First time poster here - question for DEVs and the community

Unknown

Hey guys really enjoy the game. Really concerned about the direction of alliances here is why....

So if I want to play with a smaller group of friends say 3-5...there will be no chance of every gaining bonus awards because we are not in a 13 person alliance. Cumulative Points seems like a really bad idea here as it forces you into a large alliance to even stand a chance at awards. Instead of awarding a talented smaller group of players...

This is my first time post as I am not one of those guys to "tee off" on the DEVs or go Hulk Smash on the forums. But I think the amount of riding the coat tails of other players in large alliances needs to be addressed or at least an explanation behind the decision to score it this way would be great thanks for your time love the game.

If IceX could fire off and educated / humorous response that would've great!

NorthernPolarity

What would your reward structure be in place of this? If you made it an average of the points, then there wouldn't be a reason to even join an alliance since you can just be in a 1-man alliance and play as if you weren't in an alliance at all. It also wouldn't be fairer to the larger alliances since it's a lot harder to coordinate a group of say 10 people than it is to coordinate a group of 3. I think what we're seeing here is that out of the simpler ways to implement a scoring algorithm (average of cumulative), this one makes more sense. It does kind of suck for smaller alliances though, which is why I think that they should make the rewards less meaningful. You should still be able to reach the HP awards though: it's just the BP cover that you're missing out on, which is annoying.

Unknown

RyanJ wrote:

Hey guys really enjoy the game. Really concerned about the direction of alliances here is why....

So if I want to play with a smaller group of friends say 3-5...there will be no chance of every gaining bonus awards because we are not in a 13 person alliance. Cumulative Points seems like a really bad idea here as it forces you into a large alliance to even stand a chance at awards. Instead of awarding a talented smaller group of players...

This is my first time post as I am not one of those guys to "tee off" on the DEVs or go Hulk Smash on the forums. But I think the amount of riding the coat tails of other players in large alliances needs to be addressed or at least an explanation behind the decision to score it this way would be great thanks for your time love the game.

If IceX could fire off and educated / humorous response that would've great!

I really wouldn't worry too much about it, Ryan. This is literally the first time one of these alliance events have gone in production. I'm not sure how long you've been playing, but as someone that's been here for awhile, I can assure you that things change quickly when they aren't working. Demiurge doesn't want to scare off customers, they're just trying to freshen things up by adding some new dimensions to the game. If things go in a negative direction, they will be corrected. We need to try it out a few times and see what happens. The important thing is that you communicate the results here so the devs can absorb that feedback.

Unknown

The fact that people are already replying is really cool! Thanks for taking the time to respond. Again not mad...AT ALL love the game. Just curious of the logic and the thought process and everyone's thoughts. Thanks again for the warm welcome!

Unknown

RyanJ wrote:

The fact that people are already replying is really cool! Thanks for taking the time to respond. Again not mad...AT ALL love the game. Just curious of the logic and the thought process and everyone's thoughts. Thanks again for the warm welcome!

I think it would be better for alliances in general, as I mentioned in the heroes pvp thread, it would be better if such valuable covers weren't awarded for alliance placement. Leave our regular awards alone and make alliance placement a small bonus so that top alliances are still rewarded but are not getting such a huge boost over smaller alliances.

Hadronic

NorthernPolarity wrote:

What would your reward structure be in place of this? If you made it an average of the points, then there wouldn't be a reason to even join an alliance since you can just be in a 1-man alliance and play as if you weren't in an alliance at all. It also wouldn't be fairer to the larger alliances since it's a lot harder to coordinate a group of say 10 people than it is to coordinate a group of 3. I think what we're seeing here is that out of the simpler ways to implement a scoring algorithm (average of cumulative), this one makes more sense. It does kind of suck for smaller alliances though, which is why I think that they should make the rewards less meaningful. You should still be able to reach the HP awards though: it's just the BP cover that you're missing out on, which is annoying.

How about a cumulative total that is weighted by your rank within the alliance. For Example, the top 5 highest scoring members would have their score contribute to the total with 100% weight. The next 5 would contribute only 50% of their score to the total. The next 5 would contribute only 25% of their score to the total. And the lowest 5 would contribute only 10% of their score to the total. This would still give an advantage to increasing the size of the alliance roster, but with diminishing returns.

