Reports from battles occurring before the start of the phase?

let me put the question in a different way:

How does the moderation team feel about two players "deciding beforehand" that their game will count towards "the new location of faction X, that will open up in phase 2, but has not opened up yet"?

Does a player have to drop a report, that he couldn't get finished in time to report it? Does that report have to be discarded as the previously decided location is no longer available?

If this is a problem, are there any ways to check for that? A mere "yes" would be enough for me, not to tell people too much about the method...

Please do not take me as being a niggle, but these are problems arising from the question: "are people allowed to choose the location afterwards". There has not been an answer to that thread here unfortunately.

 

While I personally don't think it's anything to worry about, this only highlights the fact that we have not been told how we're expected to do things this year.

We've done things a certain way for two years, apparently without issues. Then we're told that's not allowed, 10 days in.

I do know that some people have been contacted by the mod team to ask why they had pictures or videos from before the campaign started, but I don't know the outcome of that.

My own veiw is that it's a bit of a dick move (and we knew that last year when we did it en mass) but I'd personally have said it fell just shy of cheating since everyone had (has) the same chance to do it, and nobody said we couldn't. On the other hand, if we're expected not to do it in future,then I'm fine with that too, though again it should have been made clear before now...

 

Additional question to this: what if it's a loss that you couldn't finish? Are we willing to accept that nobody would prioritise writing up their wins and conveniently not have time to submit a loss?

 

Thats a point I asked myselfe too. Whouldn't it be good to give a loss 1 Point, a draw 2 points and a win the weighted amount of points?
Therefore, you would have an incentive to report each battle you fought.

 

I agree, it seems a lot of people can't be arsed to report their losses...
An incentive as a single point for a loss would give you a feeling that you're helping your faction no matter what.

With the whole "You can't let the winner decide the battleground", you are basically locked in on a location, and can do fu** all about it, if you lose, and your opponent gains nothing from playing in that theatre.

 

There is a number of things that cannot really be policed. This falls in that cathegory, since unless one of the players says that the game happened before the date, there is no way to know that.
Of course, there is the option of accepting only the official missions for each site, but in that case a lot of people will get bored fast, and reports would be really spreaded on all locations.

In this case, the organization is unable to enforce such a rule, thus making it unwise to stablish it, but the PlayFair movement is a great movement, since it asks the players to behave for the sake of fun for everyone. There will always be some rotten apples, that is inevitable, but complicating things so that those have a hard time cheating would mean that players who do nothing wrong will need to go through more hoops and rings (the same as with digital gaming piracy, where there are instances of legit players unable to enjoy the game they payed for while the pirated versions work, even more smoothly).

 

I think a straight 1 2 3 system would make everything far too close, especially since a larger faction could just take over a zone by playing everyone and loosing, but the idea of some consolation points being earned is a good one, maybe if we shifted scoring to a 10 point system based upon the mission points rather than winner takes all...
That also solves the issue of getting people to play with the right mission, the custom option could stay on the 0 1 3 scale.

Well that's not entirely true, and in fact I know for sure from talking to people it's happened to that the mod team has methods that can tell when you played to detect any games played outside the time frame.

The playfair pledge doesn't mention playing games in the timeframe or predetermined location I think because frankly nobody thought it was cheating. That's the biggest issue I can see here, people aren't aware of a rule so they don't even know they're braking it...

 

We have not the 0 1 3 system.

This year we have a weighted system and this should be the actual points for a victory for each faction.

Tohaa: 5

Aleph: 4
Haqqislam: 4
NA2: 4
Yu Jing: 4

Ariadna: 3
Combined Army: 3
Nomads: 3
PanO: 3


Add then there one extra point too and i don't see the problem.

 

Then why don't they put in more missions per location instead of just 1? Have them be twists on already established missions so not too much work needs to be done and people have some variety. Is it really asking too much to have 3-4 Missions per location, with maybe 1 being fairly unique and others being ITS missions with particular benefits and downsides like Blizzard or the like?


You have this big grandiose campaign with new artwork and its own website, and then 1official mission per area for weeks. I think everything around the campaign is beautiful and the artwork for the updates and stuff is really cool, mind you.


As far as my opinion on doing battles before and then waiting to throw them into the next area to get a leg up, oh well, some people are going to be shitty and game the system, or maybe they had a report that they really didn't want to waste because they don't get to play much and they want to contribute what little they can.

 

I believe the official position on this is that (since the location should be decided before the game is played) reports for a phase must be from games played after that phase starts (or at least after the PDF becomes available since you can decide location then).

With the above said, please do not go on a witch hunt for people who may have repurposed reports that weren't yet submitted and put them on a new theatre. As with everything else, if you have concerns over a player or report, take it to any of us on the moderation team via PM. Do not try and handle it yourselves nor do it in public on the comments section! :)

Keep playing games and fight for your nation commanders!

