Fellowship recommendation mechanism is horrible

[crackie]

I just went through about 10 pages of fellowships being recommended to someone not in one and it's a sad and sorry state of affairs. The fact that I got more than 3 fellowships recommended is a step up from a few months ago where those were all you got, so there is some progress. However, most of them are still zombie fellowships with more black triangles on Elvenstats than active players. Looking at the join date of the remaining actives, some of them joined said driftwood FS recently, which means they probably used the in-game recommendation to get there. Most of these are also sub chap 5 new cities, with an occasional few that made it to Orcs. Isn't this really bad for the game? It's just promoting the sense that the game is dead if you see all these players around you, but nobody is actually playing. If it were me, I'd look around me and see nobody is actually playing and probably think it's not worth committing more time to it anymore too. I saw this happen first hand when I embdded in one of these fellowships incognito awhile ago to observe. Yeah, that FS is fully dead now too. None of those new players lasted. I know the City Move mechanism is not perfect, but the game needs a way to automate the culling of dead fellowships. At the very least, definitely don't push them to the top of the list for player recommendations.

 

[Astram]

Do you have a recommendation of how the game can Identify the "dead fellowships" or "zombie fellowships"?

 

[Smooper]

The game can see if a fellowship is half full of inactive players the same way ElvenStats can. These fellowships should not be on a "recommended" list of fellowships to join. If you are a mage or archmage in a fellowship with a dozen inactive players, dump them and your fellowship won't look like it doesn't care.

 

[Astram]

The game can see if a fellowship is half full of inactive players the same way ElvenStats can. These fellowships should not be on a "recommended" list of fellowships to join. If you are a mage or archmage in a fellowship with a dozen inactive players, dump them and your fellowship won't look like it doesn't care.

How does ElvenStats Identify Dead/Inactive fellowships?

 

[Smooper]

How does ElvenStats Identify Dead/Inactive fellowships?

By seeing they are full of dead/inactive players. Why would the game recommend you go to fellowship A with 12 inactive accounts and a few open spots when they could recommend fellowship B with a couple inactive accounts but also a couple of open spots. The game should recommend fellowships that have open recruitment and high activity levels. It is counter productive to tell a new player to join fellowship A. As Crackie said, this player is just going to quit because they will assume the game is dead.

Edit: Also the game has much better methods for tracking active fellowships then ElvenStats which relies on ranking points. Elvenar has access to logins and any sort of activity that you would want to use for parameters.

 

[Pheryll]

How does ElvenStats Identify Dead/Inactive fellowships?

It logs the last score change of each player by dynamically accessing their score.

 

[Astram]

I have never seen a notification on ElvenStats of Dead/Inactive Fellowships. When you select the "compatible fellowships" It gives you a list and on there are none shown as Dead/Inactive and only by searching thru them can you find them. I am not talking about Players here

 

[Pheryll]

@Astram, dead fellowship came from @crackie's definition below. That is over 50% of the players having a black triangle constitutes a "zombie fellowship."

However, most of them are still zombie fellowships with more black triangles on Elvenstats than active players.

 

[Darielle]

I have never seen a notification on ElvenStats of Dead/Inactive Fellowships. When you select the "compatible fellowships" It gives you a list and on there are none shown as Dead/Inactive and only by searching thru them can you find them. I am not talking about Players here

On Elvenstats, they do have fellowships with a straight line showing no activity. But I grant you it's not straightforward in automating it to weed out dead fellowships.

 

[Yavimaya]

I will say in my first 2/3 weeks I almost stopped playing bc couldn't get any response when I would say hello or ask the fs a question and wouldn't ever get a response when I tried.

 

[Astram]

@Astram, dead fellowship came from @crackie's definition below. That is over 50% of the players having a black triangle constitutes a "zombie fellowship."

I get that and understand, but what I am asking is HOW Elvenstats Tells you that an FS is Dead. I just pulled up that listing and found 2 in the first 25 meet the definition of Dead FS. Mind you, I think ElvenStats is a great tool, but it does not "Tell" you the FS is dead.

 

[Count Rupert]

I get that and understand, but what I am asking is HOW Elvenstats Tells you that an FS is Dead. I just pulled up that listing and found 2 in the first 25 meet the definition of Dead FS. Mind you, I think ElvenStats is a great tool, but it does not "Tell" you the FS is dead.

You're right it doesn't tell you they're dead. They do however give you indicators with the black triangles which is more than we're getting ingame. The game has actual login information instead of resorting to using the last time the last time there was a score change. The game uses an indicator of sorts in that cities that go 60 days without logging in have them removed from the map, but to know that you have to enter the city and exit to the world map and if you're looking at your city, the city in question has been removed from the map. Those cities retain their FS membership until the FS kicks them out. Which given some FS are all zombies isn't going to happen. So it's not very useful. The game should be able to check the activity levels of those in FS and only suggest those FS with reasonable activity.

