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8/27/2024 6:08:04   
Telcontar Arvedui I
Member

While I'm sure the staff have noticed, this year's contest highlighted just about all the big problems that made such an event, IMO, a net detriment to the community:

  • Lack of official communications, whether via in-game news or other, more publicly-accessible official channels.
  • Popularity contest format that results in a lot of the suggestions leaning towards being judged by the clout of the poster, rather than the merits of the suggestion.
  • Worst of all, rampant foul play during voting that resulted in (IMO, heavy-handed) staff intervention, which, not only robbed the staff of work-hours that can be dedicated to the game itself, but also tarnished the integrity of the vote results.

    I don't believe, if we continue with this next year, and the years thereafter, that such a state of affairs will get significantly better on its own. While I would agree that the staff can take action to resolve the problems, or mitigate their negative impact in the future, I believe it is also our job as the players to foster a upstanding community with proper conduct, instead of relying on staff to police the bad actors amongst us. And given how we performed abysmally (at least, I do think as a whole we acted appallingly) these past months, I believe that we should step away from suggestion contests for a few years.

    Just have the staff officially communicate the general theme and some details into the mechanics of the donation drive Community/Giftmaster set rewards BEFORE the donation drive actually starts, and let the players decide whether they want to gun for the rewards.

    If the staff still want ideas, I'd rather they skim through the AQ Suggestion sub-forums threads - many of those made and maintained by long-invested players with all sorts of ideas - beforehand and just pick some themes or even fully-fleshed-out stuff that caught their eye. If the staff still decides to devote professional time towards community engagement, I'd rather those hours be put into laying proper foundations and building long-term relationships and channels with the playerbase, by encouraging proper conduct and increasing participation/communications on the regular. And I'd rather we, as a community, actually step up and mature as a whole, before we deserve such privileges to directly contribute to actual game content again.

    Dev Anim: Hey all. Opening up the floor for all your discussion and feedback over the contest. Whether it:
    - In game, like donating through Tibbles.
    - Communication between Devs and players.
    - Ideas for sets etc.
    Please remember to keep it constructive and friendly. This is not the place to cast accusations. Any grievances please PM me directly.


    < Message edited by AnimalKing -- 8/27/2024 14:54:33 >
  • AQ  Post #: 1
    8/27/2024 15:20:27   
    Sapphire
    Member

    First off, I would like to remind everyone that these donation contests serve as a major windfall for AQ in terms of revenue. They are trying to generate income through this game, while attempting to have some engagement with the players and allow players an opportunity to get tokens, in some cases, even when they don't have the means to do so themselves.

    To me, this means finding the best possible solution to increase tokens donated, even if it means there are some less-than-perfect aspects or "necessary evils" if you will.

    I think this year's attempt to alter this donation system seemed to have great intentions, but I think even if you removed what took place it would have still resulted in lower donations compared to LY. So I wont focus on the bad deeds as much as the nuts and bolts of the the entire process.

    And speaking of LY, I think what happened LY caused changes to this year, when I think an argument could be made that very little needed to change from years past.

    I know that some might push for there to be a contest where there are zero player suggestions, where staff just picks w/e they want like the other 51 weeks out of the year, but I think it would be to the detriment to the game. More player engagement is needed, but hopefully somehow without some of the drama.

    I think the best business decision is to revert to previous years' systems and just tweak that. There are enormous benefits to allowing those who spent their money to more or less mostly dictate the suggestion chosen. Some may view this as a bad idea because "whales dictate it all" but I'm sorry, that's the only way to see the results that will make the contest a success from a monetary standpoint for AQ. It's one of the necessary evils.

    If staff think there are too many issues with that system, they need to consider other ways to generate more donations. The dev ticket idea is a great idea, but expanding that isn't likely in the cards because of of the time it takes to make the art and even though code is essentially copy/pasted, that's still time, and if you increase it, it;'s more time.

    Here's one idea that could work (maybe?)

    If you altered the contest to automatically give the items (all of the base items) based on a specific number of tokens donated, you might get more donations. Some players may be unwilling to donate because it's a gamble. Remove that gamble. You might generate more token donos from this alone. But we need some competition still, so here is what I mean.

    For example, currently, if you donate 2k you get the shield and 4k you get the misc. In the future, make it so you will get everything if you donate a specific number of tokens. Maybe if you donate 25k you get the weapons set, then 50k you get the pet, then 100k you get the armor. Maybe 150k gets you the CCustom armor. (Please don't focus on the benchmarks I shared, these are *just* examples)

    But here's the change, the top 25 donators get a variation of the suggestion. Maybe instead of 2 skills, the variation gets a hand-wave third skill/toggle. Maybe it gets a 2nd MC. Maybe it the skill/effect etc gets juiced (not -unbalanced, but the effect desired is bigger (you pay more to get more) SOmething that makes it stand a bit apart of the rest. Maybe all items in the set get that extra whatever for those folks. Again, not unbalanced, but you pay more to get more type of situation. Normal armor pays 50% damage for 50%n melee effect. The whale version pays 75% for 75% effect. That type of thing. (depends on the suggestion)

    This will not only still allow for whales to compete to get the extras, but more players might be able to land the base items (all items) ANd you can always keep the dev ticket stuff.

    I do think the dev ticket needs to include spells and miscs along with the shields and weapons. (Not armors, pets, or guests as these also require additional attack animation; also spells would just BE the custom animation)

    That might be worth a try.


    And lastly, staff really needs to take a step back from what might be the day-in and day-out grind of the job that is the Dev roles and think about all of the what-ifs . As an example, IMO, it should have been revealed that LS mechanics were slated for review on the frontside. There were two opportunities, one in the beginning and one when Gwen posted her LS idea. (others had LS mechanics sprinkled in also, mind you) so that they can have all of the information before collabs take place and a suggestion gets posted. For me, LS being an unknown eliminated it from being considered. Also, there should be information in-game as to any process. This can include everything from where to go to make a suggestion, to what characters can be eligible to receive donations, to everything. Maybe a FAQ page link or I'm not sure, but we con tinue to see new and returning players oblivious to it all. Not everyone uses the forums or is on discord.

    I would rather see this whole thing revert a bit but tweak the older ways rather than haphazardly and kneejerkingly scrap what has actually been a huge boon for income for this game. I see zero reason to go in a less than productive direction. This *is* a business, at the end of the day.

    I also believe that any community based issues/divides will never fully go away. I think attempting to tackle that issue as the main priority to addressing the donation contest/system as a whole will result in wasted effort. There are things that can improve, but I don't think this is going to bridge gaps or mend fences over fundamental philosophical differences, so I'd recommend looking at things in terms of this topic through a business lense.

    I also think staff should make a rule, that whomever's suggestion is chosen, they are ineligible the following year to win.

    < Message edited by Sapphire -- 8/27/2024 17:12:24 >
    Post #: 2
    8/27/2024 20:51:51   
    CH4OT1C!
    Member

    This event is, and long has been, catastrophically flawed.

    I want to preface the following comments by clearly stating that I am heavily against using democratic systems for contests such as these. There are a multitude of reasons for my adoption of this position, many of which I will discuss below. My goals with this post are to (i) highlight just some of the many problems associated with this system, and (ii) to suggest a few ways to help fix it.



    Suggesting Donator Set Mechanics

    The way the staff have incorporated player suggestions into the mechanics of the donation set has been unfair for years now. This may be surprising to some of you, but the staff released suggestion threads for the Wingweaver, Paleskull, and Frostwyrm donator sets. If you didn’t know about these threads, it’s likely because they were placed in the suggestion section of the forums (which typically has little traffic), and were never advertised in-game. I’m sure that many active players would have wanted to contribute to the design of these sets, but they never got the chance to because they weren’t informed that they existed to begin with. This pattern has continued this year; both the Warwolf and Fungibushi sets had suggestion threads posted, but neither they nor the subsequent forum polls were announced!

    Others among you will have already seen the above threads. To you, I ask: did you also know that player opinions were considered before this point too? If you didn’t, it’s probably because an unofficial group containing many (but not all) of the top donators for the Veywild set in 2020 discussed its mechanics together in private, rather than their being a public suggestion thread. I know this because a member of that group asked for my input regarding some of its design aspects. Many of the mechanics they suggested were incorporated into the final Veywild design.

    Of course, 2020 is (thankfully) now ancient history, and the systems for incorporating player feedback have improved since then, right? Well, yes, but it’s also worth mentioning that the staff have been operating a popularity-based suggestion system for years without officially notifying the community. This was only confirmed after the end of last year’s contest. Over the years, the same network of players that contributed to Veywild has stuck together. Up until this year, they were the ones primarily suggesting the mechanics of the donation sets. There was no opposition—not because players didn’t want to suggest item mechanics (as demonstrated this year), but because the broader community wasn’t informed it was a popularity contest! To those players who also proposed suggestions in those threads: I’m sorry to say that you couldn’t ‘win’ simply because your idea lacked the popular support you didn’t know you needed.

    My point here is not to completely undermine the concept of player suggestions. If handled correctly, player suggestions can be a wonderful addition to the game. However, as demonstrated above, the way player suggestions have been incorporated into the summer donation system is fundamentally flawed. Even in the most generous interpretation, the existing system has excluded a significant portion of the community simply by not properly informing them that they could contribute to the sets in the first place. At worst, a network of players has been able to exert influence over the donation set mechanics for years because no one was officially informed that popularity was the winning metric. Given the lack of advertisement for the suggestion threads, it is debatable whether this contest could be considered truly democratic even before the first ballot was cast.



    Donation Rewards

    On the subject of restricted information, it is also worth noting that players are not informed in-game that donations are awarded per character, rather than per account. This massively disadvantages casual players. Regular players often have a full set of 10 characters, and this means they have 10 times the chance to receive tokens compared to a more casual player that only has one. In a world where a single player can quite easily receive 10,000 tokens per character over the course of a contest, having 10 characters can effectively more than halve the number of tokens needed to acquire the full donation set. Moreover, restrictions are placed on new characters to prevent them from receiving token donations. This means, depending on when the player returns and the knowledge available to them, they can be frozen out for much of the contest even if they are informed! How is this remotely fair?



    The 2024 Contest

    Given the fallout from the Wingweaver contest last year, I wasn’t particularly optimistic about the 2024 Summer event. While I appreciated the clarification that the contest would be decided based on popularity, I worried that making this public would lead to a rather heated contest in an already volatile environment. However, even I wasn’t prepared for quite how bad things would become.

    Things began not in June/July, as one might expect for a Summer contest, but in April, when I was asked behind closed doors to help create a suggestion for the event. This is a request I declined, as (i) I do not support the current system, and (ii) I felt it would be unfair to suggest a set when other players did not have the same opportunity due to the lack of advertisement. However, I raise it because it demonstrates that item designs and collaborations were already being planned 2 months before the contest even started!

