Suggestions

I think part of the issue is that the dominance perks just aren't worth fighting for. To have a fighting chance in a big dominance battle you need to throw away tons of treasure, and your flight better cough up some really expensive items for the raffle. And someone needs to sacrifice their time and energy too, you can't conquest casually. For all that you get... What? Some extra treasure and gathering turns, and small discounts in marketplace and on lair expansions? And bragging rights too, I guess. Not really enough for me personally to do much else than casual profit pushing.

I don't mind Earth having dom all the time. If they have the energy and motivation for it, they can have it and they certainly deserve it!

there arent any other flights doing conquest pushes, i dont see any harm in it. theyre putting in a lot of time and effort to go against the dom fatigue. it's costing them a lot of resources

let them have some fun!

I see no point in punishing flights that are able to win. Honestly, most of these threads I see about changing dom seem revolve around one thing: making it so all flights have 'fair' chances at getting dom, IE, making it so flights, other than the dom powerhouses, win even if they don't have the resources.

When flight was on top, there were threads complaining about Light. Now that Earth is on top, there are threads complaining about Earth.

Bottom line: Dominance is a competition and there is NO way to make it so that less dom oriented flights will get dom more often without making it so it is no longer a competition.

I don't even support upping the fatigue, because, at its heart, Dominance is not even a competition, but a mechanic that is meant to get players exalting dragons.

One reason why Dominance might not be 'working correctly' if it isn't, is that remember, flight changes were NOT planned, so basically whatever flight you chose at first, you were stuck with. This would have changed the dominance culture drastically, with players being forced to motivate and organize their own flights rather than move to the current dom oriented flight. However, we now have flight changes, and that allows the same thing you see in real life where players can choose their teams.

I am sure everyone has seen the cliche of team leaders choosing their teams and the ones who aren't good at whatever sport is being played are always last and taken reluctantly? The opposite happens. When team members can choose their own teams, the players who are more competitive and/or want to win more consistently will choose the team leader who is seen as more competent in that particular sport while the others will join teams more suited to their playstyles.

That is what is happening on FR. Players who are interested in Dominance will head to the team they feel is best suited for dominance. So, then that team starts winning. However, there is another part of that: when a team starts winning, players who aren't interested in dom, but interested in the benefits, will start moving to that team, making it harder for them to win dom, and then, as has happened in the past, another team will be the 'winner' and players will move to that team.

The only way to make dom truly fair is to make all flights equal population, not let anyone choose their own flights, and no flight changes. This would mean there would be no need to have a formula to make it so smaller flights can compete with larger flights. Players who are interested in dom have no choice but to either simply leave or work with the team they have, and no one could leave their one account and simply create an account in the current dom heavy flight.

They would probably have to ban OOF support as well. Because otherwise players from other teams will favor certain flights and throw off the balance of dominance again.

This is why I don't think dominance is broken, because it isn't meant to be something all flights have their 'fair share' of, but rather a competition for flights in order to get players to exalt dragons.

I honestly wouldn't mind if they came up with other incentives to exalt dragons and changed dom completely to remove the competitive aspect (but leaving the ability for flights to compete if they wanted to). I know they won't do that, but I really don't see any ways of making dom 'fair'without either punishing flights who organize themselves and work hard to achieve it, or basically making the game a lot less fun by removing the freedom to choose our own flights and change flights when we want.

[quote name="Jemadar" date="2018-12-09 07:57:04" ] Bottom line: [b]Dominance is a competition[/b] and there is NO way to make it so that less dom oriented flights will get dom more often without making it so it is no longer a competition. I don't even support upping the fatigue, because, at its heart, [b]Dominance is not even a competition[/b], but a mechanic that is meant to get players exalting dragons. [/quote] So is or isn't Dominance a competition?

[quote name="RedWillia" date="2018-12-09 08:10:12" ] [quote name="Jemadar" date="2018-12-09 07:57:04" ] Bottom line: [b]Dominance is a competition[/b] and there is NO way to make it so that less dom oriented flights will get dom more often without making it so it is no longer a competition. I don't even support upping the fatigue, because, at its heart, [b]Dominance is not even a competition[/b], but a mechanic that is meant to get players exalting dragons. [/quote] So is or isn't Dominance a competition? [/quote] Dominance is a competition but that isn't its purpose. its purpose is to get people exalting dragons. At its heart it is a mechanic that uses a competition to achieve its goals, but, I assume, the reason we have dominance isn't to bring competitive aspects to FR, but to encourage players to exalt dragons, because the admins know that players like competitions.

[quote name="Afazeria" date="2018-12-09 05:16:57" ] What is the most interesting for me is what is an actual number of active players in all flights. 1551 users are online now, but what is the rotation? How many players log in in two weeks on the site? 5k? 10k? 15k? This is the real question, how's FR doing. It can be Arcane has only 2k active players while Light, e.g. 1,5k. How to at least try to count it? [/quote] Long ago there was an study like that, and interestingly activity and average account age of a flight seemed to correlate with dom organization and success. I've been thinking about doing a new population survey myself (but I'm a busy univ student), using the User's Online page may help, although it will not let us see invisible accounts nor know for sure if displayed players are active exalters, can help to let us see which flights have highest numbers of active players at any given time and average age of these accounts, since players creating accounts to play a single day and then leaving are also a factor that drawbacks any flight in dom.

@Gaia Thank you!

Alright, so I've put together a proposal to revise the dominance system and have added it to the OP.

(1) Do away with dom fatigue and introduce a mechanic called "dom cooldown". For example: a flight that has had dom on a certain week can't have dom again until another X weeks. If the dom cooldown was, say, 2 weeks, this would guarantee that no flight could possibly get more than 1/3 of the weeks in the entire year. And if Earth gets all 1/3 of the year of dom, then fine by me, personally.

(2) Guarantee dominance to the flight celebrating a festival during festival week. Yes, I know this already happens because every flight pushes before a festival and receives support, but that's the thing: most flights need OOF support to win! This means they have to run an OOF raffle and spend money on it. Conquest pushes aren't cheap; if at least the festival week was guaranteed:
(a) All flights would, effectively, have more resources to allot a different conquest push slot during a different time of the year (because they're saving what they'd otherwise spend on conquest pushing for their festival);
(b) Paired with my other suggestion, (1), this would still allow for possible double dom pushes exactly once a year per flight - each flight could (if they want to) push for dom the week before their festival, and if they won, they would also have festival week for dom by default.
^ This of course assumes that the "guaranteed festival week of dom" overrides dom cooldown, which I think should be a given.

Please let me know your thoughts!

I don’t think there should be a cooldown or whatever to stop flights getting Dom two weeks in a row.

If flights want to put the effort in and get multiple doms they should be able to

(And I’d be saying this regardless of what flight I’m in)

@toadmonkey
Care to suggest an alternative? Because you seem to be ignoring the big elephant in the room that came up in the past five pages of this thread.