Suggestions

[quote name="Sopheroo"]Eventually, someone is gonna top Earth, and if you ask me my two cents, it's either gonna be Water, or Nature. [/quote] My bet is on Water. I've been watching this tide rising this year, should be fun in 2019 if they keep going. They're a small flight, too.

[quote name="Sopheroo" date="2018-12-10 20:48:57" ] @valoria Do you think that Light's Triple Dom was super fun for everyone else too? Or was it fun when no one was willing to fight Plague because they knew they'd lose? Or when Ice's coffers were so deep that no one really bothered either. Yeah, not winning is not fun for the 10 flights who aren't the one winning. Eventually, someone is gonna top Earth, and if you ask me my two cents, it's either gonna be Water, or Nature. But, if people just stay in their corner, afraid to push, yeah, nothing is gonna happen. Ever. [/quote] I just think there's a crucial difference between Earth and every other flight that came before it as a powerhouse. A quick glance over dom watch since it started tracking shows that earth has never been defeated when it sought to conquest, since 2014. [url=http://www1.flightrising.com/forums/sug/2584746/7#post_36681624]Graphs showing that earth has never lost a conquest since 2014[/url] On a purely number-based spectrum, light has to exalt 300% of what you exalt to win. Shadow has to exalt 600% of what you exalt to win. Presume we did LvE3. Let's say the support was evenly divided in public buys/oof raffles. Light would, to have a good shot, have to prehoard 3x what you did, plus exalt 3 times what half of 9 flights could level in a week to keep up with the ratio. And that's the flight that is perhaps the second most powerful on the site in terms of dominance. Earth has also really benefited from the power exalters moving there, as they do when the title of powerhouse shifts, making the chances for another flight even worse. Again, it's not earth's fault at all. It's just an unfortunate happenstance. But it's obvious there's some kind of flaw in the system. I think some people would just like to see something adjusted; I'm one of them.

@Sopheroo Not Valoria, but, uh... yes, I do think Light's Triple Dom was at least somewhat fun, even if not Super Fun, for at least some subset of Everyone Else. I mean a lot of Nature folks had a great time fighting us, it was down to the wire who would win, there were literal poetry battles in dom watch, it was great! Every time anybody got disheartened at someone in Nature being petty, someone else in Nature would go "hey c'mon we're not all like that have a PM full of flower food items".

Fighting Earth is not like that. Light knew, going into our battle with Earth, that we needed to prehoard as much as we could, right? and we had as a reach-for-the-sky stretch goal prehoarding 3x as much as we'd prehoarded against Plague, right? We could not do it, not because we weren't dedicated to the goal, but because we ran out of lair space in everyone else's lairs. We were down to knocking on doors and asking strangers in other flights if they'd heard the good news of JUST TAKE OUR DRAGONS PLEASE WE'LL PAY YOU. It might not be literally impossible to prepare vs Earth the way one might prepare against a more-closely-matched-in-size flight, but it's the next best thing.

[quote name="Sopheroo" date="2018-12-10 20:48:57" ] Do you think that Light's Triple Dom was super fun for everyone else too? [/quote]Well... yes, tbh. Week one of that was the Brightshine push, and Light always makes sure there are activities for oof players for our festival pushes. Week 2 was the actual festival. And since most players equate profiting to fun, then week 3 should have been an absolute BLAST because Nature jumped in the third week and Light was paying over 20,000t per level 5 dragon (I’m pretty sure Nature was paying a similarly high payouts by the end of the week). People can enjoy participating in dominance activities even if their actual flight isn’t pushing....

100% agree. Earth has an advantage specifically because it's small and people that primarily care about dom move there because of that advantage, therefore giving them a large exalter population while still maintaining a small overall population.

The ratio was suppose to help allow small flights to compete with big flights, except it's had the opposite effect of making it damn near impossible for large flights to compete with smaller ones. No matter how much you try to promote dom in your flight, if it's huge there will still be a ton of 'active' members that play the game without exalting much of anything or reading forums at all. People can play how they want but a flight shouldn't be crippled just because it has an aesthetic that appeals to a larger amount of people.

