Pickled male reproductive organbum Posted:

so wait, what you want then is that increased effort shouldn’t include increased reward? thats supposed to inspire more players?

I think you’re missing something. People who don’t play won’t be clogging up the brackets because they wouldn’t be earning enough scoops to get into the higher brackets; no one accidentally gets 30 scoops. They might be clogging up the bottom one or two brackets, but they wouldn’t be rewarded because there’d be a 50-way tie. But those who casually play would most likely be more active as they’d feel they have a chance to win. Or at least, that’s the theory that I’m trying to accomplish.

Vuron Posted:

it seems that many people are actively choosing not to compete in domination as they feel it’s currently hopelessly broken

Exactly. I’m one of them. I can’t always play at end time, and I can’t use all my visits earned, and I don’t gamble — so what chance do I have against those who can? How can I earn 25-40 scoops and still feel competitive? Because I’m not now.

MC Banhammer Posted:

Exactly. I’m one of them. I can’t always play at end time, and I can’t use all my visits earned, and I don’t gamble — so what chance do I have against those who can? How can I earn 25-40 scoops and still feel competitive? Because I’m not now.

Honestly CZ should be looking at domination changes that encourage more people to play rather than less. Antifreeze was capped because a small number of players could easily win all 4 medals every week. It was unfun for the vast majority of players. Capping antifreeze increases the potential number of medal winners.

Currently the pool of potential medal winners are people who are in singleton brackets (which should be fixed) or people who are in involved in domination klans. Honestly not counting alts that appears to be about 30 players. I have no problem in making it harder for those 30 in order to increase the pool of active players from 30 to 300 or even 3000.

Pickled male reproductive organbum Posted:

perhaps they should make it that you only stay in **** brigade if you medaled last week, you fall into pre-set sub brackets if you didn’t. that would allow people who can’t compete with clan vanilla and gambling to get medals at least every other week.

That wouldn’t be a bad idea.

spacekadt Posted:

And how many people don’t participate on flamebate? Where’s the plan to make that better? I know this is focused on domination, but if the goal is to increase endgame participation, you’re only effectively trading off.

I don’t (generally) enjoy flamebate. I don’t generally enjoy forumbuildr. Domination is the one piece of endgame that I do enjoy and you’re really all but taking that away from me. I enjoy the raiding, I enjoy the competition, I enjoy the cutthroat nature of it.

If you’re talking about drastically altering dom (changing where people are seeded based on scoop counts), what’s the possibility of people participating in raid vs. non-raid brackets? I guess it’d probably be two klans warring with each other, but there’s got to be some better solution than taking away the one piece of endgame that’s strategy based instead of roleplay or creativity based. (yes, if you cap my vanillas to the numbers I’ve seen thrown around and my raid abilities, you’ve taken away my fun)

I understand what you are saying, there is one aspect of the game that you still enjoy and you’d rather not see it screwed with. However if domination is going to be the flagship endgame it really needs to be fun for the maximum number of players not just a small number of dedicated players.

What MC and others are saying is that in order to grow forumwarz as a whole you need to find a balance between the experienced fanbase and the new fanbase. If new players cannot compete in domination they are unlikely to play it. If they quit playing domination what is around to keep them here until episode 2 and beyond? Incit? Forumbuildr? Flamebate? IDC? each of those have a very dedicated userbase but honestly there are relatively small groups. You need an endgame that keeps people coming back and spending their visits. Presumably domination is that game but currently I think it’s failing at that task.

Just voicing my agreement with Vuron on nearly every issue here. The alternating **** brigade thing I’m not sure about though, that could easily be gamed and could lead to screwing newbies out of dom even more. My tactic at least would be to only compete when I’m not in **** brigade. Any non-raiding player (the vast majority) in a bracket with me is sort of screwed in that case.

SG94 Posted:

Just voicing my agreement with Vuron on nearly every issue here. The alternating **** brigade thing I’m not sure about though, that could easily be gamed and could lead to screwing newbies out of dom even more. My tactic at least would be to only compete when I’m not in **** brigade. Any non-raiding player (the vast majority) in a bracket with me is sort of screwed in that case.

That’s not necessarily true. There are two fairly large raiding klans right now… there’s less than a snowball’s chance in hell that all of us are going to medal in the same week and have **** brigade become THAT big. In fact, it’s more likely that there will be more vanilla raiders *not* in **** brigade any given week with the suggestion to have only medal winners from the past week in there.

Within the next few weeks, I expect dom to start looking again like it did toward the end of season 1. The top bracket will be the highest/current medal winners. The next two or three will be right behind, and on down the line from there. I actually liked the way that worked and set us all up with approximately equal players over time. The only part of it that sucks is that eventually, the newbies will never be able to catch up. In the meantime, the newbies are in the lower brackets with other newbies and learn as they climb.

In fact, I think I found part of my answer on how to “fix” this… at least in my own mind. The way the seeding for the brackets was done toward the end of last season was ideal. I think it’s a valid (and easy because it already exists) solution. The first few weeks of a dom season are going to suck as players shake out with the seasons rolling over the way they did here… so maybe the season rollovers need to take previous medal counts into account for seeding purposes, but they’re still “wiped” from the current season counts. (I’m not entirely sure I said that at all clearly)

kittiejenn Posted:

Also, there sort of is a cap on vanilla.. the number of visits available.

spacekadt Posted:

I’m incredibly opposed to this only because we *use* our alts in our raids. Why can’t my alt get scoops even thought it spent 12 visits earning those scoops. And spacekadt’s 12 visits.

This is why I suggested the one-alt thing. Because the cap doesn’t apply to people who spend money; they can effectively buy as many visits as they can afford. That’s not balanced for those people who don’t spend real-world money.

Pickled male reproductive organbum Posted:

unless you mean brainfreeze and enjoy, good omens is technically a small clan.

large raids as opposed to large klans, brainfreeze really isn’t that large either, especially once you consider that about 25% of the klan isn’t terribly active anymore.

haven’t seen any enjoy raids yet (not to say that they haven’t done them or they haven’t been successful) so I’m not sure if they’re going to be big on the vanillas like brainfreeze and good omens are.

MC Banhammer Posted:

This is why I suggested the one-alt thing. Because the cap doesn’t apply to people who spend money; they can effectively buy as many visits as they can afford. That’s not balanced for those people who don’t spend real-world money.

valid point, but there’s a trade-off here. it takes twice as long for someone with two characters to run the visits as it does for someone with one (let’s pretend for a second there’s no lag, they’re pwning equal strength forums on equal strength characters). that person put in twice the effort and gets the same payoff as someone that doesn’t use/have an alt. it isn’t fair to people without alts as it stands right now, but it’s not fair to people with alts to restrict that, either. it’s like the domination ending time. someone gets screwed – the question is “who?”

The whole reason that alternate characters are shoved into different brackets, if at all possible, is to prevent multiple characters of the same player from having too much of an advantage in Domination.

Preventing alternate characters from being able to participate in Domination at all will certainly reduce bracket sizes at the cost of making people who have paid for alts for Domination pretty angry.