Warrior General Games

This suggestion is conceived to make things easier for newbs who find the site on any day other than d40-48.

The problem -- dots built on other days are sub-optimal, especially as a new season rolls along. This is one of the major hurdles to attracting and keeping new players and should be addressed, whether through this suggestion or some other.

The solution -- newly made dots automatically get the amount of XP everyone else has on that day.

Complication -- teams play on different days so game XP can be tricky to assign correctly. One possible solution is to only assign the amount of XP everyone has already gotten. Unlucky dots will lose one game of XP in their first season, but the sim will take care of that over time, and this is not a career ending problem.

The benefits -- 1. people who find the game mid season can still create and enjoy a player. 2. rookie teams that have someone disappear on them can replace that dot.

There is one further complication in that dots made d40-48 would now be a season old without having played in a game, but I assume that either the pro-rating could be turned off at that point OR, and this is my preference, we could simply accept that consequence. It never made sense to me to build a dot a season previous to its use.

Get the XP?
How to assign training gain and ALG?
We build at off-season not only to get XP, but to maximize training gain....

This probably does make new people cringe after they create a dot and try to learn the game, then again they do get a freebie to test things out with and can retire and remake.

But +1 to anything that can help the user base grow.

OP has potential.

Originally posted by aaasahi
Get the XP?
How to assign training gain and ALG?
We build at off-season not only to get XP, but to maximize training gain....

This is kind of what I was thinking. Maybe the XP would hold off until training points were spent or something. This idea does have merit though (and normally I'm against insta dots lol) , just need to tweak it out for possible exploits that could follow.

Originally posted by aaasahi
Get the XP?
How to assign training gain and ALG?
We build at off-season not only to get XP, but to maximize training gain....

Your 2nd point isn't relevant, because this is not for us, (unless we are in a bind) but for new players who find the game mid season. It isn't a good business model to ask them to wait a month for the next season to start. You want them playing NOW. The majority of them might fall away, as these things go, but many of them will spend some flex before they do if they are allowed to. And of course, some of them will stick around.

As it is now, players come along and they have to wait. Sure, they can build a player and fool with it, but there's no payoff for them. There's no hook.

So the answer to your question is however it needs to be done to make it easier for the players to use, and for the coders to code (if there is such a happy coincidence of these factors!) My guess is that the ALGs will fall naturally as the dots are auto-leveled, and the amount of training the designers are willing to allow will simply have to go over top of that. It ought to be balanced so that the dots are good enough to play somewhere, but not so good everyone would prefer to make dots that way.

From there, it's up to the player base to take the new guys under our wings and show them the ropes.

Originally posted by JcWildcat
This is kind of what I was thinking. Maybe the XP would hold off until training points were spent or something. This idea does have merit though (and normally I'm against insta dots lol) , just need to tweak it out for possible exploits that could follow.

I think part of the balancing would have to be to make sure there aren't any exploits - -that is, a good dotbuilder would always prefer to build from his or her own favorite build day. Other than that, how the XP and ALGs get assigned seems like an upper level decision.

Originally posted by NOVASaint
Your 2nd point isn't relevant, because this is not for us, (unless we are in a bind) but for new players who find the game mid season. It isn't a good business model to ask them to wait a month for the next season to start. You want them playing NOW. The majority of them might fall away, as these things go, but many of them will spend some flex before they do if they are allowed to. And of course, some of them will stick around.

So would this be strictly limited to brand new accounts?

Originally posted by Myd
So would this be strictly limited to brand new accounts?

There isn't a limit being proposed. He wrote, "We build at off-season not only to get XP, but to maximize training gain...."

But that's irrelevant, because WE don't have occasion to build a dot midseason unless we want to (which, because of the reasons he mentioned, we won't very often) while a brand new player who finds the game on d15 wants to play right then, and can't.

So, effectively, the free player gains extra free boosts equal to Day Created * ((Game XP + Day Off XP) / 2000) if created during the season. Any fraction in the equation would be subtracted and multiplied by 100, then added to the dot's XP total.

This would also give them extra SP (6 per level up rather than 5) which would help to offset lost training opportunity. The dot would lose out on the BT plus the advantages of multi-training, but SP and ALGs would at least give him a chance to be competitive with other dots in the league. The free dot created in-season would likely never be able to maximize his build like an off-season dot (training and enhancements kick in later resulting in lesser gains plus a lower BT potential for purchasing AEQ). So in the long-term, he won't be quite as good. That's a deterrent against exploitation, but it gives the new user plenty of time to tinker around and figure stuff out. Also, the 1 extra SP every 2 days or so is still less than the training gains a low-level dot is likely to receive while multi-training.

Seeing as how the Wiki is down and my laptop hdd is broken, I can't access the exact numbers to give an accurate of example of how the math would work out. I actually had Excel charts which mapped a lot of this out....all lost until data recovery can be done. If someone else could do the math, and it corroborated my thinking, then this may be the simplest route to go.