Fearless Defenders Discussion Thread

Unknown

Phantron wrote:

It looks like the alliance rating is just the sum of its members unless someone miraculously has a score of 700 in the first 10 minutes of the Fearless Defenders event starting. This seems really backwards to me. It will mean the biggest alliance will always win and even if there's a cap it still means there's no point to compete unless you're at the maximum size. It's easy to get 2 guys with 500 rating. Good luck getting a single guy with 1000 rating.

Why is big alliances always winning a bad thing? Wouldn't small alliances beating large ones be the equivalent of a 1* roster taking first in the big PVE events?

I want to see a team in the NFL that complains that it should be able to win with 5 people on the field against a team that fields 11.

Konman

Riggy wrote:

radav wrote:

Iron Batman wrote:

So the more members you have in the alliance, the higher your chance of winning since the members' points add up? or is it an average?

I have a feeling it will just be the total but, it would make a lot more sense to do it as an average so that the inevitable 10+ person alliance doesn't just walk away with an easy win. I'd be surprised if its not the total though because that way it will encourage people to spend HP on member slots for alliances. Not really liking this addition to the game at all tbh.

The idea of averages is terrible as it would unfairly penalize an alliance when a team member has to take a weekend off or can only play casually in an event. At least with summation, players can make up for missing players by playing more themselves.

If you as a loner or small alliance player doesn't want to join a large alliance, then that's entirely your decision and you can still place highly in the individual rankings and earn rewards appropriate for a solo player.

Based on what I've seen so far, I think more people have joined the tournament near the beginning. I'd love to get IceIX's input on specific numbers of when people are joining this tournament compared to past tournaments. It might actually be easier for the solo players who want to jump in late to get the individual rewards.

If its not done by average scores, then the largest alliance will almost always win by numbers alone. That's an unfair advantage. Right now, the whole alliance concept as its been implemented is unfair to players not in an alliance.

Can't say I'm a fan of the new alliances so far.

Puritas

Riggy wrote:

Phantron wrote:

It looks like the alliance rating is just the sum of its members unless someone miraculously has a score of 700 in the first 10 minutes of the Fearless Defenders event starting. This seems really backwards to me. It will mean the biggest alliance will always win and even if there's a cap it still means there's no point to compete unless you're at the maximum size. It's easy to get 2 guys with 500 rating. Good luck getting a single guy with 1000 rating.

Why is big alliances always winning a bad thing? Wouldn't small alliances beating large ones be the equivalent of a 1* roster taking first in the big PVE events?

I want to see a team in the NFL that complains that it should be able to win with 5 people on the field against a team that fields 11.

except this is more like 5 NFL players getting smoked by 11 office drones who play pickup on the weekends

Unknown

Quick Q: what's the member cap on alliances. 10? 20? Iirc IceIX stated one time, but can't find it.

And imo quality > quantity still.

Puritas

20
quantity will still win if the number discrepancy's big enough

Unknown

With the way the scoring works, quantity > quality if it's the sum. I can't say for sure if it's the sum, since there's no easy way to communicate with your alliance. I know that when I started first playing, my alliance's score is exactly equal to my score (presumably the other two guys aren't playing) with like a 110 (did the usual seed guys and stopped). Now it went up to about 310. I feel pretty confident this is not the average score and I know the other guys are very casual, so this looks a lot like the sum of their scores. It's easy to find 2 guys who can do 500 points. I've heard of guys claim to have 1000 points on the forum, but I've never seen one in a long time in my PvP bracket, so it must be a very rare sighting. And under this system they'd be equal.

IMO it should be the average ranking, e.g. if you have a guy ranked #1, #10, and #100 your alliance rank is 37, and you'll be ahead of anyone with a bigger number. If you don't have 5 members, your rank gets filled by a 250 instead (exactly average out of 500), to prevent having a one man alliance of a guy who is consistently #1. That way there's an incentive to fill up to 5, but it's not impossible to make up the numbers if you can't fill it, and it also stops from just having 2 really awesome guys carry the whole alliance. Bigger alliance wouldn't necessarily be weaker or stronger.

Unknown

Puritas wrote:

Riggy wrote:

Phantron wrote:

It looks like the alliance rating is just the sum of its members unless someone miraculously has a score of 700 in the first 10 minutes of the Fearless Defenders event starting. This seems really backwards to me. It will mean the biggest alliance will always win and even if there's a cap it still means there's no point to compete unless you're at the maximum size. It's easy to get 2 guys with 500 rating. Good luck getting a single guy with 1000 rating.

