looking to the future
 

as this forum is quite dull at the moment i figured i would open the floor to discussion.

what went wrong this round?
why do we think it went wrong?
how can the game be improved to prevent such a dull (this is my opinion, i imagine a few others may not think it, but I feel this is the general consensus of the playerbase) round occuring again?

please avoid flaming and turning this into a slagging match. I'm looking for constructive thoughts and ideas about how the round progressed and what could be done differently. At the end of the day, in my opinion rounds like this with such dominance do the game more harm than good.

thanks guys :)

Re: looking to the future
 

nothing went wrong this round? the only thing you'd consider going wrong, is Apprime winning by so much but thats nothing to do with the game or anything that changed. Thats simply almost all the top players joining one alliance instead of fighting each other.

So if anything, the top players ruined this round.

Re: looking to the future
 

I agree, this is surely all rather familiar, thinking of r28/9 particularly, and I agree with Light its all about the players.
Nothing can be done to force the best players to spread themselves around more, very small tag limits perhaps, but that would annoy more than just the elite, and result in multi tag allies.
I hope CarDi has already done enough to prevent a repetition by generally pissing everyone off.

Re: looking to the future
 

sorry I didn't make it clear enough. when I said what is wrong with the game, I was including the attitudes and the community as well as the game mechanics :)

Re: looking to the future
 

Small tags don't help lower tier alliances, they punish them. Low limit -> rare spots -> high recruitment requirements -> stranded newbies.

Re: looking to the future
 

which is what I alluded to in that it annoys everyone, the issue isnt helping lower teir allies anyway its hamstringing giants.
Im not in favour of tag limits, i deliberately brought them up so they could be dismissed early as they are the only way that the game mechanics have for handling this issue.
I dont think this round means changes are needed; rounds of total domination periodically occur and the alliance system shifts to counter it, not always successfully but it will. Take the change from r29 to r30, ok asc won both but r29 was a total domination round as this one and in r30 Omen appeared to challange Asc, they lost but it was one of the best rounds for sustained war. There is no current indication of a counterweight alliance appearing but with a longer than usual intermission before next round there is plenty of time.

Re: looking to the future
 

Apperently Apprime are not playing next round.

Re: looking to the future
 

but at a guess, Asc is playing next round.. and is now opening recruitment for any Apprime player!

Re: looking to the future
 

a lot of vetoing would occur
we have spent most of this round hating!
[edit] who said asc is playing, im not sure that is anything like decided yet.

Re: looking to the future
 

we might, just might recruit isildurx. heard he was a pretty funny chap.

Re: looking to the future
 

Clearly recruiting back those that were ours originally is a different thing.
How far we cast that net depends on what our goals are, and no-one knows that atm, even if we have goals at all... I dont think anyone would see any point in absorbing app just to pwn the uni again, Asc has been there and done that.

Re: looking to the future
 

how many people are in app that were originally asc players that you would be looking to take back?

Re: looking to the future
 

1. 50 man tags
2. Private galaxies

Re: looking to the future
 

I have no idea, hence the net metaphor.
Without app as opposition there is far less need for asc to return as anything large, a round without great powers would be nice, but those ppl have to go somewhere so its wishful thinking.

Re: looking to the future
 

There are plenty of retards in Apprime who I wouldn't entrust to organize a piss up in a brewery. That said there are also plenty who would do a good job, but from most of those I did not hear any intend in 'pwning the universe once more'.

To be honest it gets a bit tedious to beat CT, ND, DLR and whatever other mediocre alliance there is over and over and over ..

What is even worse is people in those alliances then getting a say in how to shape the next round, making it 'easier' for them. (While they forget it will be even easier for us so they still die. And die hard.)

Re: looking to the future
 

so you would rather people just didn't even try to mount an opposition against you round after round so you could win easier?

Re: looking to the future
 

I wish they learned from their mistakes instead of making the same mistakes over and over and over and ...

Re: looking to the future
 

or maybe all the 'great' and 'awesome' PA players could stop grouping together in one alliance and then blaming everyone else for not providing them with any competition.

Every flooded to Apprime, as that was the alliance to go to for the win.

Re: looking to the future
 

As if anyone who left App\Asc would be allowed to go straight into a decision-making position in DLR\ND\CT, and thus help them correct their mistakes.

