Flight Rising Discussion

[quote name="LuminAgricola" date="2021-03-20 21:06:02" ] From what I've noticed, Nature get dom whenever we have a push, and when we're not having one, we don't. That seems reasonable to me - the effort and resources required to win dom are concentrated into particular defined time periods that everyone knows about, and our effort results in a reward. I'd claim the system was broken if we pushed our hardest and *still* couldn't get on the board, but that's not what happens. [/quote] Yeah basically. At one point I tried mass exalt training and found it too time consuming... (doesn't help that I have only 1 eliminate dragon) Now I just do without thinking of the dom system. I just don't see the point. You only get 15% off of items on the treasure mp anyways. Don't get me wrong, the discount is nice but it could be higher (like say 20 to 25%. That'd definitely motivate pushes). Though, this is just my opinion. Wouldn't be surprised if I was wrong.

[quote name="Sick" date="2021-03-20 16:53:17" ] i was defending earth's dom but also stating earth still has an undeniable advantage. you DO have to work hard but it IS easier compared to shadow or wind (not that these flights are all 'bad', but these are bigger flights and they do have a disadvantage). and i don't think anyone was insinuating earth dom is lazy. the post i and other folks have been responding to is honestly just about poor sportsmanship, like the first time i read the post i thought it the first part was in jest lol. edit for grammar [/quote] What kind of advantage are we talking about here? Because site-wise, mechanically, Earth has no advantage over any other flight. It's levels exalted/number of active players, which means if 10% of Earth exalts the same number of levels per person as 10% of Shadow, it's a draw. It's explicitly fair based on flight size. The only time it becomes unfair is with out-of-flight support... which is battle-specific and Earth hasn't been in a battle for literal years. So, until we battle again, Earth has 0 advantage. Earth is the current dom flight, like light/plague/ice were before them. That means players who want dom bonuses gravitate towards them. That's... not a site advantage though. That's just players and social dynamics. This may be what you mean by 'advantage' but I think it helps to be clear, because usually when people say advantage in games, it means something implemented by the game itself, and that just isn't true outside of the non-existent earth battles. It's even worth noting that - as we saw in the recent Light vs someone I can't remember battle, large flights also have a non-site-based advantage! With more players, there's typically more money in the bank per unit time, which means that large flights are more likely to be able to offer things like KS familiars.

[quote name="Mutation" date="2021-01-26 12:26:12" ] I've been here since 2013, and while Earth was t i n y (like, under 4000 clans still somewhere in 2014) I do not remember it ever being this bad in the early days. In the past, if a Flight was profit-pushing without competition, they would generally get on top and even got Dominance some times. Earth got dom a lot due to their tiny size of course, but it was nothing like this. Now it's just... Earth on top for 2/3rds of the year, seemingly without effort. (No hate I know it's not you awesome folks' fault... the dom system is just borked.) [/quote] this is a good point. i think as flight rising has grown, the system has become outdated. there are some flights that i never, ever, ever see on the top except for during the festivals. it isn't fair, and i'm sure staff is aware of it. we'll get there ^^

