Distorted Ship Shard

Replies

  • All of you that have time to stop by this thread and say "sucks to be you" are really great! As far as where to put the people on this shard, I would think they could chunk us out in groups of 5 or 10 to shards made up of older players but less active than this shard, so that maybe we are still locked out of top 20, but have a prayer of staying in top 500 without spending hours and crystals.
  • Redistribution is one solution - particularly to other shards of the same vintage as players in this shard. The calculation should have done this at the start anyway. Some servers are harder / easier everyone gets that. This server is by far the hardest because of an oversight - that's the difference. More than happy to start at 12,000 on yours!

    Aren't shards capped at 20,000? That would mean people would need to be booted off to make room for you. How do you decide who goes and where they go?

    I'm just saying there's a lot of logistics you aren't taking into account. Also EA has stated multiple times that they don't shuffle leaderboards as this has been brought up by players in the past.

    Just let it go man.
    ΔCŁBØSØX | Discord: aclbosox#8982
  • aclbosox wrote: »
    Redistribution is one solution - particularly to other shards of the same vintage as players in this shard. The calculation should have done this at the start anyway. Some servers are harder / easier everyone gets that. This server is by far the hardest because of an oversight - that's the difference. More than happy to start at 12,000 on yours!

    Aren't shards capped at 20,000? That would mean people would need to be booted off to make room for you. How do you decide who goes and where they go?

    I'm just saying there's a lot of logistics you aren't taking into account. Also EA has stated multiple times that they don't shuffle leaderboards as this has been brought up by players in the past.

    Just let it go man.

    Ship shards are not that big, and how many shards have players that have not logged on in 6 months, pretty easy to decide who goes.

    Anyway, many of you are missing the point. When you unlock arena, you are on an even playing field, people are within a reasonable range of power. It was not the case with this particular shard. I for example had just reached lvl 85 a few says before ships unlocked, and I got thrown into this shard with people who were clearly whales, and had all of their pilots at level 85, where all of mine were like 72. I was like half the power of everyone around me. I have since "caught" up in power, but I have to do all 5 battles a day just to get under 500. My guildmates with less fleet power do the requisite 1 battle a day to get the activity and get top 50. Some are newer, and some are older as far as how long they have been playing the game, but by far, everyone I talk to indicates this is truly an outlier. I can guarantee all of you peeps who are telling us to let it go don't have 7 star capital ships and 350k power at rank 500 on your shards.
  • Ignoring the other trolls, where exactly are you guys trying to go with this?
    1) Devs already stated they don't mess about with leaderboards, and I doubt that they're going to start since it'll open the floodgates for more shenanigans. (Redistribution counts as messing about with the leaderboards, and moreover, if they send you to a different leaderboard, it is only logical that they'd have to send someone from your destination leaderboard into the hellhole to replace your position. Why would you wish that on another poor innocent player?)
    2) I've already suggested before, for the amount of investment you are putting into this hellhole, you're probably better off creating a new account and this is the probably the only feasible/plausible suggestion you're going to get. No one else has suggested an even remotely feasible/plausible suggestion yet.
    3) If you're just putting this out here to whine about it, then well, carry on. But you're probably just going to attract more trolls though.
  • Yesterday I saw a 7 star chimaera at rank 920 on this shard.
  • Dev have to know they did a big mistake with this shard. As you said they will probably do nothing, but I wont start a new account, wont spent a penny for ships, and wont play arena ships. Ty CG
  • @Huatimus

    Your solution is starting a new account? Come on don't be ridiculous...
  • Magulama wrote: »
    @Huatimus

    Your solution is starting a new account? Come on don't be ridiculous...

    @Magulama

    Eagerly awaiting for anyone else to even suggest something that can remotely be put into action right now.
    And it's not ridiculous, I've already read of others in that hellhole of yours quit/give up/make a new account. (Applauding their practicality and rationality and knowing when to let it go)
  • I appreciate your input providing us with a solution to the broken shard, letting over a years playing go to waste, by starting again is not rational nor practical.
  • It doesn't open any floodgates. Most arena shards are relatively random in nature, some are more competitive than others but ultimately selection was random. You have a situation here where a flawed calculation concentrated active players. This problem was exacerbated recently by the changing of the reward schemes which effectively funded additional refreshes in this particular shard

    In my mind "whining" constitutes a complaint that can be solved with patience or investment. As previously stated, this was an oversight that now requires materially more time and resources versus any other shard out there

