Time-Critical decisions feedback

Atlas
#1

I am disappointed that both the official guard change thread, and the related threads such as Seriphs personal testimony of the impact it will have have been closed.

Such a critical change should not have the voice of the people silenced.

There was healthy debate inside the threads despite some personal slanging. ( on that note, why not introduce a flag on people who’s comments then require moderation before being shown, rather than just hiding posts and shutting threads down?)

The fundamental issues, and suggestions for change, remain:

  1. The starting point is not equal. All castles are not equally accessible. Check the stats. How many 5+ bubble deep castles have lost over 100k troops and/or guards since the time delay reduction came into play?

  • Suggestion: add roads between continents that are buried deep. They could be only a few pixels wide to run along the borders of continents so that the map doesn’t need to be redrawn. You dont need space in a redzone. You just need an entry point for each castle.

  • (And dont say that this cant be done. My team was suddenly exposed without notice when someone pointed out to PG there was no access to my continent from neutral. It can, and has been, done)

  1. The amount of guards, and defensive resources are not equal. Teams who have been wholly hidden, or with 1-2 accessible castles have been stockpiling guards and defensive resources, while those more exposed have been steadily drained. - the ‘haves’ will have an upper hand.
  • Suggestion: do a stocktake and distribute fair and equitable defensive resources before rolling this change out.
  1. Re-look at the delay, as has been called for by others. Consider that all levels of the game cannot defend the same as 24/7 diamond / high sapphire active teams. Yes, you may get castle turnover. But you’ll be seeing a vast number of the platinum teams you let into atlas losing their lands and then their players. You welcomed them into atlas, now consider them in making it playable for less active teams like they are.
  • Suggestion: Increase the delays a bit. And look at making delays longer on lower-league teams castles.
  • And/or instigate the league separation. An Atlas for platinum to war amongst themselves with end of season promotion to the main atlas map.
  1. Decrease disparity between ‘have’ and ‘have not’ teams where proximity alerts are concerned. With the shorter delays, players can come in, fly, kill one lot, then leave and refill before the team they attack can mount a response (thinking of mostly lower leagues who have less players online / less seeing banners)
  • Build a proximity alert function into the game where a dedicated alert chat room can have a message posted about an incoming prime on the castle next to one the team owns. Have this alert above to be enabled/disabled in the Admin like the RSS notices.
  • See 3 above to increase the delay allowing more time for a response.
  1. Allow more time for feedback. And for trialling major changes such as these.

You want to see castles change hands. The above suggestions are about making it fair and equitable that all teams stand the same chance of losing a castle, not just those already exposed and attacked.

20 Likes
#2

While we all acknowledge the perfect atlas world cant be built in a day , we also can agree that changes cant come in a day .

Blockade’s times are perfectly balanced and even as it is now people are still using bots to counter so their impact is not what was intended either .

Accepting that atlas is a world of conflict is the first step into making it work . Having castles for years and untouched is not what atlas is meant for .

Answer me this please , have you done a conquer recently ? If you didnt I did , plenty , not cause the mechanics allowed me but cause I used quick and clever strategy on poorly defended castles . Is your opposed alliance conquering from your side ? Yes they are , castles that are being abandoned .

Can they conquer if they want to ? No , cause castles get spammed with 79 teams minimum in seconds . So they end up combating 4k primes just for ego

Is mega alliance being exploited in the wrong way to meatshield ? Yes both sides .

If we dont increase castle turnover the water will only stink .

Need I remind you the current situation is a legacy of what mega alliances have done so far ?

Don’t you think that the opposed alliance will have it harder if you just give up again your castles or go pirate like seriph suggested ? They already have less targets to hit and probably will turn canibals on their own fractions .

If the game needs a side to collapse so be it . I guess everyone is tired of something .

On a personal note : I understand the frustration , but don’t forget this is a game . A cute virtual reality under some codes .

