Why should I come back?

[Tietäjä]

Dear I'm ignorant.

[Jester]

Originally Posted by Tietäjä

Yeah. One thing I believe changed the alliance scheme was 1up's start with the anti-block propaganda machine. Obviously the tag scheme has had a great impact too, but on the last point of people not being bothered I agree 100%. This is why

1up didn't start the anti-block propaganda, it's been around since round 3 (at least). It's a natural reaction in any case. If you can paint your opponent as unfairly using a good strategy, you can justify using the same strategy even more strongly. What 1up did was break the pre-round build-up to rounds. They proved it was possible to win a round without a pre-built block*. I'm not saying that they stopped this from ever happening again, but they opened people's eyes to it as a viable way to play.

* I'm not commenting on whether they 'blocked' during the round proper.

[Tietäjä]

Allright, you probably know better than I do.

It could probably be just the decline in activity and community size that eventually got the best of the blocking too, or the inbuilt alliance ranks. Or the hardcoded alliance limits. Damned.

[JonnyBGood]

Originally Posted by Tietäjä

This wouldn't really change anything - not anymore, if it had ever.

I don't understand how you can say it wouldn't change anything. The entire goal of alliances "playing for the win" is gone. Presuming you can change anything at all anymore this probably would. And it's probably better than sitting here holding our dicks whining.

[Tietäjä]

The "entire goal" of winning would be gone, but that wouldn't mean there'd be loads of more people around to do the inevitable "work" required for the setup. Obviously, there's little to lose trying it, though.

[AV.]

I received the e-mail, and I was so flattered I intend to play again seriously for the first time since R6.

Or at least that is the story I'm sticking too. I don't recognise any of the usernames on here anymore. Used to be a mod too. Forget how that happened.

I'm sure nothing has changed!

[Juffled]

bit late response, but there maybe more people going for their rank than say the top3/4 (which is generally how many alliances have a genuine chance of winning each round) but i think if they were honest with themselves they would not really care too much if they finished 7th or 10th.

Again rock as an alliance were not the 14th best alliance, they played with a small group of active players, gained a high average score (by kicking inactives) and were better than alot of alliances above them imo, again the same can be said for tgv again imo. while some other alliances in the top 7 although with alot of score really were not as good....thats the point i was trying to make wakey, and i think others have made, not having actual rankings would probably give more accurate alliance rankings in that you would get say
a winner,
2nd-4th grouped
5/6 as the best of the rest (maybe someone like a rock,tgv or a vision this round which were imo better than e.g tof again imo)
7th-12th - the smaller alliances in the blocks
13th onwards everyone else

if it was decided that actual rankings were needed there should be some other victory conditions which has been discussed in earlier threads or your alliance gets points for winning wars and thus wars are made official within pa and so on and so forth

score accumulation by galaxy raiding is boring for everyone as after 3/4/etc rounds of repetative targeting you lose the draw of the game and drift away and with the current way things work galaxy raiding is the most effective way of score accumulation, the wars this round have been low key in that tof vs subh never really happened, wp may have got alot of incs but it was never sustained and targetted for a long time, and a large majority of it could of been put down to gal raids with their members being fat and in some good galaxies.

[Ferretus]

Originally Posted by Ultimate Newbie

...but i think your reply kinda makes it obvious why he responded in that way: Makhil feels you betrayed his alliance. Your own admission of hopping alliances in the middle of a round to preserve your rank could be seen as damning evidence in this regard. No, it doesnt excuse the harshness of the 'welcome', but if you have been a pillar of an alliance's HC and then abandoned them rather than stepping up and trying to fix it and lead, should it be such a surprise that you find resentment?...

I was just a ploppy member matey and wanted to contribute more. I even provided regular co-ords updates of other alliances as I became aware of them. So I contributed as much as I could. After maybe a month tops I realised that ToF was not for me and took Wolfpacks offer, although I didn't take the BC position offered and remained a standard member with them.

So I would argue makhil's comments were unjust and a good example of what some of the PA community have become. :-(

[Ferretus]

Originally Posted by Kal

Reading this thread has made me very disappointed in the community (bar a few people who have made what I would call good posts.)

It certainly is a shame :-(

[Ferretus]

Originally Posted by Achilles

Look, if he wants a warm fuzzy atmosphere he can go play mylittlepony.net or some other such faggotry. PA is a war game in which conflicts and disputes often spill over into the forums. This is both understandable and fun, so toughen up bitch.

Funny, back in the day when this game had a ridiculous amount of players and was in fact still a "wargame" I didn't feel the need to play mylittlepony. lets remember I played 14 rounds before quitting and it was only maybe from around R10ish that I noticed this change in attitude.

