The Conquest 2.0 Capitial Soltution

[Ajaxan]

-----------------------Overview----------------------​

So this is a big topic. How do we decide who is Capital? Many methods have been tried but ultimately they have failed to produce an outcome the truthfully reflects who should be capital. So to get this solved lets think a bit about what made real cities top dog and put them on the map in medieval times. (Disclaimer: no actual research was done, just my knowledge of history in general and some common sense.)

Large towns back in the day had to do many things. Among them, was be able to defend themselves, have a lage population, and be well liked. You can have a powerful city if you can't fight. You can't be large city unless you have a large population. And finally, you cant be a wealthy city unless you have many trade partners. So my idea is based around the idea of military, population, and trade. Which to me, is what it takes to become top dog. Now, transferring this Idea to Loka is not actually that hard!

-----------------------Military----------------------
​

So first off, military. This is the part Loka has always been doing and.. it works! You know exactly who the toughest fighters are. Unfortunately, that isn't enough. military is important, probably more so than any one of the other two parts, but it isn't everything. So for the military aspect of Loka, it should say nearly the same as it has been. I'd suggest a few changes though.

Instead of points gained at each battle they should be gained from holding control of territory over the course of days. So for example at the end of the day you gain a point for each territory you control. And so, those towns that can expand on hold onto territory will gain points for it.

There is a catch though. At the end of each month, they are all gone. Wiped off the map. And yes, this means at the beginning of each month a mad dash for territory will be done every time. Which will prevent an inactive town from holding on to territory past a months time, and also create a server wide madness at the beginning of each month. No player will not be online during the first of the month.

And finally, this system combats what the midnight raids attempted to do. No more last minute booting towns. A single night should not be enough to unseat an undisputed champion while they sleep. Also, in this way, even if you take a towns territory, they have time to respond before they actually lose points! I could talk about this even more but I'll wait for questions about it.

-----------------------Population----------------------​

Populations is an important part of having a large successful town. And isn't that what loka is about? Having large groups of players working together to create great towns. It doesn't make sense for that not to count towards the crowning accomplishment of loka! So what I suggest is rather simple. Towns with large amounts of active players get capital points much the same way territory points are calculated each day. For each player that logged on during the day (for 20 minutes, heck even for 1 second) the town gets a point at the end of the day. This may seem like it is much more powerful than grabbing territory. But think about it. If you can expand infinitely capturing tgens (which will not have a max limit in 2.0) you will now doubt have twice maybe even three times the tgens as active players.

-----------------------Trade----------------------​

Finally, the third part, trade. Now trade is trickier. In my mind it has two parts of importance. It means you have friends and that you have things people wants. These parts are both important because if you have no friends, no one will buy from you, and if you have nothing anyone wants, well... you wont be selling anything.
This part can be done in a few different ways. I'll be interested to see what everyone thinks is the best way.

So first off, trade at the market. Imagine if you got points towards capital for trades! Its easy to keep track of and a very true way to say who has what everyone else wants. Obviously though, this system is highly abuse-able, and so must be implemented in a special way to make sure it can't be. So my suggestion is that for each town you trade with in the market, the selling town gets 5 points. and the buying town loses 5.

I know, I know this sounds crazy, but it can only be done once! Here's an example. Let's say, Auru is selling hamburgers. Now Feronin really wants some hamburgers! Like 10 stacks of hamburgers. And so if they buy them all from Auru in the Market, Auru will now have 10 extra points and Feronin will have 10 less. Now lets say Auru goes to buy Hot-dogs from Feronin. But they aren't as hungry and they only buy 5 stacks through the market. Auru has still sold more to Feronin and so still has an advantage. Not until Auru has bought just as much from Feronin will the system reset. And then if Auru buys 6 stacks more of any other resources (11 total stacks compared to Feronin's 10 stacks bought from Auru) now Feronin will hold the 5 point advantage in points.