14 Likes
#3

We have had the opportunity to conquer recently, on more than one occasion, but I have distinctly told my team NOT to conquer. Reason? We are delicately balanced with several exposures at present. 99% of castles that can be worked into a conquer are gate castles, presenting an immediate escalation in hits.

Right now, the game rewards people based on 20 castles. I had, until recently 21, and am now holding 23 (returned/awarded for assets previously gifted). We are approaching the end of season payout for season rewards which STILL aren’t fixed. They reward people for sitting on castles, not for conquering them, nor for their level of activity in Atlas. My team works hard, we are high ranked in atlas activity, and they deserve the maximum season reward that I can get for them which is through blood sweat and tears. So no, right now I am not aiming to conquer any more.

To be able to conquer more, I need to drop castles, ideally the ones I am hit on, so I can take on more risk with access castles and make inroads into non-alliance areas. In doing this I put my teams daily, weekly and seasonal rewards at risk. Maybe these things also need to be looked at.

It galls me immensely that my team who is regularly in the top half of D1 is a relative pauper compared to a certain S2 team (among others) who is being sponsored into safe level 5s and multiple level 4 castles. (They had 32 castles at last count) Are they conquering those? Maybe they get to hit the conquer button after their sponsor has softened up the crowd and provided the bouncers (100b+ taunters) to make the former owners retreat.

It is not possible for the 99% of teams to hold 20 access castles. The mechanics of the game will break. If they want to make us all accessible everywhere then the rewards and ratios for holding castles need to be reviewed. Currently most teams operate on a 2-3 accessible castles policy, and it has been noted many teams are repositioning themselves in this way. Why is this? Because the functions of atlas make it hard to cover multiple accessible points without sacrificing most of your logged in time to defence.

4 Likes
#4

There are some fine ideas here.

1 - Adding roads. Yep, wholeheartedly agree.

There’s a complex graph theory problem here in doing it equitably. “Add a set of edges to a weighted graph to reduce the diameter of the graph” has a few solutions, not clear what the optimal way to do this is. Solving for some criteria (e.g., if you wanted the lowest cardinality such set, to be minimally disruptive) is probably a smart way to go about it, but also is hard to do. But there are less perfect ways to do it that would be straightforward and would improve overall equity.

2 - Defensive resource rebalance. Probably agree. What do you mean by defensive resources? I think hammer availability needs to go up by 5-10x; it’s crappy to limit people’s ability to defend themselves when not all teams have the same defensive burden.

Agree that stockpiled guards are really dumb. Resetting them, or scaling up glory cost per guard past a certain threshold of accumulated team glory, might be reasonable compromises.

3 - Sharding Atlas / changing delay. Hm. Separating Atlas, and in particular creating a haven for small teams, is a very good idea. I’ve been asking for it for over 2 years. :man_shrugging: I’m not optimistic about it happening soon.

Delay idea needs work; a major function of the change is to reduce the need for large teams to attack and bubble smaller teams to reach their preferred opponents. Increasing delays for those teams seems likelier to hurt them more, since large teams might prefer to bubble them. Will continue to next point.

4 - Increasing delay for small teams’ castles / notifications. You’re concerned about hit and runs on smaller teams’ T2/T3s? Ok. Has this been a widespread problem?

I have some concerns expressed earlier; would it work to add 2-3 minutes to delays on T2/T3s after your first attack on that castle, if any?

Proximity alerts are pretty hard for PG to do for a few reasons, lack of formalized alliance structures being one. E.g. if you see a BWAB prim move next door to you, a notification for that would be annoying spam, whereas it’d be useful to me.

5 - More time for feedback. You know, there was a time when I would have agreed. Now I just don’t know. Nowadays PG can’t post an announcement saying “hey we changed a minor thing, won’t affect too many of you!” without getting hundreds of posts along the lines that their arrogance in daring to fix a minor thing exceeds Lucifer’s, and the lack of thunderbolts smiting them for their hubris is proof that the throne of the Lord sits empty. Then Gal has the unenviable task of explaining to a dev that while they thought they were just changing a number in a video game, they have apparently caused the death of God.

