Use BENEFITS, rather than Costs, for the Global Rank

[DeletedUser61]

Proposal: Global Rank should be based on BENEFITS (Invested Knowledge Points), rather than COSTS.

A goodly portion of the "blame" for the current kerfuffle about Repeatable Quest lies with the developer's use of Costs to define Global Rank.
Benefits would be a FAR BETTER CRITERIA for a City Builder.

Cost/Benefit Ratios, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost–benefit_analysis, are the typical means of evaluating performance in "real world" construction projects and other capital investements.

• Costs are the current Required Population + Required Culture + weighted by distance Relics
• Benefits SHOULD BE the total number of Knowledge Points used to
  1. Research Capabilities in the Technology Tree
  2. Level Ancient Wonders (which isn't possible until the end of Chapter IV)
• The Cost/Benefit Ratio is an important Performance metric.
  You want Cost effective Benefits. Lower Costs and Higher Benefits are both good.
  .
• All FOUR numbers should be presented in the Global Rank list.
• The two Benefit elements should be presented separately, but (invisibly) added together, with the SUM used as the primary sort order for the Global Rank list.
• In the Global Rank list, Costs would be the secondary sort order when the summed Benefits were identical for one or more players. This makes sense because the player with the higher costs is probably more capable of acquiring additional Relics, and thereby additional Knowledge Points.
• As is currently the case, the Date Joined would remain as the final sort order
• If possible, it would be desirable if the user could sort at will on the various columns, but separate tabs, each with identical information, would suffice. The four sorts/tabs would be ordered by

1. Costs
2. Technology Tree Knowledge Points (Part of Benefit)
3. Ancient Wonder Knowledge Points (Part of Benefit)
4. Cost/Benefit Ratio (Costs / (TT KPs + AW KPs))

 

[DeletedUser1161]

I agree that for a city builder, cost/benefit ratio is a more interesting metric, but I think your proposed scoring system could ultimately undermine diamond sales. Why do I care? Because if Inno stops making money, the game goes away.

Inno has two goals, player recruitment and retention, and player conversion. Recruitment is not tightly tied to conversion, but players you don't retain never convert.

The current scoring system focuses on use of culture and population, and indirectly on city space. All three of those can be purchased for diamonds. The artwork on the diamond cultural buildings is appealing, and spending diamonds immediately alters the look of your city and provides a tangible boost. These are powerful ways to encourage player conversion.

If a player is in a hurry to increase score, KP, builders, and even time can be purchased, but it seems to me that a lot of players are saying they collect their 24 KP a day (plus some from provinces) and don't pay for tech. Diamond costs for KP are daunting compared to the cost of buildings. Calculating score on costs used means players can increase their scores with diamonds by buying city space, culture, and population without needing to rush their tech tree research. This works out well for Inno because it stretches out content for all but the most score-driven players.

Shift the scoring over to KP and the high score game becomes a race to fill out the tech tree. This is not so good for Inno. Content is expensive to develop and if your players are racing each other and paying to complete it, they finish expansions faster and get bored. Then they leave. You can already tell Inno has thought about this because KP are very expensive relative to the buildings. You have to have deep pockets to race through content. Even if Inno can develop content fast enough for a KP-based score system (doubtful), having too much linear content can discourage new players because catching up to established players starts to look too hard. Finally, by trying to optimize cost/benefit ratio, players are encouraged to minimize space, culture, or population. That's not good for diamond expansion or building sales.

 

[DeletedUser61]

I think your proposed scoring system could ultimately undermine diamond sales.

You need enough residences to cover the coins that you'll need, but after you have "enough" coins per day, which depends mostly on how much time you have for fellowship and neighborhood rotations, then the combined Population+Culture premium buildings are just wonderful.

Were progress to drive the global rank, then it would be very easy to compare your city layout, and organizational tradeoffs, with OTHER players who are facing exactly the same problems. What are THEIR costs, as compared to your own? With the current ranking system we only have the vaguest of notions regarding where somebody is in their technology tree.

We are, of course, pulling our prejudices out of a black bag, but I don't think for a moment that InnoGames is all that worried about squeezing players for every last dime. If folks are playing an hour or so every day, for months on end, the microtransaction Diamonds model will allow EACH player to support the portion of the game that THEY find to be the most enjoyable. I'm quite certain that InnoGames tracks WHERE folks are spending their time, and their diamonds, and the developers will continue to shape the game accordingly. It's the ultimate democracy.

I'm more concerned that we have an "honest" City Builder game, and that we do THAT very well. We should very much resist the folks who would prefer an arcade game, and perhaps don't even understand, nor care, what a city builder is "supposed" to be.

