Shields in Tournaments - What do you think

Unknown

Psykopathic28 wrote:

Why Is there never any options on the polls to say that the options given are ridiculous. How about this:
Do you think shield were an improvement?
Yes
No

Ta-Da!!! Less effort and it doesn't look like a jumbled mess where you were unnecessarily scrounging to suit the needs of everyone who has ever posted about it.

I don't like the way the shield system is implemented. The cost is a different matter. From 1221 to 1786 I had encountered 9 bagman teams, got 49/50 points for each. There were a couple regular teams which broke the monotony. One was Rag/Ares/Thor at max levels I think. AI got a miracle cascade and I couldn't recover. I had some pretty good cascades myself but AI blew me away with that one. I got 25 points for that battle after I beat it on the second try. Too easy. I didn't shield. I didn't lose any points by the time tournament ended.

If you're interested in why I asked what I asked I can elaborate but it will have to be at another time. Your suggestion is noted however I didn't place the choices there to suit the needs of anyone other than me. I just wanted to know. I'd like to keep this thread on track about Shields in Tournaments. As I'm limited to 10 lines, if you feel that I missed a benefit or drawback from the shield feature, you can post that I have lousy polling options after you post the missed benefit or drawback. Otherwise you're not helpful.

Unknown

Shields have been a huge benefit. They keep people from having to be on at end of tourney and keep them safe through work. Amazing feature. The question you asked is fine and not what I critiqued. The problem I mentioned us every time someone makes a poll they over complicate the living **** out of it and it really hinders the poll.

Unknown

Psykopathic28 wrote:

Why Is there never any options on the polls to say that the options given are ridiculous. How about this:
Do you think shield were an improvement?
Yes
No

Ta-Da!!! Less effort and it doesn't look like a jumbled mess where you were unnecessarily scrounging to suit the needs of everyone who has ever posted about it.

The options could cover a wider range, but I found them decent. I think the spread of votes shows that as well. A Yes/No is not a poll. You can't extract any significant information because in real world most options are not black or white. They are grey and there are countless shades. If your suggestion was used with the addition of a third option "Yes, but..." 99% would go for that "but".

Unknown

Narkon wrote:

Psykopathic28 wrote:

Why Is there never any options on the polls to say that the options given are ridiculous. How about this:
Do you think shield were an improvement?
Yes
No

Ta-Da!!! Less effort and it doesn't look like a jumbled mess where you were unnecessarily scrounging to suit the needs of everyone who has ever posted about it.

The options could cover a wider range, but I found them decent. I think the spread of choices shows that as well. A Yes/No is not a poll. You can't extract any significant information because in real world most options are not black or white. They are grey and there are countless shades. If your suggestion was used with the addition of a third option "Yes, but..." 99% would go for that "but".

That's why we have the ability to....get this.... Leave comments.

Unknown

Psykopathic28 wrote:

That's why we have the ability to....get this.... Leave comments.

Got it. Now, get this. If this topic ever get to 10 pages will you ask people to read though them all to get an idea of what others think? Polls are useful because they allow people to see how a change is received by checking a table or a diagram. Comments and feedback are invaluable, but not everyone can spend 1 hour reading 1 topic. Also, participating or commenting on them is optional, so those who don't find them useful can simply skip them.

Unknown

I wrote about it so many times: the bagman teams are disrupting everything this game is supposed to be. Formerly it was just used as "tanking" due to a broken mmr schema. Now we have its advanced version combined with shields. That is completely nuts.

Meanwhile the trivial improvement suggested a zillion times, to just make the point loss a fraction would much better fix the original problem, and also would have prevented this bagmanized abuse. It's still anyones guess why it was dismissed.

Oh yeah, we could have prevented much of the progression-inflation too.

Unknown

Narkon wrote:

Psykopathic28 wrote:

That's why we have the ability to....get this.... Leave comments.

Got it. Now, get this. If this topic ever get to 10 pages will you ask people to read though them all to get an idea of what others think? Polls are useful because they allow people to see how a change is received by checking a table or a diagram. Comments and feedback are invaluable, but not everyone can spend 1 hour reading 1 topic. Also, participating or commenting on them is optional, so those who don't find them useful can simply skip them.

Once again, the only people this information is useful to is the devs and such. The devs also have mentioned many times that they read EVERY word. Please explain what part is useful?

Also once again I'm not complaining about the poll itself. It is a highly discuss able topic ATM. Just thought the poll options were overkill.

Unknown

Bugpop wrote:

Psykopathic28 wrote:

Why Is there never any options on the polls to say that the options given are ridiculous. How about this:
Do you think shield were an improvement?
Yes
No

Ta-Da!!! Less effort and it doesn't look like a jumbled mess where you were unnecessarily scrounging to suit the needs of everyone who has ever posted about it.

I don't like the way the shield system is implemented. The cost is a different matter. From 1221 to 1786 I had encountered 9 bagman teams, got 49/50 points for each. There were a couple regular teams which broke the monotony. One was Rag/Ares/Thor at max levels I think. AI got a miracle cascade and I couldn't recover. I had some pretty good cascades myself but AI blew me away with that one. I got 25 points for that battle after I beat it on the second try. Too easy. I didn't shield. I didn't lose any points by the time tournament ended.

The issue you speak of is that once you get high enough you're effectively insulated from further aggression. Even if shields did not exist, if it was possible to somehow jump out ahead so much, you'll still see similar behaviors. In this case, those guys you see probably won't be running bagman teams, but if you had that kind of lead compared to rest of your competitors, there would be relatively little incentive to continue playing (without shields you wouldn't be able to make further progress) so people might just hold off aggression anyway. In the worst case those guys might be fighting back and trading points back and forth, but it's still not going to change the fact that there won't be aggression coming from anyone else below, as you've noted that your unshielded Bagman team wasn't even attacked.

The existence of shields allows this problem to be highlighted because otherwise people could not jump out to such a huge lead, but this problem always existed even before shields. It's just that nobody was able to build that kind of lead in the past to see this problem.

Unknown

I have not yet used shields but voted for the options that talk about me benefiting from others using them. Retaliations are down (assume because I'm attacking shielded people) and the people ahead of me are stationary targets unless they want to give up the shield they spent all that HP on. Also, with people getting so high in points, I seem to be able to find 40-50pt matches fairly regularly. Had a guy shielded in first a couple of hundred points ahead of me and made a run to pass them with 15mins left and almost caught up until they unshielded and started going too. Got second pretty easily as the rest of the top 5 stayed shielded after I passed them.

Overall I'm not a big fan of shields from the perspective of using them but they seem to be benefiting me. I might use them if they were cheaper but I'm not sure that would be good for the game. I think I liked it better when the damage of being attacked was lower and shielding was not in. I think it is an HP sink because there is nothing to really spend it on right now. I know I'm hoarding mine until the re-balance is done after getting burned after putting thousands of HP into Rags.