The Violet Sector

Just an idea I got while looking at the top legions graphs.

There has always been a lot to do about legion activity and how the balance is not good.
I suspect that right now there is only a formula for looking at people that moved within the last n ticks.
Maybe this could be improved by having the system take into account how fast the score of a legion is going up. If the graph is going up steeply it means that the legion is active. If it is going down it means that legion is in trouble. It would also 'reward' legions that lost ships in battle.

Mind you, I do not propose to look only at the steepness of the graph, but to add it to the current formula.

What do you think?

I think a good indication on how active a pilot is, is his TOTAL score.

Of course, but even better is to look at his total score AND his recent score increase?

You could measure how active someone is by their score yes, or their level, or how many moves they have made...

The reason we don't, is simple.

Score points? Make more ticks? We will punish your legion by declaring it more active, therefore giving new signups to another side.

Play poorly? Dont make many moves? We reward you by giving your side more people than another.

This results in feeling like you are being punished for playing the game, and even open to abuse by people by, for example, signing up for a beta and then not moving for a few days to improve the chances of people joining the same legion you did.

I think a better change it to have those in vacation NOT set as inactive until they havent moved in the last X ticks, because previous games people have went into vac for a short time and their legion has gained new people during it - as they are suddenly counted as 'weaker' than before, while in fact they can return at any time.

I'll admit that it may not seem fair, and we certainly do not want to exaggerate the balancing, but that is just a matter of twisting the knobs.

What you forget to mention is the effect that once a legion is running behind on the leading legion, activity goes down automatically because everybody is thinking: oh pooh i'm in an inactive legion and we are never going to win this so i may as well not play as fanatic as i could. Whereas activity rises on the leading legion simply because people love to win. This effect is much stronger than the 'punishment' of balancing legions, at least the way it is now.

So I don't think wee need to worry about it too much. We simply want to improve the balancing act. Question is: how can it be done?

Okay here is another wild idea, it involves more programming work though.

Before the game starts, everyone must give an estime on how many ticks a day he or she will be active on average. Balancing is based on this.
Once the game starts, everyone gets insight in how many moves they have made too much or too little based on their estimate.
If they have used more than 50(?) too much, their scores are halved.
If they have used more than 50(?) too little, nothing happens. The idea being that if you overestimated your activity, you are already punishing your legion by decreasing the chance of getting extra players.

It could be abused though, if people sign up multis, indicating they will be fully active, and then they dont do any useful moves. (But then again, such abuse can be done in any system).

yeah, I am looking at the Legion Levels now and the distribution between the two surviving legions is terrible. :-/

25 Tibs and 18 Krils. It almost feels like all the Bors and Jax got handed to the tibs...

That was because the krils were miles ahead of the tibs... but that is getting slightly offtopic

iceblink wrote:That was because the krils were miles ahead of the tibs... but that is getting slightly offtopic

Score doesn't get used when ships are assigned a new legion at present. Maybe the Krils have less because the ships they got assigned became inactive.

I can attest to that. When I died and became a Kril that was it for me, and haven't logged in since.

I made it to level 5 3 times this beta between my 2 factions already, and really have no desire to fight for the krils and do it once again

I probably still wouldn't have for the tibs either, but would carry a little more weight as I could tailor towards the vengeance side of things a little bit.

But playing for the overwhelming faction almost all beta long, just doesn't hold any appeal to be honest.

I am sure there are others that feel the same way, so dividing ships will never really work, as people will hold no real motivation for starting over for the 3rd time on a team that has been there nemesis the entire game