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Valor envirnment is an oligarchy

Posted: Tue May 29, 2012 10:38 am
by RPGgamer
I have seen people talking about guilds branching off into other smaller ones in later worlds to gather up active players, but in my opinion, that would eventually lower the total number of guilds since this game environment forces you to join guilds. Since most people will just tend to try and ally with the stronger guilds for protection, that just creates an oligarchy where the on,y things around are just a few super guilds and a mix of active and inactive players caught in the middle of it. It doesn't encourage competition among many equally sized and powerful guilds but just turns into a "race" to join a super guild....
This kind of hierarchical environment is just unfair to individual endevours....people should be allowed to try to go solo and earn their way to victory on their own terms without people trying to recruit them just obliterating them just because they seem strong or weaker.
I know that this isn't truly supposed to be like some kind of "single player" game, ( although it sort of technically is in a way) but there should still be functions that would allow individuals to play on a more even and fair field without without such profound solicitation of partnership with any kind of alliance or guild.
Individualism and fairness should seriously be put into consideration because I feel that people shouln't have to "conform" to this environment in order to "survive".....
It's just unfair for people that just want to enjoy and play this game and to have fun while doing so as a single individual person, such as myself.
Compulsion to change due to factors against a person's own will is not right at all.

Posted: Tue May 29, 2012 11:14 am
by Destroyer75
Thats the whole stratedgy of the game though

Posted: Tue May 29, 2012 12:37 pm
by RPGgamer
But it is not fair to new people that start their own guilds or small guilds and those with no guilds, along with those who do not wish to join any guilds at all

Posted: Tue May 29, 2012 1:48 pm
by Stuckmojo
Agree coalitions suck.
At least in the first few worlds people had the guts to fight 1:1 when you had a real beef.

Posted: Tue May 29, 2012 4:38 pm
by PwnLaw
Good thoughts, and duly noted. Alliances are a pretty vital part of the game, but we'll give some thought to what might be done for the lone wolves. I have some thoughts that wouldn't impact the core of the game, but it is going to take some time to work out.

BTW, that's what we call players that don't join guilds. Lone Wolves. I think that's a pretty awesome name even if you end up getting pwn3d. :D

Posted: Tue May 29, 2012 4:53 pm
by RPGgamer
PwnLaw wrote:Good thoughts, and duly noted. Alliances are a pretty vital part of the game, but we'll give some thought to what might be done for the lone wolves. I have some thoughts that wouldn't impact the core of the game, but it is going to take some time to work out.

BTW, that's what we call players that don't join guilds. Lone Wolves. I think that's a pretty awesome name even if you end up getting pwn3d. :D


Thank you very much for taking this matter into consideration.
I just want people to take pride in their work rather rather then "being lazy" ( no offense to anyone, just referring to the massive guilding for protection aspect.)

This is very important.

Posted: Thu May 31, 2012 6:28 pm
by randb
Excellent point, RPGgamer.

Valor designers and developers, please listen. Forget about chaos, this is the single most important issue in Valor. This game mechanics is unhealthy. It is a problem for the game and a problem for your business model. A game that does not encourage competition is NOT a game. So far my experience showed me that the art of growing and surviving in Valor is not by smart city building and war planning, but by joining a strong guild, and very often, surrendering to your stronger enemy (sometimes, just a little bit stronger) as fast as possible so that you can later turn back to slaughter your old guild mates to get more cities. I have seen very little "VALOR" in the game. People abandon world in droves because all the strong players join a massive guild and crush everyone who does not want to join. This issue does not just affect solo players, but also every guild except the biggest ones.

Again, if in a playing field there is only one player, there is no game and there is no money for you.

This game mechanics maybe harder for you to fix. But if you do not fix it, your company will not be successful.

I have one suggestion: making people switching guild HARDER and with a COST, especially when two sides are having war. Do you see WWII US soldiers surrendered to Germany and turned their guns and shot back at their follow Americans? No. The prisoners of war, once surrendered, were put in camps and lost anything for very long time. So whoever surrenders to enemy should lose most of his/her cities or soldiers. This will even the playing field. It matters a lot in wars and encourage healthy competitions among guilds.

Posted: Thu May 31, 2012 9:31 pm
by Tooltip
Personally, i don't prefer penalties for the occasional guild change. Spies and traitors have made our wars interesting.

The last spy several maganged to foil our attack on enemy crowns, and subsequently gave out locations of our empty cities.

There's little difference between an alliance with 1000 cities and a guild with a 1000 cities. The weak are crushed either way.

Darn, if forgot the fictional reference,something to do about uniting factionalized lands, but Sometimes survival trumps all. It great for lords to fight to the bitter end, but it may not be great for ones people.

Posted: Thu May 31, 2012 10:42 pm
by randb
Tooltip wrote:Personally, i don't prefer penalties for the occasional guild change. Spies and traitors have made our wars interesting.

Being spies and traitors has a cost in real life. Here there is none. If they want to be spies, pay the price.

My point is that in Valor, the strong becomes stronger and the weak becomes weaker because people can easily switch guilds. They always switch to larger guilds without any loyalty consideration. If all the best basketball players go to ONE NBA team, will there be any NBA games?

In some cases that I experienced, two guilds were fighting. One was like 10% bigger than another one. We wanted to see some epic battles. But actually what happened was that one player deserted to the stronger side because of safety concern. Then another player followed. This tipped off the balance and the smaller guild collapsed in a few days, WITHOUT any battle. This situation continuously happen everywhere. So there is NO real battle, only switching sides and slaughtering the weak.

Again, there is no game and no money if there is only one strongest player in a deserted world. The game mechanics encourages this behavior, making itself problematic.

AFAIK, some Playmesh people wonder why some top players do not spend money in the game. I am giving my answer here - they do not need to.

Posted: Fri Jun 01, 2012 2:17 am
by Destroyer75
Its just unloyal not very smart people no offence doing that if there really like that it's the guild leaders fault for getting tratiors