[Ferretus]

Originally Posted by wakey

So quite frankly some of you either need to wake up and realise that your actions do have consequences on this games success and adjust your actions for the better or you simple just need to piss off and let the people in this community who are willing to try and make this a place witha good community spirit like it used to be back

Nice post Wakey.

Good to see you are still here, F-Crew are a great bunch and a credit to the game.

[Ferretus]

Originally Posted by Marv

You should come back because despite all this arguing and bickering on all sides of every argument with regards to every aspect of the game, it's still fun and enjoyable to play if this genre of gaming is your particular brand of whisky.

If it wasn't then no one would bother arguing so passionately their views, with everyone aiming for the ultimate goal of making Planetarion, this game that they love better.

That's my answer to the opening question which seems to have been veered off ever so slightly

Good point

[Ferretus]

Originally Posted by wakey

3) I do agree there was a slight cockyness about Ferretus and actually some inacurracies in his claims. In the rounds that ARS played where we had official rankings they were no where near top10 and even the other rounds its hard to say they were ever top10. Now yes if Ferretus goes in telling himself that hes some 'super leader' no matter what alliance he ends up in he's probally going to be dissapointed but I think if he did return and was a bit more realistic about his achievements and actually remember the struggles that ARS had as an alliance that fell in the training alliance group he would be impressed at how far alliances in the middle and even lower tiers have come from a command pov.

Agreed...the earlier rounds were when we were in our prime. Had several hundred members and controlled huge portions of clusters, our top 10 ranking was estimated or id'd by the use of whatever random online utility was around back then. We were hitting the likes of Blue Tuba regularily if anyone remembers who they were, so I guess we weren't that bad. I have screenshots of all our ranked games though which is on our webbie but I can't access this at work due to its 'adult' theme, hehe.
I do not dispute we were a training alliance and I am happy to say that. We took in nooblets and taught them how to play, some stayed, many left. Running an alliance is hard work, especially a multi gaming clan like ARS. We started in 1994 or 95 and so had many other commitments outside of PA. To our credit, players who left ARS PA still stayed with us for other games. They understandably needed the support of a larger alliance and we had a high turnover that made it difficult to identify suitable replacements for myself and Tosswink. BC's etc would stay maybe 2 or 3 rounds which made things difficult. Tosswink retiring in R12 meant that it was time to call it a day and needed to go alliance shopping.

[Ferretus]

Originally Posted by wakey

Theres more people playing this game than just those in alliances that have a real shot of getting the #1 spot. so dont even try pulling the no-one cares card. Its another one of these awful traits the vocal minority of this community has, stop dismissing people just because they arent going to be #1.

Agreed, I'm sure I speak for a lot of HC's when I say that few alliances aim for the top spot. We are content with having a good community, member base and giving as much as we get.

Why are games like Runescape so popular when, although there are ranking tables, they are simply used as reference not competition. It is wrong to think that everyone wants to win. I could offer other examples that are similar to PA but I think these would be edited, hence that example.

[Ferretus]

Originally Posted by AV.

I received the e-mail, and I was so flattered I intend to play again seriously for the first time since R6.

Or at least that is the story I'm sticking too. I don't recognise any of the usernames on here anymore. Used to be a mod too. Forget how that happened.

I'm sure nothing has changed!

Good luck mate I hope it goes well for you.

Due to time constraints I thought I would start this thread to see if I could play, or just be exiled for not logging in every hour.

[Tietäjä]

Originally Posted by Juffled

score accumulation by galaxy raiding is boring for everyone.

Yes. Sadly, to agree with you, the game mechanics do not favour fighting a war at all, unless you can actually bash your foes very fast and very effective, which probably requires a military engine nobody seems to be able to put up with the current levels of activity.

[Juffled]

Originally Posted by Tietäjä

Yes. Sadly, to agree with you, the game mechanics do not favour fighting a war at all, unless you can actually bash your foes very fast and very effective, which probably requires a military engine nobody seems to be able to put up with the current levels of activity.

yes we all know gal raids boring, some bloke who dipped into this game about a month ago suggested making wars official and alocating score/points whatever for the winning side etc, maybe this could be expanded on as an incentive to war

[wakey]

Originally Posted by Juffled

Again rock as an alliance were not the 14th best alliance, they played with a small group of active players, gained a high average score (by kicking inactives) and were better than alot of alliances above them imo, again the same can be said for tgv again imo. while some other alliances in the top 7 although with alot of score really were not as good....thats the point i was trying to make wakey, and i think others have made, not having actual rankings would probably give more accurate alliance rankings in that you would get say
a winner,
2nd-4th grouped
5/6 as the best of the rest (maybe someone like a rock,tgv or a vision this round which were imo better than e.g tof again imo)
7th-12th - the smaller alliances in the blocks
13th onwards everyone else

.