[quote name="mothscale" date="2021-03-21 10:35:01" ] Dom culture is absolutely the problem and why I hesitate in suggestions and here to agree that any given solution is going to fix Dom— in most cases, it'd just change how Dom was gamed. The thing is, say, for Wind. Someone says "I'm interested in Dom"— they're told "don't go to Wind, they're bad at Dom." It has been this way for years, since Flight changes were first allowed. Now, I've been here for a very long time. A lot of this comes from the very earliest days back before the first Dom revamp, before anyone knew how Dom worked. We genuinely were not good, and a lot of us were uninterested in the more cutthroat Dom battles of the early days and more interested in peacing out. Our Dom team is really good now, we're pushing more regularly, we won a battle against Plague! Now that Dom is overall friendlier in terms of competition, even some of us who weren't interested in the beginning (me) are having more fun with it. …But still people get told things like "don't go to Wind, they're bad at Dom," instead of people interested in Dom moving to Wind and helping out with Dom. That kind of thing (exalt-heavy flights being predetermined by users and self-selected by how often a flight has already won) and the OOF support angle where OOF dragons are going to count differently for different flights are the main problems with Dom balance, and they're not something that I think staff can fix. It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, in essence. "Don't go to Wind, they're bad at Dom," so Dom-oriented players don't move here, and Wind stays lower on the overall Dom scale of successes because we don't have as many people invested in pushing. "Go to Earth, they win all the time," so Dom-oriented players move there and the balance tips to Earth because that's where people interested in exalting are told to move. Etc. If they can, though, without making it something else that gets gamed and broken, serious props to them! I just don't think it's any sort of simple solution, and I'm fairly sure a perfect solution doesn't exist without making the game less fun in other ways (no OOF support, no flight changes.) I'd rather have today's broken Dom system than go back to that. At the end of the day, the game should be a game, and in my observations there were a lot more genuine bad feelings fostered between flights when people couldn't change flights and see that, no, it's just a flight made up of the same people as any other flight. These days Dom might be broken, but there's also an awareness that every flight's got rad people who are going to welcome new friends with open arms. Edited to fix my parentheses and to add a paragraph clarifying how community perception of a flight becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. [/quote] This is honestly exactly how I feel, and why I also hesitate to say 'ooh this sounds nice!' when people do suggest changes, because it either just seems to punish people/flights, or is something else that can be gamed by the people who are heavily into dom.

