New catch-up mechanic: Can the Eagles secure a victory?
CATANdominik
Administrator, Community Manager Posts: 110 Community Manager, Global
Greetings Explorers,
Over the last 10 seasons, the Eagles had a disproportionately smaller team size which has created more of a challenge for the team than intended. This is a concern for us because we want competition among all Factions to be viable and enjoyable. Everyone should have a chance to become the Season Winner!
For some time now there has been a catch-up mechanic in the game meant to help the underdog. The faction in third place can currently receive Daily Hard Quests offering up to 50 VP, with the Easy Quest offering less. This amount is variable based upon points deficit and diminishes for second place.
Lately, this mechanic has not been enough to move the needle. We are always looking into new ways to reinvigorate the competition and are experimenting with greater Daily VP opportunities for factions that have a population disparity. This will be tuned going forward until we find the right balance and competition is fun for everyone, no matter if you are in the Faction with the most players or the least.
As always, please let us know your feedback!
Please note, you can only change your Faction once!
Yours,
The CATAN – World Explorers Team
PS: No more empty shrubs! So enjoy collecting :-)
Comments
There was a voting about this and grand majority of people wanted to see local competition highlighted more. On that level any team can have a chance just by playing wisely and more strategically, I think.
Global competition is meaningless as it just depends on the number of players in different factions. Giving Eagles more points for same amount of gameplay as others makes no sense. Whatever balance you find to make competition as even as possible just nullifies all the effect of players’ gameplay as it would just be about who gets the most free points.
If you are the biggest team on global level any other result than victory each season wouldn’t be fair towards that team. And if you are the smallest you will lose every time. That’s basic statistics. And if it doesn’t happen like that it’s artificial.
Local however doesn’t have such statistical convergence. Recruiting a few new active people to your team can turn the table entirely. 🙂
Please just remove the EP rewards and achievement for global competition. It’s nice one to see but means nothing.
If I would design this one option to even out it on global level would be to look at point percentages of teams.
Like let’s assume that season ends and the amount of VP earned by team:
Bears 40 %
Wolves 35 %
Eagles 25 %
of the total VP earned by everybody.
Now during next season it would be like
Bears 37 %
Wolves 35 %
Eagles 28 %
I would look at how much each team has relatively improved from previous season 37/40 < 35/35 < 28/25. Eagles would win the second season. This is totally different perspective and I don’t think it’s good either but definitely better than the current artificial one. This highligths how much better each team has played compared to previous season and it would cause variation when seasons go on.
This is a really bad idea. Please just focus on improving the local gameplay and the rewards based on the team performance in the local level. Because the local gameplay is what we all need more than the global one. I wouldn't care much if my team win or lose the global gameboard than the local one.
cant you just make global scoring to have no bearing on the gameplay and just focus more on local and regional
i am an eagle and i do not care for global scoring system. Only local and a geoup of surrounding local cells that can be grouped as regional.
I agree that the local game is more relevant. But if there has to be a global score, why not do it based on average VP per player, to even out the disproportionate team sizes?
I dont care for global score but while there are rewards for winning its nice to know there is attempts to balance that.
One issue with this catchup vp is it distorts your personal vp. So if I am trying to compare my score from one season to the next to see if I am improving or if one strategy was better than another I have no way of knowing as my personal vp changes based on this mechanic. As an eagle that is particularly bad as our personal vp jumps around so much due to it.
The catch-up mechanic also confuses people in their local region. When you know your the only player in the region and your score is higher than your team in the local region it appears like there is a bug which can confuse and frustrate people.
I assume there is more complexity than I can think of to just scale the global score by the player base rather than apply bonus mechanics?
Yeah, figure out how to create critera to be considered eligible to be counted as average into the global score
now my personal vp is screwed so badly cauz of this catchup ****. Am 9k+, been 13k+ for last 3 seasom every time
@CATANdominik there are 2 key problems that have not been addressed, which have both been well reported for months and need urgent attention.
1) Spoo fing,
It's happening, ongoing and actively encouraged by the game design. It is for this reason that my review on the Android Play Store will remain at 1*
2) The Robber
It does not do what it is supposed to do, and this has a major impact on the game.
Bugs too which prevent access to resources. As the last few days have been for myself, game has been unplayable.
@Grogyan wheres your evidence for the spoofing? Does it still occurs in this season? All we know is your hate for the totems.
@Wind your disregard of the amount of visible Spoo fing is concerning
Any evidence I provide is quickly dismissed, and yet it still continues.
The arguments that there is no Spoo fing, when it is so prevalent, is disgusting!
The game devs have presented data that concludes that Spoo fing is having a determinatal effect.
Also, If anyone is using Totems exclusively to win a cell they are in effect, Spoo fing. Which is against the ToS, and I expect to the developers to acknowledge that they too need to abide by the same, ToS that is players do.
I think Totems are cool, but not to the determent of scoring, as I stated when they were announced, they are continually being abused with actual Spoo fing
Summed up nicely above. It isnt fair to win on global just because of the sheer size of the team. Right now a bear can not score a single point in their own local cell but is guaranteed to get 11EP or more whereas the max for an eagle is definitely 11EP month after month and that is after working their **** off to win their local scoring area.
Does the hard quest claimed VP get added to the local region, or is it just an add on to the personal score?
@Davejjjjj it hasn't added to local region so far, just adds to personal score. Which creates issues I raised above.
The personal score (You've earned this season) is the sum of all VP gained from quests and your VPs locally (from all regions where you have built buildings.)
Sometimes there is a little mistake.