That will be the feedback for the next ten significant Atlas changes, whether they are good or bad, and the constant complaining means that, while legitimate criticism is plentiful, it’s also hard to spot and painful to get to. The equivalent of a 12-bubble deep castle, I suppose–in order to get to rank 1 criticism, you have to trudge through the equivalent of 4k prim spam from the equivalent of rank 1000 team posters, all of whom have their finger on the enfeeble button. I don’t know a single person who has looked at one of those big threads and said, “Wow most of this is good points, really glad I spent time reading all that.” It’s hard to look at the quality of discussion and think that there should be more of it.

19 Likes
#5

HALLELUJAH - I’m glad you agree

OK :+1:

Another point to agree on. I hope PG will listen.

Quite possibly, but, this still only addresses current teams with existing perimeters. Delay needs to be more than 3 mins because that’s the typical maximum length of an attack, so maybe 4 mins allowing retaliation time.

If in a separate ingame chat its up to people to look at it, like Alliance Chat - you only see what goes on in there if you look. Alliances doesn’t matter. # of primarchs by x team and loading matters. You’d self-filter for the ones that matter

As to the negativity, as I mentioned before I suggest a moderation tool that flags toxic people for their comments to be reviewed before being posted. This game rises and falls on the investment of the players, they need a voice. Yes, people are adverse to change, but you’ll notice many solid thinkers who really put time and effort into explaining what changes will mean to them / their team, and how it could be revised.

4 Likes
#6

Moderators have a life :grimacing:

Edit: To elaborate - I don’t think an AI tool will be able to differentiate what’s constructive and what’s toxic, so you’ll inevitably need human intervention, which is a massive burden, looking at each and every single post and approving or rejecting before it’s allowed

Would require for there to be people available around the clock for that to occur, so posts can also go up in a timely manner and for things to actually feel like a flowing discussion

I’m not exaggerating when I say I’ve been on the forums literally the entire day yesterday, trying hard to catch up, but dealing with a flag fest from the Atlas thread - trust me, I didn’t want to close down the thread either because I do agree people should be able to express their opinion, but it became necessary, feel free to pm me to discuss that so I don’t clog up this thread

P.S: Seriph’s thread at the time of opening and closure was a duplicate thread, I couldn’t have known that the main discussion thread would later be closed. Basically, it’s not intentional silencing of the people’s voices.

8 Likes
#7

I’d suggest a few things that’s possibly could work -

  1. Remove player bases from t4s and t5 guards on castles - some bases are just too insane make castles really impossible to conquer or even lose guard on.
  2. Put limits on castle types t5 alliances can hold, example max 20 t5s to a 5 team alliance etc etc, would distribute the castles more out to everyone or would stop strong teams protecting weaker teams to hold great castles where other teams that are just as good can’t.
  3. Possible lower castle guards on internal castles, like it is near impossible to take out 3 mil guard before a team can bring thier mega alliance in and the lag to boot, lower guard would mean they have to be wary on any cooldown.
  4. Give greater bonus’ for access castles, at the moment accesses are getting less and less invitable for teams, make a t2 access give the same benefits as a t3, a t3 give same benefits as a t4, a t4 give same benefits as a t5
  5. Possible make every team have to own an access castle per 5ish castles they own, so to own a castle I would have to have an access then next 4 can be deeper then to own anymore I need another access, means everyone would have to have an access castle
  6. Link max bonuses to less castles - ie 10 t5s would give you maximum of all bonuses and egg tokens, 15 t4s would give you the same bonuses, 20 t3s the same bonus and like 30 t2s the same bonus. Would mean the max bonus is actually achievable for teams and give players and teams another thing they can try to achieve, where at the moment only way to get max benefits it to join one of 5 teams. And because of castles at that level never really moving apart from a disbanding team or someone just giving it up, would make the game more equal and give a chance to the other teams to actually compete vs these top teams
3 Likes
#8

It is great idea to base the Atlas ranking on the team activity, not ownership of the castles! Or at least divide it between these two significants! Glories earned during season and castles ownership might be better than just castles ownership and would make teams ask players for higher activity naturally.

