Unhijacking (in General)

See http://www.carnageblender.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg.tcl?msg_id=0034zr

@ LB: You said it was "impossible" to slog to the top without a NCB. I'm saying that that's untrue. You can definitely gain ground on people above you by fighting focused on a good challenge bonus, which they (because of much higher PRs) will not be able to obtain. Your rewards will be higher than theirs, and ground will be gained.
Also, the high cost of a good NCB is hardly irrelevant. It's heavy investment in the character, which is exactly what you've been complaining it lacks.

LB: Both Natasha' and I have Moved up Spots in the MPR Rankings and we are NO LONGER in our NCB Periods and this includes AFTER Nat's Hiring. Proof is in the pudding so to speak, if you truly want it you will find a way to get it. Investment, Thinking outside the box, and Deal Making or a mixture of all three. The NCB is only a Stepping Stone the rest is up to you case close, end of report.

"If you get rid of the N*B you'll take this game from a 160 player base to a 40 in about 4 months. So good luck with that."

LB: Support for this? We had a higher player base back in the old days where there was no N*B.

I would quit if I didn't get a bonus to my rewards. Heck, I'm thinking of quitting right now even with the bonus. It's no fun fighting these boring characters where I'm at. If I had to stay down here forever because I had no bonus, I would be done. I was told that carnageblender is a PvP game, but right now I'm just grindfesting. PvP implies that you need to tweak your strategy to each person, and milk your character for all it's worth. PvP is different from grindfesting in that you're never sure what's going to happen. You could win, and receive great rewards, or lose and have to commit suicide. Fights are so evenly matched that you pay attention to every single battle, and squeeze every last bit of damage, but you still have a 50/50 chance to win.

But when I'm playing carnageblender, a so called "PVP" game, I'm attacking characters over, and over, and over again, with the knowledge that I'm going to win. And the rewards? The same old 50 dollars, 50 exp. Every single time. This is NOT a pvp game. This is a boring old run of the mill grindfest.

I stopped after 30 battles. And out of those 30 battles, 27 wins. Using the default strategy.

Hell, this might as well be fighting slimes at level 1 of maple story.

I do love the activity of the forums, and that's the only reason why I've been logging on.

Yeah, the first week or so is pretty ridiculously boring. I've been playing for just over 2 months, though, and I'm certainly fighting other players, using an original strategy, and reaping the benefits from it in MPR gap reduction. It gets better later on, but the very bottom tier is pretty bad.

The beginning of the game is harder because there's less activity there.

I don't know what to do about that.

give people the option to just jump to the magic 90 percent of the top mpr. we only have about 70 very active players (more like 50 depending on your definition of active) and letting them all fight each other might just save the game instead of the slow attrition we have now.

new users would have to be given a chunk of change equal to the amount gotten during the nub to allow them to get their gear up to par.

90% is a little aggressive, but iirc Guild Wars had a similar system which worked fairly well. You could have a PVP char, which started at max level, or a quest char that began at the beginning.
So, good concept. The problem is that 90% of the top MPR is in the top 20 MPR, but I'll leave it to the admins to figure out what an appropriate percentage would be.

Admin run donated NPC charcaters that are set up and changed frequently. Give the low levels something to think about.

Let the Admins (create new ones if needed) fight with these NPC as well. The profits from item drops or rewards go straight to Central Bank or Tourny Prizes.

90 percent is the number chosen as the target of the n*b bonus system as chosen by jon. that is the reason i chose that number.

it would no longer be top 20 if all of us were there! ; )

imagine it though, all active fighters all showing up on the top mpr page with a much closer gap than what we have now all trying to get the best strategy to move up instead of down and new users instantly being placed in that frenzy of competition.

*cough*95%*cough*

;)

They don't even have to be donated... pluck them out of the tourney system.

http://www.carnageblender.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg.tcl?msg_id=001bal

95 is correct! sorry. ; )

We recently had a drive to donate unwanted retired characters. T ones don't think would work, as they can't be put back into 'mainstream' fighting. If tha makes sense. ;)

I think jumping to 95% is too extreme. In the casual wiki reading I've been doing, I've acquainted myself with most of the spells. However, I don't know how well they work in the meta game.

Example: I was thinking of running a Melee character + a CoC mage, but then someone (I think his name was gun?..weird) told me that rangers do too much damage to live to melee.

So boost us to 60%, give us a small bonus to top us out at about 90%. Give us some upgrade money, some rare weapons, and a decent tatto/rune/familiar, and a bit of freedom with retraining, and we'll figure things out from there.

However, I would _HATE_ do dethrone the top characters that have been here for a long time. They have a right to whale on me if they've been here since the beginning of CB. I just want to be able to fight some well thought out strategies.