Sometimes the bonuses of cultural buildings are not correctly incremented.
This is why even being the only player in your region, the 2 numbers cannot be identical.
Personal score = VPs locally + VPs quests
Since winning EPs I have always won only 2 EPs at the end of the season.
I am an eagle so 3rd globally.
I am the only player in my region so the eagles win but the game always tells me that I am 3rd.
And it's been 2 seasons that I only won 2 EP.
@Charmq
I don't know since when the mechanic has been messing around in the quest VPs, or how ...
But in season 10, the VPs for the hard quest were:
15 vp 41 vp 35 vp 29 vp 25 vp 24 vp 24 vp 26 vp 26 vp 28 vp 28 vp 29 vp 29 vp 29 vp 30 vp 31 vp 31 vp 31 vp 31 vp 31 vp 31 vp
For season 11 I got for the hard quest:
30 vp 32 vp 32 vp 32 vp 30 vp 31 vp 30 vp 132 vp 133 vp 134 vp
And these last 3 also had 1 EP.
@CATANdominik
@Tahalnyou Im not too concerned about personal score coz there is no reward for it (for now) and im assuming whatever mistake or intended “balancing” which causes incorrect VP which affects me probably affects other players from all factions as well. For example there was a season where T3 cards were all giving 2VP instead of 3 affected all factions. I have always thought the local scoring area VP (those from public settlements and personal settlements) was what determined the local EP scoring n the balancing VP from hard quest and the local scoring contributed to the global score which determines the global EP (correct me if im wrong)
the VPs u have listed above are the balancing VPs which was supposed to compensate for the lack of players in eagles and there is some sorta algorithm which is determined by the gap in global scores for the day. but is clearly not working.
For me, the end of season EP is a visual bug. The summary stats shows my local area as 3rd but i still get 10EP for winning local area. But that’s besides the point. What im saying is that if EP is going to be an important mechanics in the game whereby you can only win it or earn it by hard quest and not buy it, it cant be so skewed towards the biggest team getting 10EP almost by default, simply because they have more players.
Either scrape the global score or take the average score as mentioned by @Wind or some other method which rewards more fairly for the amount of effort put in.
.... This morning my VP I was 1% of the global wolf score ..... I know 4 other agents in my 'pack' have higher VP than me.
Based on 31 regions in the greater Brisbane area wolves had a score of ~53000 four days out of end of season which was roughly 10% of the global wolf score at the time.
not sure we can say that an individual player has no impact on the global score.
just saying is all.
@grogyan totems are not spoo f ing. Spoo is using 3rd party software to trick the game to cheat your location. Totems are a pivotal part of play. Leave your ingress anxieties in ingress.
Goodness you may as well not play a minigames because that's not an adventure on foot is it now .... it's sitting on your bum getting resources .
You haven't even used a totem have you? 🤔
Many long term ingress players that hate spoo passionately do not come to the same conclusion that you do.
@ZinkyZonk u have just proven my point. I have more then 1% of the current bears global score even and yet the max i can ever get is 11EP coz eagles have such a disproportionate small number, whereas a bear that doesnt have to lift a finger (the most extreme scenario being that they dont even contribute a single point this season) n lose their local area will get the same 11EP.
@Tahalnyou that advice screen was at error not the points ..... check your points .... the screen said I had won both global and regional instead of just regional .... but I got 15 EP all the same.
@Charmq tough being an eagle.... you have the coolest totem though ... friend told me to pick red then got was lured away back to pogo.
@ZinkyZonk thanks. I tink so too that eagles has the coolest totem :)
I have given my feedback previously.
The catch-up mechanism was flawed from concept / design stage.
You simply cannot give different rewards to 2 different players for doing the exact same thing and achieving the same result just because they belong to different fractions. The rewards have to be equitable to the effort being put in. This is a fair design. Of course, unless the rewards are different due to a random "luck" factor, then there would be a difference in rewards, but that "luck" factor will have to apply equally to all players, regardless of fractions.
We all know that Blues have a disproportionately larger number of players. Many players have suggested a few viable solutions:
To be fair, I think we need to weed out the non-active / non-contributing players in the computation of the global winner. Eg those who play in day 1 to place fairground and a market on * tile, and then stop; this is to prevent the scores of being skewed (either positively or negatively) by temporary players when taking average. Whether these non-active / non-contributing players should receive rewards would be a different consideration.
Agree with @RandomExplorers that the balancing VPs is flawed from the get go and also the need to weed out the saboteurs. There are several settlements with market/fairground on starred tiles and nothing built up beyond that. If its truly a newbie who is trying out the game, the settlements would have been built up beyond that with other tier one buildings and also we’ll see a variation on star tiles. U may even pick up other types of cards from exploring in new season so its very obvious the work of saboteurs.
@RandomExplorers agreed with that.
either ditch the global scoring or introduce some average and active player checking
also suggest the prevention measure for the first 2 days of a season to prohibits pre lv20 accounts from placing commons on *’s
Are with the above comments about the flaws with the catch up mechanics and agree that global score based on average contributions would be much fairer.
Giving VP for daily hard quest is a very good idea. Should be calculated based on the previous season.
Another idea: New players should have an assignated faction and should not choose. After reaching max lvl they could change.
Forcing a faction is totally terrible idea. Players need to be able to play in same teams as their friends play in.
But it doesn’t matter so much in local areas where single active players can create a difference.
Weight the scores. Assume all 3 teams each have scores as below, and team A has 20 players, team B has 50 players and team C has 100 players.
A 1000/20=50. 2nd
B 5000/50=100. 1st
C 8000/100=80. 3rd