    The recent reward change was to stimulate activity in ships in general. However, this shard was probably a factor in several low activity shards of the same vintage. This further distorts my Arena Shard with half of the guys in the top being in this shard and the other half being in shards that are gifting away currency

    As you rightly point out, the only solution here is to quit. Doesn't sound like a particularly attractive commercial proposition for CG / EA
  • It doesn't open any floodgates. Most arena shards are relatively random in nature, some are more competitive than others but ultimately selection was random. You have a situation here where a flawed calculation concentrated active players. This problem was exacerbated recently by the changing of the reward schemes which effectively funded additional refreshes in this particular shard

    In my mind "whining" constitutes a complaint that can be solved with patience or investment. As previously stated, this was an oversight that now requires materially more time and resources versus any other shard out there

    The recent reward change was to stimulate activity in ships in general. However, this shard was probably a factor in several low activity shards of the same vintage. This further distorts my Arena Shard with half of the guys in the top being in this shard and the other half being in shards that are gifting away currency

    As you rightly point out, the only solution here is to quit. Doesn't sound like a particularly attractive commercial proposition for CG / EA

    If you open up the precedent for messing about with the leaderboards, you will be flooded with the following requests:
    F2P players looking for an easier leaderboard, since their logic would be that F2P should only have to fight F2P and whales can just fight amongst themselves.
    Players who have quit for a few months and want to come back to the game but want a new leaderboard to compete in
    "Bullied" players, i.e. from Arena Collusion seeking an out from their leaderboard.
    And probably other reasons that I can't think of yet. Not to mention, it sounds like a very manual process and their customer support is going to be overloaded with extra work entertaining all these requests.
    Plus what I have mentioned earlier, how do you 'fairly' distribute the affected guys into other leaderboards? Who's going to be the unlucky victim that will take your place in the hellhole instead?

    If enough people vote with their wallets by boycotting/quitting, I suppose that could make EA/CG look into this issue. Unfortunately, if what the above poster said is true regarding a 7* Chimera at rank 920, you all are spending a lot more $$$ than other leaderboards. From a business point of view and if I were EA/CG, I think I'd happily let you guys carry on spending more while I roll around in my Galaxy of $$$.
  • I am p2p and this shard just make me stop paying for ships. Bad businnes for EA.
  • Hi all. This thread lured me as I started looking for my fleet shard mates and it turned out we are sitting on the same boat. I admit I joined ships as soon as possible and probably that was the mistake. When arena started I fell around place 1k after that I intentionally dropped further to 3k something, but from then on I gradually moved to top100. I agree it's so much harder and when I see my arena or guild mates fleets it's laughable that they have top spots. As long as there were no crystals involved it was only a matter of zeta materials. I could have lived with that, but since introduction of crystals it bacame impossible to compete in our already very competetive shard. At some point in time I felt punished only because I was active in the game.

    That's not a ranting or complaining it's just a life and that happened to most of us. Discussing all around will not change anything. Waiting for Deus ex machina won't happen and if it will we may not like a solution. Let's look at our options.

    1. Do nothing - I think was already covered
    2. Stop playing ships - active players won't do that (like 500 in our shard)
    3. Stop paying - that's an option but EVERYBODY should be solidar and join a boycott
    4. Stop playing - natural process which can be speed up, probably most of us considered it as some point in time

    This is what we can do. Another portion of solutions would relly on developers. They will of balancing the game and rewarding active players - wasn't that a reason why crystals were introduced in first place?
    1. Divide our shard to few smaller ones (probably 5) - this won't interfere with other shards and top100 would have possibility of reaching top20, while top500 could reach top100 easily.
    2. Distribute us to existing shards - heavily discussed here. It could be a selective process, adding one, two or five players here and there shouldn't impact a lot existing shards. We don't know what is a shard max capacity. If it's locked at 20k removing least active players and migrating them to one of new shards could be a solution. They will still probably fall immediattely on the bottom of new shard.

    If both solutions are possible we would need a feedback from developer. A plus is that they could utilise existing solutions and implementations.