~TDC~
Mod Team.

 

Losses counting for something something would incentivise people to write them up, and would absolutely increase the quantity of linked up games and the quality of the experience as a whole. As for playing games before hand and counting to the next phase on principal I'm against it but I'll freely admit I've done it (if not intentionally), my last report was going to be aimed at J5 Kommstat but I did discuss with my opponent that if it closed i'd point it at Aplekton instead.

It ended up being the latter, not because of trying to game the system, but because we played the game on Sunday night, it takes me around 30-40 minutes on average to edit a photo to the point I'm happy enough to put it into a report and my last report had 30 photos. Each one post processed to hell; all before subtracting the time required for a nine month old and a ten hour a day job. And I have no intention of simply throwing away literally 16hrs of work and what I think is an outstanding game to write up (literally down to the last die roll), just because I don't have the time to do it justice.

However actually intentionally hording and holding batreps to spam into the next phase is IMO absolutely cheating, and just because everybody can do it doesn't make it any less so.

Weighting for playing the scenario sound good in principal but frankly something like a one off bonus would be enough, if I had to play 'insert scenario here I don't care which' 10 times in a row in two weeks for optimum point scoring I would legitimately beat somebody to death with a Caskuda in a sock before turning the Caskuda on myself.

Weighting for size of game however, that should have happened a long time ago, the effort required for a 400pt game shouldn't be rewarded the same as a 150pt game.

TL:DR Don't be a batrep holding tool,

• Anything that encourages the playing of more games is a good thing,
• Anything that encourages quality over spam is a good thing,
• Anything that increases the engagement of losers is a good thing,
• Anything that helps retain the interest of the players over the duration is a good thing.
• And remember it's meant to be fun.

 

Oh, forgot to say. With regards to

sorts of ideas.

These have already been brought up and hopefully next time around there will be an incentive for reporting losses :)

 

I know how scoring works bud, and it's still a 0 1 3 system at it's core, just with help for smaller factions.
Scoring 4 or 5 for a win doesn't matter if you lose,and if you don't report the loss, especially when you lose to people who aren't registered and aren't submiting their wins, it counts even less.

A loss gives you nothing but xp and reputation points, an unreported loss gives nobody anything...

 

My personal opinion is, that the American way "winning is everything, looser get's nothing" the wrong way is, especially in a campaign, that should make fun.
I understand the opinion of those, who disagree with this, but I don't want to see this event as a tournament.

 

Exactly why I suggested using the mission points instead. If you win 10 to 5 you get 10, if you lose 5 to 10 you get 5.
This means unless you're absolutely trounced you'll earn some points for reporting a loss...

 

I Iike that, but i can see a few issues

the ITS missions themselves, some basically can be vastly easier to score than others I'd say for example you're more likely to see a 10-1 in fire fight than you are in power pack where you can utterly ruin somebody and come in at 3/4-1.

Second it locks people into ITS and adds a barrier to cool narrative games or other systems like TACOS etc, plenty of people have issues with ITS and that discourages them from participation.

Third, you'll inevitably get people who'll overstate their score as their opponent will never write it up anyway, why not just make it a 10-3 rather than a 6-3 etc so you'd need far more rigorous safeguards.

 

Well that's only a flaw if you assign the wrong missions to the wrong zones, by using the harder to score missions in places CB want to protect the need for exclusive zones is reduced, and anything CB want to be a huge hotspot gets a higher scoreing mission.

If you select custom mission you get set numbers for say 5 win 3 draw and 1 loss. It's not ideal but if you're not using CB's system part of me feels like it's a bit like trying to win a formula 1 race in a hovercraft.
Fun as hell and I want it to be an option, but you shouldn't expect it to be effective..

The CKI is a flaw in almost every system...

 

First and foremost we want people to have fun playing the game, if mission selection really impacts your enjoyment of the game by all means let it not impact your enjoyment of this global campaign.

Now Ideally, we prefer area of operations to be selected first, this is for several reasons, first because players choosing to play a campaign mission properly have selected the location along with the mission, secondly and more importantly because it gives the faction with the most skilled players an advantage to score their points were they want with coordination.

Now this brings us with the situation about reports from first phase that were not reported, again ideally I thing a grace period is needed for such reports, I think it would be fair to be reported to the same area they were intended in the first phase, for example A battle for one of the two Nomads areas should be fielded in the new Nomads area.

All the above been said, don't forget what I said first, we primarily want people to have fun and do not let what we would ideally prefer impact your fun playing this global campaign.

 

Guys, I love you and your work, but this should ALL have been made much clearer up front.

Those intro videos would have been a great place to do it.

But at least in the campaign docs.