In every PERT Chart (Program Evaluation Review Technique) that I've ever seen, PROGRESS was credited milestone by milestone. Our tech tree looks for all the world like a PERT Chart, and while Knowledge Points, themselves, are NOT progress; they're an obviously convenient way to account for the actual milestones, which can vary in size.

Also, Ancient Wonders may be usefully regarded as just another fancy box on the Technology Tree, and they have all of the basic elements of a Technology, rather than having a similarity to the various resource buildings.

In that same hypothetical construction meeting, Costs To Date was the other important metric and, while there were usually some quarrels regarding WHICH milestone activities were busting the budget, the underlying reality is that cost is an aggregate function. It's like the carnival balloon animals; if you squeeze them in one place the costs just pop up somewhere else.

MANAGING that dynamic, and delivering cost effective benefits, is what the Cost/Benefit Ratio is all about, and THAT'S the intriguing heart of a City Builder game. Or of a real life Project Management responsibility, for that matter.

 

[DeletedUser626]

Rank/Score, doesn't matter to me if it's calculations are done by Required Population + Required Culture + weighted by distance Relics, or by your proposed kp cost v's benefit ratio. It's just a number, and it has no bearing on how I play or how often I play this game.

I hope every player is enjoying the experience from building their city in Elvenar. The current game set perimeters for style of play, whether it's arcade style (click/hit something every 5min) or sit there and watch the hours trickle is a choice each of us can make when choosing our city design, and that city building flexibility is enjoyable for me.

 

[DeletedUser43]

Global Rank should be based on BENEFITS (Invested Knowledge Points)

Let's see....the players who had been playing the longest would have an insurmountable advantage over the new comers. Oh, sure, the long time players will always have some advantage over the new folks, but this change would make it insurmountable. I agree with Aydenn that this would really harm diamond sales. I also agree that if people don't buy diamonds we have no game, so it is important to all of us to have recruitment, retention and conversion. Recruitment is mostly up to Inno. (Though, it would greatly help word of mouth if they tried to make their customers happier.) Retention...well...we all keep telling them the game is losing people because it is so slow. But conversion....if people who start playing don't feel they have any chance they won't bother competing. Competitors are good customers because more people spend for competitive reasons than just to have some pretty aesthetics. (Though, I don't know WHY they work on selling more to the aesthetics....they have a lot of room to do that).

And again....as you grow your city, you can create more factories. More factories, more goods. More goods, the more KP you can buy. More opportunities for coins...again, the more KP you can buy. The faster you buy KP, the faster you get through the tech tree and the faster Inno has to develop more content. The devs obviously want this game slower, not faster. I don't think they would be very happy with this model.

 

[DeletedUser61]

the players who had been playing the longest would have an insurmountable advantage over the new comers.

Which contradicts

The faster you buy KP, the faster you get through the tech tree

 

[DeletedUser43]

Not at all. The players who have been here the longest would be the ones who got through the tech tree the fastest.

 

[DeletedUser627]

Proposal: Global Rank should be based on BENEFITS (Invested Knowledge Points), rather than COSTS.

A goodly portion of the "blame" for the current kerfuffle about Repeatable Quest lies with the developer's use of Costs to define Global Rank.
Benefits would be a FAR BETTER CRITERIA for a City Builder.

Thinking about your proposal for the new scoring methodology: it's a complex scoring mechanism - too complex for players to make informed decisions. I'm not sure most of us want to compete without understanding the rules of the competition. Not to mention that the formula could possibly produce a downward move in the ranks when a player upgrades/builds a manufactory (if the worsened ratio outweighs the gain in population). Even Inno would find that too blatant a discouragement for players: work to gain a coveted building and watch your rank go Down.

Did you run any numbers for large cities with the cost/benefit ratio? A city with working population of 50k with never have a competitive ratio, because all cities have the same 24 base KP available every day. In your model, small is always better. You often ask for real-world scenarios...in the real world, manufacturing seldom hits that sweet spot of perfect efficiency. In fact, it's rather the opposite. Companies can calculate, 'yes, we can reach maximum efficiency when produce x number of goods, and have the highest profitability per item'. But, given an opportunity to produce more, even at a lower efficiency, they don't opt to stay small. They opt to produce more volume with lower per item profitability but greater total revenues.

This is the scenario in Elvenar. Large cities produce more goods, and the goods benefit everyone in our spheres. We are now using those goods to purchase KP to aid other players' Wonders. We use our goods to aid our fellowship members. Many of us try to encourage new players in our neighborhoods by picking up their trades - anything to help with player retention. We have opened a Trading Post for fellowships to trade on par, and have plans to expand into a Bank [system] so that players have a resource for trading when other options fail.

