Suggestions

I'm really liking all these suggestions toward incentivizing not dom, but exalting. There will always be players who don't care for dom just like there will always be people who don't like PvP in games or sports. No amount of dom bonuses are going to change that, nor should they since not participating in dom is also a valid playstyle.

Exalting on the other hand isn't a competition, it's a vital site mechanic directly tied to the health of the dragon market. Encouraging more players to participate in exalting can IMO only be a good thing. I really like the idea of a currency we sometimes get for exalting dragons (think in the same way we sometimes get gems) that we can then spend at a shop with rotating merch.

I also really enjoy the idea of site wide events that encourage all the flights to exalt (and give prizes) regardless of where on the board they may land. Boss battles, stronger empowered beastclans, emperors, stuff like that.

Dom prizes and competition just aren't enough to get players who otherwise wouldn't to exalt. Exalting itself needs to be more rewarding, more people of all flights exalting (even if just for the prizes associated with exalting, rather than purposefully trying to win) would have a direct effect on the leaderboard.

There's three problems here, as far as I can see:

1) Some players just don't think exalting is worth it. Fayd's Exaltation Overhaul has really stood the test of time, but even an exalt points shop would help. Rewards for every hundred dragons exalted would be nice too. Achievements that go beyond 100 (and 1000) dragons exalted into the tens of thousands would be fantastic!

2) Some flights find it hard to encourage conquest pushes. Better second-place rewards (to encourage "trying just in case") would help; so might progress bars or percentages or some way of seeing that you're actually accomplishing something. (Light gets a lot of mileage out of "one dragon behind!" but imagine if you could see that Wind had ten scrolls in their progress bar and Shadow had nine and a half pinecones!)

3) Encouraging conquest pushes, or believing your friends that your flight is only one dragon behind, or feeling like putting just one more dragon towards the fight before you go to bed, is a lot harder when Earth can accidentally flatten a profit push and their conquest pushes are shut-outs. This isn't about competitiveness. If it's functionally impossible to prehoard enough dragons, no amount of competitiveness will help! Counting only players who actually exalt towards an activity total, and making this calculation over a period of weeks so people aren't just delivery-CR-ing all their leveled dragons to a few people to exalt, might help with this; we don't know! Altering the ratio math (perhaps by setting an upper and lower bound to the adjustment?) might help; we don't know! Making fatigue decay rather than evaporating, in the case of double/triple/quadruple/vigintuple dom, might help; we don't know! I do not think any solution to Problem #2 ("it's hard to encourage competition") will be sufficient as long as people are looking at it as "well I guess we can spend half a billion treasure on getting second".

Chiming in again cause I was talking about it on Discord with a friend and I feel like I described my suggestion better there, so I'm copy pasting it :P [quote]"The best solution I can think of is for the site to implement a Dom Shop that grants significant account bound rewards for exalting dragons and to then change the ratio to only account for lairs that have exalted dragons within a certain time frame. The rewards should be account bound and consumable/time limited, meaning if you want to maintain them, you have to be exalting dragons regularly and you can't get them from anywhere else because they're account bound. So if people wanted to funnel, they'd have to forgo significant rewards for their account for a while."[/quote] I'm fine with there being other rewards like apparel and stuff, that aren't accountbound, but you definitely need something in there that requires people to exalt things on their own account instead of funneling. This would probably also discourage a ton of OOF support like we have now, but with the increasing cost of conquest battles...that might be a good thing. I'm also not trying to say this is the best possible solution, this is just the best thing I can think of that would seem to solve the issues...in theory.

@Ototo Making it account-bound and time-limited shuts out the people who can't coli, or who just do not want to exalt dragons, though! People were upset enough about Python and Morph; this would be worse.