Also what if there would be possibility to fly directly to a castle which doesn’t have proper protection (based on troops amount or number of owner’s primarchs - at least one Prim, at least 30 K troops for example) ? As we can see 5-6 bubble deep castles with no primarchs on it … this way some teams can own number of castles they wouldn’t be able to protect if the access was easier. It would extend the attention and responsibility needed. And as this would put into danger also the neighbors, we might see higher Atlas activity even without adding roads… just an idea :sweat_smile:

#9

I suspect the rank order if seasons are determined by glory (which I strongly agree with btw) will not significantly change the top 10 with the exception of one or two spots. But this would be a good step in the right direction.

I’m sure said team would be happy to go one v one (team v team, no TA involved) with your team for however long you like to see if you can conquer their undeserved castles? Or vice versa. I’d be interested to see how it goes myself.

6 Likes
#10

One of the things that also would be awesome to deal with before introducing more half thought through solutions would be to end mega alliances. Would be easy to mark everyone outside your 5ta as enemies. So it would be like team A’s castle are attacked by team B. Team C from a third TA shows up to join the battle. If you’re only allied with your TA the taunters from team B, would taunt everyone outside of team B’s 5ta that way it’s a 5ta fight making it way more fair battles.

Lock 5tas for a certain period, so you can’t swap around to surrender castles or take a team in that needs help

Right now you can’t attack primes from your TA in red zone - or anywhere else. We can still have “sides” with friends and enemies, so expand that feature so you can’t attack friends anywhere, except others teams castles - that would put an end to all the guard swapping, or at least make it harder to do.

Divide atlas so diamond fight diamond, sapphire fight sapphire and so on. Would fix the issue with certain teams sandbagging in sapphire. The shuffle idea would work with this.

Make the map dynamic with land sinking in to the sea, and rise from the sea - that way no castle will be held by one team for more than a certain period of time. New roads pop up and making safe castles be entry’s and entry’s will be safe.

And finally fix the lag, but I’m sure some of the above would help with that.

2 Likes
#11

:thinking:

thought you guys were boterators.

4 Likes
#12

That’s your opinion…

Have you thought this through? It is far far more complex than you’re making it out to be

#13

Can’t really see how making unfair more unfair is a thought through idea, but anyways let’s agree to disagree.

Ending mega alliances would be awesome, yes - the how to is not my thing, hence I’m not developer, but there has to be a way fairly easy to put an end to it.

3 Likes
#14

Yes, let’s agree to disagree here we can argue it all day long but until it’s in motion for people to experience it’s all speculation.

I completely agree with this, the bullying and hindrance coming from both sides is not needed and should be removed however in a map set up as it is then that’s nigh on impossible as humans we subconsciously try to merge into groups to help protect ourselves-the best idea in my eyes for this would be a complete reset/map change which wouldn’t happen because people will argue and fight it too much even though a different map opening everyone up more and preventing the need of alliances would be vastly beneficial for quality of life in atlas and helping it grow

#15

Enlighten us. Because people have been looking for one for years.

4 Likes
#16

I’d say one obvious reason that we have better castles than yours is that we’re a significantly better Atlas team than yours. Grats for being top-half-of-D1 team, and I think that’s probably a fair evaluation for your Atlas ability too. But we’re easily top five.

My main basis for thinking we’re a better Atlas team than yours is that we consistently trounce yours on offense and defense, as we have done since we were power rank 100 and you were still ~10ish. To give you an idea, your ratio of kills to deaths versus us over the past 60 days is 0.74, meaning ours versus you was 1.34, hence, we did significantly better. We generally kill more troops than your team does, month over month and in all-time.

