And what is this tiered BGP distribution you talk of? How did you hear of it?
I don't mind being the punching bag so long as I can still gear up - and one day beat all those bullies down :)
Printable View
And what is this tiered BGP distribution you talk of? How did you hear of it?
I don't mind being the punching bag so long as I can still gear up - and one day beat all those bullies down :)
you did, but we're far behind, it's pure shiberu.
p.s. check season 7 info
This Week's Top Team BGP Bonus: 1st = 500, 2nd = 250, 3rd = 125
I must say, the w/l I expected is way higher than I anticipated. Based off last seasons results it was looking like it was going to be 55%, not 68% :S I guess I didnt adjust enough for SOTCs glads all being on the 1 team this time around.
We'll see how this pans out a week or 2 in. Some managers are already starting to swap things around a lot in light of the balance pass.
That tiered system doesn't do much for the cellar-dwellers - made up of the teams that could most benefit from some bgp's.
Nate, I'm putting my faith in you that you have something in mind to balance this better. All the managers in blood gods have put too much of their time and resources into building their teams to be subjected to something so starkly unbalanced.
I'm going to give this week a pass to see what you have in mind to address the concerns about this format. I believe in you, Nate!
can't say I'm enjoying fighting against top contenders everyday
DIXEVIL hits the sweet spot on ASATSUO's head and drops him! (-Knockout-)
You must have enjoyed that though, that's Asatsuo's third loss :p
But ya I can imagine it isn't very fun to be teamed up with most of the gladiators that you do infact have a better chance of winning against~
I didn't even realize that yet...
So, not only am I on a team with the lowest ranked glads in the arena, but I also don't get to fight against them since they're on my team - lowering my winrate since those are glads I can actually compete against. On top of that, the top teams don't have to go against the top competition on their own teams. No wonder my winrate is so much lower than last season.
And this is going to make it harder for the low ranked glads on our team to even get to 30 wins for the week...giving them less bgp's and making things even more unfair again.
I think we are all interested in seeing if there are any other changes to the season, like what "Favor" is and if it will be a balancing tool for the teams or if its just a count for how many weekly wins your team has. It would be nice if Nate could let us know if there is going to be some form of a balancing mechanism going in or if its just going to be two months of watching team Drajaka-Zul dominate the team rankings.
I didn't expect to do well myself as i am moving skills around on several glads and re-rolling half my teams again (my normal :P ) but really the only fun part of this so far is watching to see if Asatsuo can hold off the dark blue army from getting 1st place. :) So I can see how your aggravated about the situation for the filler team Xaal-Zul since they really got the shaft on who they get to fight.
Knockout is my only hope and scoring one the top glad made my day :P by the way Dixevil is my first glad so his stats are not that good, anyway I've decided to keep him.
Adoede don't be so harsh on refunds as it's not about personal gain, but more about supporting the game, which by the way you stated on your previous messages :)
I've myself thew like 50$ and starting to regret it, as if it continues this way it'll be a total waste..
Vertigo and Adoebe, I understand your frustration with the current teams unbalance but you need to understand that player-organized teams in Seasons is a new thing and a work in progress...
I'm sure Nate is watching carefully how things work out to make it better next time and maybe put a quick fix in place if it really goes astray...
Personnally my feeling is that putting all the remaining teams in a 5th team was a mistake and that it would have been better to split them between the 4 "vet teams" to equilibrate the odds.
My suggestion for next seasons would be to automatically design as captains the 5 players with the most glads in Top 25 so that you don't have 2 or 3 top dogs in the same team !
You probably should both have asked to join one of the existing teams during the formation period to avoid to be in your current situation, but like us you didn't know how things would turn out so noone can blame you for not having expressed yourself that way then...
PS : Btw What about transferring immediately Sotc to team 5 and put Adoebe and/or Vertigo instead in team Apoc, with retro-effectiveness, Nate ? Season 7 just started so it's still time to fix the blatant unbalance and maybe that could do the trick ! (Sorry Sotc, but I don't see any other solution and I'm sure you are sport enough to accept the challenge...)