    For the most part, the suggestion process itself went relatively smoothly, though I reiterate that, since the suggestion threads were never announced, players inevitably missed their chance to contribute. Conditions, however, deteriorated rapidly once the poll began. Almost immediately, there were calls that the staff feedback was biased, and proponents of the two more popular sets began campaigning for votes on unofficial channels. This rapidly progressed beyond the typical routes into campaign messages being DM’d to individual players. Messages were also left on both on Reddit and YouTube attempting to garner more votes. The extent of campaigning is clearly evident in the disparity in vote number between the Warwolf and Fungibushi polls. The latter is relevant to a greater number of people, yet it has fewer than half the votes of the former (and it hasn’t even been fully reviewed for alt accounts yet; I’ll be discussing that below). The sheer lengths players went to in order to garner votes is astounding, made all the more striking by the fact that it was evidently necessary. @Dardiel won by just two votes. While it’s impossible to be certain with hypotheticals, it’s highly likely that if either of the two more popular sets had stopped campaigning, they would have lost.

    Over extended periods of time, this level of consistent pressure inevitably leads to anger and polarisation, and that’s exactly what happened. For the same reasons as my stance on suggestions, I chose not to support any of the options this year and instead intentionally cast a protest vote for the least popular set in both polls. Yet despite this, I was accused on two separate occasions of intentionally supporting the campaign for one of the two sets, including engaging in some rather underhanded tactics. I want to make it clear now that I consider myself one of the lucky ones; once the accuser realised I played no part, they apologised to me. Others weren’t so fortunate—several players have been banned both here and elsewhere, and I’ve seen multiple community members grow tired and extremely frustrated as a result of this conflict.

    My point? The contest is set up in a way that has allowed this situation to get way out of hand, and the prior conditions of the contest predisposed it to this outcome.



    Alt Accounts

    I now come to what I consider the most concerning part of this contest: the cheating. It’s one thing for a contest to become heated, but it’s entirely another when there are attempts to subvert the results. This is especially true when (i) the situation is already volatile, and (ii) the poll results are this close. In a ‘first past the post’ system (NB: I consider this system flawed. However, as this post is already extremely long, I’ll overlook this now for brevity), even a single vote can change the entire outcome of a contest. Realistically, the security of the forum poll was not nearly strong enough to handle the cheating that occurred during this event. Moreover, it’s difficult to overstate the extent of the impact this cheating had.

    The poll ended in @Dardiel’s victory, but it is difficult to call this a true win. Why? Because 14.2% (26) of the 182 votes in the contest were excluded. 10 of these supported Dardiel’s set, while 16 were removed from @GwenMay’s results. The problem is that if those who cheated had voted fairly like everyone else, GwenMay would have won the vote. While I can’t help but find some karmic irony in the fact that the cheaters ended up costing themselves the win, the reality is that GwenMay is also paying the price. It is admirable that GwenMay is respectfully accepting the defeat, but the fact remains that they shouldn’t have to.

    Those 26 excluded votes made a major difference to this poll. If they had been concentrated on one option rather than spread across two, they could have turned a close contest into a landslide. Alternatively, if they had been added to @RobynJoanne’s set, they could have transformed a distant third place into a competitive alternative. They still made a difference even though they’ve now been excluded, as psychology plays a significant role in these types of contests. Falling far behind can be demoralising, and crucially the pressure to stay competitive increases if the results are kept intentionally tight.

    There were other impacts too. The cheating was so rampant that the staff had to (i) thoroughly vet the entire poll to sanitise it as much as possible, and (ii) Intentionally exclude players with forum accounts less than 30 days old that voted after the eighth of August. Aside from significantly delaying the results of the poll—and thus affecting whether players decided to contribute to the donation drive—I have spoken with at least two players who were concerned that their votes might have been excluded. Given that only two votes separated the leading sets, it is no exaggeration to say that this (albeit necessary) action could have easily undermined the contest results.

    Taking all this into account, even with the staff’s best efforts to sanitise the poll (NB: a huge thank you to @AnimAnimalKing for their efforts), I cannot, in good conscience, argue that these results are accurate. The democratic process has been thoroughly undermined by the cheaters, and both leading sets could reasonably argue that they won this event. The crazy thing about this is it could have been even worse. If the results had not been posted before Thursday (and considering that the poll sanitisation took more than two weeks, that appears to have been entirely feasible), it would have even undermined a key reason for the changes made to the contest from last year: providing certainty to the community before the contest closed.



    So, what do we do?

    The points mentioned above are just some of the issues I have personally observed with the donation contest. I could go on: the poll software was outdated, making vote switching impossible, and at one point, the poll even mysteriously disappeared entirely. I’m also certain there are problems I’m not aware of. However, I believe I’ve made my point—this contest is absolutely riddled with serious problems that can’t easily be resolved. This led me to question whether adopting a democratic system is worth the effort. The conclusion I reached is… no.

    Adopting a democratic, poll-based approach has proven to be a logistical nightmare. The software is clunky, weak security necessitates thorough, labour-intensive checks to prevent cheating, and the ‘first-past-the-post’ system means that even a single false vote can skew the results. Even if all those issues could be overcome, the scale of unofficial collaborative effort turns the contest into an extensive and heated political campaign where every vote matters. Changing it to a poll based on theme or using three staff-based ideas would likely produce the same outcome. Equally though, it would be unfair to revert to a 2020 Veywild-type situation. While the top donators should be commended for their generosity, (i) the design of the Donator set is not a part of the prize system, and (ii) neither should it be, given that parts of the set are currently distributed to far more than just that specific subset. Additionally, not all top donators were included in that unofficial group.

    With that in mind, my proposed solution is to eliminate player suggestions altogether. I recognise that this will likely disappoint many, but I consider it far preferable to the current system. The staff regularly demonstrates their ability to create excellent items, and allowing them the freedom to design these sets would give them the opportunity to showcase their full potential. If the problem is that the mechanics are not known in advance, the staff could release the theme of the items at the start of the contest. This approach is already extremely likely to be effective given the number of votes for @GwenMay’s set, despite the need for significant reworking. It would also prevent the need to exclude any sets due to unworkable mechanics, as was necessary in the Fungibushi poll.

    Barring that though, if we must continue to follow a democratic system (and I reiterate how bad of an idea I think this is), then fundamental and sweeping changes must be made. There needs to be much better security, ‘First past the post’ needs to be ditched (a ranked voting system, perhaps?), greater transparency and advertisements for the suggestion thread and the poll are all vital.

    As a final thought, a key aspect of what makes this contest special is that the donated tokens are redistributed to those who need them, most of whom are likely to be casual players. Therefore, it would be beneficial, if possible, to distribute the donations by account rather than by character.

    While the last few weeks have highlighted the numerous problems associated with this contest, they also present an opportunity to improve it. I hope we seize it.

    < Message edited by CH4OT1C! -- 8/28/2024 8:08:15 >


    _____________________________


    AQ  Post #: 3
    8/27/2024 21:02:25   
    Dardiel
    Member

    I had been taking a few notes throughout the contest and poll, hopefully I can put them all together to have a reasonable take. Some of the notes would be about some pretty specific things, so it's pretty likely that some comments could be about something that's already definitely going to change / be scrapped.

    I've grouped my notes somewhat because there's some recurring themes:

    Times where players were confused about what's happening:
    - - - Suggestion threads were left open for an extra day-ish; announcement was given last minute, with no context, and nothing happened.
    - - - Fungibushi had a spell and a pet added to the item list; players didn't find out until the image of the stretch goals were posted near the end of the suggestion window, there was no announcement, and it was not stated whether player suggestions would affect them (even now we have no idea - Jeanne didn't make any suggestions for pet 2 / spell, so I guess staff get to pick what they do within the theme?).
    - - - (Minor things) The suggestion threads just said the "top 3" would be picked which kinda implies there's some objective measure even if it is easy to assume it's by staff discretion; the announcement date of the top 3 was delayed indefinitely (which is very relevant to the suggesters in that top 3, given the poll setup)

    Things that were overall a bit rough:
    - - - The suggestion threads weren't announced; they were just kinda put in a section of the forums that people don't actively visit nearly as often, and the playerbase had to spread the news via word of mouth.
    - - - The poll was first past the post; I can pretty confidently say that FPTP voting is objectively the worst voting style that's still somehow considered legitimate.
    - - - Swapping was disallowed (which is a very important detail, and which wasn't announced until part way into the contest when people wanted to swap); while infinite swapping would of course be a pain, swapping away from the 3rd-place set as a way to emulate runoff voting could've been a somewhat decent method for salvaging the FPTP implementation.

    Overall, the notes I took were heavily themed after "things are happening out of nowhere and we don't know why, and other things are being delayed and we don't know why". I personally don't expect constant updates but I think that when players are asked to participate with an event, it's reasonable to give players a clear timeline then explain any deviations - we were instead given a general timeline and things just kinda happened out of the blue at various points which made it frustrating to keep track of.




    On the topic of how things can go forward (aside from the above note about communicating the plan and communicating the changes):

    Any poll system is abusable to some extent; it's possible to pick better ones (such as ranked choice or approval voting) but it's always possible for various factors to degrade their integrity.
    - I would consider it an improvement to update the polling system from FPTP to ranked choice or approval voting.
    - I would consider it a further improvement if the polling system was updated AND it was changed from "staff pick top 3, players pick winner" to "players pick top 3, staff pick winner".
    - I would also consider it an improvement over this year if the winner-deciding was fully within staff's hands; just skipping the top 3 entirely and going "step 1 is everybody makes suggestions, step 2 is staff letting everybody know the winner".
    I'm not certain which I prefer between "vote for top 3 then staff pick" and just "staff pick" but I think both of them are notable steps forward.

    I do still support the idea of letting players suggest items, I think it's a fun way to reward players for caring about the game and to bring some new ideas in.

    I also wonder if the higher emotions associated with the suggestion situation is that it's only once a year but the winner gets an entire set; hypothetically if it was like 5 items and each person can design a single item then there'd be way less competition because the reward is more spread out - instead of "2nd place gets told they missed out on an entire cohesive set" it's "6th place gets told they missed out on an item" where the most invested people are probably in the top 5 anyway (assuming there's at least a small correlation between caring about item design and designing good items).

    As more of a thought, if staff don't want to be doing player suggestions so much but do still want to have community involvement, a system could be tried where the devs slowly piece together a set's details through a mix of suggestion threads and polls (using a better polling system). For example:
    - Week 1, devs ask for mechanics that players would like to see
    - Week 2, devs pick from those mechanics and announce them; they also make a poll listing various playstyles and the players can vote on which they'd like the set to be geared toward
    - Repeat for various details with small/quick polls so that the players can guide the design process but only within the bounds of what the staff allow. Eg maybe staff allow a poll for how a weapon might inflict a status (pays damage, SP toggle, trigger) but don't allow a poll for the weapon's lean/BR or vice versa.