These are objective facts; subjectively, my opinion is that we play more than 34% better, since we are a substantially smaller team, and the 60d window includes periods of intense fighting on castles during which your team was not the primary target. (Generally, this is the most favorable type of engagement toward any team.) When we’ve been focused on you, the ratio has usually been closer to 1.7; was higher back before you gave up trying to attack us. So, good self-awareness, I suppose. Anyway, we outperform you at every turn. Hopefully that puts an end to that galled feeling you mentioned, seems like it’d be a bummer.

Those are some interesting facts you made up. Personally, I had no idea I was being sponsored by anyone. I thought we relentlessly sieged the teams there, had players sniping around the clock, organized dozens of waves, killed by far the most troops of any team during those fights, sat with bared fangs on the front lines for two months against RR, faced daily raids from the power rank 1 team in the game at the time, was impressed by how well they fought, beat them anyway, got hit all over the map by a variety of D1 teams in an attempt to pull us off, bodied them all, and on and on. We ran in around the clock as 400s and 500s versus 600s, into a hail of counters, and still managed to make it work. Dragon Lords? We were the damned dragon Red Barons.

Our 5TA is a fantastic 5TA, the best in the game, and if you are saying they gave us excellent support, you’re exactly right. I’m grateful for all of it. Feel free to ask them if any think we did less than a fair share, though.

I do have to wonder if you were just not paying attention during these fights, though. In any case, you chose the single worst example of a well-landed team as your example of iniquity: the one who rose from nothing in the last year and scrapped for everything they have, under the hardest circumstances.

We’re all used to it by now, and but are you guys ever going to get tired of this bizarre denialist narrative? We’ve seen the same thing play out with nearly every large opposing team in the game.

Them: We are going to teach these little PUNKS a lesson.
(they die)
Them: Well that was weird, surely this can’t happen again.
(it happens again)
Them: It must be because of their bots! Notification bots! Trap bots, which definitely exist!
Us: Actually, we are just a better team.
Them: But the bots!

(they get bots)

Us: Beep beep. (continues killing them on their home turf and on ours, at the same ratios)
Them: You must be cheating! Invincible dragons, not that I can ever find evidence or even name a single player using them!
Us: Actually, we are just a better team.
Them: Okay yeah I wasn’t really going anywhere with that one. But what about the bots!
Us: You have bots, though? And we’re mostly the attacker when we fight? Have you considered that we might be a better team?
Them: It must be Dread! They must be Dread’s meat shields!
Us: Dread has more defensive prims on our castles (1, I think?) than we have on theirs, though.
Them: AHA! Dread is their meatshields!
Us: A loaded allied taunter can sleep for four weeks on an AnD castle, with a golden vessel balanced on her head, and not be bothered.
Them: What?
Us: It’s a reference to the Pax Mongolica, you illiterate schmuck. Anyway, why do we still beat you when Dread isn’t there? Seems weird, like maybe we’re a better team.
Them: It’s got to be the bots!
A Burning Bush (exasperated): yo.
Them: Who are you?
Bush: I AM who I AM.
Them: You aren’t even in D1!
Bush: Yeah. Anyway, AnD is better than you, hope this helps! (douses)
Them: So it’s definitely the bots?

24 Likes
Low troop sniping
#17

Well it’s so funny that certain teams can trap and attack with primes not even on the castle one is attacking. What’s more fun is that even with the recording sent to PG nothing changes. Grats for having the best tech guys on the team!

2 Likes
#18

Shall I get my tinfoil hat out now or can we get back onto topic and stop acting like children?

#19

I still think we can settle this like the old times! A 1v1 duel! Let’s do this. Come on top half of D1 team, surely you’re not :poultry_leg:?

1 Like
#20

please, i wanna listen more urban legends.
im preparing the bonfire, you bring marshmellows.
@Lucky are there any Bigfoot stories you can tell?
i LUV em

4 Likes