Suggestions

[quote name="cheyinka" date="2018-12-06 10:03:21" ] 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! [/quote] This is an interesting issue. If we count people sending to other flights for payout to avoid registering as an own-flight exalter, then we may see more cases of flights encouraging "OOF support" during weeks where they are not pushing. However, I don't think it could be controlled based on tracking visits to the Coliseum, because the visit to the Coliseum may be for farming purposes or training permanent dragons (your own, or someone else's for a service). @cheyinka [quote name="Irien" date="2018-12-06 10:13:40" ] 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. [/quote] I definitely share this concern, and it's one of the problems that I worried about for past proposals such as opting in to Dom or only counting exalters on the current week. However, I also think that this proposal makes OOF support more balanced, hopefully leading more community involvement in battles. In addition, flights may want to make an effort to help new exalters become more enthusiastic about Dominance, and I hope that this would be the focus (instead of chastising people who want to participate). I think this concern is very real, though, and I don't have an answer. [EDIT]: I added this drawback to the first post. @Irien

@Sylvandyr
You raise a good point about the OOF support becoming maybe more central to dom, even for casual conquests. It would also change the mechanic of "profit pushing" quite a bit.
As for encouraging contribution... Maybe something to do with the number of exalted dragons? That becomes a bit harder to implement unfortunately. However, say you have tiers of exalters, where "small exalters" weigh less in the ratio than "big exalters".
However, the tuning of such tiers would probably be quite a headache to keep fair :/

How many dragons exalted does it take, in your opinion, to be considered an active "exalting" lair? For people like me, I sell almost all my dragons, wether for profit or fodder, but I have a single pair I personally exalt so the names of the hatchlings aren't changed. However, I'm not really into dom. I don't want my totals added, if I'm only exalting an average of 8 hatchlings in an 8 week period (it's been as low as 4 and as high as 12 though). Its not really fair to any flight if a single dragon exalted adds you to the pool, or a small (say it averages less than 2) ammount per week.

Edited to say this isn't a bad idea, but I think it should have some exclusions for small exalters or weigh our input much, much less.

Well, the thing is, dear fellow player from Water who prefers not to be pinged, having a lot of veteran dominance experts should be good for a flight. The problem right now, as far as I can tell, is only that Earth's "active population" (however that's calculated) is so much smaller than other flights that it's extremely difficult even to flip Earth, never mind flip and stay flipped. It's not that their efforts one week keep them in the top three spots for multiple weeks: it's that we're comparing 12000 Earth lairs, with e active exalters, to 37000 Light lairs, with l active exalters, and so Earth's e exalters have their dragons go three times farther, even though e and l might be very similar numbers - maybe Earth's e exalters should only have their dragons count half again as much! Maybe Earth has more exalters than Shadow and so Shadow should get a bonus! We don't know.

Like, if every dom team member from every flight, and every person who exalted at least 2 dragons a week over the last month, were all put into Lightning flight overnight, Lightning should be winning all the time until everyone's flight change cooldown were up: having a lot of people interested in dom should mean success. As it is, the dom organization people and the "I exalt for money" people and the "I exalt for lore" people and the "I exalt because a carpal tunnel specialist wants to see how much damage I can do to my wrists in one ninety-day period" people are scattered throughout, and if we took them into account, battles might be fairer.

I think it's at least worth a try, especially if we can somehow factor in both "seconds since this player last exalted a dragon" and "seconds since this player last trained a dragon for exaltation" (Irien pointed out to me that there are, actually, people who... like the coli? and spend time it without ever exalting a dragon? and I had totally overlooked them! so "player last won a battle" isn't how to do it, but something.)

@ArchnarQuibQuib On the other hand it seems rude to say to someone who was really proud of exalting four dragons in one week that they didn't count as a 'real' exalter - even if it benefited their flight that they didn't count, that's still kind of disheartening.

People are only going to go through the trouble of sending their dergs out of flight if they get more money for doing so. (Because of delays, inconvenience, extra clicks, and the occasional spreadsheet meltdown.) But also, on an average week, most flights aren't going to pay more than exalt price to buy dergs. You're losing money that you could save for a more epic battle somewhere down the line. I reckon if you were to poll any flight (even Earth) the preference would be frequent profit pushes scattered throughout the year, and maybe two or three epic battles a year.

So I don't see "It encourages OOF support" as a valid reason when most weeks, OOF support isn't a factor.

@ArchnarQuibQuib
The system currently counts you for existing. That is also not really fair.
The main point of this suggestion is that it is a different system, which to some of us so far looks like it would be better than the current one.
However, the idea of having a lower bound on dragons exalted needed to be counted is interesting, and could help mitigate the drawback I pointed before!

I'm actually liking more and more the idea of having this limit in place. It would encourage people to keep exalting a bit if they want, and reduce the strain on the mentality of "any help towards dominance is appreciated".

@Sylvandyr
Food for thought?

@Irien Hm, I hesitate to suggest an implementation of a "lower bound" - I don't feel that we can judge someone's "value as an exalter" in that way. If we set a lower bound, the "low output" blame bar just shifts a little higher. While it might reduce noise from exalting for non-Dominance-based reasons, I think the effect of excluding would-be participants wouldn't be worthwhile.

In my ideal Dominance scenario, anyone who wants to participate would be encouraged and have fun. No one's output would be ridiculed, everyone would believe that Dominance is fair, and anyone who participates would be welcomed. I think to solve that problem, we would need a system that enables and encourages more people to participate for more interesting reasons. There have been interesting suggestions in the past for larger overhauls.

I think this suggestion would give more flights a better shot at Dominance as an intermediate solution for a much better overhaul, but this system is far from perfect, and we should consider those flaws. We might have a case of a "pick your poison" scenario. I'd prefer to try this out and hope for the best, but there is indeed a risk of some of the concerns that have been expressed.

@/cheyinka (assuming you dont want to be pinged)

I guess that's true. It would be pretty insulting. I like this suggestion as it would, somewhat at least, potentially remove me from the current pool. I don't mind dom, but I have a busy life and don't have the time or patience to do a massive dom push. It took almost 5 years to get my custom progen and my wind mage to 25.

Though I see what you're getting at.

@Irien
I agree with you! I don't want to be counted either. I do agree this current system doesn't really work anymore. Whether we implement a system like this, or we increase the battle weariness drastically, something needs to be done.

Well, the good thing is that we have microholidays now, right? If the staff were to like this suggestion it could be implemented for one of them, and if everyone hated it it could be turned off at the next microholiday.