If you seriously think Rock are the 5th or 6th best alliance then your proving exactly why this idea is foolish. Your putting way too much weight on an average score and then comparing them to a completely different situation.

For example you would probably argue that Rock were better than F-Crew this round based on the averages. However using averages your comparing apples and oranges. You have Rock, an alliance that just kept its core, didn't really recruit, removed inactive members and didn't replace them and in F-Crew you have an alliance that took its core and who recruited without any score provision to add to this core. If Rock had of recruited past their core then they wouldn't have had the average they had and I can tell you that looking at the final scores of F-Crew's members if I take the 27 members with the most activity and defence calls we get an average score thats not far behind Asc (3,717,064)

I would put money on orbit, tof, ha all being able to take their core 27 people and have an average around the same mark and I think giving these alliances disrespect because they choose to put their spare space to use at the expense of their average is really out of order.

TGV is a slightly better example for you, their average was good without restricting themselves too much and their average is certainly more of a true reflection than Rocks, Visions,xVx and ND but despite the better average you still cant say that TGV was better than vgn because theres another factor to bring into play on averages. When you reach 60 members you can only recruit people who are smaller than half the average of the top10.

If I remember rightly that was around 1.6mill. So if vgn recruited the 8 members over their limit at this limit that would be worth 12.8mill. Knock that off their total of 199mill and you get 186.2 mill which gives an average of 3.1mill for the alliance. And thats if everyone was recruited at the 1.6mill mark, its probably safe to assume they weren't and contributed a fair bit less score than that so their average would be higher.

Also lets be honest here, without the scores being published you wouldn't even be holding Rock up as doing great. Its their average and their average alone thats making you say that. They would have simply been in the group of alliances from about 5th down that the vocal minority in this community ignore as it doesnt involve them

[wakey]

Originally Posted by Juffled

yes we all know gal raids boring, some bloke who dipped into this game about a month ago suggested making wars official and alocating score/points whatever for the winning side etc, maybe this could be expanded on as an incentive to war

The problem is still that ultimately wars involve one group of players totally destroying another group of players very means to play the game. When this happens there's very little motivation to carry on the round and less motivation to ever return.

If we want the game to be about big alliance wars we need someone to think of a system that limits the damage being on the losing side of a war brings to a players ability to keep playing. Things like a small amount of the resources for the lost ships back simply doesn't cut it. People need to know that going into a war isnt potentially going to end their round before its started so the members and the alliances themselves are more inclined to enter a war that they don't already know they have won

[I am Idler]

Originally Posted by wakey

Ofc jumped up idiots like yourself just sit there and go "its not our job' and many even go as far as undermining attempts to make the place nicer (for example the likes of Idler who would through his actions would drive alot of people away and when we banned him for hit he would go over our heads to get himself unbanned, and idler isnt the only one to do this kind of thing)

Can you be a bit more spesific the next time you decide to throw slander at people ? This isnt only provocative, its insulting and degrading and I will not stand for it.

[wakey]

Originally Posted by Ferretus

I was just a ploppy member matey and wanted to contribute more. I even provided regular co-ords updates of other alliances as I became aware of them. So I contributed as much as I could. After maybe a month tops I realised that ToF was not for me and took Wolfpacks offer, although I didn't take the BC position offered and remained a standard member with them.

So I would argue makhil's comments were unjust and a good example of what some of the PA community have become. :-(

From what I gather from this thread you were worth a fair amount of score to tof and probably worth a fair amount defence missions. I'm sure you remember how annoying it is not only for the hc of an alliance but also the other members when one of your good players jumps ship midround. When you join an alliance there's somewhat of an unspoken rule that your doing so for the whole round and when people dont its easy to be a little bitter at them

Makhill thinks you screwed them over and you probably did to a degree so his reaction to you is somewhat understandable. If you want people to be nice to you then you have to be willing to always act in the correct way, if your going to be single minded and go after what suits you best then you have to be prepared for some resentment and burnt bridges

Originally Posted by Ferretus

Funny, back in the day when this game had a ridiculous amount of players and was in fact still a "wargame" I didn't feel the need to play mylittlepony. lets remember I played 14 rounds before quitting and it was only maybe from around R10ish that I noticed this change in attitude.

