Suggestions

I agree with the concern that a lower bound could be seen as not valuing someone's effort.
That is not how I'd hope to see it.

In my opinion, a lower bound can also be seen as a free ticket to participate and help while being extra valuable, due to not yet counting towards the ratio. I am, however, aware that not everyone would see it so, and it has the potential to be hurtful towards players. Still, it bears some thinking I'd say, because it would give more room to avoid massive funneling. But it definitely would need to be done very delicately so no one feels depreciated.

While I do think that Dom could be more exciting, Iwould be concerned that this would:

1. Make a dom culture where, as has been pointed out before, 'small time exalters' are discourage from exalting, because then they are counted towards the population. Even if players dont' know when the active players are calculated, this would still happen, because then players would be discouraged from exalting at all.

2. Potentially make it so that players who benefit from dom, but don't participate in dom, are seen as 'freeloaders' who are riding the coattails of the dom players. I have recently seen at least one person who talked about players who open dom shops, but don't participate in dom itself. I don't want to see that encouraged as I feel that dom *should* be something players participate in because they want to.

3. Ultimately, I am not sure anything FR does would work. It isn't just the numbers of players, it is the culture of the flights. some flights become known for being 'Dom Oriented' and thus players who are competitive and like winning switch to that flight. That is simply human nature. On the flip side, players who aren't interested in dom, are less likely to join a dom oriented flight (I am not talking about players like me, who are interested in Aesthetics or lore, so would join a flight regardless of dom culture) and will gravitate towards flights less known for dom. If these players exalt dragons, they will be counted towards the flights active exalters, potentially making it so that flight will have an even harder time winning.

Since players can leave and join flights any time, this leaves some flights with few active dom participants (not to be confused with active exalters) but still many players who might exalt a hand ful of dragons in the weeks in question, while others have larger numbers dom participants.

I honestly don't know what, if anything, could be done to make it so other flights have more of a chance at getting dom, which brings me to my last concern:

4. I don't want to see a system that punishes flights with large active dom participants, because their flight wins more often, simply to allow smaller flights 'their chance' at winning. I would rather Dominance remain a competition where participation matters, and if a flight is able to pull off multiple dom weeks in a row, then they should be congratulated, rather than punished for it.


Lastly, as always, I feel a better way to go, rather than trying to 'fix' Dominance, which would be a massive undertaking, and would probably require dominance being changed several times (instead of just tweaked), go at the problem from the other end: exalting. Encourage players to exalt, and they might become interested in Dom.

However, even when encouraging players to exalt, I don't want those players to feel they have to participate in Dominance. (which is one of my biggest concerns with this, the idea that players might either feel forced to either participate in, or to NOT participate in Dominance)

@Jemadar
You raise valid concerns.
I'd like to answer your second point though: I think this suggestion would, actually, lessen the idea of free-loaders. Indeed, if you don't exalt, you don't count towards the ratio, so it impacts your flight in an even less negative way as it already does. In fact, "freeloaders" are removed here from the calculation of flight ratios, making them less of a "burden". (That said, I don't like not agree with the notion of freeloaders)

As for your third point, the system is already terribly biased towards powerful flights staying powerful flights. You might notice that neither Earth nor Light have gotten a good battle recently. That is because we're both considered too powerful to challenge, and I know it makes some dom-oriented people in Light quite sad (me included). The problem is that the current system is too punishing towards flights that aren't that dom-oriented. This suggestion offers a different way of balancing flights that doesn't punish, imo, the big Dom flights so much as it helps the smaller ones. But good Dom strategies would still be very much important in securing dominance.

@Sopheroo
Well, that's true, but not a reason imo to dismiss such concerns out of hand ^^ Though no system will ever satisfy everyone, I think

I think this is a nice suggestion and helps make Dom more fair between flights with ridiculous different population sizes xD

Although it wouldn't solve the problem of "heavy exalters" flocking towards the flight that seems to "Dom more", which is obviously part of human nature, it does even the size rate that is giving them almost certain 1rst place even over flights actively pushing that may be doing over the triple of effort but have 5 time more players. The best is that this wouldn't count non-exalters at all (and that's a huge good over the current system), which frees every player of the burden of being or carrying a flight with a non dom oriented culture.

((((Actually I was thinking about something similar, but using Average amount of Dragons or Levels exalted (over the course of 1, 2 or even longer period) by a flight instead of "total active population", in a way that the flight that exalted a bigger proportion over their average ended in top position, and thus that calculation wouldn't be statistically affected by regular profit exalters nor sporadic lore exalters, as their numbers will be part of the average or close to .0 around it. It would be more like a "who fights actually harder to grab that week" calculation, and wouldn't care too much of Dom Culture, as "always profit pushing flights" will be in equal base than "not dom oriented" ones, at least while not openly battling eachother with OoF support.

The counter side of this is that it may encourage organized attempts of "no exalting dragons" (which would be pretty similar to current in-flight and oof boarding) in preparation for a push, but making the average consider more weeks long can easily dismiss that. Also it may make dom biased towards flights that due to dom culture have really small exaltation numbers and are getting OOF help of heavy exalters, but in the long run it may even itself as heavy exalters spread statistically evenly thorough the flights (like it was in the past) or move towards dom oriented flights to participate as part of them (thus removing part of the biased % of the oof factor).)))

