Best Of

Don't mind me necro'ing this thread. Felt like this will help me after returning.  

Firstly, thank you for the input. I am not going to speak to anything outside of the Alliance system within this thread, as this is what the purpose is here. Any further comments on the thread outside of the Alliance system are not going to be responded to. I acknowledge there are other issues at play within the game, but that is not the purpose of this forums thread.

After reading through a lot of the stuff here, I took a bit of a break to think about it and come up with other things. Below are what I have thought about:

        - Ally and Enemy lists – Instead of having them be automatically assigned to enemy all non-alliance members and ally all alliance members, would it be better if there was a config option? For example, CONFIG ALLIANCELISTS ON would mark all non-alliance members as enemies and all alliance members as allies. At least this way, you can toggle it on when going into conflict, and toggle it off after and your personal ally/enemy lists would remain the same.

        - Power cost – This value was formulated based off the power increase I saw during the 4 month period where I collected the data. In the grand scheme of it, all orgs saw an increase of approximately 600k power over the 4 month period. 155k/600k didn’t seem like a huge number. I understand the organization gold is less easy to obtain, so I am happy to drop the gold cost. There will, however, be a power cost regardless of the outcome. If I was to propose that alliances would last until they are broken, then there would be an up front cost and that is all. I am not putting a figure on this yet, however I will do more research and calculations into the average DAILY power gain per org and find something.

        - Alliance powers – It seems the consensus is that people don’t want to have any kind of mechanical benefit to alliances outside of a few channels and alliance helps. If this is the general player opinion, I’m happy to drop these things. These things can always be added in later if it is something that becomes desirable down the track.

My intention of this entire thread was to get the player opinion on what I thought up for alliances, and to work with the player base to come up with something for you. I have a completely different vision of what an alliance looks like to you. So I built the idea off of things that I would have wanted as a player (Such as cross org influencing in revolts) and it is entirely fine if my vision is not what the player base as a whole wants. Hence why we post about proposals and collect feedback before we put things out there.

We, as admin, talk a lot about remembering that the player is in fact a person behind the screen. I understand and can sympathise with the low morale and burnout that a lot of people are experiencing, however that is a factor that is at play for us as the administration as well. There is only so much we can reasonably achieve daily, and a large number of the code-side changes are not as easy to do on the fly.

With that said, again, thank you for the input. Please let me know if you have any objections or feedback on the above things I have written in this post, and please ensure that you are as specific as possible.

I don't think the above comment is necessary, I think it's great for people to work on passion projects, they're more likely to be finished.
 
I do agree with some of the others. I don't think we have a need for the proposed benefits. I do like the idea of a combined aether and newsboard for ease of communication and thus removal of the need to ensure everyone is added to clans/given permissions, as well as a toggle for the enemy and ally lists. While I can appreciate in some respects the thought behind allowing allies to influence/bombard for a nation, I still think it is not needed and potentially in the long run might mean less people bother to learn about how to do these things themselves - as in, it's less important to train new people on how to get to an aetherbubble and bombard if we have allies there who just do it half the time when we're lacking. As it is, there have been many, many instances where an org who only had one person awake at the time was still able to claim a village/bubble because there were allies there protecting/fighting off enemies/calling out shuffles etc. Jumping in to influence might speed things up, but I also think that in itself goes against the spirit of competition. 

I appreciate the thought and spirit going into this but I don't think we need this sort of complexity at all. And a cost does just become a burden, when all most of us really want is an aether that doesn't take a clan slot or need someone awake to induct.

Magnagora and Serenwilde have fundamentally incompatible worldviews. If we haven't split up based on our drastically different RP yet, it means there is something else keeping us linked (love of winning? fear of change? fear of Mag being our enemy? not knowing people on the other side well?). The admins doing a world event is not going to change people's minds about alliances.

There is a mechanical way to make alliances inherently unstable - and that is to put an increasing cost on maintaining it. So the long you're allied with them, the more it costs the org, and the more they want to break the alliance. But people have already said they don't want even a flat cost to alliances, so a system that mechanically encourages alliances to change is difficult to do, and would likely be rejected by the players.

Alliances should be simple - aether and log to replace the alliance clans that are in place. Efforts can then be focused on story and things that will draw people back into the game. Adding more upkeeps seems antithesis to that.