You needed to open your eyes a bit more pre PAX then . The community started to change when the alliances did. Fury, Legion and RB;s bending of the rules to give themselves private galaxies in r3 allowed them to bring a new level of professionalism to alliances and when that forced private galaxies onto everyone in r4 and other alliances caught up to that level the game changed for ever. During round 4 there was alot of grumberling on irc and the forums about the community and the way it became less of one big open community and more lots of small closed communities and alot of people did quit because of it. The only saving grace was the fact the game was free, this meant it had no trouble bringing new people in which helped mask the unrest in some quarters somewhat.

[Juffled]

in response to your first post wakey,

for that "best of the rest" tag I was in TGV for alot of the round so i will be biased there they were good and i left due to personnel reasons not performance reasons, vision never attacked me as I had 2 of their members in galaxy but their defence was incredible, and the rock attack on my galaxy was the second most successful after the wp one (which was very good fair play to wp there).

Whenever i hit a rock player they got defence except for once, thats my basis on why rock were better than most, howver maybe it was only an isolated good attack by them, i do not know but the few moments i did have contact with rock they did well

Their average score was impressive yes and it helped give them an achievable goal. however it is a good point on the stats you have made there and yes i prolly did put slightly too much play into that but i would still say rock were better than tof/ha/f-crew imo this round and that is the pros and cons of this way of the rankings in that alliances get their proper dues instead of such a cut and dry system

Edit- in response to ferratus/wakeys post above about the community changing, people used to dislike other people simply because they were in alliance x, that doesnt happen now

[Juffled]

Originally Posted by wakey

The problem is still that ultimately wars involve one group of players totally destroying another group of players very means to play the game. When this happens there's very little motivation to carry on the round and less motivation to ever return.

If we want the game to be about big alliance wars we need someone to think of a system that limits the damage being on the losing side of a war brings to a players ability to keep playing. Things like a small amount of the resources for the lost ships back simply doesn't cut it. People need to know that going into a war isnt potentially going to end their round before its started so the members and the alliances themselves are more inclined to enter a war that they don't already know they have won

to the contary they need to go into a war knowing they can lose their round which cant happen atm really, however there needs to be enough of a positive for the alliance or something similar that it is worth having a war.

And with 7 week rounds with wars not really happening till week 4 at the earliest a player isnt going to lose too much of the time and could change to a support planet (scanning cov-opping, escorting)

edit - i do agree though that there is no incentive to war atm which is the problem

[Wandows]

Originally Posted by wakey

The problem is still that ultimately wars involve one group of players totally destroying another group of players very means to play the game. When this happens there's very little motivation to carry on the round and less motivation to ever return.

If we want the game to be about big alliance wars we need someone to think of a system that limits the damage being on the losing side of a war brings to a players ability to keep playing. Things like a small amount of the resources for the lost ships back simply doesn't cut it. People need to know that going into a war isnt potentially going to end their round before its started so the members and the alliances themselves are more inclined to enter a war that they don't already know they have won

What kind of crap is this? Sorry, but why on earth should people be reassured that going to war isn't going to end their round? "Soldiers, we are going to war, but don't worry, we are all immume to eachother, so we'll just be exchanging fire untill we get tired of it, as none of us can die anyway". In any war you can and should expect losses, and having some kind of safety net is just stupid. There is already salvage in place to make sure you can recover somewhat, giving even more is just idiotic and plain stupid in a war game where you are supposed to hurt eachother (at least, assuming we go down that road, rather than having a score accumulation race).

The only way i see to 'force' alliance wars to take place is to seperate planet score and alliance score. Alliances should only be able to gain score while at war with another alliance, each action taken upon a hostile planet (be it roiding it, killing its fleet, cov opping) should gain the alliance some kind of score rating. The scores gained would ofcourse be very complex, taking rating differences between alliances and individual (or total) planet differences in account. Then add options to end the war by either mutual agreement (no winner) or surrender, in which case the winning alliance gets a certain percentage of the losing alliance it's rating. Ending a war would result in some kind of forced nap status for a certain period where no hostile actions can be inflicted on either side. Individual planets can still grow score for the planet ranking, but for the alliance rankings official wars would have to be fought (and won?) to get high up there.

[wakey]

Lets say your a big fan of the tv show lost. They announce a mmorpg based around it and you rush out with your £20 on realise day to buy it and then shell out a further £10 a month to play.

You spend a month levelling up, building up a party of companions and going out questing together. Your party though stumbles across another party who are all 20 levels higher than you or an extreamly hard quest and it see you all killed. The game however takes a PA stance that 'losing' pretty much sets you back to the start, you have lost most if not all your levels, you have lost all your equipment and all your resources. This means you and your party pretty much have to start from the beginning again. Are you going to be motivated to repeat what you have done, are you going to be eager to partake in any quest that may be difficult and see you killed. The simple answer is no and your prone to just saying "sod it" after a few deaths.

