LordFirefall wrote:I'm well acquainted with how and why negative scholars are used. Here's the reality to taking away the scholarship requirement: whether its 1 more or 800 more cities, the player who has more cities can overwhelm those with less players if they can devote all their resources to troops. Scholarships are a limiting factor that allows that smaller player to at least compete. It doesn't matter if worlds are smaller or not.
That is the current state of the game and why people spend as much as they do early on in a world. Also, it is not entirely true that a person with 1 additional city can simply overrun another person given the game engine and the advantage given on defense. You are correct that someone with 800 more cities would clearly have an advantage over someone with less which is why I said the size of the world is completely relevant. On evaluating this solely on an absolute basis it would imbalance the game to a large degree. On a relative basis this advantage is smaller. I personally would love to see one person accumulate 250 cities in a 1k and try to conquer it on their own if this is the biggest drawback to this structure.
This would devalue the re-spawn of a world though.
LordFirefall wrote:I'm going to say this again - you've not played against the right guild. Sim. It. Out. It doesn't take a lot of ballistae to get through heavy defenses and knock down buildings (especially 1 level buildings). My guild has brought enemy offensives to a screeching halt with the right application of ballista.
I guess I take the stance because I have not seen any in GW other than defensive or chaos purposes. Again it may be a large mistake on many factions sides but if the "top players in the game" aren't using them on what is supposed to be the winner's platform, I think it isn't as relative as you are implying they are.
LordFirefall wrote:It doesn't add another layer though - its merely a derivation on existing strategy. Moreover, its one that sharp or seasoned players won't fall for.
Generally speaking a derivative it something new. Something that doesnt impede the seasoned players and possibly helps new players (SS rally and map) is potentially a good thing.
My whole post was based on a derivation of what is here.
LordFirefall wrote:Do some research and you will see the fallacy of your premise. You get a higher stick rate, the longer you keep a player around.
Let me clarify what I meant as I see it wasn't too clear. I think that a shorter time spent PER WORLD could potentially translate to a higher stick rate in the game overall. I think the worlds of today (lasting 3 months on average lets say) is too lengthy, time consuming and repetitive. By shortening this down (to say 6 weeks) I think you will have less inactives per world (more people likely to stick it out until the end) and also (potentially) a higher stick rate long term.
LordFirefall wrote:There's nothing saying your idea won't present ways to game the system. Depending how your method is implemented, I can think of at least three ways to game the system.
I'm not saying my idea is a panacea. With any idea there will always be pros and cons depending on implementation. Thinking of ideas is (generally) the easy part, it is following through with it and bringing it to fruition where the problems generally lie.
LordFirefall wrote:Quicker worlds don't necessarily mean more money. It could easily mean more inactives. People have a tendency to play many worlds at once, when playing quick worlds. As a result, they go inactive in more worlds as the one in which they are doing well takes up more of their time.
I think this is the message that Quark has been telling us for quite some time. The quicker worlds (1ks) are the most profitable. They also lead to GWs which are (probably) the biggest profit center to them. I think with a shorter game life per world, we would cut back on the degree of inactives. Also, a quicker world would mean people would NEED to be more active for this period of time but could make it more palatable than the current requirements.
Most of my experience is around people playing one world at a time. The majority of players I play with generally only start a second world if/when their primary becomes too boring (slow). I never considered the speed of the world to have a correlation to activity levels and do no personally see it. I will ask around more to see if people feel this way in my group.
LordFirefall wrote:Only a fool purchases speed ups to demolish buildings. Its too easy to have a neighbor drop guild and launch ballistae (yet another use for them in a savvy guild).
My point was that it COULD make it relevant.
LordFirefall wrote:It may not be of any use to you. That's not the case for many of us. Additionally, one of the portions of MCM that Quark has been working on will use the scroll bar.
I didn't say it had no benefit to me but felt my ideas expanded on these features which already exist.
LordFirefall wrote:You advocate bringing use to something you think is unused, yet you convert barbs without building an academy. Interesting.