Good thoughts Narol. Though to set the record straight, I did try to join other teams many times, but being new here I found all the vets had already filled their teams with other vets by then. I even asked to have my glads split between the other teams and was told by Nate that this was not allowed. So, I did do everything I could to not be in the situation I'm in now.
The biggest indignity is that we have both the least developed glads and the highest level of difficulty in our opponents of all the teams. So, yes, I expect things to change or there will be a lot of venting on the forums these next few weeks.
on the other side, not everyone reads forums. There were no notification in game, letting you know that you have to go to forums so you wouldn't be screwed.
+ what Adoede wrote - nobody wants newcomers anyway. This type of arena format punishes new players hard.
To be fair, I simply put both my stables together and asked who wanted to be on it on the forums, Alba reacted first and basicly got the spot that way as the team would be fairly balanced (No offence but I would've declined ya for the sake of balance Sotc :p)
If you or vertigo had been able to react sooner Tagro-Zuls team would look different now~
We all pretty much expected that the teams would get balanced out if it was really unfair and I do believe that Narols suggestion would be the most effective from a balancing point of view.
If my team performs overly more potent with that change than placing Dain's Thunder Lips, Tokerjokers Ganja King or Preachers Jeeves on my team might be an option to balance things out, they're the only glads of the stables in Blood Gods and the winrate is lower compared to the current average winrate. Although idd prefer old man Dain :p
Good point Vertigo, the lack of an in-game notifications indeed didn't helped to prevent an imbalance to occur,as vets tends to read the forum more frequently than younger managers...
However, I insist again that we must be very indulgent with Nate about that situation, he's a one-man team who already handle a hell of a huge work all by himself and he can't anticipate all the problems by advance !
The best we can do is think by ourselves about what solutions could help fix the mess, and then let him pick what works optimally in his opinion as he knows the game better than any of us.
Sorry for the delay, I've been off gathering firewood and rounding up pitchforks but then I found out not everyone wanted pitchforks and some people didn't like the pinewood I brought so I went back and got some rakes instead and a different kind of wood (Oak this time). Thinking we were ready to go burn us a villain, the pitchfork folks said they didn't want rakes, they wanted good old fashion pitchforks (hey, they worked for Grandpa! Besides, who uses rakes anyway) but they were happy with the oakwood. At this point the rakes started arguing with the pitchforks and the pinewood with the oakwood...it got messy but I managed to calm them down and eventually everyone agreed they wanted a burning. Smiling and thinking about the huge fire we were going to build our precarious unity was broken when a voice cried out and said:
"Hey, let's have a hanging instead!"
"Oooh, yeah, a hanging this time! We could even pick out our own tree and rope!" another voice joined in.
"A hanging? That's boring...besides it isn't fair to the people in the back, it's hard for them to see! Only the people in the front will enjoy it."
"Wait! Why don't we feed him to the lions!" a voice in the darkness suggested.
"Lions? Now THAT wouldn't be fair! If you had said SHARKS though! Now that is something I could support, especially if they have torches tied to their heads!"
"WHOOOOOOAAAAAA!" the excited mob exhaled in unison.
"Sharks with frickin' torches on their heads...it'll be epic!"
Awesome! Everyone was once again back on track and an execution was eminent.
"What kind of sharks are we going to use?"
"Great White sharks of course!"
"Why not Tiger Sharks? I think it should be tiger sharks since it was my idea to use lions in the first place and tigers are almost like lions...they're really just lions with stripes and no beard so it makes perfect sense."
....Silence...
...Crickets chirping...
"So how about that burning?"
