Guest posts by Skydaemon

13

General Discussion / Re: i am almost ashamed of the kongregate community right now

« on: June 11, 2011, 09:03:09 am »

I play both as well.  I have a preference for tyrant at the moment.

On elements, I've upped 833 cards and collected 14 nymphs.  That's somewhere around 2/3 of the way through upgrades, that's taken me a couple of years of on-and-off again upgrading, pretty much since the game started.

On tyrants I'm lvl 47 and am missing 3 standard and 3 enclave cards, and have finished all missions, achievements and raids other than oluth.  I plan to join a guild soon when I find an appropriate one for me.

Generally speaking I find elements to be less fun, and more of a grind.  The bugs (desyncs, game play bugs, cheating etc) directly interfere with my enjoyment of the game in elements, and I miss the total lack of a social element (something the forum tries to provide and mostly fails).  I also miss the complete lack of point to progress in elements.  What benefit is there to upping cards?  There basically is none.  I've upped 833 cards, I use about 35, which I swap around about once a month out of boredom, not because of any actual reason.  In tyrants, gaining access to cards revolves around collective endeavors in pve (raids) and pvp (guild/faction growth through wars), in turn, your card stock aids you in doing those activities.  It's not great, but it's more than elements has.  Grinding in tyrants means 2 weeks of mostly waiting for timers to expire.  Grinding on elements means 2 years of the same fg battles using the same deck, or not far removed from that.  The energy system in tyrants is a good thing as well, as it limits the value of botting and renders it a more casual type of game than it would otherwise be.

At the end of the day, I enjoy playing tyrants, and look forward to expansions coming out, which means more missions, more raids, more card concepts and new challenges.  The additional grinding is a minor part of expansions.  That's mostly not the case in elements, where expansions just mean more grinding, and I don't think anyone looks forward to grinding fg's for electrum.  Taking the last version upgrade in elements, it had the bonus of upgrading the AI difficulty, which had the effect of making grinding marginally harder.  Awesome.  I know I should've been pleased at better ai and having to alter my grinding deck, but you know, I just wasn't.

The paying player thing in tyrants is disappointing, but it's not that big of a deal for the most part.  I've played games that had it worse in that respect.  It doesn't really affect pve, and pvp is mostly on a guild basis, so it's not essential for every single member to pay for a guild to compete.  I've gained elite (ie, access to the store) and used 145 warbonds without spending a dime, so even as a free player, you do have minor access to the same stuff, just not in bulk.

Anyway, for what it's worth I rated both games the same.  The games are what they are, and both are mediocre specimens of their breed.

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War Archive / Re: War #3 - Feedback

« on: June 10, 2011, 04:57:41 am »

One thing though, IF we want to take this suggestion, will it have a significant effect to the auction process? ...and what should be the name of this 'extra' player? We already have dogsbody. >.<

Not sure it matters how it's done as long as it's the same for all teams.  It could just be an extra player in the auction process.

Alternatively, because they're non-fighting roles and you don't want to surprise people by telling them they can't play, you could make a separate auction category.  Right now there's slaves, loyalists and mercs.  Maybe there's a 4th category for this, where players that want the non-fighting role have to register separately, and each team must pick one player from that section.  The main advantages to separating them, is the players have agreed to the role in advance of bidding.  That means they can customize their applications to the relevant stuff for this role, and no one has hard feelings about not playing matches.  Being a non-fighting role, does make it different in nature from the rest of the spots being bid on, with potentially different skillsets.

As for the name, doesn't matter to me, but it could be something like tinkerer, Whisper (the old guy in the blade movies), Cyd (the engineer from final fantasy), armourer or something like that.  The idea being a person back in the shop building stuff which the team uses.  It's a common enough theme anyway.

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War Archive / Re: War #3 - Feedback

« on: June 10, 2011, 12:03:44 am »

If nothing else UW should be able to hire an advisor.

You know, I was thinking that all war teams might be better off with 1 extra player who doesn't play.  So if you want 8 matchups per team, they'd have 9 players with one non-fighting member.

