PD
Member
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A general reply to the above poster(s): 1. There wouldn't really be a goal to go beyond a max tier, and you people are right on that one. The goal is to get rid of snipers and those who take advantage of the competitive nature to game the system in only a dishonest way. I'd already documented empirically that nobody donated during the month of August, and 40% of the prize pool was added only at the last day (from 8m to 13.5m, or 5.5m out of 13.5m), and you can't really deny the stories of people gaming this to their gross advantage. 3 players whom I will not name (you know who you are if you are reading this) were able to game the system to between the 3 of them gain over 350,000 tokens collectively. As I said before by some accounts, the top 25 players reaped nearly 20% (or 2.7m) of all the tokens. If we're worried about total donations being unmatched, you really should ask yourselves how many people don't participate at all because of the current structure. Of course adopting all of these ideas means it's effectively no longer a contest. But contests aren't virtuous in of themselves, but rather because of what they're supposed (motivate people to donate more), but this competitive format has presented more issues than it purportedly helps to spurn in goodness. As for the controversy -- I said briefly. I and everyone else are glad that Hollow has taken our opinions into consideration (and thus maintain our trust by maintaining our expectations). But that controversy was about retroactively changing the rules, not against changing rules in general as I will explain further down. 2. Tracking unused accounts is a moot point because dead/inactive accounts don't donate and thus don't get to get anything. Only donators will get them (which means you'll have to have been active at one point during the contest thusly disqualifying dead accounts). Considering how the current system works where only people who won battles within 12 hours are even eligible to get tokens this is also further moot as "dead accounts" aren't eligible even in the current system. 3. Except there's been more people than just me who are dis-satisfied with how contests are run in general. The mentioned controversy, by even DarkKnight's account ( which you (DarkKnight) had even agreed to my proposed compromised to temporarily increase the top cut from 15 to 20.) actually had people either supporting changes going forward, or not being in opposition to changes going forward. Again, the controversy wasn't related to making things easier in general. It was about retroactive rule changes. The same reaction would have happened if Hollow decided to change the top cut from top 15 to top 10 retroactive for example because people would have been angry at being suddenly disqualified and potentially wasting everything for nothing. The whole point was that we were given an expectation from the beginning, and then this expectation changed after the fact and being tantamount to a bait-and-switch (although by not fault of Hollow). And this retro-activity would have been an issue because it's ranked and thusly it would have changed the top cut criteria. Which again, is another problem with ranked contests that makes people extremely paranoid especially when the the true donated totals are only able to be self-verified. So we snipe. We don't donate until the very last moment to prevent the ability of giving our opponents a possible advantage by getting free tokens they will then use against us. You say nothing is wrong and thus we should not fix anything. But by all accounts (including your own messages on discord) you can hop onto the Discord to verify accounts of people waiting until the last moment, playing only on the days the really matter on as many characters as they can own, because they know that they can abuse the current design of the contests. If it weren't broken, we wouldn't be resorting to gaming the system. We wouldn't be sniping out of fear and paranoia. We wouldn't get people sitting out because they know they can't possibly hope to compete. 4. We got rid of ranked rewards a long time ago for warring, but people still fight for rankings because they want to. And Wars progress just fine. The same principle applies to contests. A lot of people don't participate as much as they really should because it's far too expensive or they are unsure in general if they'll even be able to make it. If you think interest will be reduced - Ask how many people refuse to donate as much as they could because they know they can't win? Versus those who would participate a lot more if they knew they had a reasonably expectation to win. And the contest would be less top heavy - this is to be expected of un-ranking the event. But this is then replaced by an objective system where people know if they donate 200k for example, that they would win, and not have to worry about being usurped later by a sniper or someone else engaging in a dishonest tactic. If anything a lot of people right NOW don't care because they know it's not a reality that they could win anything. Interest grows in the attainable, and lower participation thresholds increase interest. It would be extremely expensive for a full set (minimally $250) - I initially set this number for two reasons - To motivate a high pool, and to set the threshold low enough to warrant interest in those whom normally sit out because of the top cut being variable but high. Although at this point by the argument, I should have probably set those thresholds even lower to garner more interest. There's also the charity element involved where you are rewarded for donating (and being nice to others like the in-game event text says is the point of all of this), not donating for a reward. 5. Nilak and Neko drives were huge success by any account. Yes there are always those who sit out and wait for everything to end. This indeed is unavoidable. The point of the community-wide goals suggestion was to be paired with the other changes, not be singularly implemented (although I acknowledge the staff probably won't implement all, if any of these). Implementing only 1 of the suggestions wouldn't fix anything (And acknowledged would make these events worse if done singularly). The point of all the suggestions was to be implemented together, because each of the suggestions works to reinforce the point of the other. The community-wide goals is reached from enough moderately large donations which in turn is caused by a lower fixed tier threshold of rewards and fixed donation distributions paired with raffles, which in turn stops paranoid and dishonest activity like sniping and mules from happening by encouraging a more sane pace of donating.
< Message edited by PD -- 9/8/2021 1:05:27 >
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