Traditionally, we hold burnings at the center of town but due to a scheduling conflict (apparently there is Trug cosplay convention going on where they dress up as their favorite heroes and even have mock battles with padded weapons) we're going to have to hold it near the Black Market. Don't worry, Jimmy gave us a good price so long as he could sell tickets to the burning, however, he made us promise it would last at least a few hour so we'll need to drag it out a bit. I told him it shouldn't be a problem.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
What's that? What ever happened to the pitchforks, rakes, pinewood and oak? That's a good question. We agreed to use some pitchforks, some rakes, some pinewood and some oakwood of course. We're planning to tie the villain to the stake (made from birch wood) with the (free trade organic hemp) rope we were going to use in the hanging and we've used some shovels (some people wanted to use them instead of rakes and pitchforks) to dig a moat around the stake where we'll place both Great White and Tiger sharks with torches tied to their head. Left over farming tools (things like hoes and picks that a few people wanted to use) are being used to build two fences around the moat where we'll be placing lions, tigers and bears (last minute suggestion) OH MY! It should be an AMAZING execution!
Is everyone happy you ask?
"You can please some of the people some of the time, all of the people some of the time, some of the people all of the time, but, you can never please all of the people all of the time." :)
This message was paid for by the Nurturing Arena Trugs & Elaarans society a proud member of the Great Realm alliance and Jimmy the Squid a proud sponsor of the Season 7 games!
Stay tuned for part 2 of this exciting story where we went undercover and found out the answers to questions like "What is favor?", "Did the balancing pass go live", and "Who really did frame Roger Rabbit?"
Nate, making fun of the concerns of your player base is a commercial suicide in my book and I feel personally offended by your answer to them (and I mean it seriously).
I tried to defend you here and to suggest solutions that could work, but so far it feels like a slap in the face !
Most of the managers here see player-made teams as a great improvement to the Seasons game that we had been waiting for long, but that doesn't mean that the way it has been done cannot be corrected to remove major imbalances.
There has obviously been a lot of improvision on both your side and ours about the way teams should be built, and afterthoughts at the lights of the first results are legitimate.
A quick fix seems possible, especially if Sotc has the niceness to accept a team change, please take the time to consider calmly the situation and to understand how the younger managers who have been all dumped in the 5th team can rightly feel at the present time...
Well since you got this nice fire going, someone bust out the hotdogs while we wait for part 2. :)
BTW:
Looking at the points, if Sotc was up for it, that would make the teams MUCH more balanced, 1st and 2nd would be very close to each other, and the other 3 would be less then 125 points apart.
Nate, that big post made me giggle :3
As for the team structure, I was honestly not expecting things to be so lopsided. I'm totally ok with SOTC jumping onto Xaal-Zul and sending someone over to Drajaka-Zul to fill his place.
In saying that, Tagro-Zul has almost the same win rate (61%) so I think a big part in the rating differences is that Drajaka-Zul has 80 more fights. It will be interesting to see how dominant they become if/when teams get swapped a little.
I wasnt expecting a gladiator distribution to compensate, but I also was not expecting things to be so lop sided. I didnt factor in how having all the new gladiators on 1 team would skew things.
Also, dont take things out on Nate too badly. This was an experiment, and Nate will fix things in 1 way or another. He always has and always will. I sympathise with him as he keeps trying to deliver what we've been asking for only to be met with more whinging in 1 form or another each time. As I said though, he does his best to try and right things. Just give it some time as he is 1 man, and has a life too.
I've been a fan of option #2 since the get-go. I'd love gladiators to see how they go against the whole field for ranking purposes, and to stop that feeling when teams change and your w/l spikes up or down. As for Team ratings, I'm sure that something could be done so that they dont go all screwy in a format where everyone fights everyone.
That was my nice statement :)
I also believe Nate is trustworthy to fix things when he thinks there is a problem...but his response to our concerns left me feeling like he didn't think there was a problem...and that is a problem. I just wanted to make that clear. IF he realizes it is a problem I'm sure he will address it like he always does.
there will never be a perfect solution.
I apologize to anyone that was offended by my humorous antidote, text is a terrible medium for conveying emotion. I find humor to be the best way to approach situations such as these as it helps many take a step back, laugh, and have a second look (not to mention creative writing is a great break from coding)! I think my style has been pretty consistent in that regard over the years and I fear my sense of humor is an incurable condition. ;) I am not and never have been dismissive of player feedback, quite the opposite in fact as I'm sure many who have been around for some time will attest to. Nevertheless, please accept my apology.
