Flight Rising Discussion

[quote name="Astaraela" date="2023-03-19 12:27:18" ] It’s been discussed before, but it’s not really feasible. The beastclans place is based on how much the clans exalt, and it would take only one person pushing on Saturday night and exalting a decent amount to mess the entire thing up. [/quote] I did some digging on this a while back and I couldn't find any actual confirmation OR good evidence that beastclans placement is tied in any way to the number of dragons exalted by players that week. If anyone knows otherwise and can point me to it, that would be apprciated!

I swear I heard something mentioned in one of the Q&As way back about the Beastclans mechanic, but, I haven't seen anything empirical about it afaik. [s]Please stand by, Research Time![/s] Found it! @brit, this is what was officially stated about how Beastclans work- [quote name="Aequorin" date="October 13, 2014 10:23:44"] Akiri is not willing to divulge the exact mechanics behind the Beastclans, but he has said that it is both not entirely random and not a set value. [/quote] (taken from [url=https://www1.flightrising.com/forums/frd/1199916/75#post_6649551]here[/url] via this [url=https://www1.flightrising.com/forums/gde/1946354/1#post_21896840]guide[/url])

So like... that's just confirmation it's tied to something, not that it's tied to Dominance exactly. However, given how long ago it was implemented... what else onsite could it have been tied to? Crim, Swipp, Pinkerton? Tomo? I don't think Baldwin was a thing yet.

I would absolutely love to see the flights do some data-collecting together (not even a coordinated push necessarily, just, "here's what I did today" for a couple weeks), but I get the feeling it might be a bit of a moon-shot.

From what I’ve observed, Beastclans consistently place high up on the board at the start of the week and just drop off after that so it might just be a combination of total exalts + total players online for the week.

Anyway, I’d hate for a flight to get dinged out of first place dom benefits so no thanks to letting them get first.

@Renaiwom Oh, thanks for the source! The data collection initiative you're suggesting is not neccessary, [url=https://www1.flightrising.com/forums/gde/3041162/1#post_3041162]Devi has been pulling the numbers from dragon search[/url] for a few years to give us records of how many total dragons have been exalted onsite each week. [img]https://media.discordapp.net/attachments/683419813711839318/1087389903723175936/image.png[/img] What I see from this is like, no correlation. Obviously when there's dom battles (the outliers) beastclans gets third, but nobody else would lose to the money to push during a dom battle that they aren't a part of so we don't know if beastclans is easy or difficult to beat on those weeks. [img]https://media.discordapp.net/attachments/919755336523599912/928684690087493682/unknown.png[/img] Their placement looks [i]somewhat[/i] cyclical, and they (usually but not always) place high-ish on fest push weeks and then lower the week after despite the numbers of dragons exalted being pretty similar on both of those weeks typically. So basically my best guess that if it is tied to exalt data at all, it might be tied to something like median number of dragons exalted by flight? IDK? Or "not entirely random but not set" doesn't even mean it needs to be tied to what the players are currently doing, that could mean all sorts of things. For example, "We randomly generate a number that determines how hard beastclans will push. If their placement last week was below 6th, we roll that number again and take the higher one". Sorry for info dump I find this very interesting LOL

@brit No worries, I find this fascinating too. And like, I knew about Devi's project (it's one of the pings I look forward to on Sundays), didn't think about it being helpful for this!

I do think it'd be useful to know median dragons exalted by flight, but man... to do that without having data for more than who's pushing that week, that's a LOT of dragons to go through by hand to see what deities they're exalted to. One of my favorite pushes I've ever participated in was back in '16 (I think) where Light and Lightning did a data-collection push (specifically holding off exalting and seeing how long the other flight took to flip), and Idk, I just wanna do it again. Light did do another data-collection push later (on what builds were most time-efficient- spoilers, it was the Mire Flier/GLR Anticitank) but I had something going on offline iirc...

I am wondering if any useful proxy data could be gleaned by going through old Dom Watch threads and looking at where Beastclans fall over the course of a week, but I also think that nobody posts board screencaps when there isn't a fight going on, so the most interesting weeks will be underrepresented. Also the available spreadsheets for battles won't have how many dragons were exalted at that point in time...

TL;DR: I'm a scientist, I just gotta know!

@Renaiwom

Yeah if we could actually get the breakdown of dragons exalted by all flights that would be interesting but kind of impossible to do while staying within ToS and collecting the data manually. We do some little experiments in Water every once in a while but nothing on that scale.

I think somebody could spend a lot of time studying beastclans but my hunch is that it's mostly random so I don't want to do it LOL it would be too frustrating.

@brit I was thinking about this a little more, and... I think it might actually be doable, but it would require at least person to be "in on it" from every flight.

Proposed methodology:
- Each night that a flight is pushing, preferably as close to Rollover as possible, a person from that flight logs that day's exalts from their dom team's spreadsheet on a personal sheet, and also logs total exalted dragons and flight board placements (this will lead to some redundancy, but I think that's ok). Getting all the board placements instead of just top three allows for some level of accounting for other flights' activity- we would be able to see if a flight goes from 9th to 5th midweek or if there's a flight trying for third during a battle, stuff like that which Dom Watch wouldn't necessarily see. Might be useful proxy data.
- After the push is over, the data for daily percent of total exalts for their flight is added to the communal Beastclans Placement Tracker sheet. This means data doesn't leak in the middle of a push and makes the experiment a bit more ethical to propose. It also means that we won't have the direct dragon count, but that's maybe ok?
- Hopefully we can extrapolate some trends? I mean, the big unknown is gonna be Earth since they're always shoving dragons at Earthpop, but a) at least it's a known unknown, and b) I think pre-supposing that the exalt level for them is more or less the same every week is reasonable.

The one thing I'm not sure of importance is, we can directly track dragons exalted, but it's harder to track total levels exalted, and that's trickier data to ask flights for since it might fall under trade secrets.