This system, although it may seem complicated truly isn't. It allows towns with better trade connections and more friends to score a few extra points. Its only 10 points per town though which over the course of a month is tiny. Think of it this way. If 10 towns buy from Auru, Auru gets 10 points extra from each of them (each of those towns loses 10 points as well) meaning they have 100 trade points. Which, compared to Captial is tiny. In just 4 days a town with 25 territories will have overshadowed that amount. An argument could be made for trade to be worth more even.

Now since this is the weirdest of the ideas, I'm happy to try and explain it better (perhaps even with diagrams!)

-----------------------Summary----------------------​

So in summary imagine a town going for capital. They aren't as big on military, but they have many friends and many trade partners. As well as many, many members. they hold maybe only 5 territories but have 10 players log on each day and have 10 towns that all gave thema trade advanatage. in one month their poitns will look something like this:

5 territories x 30 days = 150 points
10 players x 30 days = 300 points
10 trade advantages = 100 points
Total = 550 points.

The next town over is a supreme military conqueror. They own 30 territories but have only 3-4 active players and actually have negative trade points by giving it up to other towns.

30 territories x 30 days = 900 points
4 players x 30 days = 120 points
10 trade disadvantages = -100 points
Total = 920 points

So the military town still wins! But, you can see how this still makes the system more interesting and not solely military based. I'd want to see more points for trade and population but lets be honest. If you look at history, military is still the #1 most important thing. Its up to y'all though if you'd like to see more points for the others parts!

 

[Cryptite]

Great post! I love the attention to detail and the thoughtfulness by which all of your posts come in as suggestions to the server.

Unfortunately, there are problems with each of your arguments. Trust me when I say that in the vast span of Conquest's existence on Loka, we've actually debated these exact ideas more than a few times over and there are problems with all of them. That is exactly why none of these things are in the system now as determinations for Capital. I'll break it down for you:

Instead of points gained at each battle they should be gained from holding control of territory over the course of days

We've had actually two separate versions of this in the past, and while you touch on a part of it later with wiping, we have a different plan that's not too dissimilar. Having a daily increase of points over territory held only means that the biggest towns owning the biggest territories become SO big that they don't even have to worry about losing fights because they have so many territories. Couple that with a town that's too scary to fight and they win through inaction.

The current proposal for points in C2 is that at the end of the month, your total territory control is converted into a number of strenght points that you start out with at the beginning of the next month. From then on though it's still win/loss strength calculations. This makes immediate targets when new months roll around as well as fewer 0-0 fights where people don't feel obliged to let their territories fall because they won't lose any points (sometimes).

At the end of each month, they are all gone. Wiped off the map.

Because of how MUCH territory can be gained, and additionally that it will cost shards to keep a big territory, we don't want to wipe the map every month as it effectively can throw away all of the progress you made. Players will grow tired of waging the same war over territory every month. If your argument is in keeping new towns seeming like they have a fresh chance at success every month, I can see that; and that's why we have a Decay system in the works that means you don't permanently hold all 100 territories all the time without doing anything. For one, the more territory you hold, the harder it is not only in terms of upkeep (shards cost daily), but also your reinforcements to distant territories will take longer (beacon cooldown), and the "Wilds" will attempt to take back territory from time to time as well.

this system combats what the midnight raids attempted to do. No more last minute booting towns. A single night should not be enough to unseat an undisputed champion while they sleep

Three things here:

First, we have a daily attack limit (when it's working, in fairness) to prevent this exact thing from happening.

Second, if you're very close to losing and can possibly lose capital in the last moment, that fault is not ours, it's yours for staying vulnerable up until the very last moment. It's a gamble you're making. If you want to safely stay capital, make sure you have a good lead at the end of the month.

With C2, having a situation where like 10 towns from different continents all use their 5 attacks on you on the last day is impossible now. You only have to worry about your own continent, and maybe an invader if they're on your continent. So that situation isn't likely to happen anymore, meaning a last-day attack should be foreseeable.

Towns with large amounts of active players get capital points much the same way territory points are calculated each day

This is extremely abusable by alts and people getting all of their friends to logon to Loka for just long enough to count, then bail.

If your argument is that Population should contribute to Capital, it does, by the very nature of the beast. More players = more activity = more war effort supplies, more people at fights, more people supplying for fights, mining, etc. I'll reiterate this exact point below as well for Trade.

