Improving competition and stability in Faction seasons

This thread was made to discuss improvements in Faction seasons. As some of you have already expressed, there is currently little competition around Faction gamer points, and many players are frustrated with the system for a number of reasons. One of these reasons is the recent appearance of fake factions (which Wonder Bread and Aardvark are working hard to remove.) We are also seeing quite a lot of account sharing because of the need to finish gamer points first, which is both against our and Facebook’s Terms of Use and a terrible idea in general with regards to account and personal information security.
We understand that these issues take away from the fun and competiveness of the feature, and we are committed to bringing back the awesome to this feature.


We would like to explore new ways to reward our true active players in Faction seasons. Here are some suggestions we are considering:


-Removing the "first to finish GPs tiebreaker". We realize that resolving ties based on whoever finishes their points first is flawed in a variety ways. Not only do the start/end times favor certain time zones, we've also had many complaints about account sharing which isn’t something we support or encourage, as mentioned above. Additionally, blowing through your gamer points in 10 minutes right when the day turns doesn't seem very competitive or fun, and we believe your overall season activity and efforts should be rewarded.


-Faction activity during the season, outside of GPs, your general activity amongst Faction members (messaging, boosts, helping etc.) can be valued in your season totals. Valuing your total activity should help reward active engaged players and make it harder for players who are trying to ruin the competitiveness of the feature.


Please let us know what you think of these suggestions, and if you have any of your own please let us know.

 

It's nice to see this being brought up(granted this is in ZS right now I assume it's only time before the other 3 games get the same adjustments)

So,if someone messaged there members saying,it it it it it it it it it it it it it it,all day,you're saying that'll be counted as points?

Boosts and helping on the other hand,yes,great idea.

 

This was brought up in ZS as it is a followup to this thread http://forums.kanoapps.com/showthread.php?7294 which was closed recently.

About the messaging, if we see a faction board full of "it it it it" it will be easy for us to decide to close it down. The point around evaluating general correspondence and daily actions is that it would be alot harder to take on multiple personalities and get away with it.

 

So does this mean factions/guilds/syndicates/armadas that don't have the full 25 players can still pull out a win?

 

No, a full faction of 25 real players that fulfill GPs and are active should still be favored to win, we're more interested here in quantifying activity and engagement of real players and rewarding them rather then having these dead factions of 25 float up in the ranks.

 

How is that fair to players who refuse to join big armadas because of constant conflict. Or they just want to be outside the armada. You need to create tiers to benefit all players not just full armadas.

 

its not fair to people who wont join a big armada, tough luck join one or dont waste the space

 

i support any idea which rewards play over login. I would like to see some sort of contest where we can get points for doing things that we would normally do to advance our game one way or another. Also a contest that doesnt end at the completion of another factions logging in, but something that will count our ENTIRE contribution on each and every day of the season, not six days and one hour, with the rest of sunday as being no consequence. I cant believe you cant come up with some kind of ranking system that is visible to all players and factions that want to compete so they know where they have to improve and how much is needed to do to get a high placement. I have no idea where you are going with messaging as being one of the factors of being a top faction? What is wrong with solid numbers doing the talking, the top factions know each other very well and real competition is desired by any and every top faction. If you want to give a reward to the best playing faction let everyone know the parameters of the competition and dont keep it secret on the formula, fight wins, hitlists, challenge helps, outbreaks assists, etc etc are quantifiable. Lets have a real competition and not some type of message competition. Let us decide it on the zombie slayer playing field, you have enough categories that you already track, use them, tell us what is scored and let us go! Its not that hard.

But dont turn it into another pointless competitition that people can win without actually playing. We have been dealing with that for too long already.

slave

 

http://forums.kanoapps.com/showthread.php?6566-Uncap-gamerpoints-7.9


Eric, please refer to my thread. For info on how people feel about this. Yes, Its only rated a 7.9, but its rated 33 times.

 

Alongside other examples, messaging was there to put a value on human interaction, it's not as easy to setup a script or bot to crank out meaningful messages to friends vs performing the same action over and over again. Your other points are inline with my original post, we also don't want to see a competition that results with a faction logging in on the last day and want to count activity overall. This is why we mentioned to remove the who finished their gps first condition and rather quantify and reward overall activity in the season.

Note that adding more categories wouldn't solve anything either, it will just extend the same problem. Also we don't want a system with more tasks which could make players feel they have more work to do on a daily basis rather then enjoying the game they way they like. We are trying to work with what we have in the current system as overhauling the faction seasons system is not an option with our current resources.

 

The GPs are currently based off of Fights, Bosses, Outbreaks and Help, which don't encompass all aspects of daily game play. Uncapping that would not be representative of overall activity and gameplay in a season, it could actually have a negative effect making people feel like they are grinding on the same feature daily to fulfill a GP cap that really has no end.

 

I think your Idea should be something completely different from GPs. A new feature on it's own. Maybe something like the Olympics. Were we compete in different events (bounties, fights, boss damage etc.) over so many days to determine who's the best (or does the most) at each.

 

Maybe , add one more section onto the gp's where the faction has to work together to get the GPS,rather that it be for the individual people in the factions?

 

waht game options do not give you gamer points?

Fight from your fight list rivals or attack a bounty or undead/ fight

outbreak assist, challenge helps, boss helps, filling squad contracts send/recieve gifts/ help

attack any boss owner or squad/ boss

use energy on outbreaks/ outbreak.

The only things i can think of that do not pay gamer points is ambushes, boobytraps, hitlisting, punches and vaccinee....