However if it stuck to the conventional mmorpg death systems such as experience debt where you are penalised for being killed through the fact that any time you gain xp a substantial amount of it is used to pay off the debt you have incurred rather than going towards levelling you up your more likly to keepplaying. Yes it makes the game harder but its not setting you back to nearly zero and leaving you in a state where you simply dont have what you need progress in the game.

For a war game in PA to work we simple need to come up with a more ingenious way to handle winning and losing just like mmorpgs did. A system that encourages you to 'war' more no matter if your a top player or a smaller player rather than a system where your only encouraged to war smaller alliances than yourself and which for alot of players has no real gains for them but a round ending amount of loss at stake.

If we think outside the box there's a possibility to find a reward and punishment system that would encourage warring without going down the completely end the other sides round route. If we just keep thinking inside the box though the only outcome for a war game is one that does little but to kill the game further with every war declared

@Wandows: How on earth does making alliance score different to individual score solve anything. For all the members of an alliance going to war means there's one very big thing on the line, their whole round. The war effects their individual score so where's the additional motivation for a player to take part in a war and where's the real motivation for an alliance to parttake if it want to keep its members.

[JonnyBGood]

It's not necessarily total score or average score wakey. For me at least it's far more to do with how the alliance plays, how their defence is, how difficult to defend against their attacks are. Score, in any sense, measures nothing bar how good you are at accumulating score. For example if alliance x has a better total/average score than alliance y and they go to war and alliance y wins does that mean alliance x was more powerful militarily than alliance y before they went to war? Extending the idea why should the rankings at the end of the round have to mean anything bar the alliance with more score is the alliance with more score?

Edit: To be honest wakey I think it's fairly obvious that you don't really have much interest in playing what anyone would define as a wargame. The quality of a round, and the entertainment you can derive from it, isn't necessarily linked to your final score at the end of it, although I will admit for a lot of people it seems to be.

[Wandows]

Originally Posted by wakey

@Wandows: How on earth does making alliance score different to individual score solve anything. For all the members of an alliance going to war means there's one very big thing on the line, their whole round. The war effects their individual score so where's the additional motivation for a player to take part in a war and where's the real motivation for an alliance to parttake if it want to keep its members.

That is actually not true. Seperating the score ratings would mean any alliance member can sacrifice its own score for the good of the alliance. You are looking at it from a individual point of view, where as alliance wars require group effort (i.e. "take one for the team"). Given a right implementation (which is ofcourse vague in its description at this point) the choise would be made between alliance or personal ranks. Both could still be done, but it may also be required for some to sacrifice themselves to allow their alliance to win. In the ideal situation the alliance rating would reflect the overall damage inflicted by each alliance, and this can include members of that alliance 'suiciding' smart attacks that gain the alliance high ratings (by doing lots of damage to the other side while dying).

Speaking of your "thinking outside the box" it would change the game to having seperated rankings and each player / group having to make a choise (to some extent) how to fight the right. Do they go for individual planet ranks (the current value/score) or want to win the alliance ranking by being the most damaging alliance around. I fail to see why individual and group rank choises can't be mixed. Players can still "chose" to play for their own ranking, but it might also mean that their alliance has a harder time trying to go up the rankings. And even if they lose their fleet, they can rebuild that (you don't lose techs) and continue to harm your enemy and be an asset to your alliance (unless ofcourse you're a sore loser and give up after being owned).

[Heartless]

I've always preferred Capture the Flag over Last Man Standing. Death match is also nice but requires people to revive again.

Maybe instead of rewarding the biggest score we should reward most roids held over a round (=> most resources gained). That would certainly be far more interesting in terms of deciding the winning alliance, because you can gain good rankings there either politically (trying to avoid incoming by NAPS, for instance) as well as military power (huge fleets and efficient fleet usage helps a lot!).

[wakey]

Attacks and defence stats are subjective though. I posted the following stats on F-crew's incoming and how well we defended over on AD the other day

Incoming From	Total	Covered	%
Ascendancy	92	67	73%
Conspiracy	87	44	51%
Hidden Agenda	35	18	51%
Howling Rain	73	39	54%
NewDawn	        71	24	34%
Orbit	        73	61	84%
ROCK	        93	73	78%
Subh	        50	33	65%
TGV	        86	53	62%
Tides of Fire	63	35	55%
Vengeance	67	32	48%
VisioN	        86	50	58%
Wolfpack	81	44	54%
xVx	        50	35	69%
Other	        408	228	56%
	        1415	836	59%

So based on that my order of Best alliance this round would have to be

1 - NewDawn
2 - Vengeance
3 - Conspiracy
3 = Hidden Agenda
5 - Howling Rain
5 = Wolfpack
7 - Tides of Fire
8 - VisioN
9 - TGV
10 - Subh
11 - xVx
12 - Ascendancy
13 - ROCK
14 - Orbit

Were ND really the best alliance, was HA really the joint 3rd best alliance, was Asc really the 3rd worst alliance and Orbit the worst. And if Rock were considered to have done so well against others why are they the second worst for us?