I also think that losses should be more acceptable. I've been told that winning 100% is always absolutely necessary. I'd love to see more luck added into the game that would make only certain counter teams be able to beat other teams 100%.

GL - I Agreed to let TP hold NPC parties. Now it's just a matter of getting the people involved to really manage that.

Awesome! :D

Maybe there could be a shared account, like Tourny Prizes, where multiple NPC admin could log into to upkeep and fight them. Or maybe seperate NPC accounts, so as to have more BA 'lots' available to running NPCs?

But this would not only help the low game, but we could also link new player 'achievements' into beating set NPC teams. ;)

let me start over. the first time i said "create all new characters at the top" i was being flippant regarding those that i thought wanted to diminish the game by making it too easy...but then i started thinking about it.

we now have a stagnant lower game with not enough players and many abandoned accounts but no real competition unless you happen to find someone running a n*b concurrently but even then one usually beats another while the loser is left to grind and get pwned!

at the top we also have a stagnant game due to very little changes at least in the short term. yes there are changes but they are subtle and take time. it is quite rare that someone new comes along to spice things up.

in between the top and the bottom you have more stagnation and grinding. it is nice growth but is that enough to offset the tedium?

i propose we find some way to create new teams all in the same area as the vets. maybe take the top mpr team to determine mpr, the top nw team to determine nw and the top tat to determine tat level. all of these would be based on some percentage that smarter folks than i agree upon but make it close enough to keep it from being hopeless.

close off all character transfers and make the stores more like tournament stores. we could then clean up the lower ranks completely. tournaments could take place within the active character ranks.

i really don't know if this would work, but what we are doing now isn't working either. what i keep coming back to is that with our small population should the less than a hundred truly active players really be spread out over 11550 characters which are 99% inactive teams?

as far as why i think this is worth a shot? most fixes that we can think of will take a ton of coding and reworking which also means time given our limited resources. time may not be on our side.

this solution would likely be pretty easy to code and would actually end up removing more features than it adds. the beloved economy would be gone, but is there much of an economy left even?

Yes, we certainly do have an economy. Otherwise I wouldn't have been able to work myself up into one of the highest NW in the game without resorting to USD.

you're right, a failing economy is still an economy! ; )

That was the idea

Woo!

Awesome x2. ;)

See you do know what to do mate! :P

I said it was impossible to get to the top without an N*B.
I did not say it was not possible to move up the ranks without an N*B.
One is true, the other isn't.


It was entirely irrelevant to both parts of the conversation.


I never said anything about investment. I said long-term commitment.


So have I. What's the point?


Draw me a sketch on how I hire a new minion.


I still fail to see how any of this addresses either of the points I was making on the other thread about the item economy or the NCB encouraging disposeable characters.


You're one person, and you got used to the bonus. I think that's part of the problem. Thanks for furthering my point.

I don't really have time to respond to the posts about the sluggishness of the early ranks. I might agree that a tutorial accompanying bonus up to about 5,000 MPR is reasonable.

If your fight rewards, per BA, are higher than anyone else's, your MPR will eventually be higher than everyone else's. Simple math. Therefore, it is possible to reach the top without a N*B. Just because it hasn't be done and isn't easy doesn't make it impossible.

I guess this comes down to a fundamental ideological difference: I believe the metagame should be kept as fluid as possible by allowing people to rework strategies and try different teams in a reasonable time frame. I think it shouldn't be necessary to commit to a strategy right when you start playing, and then "stay the course" for the next few years.

To me, the N*B seems like a critically important mechanism for keeping CB from stagnating. Slowing everything down means slower feedback on strat quality, leading to a less fluid metagame (which is already fairly solidified, unfortunately), and all around a less engaging, less fun game.

Incorrect.
The beggining of the game is harder MAINLY because IT IS CLUTTERED BY INACTIVE/LOUSY/FAILED CHARACTERS with bad score:PR ratios, which makes finding reasonable targets a pain in the posterior.
The fact that reasonable targets are in short supply is a secondary issue, which would be much less of a problem if the primary issue would be dealt with.

In other words, we need to almost completely scrap the current score system (where score rises almost exclusively when active) and devise a new one where score is a function of average fighting power rather than activity level.
Alternatively (and this is the quick-and-dirty version) you could just have scores auto-recover in time towards the maximum score that character had (or to the best acheived ratio of score:PR, or whichever of those two is lowest).
Or, you can do it even more brutally : at cache flush, auto-retire characters that dropped in score below 80% of their PR, but at the same time, make it possible to unretire ANY character at ANY time WITHOUT any fees.

So when you say "I don't know what to do about it" I sincerely hope you mean "I don't know which of the possible solutions to pick", NOT that you lack ideas about possible solutions.