With the exception of vaccines... all of that is considered hard fighting. My expereience in the past yall (Kano) have kept all of those actions off of the leaderboards for the same reason. Encouraging players to fight hard or dirty results in Increased support mail.

Increased support mail means slower updates. Slower updates means even more support mail about no updates coming out.

How about that for a viscous cycle?

I was under the impression that gamer points where a way of counting the encouraged game actions.If you'dd like to make 2 ways of counting game actions I dont understand the reasoning.

Faction competition=Restricted gamerpoints=restricted actions count
Faction competition=Unlimed actions count=unlimited gamerpoints

I guess what you are saying is... In your idea of a fair faction competiton, You would both have to be A full faction fo 25, with every member logging in daily, and have the action count too?

That hardly seems fair to me. IF I am in a faction of 10 people, and us 10 together Fight more, help more, boss more, and kill more zombies ALL IN ONE DAY than another faction with 25 members did in a whole week. We should get a higher rank than that faction.

 

Not sure why my other comment regarding "chat wars" was deleted!
As I said you can't catch a fake Faction yet alone going to catch Factions using drivel to gain points.
Adding something as simple as hunting would have a drastic effect on a Faction full of Alts.

As for "adding more categories wouldn't solve anything either", of course it would.
You could add at least 8 categories without even having to add "chat". The winner would be the Faction that achieved the most hits on those achievements.

BTW, it's interesting to know you can snoop in and read our Faction posts, thus not making them very private!

 

Remove this post please, ended up being a double.

 

#1 and biggest issue is the faction is the Free EXP bonus BS that is given after each season.

That right there is and has caused the CHEATERS to come out in groves...

People in this game should be lucky that your not allowed to discuss The Faction cheaters.. Alot of people would be feeling pretty stupid in this game because its very obvious who they are. And its even funnier that some of them PROCLAIM how legit their factions are..

Now #1 ISSUE is the BONUS EXP.

Get rid of it. That will help immediately. That has caused the single biggest reasons why these idiots continue ruining this game..

Instead of KANO improving the game with things to capture the mind and getting more out of this game.. You just throw out FREE experience everywhere..

So much so is that People in this game thats all they Expect.. A FREE HANDOUT.

Give me free exp this, give me a calendar, give me a bonus.. F THAT. Take it all away.

Make people earn it.. Its really Pathetic to see how bad this game has gone down in that sense.

Cut back on these weapons.. Again its like Free EXP.

and one other big thing..

Just because some of the people that play your game spend alot of money..
DOESNT MEAN they should be ALLOWED to have AS MANY CHARACTERS as they WANT.

Plain and Simple.

 

I cannot understand the negativity to find out who really is being the best faction for the week, skywalker is right if ten people outperform 25, then they deserve to be the top faction, period. If 25 people perform minimum functions for one week, and do it perfectly, that does not make them the top faction! It doesnt!

Come up with a scoring system, lose this thinking about unlimited gps, and dont put a top end or cap on the competition, if someones faction wins 28,678 fights and second place is 11,345, thats cut and dry. It doesnt matter who logged in, how many in the faction, and how many messages they interacted with. If they are the top fighting faction for the week give them points for first place and move on, what i think you will see, is some factions will be great at winning fights, some factions great at doing helps, some factions great at killing bosses or doing outbreaks, but add them all together and you will find the best faction. We dont have to invent a new mousetrap, make the categories, add up the numbers for the day so we can see where we are, and let us go. Some factions wont be able to compete...this is not little league! not everyone gets a trophy, those that can will, and those that cant will log in and do the minimums and whine about the old days when they could get gps done at 0330 and win xp.

come on i want to know if we are better than TF, TBH, HM, Won, One life, wiesse rose and more, and if we arent i want to know how we can do things better to be better, the cream will rise to the top and we will seperate contender from pretenders real easy if you let PLAYING stats determine the winner, not message interactions......

 

If you really wanted to blow us away, make it a different contest each week, add/subract categories, make it a challenge, something, then it wont be the same faction every week, and if it is the same faction then that will tell you something wont it??????

one week make it fight wins, another week make it boss kills, another week make it outbreaks, you guys are the developers, your supposed have some imagination, some creativity. we give you tons of ideas and you want to turn the top faction contest into something where messaging in faction feed is a must???

i'm a little lost on that point truthfully, i get extremely frustrated to see every punch kill, every bounty put up in my faction feed, i want to read important stuff, like who needs help with their game, how do i assign hireds, etc, not who pk'd who or your bounty was worth 1,345,678 dollars.....we see that all day long, thats what chats are for.

 

I certainly like that Kano wants to expand on Gamer point Seasons, It all sounded great right up until I heard some of the proposed new categories, "messaging".....LOL. I assure you that that can and will be abused......perhaps the most abused aspect of the games ever. How in the heck is Kano going to police every single message that sent? Wasnt the reason for the "griefing" thing that Kano did not have the time or resources to deal with it on an individual basis? How many messages r sent a day on both mysace and FB combined?


As others have said...no new categories are necessary....just uncap the existing ones. By doing this it will make alt guilds a non factor. Im ok with the fact that some players may feel compelled to play more to get more dailys.....it is a competition right? I would certainly feel better about putting in a lil more work than being judged on my messages...that sounds scary sissy like.


Sorry.....but getting my head wrapped around this one is just never gonna happen, as much as I dont like Gamer points the way they r now....Ide rather them stay the way they are then switch to the new idea.