Suggestions

[b]The issue:[/b] Our next announced dom battle is in [i]April[/i]. There aren't even many announced conquest pushes between now and then, just a couple of profit pushes. While the top dom flights shuffle occasionally (earth, I'm looking at you), the pattern is consistent - relatively fewer people are actively participating in dominance and they're all concentrated. The ways of getting involved are limited, particularly if you don't want to dive into the world of Discord and other off-site things (if you're only dealing with one Google Spreadsheet, you're doing well!). Everything else is AH and Coli centric, and that's not your thing then Dom battles are mostly going to wash over you. [b]What I don't want to mess with:[/b] Dom is, at its core, a way to get dragons off the site. Any suggestions for this should at the very least have no negative impact on this aim, and at best encourage it. So, I'd like to present... [b]Boosts and Bonuses[/b] [img]https://i.imgur.com/AmTjQi1.png[/img] [size=2](No, I didn't nick this straight from achievements, what are you talking about?)[/size] Daily challenges pop up on the dom screen after rollover. Proportional to the number of active people in your flight, they require enough of a certain activity across the flight to unlock a temporary bonus or boost specific to that flight. [u]Boost:[/u] Dragons exalted in the next [period of time] are worth 1.5x dom points for your flight [u]Bonus:[/u] Y characteristic is now a bonus for your flight for the next [period of time] [b]Benefits[/b] Encourage use of other areas of site (in ways that typically earn money)! Limited time to earn more money or not have to train as high? [i]Better nab and exalt all those extra dragons fast.[/i] If you can't participate in Dom now, your use of FR is probably limited to staring at Scrying Workshop and weeping! Support your flight [i]with literally no social interaction[/i]! [b]Negatives[/b] The extra bonus could act as a treasure source without an appropriate sink. While it'll be broadly distributed across players, it'll have an effect. An option could be to have a bonus goal which is 'donate treasure' or to make them solely give dom-point bonuses, but any other ideas would be welcomed.

While I like the general idea - adding more to Dom than only exalting - I have problems with the boost/bonus idea:

If the boost/bonus doesn't directly impact Dom counts (by ~levels), then it is a bit useless as its effectiveness still depends on trainers' work = exalted levels. So if a flight is good at exalting due to the number of trainers they have, then the boosts/bonuses will impact them more than they would a flight that doesn't have proportionally sized trainer number. And then we're back at the start - if a flight has proportionally more trainers, they get more use of the bonuses/boosts, they place even easier?..

(Also, 'hatched nests'? They take 6 days to hatch, how can it be a daily challenge when you had to know 5 days ago that 'hatched nests' will give a boost?)

@RedWillia
Exactly what counts for bonuses would be up to the admins, those were literally the first things I could think of! You're right about nests though - it'd put pressure on people to either be nesting every day or to hold off on hatching nests.

For the other, anything that doesn't rely on people exalting isn't going to feed into the site goal of dominance - clearing dragons off the site. This is to encourage and enable participation across the board to drum up more interest in dom overall, and hey - fodder hatchies that suddenly have colour bonus are going to be worth exalting!

Hmm, but it's the whole 'indirect' help that is weird for me - let's imagine that the 'daily challenge' is Baldwin Brews?

People work hard, brew and brew and complete the challenge but the effect of their hard work depends on the trainers' work as only exalted levels count towards to dom. So if a flight with proportionally more trainers get the bonus (whatever it is), they get a boost to dom. But if a flight with proportionally fewer trainers get the bonus, it might not influence their dom standings at all - the pattern you mentioned in the first post is kept.

So I don't think that boosts/bonuses that do not directly influence dom ranking will do anything to change the current dom pattern.

@Redwillia
I think I need to reword my first bit! Human nature is what makes that pattern and I can't change that. What we can do is give more opportunities for people who don't engage well with the current form of Dom (who are mostly in non-dom-heavy flights) to participate while probably increasing dragons exalted. Hopefully, it'd also act as a gateway to more people participating via dragons as well, who knows!

I have always felt that any changes to dom should not remove or lessen the need for dragons to be exalted (as that is Dominance's main purpose), and this sounds like it might work nicely.

People have been wanting daily goals/quests for a while, and this is what this sounds like. Perhaps, instead of having it solely affecting Dominance, there could be minor awards for each goal met.