All this is somewhat rhetorical - your plan won't be implemented as is, since it might result in smaller cities becoming highly ranked. Inno wants their top spenders to be the top ranked. They sure as heck don't want new players to visit the top ranks and see small cities with few premium expansions and buildings. I don't hesitate to emphasize this because we already tested this theory: the week we discovered that residences outscored Goddesses and started deleting premium buildings was the week they suddenly deleted our ability to function without them, precipitating this most recent quest squabble.

I don't categorically object to some additions to the scoring system, and I assume they're in the works. I wouldn't object to seeing the Wonders add to scoring - since we should gain some advantage from them (other than the relative miniscule benefit). But, whatever plan they devise, the sum total will be that payers will be winners.

NOTE: readers please know that I'm not in favor of the "payer wins" scenario, merely observing that it exists.

 

[DeletedUser627]

Not at all. The players who have been here the longest would be the ones who got through the tech tree the fastest.

Exactly. I used coins and goods for 1000 KP to get through Dwarven as quickly as possible.

 

[DeletedUser61]

I used coins and goods for 1000 KP to get through Dwarven as quickly as possible.

By which I'm assuming that you negotiated a thousand encounters, and acquired an additional 125 sectors and Rune Shards?

Assuming that's the case, your COST would be much higher, for the same BENEFIT, than someone who waited for the Knowledge Points to accumulate, 24 per day, because you'll need significantly more manufacturing capacity. Your Cost/Benefit ratio would therefore be HIGHER, which is the essence of what we're trying to spotlight.

But you WILL have 125 Rune Shards that they won't have, and more expansions. Building Ancient Wonders, sooner, and leveling them, sooner, will allow you to increase your Benefits by contributing to your own AWs or by swapping KPs to get the additional Rune Shards and bonus KPs. You'll thereby LOWER your Cost/Benefit Ratio. It's not a trivial decision.

the formula could possibly produce a downward move in the ranks when a player upgrades/builds a manufactory (if the worsened ratio outweighs the gain in population).

The global rank would be based on Benefits = Knowledge Points invested in your Technology Tree plus KPs contributed to Ancient Wonders. The ONLY way for you to lose rank would be for somebody ELSE to accumulate KPs even faster than you can.

I suspect that you're concerned about that nasty Cost effective Benefits Ratio? Fair's fair. If we both have similar Benefits = Global Rank, then a lower Cost/Benefits ratio would CERTAINLY be worth some bragging rights. The person with the lower CBR is the "better" City Builder, even though the progress = benefits = global scores are very similar.

Shift the scoring over to KP and the high score game becomes a race to fill out the tech tree. This is not so good for Inno.

Which is why the Ancient Wonders are ALSO included, along with the Tech Tree itself.

I'd suggest that folks with deep pockets would be likely to spend MORE diamonds on Research if there were an obvious and immediate ranking bump but, when somebody DOES reach the end of their Tech Tree, all of those lovely Ancient Wonders levels are just begging for attention, and THOSE enhanced capabilities will carry over into the subsequent chapters.

 

[DeletedUser61]

Here's a heads-up. You may want to plan accordingly.

1. Elvenar Ancient Wonders do not currently contribute to player scores
2. Forge of Empires just announced a MAJOR revamp of their scoring system, which will favor combat
   See https://forum.us.forgeofempires.com/index.php?threads/new-ranking.11983/ for the details

Allow me to speculate.

Elvenar

Our scoring system has the following elements:

1. Workers Required plus Culture Required, which is the analog of the FoE Building Footprint credit
2. Relics, weighted by distance, which is the analog of the FoE Battle Points
3. There is (currently) no provision for Goods Consumed
4. There is (currently) no provision for Ancient Wonders

Forge of Empires

The FoE scoring system is very nearly being turned upside down, as follows:

1. Battle Points will still be used, but they'll have more influence
2. Building Footprints will still count, although they're being rebalanced
3. Coins accumulated, since forever, will no longer be considered
4. Supplies accumulated, since forever, will no longer be considered
5. Goods consumed, since forever by other than trades, will be ADDED to the calculation
6. Forge Points contributed to your own Great Buildings, since forever, will be ADDED to the calculation.
7. Great Building driven scores will collapse.

You won't be receiving a ton of outside contributions unless you're swapping points with somebody anyway, so it's efficient to simply tally up the contributions to your OWN Great Buildings as a close approximation of your actual contributions.

The fundamental problem is that FoE has been using an exponential formula to determine the score of a building, based on both its footprint and its level. Great Buildings were originally capped at level 10, but when the cap was taken away folks rather quickly worked out that a high level Great Building would generate an enormous number of points. We're talking a billion points per level at level 70. The combat folks were not very happy about being dropped out of the top 100, by some accountants in a Forge Point Club. (Guess who!)