    In short: I like when player suggestions make it into the game, maybe it could be viable to allow multiple small suggestions rather than one big suggestion. However I think most solutions for improving the process do involve letting the staff make more impactful decisions regarding which suggestions make it in (either choosing the winners directly, or guiding the design process).

    Oh and I also think donations should be per account instead of per character; I tend to dislike when the optimal gameplay (make "token mule" characters until you have all 10 spots filled, then do a battle a day on all accounts to try and siphon tokens into your "real" characters) is unfun / contributes to burnout and I do think that "fight the shower braken every day with up to 9 characters you don't care about" is unfun and very slightly contributes to burnout.
    Post #: 4
    8/28/2024 4:32:44   
    ming shuen
    Member

    For the contest next iteration, I suggest that staff keep poll edits to a minimum. This will help preserve integrity and faith people have in the poll.

    Regarding Vote Deletions
    There is this constant tiny feeling at the back of my mind that the staff basically chose their preferred winner, and the poll is merely theatre, and the investigation is merely a way to buy time to announce the results in a manner that pacifies all parties.

    To elaborate, the staff has constantly stated through official and unofficial channels that Gwen’s set would have won if the cheaters did not also have their original votes removed.

    Read another way, it means that they basically selected the winner by making the conscious decision to delete original votes – instead of just the alternate votes. It is essentially choosing the convenient result by selection of parameters, and well, Gwen’s set is quite inconvenient.

    Of course, one can deny these sentiments, and that integrity is held up, but because of the way this was executed, nobody knows for sure, and I believe that sentiments like mine is not entirely uncommon. This is an issue about optics. Not too much can be done about it now, except being cautious with vote deletions in future iterations.

    Edit: Let me emphasize that I trust in the staff's integrity - 99% of my mind believes that the staff were as fair as they possibly could be. Poll edits just makes it impossible to know for sure, and this is an issue inherent in all black-box systems. Hence, if one were to proceed with a polling system (which is in itself debatable in the first place), a lot more bubble wrap should be placed, and vote edits minimized. Also, I am not a huge fan of polling, but this entire post assumes that polling continues.

    Regarding Vote Security
    I suggest making it so that only confirmed AQ players can vote. How this is executed can be left up to staff discretion, but I think this is important

    During the voting period, a campaigner, realizing the challenges of keeping up with Hyercrit’s popularity, reached out to non-AQ players, players of other AE games, in order to get them to vote for their preferred set, leveraging their disdain for an opposition member. This was the catalyst for alt-account creation, especially when a +5-lead appeared, and a former content creator took offense to some disparaging statements.

    Usage of alt-accounts should be condemned, and the alt-account vote removal was 100% the right move. However, some members of the community believe that non-AQ player votes should have also been removed. Situations like this creates ‘point-of-contention’ and once again raises a problem with optics.

    All of this could have been avoided, if only confirmed AQ players are eligible. Hence, for future iterations of this contest, a measure of vote security should ideally be put in place.

    Re-using Suggestions
    Gwen is unfortunately paying the price of the action of some cheaters. Her set would have won if the cheaters original votes won’t also removed. Though she is taking it gracefully, I suggest having a toned-down hypercrit set be released in the future, as a new $100 package or having our winter GGBs be hyper-crit themed or having an individual item be placed in a storyline quest or something.

    To make it clear, I am not a FO player, and Gwen’s set is entirely FO. I am not a Hyper-crit player either, despite its immense popularity. Y’all can check my AQ page loadout to confirm my statements.

    It just that Gwen is being unfairly dragged down, despite how gracious she is about it.

    Concluding Sentiments
    I get that the team weren’t expecting such shenanigans from the community and that they are probably trying to make the best out of a rough situation. However, execution has raised question marks on the integrity of the poll, which to be fair to the team, would likely have happened no matter what the team did. The situation was rough on everyone, all around

    Well, 2024 was a test for a new format, and this is just the first run. There is bound to be some hiccups. This contest presents many opportunities to improve, and I hope that we, as a community, would be able to move pass this series of conflicts.


    < Message edited by ming shuen -- 8/28/2024 7:48:32 >
    AQ DF MQ  Post #: 5
    8/28/2024 7:42:08   
    Sapphire
    Member

    I wouldn't be opposed to staff announcing theme choice when suggestions get made. What I mean is, they can give us 2 or 3 options for general theme and then let the players craft ideas born from staff's desires.

    One of the reasons I think this could be beneficial is something that was alluded to in more than one dev notes post. The words used seemed to indicate that staff was looking into finding a new way to separate poison out from other statuses. In another, they mentioned that reworking charge mechanics might be a win. So with these suggestions coming from staff, they could also include these small tidbits that say "we were looking at redesigning charge mechanics, so if you have any ideas utilizing that then include those ideas" or "we wanted to redesign status X" etc. Since time will be taken and planned to make these sets, this might be a good time to also deal with issues that staff see that need to be addressed, too. The fix is part of that week's already planned workload, as opposed to fitting it in whenever. (if staff wishes to address it that way)

    This also removes issues where players suggest things that won't be considered for other reasons, such as the reasoning given to the spirit seed set suggestion....although I believe it should be stated on the front side what types of ideas they'd rather not deal with.



    ____________________________________________________________

    Also, in regards to potentially altering this to be based on account instead of character, I can't stop counting the ways this is a bad idea.

    First off, how would you list that? My account name? No thank you, I would rather not give my AQ account name out. (Speaking for players who wouldn't want this, as it's a security issue)

    Secondly, making it based on character and having the system as it currently does promotes expanding your gaming experience into the other character slots. By doing so, you can have new characters with different builds and experience more of the game. Since the vault exists, more characters acts as more storage. I view this as disincentivizing playing AQ.

    Also, there should be ways to reward players who spend more time playing this game. I think a player who took the time to make and levels 10 characters should reap some benefits compared to others who only use 1 character...and I used to be that guy with only 1 character. I used to think the utilization of 10 characters for this event was unfair. But I also realized I was being selfish because I only had 1 character. So I decided to play the game, and make more characters. I don't think anyone should expect to get the same benefits as everyone else who put in more time. Not even close.

    Furthermore, it is not difficult at all to level a char to L25. You can get one to L25 in about 15 minutes or w/e. And it's not very time-consuming to simply beat the shower monster 1x per day.

    I can't even fathom a single argument that has an ounce of merit that would come close to making it a good idea to make this account-based.





    < Message edited by Sapphire -- 8/30/2024 14:45:21 >
    Post #: 6
    8/28/2024 11:38:49   
    kreem
    Member

    quote:

    First off, how would you list that? My account name? No thank you, I would rather not give my AQ account name out. (Speaking for players who wouldn't want this, as it's a security issue)


    It can instead use a random character on the account instead of the account name. I think one of AQs strengths is the unique and hidden username.
    AQ DF MQ AQW  Post #: 7
    8/28/2024 14:05:52   
    1stClassGenesis
    Member

    Increase the number of miscs given out to daily donators (40?) and shorten the duration to 3 weeks. The giveaway can increase to say, 50 daily for the last week.

    I get that devs need time for the sets’ development, but I don’t see why the set(s) need to be rushed out. This might be a symptom of a greater problem in sticking to a weekly release schedule (upper management needs to talk to AQ devs about this), so I’ll keep this short — don’t force yourselves to rush the set release. This feedback comes from Warwolf Prime’s “we just unveiled the winner, give us a week to get this (with the necessary changes) out to you.” I think both sets can be released together as part of, if not a whole weekly release, whenever they’re ready (by this I mean, taking into account IRL matters that may come up).

    < Message edited by 1stClassGenesis -- 8/28/2024 14:19:45 >
    Post #: 8
    8/28/2024 14:44:16   
    Branl
    Member

    With my non participation in the last donation contest beyond 4k tokens and preoccupation with personal matters, I missed some of the worst outcomes of the previous contest. So, while the concerns expressed by others regarding a formal popular vote format were noted, I was a little more optimistic about the potential outcomes of said contest than many around me. The logic seemed simple, right? People would vote for the set they liked, and whatever won, wouldn’t be as contested as the format of an informal popular vote, where one group that regularly collaborated with each other correctly guessed the metric by which suggestions were chosen, and anyone that proposed suggestions without knowing as such, were left unaware that their suggestions never had a chance at actually being chosen. Unfortunately, formalizing the popular vote format actually seemed to have resulted in an even more hotly contested and controversial contest.

    Campaigning Efforts:


    So the situation right now is that, there are a very large group of regular collaborators who, up until this year, have had the suggestions they chose picked, every year it was possible for it to be. Please note that there isn’t an actual problem with this in a popular vote format (Beyond the lack of communication about it being a informal popular vote prior to this year). People banding together to increase the odds their preferred choice gets picked is just a feature of such a format. The issue with this, lies in just how big an advantage this presents, and the near insurmountable wall anyone not directly affiliated with that group, have to overcome to have a chance at victory. This issue also goes beyond merely being unlikely to win, but encourages a set of circumstances that have done nothing but perpetuate negativity in the community that even outstrips the negativity we have to deal with when discussing balance issues.

    The winning suggestion, the Accuracy/Beast Manipulation Set created by Dardiel and a few other collaborators. While I do not wish to take away from the impressive feat of winning a popularity contest with the least democratic implementation of a popular vote that was instituted, by necessity by previous staff commitments to the format, but nonetheless made the already daunting task of getting more votes than the LS set even more daunting, I must caution players and staff, that the campaigning efforts Dardiel put forth were unfortunately, very unhealthy to the community at large, and even to himself. It was necessary to mass message players constantly asking if they were interested in voting, but the aftereffect of this was some players feeling like they were being harassed. And whatever issues people have with sourcing votes from AQ players that primarily play Dragonfable, the end result proved such outreach and effort is necessary to win, if you either don’t like the suggestion put forth by the largest entrenched group of players, or simply weren’t reached out to and your impact on the set suggestion is… none, or you need to result to drastic measures to even be in contention to win. In addition, Dardiel’s victory also came, not with a clear majority, but because more individuals attempted to cheat in favor of the Hypercrit set than the Accuracy/Beast Manipulation set. It has been stated in no uncertain terms, if everyone that attempted to cheat played by the rules, Gwen’s set would have eked out the win.

