Alliance question/discussion

MarvelMan

I like the way that professional sports do it. There is a moratorium on trades/moves within X time from the post season, to prohibit stars from teams mathematically eliminated from switching just to make the post season. Maybe any moves made within the last 12 hours of PVP are not counted, like a trade deadline. That way its between the 8 and 24hr shields, but there is at least a feel for how someone is going to play the PVP. Yes, it doesnt work well for those that join the last 5-7 hours and push, which seems to be more and more common in our alliance. You cant account for everything though, and it would help with reducing the last minute shuffles. The upside is that it sets the playing field for those last 12 hours so everyone knows, as much as they can, what they are up against.


Which is not to say I think that alliances are broken from a competitive standpoint. I think there is more a reward side issue where they are semi required for cover collection, and must be 20 slots full at that point. Yes, they shuffled rewards so that you can get all three covers without being in a top alliance, and HP was distributed out to the progressions, but I would like to see the alliance rewards more ISO based with token HP (it does required shielding for alliances to place high). Have some alliance progression rewards, such as a top tier 2* or second tier 3*, at attainable levels based off what a 12 or 15 person alliance scoring ~600 pts would hit. Even broaden it out to Season alliance progression rewards.

mohio

clean_cut_hippie wrote:

mohio wrote:

Yeah I wanted to chime in on the shuffling thing too. We had a team member recently decide he needed to be more casual due to work/life/etc. and instead of just drop out he created a new alliance meant to be the noob/casual arm of our main alliance. Since we're cool people and all that, a bunch of us pitched in to open up slots, so now it's almost full. Anyway, long story short(er), we can now swap people in/out whenever some of the vets in the main alliance either want a break or don't need the rewards, and someone from the other alliance can come get a cover they otherwise wouldn't have. Because we're often in the 70-100 range, this is a delicate proposition so it is often crucial to be able to make swaps near the end of events and occasionally swap guys back if we miscalculate and wind up on the wrong side of 100. Any meaningful delay in when "new" members can contribute would make this kind of thing really hard to do optimally, and I don't think many people would consider what we're doing part of the problem.

We actually considered doing something similar but haven't actually gone down that path yet due to logistical/management effort concerns and worries about being fair in our swapping. Have you run into any hard feelings or decisions that everyone isn't happy with when swap time comes or has it pretty much worked itself out so far?

The biggest issue we've had is from our main commander being in UK and just coordinating talking with everyone to make sure everyone understands who's moving and when. He keeps a queue of who's moved up to get the alliance cover and after it's your turn you go back to the back of the queue. So, everyone knows that it's a fair system and they will all get a turn. Usually we have more people who don't need the covers than we can even swap out, mostly due to trying to keep our score in the top 100. Also no one would ever get moved against their will, so only the volunteers get moved. It's only been 4 or 5 events now so far so we're still getting better at it, but it's worked pretty well for us.

avs962

Cryptobrancus wrote:

Then there is the other side of this coin, from suggestions and feedback we have this post.
The complaint is similar talking about losing the drive to play, but based on being shut out of cover reward tiers entirely. It would be awesome if there was a reward structure that provided an ever present carrot for people at all levels. Elite and Newb alike.

Season Progression rewards at individual and alliance level could be reworked towards this goal. Move the bulk of ISO and HP rewards to placement (leaving a few covers to really fight over at the top), move the bulk of covers to progression so every ~500 pvp points a new 3* cover is awarded, add in another one for every ~7500 alliance points, have everything reset back to zero with each season and start again. The elite would still need to collect all the progression and as much HP and iso as they can, while securing the few covers still being left for competition, and everyone else would still have ever present goals to work at and most importantly enjoy the rewards from, the end of season would be a mad push for everyone and every alliance to secure one last cover. It *could* be awesome.

This is my view as a middleweight player, I am certain the casuals would love this as well. Thoughts from the top 10 crowd?

I remember this post, and it's an awesome idea. I think the values would have to be tweaked for it to be viable for D3 (10-15k for alliances, 1250 individual?) since they do understandably, can't give covers out like it's Halloween. But yeah, I would looove if this were the system.

Unknown

To stop the swapping, couldn't they just make it so that an alliance only gets points scored by alliance members? For example: I'm in scAvengers and I score 800 points in the current PVP. But the leaders decide that they hate my face and boot me. The alliance's score drops by 800 for that event. The alliance then recruits the much, much more handsome Spoit who is sitting on 1100 points when he joins the alliance. The alliance's score does not go up 1100 points because he was not a member when he scored those points. If he ends up shielding at 1300 points, then the alliance would only make 200 off of his efforts for a net of -600 points.