[quote]the board hasn't been flipped once since the week started. At least not that I've noticed. We may disagree on how to fix dominance, but I'd say it's pretty obvious dominance as a system has a problem.[/quote] But... we're having a PB and no one else is conquesting, it shouldn't even be flipping. It's broken if it _does_. Conquesting flights with oof support are never surpassed by profit pushers, even if those profit pushers are Light or Earth. I think it's pretty unfair to blame this on ratio too seeing as we're buying thousands of dragons every day to make up for fatigue and ensure our win. A conquesting flight always wins. No exception. Which conquesting flight gets on top is another matter, but this one has never been proven wrong yet.

[quote name="SilverQuark" date="2018-12-12 01:43:16" ] It feels a lot like there's a sentiment of "if no one fights hard for it, then Earth is going to get it and you have to swallow the pill". I don't doubt that there's no malicious intent in the words of people who bring forward this argument, but folks, this is what you're saying. You're saying that dominance is a generous concession of Earth as the strongest dom flight, and it really, really shouldn't be that way.[/quote] It seems like you are saying that flights deserve to win dominance without fighting for it. I don't think it should be THAT way... [quote name="SilverQuark" date="2018-12-12 01:43:16" ] Edit: three days into the week, Earth is looking like it'll get quadruple dom and not only that, [i]the board hasn't been flipped once since the week started.[/i] At least not that I've noticed. We may disagree on how to fix dominance, but I'd say it's pretty obvious dominance as a system has a problem. [/quote] Why would the board flip if only one flight is conquest pushing? As I posted earlier in this thread, over the last 2 years, a conquesting flight has NEVER placed lower than 1st place if they are uncontested. Since Arcane, Nature and Plague are only profit pushing, where the focus is more on profits than placement, it's simply unrealistic to honestly expect any of them to flip Earth who has a PB open this week.

@cheyinka
That is true, but if it's not accountbound and isn't something you have to refresh regularly it won't work with the ratio change I proposed. The entire point of making a dom shop, though, should be to make more people want to exalt dragons, because it gives their account benefits. If you make exalting more appealing, more people would be willing to do it. If coli is still inaccessible to some people, then that needs to also be addressed (like the stupid captcha things and the dang elim drop rate/prices), but if you "can't" get the rewards cause you're a casual player with less time well...people that put more time and effort into the game should get more rewards. I know that sucks to hear, but it's like saying that everyone should just automatically have all the champions unlocked for free in a game like League of Legends just cause that's fair to casual players. People that play often and regularly get more rewards.

But! Like I mentioned in my previous post, I don't think everything from the dom shop should be accountbound and time limited. I'm perfectly fine with there also being apparel and fams that can be traded. But if you could get something like an EXP boost from the shop that wears off after some amount of time, that would be a big incentive for people that do level fodder without being of concern to casual players.

I just think that to truly fix dom there needs to be a big change and there's no bandaid fix that would address all the problems.

(Sorry if there are any typos or something doesn't make sense, I'm being a bad and typing on a tablet while in class <u >)

[quote name="Sopheroo" date="2018-12-12 12:22:08" ] [quote name="Jessyta" date="2018-12-12 07:40:38" ] Why would the board flip if only one flight is conquest pushing? [/quote] ^this How is that a problem that the flight that is actually conquesting is first? [/quote] There's nothing wrong with it at all, but the fact Earth has 30% fatigue and hasn't flipped to nature once when Nature managed to flip Light over and over again when light had just 20% fatigue is a bit...broken.

[quote name="Valoria" date="2018-12-12 13:09:52" ] [quote name="Sopheroo" date="2018-12-12 12:22:08" ] [quote name="Jessyta" date="2018-12-12 07:40:38" ] Why would the board flip if only one flight is conquest pushing? [/quote] ^this How is that a problem that the flight that is actually conquesting is first? [/quote] There's nothing wrong with it at all, but the fact Earth has 30% fatigue and hasn't flipped to nature once when Nature managed to flip Light over and over again when light had just 20% fatigue is a bit...broken. [/quote]Nature was flipping with Light when we were trying for triple dom because they were conquest pushing. Nature had a lot of oof support that week. It’s unrealistic to expect a flight that has no public buy or oof raffle to flip a flight that is getting oof support, even with fatigue.