No I was saying once I have 30 cities with academies I generally don't build anymore. In fact, once the basics are maxed out (troops, resources and wall) I do not build anything other than troops. For instance in my current world I cannot say I have queued up many buildings in the last couple of weeks (other than rebuilding walls). Sure the person that caps 1ks has a long road of queuing buildings. My idea is to make buildings (and construction of cities) have an increase priority throughout the world. At the very least all of the resources in a game would be directed towards tangible items: troops and buildings. This would mean constant growth for players that are active (either increasing points with buildings or lots of additional KST with all of the additional resources for troops).
LordFirefall wrote:If you think the diplo job is the worst job in history, you are missing many levels of strategy. This is part of my problem with your suggestion. You're not looking at the second and third tier effects your suggestion would bring.
Again just an idea for some worlds to avoid the "recruit the world" phenomena that has been going around for a while. As I said before this is simply a separate idea and should simply be viewed in isolation (and possibly deserved its own thread initially).
LordFirefall wrote:Google is your friend. It's not a secret for anyone that cares too look, listen, and learn.
Just because you can Google something, doesn't make it a good think. There a lots of things out there that people shouldn't be Googling and learning.
More to the point would be who is the target demographic for the game? It is a male age 10-30? They would likely go this route or is it the casual gamer that shops the app store and downloads the app (everybody)? I say this because the bulk of the people I play with dont check the fourms and would never Google something like this. Kids, jobs, spouses and all of the other RL things suck up too much time to go through all of this. In fact I doubt any of them know I am so outspoken here on this forum and probably never will. I agree the person maintaining a spreadsheet will look this up but is that the only Valor player we are catering too?
LordFirefall wrote:Changing a fundamental piece of the game certainly wouldn't be any easier. As to the mechanics, I can think of many easy and intelligent ways to do things with MCM and Mass Scholarship purchasing. One part of MCM is being able to apply user defined filters to the side bar. You could tag your cities that need work and do that work before you purchase scholarships. You could set a resource threshold for all your cities and purchase scholarships down to that threshold (no need to work individual cities prior). You could set it so a scholarship is purchased before resources max out (if you were doing it server side). The logic isn't hard, if you think about it. Those ideas were just off the top of my head.
As I pointed before out most of those suggestions will still suck up a significant amount of time still. Going through and changing city tabs require an in-depth knowledge of all of your cities. If we have the information similar to Aura's Blessing (population, resource level and troops in city) available in the side scroll bar this would be a lot easier but again on the scale you are talking about (800+ cities) tagging cities (and un-tagging) would still require a significant amount of time.
An auto-scholarship purchase system would go against the nature of the game (activity) and perpetuates the problem you were against of the 800 city player versus the 1 city player.
The logic isn't hard at all, it is the implementation of this where the issues arise.
LordFirefall wrote:I don't recall making a claim that the data on this thread could be generalized back to the overall Valor population. However, I'm not new to this game (been playing since W15), or multiplayer strategy games (over 30 years), and that experience says you will lose a lot of players when you fundamentally change game mechanics.
You didnt make a claim but an implication that, because three people hadn't agreed, the Valor population didn't agree. All I am saying is that Quark wasn't afraid to make these changes with TBS and shouldn't be afraid to make drastic changes again.
LordFirefall wrote:I know better than most why players have left the game (yes, I'm the guy that conducted that survey a while back). I've looked at this game from many angles, and argue based on the knowledge gained through those observations. Also, if you do some searching and reading on the forums, you'll see I'm not a "fanboy". Since I also am a GuildMaster, am in a Kakao chatroom with Ben, other GMs, and Quark staff, I can tell you Ben isn't either. Most of our opinions (GMs) are outcroppings of those of our guildmembers.
[/QUOTE]
I know all about your survey and commend you for taking a proactive role. I also apologize to you as I was not referring to you as a fanboy but rather the other users who did not present an argument but defended the game without any additional ideas.
I understand you are arguing based on the knowledge gained through the survey but consider this. Your survey is ripe with biases. The survivorship bias alone (you asked people who play(ed) the game at the time) what they would like to see and also asked people to fill out a survey on a forum that is for people that CURRENTLY play Valor. I really don’t think many people that quit Valor are coming back to these forums to look for a survey to improve the game. This means that the information gained is biased towards the current users and not actually gaining new players or getting back the players that have actually left. Unfortunately, to overcome this you would need to survey an additional 9,500 people (including those that left the game) at random.