Why is big alliances always winning a bad thing? Wouldn't small alliances beating large ones be the equivalent of a 1* roster taking first in the big PVE events?

I want to see a team in the NFL that complains that it should be able to win with 5 people on the field against a team that fields 11.

except this is more like 5 NFL players getting smoked by 11 office drones who play pickup on the weekends

I'm not sure I follow. To me, that analogy is mixing apples and oranges. Either everyone's an office drone or they're all major league players. From what I can tell, if you're a solo player, you have the same chance at similar rewards you had before alliances (that's arguable, I suppose, as I believe competition will be higher b/c of alliance rewards). And if you want to join the big leagues and duke it out on bigger teams, you can do that too. I imagine that - just like every event to date, and as PandaBerry said on page 1 - they'll keep changing and tweaking and have events that focus on different types of people.

In every FPS I've played, if a team is short-handed, they're very likely to lose. The designers have said, we expect people to aim towards larger alliances, and they're most likely going to keep on designing towards larger alliances.

Unknown

Considering #1 ranked alliance has almost 1.1K points, I'd bet the score is sum of each member.

Unknown

I for one think the alliances are a nice addition. It's not like you're forced to be in one to participate or you're missing out on any unbelievable alliance-only prizes - most alliances will end up with 50HP and a little ISO (oooooh). If you think you're missing out, join an alliance - what's the harm? You can leave it and join another one for the next event if you want to.

Those of us that are in alliances get to engage in a little friendly competition and reap some small, extra rewards. The developers should be patted on the back for continuing to add and test new features.

And who cares if there is an alliance out there with 10, 15, or even 20 members? Let them go buy their big alliance. It's not like this game isn't already geared for pay-2-win. That doesn't have to detract from the fun you can still have with a 5-person alliance.

Unknown

frozenhero1 wrote:

I for one think the alliances are a nice addition. It's not like you're forced to be in one to participate or you're missing out on any unbelievable alliance-only prizes - most alliances will end up with 50HP and a little ISO (oooooh). If you think you're missing out, join an alliance - what's the harm? You can leave it and join another one for the next event if you want to.

Those of us that are in alliances get to engage in a little friendly competition and reap some small, extra rewards. The developers should be patted on the back for continuing to add and test new features.

And who cares if there is an alliance out there with 10, 15, or even 20 members? Let them go buy their big alliance. It's not like this game isn't already geared for pay-2-win. That doesn't have to detract from the fun you can still have with a 5-person alliance.

I don't think people are complaining that there's an alliance-only prize so much as that they took away one of the covers from the regular prize. It's now impossible to get all three covers unless you're in an alliance.

Unknown

Alliance prizes, especially if they're going with this 'bigger alliance automatically wins', should not be valuable stuff, as in shouldn't be HP or covers. It should be tokens and maybe isotope (while Isotope 8 is probably more valuable than HP in the long run, in general people still want HP more outside of the very top). The top alliance should get say 3 Pure Vibarnium tokens + 1000 isotope 8 for their efforts, which wouldn't be much right now if it is indeed just having a bigger alliance than anyone else. This structure already promotes a 'rich get richer', since the alliance winning the stuff will have the resources to expand and get even more members and then win even easier. This is not the same as a quality-based approach. That is, suppose the ranking is based on average and I recruited the 4 best MPQ players on the planet so we win every time while I do nothing. This success doesn't really help me recruit a 6th member, who is probably going to worse than whoever I already got. In the current scenario, assuming alliance ranking = sum of members, if your alliance is #1 with 10 guys, it can only get easier if it has 11 guys and so on. You don't even have to be selective of who to recruit until you hit 20 guys, and the best 5 MPQ players on the world put together would have practically no chance of defeating 20 random guys. If each guy average 200 points (an incredibly low numbers), that means each of your superstars has to do 800, and a lot of time 800 can win a non ultra competitive bracket!

radav

Ben Grimm wrote:

I think this will be a nice time to have a MPQ-lite (or even -free) weekend for a change. I'll probably play a little, but this is the sort of change I really don't want to encourage.