    Hovewer I would like to propose another way of handling this. Let's recap some well known facts
    * we have different payout times for everybody, this means if you move to another country or started an account on your holidays in a time zone far far away you are stucked for the rest of your game time
    * some of the older arena shards are either stale or have well organised co-operation on line or discord
    * people have their private life and playing around 5pm - 7pm does impact it, I think that TB adressed it very well and it's a optimal way of handling it
    * some players like to compete (myself) and are into challanges (Team Instinct) while others don't mind so much and they are here for fun

    A solution which addresses all of above points is a league system for both Arenas. I did some quick calculations and would like to present my results, it's based on my assumptions as I don't have all details.
    1) A League season lasts 8 weeks, 4 weeks or a month - for further analysis let's assume 8 weeks.
    2) Each League consists of 300 teams.
    3a) Each player faces 5 random team daily based on current ranking. This makes 50 small buckets of 6 teams and 8 weeks is the best as there would be 56 league days and potentially you could fight 280 different opponents.
    3b) Randomisation would be done based on normal (Gaussian) distribution. Top players would have very small chances to fight with league bottoms and vice versa.
    4) Instead of that we could play against each player but that require 2 parts of season (match, re-match) and different number of teams per league. With that solution home team could have some specific bonusses (defence) and away team would get bonus to attack.
    5) There are different League Tiers. Top Tier, Tier1, Premier League, Bundesliga, Premiership or whatever we call it would be on top. Below that 4 sub-leagues, ie. Tier2 - 4 Leagues, Tier3 - 16 and so on. This would ensure scalability. Detail numbers below. Tier10 would have ~260k separate leagues which accommodates 78m players. From Tier10 and on further scalability wouldn't be needed and we could keep the same amount of leagues per tier. https://imgur.com/a/0y0mx
    6) After each season there are promotions and demotions. Top 20 players qualify to Tier above and bottom 80 players fall to Tiers below. If there are any ties let's do random selection as we have currently with Rancor - a better solution could be provided later. With that 1/3 of your league gets exchanged each season :-)
    7) Whenever a new player starts arena they would be assigned to currently lowest available League. For instance if Tier9 is not fully covered they are located there and reaching Tier1 would potentially take him 8 seasons ie. 16 months.
    8) Daily you have to do only 5 matches with preselected opponents. Potentially we could remove time constraint as we have with TB or we could expand it to 10 minutes in case there are any timeout teams (Kenobi+Zarris). You can start second match without need to wait for 1st to expiry. In case player doesn't approach, ties or forfeits a match it's counted as a defeat. With that again active players are in advantage how it should be.
    9a) Rewards - the most important :) are tied to Tier Level. They should somehow reflect existing implementation but definitely they should grow with Tiers. Advancing to higher Tier and receiving lower rewards should not be penalized so much being in lower tier and taking a top spot. In general rewards would be flattened.
    9b) There would be 3 types of rewards: daily - similar to what we have today, weeekly - based on weekly ranking - similar to what TB offers and at the end of the season - especially top20. Daily and weekly rewards are in place for players who joined in the middle of current season.
    10) Rankin system can be one of two. Simply - percentage of won attempts (still not taking mandatory fight is counted as a defeat), Star based - similar to what we have with Dark and Light side paths. Flawless won 3*, 1 Team member down 2*, Victory 1*. However if you lose, tie, forfeit or don't approach opponent team gets 1*. With second approach there would be potentially 20* to win daily. This system would be similar to introduced by TB. In both approaches you can pay to replay matches to improve your score. If it comes to percantage, all matches would count original and replay. When it comes to stars you can only improve your score, but if you lose at any point opponent gets his star.
    11) With such way of playing matches we could also think about introducing aspect similar to what we had we tourneys. One team on defense and the rest roster can be used only once. In first phase it could be too much but worth to think about this in future.

    All in all. League solution would provide many benefits: competing with all players and being top 1 giving a right to brag about it, scalable rewards, more and better arrangement of teams. Even if current shards are not properly divided with that approach they should equalized quite quick. And the most important. With more coming content it would give many players more and flexible time.

    Initial arrangement could be random, based on GP or ranking based on current spots in arena taking under consideration length of time in game. Hope you went through this and wish for some discussion. Does anybody know how to reach developers and discuss with them on potential solutions?

    TLDR; I propose that we change style of playing both arenas to league oriented style with promotions and demotions.
  • Ameepa
    20 posts Member
    edited October 2017
    Huatimus wrote: »
    If enough people vote with their wallets by boycotting/quitting, I suppose that could make EA/CG look into this issue. Unfortunately, if what the above poster said is true regarding a 7* Chimera at rank 920, you all are spending a lot more $$$ than other leaderboards. From a business point of view and if I were EA/CG, I think I'd happily let you guys carry on spending more while I roll around in my Galaxy of $$$.

