Flight Rising Discussion

lmao so many flights have been dom powerhouses, some longer than others... ah. i moved to earth to get away from dom culture. back then, earth was the 'retirement village' of fr and it's just wild to me that so many heavy exalters moved into our sleepy neighbourhood.

more on topic: serious pushes are expensive, others have mentioned it. i remember shadow going broke when i was there (and in the dom team) during a big push and i'm sure other flights do too. so what's the point in fighting so hard for dom when TWO of the things you get still involve spending money. and if your flight has gone broke getting there, then you don't have money to spend on the rewards. so what's the point?

possible rewards for winning dom that don't involve spending money you don't have:
> new hib den unlockable slots that are exclusively available for dominance. they are individual things, the more dragons you - personally - exalt, the more dom slots you can unlock. not sure if it should be only if your flight wins or just if you exalt a certain number? if it was a combination of both that'd perhaps get more people involved when their flight's doing a push. that's a wip idea

> actual free things: tokens that can be turned in at the mp for genes, familiars, apparel REGARDLESS of whether that particular item is in stock. the number of times i've had dom and gone to buy a scroll that doesn't stock for days is outrageous.

> gem tokens? gem tokens. let me buy a gem item with a token from dominance, just one, and maybe tucked away behind a high-exalt requirement idk. make them account locked? could maybe even make it like, like a gem gift card. each one worth like 500g or smth and you can cash it in for smth that price or save up and spend a few getting a more expensive thing like a gene idk. that'd be more fair than getting a token and being able to spend on either a 250g familiar or a 2kg scroll. earthdad knows if i could get gem genes for exalting my own dragons i probably wouldn't store them up for oof pushes lol.

> trading post tokens. make blossom a little less traumatising to get your claws on, eh? or higher level baldwin items that you can't get yet, just trade one in, yeah? maybe an extra pinkerton grab or smth.

> give me gilded chests. not bc they're fantastic, but bc they're FUN. fun to open, fun to sell, give me those thanks.

> maybe a dominance npc/trader that has a selection of just funky items. not necessarily 1-off like fiona or a ptw situation but like. if you're into dom you're in the coli a lot right? maybe week-long things like a boost to exp gain, increased chance of rarer drops, etc. or more recolours of battle stones

idk, i just feel that if the rewards were better more people would try to win them? someone suggested once getting dom familiars or apparel and that's a neat idea too as long as they're not flight specific (ie, you can only get them if you're in that flight) and they're not 1-off items, that could be cool too. chuck those in the dom trader? let me put some worn battle armour on my mire flier so everyone knows he carries my fodder through lmao.

I think it’s definitely both the mechanics and the culture, but the way I see it, the culture developed largely *because* of the mechanics. People start going to flights that do well. Before Earth, plenty of people moved to Plague, Ice, or Light for dom activities. I started in a different flight and moved specifically for that reason a number of years ago. That’s why I don’t blame Earth for becoming the unstoppable force it’s become. There’s not one person or even one dom team responsible for that.

But competitive dom can really lose its appeal when you (“you” as in “your flight”) spend absolutely enormous amounts of time and money, give up so many items and never even flip the board. I still exalt during pushes, but overall - there’s a reason huge battles have become more rare. What point is there to putting yourselves through all that when you have little to no chance of winning? The really invested and organized flights still do it once in a while, but it’s not as common as it used to be.

I remember when Light had trouble finding someone to fight, because we were in a similar position to Earth. No one wanted to go through that. I can’t speak for Earth, but if you move to a dom flight and then have no opponents willing to battle - it gets boring. I can’t help but wonder if that’s what will eventually drive people out of Earth. Or if casual, small dom rewards are really going to keep people invested in staying long-term. There are other factors too of course - dom doesn’t account for aesthetics or just generally a good community.

The mechanics need to be reevaluated. The rewards ought to be improved. And yeah, we should consider if the popularized system of oof supports are sustainable or adding to the problem. (That is....unfortunate but in my view, likely.)

But unless/until the mechanics get revamped, anything else is just - not going to be terribly effective imo. Big battles are going to stay relatively infrequent compared to what they used to be.

