Suggestions

I support this.

It leaves room for different strategies to be implemented by a flight to try and get dominance, while balancing OOF support, flight size and capacities of each flight. It also takes into account dom culture in a flight to make it so that flights which don't have a history of being big dom players stand a chance with the right strategies, without having to carry a whole portion of their flight that is not into dominance and exalting.

The fact that dom-savvy flights tend to low-key push all the time means that their dom-active userbase is pretty much always taken into account.
All in all, I think this proposition would help make dominance fairer.

To make sure this is not abused through funneling, I would recommand keeping the exact time over which exalts are recorded hidden. Other than that, @Sylvandyr put it beautifully into words, and I agree whole-heartedly with them.

@Irien, I hadn't thought of this, but it's a great idea - if you don't mind, may I quote it to supplement my proposal? [quote]To make sure this is not abused through funneling, I would recommand keeping the exact time over which exalts are recorded hidden.[/quote] @Sopheroo I'm really sorry, I think we've drifted off to parallel planes, and I'm not sure I understand what we're talking about anymore. :(

@Sylvandyr
Yes, feel free to do so! :)

@Sopheroo
But this suggestion actually doesn't include the flight population, just the number of exalters? You have to account for the size of a flight that's fighting for dominance at some point unless you want the current handicaps to be reversed and actually make big dom-oriented flights like Light impossible to ever defeat.

Taking into account just the recent exalters make it so you only target the number of people who have a chance to be involved in dom in your calculations. So a large flight like Shadow may have a core of dom-oriented people of roughly the same size as Water's for example. Ratios would reflect that, and then for example Light vs Shadow would not be a one-sided battle because of the ratio anymore.

@Sopheroo We don't know what the proportions are, or even the totals of exalters, so we don't know what would or wouldn't work. We know that proportional population doesn't work. Would straight totals of exalters be better? Would proportion of exalters be better? I have no idea. We haven't gotten stats at all for battles in a long time, so the best we can do is "number of dragons entered for in-flight raffles", which is only an approximation. Even when we did get stats, it was "Metal Flight exalted 99999 dragons and Time Flight exalted 15959 dragons", not "1500 Time exalters and 2000 Metal exalters exalted dragons". If nothing else, taking number of clans-that-have-exalted into account would be different.

Having the exact time over which exalters are recorded be hidden, and having it be more than two weeks, would mean it would be at least more tedious to have a small number of people designated The Flight's Only Exalters. (In theory it could just be a flag on a player account, right? if your last_dragon_exalted_time = 1544116163, you count as an exalter until time() is greater than 1545782413?)

On the other hand, @Sylvandyr, I'm concerned that even with funneling-to-defeat-this-method made more difficult, this would still unfairly benefit flights where trainers send trained dragons to someone else to exalt. (Unless no flights still do that?) Possibly the check should be last_dragon_exalted_time and last_coliseum_battle_won? That would have the interesting effect of flights with lots of active mercs slipping down the rankings, since all their effort that week is going to a battling flight, which seems pretty lore-appropriate, to be honest!

I fully support your suggestion. It literally takes months for the most DOM heavy Flight, Earth, to even get out of the top 3 positions and that does not seem fair, especially because of the advantage of being a smaller flight and said flight having more veteran DOM experts. I support any way to make it to where all flights, big or small, are on a purely even battleground.

Please do not ping me, thank you.

It has been pointed to me that one drawback of this approach is that it would discourage the mindset of "everyone is encouraged to participate". In the extreme, it could lead to some toxicity around dom. I don't know how this could be mitigated.

But on the other hand, the current system also promotes the view of "freeloaders" that don't participate, so it doesn't seem over-concerning to me. I believe the community is strong enough to keep dom friendly and fun.

A lot of what bothers me abut this suggestion is is reliance on current Dom culture staying the same. Yeah, right now, OOF boarding and Public Buys are the norm. We do these because they're fun. I strongly dislike the idea of them becoming required.

(EDIT: And yes, I understand this depends on your definition of the word "required.")

And, as Irien pointed out, it promotes a culture where people who might exalt two or three dragons a week are actively discouraged from doing that because it adds to population while doing very little to add to actual levels exalted.