    But, let’s not be mistaken, questionable campaigning tactics weren’t strictly the domain of any one player, and I would object to any accusations that try to lay the blame at anyone's feet for how this contest transpired. Summations of rival sets that, deliberately or not, misrepresented them, despite the existence of developer feedback on every set that people could link to were abundant. Direct Linking to donation suggestions, that, unless someone scrolled up, would miss the Dev Notes that detailed what was and wasn’t feasible to implement, also occurred, and was an obvious enough problem that a forum moderator had to staple the dev notes to all three suggestions as well as the opening post of the contest thread. Two of the three forum members that argued against an attempt at a more democratic system by allowing vote swapping were backers of the LS set. There was likely a principled stance beguiling these objections, but they came after at minimum, 2 voters of Jeanne’s set, expressed interest in swapping to Dardiel. So, unfortunately, even absent trying to guess intentions, this was a campaigning tactic. And a tactic that made the popular vote system worse. The 3rd person that objected, refused to back any suggestions due to objections to this format, that turned out to be painfully warranted. Unsurprisingly, not a single person that voted for Jeanne’s set argued against vote swapping.

    Ultimately, the format of a popular vote makes all of these legitimate campaign tactics, no individual player can be held responsible for the poll turning toxic. The potential of being able to source votes due to an associated player’s negative history with a group of players, as well as the characterization of both sets as being backed by one server or another, unfortunately leads me to a very uncomfortable conclusion. The donation contest as it stands, is unable to be a pure reflection of interest in one mechanic or another. The tight margins by which this contest was determined by, means that players are encouraged to, at risk of breaking their voting group, fall in line and back one suggestion, even if it means heavily compromising your interest for the sake of maintaining a coalition.

    RobynJoanne, issues with FPTP voting
    So let’s discuss RobynJoanne. With her, you can see the reward for not resorting to dubious campaigning tactics. A rapid decline to third place, along with a very quick understanding that you are unable to vote for her set and have an impact on the final results, which likely further negatively impacted her votes. As someone who fairly equally supported RobynJoanne and Dardiel’s ideas, and even supported both of them in the suggestion thread, I had to make the unfortunate decision of basing my vote not purely based on interest in mechanics, but on feasibility of their chances of victory. Had I voted for RobynJoanne’s set, my vote would’ve, in effect, had no impact on which set was chosen. And it’s impossible to believe I’m the only one that had to strategically vote. If we didn’t, we would have almost certainly not gotten either set we wanted. Some who wanted to impact the results were already unfortunately prevented from doing so, such are the follies of a FPTP system.

    Cheating
    There were numerous attempts at cheating to unfairly swing the outcome towards Dardiel or Gwenmay’s set. This led to a 17 day delay in announcing the results, which unquestionably affected the donation drive due to uncertainty of which set was chosen, which also had the unfortunate effect of pushing back valuable development time for the game that weren’t related to the contest. While the herculean efforts by the staff to ensure we have an honest reflection of the final results are laudable and I’m very grateful they took the time to to do this, I don’t see this being sustainable in the long term. Having to delay the announcement of contest results, having to take time away from working on the game, and players not having a true reflection of the state of the poll are all things that will become a feature in the future if we do more polls. Further, the attempt to disqualify all votes from forum accounts less than a month, which got softened to any that voted after 8/8, hints at a difficulty at discerning between a legitimate new voter, and a actual new account. In the likely outcome that some alt accounts were able to fly under the radar, what then? Why not share their cheating tactics with peers and make it even more likely their set wins? The existence of cheating hard enough to detect that legitimate voters were disqualified makes it effectively impossible for any future polls to not be cheated. Further, that 1 month restriction works only once. Now that everyone is aware of it, cheaters can make accounts in advance in future efforts to cheat.

    What to do moving forward:
    With me being forced to conclude that a popular vote system:
  • Encourages players towards behavior that negatively impacts the community.
  • Resulted in harassment unfairly leveled at staff and players alike as a result of this contest.
  • Will turn toxic the moment it becomes competitive based on this year and last year.
  • Is unable to fully ensure every cheater is caught, and thus, said cheaters can go on to share methodology and continue to unfairly bias the poll.

    I just find it impossible to see further popular vote formats as a good idea. The benefits of this format are far outstripped by the negatives. With that I propose:

    No more popular vote formats.
    This year proved that, if you aren’t associated with one or two unofficial discord servers, it is impossible for your idea to win. Good suggestions presented by players who either, through ignorance or willingness, are not associated with unofficial AQ discord servers will never win these contests. It is functionally impossible for a popular vote to not turn negative, as such negativity is a prerequisite to even being a viable contender for winning the vote. And if anyone cheated and were not caught, they are encouraged to get their friends to cheat with them. With that, I have two suggestions:

    1) Players put forth set ideas. Staff ultimately choose which one they’d prefer.
    This allows players to put forth suggestions, prevents chosen suggestions from being gatekept behind participating in unofficial discord servers, and allows staff to chose sets that they are confident they can implement as close to the original proposal as possible, and prevents suggestions being picked that rely on problematic mechanics that players are unaware were considered problematic, that would result in almost the entirety of the original suggestion being thrown out. However, the potential for more abuse to be levied at staff is obvious with this one. And there’s still outcomes where server infighting impacts the ideas proposed and the frequency they are proposed. So while I would accept this option, I would be remiss to not float this option:

    2) Return to staff designing sets. Staff will communicate the theme of the set and players can donate in kind.
    While this unfortunately means players couldn’t propose the mechanics of the set, the staff are much more equipped to craft a set, as they are the only ones that have a full understanding of which mechanics are problematic or not, and what lines they are willing to cross. This also means that there is zero potential for server infighting to spill over onto the official forums. The popularity of Gwenmay’s set, despite the need for the staff to redesign it from the ground up, shows that players are largely fine with staff designing donation items, as long as they know and like the theme proposed. The Winter Donation contest gets to avert all of this controversy and negativity by doing this, so I propose the Summer Donation contest do the same.

    So that’s all the poll related stuff. So I’d like to move on to making general proposals for the contest itself, that I think can improve the contest for all.

  • Make received donations account based rather than character based.
    As it stands, veteran players who know that alternate characters increase their chances of receiving tokens, have a massive x10 advantage over players who only have a single character or aren’t aware that this is the case. This makes it harder for donations to go towards more casual players. I say this as someone who weaponizes this myself, but I strongly believe it would be better to make donations go to accounts, rather than characters. The character donated to could be the character used to donate the most, or, if there are no donations, donate to the first character created in an account.

  • Make the items of the set, benchmark based rather than placement based. Introduce more rewards like Golden Dev Tickets for placement based rewards.

    Many players are very wary of donating, as they risk being pushed out of contention last second without room to retaliate. Players who don’t have the scheduling to observe the contest ending are at extreme risk of being pushed out of an item’s contention last minute. This would make it so more players are comfortable donating amounts, as they know for sure that they’ll receive an item if they donate a certain amount. Players that donate for placement based rewards would have the same problem, but those rewards would be less impactful than access to an entire equipment set, ideally, so the harm from this would be lessened.

    < Message edited by Branl -- 8/29/2024 16:33:03 >
  • AQ DF  Post #: 9
    8/28/2024 15:48:12   
    Sapphire
    Member

    Jeanne's giftmaster suggestion in my mind was by far the worst of the three sets. It's the biggest reason why it came in 3rd. Her community set suggestion was by far the best and it's why it won.

    For the giftmaster two frontrunners, I believe Dardiel's set won, in part, because the dev notes for Gwen's left much of it in limbo. While players know and understand that the suggested specifics of items will always be evaluated and changed from the exact suggestion, Gwen's set idea left almost nothing in tact. All that remained was the theme, and that theme, was slated for a review/nerf. I suspect if none of those things were mentioned by staff in the dev notes, Gwen's would have won. All of the campaigning and theatrics surrounding campaigning in my mind wouldn't have overcome Gwen's set had that not been the case.

    I do think there needs to be a mechanism such that the same person's suggestion cannot win in back to back years. That might be rather difficult because the winner from LY could pose to not be the "front-person" but still be heavily involved and heavily campaigning, so idk how you'd try and be fair over time.

    Ultimately, I still think player suggestions is partly what motivates donating, especially for those who had input.
    Post #: 10
    8/28/2024 17:28:52   
      Lorekeeper
    And Pun-isher

     

    To mention none of those things would have been a massive misrepresentation. It would've required making an exception to the requested developer notes and potentially following it with nothing short of a rug pull. Transparency and professionalism demanded that we made voters aware that if that set won, we would have to either take the extra work to revamp related mechanics, or create something that would be subject to thorough changes that we could not specify the details of until we revamped said mechanics.
    Post #: 11
    8/28/2024 17:28:56   
    KhalJJ
    Member
     

    I have thoughts but Chaotic has covered most of the main discussion pretty well I think.

    On the voting, I just want to add that in my experience, a poll in this community is not achieving the aim (a representative overview of player preference) due to many reasons - not even considering the stuff that crossed the line, I know some people just voted for a person and didn't even read the set descriptions, which just immediately defeats the point, for me.


    For future, I'd suggest (some repetition here, but most important points):

    1) Keep doing player suggestions - these are fun and engaging. However, staff could outline 2-3 mechanics they are interested in, or at the very least, should provide a list of mechanics that should not be involved (ie. that are pending changes).

    2) Scrap a poll. Despite good intentions, it's doesn't work and I'm not convinced it will.

    3) In an ideal world, I'd say still have player suggestions of full sets, but have complete staff discretion over picking the winner - I'm very pro the idea of staff picking an initial draft of winners, (like the "first round" this time, picking the the 3 poll options) and providing feedback on each, but instead of doing a poll, getting further feedback from players. It's a little work, but with planning, I think could be well executed - so i) players suggest in a timeframe, ii) staff picks favorites and provides feedback (eg. can't do xyz) iii) players respond to staff feedback iv) staff announces set they are implementing based on player feedback (well before the donation period ends).

    4) Part 3 above also opens the door to potentially taking components from multiple suggestions at staff discretion (eg. We like Set Y but particularly think Weapon Z from this other suggestion would go well with this) - in the "first round" phase. Players could then feed back on this. I think this being a possibility would be popular, potentially creating more suggestions, and there were some good examples this year of items that could have worked in other suggested sets.

    5) And of course, advertise the suggestion threads! Ideally in game, but at the very least in the newsletters, and more obviously! I thought communication was reasonable this year all things considered, but can certainly be much better on this specific aspect.

    Edit 6) to add 2 cents on per character vs per account receipt of donations: There are obvious bonuses to making it per account so I'd be loosely pro this. However, I did make multiple characters to benefit from this and have ended up using some of them to try out different builds more easily and have had fun doing so, so in this sense I agree with Sapphire that this is potentially a very positive incentive. If staff do choose to keep per character donations, I would make this much more clearly advertised through official channels and in the donation contest announcement newsletter.

