Privileged information

I think we need to consider "compartmentalizing" our forums, much like you guys have done with this room. The reason being is that we have some members that have ties to other factions, and we will always be vulnerable to spies.

For that reason, I propose that we have something like 3 tiers of access: the first will be for officers, the second for veterans, the third for members (I would propose a top tier for commanders, but you guys can just pm each other). The officers tier will be where information on our defensive decks and deck assignments is stored, as well as things that generally concern the faction. The veterans tier can be where we store information on decks that work for attacking other factions, as well as our master list of defensive decks that other factions are using. The member's tier can be open to general chat, tips on decks, etc.

We could ask that members PM their defensive decks to officers, or we could pm the deck assignments to them.

We are probably going to have to ask each member to make 2-3 competent defensive decks, and we should also come up with some sort of code that we ask members to check up on. For instance, during a war Plex0n could announce something like "okay guys, switch to deck mode: asskicker", which will be code for everyone to switch to a certain defensive deck or do nothing at all. In that way, we can have a constantly evolving defense, while maintaining a sufficient level of security.

There is a level of intrigue in the top 10 that we are barely beginning to scratch, but I think that this is what it's going to take for us to win. I know that this kind of stuff is tedious for a lot of members, but everybody has something that bores them to death to go along with their interests. For instance--N1nja is a people person adept at diplomacy and morale, and I like to sit in the background and mess with strategies. But when it comes time for diplomacy, I listen to him...and when he wants a good deck in a certain situation, he (often) listens to me. We have similar relationships throughout our faction, and it is a wonderful thing...but the point is that I'm willing to take part in the things that make N1nja's diplomacy work because I know he's better at it than I.

This sounds like a great idea.
Kicking my self for not being able to see this on my own

The defence deck system should be in the interest of all the members to follow, because a good defence is the way to an easy win.
It will require a much more hard hand from the officers than we have used before, and since we now are in the top 15 i think its time to enforce such thing on our members.
There will always be a pool of members to join us after we reach this high, so i think we can make good of threats for not complying with the rules and guidelines.
I do not wish to kick any of our members, but if i must for the sake of the faction, i will.

I would also title some officers as defence officers like we used to when we was lvl 5.
Those officers should have the last word on everything with defence decks.

Anyone up for the task?

Here's my take on the situation, and I think we need to get a consensus together too.

1. Future recruitment and current status of members:

For future recruitment, we will state that we want 280LP/week, but internally, we'll settle for 210LP. We cannot be accepting level 20-30 anymore, I think the minimum level I'm willing to go is 35. We haven't been doing this, but they need to at least try to be in our channel and hang with us.

For now I think we can ask for a 210LP/week for our current members, save those under 40, they might have more difficult as we take on tougher opponents.
We have to decide on the level 20-40 (below 40) those we should keep and those we have to let go.
I'm fine with grooming those between 20-40, especially those who communicate with us in the channel. That way they'll stick with us. These guys are good at the moment: pikinator, q423, rexahl, nigelhee.



2. Housekeeping:

We'll also have to talk/ask for explanations from inactive members. If we want to stay in the top 20, and lighten the burden on ninj, we have to achieve 85-90% activity rate. I've seen it drop to 70% the past week, but that might be because of the hiring and dropping of members. Even so, it does tell that our activity rates are not high enough. It's mean, but that's the reality of it. As mentioned in the other thread from fade, we need to sort out our defences good and proper. With all the new material coming in, and as we break our way into top 10, we'll need to have good defences so that we don't have to always have to keep up due to point loss from poor def decks.

Keeping a small pool of low levels is fine, because that means we can cover for their point loss, those who are active. Ideally, our faction should have a large pool of 40-60s, and these bunch must be doing more surging than fighting. They can still fight, if they don't have WB cards to help and they're losing more points in surging.



3. The direction the Faction wants to go:

I think we're trying to achieve too many things at one go. Getting into top 10, keeping our member list full, organising the forums, defence decks, our online times, and so on. I think we need to consolidate our goals first, see how we go for about a couple of weeks before we try to advance into top 10. So, we here have to agree with what we want to do first for the immediate future.

