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

Unknown

ihearthawthats wrote:

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 think we are far from done. Those who spent in the last 2-3 days were those who had stored HP. Wait for 1-2 weeks for people to get some HP from rewards and many more will decide to join an alliance for a chance at the third cover. If you think about it, it is worth the 600-1000 HP. If your alliance gets top 100 you will get several covers over the next months which means you won't have to spend HP to level those abilities.

Also, since there are many who spent real money or stored HP on the slots, I doubt they will change the prices or the system now. I decided to take it easy for now and be content with my 5 person alliance because I can't stand the drama, the backstabbing and the constant bickering competitive players may cause in a top alliance. Hopefully all covers will be available as prizes in solo tournaments and since I have no problem placing top 5, I will get the covers I miss from there.

Personally I would be fine with the slots cost HP if the cost was fixed to a low value, like 200-400 and they had used a better alliance system with more complex hierarchy system and ranks based on player performance and contribution in the alliance. They could even introduce alliance achievements to make things more interesting, but no. Like all things in the game, this is one more underdeveloped system.

Unknown

Moghwyn wrote:

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.

I imagine Alliance War chest and supply box. Members could add to it -- HP, boosts for starters.

In suggestions there was a great thread on having HQ for player that creates some benefits and is nice even if just upgrades a picrute like your castle in Civilization. Now instead of that we could have Alliance HQ using the same ideas.

Unknown

Moghwyn wrote:

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.

I really doubt this will happen. Since the alliance score doesn't require you to do additional work, if they offer rewards to alliances while they keep the solo rewards as they were, it would mean they give extra rewards to almost everyone. When is the last time you remember a change adding something to the rewards? The only way I can think of that would allow additional rewards is if the player had to sacrifice some of his progress for that of his alliance. For example, if the alliance score was not the sum of the members' score, but instead a % of the gained points from each match was added to the alliance score, this could justify more rewards to the players who are members of an alliance since they would need to play more in order to place high in solo ranking.

Phaserhawk

Moghwyn wrote:

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).

That is a really good idea. I second that motion.

vudu3

datmi wrote:

jozier wrote:

The Alliance that finished first didn't have 20 members

Would bet my cents they had 5 or 6 members.

I can't say what they had yesterday, but they have 17 members currently.

Unknown

If you want to do weighted stuff just do the top 5 ranking in their bracket. The highest score would obviusly be 1/1/1/1/1, and you can represent that as say 1000/(average of ranking), so a 1/1/1/1/1 alliance would show up as 1000 and an alliance with a ranking of 100/100/100/100/100 would show up as 10. This is just so that it's easier to see what the numbers mean as opposed to like 1.1234 being the highest score.

Since it's done by ranking, and you're not certain your best 5 players are always going to be the ranked the highest because competitive brackets exist, it gives an advantage for the bigger alliances that can spread out their people more and avoid the nastiest brackets. If you do top 5 score, it's pretty much always going to be the same 5 guys unless one of the guys couldn't make it or that his roster is very bad for that particular tournament.

Unknown

Only thing I didn't like was the reward curve. Seems like it's a lot harder to finish second then it is to finish 50th. Yet rewards were the same.

Unknown

Since the alliance structure was not bracketed the top tier rewards should have a range like 1-5. Then the 6-50 could make up the 2nd tier. Didn't IceIX say there were about 4000 alliances at the start of the event?

Unknown

I think the placement rewards is the thing that needs the most change. Firstly, I would just like to say that I believe the first place rewards need to be toned down, especially when in comparison to the second place prize, which is 400 Hero Points less for each member of the alliance. Second, the placement rewards need to be changed. Having 1 spot for the top reward? Sure, that makes sense. 49 spots for the second best reward, with the second and third placed alliances being thousands of points ahead of the alliance in 50th place? No, it shouldn't be like that, not with a gap that huge. I feel like it should be closer to the individual tournaments, i.e. 1st, 2nd-5th, 6th-15th, etc. That's just a quick example for how the placement rewards should be placed, since their would be almost no effort needed or reason to get into the top 5 or 3 when you'll still get the same reward for being in 50th place.

I know this is only the first ever alliance tournament, so that still leaves a lot of room for changes and improvement for the next alliance tournaments. I know D3 is great at making changes for the better, so I have faith that the alliance tournaments will soon become something that everybody sees as fair and balanced.

Unknown

I loved the alliance tourney. I think everyone in my alliance had fun with it, and I think it encouraged us to play harder for the team than we might have for individual scores. I'm pretty sure we had the fewest members of all the top ten alliances, and I think we came in second in average score per player, but first place was the same in both categories. Have you looked at Shield's roster? They will likely win no matter what metric you use to measure this thing. Face facts, the only shot any mid-tier players have at winning an alliance event is if they keep the scoring system exactly as it is, but allow alliance expansion to the point where Shield just can't recruit any more world class players!