And yes I don't want a war game in the conventional sense that everyone else seems to think is great. While most of you were in your big blocks in the past fighting the wars I saw the fall out it brought with it lower down, i saw the players caught in the middle and driven out of the game for good. I'm all for a system that encourages alliances to war more but we have to look at the wider picture not everyone in a big alliance, not everyone has obscene activity and not everyone has a support system thats also got an obscene level of activity. Hardcore gamers in general dont want to play a simple browser based game and as such you have to consider the none hardcore gamers this community has and which it can attract more of and any attempt to move to a full war game it has to take the mid level and low level players who are only going to put up with being zero'd a certain number of times into account

[Ceadrath]

The point here wakey is that the alliance score would be calculated against ALL alliances. An idea also would be to weight potential score gain similar/higher ranked alliances similar to how xp would work attacking larger planets.

Personally however i think that the biggest problem when it comes to forcing alliances to fight wars, the lack of people willing to put the time and effort in to make it happern is a much bigger factor. Forcing them to only gain score through fighting them is only going to favour those alliances who have the people available with willingness/experience to do so.

[Wandows]

How can defence and attack statistics be subjective when they cover ALL attacks and defences a alliance did, instead of only using the F-Crew related list you posted.

Just because wars in the past involved alot of bashing doesn't mean it will be so again if the system is changed. You immediatly start comparing it to all rounds which didn't have any bash ust for your info, i never was winning in the block wars, my planet always ended up in the outposts of the universe with little to no chance on growing (despite being on the winning side in some limits and value/fleet was the only existing ranking. If there would be system that simply doesn't reward killing weak players, there won't be any need for others to waste their time on doing so (question remains what these values include, but with some research it should be possible to get out of this whole static concept that PA currently has). The closer you come to the top, the tougher your competition will and the more rewarding the fights should become. Instead of looking at the bigger picture like you are suggesting all the time, you seem to continue staying inside your little box that has to protect all the weaker and inactive players.

P.S. i personally enjoyed being involved in the conventional war game despite my planet always being bashed to oblivion.

[Tietäjä]

Originally Posted by wakey

So based on that my order of Best alliance this round would have to be

Or how faulty your intel is? Or how many calls from any given alliance went unreported and broke through? Or what? And F-Crew never had incomings from Angels? That's a strange way to list things...

[Heartless]

Originally Posted by Tietäjä

Or how faulty your intel is? Or how many calls from any given alliance went unreported and broke through? Or what? And F-Crew never had incomings from Angels? That's a strange way to list things...

Surely the game itself has no faulty intel. Even if you stay outside a tag - you aren't contributing to the alliances performance then and as such the alliance does not gain score. I guess that idea deserves some more pondering.

[JonnyBGood]

90% of those ascendancy incs are probably stoom's ridiculous fi as cr fakes or something. None of those %s really reflect anything though, lies, damn lies and statistics y'know. Sending out masses of early fakes that get covered and suck in defence is an advisable move but would, by its very nature as a tactic, artificially warp % of calls covered. Equally if you roid a 300 roid planet with 3 waves from 3 launched and a 1200 roid planet with 1 from 3 you lose more roids from the second one but it's better for your stats. For another example large parts of my gal would only daytime raid when we had incs due to need to use ships to cover ingal. This could lead to a situation where only 500 roids were lost from incs and 500 capped as opposed to 2k lost and 1500 capped on night attacks. Overall impression of alliance abilities are really what you should be considering.

[JonnyBGood]

Originally Posted by wakey

While most of you were in your big blocks in the past

Oh look it's a damn lie and an ad hominem in the same sentence fragment. Awesome.


Anyways it's a completely different situation. And no offence but the current game isn't exactly growing either. Perhaps if you presented a coherent view of what you want for PA as a game?

[Tietäjä]

Originally Posted by Heartless

Surely the game itself has no faulty intel. Even if you stay outside a tag - you aren't contributing to the alliances performance then and as such the alliance does not gain score. I guess that idea deserves some more pondering.

