identified 55 accounts and deleted them.

In the chart below you can see the results of the election. The blue bars represent the original votes, the red ones after subtracting the votes of the 55 accounts.

Since Tnn and yfj911 have no votes left after the deletion, we decided to remove them from the government of Promitor.

[FOREVEREALIZE]

I understand it’s probably not that simple, but I am of the opinion that all motions that were only passed because of Tnn and yfj911’s vote should be reversed, or at least re-voted. It’s not reasonable, at least in my opinion to maintain a motion that the “lawful” government wouldn’t be able to pass.

[SLKLS]

will the motions that were already made reversed? (I wouldn’t bother with tax refunds though, it is mainly about the 25M)

[OptimizedFunction]

I think all motions except the withdrawal of funds can be reversed by the existing parliament. The withdrawal of funds can only really be fixed by molp, provided Euu didn’t already spend that money, which they probably did.

[FOREVEREALIZE]

Yeah, I’m aware. If Euu did already spend those funds, I think she should be forced into the negatives, if that’s something the APEX allows, or take assets of hers until it’s been paid back. If assets of hers cannot be taken, take all her money, and then keep taking her money until it’s all paid back.

[CoffeeCupMassacre]

Or maybe ban the person for exploitation.

I appreciate the work being done on this, but now with clear evidence of botting here, why are we still talking about this? It’s really making me want to look elsewhere for this kind of entertainment. Why should I play with botters and exploiters?

One more point on this is I feel allowing what has transpired flies directly in the face of the community guidelines. It sets a poor example of what the developers are willing to tolerate as far as toxic and uncooperative behavior.

[FOREVEREALIZE]

It can’t be proven that Euu & co. did the botting themselves. Someone else could have ordered bots to make them look bad and be otherwise not welcome. As such, banning them is not justifiable.