    7) Lastly, I've only just noticed a quote from Hollow in the original Dono thread here:

    quote:

    Thank you all for being so patient! Due to the number of interesting and thorough suggestions, it took us much longer to analyze them and make some decisions than we had planned. I want to thank our community for taking the time to write up so many great suggestions this year (some ideas you may see repurposed in a future release). You folks made narrowing down the choices to 3 difficult!

    This is extremely encouraging and if we do see such implementations (loosely perhaps we already have with some of the poison/status inflict mechanics of recent GGB/quest gear?) this furthers my view that we should keep annual suggestions, and that they can be highly rewarding and engaging events.

    Thanks to staff for dealing with all of this in a frankly hugely impressive manner.

    < Message edited by KhalJJ -- 8/29/2024 8:36:52 >
    Post #: 12
    8/28/2024 22:07:22   
    ming shuen
    Member

    @Branl
    Regarding your statements about Gwen:

    Emphasizing strengths and downplaying weaknesses is campaigning101. In case-making or pitching, one always tries to present oneself in the best possible light. In an interview or online job applications, when one is asked about their personal strength and weaknesses, one isn’t supposed to list out weaknesses in complete, explicit detail. One isn't suppose to put a metaphorical bright red circle around it. The right move would have been to acknowledge it briefly, offer up a mitigating solution and then dance around it. Anything else would have one’s application tossed in the trash.

    To call it questionable campaigning tactics would be a disservice to Gwen. Also, it was just 1 link in an extremely long reddit post. I believe her when she says that she didn’t even think it was important. In a court of law, at most she would have been dinged with a singular objection before everyone elegantly moves past it. However, since the setting was discord, where everyone goes through text with a fine-toothed comb, and frustrations escalate, reactions to that 1 link is way too intense for my liking

    @Sapphire, @Lorekeeper
    This is a great discussion point that you brought up. I think we can all acknowledge that statements like:

    -“Interesting Set + “Opportunity to set new standards” + “Complex” [Buff]
    - “Cannot be implemented + “Entirety of the set needing to be reworked” [Huge Debuff]
    - “Huge Boon for the game” [Massive Buff]

    They are essentially buffs and debuffs in the campaigning process. I understand the position that these are important information for players to know, but it definitely made things challenging for Gwen.

    Hence for future iterations, I suggest letting the players know during the suggestion period what areas not to touch. Or having a player propose the theme first, and it being acknowledged by the staff, before the details are then worked out.
    AQ DF MQ  Post #: 13
    8/29/2024 18:47:04   
    Grace Xisthrith
    Member
     

    I want to initially say I suspect the vast majority of players who reap the rewards of the donation contest are not going to be heard on this thread. All active AQ players receive token donations, so far, 10 unique players have commented here.
    I also suspect, without any evidence, that many players who gain all these token donations, that they can spend for the rest of the year on GGBs, Items, houses, and other goodies, probably just want to receive the most tokens possible, particularly if they aren't going for any items other than the shield and misc. I don't know how many players this is (presumably if there's competition for top 200, there must be more than 200 players, and anyone who isn't competing for top 200 but wants tokens falls into this category), but I suspect they're a significant portion. I just wanted to bring that up. This is pretty much just my assumptions on what people I don't know want, which could very easily be wrong, but the part I feel confident to say is that the players who comment here do not fully represent the players who appreciate the donation contest each year, and those players should also be considered.

    I think staff insight on what is or isn't allowed in suggestions would be helpful. I had a lot of fun designing a set with people, only to later learn it was never gonna be implemented, because it used a back end cursed mechanic. Not the end of the world, but definitely a bummer, and I don't think it's hard to avoid. I think an easy way to do this would be to have a poll for players to pick a theme for the donation contest. I think the more options the better, personally, and then players must design a set using one of the top X themes, as decided by staff. This would prevent suggestions from being discarded outright.

    -I think depending on the goals of the donation contest, from the staff perspective, change what should or shouldn't be adjusted for next year.
    -If the goal is to motivate players to buy tokens without concern for much else, this model seems to be working well.
    -If the goal is to promote give players agency in game design in a game in which player suggestions are exceedingly rarely taken, I think that the suggestion format should change slightly. My opinion on the change is that suggestions should not be allowed to have in game numbers in them, describing their output. IE, you can't write: weapon trades 10% damage to heal 39 SP per turn, you'd instead have to write, the weapon deals less damage to restore SP. The reason for this opinion is that Lorekeeper highlighted previously that suggestions that are already balanced are more likely to get implemented. I'm oversimplifying I believe, and please correct me if I'm oversimplifying to the point of being misleading, that's how I remember the message. I will happily delete this section if I'm mistaken, and apologies if that's the case. Anyways, I think this is detrimental, as it vastly reduces the amount of players given agency in game design, because it raises the "skill" floor for suggestions to being highly literate in AQ's inconsistent, poorly documented, and often times contradictory design standards.
    -If the goal is to have a cool set available for a high number of tokens, don't do any sort of vote, and instead I suspect staff would benefit from using their best judgement to pick the "best" set out of the pack. This would remove several bummers of this donation season, including excessive campaigning, players cheating, and would allow a higher quantity of potential suggestions, probably increasing the likelihood that one is very cool.
    -If the goal is to do roughly the same thing as was done this year, allow players to suggest and do a vote to choose the playerbase favorite set, I'd recommend doing roughly the same thing, but lay out ground rules initially about what is and isn't allowed with regards to suggestions, campaigning, and other relevant topics, and have a plan for ensuring that all forum accounts that vote belong to a real player and are not alts. Depending on the staff's ability to track account activity over time, I suspect this would not be difficult to accomplish to a relatively high degree of accuracy.
    -If staff decide that player suggestions are too much hassle, I'd love to see a set of polls allowing players to vote for qualities to give the donation set (armor lean, theme, highly synergistic with itself or more scattered different effects, uses statuses / what ones / how many)

    Separately, I think that if staff do allow suggestions, they should limit complexity ahead of time (IE, only 2 abilities per item, no compression items, could be some ground rules for example). If the staff do do a vote again, please do ranked choice voting (potentially most easily achieved by having a poll to select top 2 suggestions, and at the same time, polls for each possible top 2 outcome)

    Also, I forgot: This year and the previous year, the top 5 donators seemingly made up a vast majority of token donations on their own. The impact of their donations is probably more massive than it seems, if we assume most players competing for ranks regift tokens they receive. If the staff goal is to increase token donations, changes aimed at these top top ranks are likely the way to go

    < Message edited by Grace Xisthrith -- 8/29/2024 18:52:08 >
    AQ  Post #: 14
    8/30/2024 0:04:32   
    battlesiege15
    Member

    Are there plans to address the last minute shuffle on the leader boards? I know that is inevitable but it really does suck when you donate over 200K tokens just to get bumped down from 50th spot in the last minute :(

    Like maybe extending the armor/weapon to maybe all those donating 200K? It would add like maybe 8 more people who get the armor based on the current standing considering how much money they were able to place into the contest.

    Just a thought. I am always happy to support the game but having spent so much I'm not sure I want to participate to this degree in the future :(
    AQ AQW  Post #: 15
    8/30/2024 14:00:49   
    Sapphire
    Member

    quote:

    To mention none of those things would have been a massive misrepresentation. It would've required making an exception to the requested developer notes and potentially following it with nothing short of a rug pull. Transparency and professionalism demanded that we made voters aware that if that set won, we would have to either take the extra work to revamp related mechanics, or create something that would be subject to thorough changes that we could not specify the details of until we revamped said mechanics.


    Knowing:

    1. This is a Player Suggestion Motivated Contest
    2. That the Dev team had decided beforehand, most likely, that Hypercrit/LS mechanics were in need of a complete and total review/overhaul

    This is what occurred:

    The official Giftmaster Set and Community Set Suggestions went live on the forums. This was the first opportunity to include "Oh btw, hypercrit and LS mechanics are going to be thoroughly reviewed and likely altered. You're more than welcome to offer up these in your suggestions, but just know, this may force us to move up this review if your suggestion wins and if it doesn't, these items may get altered at a later time"

    On 6/6, Gwen proposed her set with the LS/Hypercrit theme. This was a 2nd opportunity to either reach out to her or make a note right then at some point near to that day, to say something.

    On 6/28, the suggestion phase of the threads closed. Although this would be too late, nothing was said here either.

    On 7/19, the dev notes were released with the top 3 finalists and only then was it mentioned that nothing she proposed would go through even remotely close to the suggestion. We all get that stuff will get altered according to dev's preferences, but to me saying vote based on theme not the specifics is fallacy. Nobody votes based on that. Then why even include the tidbits in all 3 suggesting things like "moving away from damage based heals", "we're weary of triple modes",or "this item may be doing a bit too much" etc etc? Gwen's ideas were almost completely stricken from the record and people were told "vote for this theme but nothing will be remotely close as suggested" while the other suggestions were "this will give us an opportunity to fix charge mechanics" and "a UI update could be a huge boon for the game". The difference in tone in the dev notes was stark. But I get it was unintended.

    Furthermore, it seemed as though Gwen's suggestion made the three finalists for the giftmaster set based on player feedback inside the forums, meaning it seemed to be a popular suggestion. However, Gibby's leech seed set suggestion in the community set was omitted from being a finalist despite it pretty much being the most popular set based on comments. I don't really understand the inconsistent approach. IMO, if Gibby's set should have been omitted then so should have Gwens. ANd the players could have had an opportunity to have 3 suggestions to vote on that could look remotely close to the suggestion, instead of 2 with 1 being a massive unknown.

    Look, I don't think everyone should be perfect. Sure, there was zero foresight and hopefully in the future there will be. It's fine. I voted for Dardiel's set and I was leaning that way even before all of this took place if it had been chosen, But to me the rug was pulled anyway. You either pull the rug by not including it or you pull the rug by saying "none of this will go through" which pretty much is what is was IMO.

    What would have happened had Gwen's set won? They were already talking about getting a group together to see if they could get some ideas presented that WOULD make it through. I can tell you right now that not only would that not have been fair to everyone who "lost" if theat was allowed, but it wouldn't have been fair to those who (for some reason) voted for a set that nobody knew what the items would do at all if it wasn't.

    All because nobody bothered to bring it up.

    And this isn't about Gwen, her set, but rather about the foundation. There was more than Gwen who suggested hypercrit/LS mechanics in their ideas. I just want there to be a thorough thought process in the future. If someone suggests backlash or dodgelash or w/e next year I certainly hope we don't see dev notes indicating those are up for review after the suggestion phase is over and the vote phase begins.

    Players can speculate what aspects could be altered based on what other players soap box wherever they soapbox about such things, but it's 100% meaningless until it comes from the horses mouth. Every single time.