So he picked the tags and members from in-game? Is there a comperhensive list of all alliances and all their members published somewhere nowadays, and did I just manage to miss it? I just picked up the odd intel part noticing that there's one top10 alliance completely missing.

[Heartless]

Originally Posted by Tietäjä

So he picked the tags and members from in-game? Is there a comperhensive list of all alliances and all their members published somewhere nowadays, and did I just manage to miss it? I just picked up the odd intel part noticing that there's one top10 alliance completely missing.

I was referring to future use of this as a way to display alliance effectivity. Of course standard alliance arbiters cannot be used, but when we ponder about such a system for measuring about alliance score then we can safely take correct intel as granted.

[Heartless]

Originally Posted by JonnyBGood

Overall impression of alliance abilities are really what you should be considering.

But to consider something we have to find a way to measure it. Personally I am very interested into the thought of using covered / uncovered attacks as well as other information like "fleets launched at alliance X and roids taken from that alliance" to measure an alliances performance.

[Ferretus]

Originally Posted by wakey

From what I gather from this thread you were worth a fair amount of score to tof and probably worth a fair amount defence missions. I'm sure you remember how annoying it is not only for the hc of an alliance but also the other members when one of your good players jumps ship midround. When you join an alliance there's somewhat of an unspoken rule that your doing so for the whole round and when people dont its easy to be a little bitter at them

Makhill thinks you screwed them over and you probably did to a degree so his reaction to you is somewhat understandable. If you want people to be nice to you then you have to be willing to always act in the correct way, if your going to be single minded and go after what suits you best then you have to be prepared for some resentment and burnt bridges

You needed to open your eyes a bit more pre PAX then . The community started to change when the alliances did. Fury, Legion and RB;s bending of the rules to give themselves private galaxies in r3 allowed them to bring a new level of professionalism to alliances and when that forced private galaxies onto everyone in r4 and other alliances caught up to that level the game changed for ever. During round 4 there was alot of grumberling on irc and the forums about the community and the way it became less of one big open community and more lots of small closed communities and alot of people did quit because of it. The only saving grace was the fact the game was free, this meant it had no trouble bringing new people in which helped mask the unrest in some quarters somewhat.

To the first point, I wasn't in the alliance long enough for my departure to be unrecoverable. Neither would I join or leave an alliance for my own personal gain. You know me better than that! Would I have run ARS for 12 rounds here if I wanted to be #1? Of course not. I had friends in Wolfpack, and those I knew in ToF had left already earlier in the round for whatever reason. ToF were not able to defend me as they preferred to attack at the time. I could have run solo and achieved the same results in that situation. In short, ToF offered nothing whereas Wolfpack offered me a nice community as well as the sort of thanks and mutual respect you should have from your alliance. A fumbled retaliation strike where command only decided to tell some of us to recall was the final straw. I was still receiving mails to recall from targets I was attacking 2 weeks after I left, hardly an organised alliance at the time.

As to the being unhappy with the community R10+ apologies for not getting it right. I was only guessing as I have been out of the game so long.

[Ferretus]

On the subject of communities, it isn't a jolt thing either. Another game run by Jolt, Londinium, has an active and fairly friendly forum and gaming environment. PA is the only game to my knowledge where people feel the need to be unpleasant to one another and saying this is part of the game, in my view, is not right.

[robban1]

Originally Posted by Ferretus

On the subject of communities, it isn't a jolt thing either. Another game run by Jolt, Londinium, has an active and fairly friendly forum and gaming environment. PA is the only game to my knowledge where people feel the need to be unpleasant to one another and saying this is part of the game, in my view, is not right.

every action have an reaction, here we have fukall admins and jolt is just some mofos getting the cash for nothing. thinks its time we get something as an community instead of just beeing a bunch of retards playing a dieing game.

[Ferretus]

Originally Posted by robban1

every action have an reaction, here we have fukall admins and jolt is just some mofos getting the cash for nothing. thinks its time we get something as an community instead of just beeing a bunch of retards playing a dieing game.

Londinium only has 2 forum admins to my knowledge whom also don't get paid. Point is, the game doesn't need them as there is a community. There are alliances and wars and everything else you have here, but people leave that in the game.

[Ferretus]

As we are moving off topic a little I'd like to throw a question out to you all.

I can't comment on the latest in game politics and what has happened in recent rounds, so lets look at what can make this game better.

What would people think if alliances were removed from the game? Instead a greater focus on the galaxy was made with people having to train less experienced players rather than exile them to the 200s.