[quote name="Vendrus" date="2021-03-21 06:57:54" ] [quote name="Sick" date="2021-03-20 16:53:17" ] i was defending earth's dom but also stating earth still has an undeniable advantage. you DO have to work hard but it IS easier compared to shadow or wind (not that these flights are all 'bad', but these are bigger flights and they do have a disadvantage). and i don't think anyone was insinuating earth dom is lazy. the post i and other folks have been responding to is honestly just about poor sportsmanship, like the first time i read the post i thought it the first part was in jest lol. edit for grammar [/quote] What kind of advantage are we talking about here? Because site-wise, mechanically, Earth has no advantage over any other flight. It's levels exalted/number of active players, which means if 10% of Earth exalts the same number of levels per person as 10% of Shadow, it's a draw. It's explicitly fair based on flight size. The only time it becomes unfair is with out-of-flight support... which is battle-specific and Earth hasn't been in a battle for literal years. So, until we battle again, Earth has 0 advantage. (...) It's even worth noting that - as we saw in the recent Light vs someone I can't remember battle, large flights also have a non-site-based advantage! With more players, there's typically more money in the bank per unit time, which means that large flights are more likely to be able to offer things like KS familiars. [/quote] I think we are deviating from the point here: All flights are affected by the exact same mathematical f(x). There's no special support nor detriment nor boon to any flight (and that's Vendrus point iiac). I guess the dissadvantage Sick is reffering to is that other flight's have to deal with losing their exalt-oriented players and dom teams while mantaining a bigger population due to being still atractive to newbies and non-exalting players. ------ I would like people to leanr/remember a bit of Earth's history: Earth has always been in the top 4 Dom flights since the very inception of the game (see: Domwatch records). In the times Ice was top dom, the other flights with more placements were Plague, Light and Earth. When Plague was top, second and third were Light and Earth. When Light was top in dom, second and third were Earth and Plague, so it is kind of false to say that there ever have been times when "earth wasn't in the radar". Earth has also always been one of the flights with higher % of active players per population and higher % of veteran players and ancient lairs (see: Flight Population tracking both 2017 and 2021 surveys as well as all weekly updates), which can be atributed to active players migrating there rather than newbies registering there (FR has a retention of less than 20% overtime iirc). The little amount of newbies that Earth always catters has been atributed to the "blandness" of its aesthetics, and it is, by some, considered an advantage for Earth in Dom: it is a first barrier of entrance that keeps newbies from flattening its numbers, making easier to keep the exalt ratio high for a community of highly active exalt oriented players. In comparison all other flights do catter a higher % of newbies, at least 200% over earth, which correlates to the final sizes of the flights. As for Earth's dom history, the battles it lost were very, Very early in FR's history, 2013~2014 when Oof participation was not as huge and well organized as today: namely the Battle Royale 2 (Light win, Earth got 2nd while profit pushing against other 6 conquesting flights) And in May '14 the epic last minute flip win of Shadow that had a planed solo conquest against the mid-week impromptu push of Earth. Those are the only recorded losses of Earth in "battle". It is also notorious that just two months before that fabled loss against shadow, Earth won the Battle of the First 4 while profit pushing against Fire, Wind and Water that were properly all out conquesting, and two months later in july'14 it won the 3-way Battle of the Bay against Wind and Water, this time all out conquesting. As FR grew, started to become true another statistic that has by now removed the myth of "small flight=less people to make good dom": the organization, funding and abilities of a Flight's dom team (organizers) follows an "S" pattern, reaching an Optimal with a certain amount of population. After that, adding more people to the flight population and teams of volunteers doesn't really increase the income in funds nor the capability of the flight (it actually makes it harder to organize and reach out to everyone, like in the case of Plague), and the only thing that could further help a flight after having a good organized team is its player's culture. By 2016, when all flights had over 10k players, that Optimal amount of organizers was already reached by all flights, including Earth, making its small size not a real disadvantage, contrary to what was perceived from the exterior. By then, a big part of oof-support was for smaller flights believing them "the underdogs". By 2016 Earth was already mentioned by people in all flights as a good flight for Dom when people asked for a place to migrate to, (by that time light was just becoming the "top at dom") and it turned into a full blown migration after 2017's PvE and LvE, won by a landslide by Earth, as both "top flights" at the time (Plague and Light) didn't move Earth from first place the whole week. Since then Earth has been the Earth we know today. Ice, Plague and Light all lasted more-less than a year as "top dogs" in dom, Earth not. It was in those battles when the advantages of smaller flights were aparent: in fullblown battles against other flights, Earth and Water won by landslide as it got enough people to push as strong as possible all the while cattering the same OOF-support as the other flight, which, amplified by its size, is what makes Earth monstrous. There was the comment "bigger flight can put KS items in their raffles", well... that's not a comment that can be dropped that lightly, as if KS items were a casual in Dom fights for big flights, which is not. But anyway, if we remember EvL, both Earth and Light had 2 KS each and Earth had an extra 3 digit Imp. And in the FvL in 2020, it was a big hit in the morale of Light having to drop a last minute Bonefiend to flip and win to Fire. And lets be honest: if Fire had time to react, they would have found a way to drop a KS of their own as well... Yet it is already a very sensitive topic having to splurge a whole flight's bank (we are talking about hundreds of Billions of gems worth of money every battle, not including the rare, gut-breaking KS donation) to grab oof support. It is that amount of waste that makes the Dom rewards so lame in comparison (setting another Dom unbalance problem) and that makes players Avoid Being in Battling Flights. Players fear to be in flights that battle, so more players move to Earth: the flight that no one wants to battle, and if it fights, it wins. That way players can profit not only of having Dom regularly, but also of the other flight's pushes. And so many have moved that other flights no longer reach the Optimal conformation of their Dom teams, making them less funded and less effective, to the point that even if pushing with all their might they can't beat Earth's everyday exalting. And lets be honest, many "profit pushes that get 1st place" (like those mentioned from a pair of Nature players) are full blown In-flight Conquests spending their bank funds in IF Raffles and mercs. In the end we all know dom has become a snowballing problem. Players, that seeing that the dom scenery is being all quiet in the western (staff) front, have to migrate to have a nicer dom-oriented gameplay. After all, there's no blame in anyone, we all want to enjoy the game, we all want to enjoy dom. It is just ... insuferable having to put so much effort in funding and exalting, and blowing so much money if fighting, all of that for mere bragging rights. It is reasonable to move on and go to relax in dom oriented flights, specially earth. But then, we have to unite against the "X flight is cheap" mentality in either forums or social media whenever a flight doesn't want to offer Gems in their PBs, or if they decided "100kg total worth in the raffle and no more", or no PB and/or Raffle at all. We all agree we want dom to be more accesible and competitive for all, and is needed both from the staff (introducing a updated formula for dom) and from the communities (organizing competitions that don't splurge in oof) to push for that.