    I assure you that my claim about that 920 rank chimaera is true and have seen some other 7* capital ships too lately. Usually the ranks around that 1k are just people like me who are mostly F2P so we are stuck there. My guess is that these are players who have just now started to spend on ship after the reward system got changed and are now trying to climb.

    Most likely it is indeed very good business, but remains to be seen for how long.

  • You seem to be missing the point - every shard has some minor issues

    Collusion is a problem on some shards but is the result of players not adhering to the spirit of the game. Moving one player doesn't resolve this

    It is any players decision to quit, if they want to come back they need to accept the shard does not stand still for them

    F2P players largely accept that spending gives an advantage in this game, if it didn't this game would not make any money. How do you even make such a shard?

    None of the above factors feature an issue involved in any calculation, or flaws in the distribution of the initial ship shards, simply player behaviour

    In terms of redistribution, you'd simply take ten active players out of this shard and replace them with players who have been inactive for months. If you repeat this a number of times you will give a healthy level of activity to a number of shards while diffusing the chronic problem on this shard. This would result in a more even landscape for all players.

    As a final point, I appreciate the constructive nature in expressing your point of view
  • This is a pretty good idea. Whales will spend regardless, so let's take that out of the equation. The light spenders/dolphins in this distorted shard would have motivation to play the game and spend now that they have a chance of attaining a decent ranking. For the other inactive shards, a little healthy competition is introduced. This would cause the top players to spend some money to keep their top ranking.
    As it is now, they don't need to spend money or only a little to achieve the top ranking. Financially, this would be a big win for EA.
  • Also if you want to take vacation you fall down few levels and stay with plankton. Recovery should be quite quick. Currently you have no chance to catch top of your shard unless you spend like dazylion of crystals or start a new account.
  • @CG_TopHat would be great to get a response on this. There's obviously a lot of information and debate in the thread above but it boils down to a shard that is artificially more active than any other in the game, given the ship shard selection calculation appears to have been flawed for Summer 2016 starters. Ship shards clearly have a wide range of activity but this shard is something else - I'm on a line chat with over 50 players and people are regularly putting in more than two hours a day to hit the top spots.

    Given the change in rewards and the new content, this is leading a an unsustainable situation in terms of total time dedicated to the game. A lot of people on this shard are clearly competitive, myself included, but it comes down to the fact that if we can't afford the time, it's probably time to throw in the towel.

    Would be grateful if someone could look at the data and see both the level of activity and the avaerge character arena ranks on this shard. We believe almost every active player at the cut off date from a summer 2016 start was included in this shard
  • In terms of another data point, only seven and falling six star capital ships in the top 50 on this shard now...
  • It seems like a crazy ship shard. My intuition is more that you were among the first to join a ship arena (I probably went with the second arena ship shard). I agree there should be some rebalancing every now and then: after three months, you should have the chance to join a new arena (something like tourneys).
  • Zanth
    37 posts Member
    edited October 2017
    I am an early July 2016 starter and am an active daily player. I am no whale. I have moments as a dolphin but mostly I swim amongst the fish. I have been top 10 in SA for 6mo+, easily taking 1st on any day. My SA shardmates are a great crew and we have a large and lively discord server. Amongst our top 25, we have at least half on the same ship shard as the OP or one exactly like it given the start dates of the 12 folks I know from the discord server. We are all baffled at the imbalance. Others from our squad arena top 25 take 1st with ease, top 10 without a single refresh and often not falling at all over night. Contrast those fleets with ours, we (the 12) are far more powerful, more diversified and getting anywhere near the top 10 takes 2-3 refreshes for the whales. I have trouble getting to the top 200 without a refresh. Right now, in our 300-400, we have at least 12 7* Chimaera, fully maxed 468k+ fleets. That’s 120k more power than those of my SA mates ranking in the top 10 on their fleet shards.

    If SA shards are populated by people who started around the same time, and FA followed a similar system but implemented an additional layer by parsing each player through an algorithm that WAI programmatically but falls short on the human logic in implementing such an algorithm, then the player distribution isn’t equal. That is the problem.

    Where are the other 12-25 top folks from my SA shard? Why are they not included on my FA clusterbar? Because despite being active, and half of those folks maintaining their ranks for 6+ months, they signed up later for ships and ended up with very inactive players from the summer of 2016 or were placed with players from the fall of 2016.