My proposal is this:

Given that we've just gotten a fresh batch of surgers and would be getting more, let's just aim to stay in the top 15 for the time being. We'll also aim to get level 10 within this week, or by next week, and work towards moving up to level 11. That means we have to choose our wars carefully, so that we have a decent war that nets us about 4 rating per war, but not too tough for most of us to handle. It's during my day time, (Australasian region) that we'll suffer losses. I've been picking easy factions to win against so that we don't have a hard time to win by the time Europe comes in, if any European player comes in (like Mosfet). The latest FBB war against us is an example.

When our timings and foundations are more or less settled, let's start making a serious bid for top-10 and top-5. By this time, we'll be able to have a diverse set of defence decks, and when the majority of us are online and fighting hard with tough factions, we'd also be able to switch defence decks against them.




Conclusion:
By the time we're done with our short-term goal, we can relieve ninj from spending too much time on this game, and his WBing to keep us winning. It's a faction, a team, let's help each other out, and win this together. He can still carry us, but for him to do that, he needs our support. Let's do it.

hey,

I agree with you screwball, this is why i already started writing down the def decks off all members. I just want to start a disscussion right here
about how many of each sort of def deck we want in our faction.

fear deck
wallstal
counter
slow roll heal
strike deck
slow roll (evade)
blitz rally based
blitz heal based
protect based
other

This are the catagory's i have so far, if you have an addittional catagory or an idea what the percentage of each sort of def deck should be pleas comment;)

How about regen, poision and flying?

Regen: Not too reliable on it's own. BUT! It would be useful in a salvager/CC spam deck with micromech in it or maybe dozer

Poison: There aren't many good poison cards that can make up most of the deck out there. Toxic Cannon is a 3 wait, and a lot of that loses to a) rainbow strike b) SC/Azure spam with apollo slowroll. Salvager/CC makes short work of it with rally.

Flying: Already part of the decks listed by kani.

Where would u put a def deck with freddie and 10 ii cards for example?

that would be a heal blitz

For low level players who don't have a big card pool? Since Irradithad works sometimes.

As they get to level 40, they should not be using such a deck anymore.

I have been thinking about the complexity of running a coordinated defense. We've talked, and agreed that the system that I'd proposed is far too complicated for one person to take care of--it would require a database to back it up, ideally with each member entering their defensive decks to minimize the burden on whichever officer bears it. I still think it is the best solution--just one that isn't available at this point in time.

I think it's a good idea to have a number of "indicator" decks set up in the faction--decks that certain members have that indicate certain things about the enemy's offense at a particular time. For instance, if someone's deck is Vyander/Dracorex with 10x Daemon, and that deck is successful, then we can pretty much ascertain that the enemy uses a lot of slow fliers (probably support carriers), or a slow-rolling deck without a lot of evade. If someone is successful with a fear-based deck, then we can guess that they're using a slow-roll without walls. These indicator decks should be assigned to certain members (preferably ones that are on holiday), and the rest of the members should know which member they are assigned to so they can watch its performance and adjust their defense accordingly.

Of course, the enemy will likely adjust their offense partway through the war, so the information will become harder and harder to interpret as time goes on. Members who pay close attention to the performance of certain decks over time will be more successful: to give a concrete example, let's say that 2 hours into a war, indicator deck "A" (Apollo Slow-Roll) has gone 10/0 in defense...while indicator deck "B" (fear rush) has gone 0/10. A person looking at those scores should immediately change their deck to match "A." Now, let's say that 4 hours into the war, deck "A" is 10/10, and deck "B" is 10/10. To a person that hasn't been paying attention, they're not going to recognize any difference between the two whatsoever...while the person that has been paying attention knows that deck "B" has won 10 battles in the last two hours, while deck "A" has lost 10 wars.