I feel like it will be vary tough for DjangoUnbuffed to compete with Shield under any circumstances, although in a good week it could be possible. On the other hand, it would be a great idea to further segment the reward structure to encourage competition between "weight classes" so to speak. We already knew we were a 2-50 finisher, not long after the event started, I think we competed for top 10 for pride alone. If there were distinct prizes for top 1, 2-3, 4-10, 11-30, 31-50, I think it would be even more fun to know you are duking it out with neighboring alliances for a real prize tier, even if it was just some additional ISO or something.

Unknown

The thing I was thinking about though was that it doesn't necessarily matter if they have godly rosters, just that they play a lot. If you have some guy just starting out with a decent enough roster his mmr is going to be so low he can still get 7-900 points with his team. If they ever have an elite tourney or alliance members vs alliance members only it will be different but as it is now, it's not THAT big of a deal.

Unknown

Assuming the system for scoring doesn't change, they should drop most of the rewards for alliance placement. Put the 50 HP on an alliance progression reward that's reasonably reachable for a 5-man, and put like say a 5 heroic event tokens at a very high progression rating. Throw in another 5 heroic tokens for the #1 overall team or something like that. There is no teamwork right now involved and the highest alliance is just the one that happened to have the best individual players and the rewards are way out of whack for merely a collection of individuals that happen to have the same tag.

Unknown

The prize structure should just mirror the single player PvP tournaments....prizes for #1, #2-5, #6-15, etc....something along those lines.

The reward curve should be a little smoother, not 500% better between #1 and #2 and then 50% better between #2 and #100.

Also, prizes in the alliance side should not be locked out of the single player side, i.e. no more exclusive covers.

One last thing.....I don't understand the logic of moving the 50 HP award at the 500 level to alliance side only, except that it just screws over the single player or forces them even more so to join an alliance, which is basically what D3P wants to do. They should have left the 50 HP award on the single player side so they can still get it, and then made the alliance side 500 ISO so there is no double-dipping....in other words, reverse what they did.

Unknown

sms4002 wrote:

The thing I was thinking about though was that it doesn't necessarily matter if they have godly rosters, just that they play a lot. If you have some guy just starting out with a decent enough roster his mmr is going to be so low he can still get 7-900 points with his team. If they ever have an elite tourney or alliance members vs alliance members only it will be different but as it is now, it's not THAT big of a deal.

I agree about the godly character rosters. As we have all seen complained about in many a forum, Scaling and MMR pretty much allow any tier player to be competitive at events. But look at Shield's PLAYER roster. I doubt you will find many players as active as those are. I can think of maybe three guys that regularly dominate that aren't in their 18 man roster.

Unknown

I'm sure you can just sum the total playtime + HP spent on shields and you'd know who wins the alliance bracket.

Double dipping for doing exactly the same thing as single player is a bad idea. There's nothing any of these individuals did to deserve getting rewarded twice. In games such as MMORPG where there is community rewards, the best organizations work as a team, not a collection of individuals. No such distinction exist at this point, so no reward deserves to be given out because individual accomplishment is already rewarded.

Unknown

I think it should be tweaked to have more risk/reward for forming large alliance. For example, The HP/ISO rewards should be a set amount for the team to be divided up evenly. That way a 20 member alliance has 4x greater chance at accumulating points than 5 member alliance, but also gets 4x less rewards per member.

e.g Instead of #1 rank getting 500HP for each member like last event, the whole alliance gets 2500HP. With 5 members, everyone still gets 500HP. But with 20 members, everyone gets 125HP. You still get the glory, but much less reward.

You could do something similar with covers. For the ranks that give out covers, give a cover to 5 random members of the alliance. The smaller the alliance, the better chance of you getting one. But if you have a big alliance, you'll have more chance at accumulating enough points to get to one of these ranks that give out covers. So, risk/reward.

Unknown

I am not the biggest fan of the 5 base member structure. However, punishing those that spend to expand their alliances is pure stupidity. The horse is out of the barn. The game is evolving and that good thing. I think there could be a handicapping system but I have no answer to that end.

Side note: I sure do wish I was a part of Django unbuffed.

WilsonFisk

Other than the prize tier structure being out of Whack, I think the alliances work fine.

D3 is a for profit company. I wouldn't think it would be in their best interest to penalize the large alliances that have ponied up the HP for full rosters and help out the guys that don't pay in.