This does pose an interesting question, is Quark looking to hold onto its (weakening) player base or try to gain a large number of players again (potentially).
In addition to this you have selection biases. Who actually logs in to take a survey and/or comment on a forum? Younger people... (I just learned how to do multi-quote thing a day ago and have a facebook I check once a month if that). Most of the people I play with wouldn't ever take that survey and would never add Valor to their facebook friends/likes. I would imagine that, if this type of marketing and demographic is what Quark was going for, the twitter bonuses would still be around. I do know about 25 people who have left recently who probably spent about $50 in gold per month each. That is $1,000/month in recurring revenue gone from a company. I don't care what business you are in but that hurts. I can say confidently that this demographic isn't what is represented in your survey...but they too would be a poor proxy for the Valor population. The reality of it is that Valor is a mobile application and (I would imagine) is/was created for broad market appeal.
Finally, your data doesn't come from a random sample. It comes from a post tied directly to you. To think that the data isn't at least a little bit biased because of this would be a bit of a leap.
I think many times (in business, life and overall) people fall into a pattern and a think tank. By not introducing new people into the GM room (which I hear is very very quiet these days) you can run the risk of data mining as well.
Been a while since I took statistics and again am a BIG advocate for change in some way but just want to point out that your survey, from the point of statistical significance, isn't very relevant. So, if someone doesn't put too much stock in it (I believe I read that Quark never said anything to your survey), there may be a reason behind this. In other words, another idea out there (not necessarily my own) is quite possibly the right now. Fortunately (or unfortunately) there are market research firms that do this but the cost to figure out something like this is probably far greater than Quark is willing to invest in Valor (now if this were Champs that might be a different story... :P)
Cheers on the stimulating discussion though. Caused me to actually use my memory a bit
[quote="LordFirefall"]I'm well acquainted with how and why negative scholars are used. Here's the reality to taking away the scholarship requirement: whether its 1 more or 800 more cities, the player who has more cities can overwhelm those with less players if they can devote all their resources to troops. Scholarships are a limiting factor that allows that smaller player to at least compete. It doesn't matter if worlds are smaller or not. [/quote]
That is the current state of the game and why people spend as much as they do early on in a world. Also, it is not entirely true that a person with 1 additional city can simply overrun another person given the game engine and the advantage given on defense. You are correct that someone with 800 more cities would clearly have an advantage over someone with less which is why I said the size of the world is completely relevant. On evaluating this solely on an absolute basis it would imbalance the game to a large degree. On a relative basis this advantage is smaller. I personally would love to see one person accumulate 250 cities in a 1k and try to conquer it on their own if this is the biggest drawback to this structure.
This would devalue the re-spawn of a world though.
[quote="LordFirefall"]
I'm going to say this again - you've not played against the right guild. Sim. It. Out. It doesn't take a lot of ballistae to get through heavy defenses and knock down buildings (especially 1 level buildings). My guild has brought enemy offensives to a screeching halt with the right application of ballista.
[/quote]
I guess I take the stance because I have not seen any in GW other than defensive or chaos purposes. Again it may be a large mistake on many factions sides but if the "top players in the game" aren't using them on what is supposed to be the winner's platform, I think it isn't as relative as you are implying they are.
[quote="LordFirefall"]
It doesn't add another layer though - its merely a derivation on existing strategy. Moreover, its one that sharp or seasoned players won't fall for.
[/quote]
Generally speaking a derivative it something new. Something that doesnt impede the seasoned players and possibly helps new players (SS rally and map) is potentially a good thing.
My whole post was based on a derivation of what is here.
[quote="LordFirefall"]
Do some research and you will see the fallacy of your premise. You get a higher stick rate, the longer you keep a player around.
[/quote]
Let me clarify what I meant as I see it wasn't too clear. I think that a shorter time spent PER WORLD could potentially translate to a higher stick rate in the game overall. I think the worlds of today (lasting 3 months on average lets say) is too lengthy, time consuming and repetitive. By shortening this down (to say 6 weeks) I think you will have less inactives per world (more people likely to stick it out until the end) and also (potentially) a higher stick rate long term.
