The Mental Health Break Rule: only count the top 80%

Unknown

With alliances and PVP seasons, the pressure on players to perform is greater than ever before and relentless. Demiurge, please do something like the following to help prevent burnout and retain your customers.

The Mental Health Break Rule:

Only the top 80% of a player's individual event scores are counted toward their total season score
and...
Only the top 80% of an alliance's members' scores are counted toward that alliance's total for a particular event.

This means that you can take a couple breaks per season and not screw over your alliance, or wreck your chances at season placement rewards. Alliance members would have to communicate to make sure that not too many took the same event off, but that should be simple. In my 80% example, a 20-person alliance would only get its top 16 scores counted for an event, so four members could take a break. Hard core alliances with no break-seeking members could use this, too; with four uncounted scores per event, there's room to try out probationary members without risk to the alliance.

Unknown

I think it's a great idea, and I also think they aren't going to do it. The central idea behind most of the recent changes seems to be to ratchet up the pressure as much as possible, to make the prizes only really accessible to the most hardcore and obsessive players. It's probably an incredibly short-sighted business decision, but it seems to be working for them in the short-term. It's also liable to seriously harm them long-term.

Unknown

Yep, what Ben said. When you can view your customers as disposable, you would rather have 20/20 participants in each alliance spending their HP/ISO on boosts, shields, and health packs, or buying those covers they feel they need to compete. When they inevitably burn out, there should be more to take their places. Long term players who have outgrown the need to make IAPs to keep up, are no longer all that valuable in large numbers. Sure you want a few to inspire the lowly masses as to what they can achieve, but you want them in small numbers making it look much more attractive to buy your way into success. In large numbers they may be threatening and provide a barrier to entry and discourage spending. If there's a small number of elites, you may work (or spend) hard to become one of them. When everyone's elite and you're not, you'll feel you've missed the window of opportunity and look for the next game to play (and give your loose change to).

Unknown

Yeah, I suggested this a long time ago, but that was before they revealed their 'vision' for alliances, which included kicking low performers and getting new people in for higher scores.

That pretty much makes it certain that this isn't going to happen.

Unknown

Word gets around though. Whether here in this forum or on review boards. Just reading the recent threads you can see the player base is becoming increasingly disgruntled. Myself included.

I like the idea of the top 80% rule. It would lower of the pressure to play at high levels all the time.

Unknown

Susra wrote:

With alliances and PVP seasons, the pressure on players to perform is greater than ever before and relentless. Demiurge, please do something like the following to help prevent burnout and retain your customers.

The Mental Health Break Rule:

Only the top 80% of a player's individual event scores are counted toward their total season score
and...
Only the top 80% of an alliance's members' scores are counted toward that alliance's total for a particular event.

This means that you can take a couple breaks per season and not screw over your alliance, or wreck your chances at season placement rewards. Alliance members would have to communicate to make sure that not too many took the same event off, but that should be simple. In my 80% example, a 20-person alliance would only get its top 16 scores counted for an event, so four members could take a break. Hard core alliances with no break-seeking members could use this, too; with four uncounted scores per event, there's room to try out probationary members without risk to the alliance.

I think this would be a great idea! I suggested an average system last week. But this sounds better. Not only would it give people a break, but certain people at stronger at certain times. I do very well in PVE, but in PVP's I'm still trying to climb up. So having my PVP not count against my team members because I still suck at it would be nice. While there are people on the other end of that spectrum that are great at PVP but not so much on PVE because of the amount of time you need to invest in the PVE's are generally much greater.

Unknown

i also agree and think it'd be a good idea.

Unknown

In one of the previous discussions it was mentioned that smaller alliances want all the points they can get so only counting 4 out of 5 members would actually be a hindrance. Though i suppose if is across all alliances everything would line up fairly similarly to how it is now. This seems extra important with the summer months coming.

BearVenger

I like this MHB idea a lot. I'm a fan of the lowest two days being removed from a 4+ day event.

I can "go hard every day" for a short while, maybe a few months. But I don't see myself wanting to play like that for 3 months straight and on to the indefinite future.

Unknown

I endorse this idea. People can take the occasional event "off" (they probably won't take it completely off because alliance rewards, but at least one low-scoring event won't blow their chances for a whole Season), it also means that people won't need to press so hard in events where they don't even need the prizes and so events aren't made quite so grindy for the entire player base. As we've got closer to the end of the Season it's started to go from 900 = top 10 to 900 = top 50 IF YOU'RE LUCKY, it's quite bananas.

yogi_

I think there is some validity to some of these ideas.

I more of a solo player and a little less of an alliance person. I made myself one a few days ago, just to be in something, but don't want the commitment to someone else (which I know I would feel).

