Idea: Team Search Function (in General)

Having recently started an NCB, I'm experiencing a lot of things I think could be improved about CB. One of these things is finding targets for your team.

It's not as big a deal when you get past say, 1,000,000 MPR. But the lower ranks are absolutely infested with teams whose PR exceeds their score, which makes them horrible targets. My idea I present to you is a more comprehensive search function that allows you to comb through teams based on their attributes.
The reason I thought of this is because I was trying to use the existing "search functions" CB has to find targets I can squeeze some sort of challenge bonus out of. The tools are there, such as the character attribute page, but there's no way of organizing them. Another problem with the character attribute page is a great deal of the characters listed are retired, which makes them useless. To anyone.

Anyway, let me know what you think. It's a simple idea that I think would help the slog through the lower ranks a little more enjoyable, and anything that does that could help us retain new players... right?

BTW... knowing nothing about coding, I can't filter my ideas based on how difficult they are to implement, but I'd love to know if this can be done.

I'll support anything that makes the game less frustrating for new players.

i still think the better solution is to have score trend back towards pr now that tournaments can no longer drain score. it would need some sort of check to make sure that it isn't exploited, such as making it happen slowly over time or in small chunks given no attacks, etc.

that would fix many problems with the lower game in one fell coding swoop!

this thread seems as good a place as any to share a little data with the community.

shade and i started sending out the feedback mailings to new users who quit logging in around mid-april. since that time we have had 844 new users who failed to stick.

as i have stated many times, the best thing we can do for cb is not to advertise more but improve our retention rates dramatically.

Precisely what I was thinking. I'm just thinking that, as a new player, I'm sure that even if you like the game, things can get very frustrating when 90% of the characters around your score you lose to because they have 25-50% more PR than score. Even as a long-time veteran of CB I find it difficult to find myself targets that I can get some sort of challenge bonus out of. With a search function, one could find teams that train attributes that make them weaker to your own team.

I also thought to myself, "Well, this feels kind of like cheating," but again, the tools for doing this already exist, it's just incredibly inefficient. (for example one can comb through the standard list, find a likely team, then look them up on the character attribute page to see how much they have trained in a certain stat (though now that I look back, it only shows the number for the top minion except for intrinsics... why is that?)

actually that number would be understating things. our criteria for the mailing is usually people who signed up in a week but haven't logged on for 3 days. if they played longer than a week and then quit they wouldn't show up in these numbers at all.

Scary. I don't know the exact numbers but it seems to me we have far less than 844 active users currently on CB. And as I've been saying for a looong time now, CB desperately needs a larger player base or it is going to die. DIE I TELL YOU

from the community page:

162 active users from the past 7 days

Imagine what CB could do with 844 new active users..... *sigh*

Anyway, if for some reason this is too hard to code (And I do think that even if it is a tad difficult, it's worth looking into) why not simply clean up the character attributes page? Remove retired characters, put number listings for ALL skills/intrinsics/spells, and voila, you've got yourself a page you can at least search manually right there.

Almost every online game I play you can access a ranked list of everyone in the game and search through it, see who's on top and where you are etc.

Almost every online game also allows you to fight people right off that list so that you can use it to search for people near you, find a target that you think might work out and go for it.

What about adding something like that for us.

A list that would display the say 20 people above and below you with a couple extra stats pulled like MPR, PR, Score. Stats that you would find by looking at them anyways, this would let people actually scan through 40 people alot faster than inspecting one at a time everyone around you and hoping you find a favorable ratio.

This is my main problem with the current method of finding targets. Either you inspect, inspect, inspect, all the while not ever gaining any TRULY relevant information on your targets (things like PR and net worth are not measures of how good a team is, or whether you will find success when fighting them or not). For some reason the method of finding targets has been ignored and left alone for us to deal with this extremely archaic method of play.

This should be followed by:

OR you fight every single person, likely losing anywhere from 50-90% of those battles, and simply recording who you win against. Even then, with the sometimes-random nature of inflicting damage, you can end up keeping targets that you normally WOULDN'T beat but simply got lucky that one time. All of this makes up for a big chunk of wasted battles throughout a character's lifetime.

After maybe 5 ncb's I've gotten pretty good at the early game. I hit 220,000 mpr in my first week without saving up the initial 1600 (kind of wish I did now). Here comes the problem though, for nearly that whole week I had a one person fight list, and spent an insane amount of time each day burning BA. There is no way a NUB will be willing to do this and most people just don't have enough time on their hands for something like this.

Not only that, a new user just doesn't have the know-how do pull that off. Put yourself in the shoes you were wearing when you just joined this game. Advice from other players obviously helped, but a lot of it was trial and error. And CB has gotten so much more complex than it was when I started playing... I can't imagine a new player being happy with the early game.