Suggestions

@SilverQuark

I don’t mean to ignore it, it’s just I can’t think of any solutions that a) I think would be fair and b) hasn’t been suggested already.

I’ve seen people suggest the “flight size bonus” be adjusted so smaller flights don’t get as big a bonus, which while I agree that would solve the current issue of Earth’s Dom, I’m not sure how it would work long run. I’d certainly be willing to go through trial and error to find the “right” balance, but that doesn’t mean the majority of the user base will be.

Another suggestion I’ve seen is to increase Dom fatigue, from 10% to possibly 25% (depending on what the staff thinks would be fair). Out of these two I think this would work better, since most of the complaints I’ve seen are about the consecutive Doms, not the fact Earth is currently a powerhouse and it would probably be fairer in the long run, once the Dom powerhouse changes again, as it inevitably will.

[color=indigo] I've been reading through this thread and I really like this point: [quote]Flights are deeply different in dom culture, but that doesn't mean that dozens of players burning themselves and exalting thousands of levels each during a push must resign their aesthetics and community choices, and go to the primed flight because even after all their organized efforts their flight can't pull 1st against a flight that isn't even actively pushing.[/quote] [color=indigo] As a Shadow member for 5 years, and an active shadow dom contributor for most of that time, with the exception of hiatuses so I wouldn't be counted anyways, I hate it when people give me this advice. "Oh, you like to participate in dom and are sad that your flight rarely wins? Just move to a different flight!" No, I'm not going to abandon the community I've been a part of for 5 years and the lore and aesthetics I love. It's pretty sad how hard it is for larger flights to achieve dom. Something needs to be recalibrated. Shadow managed to beat earth in 2014 but that is just not going to happen again. We have a great dom community, the problem is that the few active members we have cannot carry a flight as large as ours, and that OOF support is so unbalanced, yet so crucial to modern dom pushes. Unlike that 2014 push, which relied mainly on effort from within the flight, newer pushes have heavy emphasis on OOF stuff, which is fine. It just isn't fair that OOF submitted to earth is worth way more than OOF submitted to shadow. The way dom is done now discourages larger flights from conquesting, and competitions in general, because the smaller flight almost always wins. It also discourages casual/profit pushing, because everyone has to deal with Earth (see Lightning's push last week). Something definitely needs to change.

[quote name="Premiumhugs" date="2018-12-09 16:59:26" ] [quote name="toadmonkey" date="2018-12-09 16:16:33" ] I’ve seen people suggest the “flight size bonus” be adjusted so smaller flights don’t get as big a bonus, which while I agree that would solve the current issue of Earth’s Dom, I’m not sure how it would work long run. I’d certainly be willing to go through trial and error to find the “right” balance, but that doesn’t mean the majority of the user base will be. [/quote] To my understanding, the size bonus just evens the points from exalting (a flight half the size would get double points compared to other flights.) Lowering this would mean smaller flights would actually have to work way harder than other flights, which doesn't seem fair. [/quote] This is why it would, in theory, be a temporary fix until the powerhouse changes again. So perhaps I should have thought more carefully while writing that post because in the long run it isn't fair. I should have expressed that more clearly. [quote="Premiumhugs" date="2018-12-09 16:59:26"]Alternatively maybe a fatigue system that doesn't end the moment the flight loses dom? Say Earth wins quad dom, they'd be sitting at 40% dom fatigue. Rather than go away, next week it goes to 30%, then 20%, etc. I'd rather just see dom fatigue upped, but it's another idea.[/quote] I'd also support this solution, maybe even a mix of this and upping fatigue? The only problem I can see with it is that I don't know how long/if Dom records are tracked by the server but that should be fairly simple to change if needed, I think?

[quote name="gootarts" date="2018-12-09 19:30:31" ] Cooldown-no support. But tweaking fatigue is fine by me. I think the main problem is the original formula never thought about OOF stuff. And that's hard to measure, so there's no real solution to it. [/quote] Also, to my understanding, it also never accounted for being able to switch flights. I thought in the beginning, players were stuck in the flight they chose, so the original formula probably also never accounted for users moving to one flight in order to make it a dom powerhouse.

I'm here to express full, 100% support for a flight being given their fest week automatically. The money that goes into prizes to incentivize OOF support for a festival could then be saved for other purposes. The reason why you saw fewer versus battles in 2018 rather than previous years is because these get insanely expensive. Without getting into specifics, Plague had a hard time even being able to afford the Riot of Rot OOFR in 2018 after the way AvP wrecked our bank earlier in the year. If people want to see more conquests and versus battles, which are arguably very good for the economy, not having to spend additional money on our fest push would be a big help.

(This is without getting into the issue of flight members being too burned out by the push to enjoy the festival - RoR was miserable for me because we were understaffed with receivers and I didn't get a lot of rest and was burned out and as such wasn't super motivated to do my usual grind for fest currency. If we'd been guaranteed our fest I would have enjoyed it a lot more than I did.)

As far as dom cooldown - I don't have a problem with a flight having triple dom or even quad dom, like Light's triple dom in 2017 and Earth currently working on quad dom in 2018. I don't believe in penalizing flights for working hard, though as a member of the third largest flight (Plague) I understand the frustration of how difficult it is for larger flights to make dom. I would support increasing dom fatigue, perhaps, but not blocking a flight from having double, triple, or quad dom if they wanted to put in that kind of work against the stacking fatigue.

I'd support giving each flight their holiday week since this is something the player base has more or less always agreed on and it would allow the celebrating flight to spend their time/resources elsewhere.

I'd also support increased dom fatigue, making 3 weeks more difficult and 4 nearly impossible. Dom fatigue was put in place to prevent a flight from getting dom multiple weeks in a row, however that was before Flight change and the invention of raffles/ public buys, adjusting dom fatigue would simply be accounting for modern playstyles.

Though I don't really agree with the idea of "Giving every flight a fair share" if it leads to crippling dom flights beyond the original spirit of dom fatigue. I think more competitive flights should have dom more often because they're putting in the work to have dom more often.

I would like to see a tiered reward system for exalting dragons. I believe making exalting more lucrative on an individual basis would be better for the site economy (clears more dragons out) and would encourage more players who otherwise wouldn't participate in exalting to take part (and dominance as a result). I believe this would be enough to shake up the leaderboard without punishing players who already enjoy dom.

I find it interesting that the opinions against my proposal all came from Earth members except for one. Doesn't make them any less valid of course, but it's exactly what I expected.

I'd really like to see guaranteed dom for a Flight's festival. I think it even makes sense lore-wise.

I've wrote in a different thread that I also do support dom cooldown. It doesn't have to be weekly (as I had originally said), but biweekly would be enough, i.e. double dom is possible, but not triple dom etc. The second and third place could still be reached though, I think only the first place should be "locked" off to the double dominant Flight.

It doesn't take away from anyone because each Flight can still achieve dom, but it evens out the field, gives the same opportunities to everyone.