I also know I am will always rank in the bottom of the alliance ranks and never have a chance with a cover. I have looked at the scores of people in alliances around my rank and I am individually scoring above multiple sets of many people. So it would be nice to be able to receive some sort of scaling / handicap upwards, but don't want to start any new crazy ideas.

Unknown

I think it's a great idea to have something built in that would allow some time off from the game that wouldn't penalize your alliance and also you place in the roster.

user311

Carnajs1 wrote:

I think it's a great idea to have something built in that would allow some time off from the game that wouldn't penalize your alliance and also you place in the roster.

What if they offered the ability for an alliance to purchase inactive roster slots? Then an alliance could rotate members in and out and the devs could make some more money for the purchase of those slots?

Unknown

I've argued against this point in other threads in pretty thorough detail. I don't feel like trying to remember and bring up every point but basically this route has a pretty significant effect on how big alliances stack up to small alliances. There's many other better routes.

Unknown

Psykopathic wrote:

I've argued against this point in other threads in pretty thorough detail. I don't feel like trying to remember and bring up every point but basically this route has a pretty significant effect on how big alliances stack up to small alliances. There's many other better routes.

Psykopathic, I'd be interested to hear more details.

On the surface of it, big and small alliances seem to be equally affected. For example, a 20-person alliance will have 16 scores count for an event, and a 10-person alliance would have 8 count. The 20-person alliance would still get double the points.

For alliances of size not evenly divisible by 5, there would have to be some thought put into a policy on rounding. I'd say that, when calculating 80% of an alliance's size, just round up. This would result in no dropped scores for alliances with fewer than five members (are there such things?), one dropped score for 5-9, and so on. You basically get a vacation slot every fifth member, which is an easy way to put it without scaring anybody off with math.

Or were you referring to the dropping of event scores for purposes of season scoring?

Unknown

As mentioned in other threads instead of a top 80%, which can be confusing or have negative impacts on <20 person alliances, make it so that only 1 in 3 events (or some other ratio) are season events. Then players can pick and choose their battles with a little more freedom. Or better yet, just do away with seasons. Did we really need another layer of metagaming?

Unknown

UncleSam wrote:

Or better yet, just do away with seasons.

I'd like that.

Assuming they stay around, though, I'd prefer the Mental Health Break rule to Demiurge making only certain events count towards the season. The problem I have with that idea is that it still produces the current undesirable level of pressure for everybody on those specific events. And, of course, the issue of which events are chosen to count towards season totals would be a divisive one. Demiurge would in effect be designating certain events as mandatory for competitive players instead of letting us decide ourselves. It also doesn't address the issue of MPQ vacations hurting alliances. I'd like to ease both alliance-related and season-related pressure.

With the Mental Health Break rule, you can choose to take any couple of events off without season- or alliance-related penalties.

Unknown

This idea seems needed. If I sat out of two events I would be dropped from my alliance, and for some reason I care about that. My addiction fueled by my alliances obsession makes me feel pretty lame. Before seasons way less people were talking about quitting. If another season starts within a week I won't participate, or at least I won't try and compete. I could have casually gotten to 5000 progression. There needs to be a tweak and although the mental health rule might not be perfect it's a hell of a lot better than the current play constantly until you want to quit model.

Unknown

A thousand times yes. Bump this until the devs listen!

Unknown

Psykopathic wrote:

Cryptobrancus wrote:

1 breather spot for every 5 members?

4 out of 5 count
8 out of 10 count
12 out of 15 count
16 out of 20 count

The reason this becomes an issue is say an alliance has 15 members. They are now being forced to only use 12 while 20
Member alliances have 16 still. So it still gives the slots for people to take breaks but it doesn't even things up for the 15-20 man alliances. It can be argued that the bigger alliances should have the advantage, they still do though. 15/15 member alliances have those 15 members to score. 20/20 members alliances automatically get their 15 best so it's still an advantage just not as big of 1.

Most alliances below like 10-12 members are typically casual anyways so the changes wouldn't effect them as much to begin with.

Psykopathic, I went looking for your arguments against this idea, and found this buried in an unrelated thread. Is this what you were referring to? Because even in your example, the 12 out of 15 and the 16 out of 20 preserves the expected score ratio of the two hypothetical alliances; the larger alliance will have a total that's one third higher with or without the vacation spots. Now, if the idea were to simply add a flat number of vacation spots to each alliance, then there would be a bad disparity between large and small alliances. But the scaling number of vacation spots preserves relative alliance performance. If this isn't the argument you were referring to, I'd love for you to direct me to the argument in question.

Moral

Drop the top. Drop the bottom. It's how many Olympic events are scored. That would toss the scores from a Kyip style bug right in the formula.