Just wanted to chime in at my distaste of how the alliance competition is being implemented. The fact that it's not an average is a pretty blatant cash grab. The group with the largest number of people will always win out period. The football analogy made earlier makes no sense because you're talking about pure numbers. You don't see teams playing 4 vs 20. lol Anyway, with this and the "tweak" to prize structure recently coupled with the disappearance of event tokens from the Hulk event I'm pretty disheartened by the changes. I'd love to see one of these f2p games actually try to make the game more enjoyable for it's players vs. what you always see which is for them to try and find the money grubbiest way to get money from its players. I get that they have to make money and I've spent it on their game. I just don't agree with the path they're continuing down and that there are largely more positive ways to try and grow their game monetarily and from a player stand point.

Unknown

If it went off alliance average then 1 man alliances would be unstoppable.

Clintman

If it was an average then you would take 2 maxed out psychopaths with full 230 and 141 rosters and have them dominate the hell out of everything.

If it is a sum of alliance members, then the biggest and active team wins.

Looks like now matter how it is implemented it is going to cause some butthurt.

Unknown

radav wrote:

Ben Grimm wrote:

I think this will be a nice time to have a MPQ-lite (or even -free) weekend for a change. I'll probably play a little, but this is the sort of change I really don't want to encourage.

Just wanted to chime in at my distaste of how the alliance competition is being implemented. The fact that it's not an average is a pretty blatant cash grab.

Averages are an even worse idea. It would encourage only the smallest alliances. And then the forums will be swamped with "I can't believe these 2 people working together did better than 20 people working together" threads. It makes sense - if more people can coordinate and work together, they should be able to achieve more than those who go it alone.

For myself, I'm eagerly (not at all eagerly) awaiting the threads vilifying player Y b/c they couldn't afford to keep up the constant shields and that cost alliance X the top ranks.

Unknown

radav wrote:

Ben Grimm wrote:

I think this will be a nice time to have a MPQ-lite (or even -free) weekend for a change. I'll probably play a little, but this is the sort of change I really don't want to encourage.

Just wanted to chime in at my distaste of how the alliance competition is being implemented. The fact that it's not an average is a pretty blatant cash grab. The group with the largest number of people will always win out period. The football analogy made earlier makes no sense because you're talking about pure numbers. You don't see teams playing 4 vs 20. lol Anyway, with this and the "tweak" to prize structure recently coupled with the disappearance of event tokens from the Hulk event I'm pretty disheartened by the changes. I'd love to see one of these f2p games actually try to make the game more enjoyable for it's players vs. what you always see which is for them to try and find the money grubbiest way to get money from its players. I get that they have to make money and I've spent it on their game. I just don't agree with the path they're continuing down and that there are largely more positive ways to try and grow their game monetarily and from a player stand point.

I don't think it's really a cash grab because as a player, you probably save more money in the long run by just investing once into a big alliance so that you can reliably win later. This is just a plain bad decision. The only scenario I'd see it can make money is if I'm really rich and I decided to open a 20 slot alliance so that my underlings can do the work for me. But if I'm really rich, I could already buy most of the covers I need and not bother with the underlings. I remember hearing the first slot beyond 5 is 600 HP and I assume it goes up, but even if not it seems reasonable to guess it'd take 10K HP to open a maximum size alliance. If I'm willingly to spend that kind of money on the game, I might as well use it to upgrade my own roster rather than hoping someone else will do the dirty work for me.

Unknown

To solve the average case, you'd simply make it so that each member you don't have is filled with a guy who is exactly average. For example if we do it by average ranking and you got 2 guys who are #1, your ranking will be 1 + 1 + 250 + 250 + 250 / 5 ~= 150. This can work if you use rating too, though coming up with an average rating is probably more complicated. The only way to win for sure is if your 5 guys are all #1, but well, it's hard to imagine why an alliance of 5 guys who are all #1 should lose in any reasonable scenario, so all I can say is more power to them if you have such an amazing gathering of 5 guys.

Konman

Psykopathic wrote:

If it went off alliance average then 1 man alliances would be unstoppable.

Logically, you can't have an alliance of one, and implementing a minimum sized alliance for events would be simple enough.

Unknown

I think everyone will benefit from this (overall) as it's going to encourage more people to try harder and push further in events and hold their positions at the end. Which (should) mean more progression awards for everyone at the top as there will be more points.

Unknown

frozenhero1 wrote:

I for one think the alliances are a nice addition. It's not like you're forced to be in one to participate or you're missing out on any unbelievable alliance-only prizes

That would be true, if they didn't gut existing rewards and shift them to alliances. Alliances add nothing, they're another irritating hurdle and all you get is same reward. Yippie.