    Maybe in the future, themes can come from staff and players derive suggestions based on those rather than having players throw darts at a dart board.



    < Message edited by Sapphire -- 8/30/2024 14:37:57 >
    Post #: 16
    8/30/2024 14:36:28   
    Telcontar Arvedui I
    Member

    My OP was written before the winners of the suggestion contest polls were announced. Now that the event has concluded, with only the delivery of the prizes to Ballyhoo shops pending, I am here to slightly revise my stance. Starting by giving thanks to @Chaotic for expanding upon my OP's bullet-points, thus removing the need for me to do them I agree with just about everything they posted, in case that was not clear. Still, this post will highlight other potential solutions, since my OP was more focused on the problems present.

    I'll be honest, the foul play aspect during voting was, in reality, less than I feared. 14% of votes being thrown out (13 votes mid-voting, 13 more after the poll closed) is not "rampant", thankfully. However, I believe it remains a source of concern, and as highlighted by @Chaotic, @Branl, and @ming shuen, direct, non-automated intervention by mods should not be regarded as a feasible solution, not when the staff has to sink significant work-hours into it, and yet further compromises public perception of the votes' integrity. Which is why I will continue to stand by no more popularity-based suggestions contest for the next few years as the baseline for my stance.

    However, such a solution is indeed a big leap to make, the impact on next year's donation contest might be too risky for the staff to take. Thus, if we want to continue with a format driven by player-input with majority/popularity elements, I am willing to yield ground and agree to with the solutions already outlined by a few other posts in this thread:

  • Change the voting format from FPTP to Ranked Pairs, Ranked Choice, or Instant-Runoff. Preferably with forum software support to automate vote-counting, saving staff's work--hours for other moderating work (eg. cheater investigation).

  • Limit the proportions of player input. @Dardiel outlined this proposal very well, so I'll just quote them:
    quote:

    (after players submit their suggestions).... "(players) vote for top 3 then staff pick (a winner)".... (or) just "staff pick"..... (or) the devs slowly piece together a set's details through a mix of suggestion threads and polls.


  • Last but not least, definitely better outreach. As a community event, the set suggestion and voting should be advertised in the in-game/in-launcher weekly newsletter, with hyperlinks directing players to the corresponding forums thread. Personally, I would even be willing to have that week be devoted to nothing else but the submission/voting phase announcement - i.e. no content releases at all, which gives time to the coders to work on other stuff. If staff were concerned about the suggestion/submission stage being clogged by random off-top-of-head ideas that are not feasible, I am grudgingly willing to concede no direct hyperlinks to that forum thread, as long as players are still instructed in the in-game newsletter on how to navigate the forums to get there. Or better yet, inform beforehand on the limitations of player suggestions, as suggested by @KhalJJ and @Grace Xisthrith

    * * * * * * *

    Okay, that was the suggestion contest out of the way. Now w.r.t. the donation drive itself, I agree with 3 points raised in this thread so far:

  • I agree with turning donation receipts account-based instead of character-based in future drives. Like @Chaotic, I do hope that
    quote:

    ...... a key aspect of what makes this contest special is that the donated tokens are redistributed to those who need them......
    and such a decision would be a step in that direction, since casual/F2P players are more likely to not have 10 characters compared to invested veterans. One way to implement this could be to: a) add the unique account ID instead of the current unique character ID to the "eligible receipients" list when any character of that account has logged in over the past 24 hours, and b) all the received tokens go to the oldest character in the recipient account. The Giftmaster leaderboards already sort ties by account (character?) age, so it makes sense that donated Tokens also go to the oldest character - it may indirectly help reduce server traffic by discouraging vaulting tokens between characters to donate for a leaderboard placement, I guess?

  • I can get behind a bigger proportion of benchmark-based Giftmaster rewards compared to placement-based rewards. Right now only 3 tiers (faces, shield, misc) are benchmark-based, and given that we have Golden Dev Tickets and Custom-Colour capabilities included as placement-based rewards, can we at least get weapons to be benchmark-based, to make it 4:4 benchmark-to-placement reward tiers? Or, do it like Winter Donation Drives, where placement-based rewards are elemental variants (plus Golden Dev Tickets) and we get all community-benchmark-based reward tiers?

  • @battlesiege15 is right - it sure feels bad being sniped out of placement at the last minute. If we move onto purely benchmark-based reward tiers in the next summer's donation drive, would it be okay if we do a final goodwill-esque sendoff by slightly extending the reward tiers this summer? Full disclaimer: I have conflict of interest here, being placed 105th and 5k tokens (or 6 minutes) short. And what with slippery slopes, dev-time concerns, and other factors that need to be considered, I am fully prepared to accept this point being discarded by devs due to being unfeasible.

    EDIT: At the risk of looking like a busybody, I would like to propose something for 6th and 7th place only, no one else (I'm neither of them). They were, after all, head-and-shoulders above the rest of the leaderboard. Since Top 5 gets to choose a reskin from any Weapon or Shield, perhaps 6th and 7th can get any Weapon reskin but not Shields, or any Shield reskin but not Weapons, thereby limiting their choices. Also, the reskin would simply be a different-coloured elemental variant, so less time required to source and implement new art. There might be other avenues or steps that can also be taken to reduce dev workload, but my gist is to provide a consolation prize for their outstanding performance, while taking the least amount of dev time possible with such a consolation measure. Again, I will accept this point being disregarded, for the same reasons outlined in the paragraph above.

    < Message edited by Telcontar Arvedui I -- 8/30/2024 14:45:22 >
  • AQ  Post #: 17
    8/30/2024 14:43:42   
    Sapphire
    Member

    After further thought and consideration, as long as there's no way to reveal account info, I think making donations account based might not be a bad idea. It would be less work on those with 10 characters, and those w/o 10 would get the same chances.

    Actually, it would probably increase chances for those with 10 characters, too. Maybe it would either go to the character on the account based on something, maybe such as born date.. or maybe it could require ownership of a vault and the tokens deposit there. And notification happens on *any* character after a battle.

    So I rescind my earlier talking points about not making this account based. (for now lol)
    Post #: 18
    8/30/2024 15:12:03   
    battlesiege15
    Member

    Yes, I think maybe top X spots plus an additional benchmark would be a nice thing to consider for the future since there are even now clear threshold between spots (6 & 7 vs 8, 200K vs 186K vs 50K for spots 101, 102 vs 7500+ for spots 204 and above).

    This would provide some leeway for the aggressive and unpredictable sniping at the very end of the contest also allowing for those who are not awake during the end of the contest to sleep in peace a little bit knowing they might not get bumped down.

    At the end of the day, this is a one player game so we can't really actively show off the equipment and the rewards all help the game thrive with participants buying tokens.
    Would it be possible to have the donated tokens go straight to a person's token vault? Probably not but it would be a little more convenient if we decide to have 1 account per win.

    Plus, we would have access to the rewards shop at the end of the day anyways. Maybe just have the color/other customizable rewards be personal rewards to the respective character.
    AQ AQW  Post #: 19
    9/1/2024 9:06:13   
    CH4OT1C!
    Member

    To be honest, I hadn't intended to create a follow-up post to my original one. However, recent developments now mean that I feel obligated to add to my initial list of grievances.



    Donation Rewards II

    In my first post, I drew attention to the unfairness surrounding token donations being divided by character. With that said, I don't think I did a particularly good job of emphasising just how dire the situation is.

    To illustrate the problem more clearly, imagine a hypothetical scenario in which 100 players are participating in the donation contest, each owning a single character. Notwithstanding Flash's notoriously bad RNG system, you would typically expect each player to receive approximately 1% of the total donated tokens under these assumptions. Now, imagine a second scenario where 10 of these players have 10 characters each, and another 10 have five characters each. The remaining 80 players still have a single character as before. In this scenario, while there are still 100 players, 10 of them contribute a total of 100 characters, and another 10 add a further 50. In total, this means there are 230 characters in the prize pool. Each player with 10 characters can expect to receive 10 / 230 * 100 = ~4.3% of the total share, while a player with five character is likely to receive 5 / 230 * 100 = 2.2%. By contrast, the other 80 players can each expect to receive just 0.4% of the total share; this is, after all, a zero sum game.

    Of course, it's impossible for me to know how many characters each player participating in the contest has. However, as you can see, it doesn't take long for the disparity to become extreme. And it shows in the contest outcomes as well. I know of at least three players who received fewer than 10,000 tokens on a character during this contest, despite the record 54,000,000 tokens donated. One barely made it past 5000. By contrast, I also know of at least three experienced players that received more than 200,000 tokens from their characters. One received 270,000, enough to donate for the full Warwolf set and still have 50,000 tokens left over! Some may argue that this is fine because more characters means more spending, but those two things aren't necessarily proportional when those characters belong to the same people!

    Some of you may also argue that this is fair—that we should reward players for having more characters because it encourages them the play the game longer and become more invested. To that, I say: "but does it?". Or does it simply just encourage the player to quickly raise nine alts to Level 25 for them to act as token mules? This practice is so prevalent that multiple players actively name their characters to highlight their status as mules or storage accounts. Even if we suppose that the system achieves this goal, aren't we already encouraging them enough anyway? Over a donation contest that typically lasts for two months (60 days), nine Adventurer alts (cap: 25 tokens) could collectively earn 25 * 9 * 60 = 13,500 tokens. That's already easily enough to get them into the top 200! Moreover, encouraging players not just to create alts but to have them actively play the game is far more likely to get them invested.

    If one of the main benefits of the Summer Donation Contest is supposed to be that the donated tokens end up in the hands of the more casual players who need them, then I can't help but think this system is utterly failing to deliver. Since the donation system is character-based, you can even donate to yourself! One individual, whom I shall not name, managed to donate 80,000 to themselves during this contest! That's five to 10 times more than the average single character player is likely to receive in total!



    Consolation Prizes

    Just as I thought the contest had finally begun to settle down, we were treated to a new thread highlighting the problems running with a 'Top [x]' format. As I noted in my response on that thread, the fight for the top five Dev tickets became quite the battle. Together, the top seven donated 33,539,100 tokens during the contest, a truly astounding display of both generosity and competitive spirit. An amount that made it particularly disappointing for me to see that, despite several calls for a consolation prize for positions six and seven, others were against any leniancy, even given these completely unprecedented and unforeseeable circumstances. And, what's more, I can completely understand why they'd be upset. While I disagree with the way that the argument was phrased, they are, ultimately, correct. Awarding consolation prizes to these positions would be deliberately making an exception to the rule. As I said in my response post, I think these unique circumstances warranted such an exception, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s fair to everyone else. That applies even though, as noted by @Branl, every member of the top five agreed to it. Making exceptions has the potential to open the floodgates. While I don’t believe the argument is strong enough, one could easily argue that exceptions should be made further down the leaderboard due to how close those positions were. You could even make a case based on last year’s events: when the staff openly announced that the suggestion system was based on popularity, they compensated those affected with the release of Wishweaver. However, what about those affected in previous years? What about players who made suggestions without knowing this (and therefore didn't stand a chance of having their ideas accepted)? Should they be compensated as well?

