The Cue wrote:What's wrong with the game goes so far back that I doubt many people were around to remember it. Ascension was created with the idea of slowing down the big players to allow for other players to have a chance. There was some grey area here while things changed in and out a bit, but the end result was a benefit for ascending in the form of more powerful weapons, and an across the board bonus. Allowing more ascensions increased the across the board bonus. The problem was that this bonus was too powerful, and there was no down side. Even without a bonus across the board, the more powerful weapons meant less UU invested in attack and defense.
These changes were ill conceived since descension took so long to come out. After years of there being no reason to play ascension and every reason to ascend, the ascended server was dominated by a small group who basically controlled everything. When descension finally came out, it couldn't be strong enough to offset the benefits gained from ascending else the player base would revolt. If you had the choice between being descended for the next six months or being a base race which would you choose? Even without the 47% bonus, ascended weapons still make being ascended the better choice. There is no reason at all to not ascend. If descension had been released at the same time that ascension was, then the process MIGHT be more balanced, but that's neither here nor there.
As it stands right now, to create a new account and be semi-decent and effective requires 46 weeks alone just in ascending. After ascending you need to build your shell of an account up. Just to be considered an average player will require at lest a year of play. That's too long to attract any new player to the game, so they feel either driven to buy an account or leave.
To really fix the game we need to start by assessing what the game would look like if it wasn't broken. Since it's a relatively simple principle of mathmatics, that's easy. If we were to plot the overall "power" of every player in the game the end result of the graph should be a rational with an asymptote or at the very least a radical based on a 4th or higher even numbered root. The most powerful player and the second most powerful player should be extremely close to either other in raw numbers, but weeks or months apart at their growth rate. This allows newer players to reach the arcing curve of the graph and become an "average" player relatively quickly, but growth gets harder and requires more skill as time goes on. The game was built on this principle, but not properly executed. The cost functions are almost all exponentially increasing, but the income function is also exponentially increasing, so growth ends up being a simple y=x. Ascension, size caps, and war end up being small speed bumps to this growth, not really changing much.
The answers aren't simple and straight forward. Changing the covert formula to double every 4th level instead of every second won't change much, just cheapen the level and eventually even out at the end of it all, instead of covert 41, it'll be covert 50. As the game sits in it's current format, fixing the power of players to match that graph is going to be a serious change. When it was a much more simple game without planets, ascension, motherships and what not, it'd be easier. As it stands, the changes need to be more complex to match the more complex game.
I'd like to preserve my conclusions of what's wrong separate from my suggestions, so here's your cutoff point if you want to disagree with my conclusions as opposed to my suggestions. My suggestions are just my take on it, whereas I believe my conclusions to be more grounded in mathematical facts.
I propose the following two changes at start, with more in the same general direction over time:
- Change covert levels to a diminishing return model for the basis of power at a rate of 10%. From level 0 to 1 will double your covert power, 1 to 2 make your covert 90% stronger, 2 to 3 will make your covert 81% stronger. That would mean covert level 42 would make your covert 1% stronger than 41, but covert 42 would still make your covert 9.87 times more powerful than covert 0. Obviously this would invalidate a certain level of covert, making it nearly pointless. To counter that, I suggest a similiar formula on changing losses. Currently, it's always 5% of what's sent on a sabotage, but if we were to change that to a diminishing loss formula based on a 1% less losses per level, that would mean that covert 42 would have only 03.34% losses. Obviously that formula can be changed easily by just changing the diminishing value. I also considered and maybe am still considering some form of losses and sabotage success being more grounded in covert level comparison and less so in spies invested, but I'm unsure of how to mathematically do that short of brute force.
- Make being descended more meaningful by subtracting a single ascension level for each time you're descended, and for a period of two weeks reducing your bonuses to 0 and returning your weapons to the power of a basic race. Painful yes? That's the point, allowing basic races to still have certain advantages in the fact that they never loose their bonuses in war and don't need to check on a second server. Obviously, to do this there would need to be chances to ascended as well, but I don't have enough data on how ETL managed to get a 7.5b TOC while the closest to him is a 4.*b TOC to suggest what to change or to even know what's broken. An amazing achievement, yes, but it points out the glaringly obvious imbalances in ascended as well.
I like it..
Only if the time to be descended is somehow lengthened.