For those of you new to Blood Gods the start of a new season generally fills the forums up with the same kind of posts as you have seen in this thread. Some people don't like it, some people do like it, most are fine and say nothing. Those who don't like it are very vocal and this is simply true of Humans regardless of the context. Suggestions are then made and if I make a post that even remotely smells like a change might happen the people who used to be happy are now not happy and become vocal and so on and so forth. This is par for the course and I'm neither bothered by it nor surprised and I'm certainly not angry or upset. I appreciate those of you who understand the situation and have faith that all will be well. Here at Great Realm Central I believe there is a great track record for that sort of thing. :)
If I don't seem to be concerned, you are correct, I'm not. And it isn't because I don't care or secretly wish frustration and ill-will on the player base! :p It is because I, unlike some EXPECTED the team records to be lopsided and everything is playing out exactly as I thought it would. It is the very reason I didn't allow it for the previous six seasons even though it was repeatedly asked for. Until something was in place to mitigate the issue, I simply didn't allow it. Why? Because I actually care about game balance and making sure everyone has a good time. This season something is in place and for the observant ones out there you will have noticed a new column called "Favor". There lies your great equalizer, but, you'll have to be patient to see it work.
Seasons is only a few days in and most gladiators are just now making their way back to the front of their round robin fight queue. For those out there familiar with statistics you know that a sample size of 1 is not something you want to hang your hat on. There is a lot of noise and until the sample size is larger the accuracy is low. For those who hate math, the phrase "jumping the gun" would be à propos. I sympathize with many of your concerns and I understand it is natural to react quickly to perceived transgressions and ask for immediate change. Please keep in mind that it takes time before any meaningful data can be collected and while simple observation can yield results it also is very fallible and more so the less time spent observing. We could certainly dismantle the teams and re-organize them, we could try and just move a few gladiators around and hope maybe that would work, or we can have faith and trust that mechanisms are in place. My vote is for the third option as I'd like to think over the past three years I've earned enough respect and trust to deserve a little faith! :p
Now, I'd like to talk about expectations because I think defining them and setting them realistically is important. A round robin tournament means 50% will have over a 50% record and 50% will have less. That's right, half the field will be "losers". When a new gladiator makes it into Blood Gods they have a hill to climb (a much smaller one now that the gauntlet and conquests are implemented) and finishing a season around 30% is great, finishing around 50% is amazing. This is a normal and realistic benchmark to compare your gladiator to. Looking at the top gladiators is great for inspiration but keep in mind those gladiators are owned by the best of the best in the game and have everything very tuned. One day your newbie Blood God will be there too, but probably not their first season. Also, keep in mind the team you are on will only move the needle so much in either direction, there are so many factors at play and that is only one. I encourage everyone to take advantage of the Gauntlet and Conquests (especially new gladiators and Primus gladiators) as the amount of gear one can get is many times greater than the few pieces BGP will buy you in an 8 week period.
Where to go from here? I leave it up to you and by "you" I mean everyone. If you are that unhappy with the team you are on and want to move to another one contact that captain and if he/she is willing to take your gladiators then we'll move them to that team. This is a one time thing as once the Season starts we're generally hands off until the next one. So, take some time, re-read this post (and my previous one, it really is funny and not poking fun at anyone in particular) and decide what you want to do. If you decide you'd like to make a move contact the captain and then have both the captain and you send me a PM indicating the transfer. Same rules apply, all gladiators owned by a player stay together. Please let me know no later than Sunday night. Cheers, and free drinks at the tavern for everyone tonight. Yay!
Good luck in the Pit!
-Nate-
Nate,
I for one have known you long enough to know that was a very good attempt at humor to quell the emotions. Personally I laughed my ass off. Also i know that you have never implemented anything in this game with out a good thought out plan.
