Evil Trout Posted:

...what if the amount of vanilla scoops you earned from a raid was inversely proportional to the size of the klan?

I like it.

Theoretically, I like the idea of inverse proportional Vanillas for larger Klans. But that still doesn’t solve the problem that if your Klan has 200+ members, a good portion of them raiding would still be able to stock up on the Vanillas just through sheer numbers (i.e.: if a larger Klan gets, say 1 Vanilla vs a small Klan’s 4, the larger Klan can still keep up the raiding with other members as the smaller Klan would just run out of forum turns sooner).

its official, crotch zombie, your brains work better than ours

Evil Trout Posted:

Finally, here’s an idea I’m just going to throw out: what if the amount of vanilla scoops you earned from a raid was inversely proportional to the size of the klan? In other words, if your Klan has 200+ members, you’ll receive far fewer vanillas than Klans with 5 members. I’m not sure exactly how I’d divide them up but it might be possible.

The idea is to encourage smaller klans, and therefore, more fair raids.

It’s a cool idea, but it still seems easier for bigger klans to get scoops. A Klan of 200 could easily get 30 users going a night, while a klan of 50 could people could maybe get 12 people every OTHER day. Even if they’re given more scoops, they still can’t raid as often.

I’m opposed to a scoop limit. It just seems like a bad solution to most problems to impose artificial limits. Rather, it would be better to solve the underlying problem.

For example, reducing the reward for Klan domination and/or increasing the number of forums pwned requirement. By simply reducing the reward to say, 1 scoop, FoL’s 177 scoops would only be 59. That already takes a huge chunk out of the imbalance.

Of course, this still rewards larger Klans at the expense of smaller Klans. So how about integrating raids more into the game by implementing a raid system like your more traditional MMOs. This way, solo players can also get together to do raids and it places an upper limit on the number of people who can participate per raid. A side-effect would be that only those who are in the raid group get the scoops, eliminating the complaint about rewarding Klan members who don’t do anything. This would, however, require also creating some kind of in-game, real-time communication system.

Well, those are just some suggestions off the top of my head.

cowpie Posted:

For example, reducing the reward for Klan domination and/or increasing the number of forums pwned requirement.

Actually, I like the idea of adjusting the number of forums pwned requirement. As I said earlier, I personally like the 3 scoops per member reward even though I’m open to it being adjusted. Adjusting the number of forums, though, suits me just fine and I think would bring Vanilla raids back towards their original scope.

Looking at the original forums, in order to pull off a Vanilla raid at the start of Forumwarz would require that every single forum be pwned at the same time. While that would have been a herculean task at first, the introduction of forumbuildr forums has significantly decreased the difficulty.

Let us increase the difficulty again! I am not advocating that we go back to 100% forums pwned, since I think the higher turnover rates of the lower levelled forums would make that impossible with our current number of players existing and growing. Instead, let’s adjust the bar to take into account the difficulty levels of the forums. If a klan is required to pwn 40 difficulty worth of forums (just an example number), then they could accomplish this by pwning a few of the really difficult forums, or a ton of the lower difficulty forums. We can adjust the difficulty until an acceptable number of vanillas are being won per week, and if we really want to make it a sliding scale then apply a percentage modifier against the target difficulty based on the size of the klan conducting the raid.

Arktor Posted:

So vanilla scoops would only be practically obtainable by participating in Klan raids?

*blink* I thought the discussion had turned to only covering klan raids at this point. The change I proposed is only for klan raids, which have the 12-forums at a time requirement.

PIMPTASTIC-FROTH Posted:

It’s a cool idea, but it still seems easier for bigger klans to get scoops. A Klan of 200 could easily get 30 users going a night, while a klan of 50 could people could maybe get 12 people every OTHER day. Even if they’re given more scoops, they still can’t raid as often.

I think the proposal on the table is scoop reward handicaped by number of *total* klan members not raid participants. So yes you are right in the fact that larger clans can organize more raid teams but are still handicaped by the klan size modifier under the current proposal (or at least I think so). More members = more raids but at the expense of lower Vanilla output per raid so it works out imo.

I don’t know if it’s been mentioned yet, but what about limiting Klan scoops to only those who actually participate in a raid? That way you won’t get people who join Klans just to leech Vanillas from everyone else who raids, but does none of the work.

Sorry to have exampled you Echuu. I agree completely that the raid itself is fun, and certainly the klan switch in your case made complete sense. It wasn’t meant to be critical of the choice, I was more sad to think that people might have to make the friends vs game choice if they really want to play.

Btw, I love the new pages the ET and team has put up, they should make things considerably easier for smaller klans. Log in to see images! scully edited this message on 03/14/2008 6:29PM