 

[Silly Bubbles]

I assume that this is on the app because browser version just lists all fellowships in ranking order and this seem to work well enough. There is even an option to only see "Application only" or "Join directly" fellowships. Maybe they should do the same for the app version rather than do recommendations?

 

[mucksterme]

One way to get an idea of active Fellowships
Click on that little trophy under your Avatar in the game.
Look at the Spire and FA tabs and see what Fellowships tend to do well there.
It is impossible for an FS to consistantly do well in the Spire without an active membership.

 

[Darielle]

I get that and understand, but what I am asking is HOW Elvenstats Tells you that an FS is Dead. I just pulled up that listing and found 2 in the first 25 meet the definition of Dead FS. Mind you, I think ElvenStats is a great tool, but it does not "Tell" you the FS is dead.

The only thing I would suggest is that Inno remove any fellowship from its recommended list if they have more than 5 black triangles. That seems a straightforward thing to implement.

 

[Iyapo]

One way to get an idea of active Fellowships
Click on that little trophy under your Avatar in the game.
Look at the Spire and FA tabs and see what Fellowships tend to do well there.
It is impossible for an FS to consistantly do well in the Spire without an active membership.

Interestingly enough on mobile you can not see the Tournament, FA or Spire Tabs unless you are in a fellowship. Without a fellowship all you can see are the player tab and the fellowship tab(top 50 only).

 

[Ihrlaen]

Elvenstats is useful for players to evaluate the status of players. It uses the (arbitrary) statistic of point changes in the most recent two weeks to determine 'activity'. We then manually evaluate whether a fellowship is (insert your relative valuation here).

INNO, on the other hand, does not have to use it. They already 'know' if a player is inactive using their own arbitrary measure.

There will always be some people at the outer edges, inactive cities are moved to the opposite side of the great abyss.

This gets evaluated every week (the weekly move and purge). We are simply suggesting that a tiny bit of care be taken, using that same data, to aggregate this to their respective fellowships and prevent recommendations for players, especially new players (aka INNOs most-likely spenders) that are highly unlikely to provide any value (aka player retention).

As it stands, the fellowship recommendations are not adding value, they are hurting potential revenue.

 

[mucksterme]

Interestingly enough on mobile you can not see the Tournament, FA or Spire Tabs unless you are in a fellowship. Without a fellowship all you can see are the player tab and the fellowship tab(top 50 only).

I had not considered that.
Been a long time since I was not in an FS
I went to one of my defunct cities
And disbanded the one man FS there
And then saw that you cannot see those tabs on pc either.
Although the quick way around that would be create a solo FS just for that purpose

 

[crackie]

I did some more research and crowdsourcing. It could be the algo is suggesting based on a city's size (score?) and is why I'm seeing mostly newbie fellowships because my city is new. Someone else with a small inactive alt (chap 3) was also seeing only newbie fellowships being offered. Another player in chap 6 saw mostly newbie fellowships suggested as well, but they were more full and more dead. By that, I mean instead of 5 newbies in the FS, it might have 20, but only 3 active. However, someone in Chapter 9 got much better offerings with maybe only 5 triangles in a full squad and varied chapters. Very small sample size, I admit, but kinda weird you get more promising offerings the more established you are. (If you have an idle alt and want to share your data, feel free.)

Either way, it's not a good idea to put all the blind mice on the same sinking ship if you're herded by size. Not the best use of the highest spenders in the demographics as @Ihrlaen already pointed out. An newbie AM doesn’t know left from right in the game yet. They won’t know who all is inactive in their group and they prob also think the FS looks like a better sell at almost max capacity, even if they have an inkling some players have already petered out. Most are not going to know about Elvenstats site to use it to help manage the FS. They will probably do their best to avoid utilizing their AM-issued trebuchet. Over time, the inactives will slowly grow in number until they become the dominant type and the newbie AM is no wiser to the situation until the FS reaches full zombie mode. Based on what AMs here have written, running a FS ain't easy, even with casual groups. Recruiting is hard™ and probably the highest cause of AM burnout, but the market is favoring some of the least qualified with an advantage while everyone else has to deal with an overly diluted pool with too many FS and not enough players to go around. Maybe players shouldn't be allowed to start a FS until Fairies (graduated first 5 and 1 settlement chapter to understand basic game concepts).

They prob have metrics that pushed their decision to revamp chap 1-5, but I wonder what the metrics say about retention after chap 5. I wonder if there's a big dropoff after 5 and 8. Doesn't seem like most of the big dogs in newbie FS go past 8. There seems to be more than one Orc wall.

 

[Genefer]

Last time I was looking for a new fellowship the suggested fellowships had between 4 and the highest 17 members. I'm not sure if my city would be considered large, but I am officially in chapter 16.

I did not look at the member status,

Seems the simplest method would just remove inactive cities to a separate server or realm until a player returns to the game. Assuming removed cities are automatically removed from Fellowships - if not that is the problem, but it shouldn't be difficult to fix.