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Arkste -> RE: Issues with wars and how to improve them? (3/21/2015 21:44:34)
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Finally finished retyping this. Some of my thoughts dissipated, but I got the bulk down.
To begin, this war was easily one of the most impressive I've encountered since I first started playing the game. I rank it up there with the Final 13th and the War at Core. When I logged on Friday night, I was genuinely surprised to see we had lost. The aspect of wars I’m going to address is how they handle efficiency and compulsion, a topic that I wanted to address some time ago, but I've been very with college and club management.
As for a description of what efficiency and compulsion actually refers to, it’s basically that you give a player a task that expends energy and then give the player a way to make the task more efficient while reducing the perceived energy output as the player puts invests in more time.
To an extent, wars do this, but I think the way they do could be altered, especially due to players like me. I’ll get to this point below.
First off, there are basically two ways that this war has created compulsion that I've separated, but they’re highly related:
1) The first way was the inclusion of a clear deadline from the onset of the war. This is something that other players asked for, and I’m very glad the staff did it. DragonFable is a bit of an oddity among games since it includes weekly releases (a more meta aspect of compulsion), so it makes sense for there to be a deadline that gives time for the staff to work on content for future releases that also won’t cause an imbalance in the release schedule.
2) Another aspect of compulsion in this war, one that has been done in wars past, is the inclusion of war challenges that provide rewards if certain conditions are met before a specified deadline. Basically, it’s just another more specified form of the deadline, but the distinction is that it offers some auxiliary win conditions for the war. It’s also an aspect of wars that I think could be altered, but I’ll address that below.
Tying these two together, we end up with a primary win condition that is the goal of the war and an auxiliary win condition that contributes to the primary win condition but provides bonuses.
For increasing player efficiency, I think that there are two basic ways you can measure this. The most obvious would be in WPM, and the other is by examining a player’s input to their output.
This war and other wars increase player efficiency by providing alternative mechanics to defeat waves, which include the Catapult, Supple Grab, and Bombing Run.
I think that the more problematic aspect of increases in player efficiency using these actions is that if you examine an individual player’s WPM, regardless of the option they choose, it will always reach an upper bound. If you examine player efficiency based on their input and output, you end up with one completed action corresponding to one completed wave, or a constant incremented value of one.
I think this is enough explanation to make sense of everything, so I’d the main problem with the mechanics of the warring system correspond to getting more players invested a war and rewarding players who invest the most while also potentially increasing the efficiency of players who invest the most/more effort.
For a description of the type player I am, I’m not very active within the community; I've come to the forums every so often, and I’m also not very invested in wars because I find them to be too monotonous. I come back for the weekly releases, and that’s about it.
For players like myself, I can still benefit from won war challenges without having contributed to a war at all, and I think that finding a way address to this could get players like myself invested in a war, potentially by changing the way efficiency works to increase it for players who go above and beyond, which would also allow them to get access to some sort of reward(s) that I cannot and also make their contribution feel more worthwhile.
I don’t know if I explained this as well I could have or if any of it is actually feasible to implement, but I’m interested in if anyone can make some sense of this and see if it could benefit wars.
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