IE, a goal of 'Exalt 10 Dragons' could not only give you a 5% boost to XP gained (allowing your flight to train dragons faster), but also perhaps give you a new deity plushie/toy/doll

Earn 50,000 treasure (from any source) could give a 1% boost to exalting treasure for the flight as well as giving a wearable pile/chest of gold.

That way, people will be more likely to want to reach them, even if they have no interest in Dom at all, they will potentially want the rewards for completing the goals.

If the admins make it so that it is like this, simple, easy to complete quests, and give a bonus for completing say all 3 quests (assuming we get 3 unique daily quests per day) as well as a slightly nicer reward, then it would also encourage people to potentially use areas of the site they don't normally use.

I do agree that it would need to be balanced because it would generate more treasure especially if more people start using things like the fairgrounds, but I think there might be two larger problems:

1. How does the site notify people that these bonuses are in effect? It doesn't really do much good if the trainers don't KNOW that there is a boost to XP earned until way to late in the game to take advantage. So there would need to be a page where it lists all the bonuses active or a way to notify everyone in a flight (page would probably be better)

2. If we are talking about flight wide bonuses that individuals earn, it has to be very delicately balanced: With my examples above, to get 100% XP boost you would only need 25 (assuming my brain is working) players exalting 10 dragons each in a flight to get that bonus. To get 100% boost to exalting payouts, you would only need 100 players earning 50K (yes it would depend on these players actually getting that particular quest, but unless there were dozens of potential quests, it wouldn't be that unlikely that a good portion of a particular flight would get those quests)

So, how does the site handle stacking. If they put a limit on how high the bnous can stack, it can have the opposite effect of what is wanted: once that cap is reached, people will stop doing that particular quest (though having desireable item awards for the individual quests and/or completing the 'daily challenge' would help mitigate that)

If they make the bonuses so small that it will take a good portion of the flight to make the bonus worthwhile, then it could also cause people to say 'what is the point? It will take 500 people all doing this one quest to do anything, and I don't feel like dealing with this particular quest now'. Again, the item rewards might help mitigate this, but only if they are desireable and something that people want more than one of.

Edit because my brain just woke up: While having it across flight would be okay, I am afraid that it will be just like Dom in that those players who don't want to participate in a 'group activity' won't bother and that, again, it might discourage people from participating if they see that goal consistently not met (ie Exalt X dragons, but their flight has a proportional large number of active players who are actively against exalting and thus would never do it, no matter the bonus which places the burden on a fewer number of players across the flight to try to meet that bonus criteria).

@Sopheroo
I'm a bit confused - I don't think I said it was boring or not worth it anywhere. I just said there's a lot of people who can't or don't want to engage with it in its current form. There's been plenty of suggestions over the years about adding dom points via fairgrounds etc, but those could result in fewer dragons exalted which is why they usually get shot down.

Its certainly true that there used to be dom battles every few weeks - at the very least, conquest pushes were almost always on from one flight or another. Perhaps we need to work on a culture shift that says that you don't need to have a light sprite/multiple expensive sprites for a raffle, but I don't feel that's what I'm addressing here.

I'm looking to engage more people who don't usually participate, and encourage more flight activity (and potentially more exalting).

Okay I’m not sure the exact purpose here but I know that dom being the main thing to help the dragon economy is in a dire need of updating. I mean a dire need because I can’t see many dom pushes ever being made and the price for dragons is so low but these dragons just aren’t selling and to be honest we don’t get enough benefits for our exalt efforts. A lair discount, market discounts and whatever else we get isn’t enough to convince more players to exalt so Dom needs serious updates.

But I do not want to see dom battles affecting how soon nests hatch or breeding cooldowns because we don’t need more dragons and the purpose of exalting is to get rid of as many of these dragons as possible. And things I’d be fine with it affecting is Baldwin time and outcomes, fairgrounds(maybe), familiars, collisum (items gained/drops, chances at familiars,maybe effects), more gathering output(not turns but amount of items), and maybe some other things such as auction fees but that’s up to the admins. So I would gladly love more reasons to exalt and for others to exalt. I know more treasure for leveled dragons is a lot but oh well we need something..

But moreover I would love to have lore events to push dom every few months with maybe a special something or other or prizes be available for participation. Just something fun and rare enough that everyone gets in on it. And ‘if’ special releases came with these events they could cycle through like gems items to give them more value and push our economy with glorious lore that makes everyone exalt.

Just make exalting more worth it please. I need more reasons and incentives to EXALT them all. Them as in all those dragons I see every day.