    My point here isn’t to argue whether they should be compensated. Rather, it’s to demonstrate that if the goal of the Dev Tickets and the 'Top [x]' Giftmaster format is to reward generosity, then this year’s system failed to achieve that purpose effectively. The fact that consolation prizes might have been warranted underscores the problem with how the current format is executed. It failed to adequately reward the generous, and it even exacerbated the already stark ideological divides within the community at a time when that is the last thing we need.



    So, what do we do? II

    Somehow, despite the mountain of existing issues with the Summer Donation contest, new problems keep being piled on. This only reinforces my belief that sweeping changes are needed. For those arguing that more power should be handed to the top 50 donators, I find that hard to accept when certain players can apparently receive enough tokens from the contest to reach that marker without spending anything themselves. Don't get me wrong; redonating those tokens is still a generous thing to do, but the situation is different when (i) you aren't buying them yourself and (ii) the token distribution system is severely biased against certain individuals. Two players might donate 250,000 tokens, but depending on their individual circumstances, one could have received all of those tokens from the contest!

    I want to raise an idea suggested by @Dreiko Shadrack elsewhere: Perhaps the Summer contest should be more like the Winter Gold donation contest. For example, there could be fixed community benchmarks, similar to the current community set, with the top 100 donators receiving a recoloured, elementally distinct version of the same set. The top 100 restriction could address many of the claims for needing consolation prizes (since it's much lower than top five), while the rest of the set remains benchmarked as before. This runs the risk of reducing the total amount of tokens contributed to the contest, but has already been raised by some donators but, as long as the tokens are distributed more evenly, could still be a net benefit to the players that really need those tokens. If that isn't enough of an incentive for large donators, we could retain the 'Top five' Dev ticket system, but with the added explicit qualifications that (i) the item will be made public, and (ii) the staff can provide additional rewards (both collectively and to individual players) depending on the circumstances. This approach would ensure that top donators still receive a degree of special treatment while also benefiting the wider community. Additionally, reducing the contest to one set rather than two would lessen the staff's workload, and their time could instead be spent on something else.

    < Message edited by CH4OT1C! -- 9/1/2024 12:09:18 >
    AQ  Post #: 20
    9/1/2024 12:44:29   
    Sapphire
    Member

    quote:


    Donation Rewards II

    In my first post, I drew attention to the unfairness surrounding token donations being divided by character. With that said, I don't think I did a particularly good job of emphasising just how dire the situation is.
    To illustrate the problem more clearly, imagine a hypothetical scenario in which 100 players are participating in the donation contest, each owning a single character. Notwithstanding Flash's notoriously bad RNG system, you would typically expect each player to receive approximately 1% of the total donated tokens under these assumptions. Now, imagine a second scenario where 10 of these players have 10 characters each, and another 10 have five characters each. The remaining 80 players still have a single character as before. In this scenario, while there are still 100 players, 10 of them contribute a total of 100 characters, and another 10 add a further 50. In total, this means there are 230 characters in the prize pool. Each player with 10 characters can expect to receive 10 / 230 * 100 = ~4.3% of the total share, while a player with five character is likely to receive 5 / 230 * 100 = 2.2%. By contrast, the other 80 players can each expect to receive just 0.4% of the total share; this is, after all, a zero sum game.

    Of course, it's impossible for me to know how many characters each player participating in the contest has. However, as you can see, it doesn't take long for the disparity to become extreme. And it shows in the contest outcomes as well. I know of at least three players who received fewer than 10,000 tokens on a character during this contest, despite the record 54,000,000 tokens donated. One barely made it past 5000. By contrast, I also know of at least three experienced players who received more than 200,000 tokens from their characters. One received 270,000, enough to donate for the full Warwolf set and still have 50,000 tokens left over! Some may argue that this is fine because more characters means more spending, but those two things aren't necessarily proportional when those characters belong to the same people!

    Some of you may also argue that this is fair—that we should reward players for having more characters because it encourages them the play the game longer and become more invested. To that, I say: "but does it?". Or does it simply just encourage the player to quickly raise nine alts to Level 25 for them to act as token mules? This practice is so prevalent that multiple players actively name their characters to highlight their status as mules or storage accounts. Even if we suppose that the system achieves this goal, aren't we already encouraging them enough anyway? Over a donation contest that typically lasts for two months (60 days), nine Adventurer alts (cap: 25 tokens) could collectively earn 25 * 9 * 60 = 13,500 tokens. That's already easily enough to get them into the top 200! Moreover, encouraging players not just to create alts but to have them actively play the game is far more likely to get them invested.

    If one of the main benefits of the Summer Donation Contest is supposed to be that the donated tokens end up in the hands of the more casual players who need them, then I can't help but think this system is utterly failing to deliver. Since the donation system is character-based, you can even donate to yourself! One individual, whom I shall not name, managed to donate 80,000 to themselves during this contest! That's five to 10 times more than the average single character player is likely to receive in total!



    The more I see this argument get made, the more I have to agree. Yes, I've changed my mind. If part of the idea here is to help give tokens to the less fortunate..ie those who don't have the means to purchase them...then it's not doing so, especially if a player only has 1 or 2 characters. I also tend to think logging in on 10 characters and winning 1/battle per day is a lot of work that might not be necessary if we had an account-based system. I am unsure if or how this could be implemented, but IMO the best scenario would be to place the tokens directly into the vault. Yes, this would mean purchasing a vault.

    I have seen some players mention that maybe it should go on the "oldest character on the account". But what if that character isn't the "main character"? What if that account doesn't have a vault and they'd be forced to purchase one to move the tokens to their main? Either way, you're going to need that vault..whether it's deposited directly on the vault, or it needs to be purchased in this scenario. We still might have players who's main is their oldest. However, winning rewards and picking up copies via ballyhoo still requires a vault to take advantage. So to me, ultimately, that should be the one and only caveat. You *need* a vault. By requiring that, it alone would encourage making multiple characters...

    Because Chaotic is right. Players are likely using their alts as token mules anyway, and it does not necessarily mean that these alts are being leveled up. As for very new characters that may not know that a vault exists, well it should be advertised by the Devs if this change happens that one will be needed. If that means a purchase of a low level package or farming for the tokens to obtain it, it may provide some time to get this done.

    Speaking of not knowing.... there are still many, many, many players who do not even know about the L25+ character rule. This is not stated anywhere. LK let some of us know in discord last year finally, and even this year there were those trying to remember what those specifics were. By making this a vault-based, account based system, you remove this "you need to make 10 chars all L25+" work and you also remove the need to login on all 10 chars, everyday, to beat the shower monster. It's a bit of a chore.

    Now, this likely WILL reduce the chances of those who are diligently playing on 10 characters per day, but it really wont be by that much. Remember, those with 1 char were likely only getting 5k, 20k TOTAL over the entirety of the event whereas others with 10 chars were getting upwards of 200k+. So maybe instead you get 180k....but those with 1 char are not also getting that chance at 180k.

    So that's specifically how I'd personally implement it...via the vault. The vault *is* tied to the account, after all. To me, it'd be simpler than basing it on figuring out what character to do it on.



    quote:


    Consolation Prizes

    Just as I thought the contest had finally begun to settle down, we were treated to a new thread highlighting the problems running with a 'Top [x]' format. As I noted in my response on that thread, the fight for the top five Dev tickets became quite the battle. Together, the top seven donated 33,539,100 tokens during the contest, a truly astounding display of both generosity and competitive spirit. An amount that made it particularly disappointing for me to see that, despite several calls for a consolation prize for positions six and seven, others were against any leniancy, even given these completely unprecedented and unforeseeable circumstances. And, what's more, I can completely understand why they'd be upset. While I disagree with the way that the argument was phrased, they are, ultimately, correct. Awarding consolation prizes to these positions would be deliberately making an exception to the rule. As I said in my response post, I think these unique circumstances warranted such an exception, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s fair to everyone else. That applies even though, as noted by @Branl, every member of the top five agreed to it. Making exceptions has the potential to open the floodgates. While I don’t believe the argument is strong enough, one could easily argue that exceptions should be made further down the leaderboard due to how close those positions were. You could even make a case based on last year’s events: when the staff openly announced that the suggestion system was based on popularity, they compensated those affected with the release of Wishweaver. However, what about those affected in previous years? What about players who made suggestions without knowing this (and therefore didn't stand a chance of having their ideas accepted)? Should they be compensated as well?

    My point here isn’t to argue whether they should be compensated. Rather, it’s to demonstrate that if the goal of the Dev Tickets and the 'Top [x]' Giftmaster format is to reward generosity, then this year’s system failed to achieve that purpose effectively. The fact that consolation prizes might have been warranted underscores the problem with how the current format is executed. It failed to adequately reward the generous, and it even exacerbated the already stark ideological divides within the community at a time when that is the last thing we need.


    So, what do we do? II

    Somehow, despite the mountain of existing issues with the Summer Donation contest, new problems keep being piled on. This only reinforces my belief that sweeping changes are needed. For those arguing that more power should be handed to the top 50 donators, I find that hard to accept when certain players can apparently receive enough tokens from the contest to reach that marker without spending anything themselves. Don't get me wrong; redonating those tokens is still a generous thing to do, but the situation is different when (i) you aren't buying them yourself and (ii) the token distribution system is severely biased against certain individuals. Two players might donate 250,000 tokens, but depending on their individual circumstances, one could have received all of those tokens from the contest!

    I want to raise an idea suggested by @Dreiko Shadrack elsewhere: Perhaps the Summer contest should be more like the Winter Gold donation contest. For example, there could be fixed community benchmarks, similar to the current community set, with the top 100 donators receiving a recoloured, elementally distinct version of the same set. The top 100 restriction could address many of the claims for needing consolation prizes (since it's much lower than top five), while the rest of the set remains benchmarked as before. This runs the risk of reducing the total amount of tokens contributed to the contest, but has already been raised by some donators but, as long as the tokens are distributed more evenly, could still be a net benefit to the players that really need those tokens. If that isn't enough of an incentive for large donators, we could retain the 'Top five' Dev ticket system, but with the added explicit qualifications that (i) the item will be made public, and (ii) the staff can provide additional rewards (both collectively and to individual players) depending on the circumstances. This approach would ensure that top donators still receive a degree of special treatment while also benefiting the wider community. Additionally, reducing the contest to one set rather than two would lessen the staff's workload, and their time could instead be spent on something else.



