Thoughts on the last campaign

The bottom line is organizing hundreds of strangers online with variable schedules and opponents is incredibly hard.

There are a lot of variables as well.

Says i can beat a tohaa player 9/10 games but they only want to play on zone B.

However i can only beat yu jing player 3/10 times and yu jing is also trying to take zone A.
Even if I've been assigned to zone A, it would not be advantageous to the faction for me to play them

 

We were super organized in Wotan and there was way more of us. As soon as that CA freighter appeared the MO players descended on it in a mad frenzy and turned it blue in a matter of hours. For all of their effort they were rewarded with "uuhhhh the ship makes it through the gate but crash lands on the planet". After that nonesense I'm not surprised that we had much less of a turn out. Hell, I registered as CA cause I wanted that kind of plot armor.

 

Have they even posted the official results yet?

I think it was primarily a numbers problem. We didn’t have enough to shore up our own defenses and go after Yu Jing. Our big mistake was over estimating our ability to project power and we kinda replied on Tohaa taking pressure off our backs but Ariadna just didn’t care about self sacrificing to get us.

Beyond that, I think a stricter enforcement of scenario and minimums for counting as legal matches. There were some reports I saw against ice storm starter set armies. Many times scenario didn’t match the area. I think maybe requiring the faction be present to defend their territory might be worth considering. At this point I’m just spit balling though.

 

Dictatorships tend to act more decisively than democracies. I wasn't in the PanO leadership this year, but I was involved the last couple of years. PanO, as a faction with a big playerbase and years of past success, has a phenomenon of "too many cooks in the kitchen" which makes it very hard to act decisively. Factions get very, very badly hurt when they split their focus between multiple campaign goals.

The more decisive the leadership, and the more that the playerbase adheres to the directives of that leadership, the better things go.

Similarly, given how dramatically player participation tends to drop off after the first week and a half, it's critical to have very strong opening moves that either give you a strong position for the rest of the campaign, or keep players interested in the promise of exciting things to come, or both.

Ariadna's model was successful, but is probably an example of what not to do from a perspective of morality.

But Yu Jing was a very good model for campaign success. They had a motivated community, everyone was working towards clearly defined goals, their leadership worked very well within the parameters of the campaign, they had unified objectives, and they managed to win the moral victory without having a huge playerbase or abusing the reporting system.

 

Care to explain what did Ariadna did? You mean fake reports?

 

About 50% of Ariadna's points were generated fewer than 20 individual players, and their W/L ratio was staggering (most factions had roughly a 1:1 W/L ratio, while Ariadna's was in excess of 2:1 in favor of wins.) Whether there was any foul play or not, communities can't really rely on having this kind of skewed support when it comes to formulating a strategy. Ariadna was able to attack two different enemy factions at once while simultaneously defending both home bases against a third faction... Which was basically way more manpower than any other faction even came close to possessing. It let them make moves that wouldn't have been successful or rewarding for anyone else.

 

Guys I have to point out that you must remember the Kurage was heavily moderated and most f not all of the cheating was caught, in order to not create any more toxic environment cheaters are and will remain anonymous and confidential, we will deal with them internally, we do not need an angry mob.

I also must point out Kurage discussion should go to Kurage Crisis sub section.

 

I think this is not a kurage discussion but ideas about what to do for the future.

I think tangible even fluff rewards for winning factions would be amazing for incentive.

Overall i think i logged like 9 reports , because that's literally all i had time to do game wise.

I honestly envy the people who managed to get 50 games in the time period. Hell even if half of those are fake, 25 games in 1 month would be amazing for me, but lgs is about an hour from my house, and ill be lucky if i can get 2-3 games per week.

 

I will see about an official thread for feedback, but we do read all the threads.

 

PanO is the last faction that should be throwing that around.

As to the drop in players, most PanO players I have interacted with that chose not to participate in the campaign did so because of the reputation being a PanO player has thanks to the past actions of members in our community.

IE: the minority of PanO players have now spoiled it for the rest of us

 

You're mistaken, the actual ratio was 1.68:1, still higher than anyone else, but significantly below 2:1.

Not sure if I should help, but I would recommend a more aggressive strategy for pano. In phase 1 Pano could have made a very present threat to the nomads, Haqqislam or YuJing. YuJing in particular would have meant that NA2 had more resources to use against Ariadna, who in turn would have had less to use at the HAS area...

 

I thought yu jing was. After all in flamia they dropped a significant amount vs pano, after the bot went through the reports.

In the end of the day pano as the most numerous factions is bound to also have the largest(numerically) number of lower skilled and newer players.

So in the end its easy for people to pick on them for easy points.

Id also like to know how report rankings and commendations function. Hell if possible id like for them to not affecr score at all, since it boild down to popularity contest or random faction favoritism.


I went through many out of faction reports to rank em fairly, giving commendations were effort was given.


On the other hand i saw members of other factions with the inverse of my w/l ratio and really crummy reports (like 1 or 2 sentences and army lists attached as well as a 15 sec YouTube vid of the table) have like 4 times my exp.

 

just because the player base is larger doesnt mean that hte proportion of players for the player base is less skilled.
In fact the safe assumption until proved otherwise is that the scale does not change the relative statistics, and that has certainly been demonstrated in the previous campaigns.

 

Hence why i said numerically largest. Not proportionally largests.

If all factions have 20% new players and pano has 200 players to everyone else's 100. They would have the most new players.

 

sure, but they also have the most experienced players, therefore the hypothesis that they are easier to gain victories against is flawed, because they would also have more players to gain victories in their favour