Alliances....ummm lets rethink placement and the prizes

Phaserhawk

So, first tournament regarding Alliances and right away a problem exists. You hand out a top tier prize for top alliances, but...any alliance founder with enough cash to get 20 members is pretty much going to win. The first change the Devs are going to have to make is to have average alliance scores, not cumulative, that was just poor design. Now, I'm not saying a large alliance shouldn't have an advantage, perhaps every 5 members, you can throw out the lowest Score in a tournament to help your average.

5 Member Alliance -- avg top 4
10 Member Allia -- avg top 8
15 member alliance - avg top 12
20 member alliance --avg top 16

That way a 5 team alliance still has as much chance to win a tournament as a 20 member alliance.

The other thing you can do is have alliance progression prizes, obviously the large alliance you have you will be able to obtain these easier, thus an advantage again, but for actually placement of the alliance, it CANNOT be cumulative score, it has to be avg, period, there is no other way.

Zifna

The suggestion of having it be the sum of the 5 highest scores is good. This way there is still an advantage to being in a bigger alliance, but you can't just zerg rush the points total.

Unknown

Too late. People have already doled out 10000+ HP in expanding alliances to get the advantage.

Under your system, it disincentivizes the need for bigger teams. Why would I make a team of 20, when I can just make a team of 5 I know will play every day and score in the 900-1000 range? Plus, the bigger the alliance the more odds you have of tripping over each other in a PvP setting. With less people, you can pretty much attack everyone.

If you took the top ten teams, and broke them up into smaller teams of 4-5, they would still be at the top of the leaderboard and push out even more teams down the reward chart.

Phaserhawk

That's why having progression rewards as another incentive would be nice. I don't know, it's a great idea with alliances, but to do just solely cumulative, without the ability to contribute HP to your alliance just seems a bit out of place, but, i'm sure thats coming.

windfallstar

Toxicadam wrote:

Too late. People have already doled out 10000+ HP in expanding alliances to get the advantage.

Under your system, it disincentivizes the need for bigger teams. Why would I make a team of 20, when I can just make a team of 5 I know will play every day and score in the 900-1000 range? Plus, the bigger the alliance the more odds you have of tripping over each other in a PvP setting. With less people, you can pretty much attack everyone.

If you took the top ten teams, and broke them up into smaller teams of 4-5, they would still be at the top of the leaderboard and push out even more teams down the reward chart.

Yup, it's better for pretty much everyone to have all the very top scores concentrated in one alliance. If anything, it's better for alliances to be as big as possible since this allows more people to get the rewards. If there are 100k players, then under the non-alliance reward structure, 1000 blue BP covers would've been given out. Under the alliance system, there's is the potential to give out 2000 blue BP covers instead. Of course, assuming that MPQ keeps growing, eventually there will be enough players that the non-alliance system would end up giving more covers.

Unknown

You could do a sliding scale. Where a team of 5 gets 125% of their points and a team of 20 gets 80%.

It's still going to favor the bigger teams, but it will make it more competitive across the board.

Unknown

Toxicadam wrote:

Why would I make a team of 20, when I can just make a team of 5 I know will play every day and score in the 900-1000 range?

Because that would give players freedom to skip/tank event, go on holidays/vacation without gimping their entire alliance. It would be a great feature for both individual player and alliance as a whole.

Kolence

Maybe the top 4/5 of scores (so someone can skip playing from time to time) average, plus bonus percentage - the more players in an alliance the bigger the bonus?

kensterr

Toxicadam wrote:

You could do a sliding scale. Where a team of 5 gets 125% of their points and a team of 20 gets 80%.

It's still going to favor the bigger teams, but it will make it more competitive across the board.

+1

Unknown

I just think that the Alliance rewards should be more ISO/HP based than splitting the 3* covers for a given event between Single Player rewards and Alliance.

Unknown

The Alliance that finished first didn't have 20 members

Unknown

jozier wrote:

The Alliance that finished first didn't have 20 members

Purely semantics. Was their size closer to 5 or 12 or 20?

For the purpose of this discussion, they were a 'big' alliance.