IceIX

Jachdo wrote:

I really wouldn't worry too much about it, Ryan. This is literally the first time one of these alliance events have gone in production. I'm not sure how long you've been playing, but as someone that's been here for awhile, I can assure you that things change quickly when they aren't working. Demiurge doesn't want to scare off customers, they're just trying to freshen things up by adding some new dimensions to the game. If things go in a negative direction, they will be corrected. We need to try it out a few times and see what happens. The important thing is that you communicate the results here so the devs can absorb that feedback.

As a more official response, double precisely what Jachdo just said 100%. Feedback is definitely welcome and we take in all the input that comes in through forums, social media, tickets, etc and add it to our data based forms of feedback. As a result, we're always tweaking things for the better. This is just mark 1 of Alliance rewards and we'll make changes as necessary. Our general philisophy is to get things out in a workable state where we can turn knobs to get everything tuned to perfection. As a result, sometimes new features come out where we only have a couple knobs to twist, other times we mis-judged something ::cough::Initial scaling::cough:: and need to make more adjustments.

windfallstar

Something feels really off about being able to finish top 5 and not winning 3 covers as in previous PvP events. It turns alliance rewards from something that could be seen as a bonus in addition to regular rewards as something that has taken away from the regular rewards.

NorthernPolarity

Hadronic wrote:

NorthernPolarity wrote:

What would your reward structure be in place of this? If you made it an average of the points, then there wouldn't be a reason to even join an alliance since you can just be in a 1-man alliance and play as if you weren't in an alliance at all. It also wouldn't be fairer to the larger alliances since it's a lot harder to coordinate a group of say 10 people than it is to coordinate a group of 3. I think what we're seeing here is that out of the simpler ways to implement a scoring algorithm (average of cumulative), this one makes more sense. It does kind of suck for smaller alliances though, which is why I think that they should make the rewards less meaningful. You should still be able to reach the HP awards though: it's just the BP cover that you're missing out on, which is annoying.

How about a cumulative total that is weighted by your rank within the alliance. For Example, the top 5 highest scoring members would have their score contribute to the total with 100% weight. The next 5 would contribute only 50% of their score to the total. The next 5 would contribute only 25% of their score to the total. And the lowest 5 would contribute only 10% of their score to the total. This would still give an advantage to increasing the size of the alliance roster, but with diminishing returns.

This would definitely be an improvement on the existing system, but probably won't solve OPs problem of being competitive with his small alliance w/ friends. I guess it really depends on how hard it is to get top 100, but as long as larger alliances has some form of tangible advantage, they'll probably still dominate smaller alliances. With the way the event is structured, only top 100 gets the most important reward, and then ranks 100-2500 (which smaller alliances can probably aim for) get the next tier of rewards, since iso doesn't really matter.

Unknown

NorthernPolarity wrote:

What would your reward structure be in place of this? If you made it an average of the points, then there wouldn't be a reason to even join an alliance since you can just be in a 1-man alliance and play as if you weren't in an alliance at all. It also wouldn't be fairer to the larger alliances since it's a lot harder to coordinate a group of say 10 people than it is to coordinate a group of 3. I think what we're seeing here is that out of the simpler ways to implement a scoring algorithm (average of cumulative), this one makes more sense. It does kind of suck for smaller alliances though, which is why I think that they should make the rewards less meaningful. You should still be able to reach the HP awards though: it's just the BP cover that you're missing out on, which is annoying.

The alternative is really simple: forget yet another braindead design. Now seriously.

This whole thing smell the "Excel sheet guy":
-- how to grab more money?
-- well, let's move a deal of the awards to a thingy to a pool that is only accessible after someone shelled out a deal of HP
-- how much will it bring in?
-- let's see: for starters make the box for 20 to fill, that is far enough from the free 5, that means they'll drop beween 500 and 18k.
-- good stuff, go ahead
-- but shouldn't we provide at least some paint on this **** to mask it?
-- we can bother with it later, and will announce it as just optional and purely additional thing, nothing old really changed by it
-- but I think people will see through it and post on forum from first minute
-- I give tinikitty about forum and people