It is of course naive to think that alliances will just go as they would simply function external to the game as they always did, but if players were forced to work with people that they wouldn't normally would that encourage players to get along better? The danger of alliances is that we form our little clique groups and tensions rise with ex members/enemies etc in other alliances. This spills onto the forums and into future rounds and eventually players leave.
I wonder if taking a step back is what is required before PA can recover. Sure the die hard alliance members will leave, but I wonder if that is what is needed.

We play this game for fun, not hassle lets remember that.

[robban1]

i talk about game admin here, forums gets nasty then the comunications between players and admins ingame fails

[Ferretus]

and back to the point

Originally Posted by Ferretus

What would people think if alliances were removed from the game? Instead a greater focus on the galaxy was made with people having to train less experienced players rather than exile them to the 200s.

[furball]

Originally Posted by Ferretus

What would people think if alliances were removed from the game? Instead a greater focus on the galaxy was made with people having to train less experienced players rather than exile them to the 200s.

It is of course naive to think that alliances will just go as they would simply function external to the game as they always did, but if players were forced to work with people that they wouldn't normally would that encourage players to get along better? The danger of alliances is that we form our little clique groups and tensions rise with ex members/enemies etc in other alliances. This spills onto the forums and into future rounds and eventually players leave.
I wonder if taking a step back is what is required before PA can recover. Sure the die hard alliance members will leave, but I wonder if that is what is needed.

It's impossible to remove alliances from the game. People will continue working together. You'd have to make out-of-galaxy/cluster defence either impossible or too slow - and then you'd lose a lot of fun from the game.


Removing the alliance limit would be a better idea.

[Ferretus]

Can we think that we are in fairy land then and somehow the formation of an alliance will result in immediate castration.
I know alliances are nigh impossible to remove but I want to know whether people are willing to co-operate with their galaxy and other unknowns? Essentially has this game turned into one big slagging match between alliances and has that resulted in the poor community behaviour and small player base?

Removing the alliance limit would result in large alliances dominating? I don't honestly know and its not something I really want to go over. I think when I left the alliance cap had been introduced at 100.

[wakey]

Originally Posted by Tietäjä

Or how faulty your intel is? Or how many calls from any given alliance went unreported and broke through? Or what? And F-Crew never had incomings from Angels? That's a strange way to list things...

Yeah I know when I original did the stats I missed Angels out. They were just missing from my array so rather than getting split into separate groups they were lumped into the other grouping.


As for people saying "its not just on F-Crew's intel', I'm not stupid I realise that and I find it hard to believe that any of you believe I was even implying that. I was pointing out simply that each alliances view of how the round went is subjective and when using subjective data its going to depend on which info is used and how.

The biggest positive surprise thread and the Most disappointing thread on AD imho show the problems you have with this kind of system. On the disappointing thread you have UN saying how well F-Crew did, you then have me saying how we were disappointing. Over on the positive one you have people saying how Orbit did really well, F-Crew were shit. I point out that for an alliance who did well Orbit failed to increase the score gap from last round over us, and we firmly admit to doing shit this round. You then get a Orbit HC confirming they didn't do great compared to last and seemed to have many of the problems that I stated F-Crew had.

Everyone view was based upon on some kind of interpretation of the information they had at hand but who's is right. And its this reason I have an issue with 'success decided by public perception'. Why should others be able to decide if your alliance failed or succeed based on intrepation of events and pre conceptions.

@JBG: I know there's aspects like fakes that come into play with these stats and that not all attacks are equal but again its something which is open for interpretation. What could be seen by one person as a Fake could by another be seen as a proper attack that defence forced a recall

You need a scoring system which is fair, consistent and most important of all quantifiable rather than one based on someone/some groups perceptions. If you can reward some alliances actions in certain areas in a consistent and fair manner that can be backed up in some quantifiable way then id be fully supportive.

[wakey]

Originally Posted by furball

I
Removing the alliance limit would be a better idea.

It would help how?

[Mzyxptlk]

Originally Posted by Ferretus

What would people think if alliances were removed from the game? Instead a greater focus on the galaxy was made with people having to train less experienced players rather than exile them to the 200s.

I think it's something which is already taking place, and which will continue on doing so, without any need for external interference (by which, paradoxically, I refer to any ingame efforts made by the game admins), intended to speed up the process.

Originally Posted by wakey

You need a scoring system which is fair, consistent and most important of all quantifiable rather than one based on someone/some groups perceptions. If you can reward some alliances actions in certain areas in a consistent and fair manner that can be backed up in some quantifiable way then id be fully supportive.

The question is, is the current score system, which discourages war and encourages galaxy raids and napping, the system we want in this game, or are we looking for something a little more, shall we say, challenging?