    Some of this I agree with, some I differ on.

    Here's what I'd do. But first, considering that the majority of the donations come from the very, very top, we need to keep the dev ticket. It's literally carrying us to the stretch goals. So what I would do, is expand the fight.

    Here's what I mean.

    First, the top 5 still need to be a Dev Ticket. The definition of a dev ticket is : The players can choose any item (category subject to staff) that will be a mechanical clone, but unique art chosen by the player. This item also gets a unique name based on what the player wants. You get both the functionality of something they desire as well as the fashionquest aspect along with the cool name.

    Next, I would expand a reward offered to #6 through #10. Here, it would not be a dev ticket. It would be more akin to a war reward. It's a slight reskin of an existing item, with the functional clone. The reskin is entirely up to staff, but the name can be up to the player. This shouldn't be a huge burden considering the lion's share of the work is copy/paste. I wouldn't be opposed to the player being in evolved in the color scheme, but I don't think there should be this constant back and forth via email with ideas, pictures, and "how does this look to you?" process that would slow this down. That's my point. This will allow an expansion of some rewards beyond the 5th spot. Also, no more special considerations between 5/6 and 10/11. You get what you get.


    Next, because the top 5 spots (and possibly top 10 if they do what I suggest) will likely carry the entirety of the stretch goal, I think we should move away from the "Top 100 get this, top 50 get this, top 25 get this ..but only in-part.


    Right now 4k tokens gets you the misc, 2k gets you the shield, and 1k gets you the elite face, and all donators get the basic face.

    Because we can possibly move to an account-based, vault-deposited specific system, more players will be getting higher donations.

    So this means the tiers to guarantee all of the basic items need to be implemented, and raised.

    For example, I would scrap elite faces. Just make 1 face. All donators get that face. Second, 5k donators get the shield instead of 2k. From there, instead of the misc being obtained at 4k, make this 15k. Instead of the weapon set being for top 200, make this 25k. Instead of the top 100 getting the pet, make it 50k. Oddly enough, top 100 this year was 50,500+. To get the armor, make it 150k. (This year was north of 200k)

    What will actually happen, I think, is we will get lower amounts gifted from those who currently sit between 100 and 50, but we will have more players gift that 150k (This year we had 63) I suspect that we might see this number double or higher, making up for the difference)

    This means more players get the items, and the total donated may be pretty equal. I suspect, that we are actually losing donations from those who wish to not gamble. There are many, many players who are waiting to see where these current Top X thresholds are and once they see it go past their amount that they have, or are willing to donate, they bow out and keep their tokens altogether. If we guaranteed the items based on the specific amount, and we are able to increase the number of players with more donations (like those with lower number of characters on the account), then I think the overall effect will actually be MORE donations.


    Finally, I would like to make the top 25 retain the color custom variant but make all items CCustom for them. I think a good mix of some competitive stuff on the top end, for those who are actually carrying the contests total amounts, with some guaranteed benchmarks is the best way to go moving forward. Oh, and we can still login to each character and donate to obtain the daily prize (crown, moontide bracer, etc) so that multiple of our characters can get a copy.

    However, IMO, I think it would be healthier if the item changed halfway through. What happens now, is the 25 token donations stop once so many characters get the item. (Notwithstanding those who were donating a million tokens via 25's...wow) So change the item to a new item halfway through, to continue pushing a number of 25 donos. This will add up over the course of the contest.



    This is all separate from the process of suggestions, how we go about deciding what sets to utilize etc, which I think still need to happen as it drives engagement up. I highly doubt Daddiel donates 3.7 million tokens if his suggestion wasn't chosen. The nuts and bolts of that can be fleshed out better, but the suggestion part needs to stay somehow. And I think a community set is still in need to be kept.


    < Message edited by Sapphire -- 9/1/2024 16:28:14 >
    Post #: 21
    9/1/2024 17:29:19   
    Dardiel
    Member

    Just for the sake of having it mentioned since this is the thread for discussing everything about the contest and I don't remember seeing it mentioned previous (but there sure has been a lot of words and AQ players are famously illiterate) - I think there could be a discussion about the idea of having donated tokens enter a pool to be evenly distributed after the contest ends. Main two justifications being:
    - Flash RNG is notoriously sticky as Chaotic mentioned - donations are currently a roll of weighted dice.
    - Token donations amount are inflated by re-donations, especially if someone donates 5k to their own alt which they can just transfer back and donate again. Theoretically if all AQ players were on the same page, we would have infinite donations every year if everybody re-donated everything. Removing re-donations would give us a clearer picture of who actually put tokens forward.

    There would be a counter-argument of "it wouldn't fix the re-donation inflation, players would just hold onto tokens for next year" - which is true, although I think having to sit on tokens for a full year without spending them is harder than just instantly re-donating incoming tokens and could itself be a sign of dedication which I think the contest is measuring.

    And just as an extra piece of clarification about the re-distribution, I do think it's still good to promote regular play/interaction so I would argue in favor of a system such as: Each day that you play, you get 1 "entry" into the token pool. At the end of the donation period, each person gains tokens equal to [Player Entries]/[Total Entries]*[Token Pool]. IE if you play for 30 days of the contest and somebody else plays for all 60, the person that played more would be getting twice as many tokens.
    The system for determining entries could be tweaked - it could give diminishing returns (eg first 5 entries are worth 4x, next 10 are worth 2x, next 40 are worth 1x) or have a cap that's below the contest duration (similar to the Back to School raffle giving maximum rewards at 25 days out of about 35, equal to playing 5 days a week) so that regular play is still optimal but doesn't feel as bad if you were doing good then missed a day. The entries could also be based on something other than days played, although rewarding consistent outgoing donations with increased incoming donations would be a bit circular.
    Post #: 22
    9/2/2024 19:09:01   
    Grace Xisthrith
    Member
     

    I missed if this has been mentioned already, if it has, my bad, but I do have a theoretical problem with donated tokens being stored and distributed in some way at the end of the contest. In short, if there are three players donating, one paid for a bunch of tokens to make sure they win the top prize, the second wants to win a high prize, but isn't willing to spend a lot of money, so they redonate the tokens they receive, and the third would love to win a prize, but is more likely going to spend any tokens they receive on basic gear like houses and item slots. If the tokens are stored and donated out at the end, more of those tokens end up with players who would normally have donated them out in an attempt to win a higher prize in the contest, and fewer would end up with players who will use those tokens on permanent items, because the second player in the example isn't able to redonate.
    I don't know if this is a real issue, I don't know if there are sections of players that can be so easily sorted into these categories, but that's one concern I saw someone bring up in the past, which I thought might be useful to bring up here.

    Separately, I want to add another voice of support discussed above, that it would be great if it were possible to have token donations (and perhaps raffle /daily login items as well) be counted per account, instead of per character. If it's possible to achieve that without a crazy dev time investment, that would be awesome
    AQ  Post #: 23
    9/2/2024 22:42:37   
    Branl
    Member

    Nobody can ever really ensure total equality of donations (they are random, after all). I do, however, believe it to still be a worthwhile endeavor to make sure as many tokens reach out those who needed them as possible.
    I plan on making a post detailing my thought process behind my eleventh hour donations, but I'll touch on a few things I've found during my donation experience:

    1) While I'm grateful to have receive the thanks of many people (and have successful manage to donate to a few players I know don't typically buy many Z Tokens), I also found it, in part, disappointing, just how many of my tokens I was able to identify that went to obvious extra characters. Not an issue in and of itself, except, I can't really fairly say that I liked seeing my tokens be donated to "storage 6" or "mule 3". It's hard for me to believe these characters serve any purpose aside from elevating the chance of some players to receive donations drastically more tokens than everyone else (about x10 more, with 10 characters, to be exact!).

    2) I've been informed, that upwards to 270k have been claimed to have gone to a player that has an active history of buying many Z Tokens. I don't think these players should be prevented from receiving donations, but I also don't think these players should also have an elevated chance at recieving them over other players. Partially due to personal objections, but also because:

    3) I've been additionally informed that, many players who only have a single character for their account, and some that even have multiple, have struggled to break even 5,000 tokens received. This is in spite of nearly 55 million tokens being donated throughout the entirety of the event. This means, that, some players were able to receive about 1/216th (250,000/54,000,000) of the tokens donated, while others couldn't even receive 1/10,800th (5,000/54,000,000) of the tokens donated.

    4) In addition, I found that my tokens received throughout the entire event was around 180,000 tokens, using 10 characters regularly. With 144,000 coming from the last day of the event. Of this total, 20,000 of these tokens minimum, came from... myself. I somehow managed to inadvertently donate more tokens to myself than many players have received... at all. While I freely take advantage of the elevated chance of receiving tokens with multiple characters (with the caveat that my 9 other characters are all maxed, used for daily gold farming, and pending changes depending on if I can find builds for them), and it's nice to see myself receive a good amount of tokens... I can't say, as someone able to donate 5,000,000 tokens at minimum throughout the course of this contest, had more of a need for these donations than someone who either can't or just didn't want to create numerous mule characters created primarily to receive more donations at the expense of those that did.

    I plan on talking more at length about contest stuff (my thoughts on popular polling format are, as poorly worded as it is, already here, and my stance remains unchanged), at a later date. If this thread closes before that happens, I'll make a new thread about it.

    < Message edited by Branl -- 9/2/2024 22:46:41 >


    _____________________________

    IGN: Teryle

    There's a method to my madness.
    AQ DF  Post #: 24
    9/3/2024 3:12:52   
    ruleandrew
    Member
     

    I want to somewhat lower the pain of falling a bit short of a character ideal target. High donation amount is more desirable than low donation amount.

    Suggested donation contest prize structure
    Tier 1 prize: character donated amount is 5th highest or higher among all characters that donated in the contest
    Tier 2 prize: character donated amount is greater or equal to 0.4 * (5th highest character donated amount among all characters that donated in the contest)
    Tier 3 prize: character donated amount is 25th highest or higher among all characters that donated in the contest (if character did not qualify for tier 2 prize)
    Tier 4 prize: character donated amount is greater or equal to 0.4 * (25th highest character donated amount among all characters that donated in the contest)
    Tier 5 prize: character donated amount is 100th highest or higher among all characters that donated in the contest (if character did not qualify for tier 4 prize)
    Tier 6 prize: character donated amount is greater or equal to 0.4 * (100th highest character donated amount among all characters that donated in the contest)
    Tier 7 prize: character donated at least 4000 z-tokens (if character did not qualify for tier 6 prize)
    Tier 8 prize: character donated at least 1000 z-tokens (if character did not qualify for tier 6 prize)
    Tier 9 prize: character donated at least 1 z-token (if character did not qualify for tier 6 prize)


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