Re: looking to the future
 

It's a vicious circle, really. The game is annoyingly one dimensional and still relies upon this brutal high value / high activity way of playing. This means that of course those people will gather together that are willed to respond to SMS when needed, even get up at night and so on. In turn this makes it fairly boring for the opposition, too, because the only way would be to massively outnumber those few active people. This, however, takes organizational skills that exceed those of the opposition, because the skilled people most of the time cannot sustain their playing style if the rest of their alliance takes a more relaxed approach. So, unless they accept to not be in a winning position, they will move on to be part of those more active people. Leaving behind those which do not care too much about the game itself but more about their internet friends. And so on ...

Re: looking to the future
 

love how everything on AD gets turned into an Ascendancy discussion, but since we are all entitled to our own opinions...

the same thing that goes wrong every round. everyone builds basically the same fleet and can't attack one other (or they just choose not to) and hides behind fences and blocks.

players would rather listen to how their alliance wants to play instead of thinking with their own mental power. most alliances only play for #2 and don't want another alliance to get #1 if cooperation does exist.

i don't think its necessarily something the game needs to improve to fix, its the community. just because an alliance has a member in a galaxy, don't purposely avoid attacking it. just because a galaxy has "the top players" don't avoid it. don't play for #2 as an alliance with the blocks you form in order to play for planet/galaxy ranks. et al.

Re: looking to the future
 

I had fun this round, so from my POV nothing went wrong!

Re: looking to the future
 

what did you enjoy about the round?

Re: looking to the future
 

ruining

Re: looking to the future
 

im predicting ODDR to have an even stronger core of players next round, build up from our own core of noobs and oldschool.

almost sad to see the tag limit go down to 50

Re: looking to the future
 

pretty much all those retards were asc core, most get kicked and more will be

Re: looking to the future
 

around 10people from asc joined and saying that all top players are in apprime its wrong. To Mek if you want your alliance's play better change ur BC's HC's because same people keep ruining things every round over and over again.
like stop hitting most active app gals every rnd and focus on their "shitter" gals this way you can easily roid us and keep our top gals for later? like we do this every round, we are going for easy gals(roids) and focus on top gals in the end only. As you can see you keep hitting our top gals and failing every time so you are killing your member morale and then more and more people going to solo attacks because they want to land some attacks, also explain me 1thing about this round why you ptargetted apprime with block in our fortress gals? like 3-4people in our gals get incs max 3 waves and rest of the gal is without incs. Tbh never saw more retarded decissions than this one.

Re: looking to the future
 

I can't believe I'm saying this, but I couldn't agree more.

Re: looking to the future
 

Seconded. Those two choices of attacking that were made were quite simply rediculous.

Re: looking to the future
 

your spelling is nothing short of rediculous

Re: looking to the future
 

Give us names, my dear idiot. NAME AND SHAME !

Re: looking to the future
 

just like his mum.

Re: looking to the future
 

So true so true. But to elaborate!

I spent the round playing when I wanted and had the time for it. That basicly means playing a covop planet, which I did. I could log on, ruin people, log off and forget about pa until next time I logged on. It was great.

Re: looking to the future
 

why all those asc people keep posting some off topic posts there?

Re: looking to the future
 

Re: looking to the future
 

Re: looking to the future
 

Well, that was certainly, er, nothing?

Re: looking to the future
 

I did, sorta. Was kinda bad timing with my computer dieing and I only played half the round. It's always hard to get the sort of respect needed for changing things in an established alliance so you would typically need more than a round to do it. However, I think we've had so many players through the system in asc now (we counted them a while back but I forgot the number, at least 200 different people I'd guess) that nearly every alliance has some ex-asc in them.

Just being a member of an alliance hardly qualifies you to go out and teach others though, there have been rounds where half of asc also had no idea what was going on. So you need the right people to do it, but they will often be frustrated by the resistance and distrust others have. I've had many talks with for example a CT hc and genuinely tried to help the alliance improve by offering my opinion about what needed to change. And while he listened, none of those things we talk about have ever happened.

Re: looking to the future
 

The fact of the matter is that the requirements to change an alliance are many and compounding, and one of them is work on all the other requirements. While many people are happy to sit around on IRC all day shooting the shit, many of these don't want to do the "work" associated with running a successful alliance.

I don't blame them, a game shouldn't be about work. But done right, that work can be fun and rewarding. You just need to find a way for that work to be fun and rewarding in its own right, rather than only if you win. While I very much enjoy saying that winning is more fun than losing, that doesn't mean there's nothing to be said for finishing second, third or even tenth in the alliance rankings. It's all about what you did to get there.

A lot of alliances seem to want a rank for the rank's sake, but it turns out that this kind of logic is self-defeating. If you're angling for a rank, you're unwilling to take risks. And what is a game if not the enjoyment of risk-taking in a controlled environment.