Player Organized Blood God Teams

[Narol]

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...)

[Adoede]

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.

[Vertigo]

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.

[Prinny]

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.

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 )
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

[Narol]

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.

[Nate]

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?"

[Narol]

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...

[Cynaidh]

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?"

Well since you got this nice fire going, someone bust out the hotdogs while we wait for part 2.


BTW:

Btw What about transferring immediately Sotc to team 5

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.

[Apoca1ypse]

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.

[Apoca1ypse]

Most managers believed that you were going to introduce some form of balancing between teams this season after they had their fun creating their teams. Especially since unassigned glads got dumped into a fifth team composed of mostly new managers. No one dreamed that you would actually allow such an unfair iteration to happen and then turn a deaf ear to the universal outcry of your player base about it. Perhaps you do have a balancing surprise up your sleeve. I sure hope so, because if not, you risk alienating the very people who actually want to help you to succeed.

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.

My suggestion on how to fix the season would be to:
1) Simply eliminate team 5 and distribute the glads among the other teams to balance them better. Then you preserve the mainly player-created teams the vets want but you don't eviscerate the new teams and managers in the process. And...
2) Have all glads fight all glads, even ones on the same team. Then the level of competition is truly even between all the teams. To make that more interesting, you could have prizes for a glad's ranking within their own team - to justify their fighting one another.

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.