Suggestions

[quote name="Vendrus" date="2023-12-08 11:50:03" ] [quote name="Zenzic" date="2023-12-08 09:57:05" ] The system makes the wrong assumption that more active members means an advantage in exalts. The reality is that the total number of active users in any given Flight means nothing if none of those users actually participate in Dominance efforts. If a large flight has small Dom participation, the "large Flight" calculation hits them extra hard. [/quote] That's where culture comes in, and that's not something that site mechanics can fairly balance for. If it does, you go from 'points are based on the average levels exalted per active user in the flight' to 'if a flight's users are less motivated to participate, it's easier for them to win'. It'd actively encourage either lack of exalting or data manipulation (funnelling dragons to a small number of users) which is not great. That's why there's big (Plague) medium (Light) and small (Earth) powerhouse flights. [/quote] I agree. The point I'm making is that this kind of system design can never be balanced. You either have "Everyone sandbags to win" or "Largest Flights get a huge penalty just for existing, regardless of how many of their numbers actually participate in Dominance efforts." If there are no reasonable solutions to equalize scores to account for uneven participation between Flights, then it's an inherently unfair design. For years now Dominance enthusiasts have been slowly migrating out of their preferred Flights and concentrating themselves into one or two smaller, competitive Flights, because Dominance is so broken that otherwise they don't get to really push (or win) elsewhere outside the Flight holiday. In my opinion, this whole concept of Dominance battle needs a complete refresh.

[quote name="@Snek" date="2023-12-09 09:07:39" ] [quote]light did have almost double (!!!) the dragons arcane did in OOF boarding[/url] due to this one week lead alone (assuming that battling flights usually see approximately equal support when opening OOF boarding at the same time)[/quote] I'm not convinced it was just because of the lead time. I was on both boarding spreadsheets for a while. Light sent me lots of dragons, most of them by offline queuing. A couple weeks in and I hadn't gotten a single one from Arcane. I ended up transferring the rest of my slots to Light because I knew they'd get filled up. Plus, looking at the graph, the last several weeks of boarding time got Arcane very few new spaces. Light was offered (and met) like another 10,000 in that time. [/quote] (apologies for the ping, I figured I would since I'm replying pretty directly here lol) You're not wrong on these points, but I would add a few things. I can't speak to your individual experience of course, but just looking at the slopes of the "spaces filled" lines, yes light was filling slots at a faster rate but there wasn't really a point where arcane "wasn't filling slots." Assuming that the rate of filled slots remained consistent for each flight (no reason to assume they wouldn't, they're quite straight lines for both), had arcane started one week earlier, we could expect their final point on the graph to be closer to 30k dragons, 75% of light's 40k. This is a HUGE difference to where they actually ended, with arcane at about 50% of light. Similarly, had light started one week later, we would expect light to have ended at 35k over arcane's 20k. Admittedly, yes, this is still a large difference. However, we likely wouldn't have run into the issue that is my next point. -- Arcane's slots were completely filled for almost the entire final week, putting a hard stop on the dragons they could prelevel when the local slope suggests that they were actually increasing their rate of leveling just before that time. Assuming that the [i]open[/i] slots for each flight would have been closer to 30k by the end had they opened at the same time (assuming that people generally don't have a large preference and often click the first they see... hence why a lead is advantageous, as is even having your post listed first on Dom Watch), then arcane would not have hit this cap in the final week. Additionally, because more slots likely would have been pledged to arcane earlier, fewer slots would even be [i]available[/i] to be pledged to light. They would have hit their cap a bit before arcane did, and would have been left trying to scrape together slots, much like arcane was by the last week. Yes, at this point we may well have seen folks with open slots for arcane moving to light, much like you did, after seeing light filling the slots faster, but I don't know that it would be nearly enough to create the difference that we saw in the actual battle. All in all though, you're right that it's a little wild to say that the lead time created [i]all[/i] of the difference and I will definitely edit/clarify my wording on the original comment. But I do think there are more factors surrounding the lead time than are being addressed and I still firmly believe that it made a significant difference, if not in the battle itself, then at least in the final dorming numbers.

[quote name="Zenzic" date="2023-12-09 09:30:08" ] I agree. The point I'm making is that this kind of system design can never be balanced. You either have "Everyone sandbags to win" or "Largest Flights get a huge penalty just for existing, regardless of how many of their numbers actually participate in Dominance efforts." If there are no reasonable solutions to equalize scores to account for uneven participation between Flights, then it's an inherently unfair design. For years now Dominance enthusiasts have been slowly migrating out of their preferred Flights and concentrating themselves into one or two smaller, competitive Flights, because Dominance is so broken that otherwise they don't get to really push (or win) elsewhere outside the Flight holiday. In my opinion, this whole concept of Dominance battle needs a complete refresh. [/quote] This is all super well-put, imo. It just keeps coming back to "the site can't balance for the culture" which is... difficult. The idea elsewhere in this thread where the first dragons exalted by a given user counts for more than their 100th, which counts for more than their 500th, and so on, is an interesting one, I think. It may not fix all of the issues outlined, but to me it sounds like the closest thing to theoretical balancing you could get in the current system. I do wonder what a total overhaul would even look like, though.

I mean... I'd say Dom is basically impossible to balance.

Like, sure, lots of people participate on Dom, and lots of roles are filled by all sorts of people receiving dragons, making art, donating funds and whatnot.

But... At the end of the day, what decides the winner/losers of dom battles are the people leveling dragons. Some people can level 50+ dragons in a day, while others can level like... 10 dragons at most.

I don't think this is balanceable. Some people just have better Coli teams (not everyone has Eliminate) and are willing to dedicate more time to grinding in Coli. The team with more people who can grind 50+ dragons in a day is basically guaranteed to win.

Unless there is like, a huge difference in funds and offered rewards that is, like... If a flight offers a Light Sprite in a raffle, while another flight can only offer a Shadow Sprite in the raffle, the flight with the Light Sprite will be basically guaranteed to win because their Raffle reward is just way more appealing.

I don't think any of that is balanceable. Dom is just inherently unbalanced due to relying heavily on the more dedicated players who focus on a specific portion of the game... The flights with more coli-heavy players are basically guaranteed to win regardless of any other factor (unless there is a huge difference in funds, as stated above), so... Well, that is that, I guess? It's just something we have to accept.

The biggest problem with dom is the fact that flight changes are a thing. Dom was not designed with flight changes in mind. Back in the day, you were stuck in the flight you originally joined, so dom would be more balanced. Nowadays, all the players who are serious about dom move to the flights that win the most often, which unbalanced the whole system.

What's the solution? I honestly don't know. I guess staff can tinker with the algorithm to try to give bigger flights a fighting chance. Another option I really like is the idea of an exaltation shop, a way for individual players to earn exclusive rewards from exalting even if they do not win dom. This will hopefully make more people want to exalt and therefore participate in dom, and make losing dom pushes not suck so much.

I do miss the days of big crazy dom pushes but they cost flights so much money, Shadow has literally gone into debt with dom battles before which kinda makes people not want to do it. The players who participate the most in dom battles are losing money, which means the best dom incentive, the discount (which lets you make a lot of profit if you use it right) is not even useable since you won't have any treasure after buying fodder at a loss to try to win the push.