Now we're in the end up, I've taken the time to count up the enter the war achievement(IMO the best way to measure player numbers is by who's actually submitted a report rather than just registered) by faction. Aleph 56/171 Ariadna 80/268 combined Army 91(!)/273 Haqqislam 76/230 NA2 85/221 Nomads 80/269 O12 35/126 Panoceania 76/239 Tohaa 26/84 Yu Jing 72/212 Most factions are really close together, only CA have a little boost ahead of the pack, aleph lags a bit, O12 and tohaa trail significantly. That sort of throws a harsh light on the scoring metrics were some factions are scoring more points per win than factions that are almost the same size, or even smaller than them, for example Haqqislam and NA2 both look like they're scoring 4 points a win against Ariadna and PanO's 3...
The weighted scores are a good idea in principle, but the football league scores don't lend themselves well to it because of how much any bonus affects the balance. If the score was shifted to a 5 point win as the default and a 2 point draw, with any faction that's significantly smaller scoring 6 or 7 if they're particularly small compared to the average, that could help.
Using an automated weighting system based on actual numbers instead of CB's best guess could help too. On top of this, factions without a home zone or with 1 instead of 2 have a huge advantage in flexibility- see Tohaa's performance in Kurage and Asteroid Blues. Giving everyone a home zone, or several unaligned zones instead of home zones could help.
I like the idea of unaligned zones, this can be great to push people neutral goals and writing better stories out of it. About points, I think it would also be owned by CB desired storyline: If repelling CA is the point, 5pt they should score each win, if the point is maintaining a Nation-state integrity, same goes for the said Nation's wins...
Ah, thank you for posting the numbers of players with reports vs players registered. I was curious about this metric as well, although I can state that Tohaa do have a couple of people who didn't play games but who were wonderful cheerleaders and participants. Not enough to skew your data, I feel, but they are still players I want to acknowledge! Combined Army had a lot more w/ reports than I anticipated, wow. As I have never experienced a Tohaa home zone, I would not mind having one. Not having a base, I feel, was a major impetus on Tohaa decision-making throughout the campaign and the source of our Phase One internal strife. I am a little surprised that it did not translate into an equal amount of aggression on the Combined Army front given that their weight of 91 players could definitely have mitigated the 3pts/win status if they focused in and hammered. The Big 4 + The 8-Army NA2 have pretty even numbers, I agree. Neutral Zones would be amazing and are something I've enjoyed from campaigns played in other formats and in other games.
The reasons not to do that far outweigh any reasons to do it, that's why I counted the achievement for the first report not the first win. This is absolutely true of all the factions, but it's not possible to quantify the contributions of morale support, thematic gravitas or momentum. The "AI historian" won't see any of these things, only the numbers.
Well, personally, I think: That. That'll do it. Maybe a few site backend adjustments (Reduce the load by not refreshing every updated item of a report, perhaps) to allow that automatic calculation to work based on active players easier, and maybe have the metrics automatically update only at a set time (EG Midnight) and have people report a date for when the battle took place so the right metric is applied to the points you expected to score. (The date thing will also help counter the Heres One I Did Earlier type games everyone gets mad about on the first day of phases ) Either remain 3 points for the base score, 1 point win bonus for below average factions, 2 points for smallest factions, or, move to 5 per win default, 1 point bonus for smallest factions, 1 point penalty for above average factions, have a draw be 2 or 3 points, and maybe even a loss be 1 point. Whatever the metric used is, automating it is IMO the best approach to having any handicapping. People already have no reason to report a loss other than sportsmanship. Sometimes not winning is penalty enough, adding insult to injury isn't gonna encourage playing or a particularly friendly campaign environment.
Haqqislam was definitely scoring 4 points Phase 1, and 3 points Phase 2. We were tracking it Phase 1 made sense, because we didn't peak over 180 until end of phase 1 then we got a 50 person boost over the weekend. Haqqislam made the 4 points work as we had a large group that were posting 5-6+ battles a piece. Our battle hardened were all 12+ battles. It actually surprises me only 70 got the enter the war achievement, it just seemed like there was a LOT of activity in Haqq in this year.
If you take the points scored divided by the number of players scoring then you get the avarage score of each faction's active players. (give or take the starting points and the fact that the totals sometimes take a couple of hours to update) Aleph 9.1 Ariadna 6.6 CA 4.8 Haqqislam 10.1 Na2 8.9 Nomads 5.5 O12 9.5 PanOceania 7.3 Tohaa 14.6 YuJing 9.9 I'm not sure if that's relevant to anything, but it's clear to see how different the results are between larger groups scoring less and smaller groups scoring more per player, interestingly the largest group is scoring the least per player and the smallest the most. This suggests that maybe CA are picking up a couple of wins from players that want to try out the other half of wildfire or the onyx box then they fold back into their regular faction, while the Tohaa players that stayed are the hardcore players not tempted by spiral corps, etc...
The average is around 2-2,5 wins per player. With the CA (1,6) and Nomads (1,8) falling behind. And Tohaa higher than average with 2,92 wins per active player. Hehe. Proud to be part of such a small, but hard-working and dedicated family of players. *__*
CA was similar during Kurage if memory serves, we do seem to have a pretty woeful win percentage in all these campaigns for some reason.
It is difficult to gain traction when the opening news on the campaing is "lets stop the Combined army" xD
One of my friends did bring up a good point about it: if you want to be the "alien" faction, you have two choices and one of them comes with a comparative ton of extra rules to figure out. CA is competitive in the tournament scene, so I don't think it's because the faction is weaker than others, but I think it might be a place where many new players find a home if they don't want to be humans and those new players will certainly lose more often to more experiences players. The only counterpoint I could come up with is that newer players aren't as likely to register for an online campaign, but who knows...
Numbers are one thing...CA certainly had far more players that I had expected (thanks for the numbers!). Still we found it somewhat difficult to focus the "masses", which isn't that surprising. A couple of well connected, coordinated and motivated players can achieve more in such a campaign, than a large mob of players reporting one or two games at a random location. This motivational issue definitely applies if you are on the offensive. Defense always is something that keeps a faction focussed. The points issue has been discussed at lenght after Kurage and a lot of the above mentioned has already been put forward. I am quite sad that basically nothig has changed. More and neutral locations, shorter phases, special point metrics for certain missions, bonussed for a win againts a specific faction, boosting a single faction while adding alliance's points for their opponents...there are various ways to make these campaigns more interesting. Aseroid Blues felt like "playing it safe"...unfortunately.
Forgive me my negative attitude, but... it did not feel like "playing it safely". It did feel like "not giving a damn about how it is playing". Because the community has been proposing such adjustments as you mention for as long as I can remember, i.e. at least since Wotan. Yet the campaigns remain copy-and-paste in terms of their mechanics and general approach.
"Playing it safely" probably could be read a euphemsim for "not investing §$%& into anything" ;) I tried to stay positive here. Many of the suggested changes would require redesigning the warconsole metrics, which of course needs investment. Other options would have required manpower, which are right now bound by new projects. Some of the suggested changes would result in another, different, but still loud wave of enraged players...so there would have been some risk involved.
I really disagree. It doesn't matter if someone reports their own loss - it's already reported when the winner reports who they beat. Yup, until CB shows they're invested and putting effort into it I don't understand why they think players should.
So all you need to do in your idea, is report a win against someone to remove points from their faction? You see no problems with that?