Reading the Tea Leaves

We can safely assume that the Elvenar and Forge of Empires developers have been comparing notes. I therefore expect the following additions to our Elvenar scoring system:

1. Goods Consumed since forever, except for trading, will be included in the score. Ancient Wonders don't require Workers nor Culture, but building an AW requires tons of goods, so the the building is indirectly included in the score
2. Knowledge Points contributed to Ancient Wonders, since forever, will be included in the score

 

[DeletedUser188]

The combat folks were not very happy about being dropped out of the top 100, by some accountants in a Forge Point Club. (Guess who!)

Are you implying that you were the reason the fine folks at inno games finally got off their collective butts and fixed the problem they created after almost 2 years
If you are that is way beyond arrogance it is borderline insane
Inno never does anything for one player or one group of players
They do what they want when they want with an agenda only they know about and their Mods are on a need to know basis and right now they don't need to know
I have been playing FoE for over 3 years this is Elvenar
Out of respect for the players that don't play FoE quit trying to describe it to them with comparison to Elvenar
It is like trying to teach people how to swim by demonstrating it on the living room floor
They might understand some of what you are saying but until they jump in the water they will never grasp the concept

 

[DeletedUser61]

Here's an excerpt from the above linked announcement.

(as you can see - and as you have pointed out on multiple occasions - this was really throwing the ranking off balance)

They might understand some of what you are saying but until they jump in the water they will never grasp the concept

Why ever would we want to discover everything anew, as we go along, when there are plenty of examples and related concepts that are out there for the asking, and that will provide insights and help us understand the context of what we are seeing in Elvenar.

To do otherwise would be like trying to explain trees to a fish.
Experience is something that you usually get right after you need it.

 

[DeletedUser]

Here's an excerpt from the above linked announcement.

Why ever would we want to discover everything anew, as we go along, when there are plenty of examples and related concepts that are out there for the asking, and that will provide insights and help us understand the context of what we are seeing in Elvenar.

To do otherwise would be like trying to explain trees to a fish.
Experience is something that you usually get right after you need it.

Oh... The arrogance, it hurts! Is trying something new a useless action? Everything's been done under the sun, surely. Is borrowing only from what you know is a lauded *pats you on the back* popular opinion the only way to go? *checks yes twice and looks around" Bobbipiazza tries to tell is like it is, and I get that she can be abrasive, but the snide remarks from the moderators are not helping anything. Healthy atmosphere? *quietly checks "no"*

 

[DeletedUser61]

Is trying something new a useless action?

Not at all. But retrying OLD stuff is a waste of your time.

 

[DeletedUser]

Not at all. But retrying OLD stuff is a waste of your time.

Now I'm confused (common enough state for me). Wouldn't

plenty of examples and related concepts that are out there

be considered "old stuff"? Or do you mean retrying what has not worked in the past? Which, yes, is a waste of time.

 

[DeletedUser61]

retrying what has not worked in the past?

If you do the same old thing the same old way you'll get the same old results. I prefer to dodge at least most of the mistakes that can be avoided.

There is, certainly, much to be said for discovering something FOR YOURSELF.

• Watching a 3 year old is delightful, for that very reason. EVERYTHING is new.
• Watching a 43 year old, not so much, and especially not when they've just told you to go pee up a rope. OK, suffer sucka.

 

[DeletedUser]

If you do the same old thing the same old way you'll get the same old results. I prefer to dodge at least most of the mistakes that can be avoided.

There is, certainly, much to be said for discovering something FOR YOURSELF.

• Watching a 3 year old is delightful, for that very reason. EVERYTHING is new.
• Watching a 43 year old, not so much, and especially not when they've just told you to go pee up a rope. OK, suffer sucka.

What you said made sense, but seemed to still disregard what I had said. I agreed with you and you overemphasized your point as though I had missed it.

 

[DeletedUser61]

you overemphasized your point as though I had missed it.

We're not just talking to each other, but rather we're crafting messages that still need to make sense six months from now, when somebody is merely skimming searched messages and lacks context. If there's any question whatever regarding intent, then further clarification is indicated.

For a message to survive the constant drip of eternity, the concepts have to be overly obvious. That's one of the several reason why sarcasm, innuendo, and subtlety all fare so poorly in a forum venue, although (timeless) metaphors do surprisingly well. Once you've lost the rhythm of a discussion you've also lost much of the "contest" aspects of the conversation, so you're just left with content that will capture a search, and entice the reader to slow down and read your material.

Go to the library (if you can still find one) and glance through a newspaper that's six months old. It's a whole different perspective.

 

[DeletedUser]

We're not just talking to each other, but rather we're crafting messages that still need to make sense six months from now, when somebody is merely skimming searched messages and lacks context.

Ah, now I understand many of our differences. You are playing for a possible future audience, while I am more concerned with the here and now. If you are seeking to be immortalized, perhaps a game forum is not the best platform.