Imagine if you got points towards capital for trades!

Also extremely abusable. So maybe you have a system which thwarts some abuse, but even if the system awards trades between towns, you could still end up with a situation where a town with no interest in capital, trades a LOT with their favorite town, thereby boosting them.

Worse, in your system, trading is actually really bad for some towns. You can literally hurt a town by simply buying their things. You could beat Hilo by just buying their spruce up, eating the high-price in favor of nuking their strength. Hilo would then be disincentivized to even use the Market...

This abuse/exploit is the same as when we used to have a town level called Marketing, which was leveling up by trading. Players would simple trade things over and over again to boost their level. There's virtually no 'fair' way to have trading (through the Market feature) count without there being a way to game the system.

So i'll reiterate what I said about Population:

If your argument is that Trade should contribute to Capital, it does, by the very nature of the beast. More actual trading = more activity = more war effort supplies. If you aren't a town big enough by population to self-sustain for war, then you trade with other towns who might have spare resources for you to use to fight. We don't need to add a 'feature' tracking trade, when trade (like Population) has a direct effect on Conquest by the nature of how it works in the real world.

I appreciate you thinking this one out, but we've talked these things over at length many times over. That said, I love being able to respond to these ideas, so keep em coming!

Finally it should be noted that in the current landscape, Hilo and Eldritch are not just powerful military towns. They produce a LOT and would likely win out with these same kinds of features if they were tracked. If Hilo and Eldritch didn't spend the time they needed to produce gear, pots, etc for the war, they wouldn't be able to sustain the fights forever, but they do spend a lot of time preparing for war when they're not actively engaged in it.

There's always an attempt to make it so that players not interested in PvP have a chance at being capital, but time and time again we've been unable to come up with a system that doesn't just reward some kind of ultra-grinder for getting points. Conquest should be won through action and strategy, and not because a few people have the ability to do a very specific things by themselves all day and gain points for doing it. If those people can mine/brew for you all day, then you need only gain members to fight and your war effort will be sustained.

Feel free to shoot some more questions/suggestions this way!

-Crypt

 

[Magpieman]

First off thanks for the post, love suggestions and ideas. What you may not know is I have attempted to make a system like this work behind the scenes many times and spent god knows how long on it. But however we implement it has serious problems which is why I eventually scrapped the idea.

One of the biggest problems is newer towns being at a significant disadvantage. A system like you suggest means existing towns get stronger and a new town would have to build up over a period of 6 months+. While this may seem like its fair that towns which have existed for a while are the only ones that can realistically compete for capital, it is incredibly disheartening to newer players and will just turn them away from the server once they realise they have no chance unless they invest 6 months of time. Population is a classic example of this snowball effect, where the bigger more established get bigger and more powerful. Having said that I would be ok with large population towns having a small point advantage if population had no other problems.

The second problem is players abusing systems. Again population falls under this too since people with multiple accounts can gain huge advantages. No matter how hard we try we cannot have an automated system for alts since many people play on the same internet connection (family) not to mention people who try hard enough can always bypass our checks.

Now while you have addressed the above issue with trade, it has created a further problem. It discourages people to use the market (buying stuff) since they will lose points. Now while it is a small amount, we need more people using the market rather than less. Players can, and often will, make trades outside the market too. With a much larger player base and huge market activity the idea could work but we are not at that stage yet.

The Military suggestion is again an idea I have toyed around with for a while but decided not to go with it for a couple of reasons. First of all we want resources to be rare on Loka. To do that we have found that unique resources need to be embargoed 99% of the time to remain rare. All it takes is a week of them being available to everyone and then players all have private stoke piles that last them a year. The way C2 works is whoever owns the most T Gens in a biome gets an embargo on that biomes resources. So once everyone gets established there should be at least 1 T gen controlled in every biome thus widespread embargos encouraging lots of trade between players. Your suggestion would mean at the start of every month for a few days most resources would be able to be farmed (not embargoed due to no T gens in biomes) and then nothing is rare or desirable. The other issue I had was that it limits how far a towns influence and land could grow. If you spend a whole month gaining land towards a biome on the other side of your continent then it all gets reset just as you reach it then you would quickly lose interest trying. Those who miss out on capital often have some land (t gens) to show for their effort but with a regular reset it feels like wasted time. It also makes trying to conquer/invade another continent (new C2 feature) almost impossible since there just wouldn't be time in a month to get to that stage.