[quote name="Kydoimos" date="2021-03-21 11:45:01" ] SNIP cause too much good stuff [/quote] Our opinions align pretty exactly - I believe I've been the main proponent of 'Earth's aesthetics make it less likely for non-exalters to join for benefits'! I gotta admit I mostly posted because the 'earth has it easy' misconception is a pet peeve (people who understand the advantage is only in battles or player-driven tend to say so). There's been a few thoughts (e.g. dragons keeping the sender's flight impact for X time) but man, when it's players directly causing all the problems it makes it really hard. Even trying to address OOF impact like that would probably result in Earth players being offered more by battling flights and that's... not great either. The raffle thing is classic Prisoner's Dilemma. It would take an agreement and a lot of trust to make two flights put up a low value raffle and not drop anything last minute... on top of OOF attitudes. The only caveat I'd make is that any formula changes must impact all flights in the same way. Flight-specific changes aren't okay, because they'd devalue the effort of some players compared to others. I'm much more in favour of things that impact OOF support and encourage casual exalting.

[quote name="Kydoimos" date="2021-03-21 11:45:01" ] It was in those battles when the advantages of smaller flights were aparent: in fullblown battles against other flights, Earth and Water won by landslide as it got enough people to push as strong as possible all the while cattering the same OOF-support as the other flight, which, amplified by its size, is what makes Earth monstrous. But then, we have to unite against the "X flight is cheap" mentality in either forums or social media whenever a flight doesn't want to offer Gems in their PBs, or if they decided "100kg total worth in the raffle and no more", or no PB and/or Raffle at all. We all agree we want dom to be more accesible and competitive for all, and is needed both from the staff (introducing a updated formula for dom) and from the communities (organizing competitions that don't splurge in oof) to push for that. [/quote] I like a lot of what you've said here @Kydoimos - just because I have insight and ran the numbers on it I need to say that Water didn't bring in equal OOF support to Ice during WvI2. It was around a 70% to 30% split in the OOF raffle numbers similar to what we saw during LvF recently (Light was bringing in these numbers even before the bone fiend, might I add!). This is something a larger flight needs in order to beat one that's significantly smaller, and it happens but requires a lot of conditions to be met. I like your last point a lot! It is mostly up to all of us to continue to evolve the meta and figure out ways to play that are fun and make sense with how things are. I think that can still include big conquests (some players [i]love[/i] to participate in them, as a battling flight, even with the costs) but I'd love to see more casual-but-still-competitive fights happen. :)

@brit Indeed I do remember WvI2 battle! and I guess that it was after WvW 2019 that people started to understand and be more aware of the power of oof support and what it means in battles for different sized flights.

I do expect (and hope) to see all flight's dom communities become as active to balance it as they've been these last battles, i.e. during LvF. We all love to see and participate of the maximum hype and craziness of dom battles from time to time, a flipping board feels cathartic xD It is good that we are already seeing comments of people that are going to give extra support to water to balance the oof participation in the upcoming WvE too :D

[quote name="TheSunTheGodsSaw" date="2021-03-20 20:34:17" ] Dom is essentially at the mercy of where the heavy exalters home themselves en masse. Players are a very volatile and fluid factor in all of this. If a handicap is implemented, they will just guide themselves to the next easiest target to get those rankings and dom discount. [/quote] I agree with this! I was in Plague when Sun was a dom coordinator there and Plague dominated through a lot of planning and saving. I spent some time in Arcane as well, where I came to understand that players who aren't into dom congregate in certain flights. Many people who were in Plague when it dominated moved to Light once Light started taking over on the dominance charts. After that, many of these same players moved to Earth. I've noticed many heavy exalters who used to be in Ice/Plague/Light congregate to Earth now.