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Player Numbers by faction

Discussion in 'OOC [Out of character]' started by cazboab, Oct 14, 2019.

  1. Hecaton

    Hecaton EI Anger Translator

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    Not really, no. Right now you can report a win against someone who never does a writeup and score points for your own faction.
     
  2. cazboab

    cazboab Definitely not Cazboaz.

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    Except there are people who don't post reports who play people who do, in fact 2 over thirds of the reports are not linked, and the third that are linked are half as many actual games, so if my math is right that's about 3 quarters of the games being reported by one person only.
    The comments about people playing too much, reporting only wins etc already happen, if every win took points off another faction it would get so much worse.

    This part actually sortof rings true, I still had fun, but the flaws from last year are still there, including a couple that were introduced then.
    There are many effortless or low effort changes that could improve the experience for us, including but not limited to releasing the PDFs for missions, or at least a list of items required, about a week ahead, putting up a quick guide as to how the mod team want things to actually work re choosing theatre, mission etc, and a dedicated thread for the mods on the forum so they're easier to get in contact with and/or to act as an FAQ.
     
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  3. Del S

    Del S Tunguskaball

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    So because the system allows unlinked fights, you want the unlinked fights to not only award factions who win points, but take them from the enemy.

    You really don't see an issue with basically doubling the effectiveness of unlinked wins?
     
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  4. Hecaton

    Hecaton EI Anger Translator

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    What do you mean "except that?" Nothing you said here contradicts what I said.

    Maybe. That's a possibility. But the certainty is, if you make a system like that, it completely solves the issue of relative faction population because the additional wins that high-population factions score is evened out by the added losses.


    The effectiveness of unlinked wins would only increase against any other faction that's in contention at a given location. If you're piling losses on a faction that's in last place it wouldn't affect the outcome.
     
  5. cazboab

    cazboab Definitely not Cazboaz.

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    It would incentivise playing third parties in contested zones, and would eliminate any incentive to report losses.
    it also reduces the visible effect any one person can have, currently you post your reports and you see your team jump 3 points. "yay I'm helping! " you think and you arrange your next game.
    Under your system you post your win at the same time someone posts a win against your faction and you see nothing change. "why did I bother?" and you go complain about it on the forum.

    Best case we'd end up with everyone playing hot potatoe with the ownership of each zone, which does have a certain appeal, but I think there are far too many improvements that can be made to this system before we make an entirely new one...

    Additive systems are also better for this kind of set up, because any mechanism where you can take points away from another faction will be abused and weaponised...
     
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  6. Hecaton

    Hecaton EI Anger Translator

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    That's already incentivized very heavily. It wouldn't change that calculus at all.

    I think that effect is a bit overstated. You know your score is counted.

    I'd say the same about any system where you can add points to your faction. And it happens, to a certain extent.
     
  7. SpectralOwl

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    I was the guy who put PanO back in the lead at the Admin Building, and it felt very nice indeed. Having my points outright erased wouldn't be very great, especially if my faction gets put to 0- why bother indeed? All the batreps amount to no progress!
     
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  8. Hecaton

    Hecaton EI Anger Translator

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    Your points wouldn't be erased, you'd be adding to a total. You're saying why bother, but it's the exact same situation as if you had put your faction in the lead and then someone else had posted a win for the faction yours is contending with and put them back in the lead.
     
  9. Del S

    Del S Tunguskaball

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    Rubbish. Your system encourages fake reports just to game the numbers. Even if the system eventually counters it, there's morale damage caused. Plenty ot people don't look deep. Just the front pages.

    It's said that most people only read a headline or about half an article in newspapers. Usually leaving before the things thay disprove the assertion the journalist made are finally mentioned. A veneer of balance is made that way. They avoid being accused of lies because, well, they have the truth there.

    Your idea basically lets people control numbers on the front page. Your idea lets people get angry at frequent winners and losers. Someone plays a few new players and had no idea they were about to yank a dozen points off hapless faction A, gets harassment for "noob farming". Fake reports distort what's seen. Casual players just see one faction totally dominate a zone. Only the smaller numbers of dedicated cores notice the truth, because they go deeper into the articles.

    So no one but dedicated players bother. Even they get tired as cheating goes on. You can ban and delete reports but you make the numbers fluctuate. Even a crap report of three memes, all star, and a copypasta has an effect for a few moments to a few days. Especially if the fake reports start coming and they don't stop coming...

    Fed to the rules and I hit the ground running
    Didn't make sense not to live for fun
    Your brain gets smart but your head gets dumb…

    Ahem. Anyway, worst case, uour idea turns it into a fight between trolls and sociopaths to get the most fake wins in. Best case, vulnerability to trolls and sucks out a lot of fun when your win gets squished by a five point loss for your faction when someone loses to Tohaa.
     
  10. Hecaton

    Hecaton EI Anger Translator

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    Not any more than the current system does.