Kind of an aside, but imo Earth's major advantage is being brown.

Ice, Light and Plague have pretty popular aesthetics and eye colour. That means that aesthetic and breeding-focussed people are relatively willing to switch to those flights to reap the Dom rewards.

Earth has easily the least popular aesthetic and eye colour, so the population is mainly limited to people who actively enjoy it or don't care about matching and breeding. That means that as it became established as a powerhouse, the population didn't balance out with less exalty people like it did with the others.

I wouldn't be surprised if Earth didn't drop off the top eventually, but imo it's got more longevity simple by being Earth.

[quote name="Stellori" date="2021-01-27 03:24:11" ] [quote name="Valemora" date="2021-01-26 13:01:37" ] And as for the size... in the recent Light vs Fire battle Light won, despite being way larger. There were lots of flips, true, but still - a much bigger flight won. Size matters, but it doesn't guarantee a win. [/quote] And that was also due to out-of-flight support too... we were flipping with them until they threw some KS thing in their raffle. Out-of-flight support does make it harder to code things to be more "fair". [/quote] Just an aside, but I will also say that I was paying attention to raffle spreadsheet numbers and Light was gathering ~70% of OOF raffle support all week, not just after certain daily prizes were announced. So yes, OOF support doesn't always benefit the smaller flight, and flights have both won and lost in the past with significantly more OOF support than their opponent. Anyway! More individual and group rewards would be fantastic, I would love that. I'm not holding out on it though, and the best way to influence dom culture in your flight is always going to be to get involved! People love to focus on the "battles" but there's great fun stuff happening all the time.

Reading this, it makes me think that the heavy exalters are clearly controlling dominate mechanics, which affects the economy in turn. Since Earth is currently the center of dominance, the other flights only receive dominance on scheduled pushes, which doesn't happen often.
I think if we want to balance out dominance, we'll have to increase the rewards. In earlier comments, I liked the idea of getting chest. Maybe the flight that get 2nd and 3rd place can get several treasure chests, probably iron. The winner could get a gilded chest.
I'm not saying this would fix everything, but I know that I for one would start exalting and training fodder regularly if the rewards were greater.

Honestly I don't think throwing more exclusive 'prizes' into the mix for the winning flights would 'fix' the problem. It would, actually, probably make it worse, because players would want those discounts, and flock to the flight that consistently gets them.

The only potential for it to make it better is if non-exalting players decided to flock to earth en masse, and thus making earth a much larger flight. Even that would be iffy. They would still have a large proportion of the heavy exalters on site, and many players simply wouldn't move because they aren't into exalting, so they are likely into aesthetics, and as mentioned above, Earth doesn't have a very popular one. So, they would still have a huge dom culture, and probably a very low trickle of non-exalters moving in for the rewards.


I think the way to go would be to focus on exalting itself, and make that more enticing.

Exalting shop, rewards randomly given when exalting, even individual tiered 'goals' that players can achieve weekly (Exalt X dragons and get Y reward, Exalt Y dragons and get Z Reward etc..), etc... one or more of these things would be good, though I have to say no to clanbound items. Just as I dislike the breeding only aspect of natural eyes, because not everyone likes to breed, Not everyone is going to want to exalt, and I don't think they should feel forced to because something they really want is locked behind a clanbound exalting shop. (I dislike clanbound things in general, but I like that FR is a fairly 'you don't like doing X, while you can take the long way and buy the rewards from other players' and don't really want to see it move away from that model more than it has).

More dominance rewards, in my opinion, would only increase the 'fix dom' and 'dom is unfair' threads, because many players wouldn't want to move to win dom, they would want their flight to obtain dom.

i do think it'd be best if any dom-shop items aren't clanbound. i like that fr generally lets you buy anything through other means (ex. gems can be bought for treasure from other players).

on top of blocking the items from users who simply don't care about dom (& it's fine that they don't care about dom), users who dorm dragons/etc are also critical to dom and an exalt-only, clanbound system would not reward them, while also not allowing them to purchase/be gifted the items from other players.

i don't think fr could have a system account for such things, but not having the items be clanbound would allow players to work around it while also encouraging exalting in general.

but overall--support your flight! help with dom!