War has a fair bit of overhead, making spreadsheets, testing decks, analyzing opponents etc.  So early in a war, this leaves one extra person to set up stuff like this and get the teams set up without interfering with the players testing/preparing for their own matches.

Later on in the war, when someone on the team leaves, this 'extra' player, becomes the first replacement player.  So if a team has 8 fighters, and 9 players, when someone leaves the team permanently, the 9th player takes their fighting spot, and the team loses their extra spot as the penalty (instead of a card penalty for the first one).  It's sort of like having a spare player for something that seems to happen a lot.  Teams that don't end up needing a replacement, retain an advantage of an extra builder/tester/whatever throughout the war.

This extra player could also double as an extra sub (with the salvage penalties) for hard to arrange matches.

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Game Suggestions and Feedback / Re: Suggested Changes to PvP Timer/Timeout System

« on: June 07, 2011, 10:53:27 pm »

I suppose it would be better than what is currently in place.

The one remaining question is how does it handle it in the event of a real desync.  It obviously can't "wait for opponent" forever, and you've shortcircuited the timer.

Personally I think it would be better to do the waiting at the front of the timer instead of at the end.

So, you end your turn, and your timer does not start yet.  Your opponent begins his turn, and the first action that occurs is to respond with an ack to the first player, letting him know the turn has begun.  The first player's yellow timer starts when the ack is received.  This way, you can still time out normally after 60 seconds, regardless of what the other player does, and the activation of your yellow timer is proof that the other person's turn has been acknowledged by the server to have connected and begun.  It also ensures that the player who's turn it is has the earlier starting timer.  It's the same process as now, with an ack required to start your initial timer.  The benefit being that you can demonstrate in a screenshot whose fault the desync was, while keeping to the real 60 sec timer. 

That's all you really need in a desync for event purposes, the ability to point out who caused the desync.

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War Archive / Re: War #3 - Feedback

« on: May 28, 2011, 09:15:22 am »

The purist in me will protest (ever so slightly) that freely distributing these tools to every team takes away the advantage from the players (and their teams) who possess the skills and ingenuity of designing spreadsheets (or other tools) which make the card-accounting tasks more accurate.  On the other hand, I think most would agree that card losses are preferable on the battlefield as opposed to on the ledger books.

Sounds fine to me.

I never saw the deckcheck spreadsheet as much of an advantage.  I'd assume most, if not all, teams had their own versions running.  That one is just dealing with the accounting, some teams have other tools for advantages.  Handing that out would partially fix one of the disadvantages team underworld faces as well.  By the time UW enters the war, teams already have their tools built and in place, whereas UW just formed their team.  Handing them some basic starter tools is probably a good idea.

Also if every single team used the exact same spreadsheet format (just for deck/vault check stuff), Kael or whichever warmaster does next war might be able to auto import each of the teams to do a full audit every round.  So there's probably some minor advantage to standardizing it.

//edit - Come to think of it, you could embed the spreadsheet directly into the round deck and salvage threads if someone had permission on the teams.  If the SS's were owned by a warmaster, they could disable editing at the cutoff time.

PS: I wonder how many of those penalties were an indirect result of the multiple masters and players abandoning the war.  Tools aren't going to fix people that don't show up to do the task.

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War Archive / Re: War #3 - Feedback

« on: May 27, 2011, 08:56:36 pm »

I'd agree with willing here.  There are only two things I like about war (which willing mentioned), and the proposed idea breaks them both while offering nothing beneficial in return.

You're also dreaming if you think that would fix vault problems.  Teams that are too lazy or disorganized to spend the 60 seconds it takes to plug their decks into a spreadsheet to check if it's valid aren't going to track in/out elements or generic element cards either.

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Round 6 / Re: (Earth) Lt. Terroking 2 - (Death) Dm1321 1

« on: May 19, 2011, 12:49:14 am »

When did you come back from the dead?