[quote="LordFirefall"]
There's nothing saying your idea won't present ways to game the system. Depending how your method is implemented, I can think of at least three ways to game the system.
[/quote]
I'm not saying my idea is a panacea. With any idea there will always be pros and cons depending on implementation. Thinking of ideas is (generally) the easy part, it is following through with it and bringing it to fruition where the problems generally lie.
[quote="LordFirefall"]
Quicker worlds don't necessarily mean more money. It could easily mean more inactives. People have a tendency to play many worlds at once, when playing quick worlds. As a result, they go inactive in more worlds as the one in which they are doing well takes up more of their time.
[/quote]
I think this is the message that Quark has been telling us for quite some time. The quicker worlds (1ks) are the most profitable. They also lead to GWs which are (probably) the biggest profit center to them. I think with a shorter game life per world, we would cut back on the degree of inactives. Also, a quicker world would mean people would NEED to be more active for this period of time but could make it more palatable than the current requirements.
Most of my experience is around people playing one world at a time. The majority of players I play with generally only start a second world if/when their primary becomes too boring (slow). I never considered the speed of the world to have a correlation to activity levels and do no personally see it. I will ask around more to see if people feel this way in my group.
[quote="LordFirefall"]
Only a fool purchases speed ups to demolish buildings. Its too easy to have a neighbor drop guild and launch ballistae (yet another use for them in a savvy guild).
[/quote]
My point was that it COULD make it relevant.
[quote="LordFirefall"]
It may not be of any use to you. That's not the case for many of us. Additionally, one of the portions of MCM that Quark has been working on will use the scroll bar.
[/quote]
I didn't say it had no benefit to me but felt my ideas expanded on these features which already exist.
[quote="LordFirefall"]
You advocate bringing use to something you think is unused, yet you convert barbs without building an academy. Interesting.
[/quote]
No I was saying once I have 30 cities with academies I generally don't build anymore. In fact, once the basics are maxed out (troops, resources and wall) I do not build anything other than troops. For instance in my current world I cannot say I have queued up many buildings in the last couple of weeks (other than rebuilding walls). Sure the person that caps 1ks has a long road of queuing buildings. My idea is to make buildings (and construction of cities) have an increase priority throughout the world. At the very least all of the resources in a game would be directed towards tangible items: troops and buildings. This would mean constant growth for players that are active (either increasing points with buildings or lots of additional KST with all of the additional resources for troops).
[quote="LordFirefall"]
If you think the diplo job is the worst job in history, you are missing many levels of strategy. This is part of my problem with your suggestion. You're not looking at the second and third tier effects your suggestion would bring.
[/quote]
Again just an idea for some worlds to avoid the "recruit the world" phenomena that has been going around for a while. As I said before this is simply a separate idea and should simply be viewed in isolation (and possibly deserved its own thread initially).
[quote="LordFirefall"]
Google is your friend. It's not a secret for anyone that cares too look, listen, and learn.
[/quote]
Just because you can Google something, doesn't make it a good think. There a lots of things out there that people shouldn't be Googling and learning.
More to the point would be who is the target demographic for the game? It is a male age 10-30? They would likely go this route or is it the casual gamer that shops the app store and downloads the app (everybody)? I say this because the bulk of the people I play with dont check the fourms and would never Google something like this. Kids, jobs, spouses and all of the other RL things suck up too much time to go through all of this. In fact I doubt any of them know I am so outspoken here on this forum and probably never will. I agree the person maintaining a spreadsheet will look this up but is that the only Valor player we are catering too?
[quote="LordFirefall"]
Changing a fundamental piece of the game certainly wouldn't be any easier. As to the mechanics, I can think of many easy and intelligent ways to do things with MCM and Mass Scholarship purchasing. One part of MCM is being able to apply user defined filters to the side bar. You could tag your cities that need work and do that work before you purchase scholarships. You could set a resource threshold for all your cities and purchase scholarships down to that threshold (no need to work individual cities prior). You could set it so a scholarship is purchased before resources max out (if you were doing it server side). The logic isn't hard, if you think about it. Those ideas were just off the top of my head.