But this points to a fundamental problem that is far larger than anything that we can plan for--namely, that we are trying to use centralized planning to run a complex system (as opposed to distributed planning, where every member takes part). What I mean is, rather than us officers telling every member what to do and how to do it, why not just give them the information they need and hold them accountable for the results?

If we use net points gained per day as the requirement for membership in The Lost Wikingz (instead of lp), members will automatically have an incentive to make defensive decks that work (because they won't want to lose points to defensive losses). It will also encourage them to surge, because it is far easier to get 400-500 points by successfully surging than it is by fighting.

This setup should give us more fluidity--allowing our offense and defense to adjust like flowing water, rather than having everyone simultaneously change to certain decks that other factions will come to expect after a certain number of wars with us. If we use the defensive "modes" that I'd suggested a few days ago (in the "privileged information" thread), the enemy will eventually recognize those modes and change as quickly as we do. By simply requiring that members have a certain amount of success (in the form of net points), we lessen the load on officers and encourage good play from the membership.

Keeping track of net points is also more convenient than lp: right now, we have to wait a week or so to see what kind of lp members get (mainly because we didn't write them down a week ago). However, if we wanted to check to see if, for instance, Zitan wasn't getting his weekly requirement of net points, all we'd have to do is look at the wars in the past week and total them up. From that point we could take instant action, instead of having to suffer another week of inactivity.

Finally, if we were to change to this system, we would have to lessen the requirements on the members that are using the indicator decks, because they shouldn't change throughout the entire course of a war. Perhaps we could drop their net requirement by 100 points per day, or perhaps we could only count their "points won" but require an extra 100 points from them.

kanichan wrote:

hey,

I agree with you screwball, this is why i already started writing down the def decks off all members. I just want to start a disscussion right here
about how many of each sort of def deck we want in our faction.

fear deck
wallstal
counter
slow roll heal
strike deck
slow roll (evade)
blitz rally based
blitz heal based
protect based
other

This are the catagory's i have so far, if you have an addittional catagory or an idea what the percentage of each sort of def deck should be pleas comment;)

My guesstimate of the most popular decks we're facing right now:
Support Carrier Spam w/elemental (~25%)
Fear Rush (~20%)
Micromech Spam w/Command Center (~10%)
Strike Rush (~15%)
(the rest)

I would say that we need to add anti-air, and lots of it. Perhaps 20% of our defense decks should be some sort of daemon spam (the worst deck I've faced was vyander, 6 daemons, and 4 gatling cannons).

Another good option for anti-air that works well against fear is salvager/cannon walker spam with command centers. This also protects against fear decks pretty well, and is decent against decks with a lot of structures.

We should also have Mimic-based and pierce-based decks. Azure reaper and micromech spam come to mind.

A Jam deck might be interesting as well. I suppose a good daemon deck could be considered a jam deck, especially with gatling cannon. I'm thinking about buying a bunch of demons--they have jam as well, and come up quickly.

screwball wrote:

Here's my take on the situation, and I think we need to get a consensus together too.

1. Future recruitment and current status of members:

For future recruitment, we will state that we want 280LP/week, but internally, we'll settle for 210LP. We cannot be accepting level 20-30 anymore, I think the minimum level I'm willing to go is 35. We haven't been doing this, but they need to at least try to be in our channel and hang with us.

For now I think we can ask for a 210LP/week for our current members, save those under 40, they might have more difficult as we take on tougher opponents.
We have to decide on the level 20-40 (below 40) those we should keep and those we have to let go.
I'm fine with grooming those between 20-40, especially those who communicate with us in the channel. That way they'll stick with us. These guys are good at the moment: pikinator, q423, rexahl, nigelhee.

If you take a look at one of my posts above this (the long one), I'm proposing that we go by net points instead of lp. To me, level reflects consistency and card pool, but not necessarily performance in war. For instance, they could have a high level from doing a lot of missions. And having 20 of every card is nice, but they aren't going to do you any good if you don't know how to use them. Of course, a good player with a good card pool trumps all...