Unknown

Toxicadam wrote:

jozier wrote:

The Alliance that finished first didn't have 20 members

Purely semantics. Was their size closer to 5 or 12 or 20?

For the purpose of this discussion, they were a 'big' alliance.

And even in a 5 person setting they would have probably won. The top alliance were filled with the top MPQ players. If you limited the number of people in an alliance, then in the end you'd just have what is now one alliance become 4 alliances that dominate and so on, making it even harder for everyone else.

Unknown

Figure out a point system that doesn't bias based on Alliance size.

ie.

Any given event, average the participants scores of any alliance to represent the Alliance score

Another possible way people suggested is top 5 of any given Alliance, giving an edge to larger Alliance but not a guaranteed win over smaller ones. This also wouldn't penalize Alliances if members go on vacation etc.

Another way would be to change Alliance rewards to progression only. All in all the system was fair enough that you get a BP cover if you're in an alliance, almost guaranteed, but just lose out on some iso/HP

On that note, it would be a great idea to have a Progression award system for Alliances similar to the daily reward system. Perhaps a meta score for progression based on how the Alliance finishes in events.

Random thoughts - -

Unknown

jozier wrote:

The Alliance that finished first didn't have 20 members

Would bet my cents they had 5 or 6 members.

Unknown

jozier wrote:

And even in a 5 person setting they would have probably won. The top alliance were filled with the top MPQ players. If you limited the number of people in an alliance, then in the end you'd just have what is now one alliance become 4 alliances that dominate and so on, making it even harder for everyone else.

That was my point in my first post of this thread.

Unknown

Toxicadam wrote:

You could do a sliding scale. Where a team of 5 gets 125% of their points and a team of 20 gets 80%.

I'd rather see some weighted individual scores. Something like topmost scorer within alliance counts for 100% points, second one for 1/2 = 50% points, third one for 1/3 = 33,3% points, fourth one for 1/4 = 25% points and so on. This will benefit alliances that have a broad mix of players, the few top players will contribute most, the weak players won't really hurt the overall score. It also significantly lessens the difference between a five player alliance and a twenty player alliance (or a one hundred player alliance, once we get to that point).

Unknown

Honestly, if it were up to me, alliance slots should not even be a precious commodity in the first place. Everyone should be able have 20 members and then find something else to monetize like alliance boosts or something.

A lot of top alliances are done with spending. There was a spike in spending sure, but what now? Alliance slot purchasing will have gone down significantly and will likely only continue to go down unless the playerbase increases or you continue to raise the cap. 30 member, 40 member alliances? No, thank you. It's not like roster slots where introducing new characters is actually desired. It's just not sustainable imo.

I don't think the points systems need to change but if they were, I agree with ToxicAdam's proposal. I'm a believer of the mentality of a team is as strong as it's weakest link. I don't like systems that try to minimize their influence.

Tl;dr reduce slot prices, leave points alone, introduce alliance boosts/bonuses/etc.

Oh, and I forgot that the 3rd cover and 50 HP should be reinstated to solo awards. Alliance rewards should be bonus on top of the regular rewards, not taking away from it.

user311

I was kind of bummed for this event. I joined an alliance at random which only has 5 members. I wasn't sure I was even interested in playing this round because I know there wasnt any chance of us winning. But then I noticed that there was an individual tier as well. So I played along and we got like top 1500 for the Alliance and I got top 35 for myself. Not too bad I guess considering. I got about 2/3s of our score I think, maybe we could have been top 1000 with others contributing. I think that the system as is does reward the person with the biggest pockets. But I think so does the regular brackets. Those of us who havent paid any money into this game are still not going to really compete with those that have paid $$$.

Maybe just make the alliance reward tiers a little more broad, and the individual rewards more valuable.

Unknown

That would make 1-man alliances quite powerful

Unknown

ihearthawthats wrote:

Oh, and I forgot that the 3rd cover and 50 HP should be reinstated to solo awards. Alliance rewards should be bonus on top of the regular rewards, not taking away from it.

Second that. I'd even go as far as introducing an alliance currency, bound to the alliance, used exclusively for extending the alliance (not just slots, think secret hideout with lots of extension options granting perks to members). No individual rewards for alliance placement, just a reward going to the alliance itself.