[/quote]
As I pointed before out most of those suggestions will still suck up a significant amount of time still. Going through and changing city tabs require an in-depth knowledge of all of your cities. If we have the information similar to Aura's Blessing (population, resource level and troops in city) available in the side scroll bar this would be a lot easier but again on the scale you are talking about (800+ cities) tagging cities (and un-tagging) would still require a significant amount of time.
An auto-scholarship purchase system would go against the nature of the game (activity) and perpetuates the problem you were against of the 800 city player versus the 1 city player.
The logic isn't hard at all, it is the implementation of this where the issues arise.
[quote="LordFirefall"]
I don't recall making a claim that the data on this thread could be generalized back to the overall Valor population. However, I'm not new to this game (been playing since W15), or multiplayer strategy games (over 30 years), and that experience says you will lose a lot of players when you fundamentally change game mechanics.
[/quote]
You didnt make a claim but an implication that, because three people hadn't agreed, the Valor population didn't agree. All I am saying is that Quark wasn't afraid to make these changes with TBS and shouldn't be afraid to make drastic changes again.
[quote="LordFirefall"]
I know better than most why players have left the game (yes, I'm the guy that conducted that survey a while back). I've looked at this game from many angles, and argue based on the knowledge gained through those observations. Also, if you do some searching and reading on the forums, you'll see I'm not a "fanboy". Since I also am a GuildMaster, am in a Kakao chatroom with Ben, other GMs, and Quark staff, I can tell you Ben isn't either. Most of our opinions (GMs) are outcroppings of those of our guildmembers.[/quote]
[/QUOTE]
I know all about your survey and commend you for taking a proactive role. I also apologize to you as I was not referring to you as a fanboy but rather the other users who did not present an argument but defended the game without any additional ideas.
I understand you are arguing based on the knowledge gained through the survey but consider this. Your survey is ripe with biases. The survivorship bias alone (you asked people who play(ed) the game at the time) what they would like to see and also asked people to fill out a survey on a forum that is for people that CURRENTLY play Valor. I really don’t think many people that quit Valor are coming back to these forums to look for a survey to improve the game. This means that the information gained is biased towards the current users and not actually gaining new players or getting back the players that have actually left. Unfortunately, to overcome this you would need to survey an additional 9,500 people (including those that left the game) at random.
This does pose an interesting question, is Quark looking to hold onto its (weakening) player base or try to gain a large number of players again (potentially).
In addition to this you have selection biases. Who actually logs in to take a survey and/or comment on a forum? Younger people... (I just learned how to do multi-quote thing a day ago and have a facebook I check once a month if that). Most of the people I play with wouldn't ever take that survey and would never add Valor to their facebook friends/likes. I would imagine that, if this type of marketing and demographic is what Quark was going for, the twitter bonuses would still be around. I do know about 25 people who have left recently who probably spent about $50 in gold per month each. That is $1,000/month in recurring revenue gone from a company. I don't care what business you are in but that hurts. I can say confidently that this demographic isn't what is represented in your survey...but they too would be a poor proxy for the Valor population. The reality of it is that Valor is a mobile application and (I would imagine) is/was created for broad market appeal.
Finally, your data doesn't come from a random sample. It comes from a post tied directly to you. To think that the data isn't at least a little bit biased because of this would be a bit of a leap.
I think many times (in business, life and overall) people fall into a pattern and a think tank. By not introducing new people into the GM room (which I hear is very very quiet these days) you can run the risk of data mining as well.
Been a while since I took statistics and again am a BIG advocate for change in some way but just want to point out that your survey, from the point of statistical significance, isn't very relevant. So, if someone doesn't put too much stock in it (I believe I read that Quark never said anything to your survey), there may be a reason behind this. In other words, another idea out there (not necessarily my own) is quite possibly the right now. Fortunately (or unfortunately) there are market research firms that do this but the cost to figure out something like this is probably far greater than Quark is willing to invest in Valor (now if this were Champs that might be a different story... :P)
Cheers on the stimulating discussion though. Caused me to actually use my memory a bit :)