In resume, I support this suggestion of change in the way that Dom is calculated.

This is an interesting suggestion to rebalance dom but there's a couple significant factors:

1. Funneling is too easy and is already part of dom organization now.

All you need is to have the people doing the OOF not be your coli-obsessed trainers. Simply organize the boarders (people who empty their lairs to store dragons) as your OOF intake people. I'd guess that people who board also do a lot of fodder flipping when they're not full up on trained dragons and thus have a fairly low exalt number to begin with outside of weeks their flight goes for dom.

Funneling also happens naturally for your trainers--many of them merc for other flights and that artificially lowers exalt numbers compared to when they focus those efforts on their own dom battles.

2. Attitudes towards "freeloaders" and other people who profit from dom (discounts, entering their own OOF raffles, dom shops) without actually participating in dom (breeding, boarding, training, attending, art, etc.) may become too negative. It's already moving that way now.

One of the interesting things is that the current system (or, realistically, any other system) self-corrects over time. Between flight changes and other methods players use to join dom-oriented flights there's a two part exodus: dom-oriented players move first and people who profit from dom without participating in dom move second. The first concentrates dom "talent" and the second dilutes it.

Stray thought--would shortening the flight cooldown and lowering the cost speed up this process?

Expanding upon an idea mentioned earlier, a possible way of lessening the issue of funneling abuse might be to track the number of players that have leveled up a dragon by at least one level in the past x weeks for the ratio instead?

It doesn't fix the problem of discouraging casual players from dominance, though.

EDIT: After some more thought, I realized that this could invalidate lvl 1 / hatchling exalting if that was the only thing that someone did for dominance. I still think that tracking by leveling might have some merit though.

I think this is a smart way to balance out dominance standings, I'm glad to see it being suggested. It's a good way to replace flight size totals while also accounting for the fact that larger flights have more room for their dominance population to grow. If more people are participating, then they will have the ratio disadvantage; if less people are participating, it becomes a ratio advantage. Having more "freeloaders" not touching dominance isn't going to be a problem, since they won't be taken into account.

The biggest issue, as many others have said, will shift from "unwelcoming freeloaders" to "unwelcoming lowloaders", if such a word existed. It makes me sad to think flights may stop supporting and incentivizing newbies to participate in dominance if they can only be casual exalters. However, I also believe that flight organizers shouldn't be the only ones incentivizing a behavior that is healthy for the site's economy (any exaltation, in this case). It's becoming increasingly hard to reach out for newbies and support their efforts, as the site is now in open registration, battlestones can be very expensive and the rewards for first place dominance aren't very enticing for many.

I still like this suggestion, though. It's better than what we have now, it goes a long way towards balancing OOF support and, as I see it, it's a good first step for bigger changes. After introducing a rebalance, staff would have a great opportunity to introduce different ways of contributing to dominance, such as brewing specific items on Baldwin or maybe playing a specific game in the Fairgrounds. I think this would ease the strain on "lowloaders", as they wouldn't have to be sitting in the coli all day to feel like they're helping their team. It would be the true "everyone can dom"!

I would also appreciate a "points shop" or some sort of official mechanics to incentivize dom participation on an individual level. Staff can reach many players that dom organizers can't, in ways dom organizers can't afford to. It would also be a very good way to disincentivize any funneling strategies.


TL;DR I like this as a first step towards a bigger revamp that would make dom more fair and accessible across the board!

Maybe it's time to put dom to rest.. If we follow site lore, it seems everyone must band together soon anyway. Perhaps dom should be replaced with individual flight goals. Exalt x% of the flights dragons this week to get your 5-10-15% discount. Dom page just lists the flights in order of their number with greyed out 5%, 10%, 15% next to it, coloring the numbers as they are reached.

Sure, it still gives Earth an advantage, we could just go and buy some cheap dragons, but if other flights can get discounts too, it should hurt less?

[quote name="Jussie" date="2018-12-06 17:16:38" ] Maybe it's time to put dom to rest.. If we follow site lore, it seems everyone must band together soon anyway. Perhaps dom should be replaced with individual flight goals. Exalt x% of the flights dragons this week to get your 5-10-15% discount. Dom page just lists the flights in order of their number with greyed out 5%, 10%, 15% next to it, coloring the numbers as they are reached. Sure, it still gives Earth an advantage, we could just go and buy some cheap dragons, but if other flights can get discounts too, it should hurt less? [/quote] Truthfully, I like this idea. I have always wanted a site that focused less on PvP competition (in this case, Flight VS flight), and thus loved that Dominance was the only competitive aspect of the site (beyond the coloring/skin contests). This would potentially shift even further away from competitive participation, and still incentivize exalting. Though I don't like the % of a flight's dragons to be able to get the discounts (as a heavy exalting flight would have larger %'s for each individual user to reach, which leaves out more casual players and new players who don't have the ability to exalt the large numbers), but rather feel that once the flight reaches the numbers needed needed, the entire flight gets that discount. Perhaps to keep a competitive aspect of it, give the first flight to reach the highest discount tier a 'bonus' (perhaps a slightly larger discount: 20% instead of 15%) and going down the line. This could also potentially be used to bring in a questing system or even a site event system, where players can participate in other ways in order to fill their meter (though have exalting weighted to fill it up faster)