I will continue to try and bring more factors to deciding capital and welcome more ideas and counter arguments. We are hoping to incorporate trade into C2 as a possible way to capture a T Gen which also provides strength towards capital.

 

[Cryptite]

ITT I type faster than Magpie

 

[Cryptite]

There's also an additional feature to TGens that we've not really mentioned here (it's on the document I think). All TGens have an NPC associated with them. At various random times, certain TGens can won over merely by trading resources to that NPC. Effectively, you start a hidden bidding-war with that NPC and both the attacker and the defender will dump resources into that TGen (not knowing the amount the other side has put in) and then at the end, whoever donated more resources takes/keeps the TGen. This allows a sort of 'resource game' to be played from time to time so that not all territories are earned through the fight.

 

[Ajaxan]

I'd just like to take a moment to appreciate these two people who responded. They've clearly spent more time thinking about this than all the rest of us combined and I think we will realize it when 2.0 comes out. Although I love all my ideas, clearly the experience gained from having tried many of them before will prove more useful and I trust y'all are probably correct as things are often not the same in practice as in theory. Also, in the end you're probably right Crypt, population and trade are factors that decide wars all on their own simply because of the advantage they give. Even more so now with the 2.0 embargo system. And mag I didn't even think about that window of time before towns reclaim territory that would be lost at the end of each month. It only took Auru 1 day of Hilo forgetting to put back the embargo for us to get a bottomless stockpile. So you are certainly correct on that front. Anyway I concede to the 2.0 hype train, can't wait too see it in action.

 

[EastBowmen]

Imagine trying to explain this to a new player in under five minutes lmao

 

[Cryptite]

Imagine trying to explain this to a new player in under five minutes lmao

Does a player new to factions know all of factions in under five minutes?

 

[Ajaxan]

Imagine trying to explain this to a new player in under five minutes lmao

Although meant as a joke, this message sums up one of the great things about Loka. Its only as complicated as you want it to be. You can play normal old survival if you want but if you chose, you can learn more and get more involved. Which is exactly the way it should be. Players get to take in as much as they want to, at their own speed.

 

[EastBowmen]

My point is not to be rude and disregard all of the time and effort you have put into this post, but rather comment on the learning gap. In my opinion, people are more likely to get involved in conquest and going for capital if it is a simple and understandable process. Perhaps making it based of something other than just conquest is a good idea, but I still don't know what that might be.
The two things I like most about Loka is how it's not PTW and the PvP system is different than any other. Maybe it should take more than a couple minutes to learn the system, like it did for me. My first conquest fight was more confusing than trying to find your classes on the first day of school. BUT that was because I was poorly taught how it all worked. I was told, kill enemies and that was pretty much all.
The one thing I'm trying to get out of this is that we need to have some kind of book or something that you can spawn in that explains how conquest works within 3-5 pages that you can spawn in with a command. I volunteer to write this book if no one else is willing to. (I know that we have made YouTube videos on conquest, but this is a lot easier to access and give out to new players.)
Once again, I don't mean to be rude to your post Ajax. I love the dedication to Loka that you hold.

 

[Cryptite]

A change coming with C2 (but probably not initially on launch) is that we are retooling the intro experience so that new players are introduced to the system immediately (as the very first thing they see). Despite your tone, you're right; players have to be both wowed and intrigued by Conquest from the get-go if they're to stay on Loka and participate in the system. Right now, they only "hear that it's a thing" but never see it because they're not willing to put in 3 weeks of effort to even participate.

 

[Wolfegger]

Maybe it would be easily represented in a flow chart or some sort of graphic organizer. Hmmm . . . I'll look into making one for the Wiki.