Dunno if I was dead per se.  I didn't have time for war so I never applied this time around.  War was the only reason I ever used these forums, so without it I never had a reason to stop by.

Still check in every round or two to see how the teams do.  But other than that my elements playing is mostly just spinning the oracle and if I happen to like the predicted fg I'll do one of those.  Sorta lost interest after the last expansion.

Anyway, good luck to you and team earth. =)

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Round 6 / Re: (Earth) Lt. Terroking 2 - (Death) Dm1321 1

« on: May 18, 2011, 11:12:23 pm »

Woot, flawless round for team .

Congrats to team earth.  Another round like that and my bet might have a hope. =p

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War Archive / Re: War #3 - Betting Discussion

« on: April 21, 2011, 08:31:27 am »

Anyone that put gravity up high in their bets, I want you to know, I'll be sure to either completely fail, or completely win (hopefully win )

I did put them high, but my faith was completely betrayed.  Since my bet:
-Sir Valimont left before the war even started
-jmdt left
-GG left
-team has suffered multiple penalties for replacements and vault problems

At this point, team gravity doesn't even resemble the one I bet on.  So good luck to you, your team appears to need it.

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War Archive / Re: War betting - Win 10 upped Shards!

« on: March 27, 2011, 09:54:22 am »

-I probably gave gravity the biggest boost, both for new cards plus an excellent team.
-The new cards play to earth's strong synergies pretty directly (gravity/darkness/light/life etc), and some of their tougher opponents got the shaft.  I think they'll do well salvage wise as well.
-Air and light potentially have new very fast decks.  Light might have more natural advantages, but I saw team air as a stronger team.  I didn't really see the organization in team light to take full advantage of their potential.  I would've placed air higher except I don't think a speed deck will win it all with the likelihood of voodoo decks out there.
-Can't see entropy repeating a victory, and new cards open up strategies against them which I don't see them stopping en masse.  The addition of sanctuary, cloak, crusader and acceleration probably hurt them more than help.
-Fire has a few new holes, notably what acceleration does to phoenix.  I figure fire either stayed in place or fell a bit, while some other teams gained a lot.
-Darkness had a really solid team last war.  Their bag of tricks is pretty much on the table already, and little improved by new cards.
-Death has some scary potential if they can figure out how to make use of the new cards.  They have an incredible team to do it, it's just a matter of whether they figure out a way to win or not.  I figured they'd suffer from poorly fitting salvage though.

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Forum Game Archive / Re: Elements mafia - 15 - Run by killsdazombies!

« on: February 17, 2011, 11:28:17 am »

With the Divine Prophet and the Doctor, it didn't really matter who Terroking targeted. The pair was going to protect whoever it was regardless.

Nah, as far as I know, we never got any updates from the divine prophet, and terro would've been on the list that ended up with that info anyway.

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Forum Game Archive / Re: Elements mafia - 15 - Run by killsdazombies!

« on: February 17, 2011, 11:05:43 am »

And I only looked like the better choice because you had been setting me up to be that for several rounds.

Actually part of this was terroking's masterful play.  Some things just don't add up for him being an FG.

As an example, here's what happened when shiningsword was attacked but lived, the act that made him a "known innocent":

1) world emails some of our group asking for advice on whom to protect - shining wasn't on that email, but terroking was
2) I reply to world, telling him that myself and shining are probably most likely targets because we were driving after RR.  I point out that since I'm immortal, I don't need the protection anyway.  Terroking is copied on the reply and knows that shiningsword is the next protectee of the doctor.  Shiningsword himself does not know he's on protection though.
3) world puts shining on protection
4) A round goes by and terroking tries to kill shiningsword, and fails.  In effect, not only did terroking attack someone he presumably had the info to know was protected (while the doctor was simultaneously vulnerable), he also created a known innocent in shiningsword, who was even more convincing since shining didn't know he was protected during the attack.

So go figure.  Not only did he waste a round of FG kill, but he created the known innocent we needed so much.  It's stuff like this which points to terro maybe being trustworthy.  It was either an accidental thing, or a masterstroke.