I received the notice today that I am in the ship shard which has an aberrant number of participants and is unusually competitive. I’m sure that everyone else in the shard shared my frustration at having to deal with this since the inception of ships. It set everyone in this shard back relative to other players in the game. Other members of my guild stated that they had to play very few ship battles a day to take top ranks, and their fleets were extremely underpowered compared to the fleets that were in the 500-800 range in this aberrant shard. So despite players investing in their fleets, they could not receive the crystals, and fleet currency (leading to zetas) that everyone else was getting.
It was stated that this shard was created due to a certain algorithm, and that the result was not desired. However the inbox message says that the solution is to “migrate” our shard into new shards of “roughly the same size as a normal ship shard”. This does not address the fault of the algorithm that originated the problem. The shard is obviously made up of extremely competitive players, and splitting them into a few groups doesn’t change that at all. They should be redistributed across all shards, and not just keep competing with the same players again.
If the shard is just split into a few new shards, then the players will still be competing at a much greater than average rate, and still get way below average rewards. For instance, I currently fight to try and break into the top 500 with a fleet that is one of the best in my guild. Many of my guildmates can get top 10 with one battle per day. If the outlier ship shard is divided into 5 shards, then I might be fighting these same people to get top 100.
I’m sad that there is probably no way to make up for the months of relatively poor rewards that the average members of this shard have received, but splitting the same members up seems like a very poor solution.
5
Replies
Actually, it works to your advantage to compete with the same people (only fewer numbers) as many of you may already be in contact with one another. Unless, of course, you all are intent on letting CG/EA keeping crystals that could be yours.
In game guild: TNR Uprising
I beat the REAL T7 Yoda (not the nerfed one) and did so before mods were there to help
*This space left intentionally blank*
Heh, my shard was initially very worried this way gonna happen, and we were gonna get some new whales to our shard. Would not have made us happy if it was on one of our busier po times.
It sucks this whole thing has to be a problem. Curious to see what the actually result of this is in a few days.
Ship shards started when ships opened are all going to be made up of more competitive players than squad shards. They are smaller and were only made of active players at the time of conception.
The situation you are being put in is very similar to someone new who started at the same time as a few whales, or older players alt accounts and gets stuck in an arena shard with them. Similar but different. But they will be stuck in that competitive shard just like you would be. It's not ideal, but it follows with the normal mode of game play.
It sucks,I'm sure.
I'm curious because that would influence my opinion on how the players should be compensated. For example if there are 20.000 players on that particular leaderboard instead of the "normal" 10.000 (just an example, i don't know how many players there are on a normal leaderboard), anyone ranking #1000 or worse isn't effected at all.
I do sympathize with the players effected by this though, but compensation fairly is going to be rather complex.
This is not equitable in comparison to other shards. For instance, report taking a vacation for two week and dropping to rank 41.
We need clarification as to how many people are active in the other shards and to have the same level of competition.
Exactly. There are 8 people in my arena shard who all happen to be in this abarent fleet shard. We all have spent the time and sometimes more money on this game to consistently get to the top of the arena ranks. We put the same effort into ships and can’t crack 500. This is not right.
This is the most important point. We are all missing out on zetas compared to everyone else.
Sort by arena power. So everybody who has a certain amount of power is lumped in together and then after a few months, the players who rage quit (I can sympathise) or whatever get knocked back to a shard their own level.
Maybe a league system?
Is that for real? They were made of only active players at the time? So where does a player that comes back from taking over a year off go? Do they put him into a new players shard? I knew they were smaller, and most in mine had the same story, they started at launch, took 8-10 months off, came back to the game just before the launch of ships. I definitely assumed there were a bunch of inactives at the bottom of every shard, even right when they launched ships.
Yes, from my understanding, just like arena you were placed in a shard when you open the game mode for the first time. So at inception, only players playing at that time would have been placed in a shard.
So if you never opened ships because you were not playing and then you came back today you would be put in whatever open shard there is. I believe
6 months @ 4 weeks per month @ 7 days per week = 168 days.
168 days @ 100 extra ship currency for finishing top 200 instead of top 500 = 16,800 extra ship currency.
16,800 ÷ 2,000 currency per mat =
8.4 zeta mats missed out on.
No one's suffering.
Well that’s the issue, it seems like they are just going to split this shard in half which doesn’t solve any of the issues.
That statement makes no sense. The only "issue" was that your shard had more players than other shards. So dividing the shard resolves all of the issues that made it the outlier compared to other ship shards.
In game guild: TNR Uprising
I beat the REAL T7 Yoda (not the nerfed one) and did so before mods were there to help
*This space left intentionally blank*
Adding one or two people to each shard would make little difference to that shard. What “suffering” are you going to experience? Having to compete against one or two extra individuals? I’m sure it’s nice to get top spots with no effort. When you see that there are 1,000 players in a shard that are all getting shafted, how is your reaction “I only care about the slightest inconvenience to myself, and no one else?”
Keep in mind that we haven't seen the in-game message you're talking about. I can't draw any conclusions from messages I don't have. But, from what you've said, it doesn't sound like it's a straight 50/50 split into two new leaderboards. From what you've said it sounds like they're taking your current board and breaking it up into existing boards that are now normally-populated. So if the average board had 500 players (which, again, is a guess--but a slightly more educated guess. I spent 6 days straight at 321 in my board by just starting a battle and retreating instantly, so we're probably not far off) and your board has 500 players, then they're not just going to break you into two leaderboards with a population of 750 and leave all the others at 500.
It sounds like they're going to normalize you. But, again, you have to keep in mind that it's hard for us to say anything since we don't know what they told you. We only have our interpretation of your interpretation of what they told you, which is a photocopy of a photocopy of a photocopy.
No. That is not the only issue. Obviously that would be a solution if it was. The makeup of the shard is the issue. They selected whales to populate this shard.
According to my guild leader: “At one point somebody looked at the top 50 and the average arena rank was around 2, and combining the top 50 would've made a top 3 guild”. That is not the makeup of an average ship shard.
Your solution is to move your ridiculous shard into other shards to make them ridiculous too? Sorry mate you're on your own with your poor suggestion. I'm pretty sure CG would rather appease one shard than **** off x-1 shards (where x = total number of fleet shards).
Newsflash : all ship shards have whales - some have many. Once yours are broken up, it'll be like every other ship shard.
In game guild: TNR Uprising
I beat the REAL T7 Yoda (not the nerfed one) and did so before mods were there to help
*This space left intentionally blank*