Also, ikkyu has been doing really well. I think a lot of times he's going unnoticed, but he is pretty consistent and has the highest lp of any non-officer.

screwball wrote:

2. Housekeeping:

We'll also have to talk/ask for explanations from inactive members. If we want to stay in the top 20, and lighten the burden on ninj, we have to achieve 85-90% activity rate. I've seen it drop to 70% the past week, but that might be because of the hiring and dropping of members. Even so, it does tell that our activity rates are not high enough. It's mean, but that's the reality of it. As mentioned in the other thread from fade, we need to sort out our defences good and proper. With all the new material coming in, and as we break our way into top 10, we'll need to have good defences so that we don't have to always have to keep up due to point loss from poor def decks.

Keeping a small pool of low levels is fine, because that means we can cover for their point loss, those who are active. Ideally, our faction should have a large pool of 40-60s, and these bunch must be doing more surging than fighting. They can still fight, if they don't have WB cards to help and they're losing more points in surging.

I agree, and I think that we should set guidelines for holidays. Lowered performance for awhile is fine...but being away for three weeks can be tough on everyone else. I propose that, if a person goes on holiday for, say, a week, then we should expect them to make up the difference over the rest of the month. As it stands right now, people just disappear for awhile and we take the hit.

Also, we have a member with a family emergency (Kilros). I want to kind of roll with it, but at what point do we kick? Three weeks? A month? We need to be compassionate, but I think that we should (from this point on) ask that members at least leave a message in the forums updating us on their status every two weeks, or explain to us why they can't. Also, if we're ever forced to kick a person in this kind of a situation, we should make that person the very next person we recruit, if they want to rejoin. In Kilros' case, I think we should give him another two weeks (it's been about one)--hopefully he'll come back on and give us an update.

screwball wrote:

3. The direction the Faction wants to go:

I think we're trying to achieve too many things at one go. Getting into top 10, keeping our member list full, organising the forums, defence decks, our online times, and so on. I think we need to consolidate our goals first, see how we go for about a couple of weeks before we try to advance into top 10. So, we here have to agree with what we want to do first for the immediate future.

My proposal is this:

Given that we've just gotten a fresh batch of surgers and would be getting more, let's just aim to stay in the top 15 for the time being. We'll also aim to get level 10 within this week, or by next week, and work towards moving up to level 11. That means we have to choose our wars carefully, so that we have a decent war that nets us about 4 rating per war, but not too tough for most of us to handle. It's during my day time, (Australasian region) that we'll suffer losses. I've been picking easy factions to win against so that we don't have a hard time to win by the time Europe comes in, if any European player comes in (like Mosfet). The latest FBB war against us is an example.

When our timings and foundations are more or less settled, let's start making a serious bid for top-10 and top-5. By this time, we'll be able to have a diverse set of defence decks, and when the majority of us are online and fighting hard with tough factions, we'd also be able to switch defence decks against them.

I totally agree. I've kind of mentioned this in passing to N1nja--we need to take the time to make sure our foundations are solid before moving forward. N1nja seems to want to fix things as we move up, but what this usually means is that he is stuck having to put 5k points into a war. We need to engage in a continuous process of vetting our members so that we can have -them- put up that 5k points instead. I think your time frame is reasonable, and ambitious enough that N1nja should agree to it. I also think he might find the break a welcome change, whether he realizes it or not.

screwball wrote:

Conclusion:
By the time we're done with our short-term goal, we can relieve ninj from spending too much time on this game, and his WBing to keep us winning. It's a faction, a team, let's help each other out, and win this together. He can still carry us, but for him to do that, he needs our support. Let's do it.

Again, I agree. We play the game to have fun, not for a second job. I have an idea how hard N1nja is working to keep us competitive--when I spent 4 hours straight surging, I was worn-out. Imagine six.

I think N1nja worries that the faction is going to lose morale if we don't make it to the top. I think it's time we started worrying about him, and his morale--I would hate to have to be stuck playing this game for 12 hours at a time at his rate. Also, I don't want him to get burned out--I want him to look forward to logging on to this game, and kicking ass if he feels like it (not because he has to).