By not having the points transfer in with the player, swapping would cease to be a thing except for "legitimate" reasons (legitimate is not the right word, but I'm struggling to think of a more apt term) whereas by having the points leave with the player, this would prevent the 'last minute boot commander grief' that would inevitably arise without such a caveat. This would mean that the mega alliances could still shuffle members around at the beginning of an event for strategic purposes without the added wait time, but it would rarely be beneficial to swap mid-event.

Unknown

Expalphalog wrote:

To stop the swapping, couldn't they just make it so that an alliance only gets points scored by alliance members? For example: I'm in scAvengers and I score 800 points in the current PVP. But the leaders decide that they hate my face and boot me. The alliance's score drops by 800 for that event. The alliance then recruits the much, much more handsome Spoit who is sitting on 1100 points when he joins the alliance. The alliance's score does not go up 1100 points because he was not a member when he scored those points. If he ends up shielding at 1300 points, then the alliance would only make 200 off of his efforts for a net of -600 points.

In theory that sounds pretty good, but sadly I suspect there are some serious technical issues involved. I doubt the current system is equipped to calculate all that, and they've had problems with server loads already without adding a lot of extra operations.

Unknown

Cryptobrancus wrote:

Then there is the other side of this coin, from suggestions and feedback we have this post.
The complaint is similar talking about losing the drive to play, but based on being shut out of cover reward tiers entirely. It would be awesome if there was a reward structure that provided an ever present carrot for people at all levels. Elite and Newb alike.

Season Progression rewards at individual and alliance level could be reworked towards this goal. Move the bulk of ISO and HP rewards to placement (leaving a few covers to really fight over at the top), move the bulk of covers to progression so every ~500 pvp points a new 3* cover is awarded, add in another one for every ~7500 alliance points, have everything reset back to zero with each season and start again. The elite would still need to collect all the progression and as much HP and iso as they can, while securing the few covers still being left for competition, and everyone else would still have ever present goals to work at and most importantly enjoy the rewards from, the end of season would be a mad push for everyone and every alliance to secure one last cover. It *could* be awesome.

This is my view as a middleweight player, I am certain the casuals would love this as well. Thoughts from the top 10 crowd?

I agree. I have argued for a shift towards covers at progression rewards in the past. From the data I'd imagine it doesn't make much overall difference as the average points a player has to score to be in the top 5 or 10% probably doesn't have a huge variance. It does feel pretty bad on the player side because you're chasing a shifting target. It is however, pretty clear what you need to do to compete: spend more on shield hops (and boosts if you're chasing an endgame score). If you spend 600hp on shields to get to the 1100 cover it's still half price even without any of the other rewards so it's not a bad investment compared to the alternatives. I agree that it probably would be better from a players perspective to change it, but I've softened my view a little by realising that the core problem is that the progression from maxed 2*'s to your first couple of maxed 3*'s actually takes months of what feels like very little progress. This is probably by design, progression always slows down dramatically the closer you get to endgame. I'm guessing that this will change as the endgame shifts to 4* rosters, allowing them to speed up the transition to the newly created 3* mid-game from the 2* mid-game.



On the topic of lockouts: realistically there's no way in which a properly organised group of alliances is going to be disadvantaged more by this than any single alliance. It'd be a bit silly investing significant effort into 'solving' a problem which only affects a couple of alliances- those that are on the verge of making the extra ISO by getting top10.

At the core of it, what is done within multi-alliances is just a less sticky version of what is done in the wider pool of alliances. People tend towards playing with people that put up similar point totals to themselves. We occasionally shift people around based on performance within our alliances, if we were a single alliance we might be tempted to kick them and recruit new players that can post better scores. The net result would be the same, but we can do it more dynamically and more efficiently and with less time spent kicking and recruiting, with the added upside of not straining our internal social ties by having to kick people that we enjoy just because their points are down.


Maybe it all boils down to the fact that there's a competitive rewards structure with pay-2-win undertones inserted into what essentially is a casual mobile game. I imagine that the vast majority of players just want to play the game, enjoy it, and have their 'work' rewarded by progression. There is an inherent disconnect here because of the competitive reality created by the reward structure that says that your hard work doesn't get you anything as long as there are enough other people out there willing to work harder. Therefore it'd be great to have covers (being the main thing people chase) as progression or another type of non-competitive reward on a more regular basis, with a shift towards competing over ISO/HP rewards.

The big downside to this is that it's probably terrible from a developer perspective as I'd wager that the vast majority of their income is from cover packs and HP expended on covers directly. The gated progression and the fact that they're giving most of the covers to people who don't need them is bound to be intended in order to let them be profitable enough to sustain development. I don't think anyone in the industry has got the right balance in a microtransaction game yet (except valve, but they're in a very different market), but I don't think these guys have done a bad job at all.