    And your point is...?

    You're stating these things, but I'm not seeing any evidence.


    Noob farming is already a thing. Casual players see factions like Haqqislam and Tohaa get amazing advantages in the scoring in campaigns like this.

    That's already the case. CA players ignore these for the most part since it's generally stacked against them.

    That seems to already be a fairly strong determiner of these campaigns.

    In my system, factions wouldn't have different points values scored for a win or a loss; it wouldn't be necessary.
     
  11. Sergej Faehrlich

    Sergej Faehrlich Well-Known Member
    Warcor

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    Let me throw this in here:

    https://forum.corvusbelli.com/threa...see-next-time-thread.24192/page-3#post-128517

    This win-lose discussion has been going on after Kurage, and at least for me, nothing has changed: not a fan of counting losses. Despite every agrument it adds more negativity.

    For me the problem with the camapign system still lies within the godforsaken intent to create a fair and levelled competition for every faction...which fails everytime because it's neither possible, nor necessary for people to have fun. A campaign should have bonusses for specific factions to make them the antagonist...or even create a couple of them.
     
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  12. SpectralOwl

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    They do have those in the scenarios (+1SWC for CA, +25pts for Ikari etc.), but they aren't often used by the looks of things. The points-per-win has far more impact. Maybe using TP, OP or even VP for scoring could be fun.
     
  13. Sergej Faehrlich

    Sergej Faehrlich Well-Known Member
    Warcor

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    As this thread is starting to derail :)...these location bound scanarios are another problem for me. Especially newer players get the impression, that you would HAVE to play a specific scenario to gain points at a location, which leads to people having to decide beforehand where they would play...so in a hypothetical scenario on a gaming night two players decide to give each one a game at their desired location, which is fair. Then they end up winning at the opponents location and both players come out with results that do not benefit their factions' goals. There is a sense of fair play among people that generally dislike games being reported at the location of winner's choice. But there is one problem with that: nobody can really control it. If there's no way to control something, we should probably legalize it.

    The same goes for factions: some people still get the impression that you would have to fight a specific opponent to make an impact at a location, which of course isn't the case as well. The system sets up imaginary constraints (like not playing x for y btw) and people are shunned upon if they break the "rules" and game the system. But the system ist there to be played.

    I would much rather see a list of interesting (!) custom missions that can be played at any location...just chose the mission, play the game, decide where to score it afterwards and write a fine report. And you know what? I would love to see linked reports with a loss score a point as well! That's probably the most rewarding system.

    There could be a way to give bonusses to a faction without changing the points balance...like CA getting +1 SWC and +25 points in EVERY campaign game. Playing Limited Insertion or any other ITS Extra could be rewarded with bonus points. Or there could be bonus points if a specific mission is scored at a specific location...or bonus points if a specific faction scores for a specific mission...or bonus points if you win agains a specific faction/beat a specific faction...if you wanna go down that road. There are so many ways to make your own choices during a campaign so much more important, and that's what I would love to see: leaving the route of amassing sheer numbers and focussing on the individual player.

    I don't really care about prescripted campaigns either. Much more, something like: "a location gets shut down once there have been x number af games player there / once a faction has scored x points there"...that would be interesting. Faction specific rewards for "scoring x points at loacation a, b and c in phase 1"...gosh, the more I think of it, the current system seems duller and duller...please forgive me derailing this thread!
     
  14. cazboab

    cazboab Definitely not Cazboaz.

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    You'd be surprised to learn how many people have been utterly confused when told that they scored more than 3 points at a time. Or that the AI historian didn't delete the fake, low quality or incomplete reports, just ignored them. Or that the 9 points in the start weren't people reporting games before they could possibly have played them during the campaign.

    The main reason not to remove points for a loss, is what that would look like on the main page.

    After 4 weeks of effort, NA2 would have 123 points. The nomads -150. That would be ridiculous, and absolutely destroy the moral of the nomads, meaning less of their players would put in effort next year.
     
  15. Spitfire_TheCat

    Spitfire_TheCat Feel the Wrath of the Miezi-Bot

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    Nomads would always be in the negative, because we are used as beatsticks for many other factions. We always have more losses than wins.

    I think negative points make no sense. Skews everything with no real benefit.

    The points per win should be adjusted next time. They will, I'm sure, because they did this time compared to last time. Hopefully Nomads get a Bonus so we finally can go on the offence. The last three campaigns (can't speak for the first one) Nomads always were on the defence, being attacked by Aleph, PanO and whatnot without the possibility to attack because of lower numbers and more importantly fewer heavy hitters.

    Just have a look at the Top-5-commanders of the factions and you'll see what I mean.

    It would be nice if Nomads could actually do something else instead of just bunkering up. We tried this year, but to be honest there was lots of luck (and lacking interest of other factions in our locations) involved, otherwise Nomads would have been wiped of the board. We had the least points of any faction that had to hold locations and we are one of the factions that had to hold the most locations (3).

