The movement update and the double penalty

Yesterday the movement update was introduced without warning. Hundreds of players were teleported home from a front they were fighting for without warning. Below is a depiction of the https://app.warera.io/alliance/6a2b13879c8c99640b9c4963 soldiers fighting for https://app.warera.io/country/683ddd2c24b5a2e114af15d3 against https://app.warera.io/country/683ddd2c24b5a2e114af15bd as Vatou snaps his fingers.

As you might imagine the community is split with the value of this update, since some view it as an effective way to combat the large empires with proxies across the globe, while others view it as reduction in quality of life adding extra steps to the gameplay loop with no real benefit.

But after 8h of sleep and a coffee I realized something. Fighting in multiple fronts was already punished with a real cost. One most people do not usually take into account.

The opportunity cost

I'll explain. Take https://app.warera.io/user/6a3ba2376ac1e1ba7a6cfee2 as an example, one of the new Uzbek recruits that joined our ranks recently. He's a level 29 player, and yesterday he fought for Madagascar in https://app.warera.io/battle/6aa900d0d5fdc38c1292cbf4 dealing almost 700k damage in the battle.

His damage was split as 609.75k on round 1 and 88.16k on round 2. He only fought in one front that day and dealt 100% of his potential damage for https://app.warera.io/country/683ddd2c24b5a2e114af15d3. What was his reward?

Elite Pants for round 1

Rifle for Round 2

Rifle for Battle

What if after his initial burst of roughly 390k, Uzbekistan Command told him to shift focus and fight for Germany in the https://app.warera.io/battle/6aa9240f3568900f8328627e ?

In Sidama he would have gotten the following rewards instead.

Advanced Helmet for Round 1

Rifle for Battle

And in Friesland he would likely get

Advanced Helmet for Round 1

Reinforce gear or Gun for round 2

Advanced Boots for Battle

Converting all rewards to scrap (to simplify calculations) we get from strategy one focusing on a single front a total of 270 scrap and from strategy two where https://app.warera.io/user/6a3ba2376ac1e1ba7a6cfee2 is splitting the damage 234 scrap.

So his opportunity cost of splitting the damage in two fronts is 36 scrap, at current market prices that's 7.92 BTC (@0.22 per scrap).

With the new update he would then also need to pay 2 oil for each region between these two fronts, which for those more geographically challenged are not close. It would require him to traverse 13 regions, meaning 26 oil or 6,24 BTC (@0,24 per barrel of oil)

Making the total cost now 14,16 BTC while before it was just 7.92 BTC.

So moving fronts does not only cost oil, it costs the opportunity of getting better loot in a single front as well. That cost as it seems was already high for mid level players like https://app.warera.io/user/6a3ba2376ac1e1ba7a6cfee2, higher than the oil.

What if I did the same thing?

I would likely lose the Jet reward I got on round 1 and the Legendary gloves on the Battle reward, I would instead get items 1 tier below. Even if I would get another Legendary and Epic Rewards on https://app.warera.io/region/6813b7039403bc4170a5d675 I would be getting 1296 scrap for splitting damage (from 2 Legendary items and 2 Epic Items) while focusing on https://app.warera.io/region/683ddd3d36dbc90b7804747c I got 1944 scrap. That's 648 scrap difference or 142.56 BTC.

By comparison the cost of Oil to move fronts, which is the same for me and https://app.warera.io/user/6a3ba2376ac1e1ba7a6cfee2, feels like a rounding error. Not to mention the medals rewards, which we will ignore for these calculations as only 1 player gets.

So will Oil make a difference in these decisions? Likely no, the new cases seem to provide a reward greater than the cost to get them and will likely pay for most of the costs of dislocation overall, and a bit more for movement between fronts.

My assessment is that the material costs of moving fronts (Oil) will be mostly felt by lower level players when they need to move across the globe as it will represent a bigger portion of their operational costs. While the opportunity cost was already felt before the update for the high level players and greatly outweighs the movement costs introduced.

If players chose to move fronts before, I think this update will not change this fact, it will just add extra steps to do so and make players stockpile oil during their econ farm so they don't have to worry about it when they move to war builds and their commander tells them to move to a different front.

If anything, it will just add another reason for fronts to post small open bounties to pay for the oil costs for dislocation. As https://app.warera.io/user/6813b75befecdf9bab1952c4 says #PutBounty