    The fall-out has been well discussed here. One suggestion, if not for ships then for any new mode that may require shard PvPs, is to replicate the SA rosters. This could be a solution for ships as well. Every player is automatically assigned to a server that matches their squad arena shard regardless of any activity running ships. Redistributing FA shards so they match SA shards should be manageable. It would rebalance the game overall. If this is too much, then splitting up the problem shards would work. If it means 6000 less on a shard, so be it. As it is now, people are halting ship participation altogether, so this might entice some re-engagement.
    Post edited by Zanth on
  • @AJRSuperstar The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over, expecting different results. If the devs haven't reached out by now, they never will. Most likely it's not even possible to manipulate leaderboards as that would leave EA open to corruption. Honestly, the best thing to do is just let it go. Do the best you can and call it a day.
    ΔCŁBØSØX | Discord: aclbosox#8982
  • Insanity is this shard. The only feedback I've ever heard is they don't want to set a precedent by amending shards. This implies that they can fix the issue and any analysis of this shard would lead to s change as it's clearly a chronic QOL issue for everyone on it

    However, I'm not going to let this go because for me it means quitting the game. I'd rather exhaust myself on this issue than battling 15 battles a day on my shard.
  • @CG_TopHat I for one, as likely is the case with many, used to spend quite a bit on this game. However, as high end materials have become in increasing demand and having no way to farm my way up this shard to improve my ability to farm zeta, I have completely stopped spending anything. Until this shard is addressed I will not spend another cent.
  • However, I'm not going to let this go because for me it means quitting the game. I'd rather exhaust myself on this issue than battling 15 battles a day on my shard.

    Same here. This will probably lead to abandoning the game for me.

  • Mattos
    24 posts Member
    edited October 2017
    Look at my friend who is on another shard. (Edit : its a sept 2016 account )
    23mk575.jpg
    Screen has been taken 5 min ago. It's completly impossible on our shard ... All this story make me sick . And no response and explanation from the dev make me even more silly.
    I wont spend an € until this problem is resolve and I hope, but wont convince, others will do the same. It's completly unfair and discouraging.
  • Mattos wrote: »
    Look at my friend who is on another shard. (Edit : its a sept 2016 account )
    23mk575.jpg
    Screen has been taken 5 min ago. It's completly impossible on our shard ... All this story make me sick . And no response and explanation from the dev make me even more silly.
    I wont spend an € until this problem is resolve and I hope, but wont convince, others will do the same. It's completly unfair and discouraging.

    Rank 286 with a 5 star capital and 4 star ships? Sounds right to me
  • Insanity is this shard. The only feedback I've ever heard is they don't want to set a precedent by amending shards. This implies that they can fix the issue and any analysis of this shard would lead to s change as it's clearly a chronic QOL issue for everyone on it

    However, I'm not going to let this go because for me it means quitting the game. I'd rather exhaust myself on this issue than battling 15 battles a day on my shard.

    I'm not saying quit playing. I'm saying please do continue playing, but don't expect devs to just drop in and break up the leaderboard any time soon. It would open up a whole can of worms where everyone will find justification for shuffling leaderboards around. It is what it is.
    ΔCŁBØSØX | Discord: aclbosox#8982
  • aclbosox wrote: »
    @AJRSuperstar The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over, expecting different results. If the devs haven't reached out by now, they never will. Most likely it's not even possible to manipulate leaderboards as that would leave EA open to corruption. Honestly, the best thing to do is just let it go. Do the best you can and call it a day.

    There is only 1 precedent for manipulating the leaderboard, and that is to move a cheater from his leaderboard into a cheater leaderboard. So it's not that it's impossible but the process is manual, and restricted to such specific conditions only. (And I fully agree that Devs should NOT relax this condition as it will open up the floodgates for multiple requests for Leaderboard shuffling)
  • I think that screenshot above is from another shard, haven't seen a five star ship anywhere on our shard for months. There are now only a handful of six star ships in the top 50

    As someone else suggested earlier in the thread, most requests for a change come from people wanting to escape collusion or the fact they have quit, returned and fallen behind. There's nothing wrong with the fundamental structure of the shard.

    If the process is manual, it would probably take a few hours to undertake this process. However, there are hundreds of people on this shard spending an additional hour a day because the intitial calculation was broken.
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