Revise Salvager/CW/Micromech with CC spam. It's definitely much higher.

@fade: It depends on which factions we're talking about. The better ones have higher ratios of Apollo-SC/Azure spam-Elemental and abovementioned then fear decks, followed by rainbow-quick strike.


Agreed, look at biggest wars in Tyrants thread, Ninj has had to put up a lot of time against his work, he's admitted that, so we need to get a good defence going, and good support. It'll take us about anywhere from 3 weeks to 2 months for us to settle our defence and get people to start surging too.

If we want to sustain ourselves in top 10, we've to get every member to surge, and get decent with it.


Also, for faction direction, that part has to be edited. I think we're ready to keep ourselves afloat between Rank 6-15, and I'll go as far as 6-12. Global Dental, 19th, and Dragons are reported to be falling apart.

screwball wrote:

Revise Salvager/CW/Micromech with CC spam. It's definitely much higher.

@fade: It depends on which factions we're talking about. The better ones have higher ratios of Apollo-SC/Azure spam-Elemental and abovementioned then fear decks, followed by rainbow-quick strike.

...

Also, for faction direction, that part has to be edited. I think we're ready to keep ourselves afloat between Rank 6-15, and I'll go as far as 6-12. Global Dental, 19th, and Dragons are reported to be falling apart.

Yeah, guess you're right. I've been seeing a ton of that lately. I'm guessing that most of the offensive decks we're facing at the top levels are either fear or sc w/elemental spam. Hence the prevalence of salvager decks and fear decks as defense.

You make a good point that the optimal "recipe" for our defense depends on which faction we face, which serves to underscore my point that we should just strive to provide members with good information, while letting them make their own defensive decks and reaping the benefits or consequences. That's part of the reason I think we should go by net points instead of lp, despite the fact that it's harder to keep track of: it makes it so that our members will work towards having a better defense, rather than simply expecting us to tell them what to do. It's a way of distributing the workload a bit, getting people more involved in the success of the faction.

On the last part, I think your original time frame was probably pretty accurate. We had a good day today, and everything seems to be solidifying beneath us. We've been approached by members of three factions (two of them in the top 25, the other ranked #70) looking to join us in the past two days. All indications are that things are looking pretty damn good...

I've put a lot of mind to the difference between lp and net points.

I've concluded that we need to change our way from lp to net points.
With a requirement of net points instead of lp, we will ensure that we get the points we set as a target.
The real question is what level to set the required net gain.

If we base it on todays 210lp pr week = 30 lp pr day and we say that net points should be 25 points pr lp as an conversion rate now in the beginning, we get the following math.

50 members x 25 points net * 30 fights * 7 days = 262 500 points minimum.
This equals min. 9 375 point pr war with 4 wars pr day. at avg.
Avg. net points pr week pr player = 5250

Since we now have a good pool of active and higher level players, i think we can raise the bar to 40 points net.
With 40 points net we get the following math.

50 members x 40 points net * 30 fights * 7 days = 420 000 points minimum.
This equals min. 15 000 point pr war with 4 wars pr day. at avg.
Avg. net points pr week pr player = 8400

How members aquire the net points of 8400 pr week is that players problem.
This will stimulate surging, surrendering and remove auto fighting along with making a good defence decks and cycle between them.
I think it might stimulate use of WB also.

I want officers to list good know def decks in this fourm and their strengths and weeknesses (perhaps with picture of each deck).
I also want officers to list good surge deck along with strengths and weeknesses.
Make a new thread or use existing threads for this.

I would like an input from officers to help me set the correct net points gained pr. week.

I also think that we should have a mothly (every 4 weeks) target that needs to be reached. This target should be at 90-95% of 4 times weekly target.
This will help us against members beeing offline due to different reasons. If they need/want to take some days off, we can accept that this week they will not make the weekly target, but they still need to make the montly target.

We might lose some players on this, but there are more players to fill their places.
I know i might have problem reaching this target my self, but i'm willing to go for this solution, because i see it as the best way to strengthen our defence and offence.