Unfortunately, aside from increasing fatigue like you've proposed I have no solution I can offer to the ratio issue that won't have...weird effects. If you change it so dominance only accounts for active members that are exalting dragons, you'll just end up with conquest fights being a ton of people funneling dragons to a very small group of people to exalt in order to abuse that ratio. Unless they were to introduce something that provided huge individual benefits for exalting dragons yourself, I can't see that working. But you can't just remove the ratio entirely because then the larger flights have the advantage.

But that's just my 2 cents, hope I conveyed my points well ;u ;
it's too late for me to be posting on the forums, wow

Ironically, afaik the only conquest loss Earth ever suffered was from Shadow. Though oof wasn't popular at that point and both were considered non-dom flights (autumn '13, I believe?)

The thing is, judging by the number of suggestion threads not just this week but for the entirety of the time I've been on the site, a substantial minority of FR players thinks (and may have thought for four years) that something is wrong with how dominance is calculated. There isn't agreement on what is wrong, though, and even when there is, there isn't any agreement on how to fix it. This is genuinely a hard problem - maybe it's not a Millennium Prize problem, but it's not as straightforward as correcting "whoever would get an ambush turn first, doesn't," at least in part because what the problem is isn't clear to everyone.

I remember being really defensive about those threads, because every battle we fought felt hard-fought, so I understand Earth folks being defensive about the assertion that they're unbeatable. I do not think Earth is maliciously manipulating the algorithms or anything like that, and I don't even think Earth isn't putting forth effort. Of course it takes work to win; last week wasn't just passive exalting. But I'm not sure that, without Lightning having had a buy thread, Earth couldn't have passively won, and that suggests there's something not quite right about the mechanic.

Here's my attempt at a suggestion: first week of fatigue behaves as normal (need to exalt 1.1x as many dragons as the week before), but fatigue begins to accrue much more dramatically afterwards and then rather than resetting at a loss, decays. If you win Week One and lose Week Two, you have 1.1x fatigue during week Two and no fatigue in Week Three, just like you didn't have any during Week One, but if you win Week One and Week Two but lose week Three, you have fatigue during Week Two (1.1x, as usual), Week Three (double fatigue, as usual), and Week Four (1.1x again, because fatigue is wearing off, not vanishing), and then you're back to normal on Week Five.

(I don't know what double / triple / quadruple / quintuple fatigue should look like, except "more", but I'm also not clear on exactly what it is now.)

The dragon worth in a small flight versus large flight also needs to be adjusted. It was a good idea to balance things out, but staff never took into account that public buys would be a thing. If most of the flight's dragons come from the 9 other flights that aren't conquesting, size doesn't matter nearly as much. At this point, it just gives an unfair advantage to smaller flights.

Well, until *someone* comes up with a solution ("wont somebody think of something" - best suggestion ever lol) it comes down to sportsmanship, and Earth has been gracious in that. Announce a conquest battle and we step aside. Pick a fight, pick a flight, announce a conquest battle. Go for it. I would LOVE to see Nature and Water push their way up, if I wasn't a pebble I'd be in Water, I started in Nature.

For now, make the best of what we got, because if FR knew the solution, they'd already have it implemented. What we have now is likely one of the best solutions available, even if it's not "fair". This one is going to be on players and the community. We're just going to have to agree on some rules of engagement with eachother. People over money. I hate to see everyone griping at eachother over a game.

Well, no, size still matters with a buy and/or a raffle: number of attendants, amount of treasure available to burn, amount of lairs in which to prehoard before it becomes necessary to go door-to-door stuffing dragons into mailboxes. So that size matters in some way is clearly important.

It's possible the problem is that the ratio itself is wrong (cf. Sylvandyr's suggestion to take number of clans that have exalted at least one dragon in the last n days rather than number of clans that have been active in the last two weeks as the number to use for the ratio).

It's possible that exalting isn't beneficial enough to individual players, or that second-place benefits aren't tempting enough. (Though I'm not sure how tempting second-place benefits could be to encourage people to exalt at a loss when there's functionally no chance of earning first. Bonus to experience points earned the next week?)

Edit: "you pick a week, we step aside" is not a solution. Scheduling dom makes conquest battles boring. Having another flight's week granted to them by the generousness of Earth's collective heart is not only boring but appalling. Light and Plague never had to say "well if you wanna fight, go for it, we'll send you our dragons instead" and that's why "There Is A Problem But We Don't Agree Exactly What Yet" wasn't as obvious when Light or Plague were considered ~the flights to beat~.