    Even CA has more points than Nomads although they didn't conquer a single location while we held 3 (hopefully).

    So it was sheer luck that we were able to fight above our weight.

    Haqq was the contrary. Surprisingly they had many heavy hitting layers (left) compared to others, got 4 points per victory and only 2 locations to hold. Result ... they were able to crush anything they wanted, fighting PanO and Ariadna simultaneously.

    And regarding the Topic: Player Numbers by faction mean nothing. Nomads always have high numbers, but still few very heavy hitting Commanders. Heck, I'm not counting me as heavy hitter and I am Nr. 2 pointswise in Nomads right now. 8 wins would have been far from Nr. 5 in Haqq for instance.

    More representive are the Top-5-Commanders of a faction. Sum them up and you'll get a better picture of the actual power structure:

    Just a few (amount of locations in brackets):
    Haqq (2): 263 points (thats almost 60% of all Nomads Points ...)
    Ariadna (3): 150 points
    PanO (3): 137 points
    Aleph (2): 135 points
    Nomads (3): 127 points

    Now you see why Haqq was able to tackle PanO and Ariadna simultaneously and why Aleph can hold it's own easily against Nomads.

    Adding Yujing, NA2 and CA
    Yujing (2): 171 points
    NA2 (3): 154 points
    Combined (0): 113 Points

    That's why CA wasn't able to conquer anything and Yujing was able to conquer Main Strip in Phase 1.

    Tohaa (0): 210 Points
    O-12 (0): 121 Points.

    Same picture: Tohaa captures 2 (!) locations, O-12 only 1 because it was left by Ariadna and noone else wanted it.

    I think Top-5-Commanders reflects power structure pretty well.

    (last year Ariadna had most heavy hitters and therefore were able to dominate the campaign)
     
    #35 Spitfire_TheCat, Oct 15, 2019
    Last edited: Oct 15, 2019
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  16. Lion Tremere

    Lion Tremere Herald of the Trident

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    Hehe, just a few rogue commanders, they said. "What can they achieve?" :3

    Heavy Hitters is a big factor of cause and for the free-roaming factions especially.
    But the simple truth is that Tohaa commanders were more motivated and we achieved a ~3 win per active player - the highest number in this campaign!
     
    #36 Lion Tremere, Oct 15, 2019
    Last edited: Oct 15, 2019
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  17. Spitfire_TheCat

    Spitfire_TheCat Feel the Wrath of the Miezi-Bot

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    Yes. Heavy Hitters dominate the result. Not because their wins are worth more or because they make up most points. No, every victory counts. But the heavy hitters tend to be more focused where to fight/play. Tohaa was successfull this time because they focused their efforts. Which is easier if you have fewer players and more Heavy Hitters. And Tohaa is an extreme example where Top-5-Commanders with 210 points alone make up more than 55% of all points of the faction.

    And because of this the ~wins per active player are rising as well. I think ~wins per active Player will come to similiar results like my Top-5-Commander-Analysis (but is harder to do)
     
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  18. Del S

    Del S Tunguskaball

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    ... Immediately following on in the rest of the post, IE "people don't read the whole thing", and somewhat proven because you just managed to overlook something right in front of you in your own haste to make your points.

    Seriously, how can you expect people to click past screens to see the real story, to see that their points are "counted" (but also vanish the second someone reports a win against your faction) when you didn't notice the analogy? People don't read. They skim. They glance. They look at the surface levels and miss the actual points.

    And say "there's no evidence" as much as you like, but there's also no evidence your system has any benefits. You're also apparently the only person who wants it.
     
  19. Hecaton

    Hecaton EI Anger Translator

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    Well, the factions that don't get free points or have the campaign structured so that it's easier for them to win (Haqqislam) are getting fairly demoralized about the issue. Regardless, as to your numbers, how many wins and losses did the Nomads and NA2 have, respectively? I have a suspicion your numbers aren't right.

    Just because I don't agree with you doesn't mean I'm ignoring things.

    My system would exactly fix the player population issue, as well as make "heavy hitters" less relevant by making them lose points from their faction for a loss. That's just math. Your ideas about human nature are kind of irrelevant considering many people pass on the campaign to begin with because they don't like how it's run; changing the formula might attract those people if they thought a positive improvement was being made.
     
  20. Spitfire_TheCat

    Spitfire_TheCat Feel the Wrath of the Miezi-Bot

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    Funnily his numbers are right:
    Nomads at the end of the campaign: 135 wins, 193 losses, 21 draws.
    Means 58 more losses than wins, times 3, would be -174 points

    NA2: 182 wins, 141 losses, 12 draws
    Means 41 more wins than losses, times 4, would be +164 points
    So yes, he was too positive
     
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