Everyone,
So to those who are very frustrated or worried, please trust this fella knows what he is doing. For those of you taking a royal ass kicking so far this season, take notice that every other manager also has glads that are also. Except SOTC but he is the lone exception, and even his boys are not as dominant so far. Be patient and lets see how this looks in a month.
Awesome response Nate. I also had a good chuckle at the creative writing :)
I'm not a statistician of a hardcore data analyst, but I agree that we need a larger sample range; ie more fights are needed to see how things finally rank up and even out. It will still be lopsided, but I really am curious to see how favor works/plays out to adjust that.
QFE
Also, take note of how many fights teams have had. I know i have had my guys burn the candle from both ends and do a good 30 extra fights while I tested some stuff/try to stay at the pointy end.
Nate,
Thanks for listening and acknowledging our concerns. As I'd hoped and come to expect, you're quite responsive to this community.
I would recommend redistributing team 5 to make the matchups more fair for the greener glads and seeing how favor plays out in evening out the ranking scores. BG team rules have changed from season to season from the start, so there's no point to panic until we have more information on how this system works re: favor.
We won't be redistributing team 5, however, anyone on any team who is not happy with their current team may ask another captain to transfer.Quote:
I would recommend redistributing team 5
Good luck in the Pit!
-Nate-
im one of those.Quote:
some people do like it, and say nothing.
but can easily become one of these ;)Quote:
Suggestions are then made and if I make a post that even remotely smells like a change might happen the people who used to be happy are now not happy and become vocal and so on and so forth.
Im not gonna make a long post just state the fact that this is what Ive been waiting for in several seasons now. My vaneing interest for the game is gone and that Ive started playing the game activly again.
team 5 is owning everything, not :cool:
I'm against any team changes during season. Let the developer have time to work on the game and stop crying like a baby. We don't even know how the new system works. And if someone is aiming at RANK 1 he will do what he have to do.
My current answer would be no, why you ask?
Look at Nate's post~
Technically speaking you are the captain for team 5 aka Xaal-Zul, this means there is another option namely: Looking at Sotc with puppy eyes and asking him if he is willing to make the move, have Vertigo do the same with apoc~
Besides this option there is also favor in play, none of us knows what in the name of Tagro-Zul it does but I imagine it balances things out.
Thanks for your apologies and offering a solution to those feeling disadvantaged, Nate.
If Crow the captain of our team agrees, I would be happy to take Adoebe or Vertigo with us so that they feel less doomed.
I'm sorry but losing all fights 3rd day in a row seems like having good time and fun, screw this.
Vertigo, why don't you switch to Crow's team with Narol. In case you missed the announcement, Nate just said if you want to switch teams you just need to ask another captain and both of you need to send him a private message about the team switch.
I'm waiting on an answer from Nate about something before I decide whether to switch teams or not. Good luck.
I completely understand if people want to move glads around, and since there is a soft deadline of Sunday to do it I guess you have to do it now or not do it, but I'd really like to see what "Favor" does before we changed stuff too much. Since we have no idea what it will do its really hard to say if your better off changing teams or just staying where you are.
First of all I want to compete fairly. Last season my glads got 33-42% win rate. Which I consider pretty good and they were and are still under geared. This season so far it's 15-32% - it pretty much says it all. I don't want any "favors" like boosting stats ect as it's not going to be same winning.
Just throwing it out there, since I saw it mentioned.
I always disliked fighting against my own glads, because my own guys tend to have counter strats to each other and kill each other more often than usual. Nothing hurts the purse more than death caused by your own. :(
I agree people need to be patient and not jump up and down immediately, Nate always needs enough time to collect enough data to analyse it across the board, so let's not force him to "fix" things after just a few days. You know he's heard you, but he needs the hard data to back up the story and can't just rely on our opinions(because we always have managers who hold opposing views), gathering and crunching enough real fight data to have an accurate picture will take some time.
I'm guessing balancing pass is in test also, but hasn't been finalized and still needs more tuning. So again, we need to give Nate some time to do his work in an accurate manner.