This system should be running from 1. nov.

If any office with time could do a run from the wars previous month and also split it by week, and posted the stats on what output we get from our members with our current system i net points, i would appriciate it.
This will give us data to compare against when we get data after we change.

I'm open for discussions and other ideas, but as far as i can see, this will only benefit our faction in the long run.

Agree with plex that we should move from recording of LP to recording of points gained if possible. Would be even better if we could go to net points gained, so that we can help each other out. With that, we can help those without good surge/def decks and improve our defence quality over all. That process would also help them gain confidence in their surging abilities, and in time, we can get everyone to surge.

I think it'd be good if all of us officers could help chip in to register net points daily. We could alternate the job between us daily and help compile the list. We should follow Tyrants Club (perhaps ask them how they do it) and compile a spreadsheet of data of who's lagging behind and needs to contribute more.

Most importantly, everyone's got their own life to handle. We're not all hardcore gamers who sit at their desk every hour playing, and we got real life to handle. So we have to lenient when possible, but all of us would at least have to do better than the standards we set.

Hope this helps.

I am glad that we are going to move in this direction--I think that it will work better for both the officers and the faction as a whole.

I will try to contribute what I believe to be a good figure for net points per person per day, but I think it would certainly be better for us to put our goal a little bit lower than what we want, then raise it from there. I have to take a better look at Plex0n's math lol

As far as keeping track of everyone's net points every day, it seems to me as if that would be a lot of work. As it stands right now, the officers have a pretty good idea of who's participating and who isn't...it's just a matter of us communicating with one another when we see problems. If we feel we have an issue with someone, it's just a matter of going back in the war records and tallying everything up...better we focus on one than fifty, especially if we're planning to write down every members net points on every war.

I will post some decks in the appropriate threads. Incidentally, I found this website which is excellent for making and describing decks to people: http://tyrant.40in.net/deck.php

I think this is obvious but we should definitely try to help those that are having difficulty with their decks. I noticed that Pikinator has improved a lot--I'm sure that's due to screwball's help, and maybe some others. We might want to consider a week of probation for those that don't make the required amount (and aren't on holiday).

Finally, we all know that there are many members that bring more to the faction than just points--some might help with morale, or they might just have great skills with, I dunno, forums For those, we might want to consider keeping the math a little fuzzy...


**edit: I think a good amount to start off should be about 600-800 net points per day (to start). If we take 40 points/surge * 30 surges/day, that equals 1200 points per day. But now that we are taking net points, we have to subtract the points lost. A solid defensive deck will probably win 40% of the time, and a decent surger will probably have a win/loss ratio of 3/2. So if 20 battles are lost for 30 surges won, and all are surrendered losses, that means that they will likely net 1000 points (1200 won from surge - 200 lost from surrender). Now, we have to consider battles lost by defensive decks: let's say that the average member has to defend against ~15 attacks per day. A middle-of-the-road defensive deck will lose twice as often as it wins (10 fights lost to 5 fights won). If those 5 fights are all surrendered, and the losses are on "fight," there is a net loss of ~150 points daily. So that brings the net points down to 850.

There is another consideration that we must take into account: the amount of stamina it takes to surge vs. fight (and therefore the amount of time a player must invest in order to meet the requirements). If we currently require 30 lp and members get that via fight, it will take (at a minimum) 300 stamina. If they win 75% of their fights, it will take 400 stamina. If they win 50% of their surges, it will take 600 stamina...which is a pretty significant increase in the amount of time we're asking them to commit to the game. Therefore, I think we should make some adjustment for that as well.

Starting lower than we want will still remove inactives and ineffectives, without forcing us to kick too many at a time. It will also allow members a chance to adjust. I would propose that we let the membership know that we will be adjusting this requirement weekly until we get the performance that we want. After one week we will know if we set it too low, and can adjust accordingly. After that, we can raise the requirement by +50 or +100 (per day) until we are happy with our results, then keep it there until it needs adjustment.