Kings Of Chaos :: Forums

I want to start off saying this is feedback, not a complaint. I'm not demanding anything or threatening not to play if something isn't changed, I'm simply offering my thoughts and concerns on an upcoming change. This was discussed on discord but I feel the forums is a more precise place to provide a thorough analysis.

This thread will focus on this change:

Officer bonus starts at 1.6% and decays after each individual officer count untill 10 officers are reached

After the speed round and a discord discussion my understanding of what this means: At 0 officers you wil have a normal 1.0 multiplier on your stats. If you have 1 officer you wil have a 1.60 multiplier at your stats. At 2-9 officers you will have a something lower than 1.6 and higher than 1.0 multiplier on your stats. At 10 officers you will have a 1.0 multiplier on your stats (or something significantly lower than 1.6x anyways).

I think this is a bad change for several reasons:

1) It punishes you for recruiting.

A big part of KoC has always been about recruiting. While I wasn't around for the birth of KoC, I imagine the 'marketing' strategy was to give players ingame benefits for recruiting their friends to join. That's how koc got so big. With this change you have a lot less incentive to recruit past one officer. Sure, the person you recruit into the game MIGHT end up clicking some under you, and that MIGHT even end up being worth more than the 5-10% in stats you lose for having him. But it also might not. Maybe he won't click as much. Maybe you won't be able to bank enough for it to be worth it. Maybe the extra TFF will make it too difficult to slay so you don't even want the TFF anyways. Do you really want people discharging officers because they aren't clicking? Do you really want people asking the question if having their friend join them in koc is even worth it if you lose out on stats because of it? That seems bad. Really bad.

It also discourages people from recruiting later in the age. It might be worth taking on an officer on day 1 if they're going to click and you will get trickle benefit from it, but what about the last month of the age? Your friend is less likely to click because it won't have as much time to pay off. Which means your friend either won't click, or he will but it won't be profitable for you to recruit him into the game because you'll lose 5-10% stats by doing it. What if you're in the middle of a war? Why would you recruit someone and take a huge stat loss in the middle of a war?

2) It doesn't reward/punish people evenly.

This change won't work how you think it will work. Rather than type a few paragraphs explaining, I'm going to post some examples of how unfair this will end up being.

Example 1:
-Player A plays actively for a month. He manages to recruit 10 officers under him who click a decent amount. He manages to reach 1 million TFF. He has a 1.0x officer bonus due to having 10 officers.
-Player B is AG's first trickle account. He plays actively for a month. He doesn't recruit any officers, he just has AG's main as his officer. He has 2 million TFF. He has a 1.6x officer bonus due to having 1 officer.

Someone explain to me why person B deserves a 1.6 multiplier for having recruited nobody and person A gets shafted with a 1.0x multiplier? How is that possibly fair?

Example 2:
-Player A is RL's main. He plays for 3 months building a strong account with 25 officers gaining lots of morale from their clicks. During the 4th and last month RL decides to go to war. Player A discharges all of his officers but 1 and they move elsewhere in the alliance. He gets a 1.6x multipier for officer bonus.

I assume this change is meant to stop large accounts from getting BOTH morale AND great officer bonus. But it's not going to do that very fairly because people can avoid a lower officer bonus by discharging people later in the age/when they stop clicking and take advantage of both worlds.

Example 3
-Player A is SR's main. He plays for 4 months actively with 100 officers. He discharges 99 of them 5 minutes before the age ends. He gets a 1.6x officer bonus for the end of the age.

This is just an obvious thing that will definitely happen to circumvent this change.

3) It can be abused.

I don't want to post how in public, though I don't think it's very difficult to figure out. I can think of several ways to abuse this during wars/end of era stages in ways you would not want it to be abused.

In conclusion:

I totally understand the thought process behind not wanting players to get BOTH officer bonus AND trickle and having a huge separation between large/small accounts. But this is NOT the answer. It will punish people unevenly, disincentive people from wanting to recruit, and generally be abused in ways that weren't intended.

I think removing officer bonus or lowering it is a completely reasonable thing to do if that's what you want to do. Trickle is already a large enough advantage.

At the very least, if you decide you REALLY want to try this out for an era(please don't...) I implore you to lower the difference between 1 officer and 10 officers to something like 10%. 60% difference is completely game changing.

Please avoid vague responses like accusing people of "being afraid of change" or labeling their concerns as "complaining". Focus on this specific idea and why you think this may or may not be a good change.

Thanks for listening.

Ok... So did anyone actually manage to plow their way through all that?

Long story short. Learn to adapt. That's part of the fun!

I would only make one suggestion. Make officers joining a commander subject to approval from the commander the same way approval is required to join an alliance. That should help prevent some of the abuse that Brando is so worried about.

xeros-rl wrote: ↑5 years ago Ok... So did anyone actually manage to plow their way through all that?

Long story short. Learn to adapt. That's part of the fun!

I would only make one suggestion. Make officers joining a commander subject to approval from the commander the same way approval is required to join an alliance. That should help prevent some of the abuse that Brando is so worried about.

I asked at the end of my post to please avoid vague responses like "change is good". "learn to adapt" kind of fits into that category as a vague useless description that adds nothing on whether a change is good or not...

Change isn't always good. Bad changes are bad. Good changes are good. Let's set the bar high and aim for good changes :/.

Officers joining subject to approval would definitely stop some abuse, not all though. And wouldn't address any of the other major problems with this.

Sorry but just because you believe it is a bad change doesn't make it bad.

This thread I take it was to garner support well, xeros-rl did support you by adding a suggestion that will be looked at.

Right, now that I'm home and not trying to type a novel on my bloody phone...

Who says the changes are bad? Who says they are good? Your opinion (right or wrong) is based on your assumption of how things are likely to go.
And I disagree that "learn to adapt" is a vague response. If you stop and think for a bit, maybe you can come up with a way to make these changes work for you and your alliance (within the rules of the game of course). I've already got an idea of how I'm likely to play things and my alliance has already had discussions about the best way to set up our chain.

As for people being discouraged from recruiting... I'm of two minds about that. If you are alliance minded, then there's nothing stopping people from recruiting for their chain. If it's all about the individual account then yes, that will probably discourage people from recruiting. As a generalised statement, I guess you could say that this change encourages alliance growth rather than player base growth.

I don't really agree with your statement that people are being "punished" unevenly. If you feel like you are being punished, why are you playing? For me it's a trade off between growth and stats. Yes, there is always going to be some disparity between bigger and smaller accounts. But this adds a new, UNKNOWN element to the overall strategies of the player and alliance. Again, I stress the word "unknown" because NOBODY knows exactly how it is going to affect gameplay (not even the admins). Everything from now until things kick off is pure speculation.

Finally, for someone who didn't want vague responses, "change isn't always good" is about as vague as it comes. What you might see as a good change might be a bad one for others. What you think is the end of the world could end up being something that revives someone's interest in the game.

Whether we like them or not, changes are coming and we all have 2 options. Adapt or quit.

When you create a change you have to think what the player base will do once the change is in effect.

The effect of this change will see most players discouraged from recruiting inside or outside of the game, it will also see mains ditch all their officers at age end and maybe during wars, small players will ditch non clicking offies, it will also make players join mains at age end to "punish" them by reducing their multiplier.

It is clearly not a well thought out change, however there are things the mods are realizing they will have to implement to counter these things, if they are implemented then this may work.

However I do like the idea of balancing the game by reducing mains stats, up the slayers!

Well that was a nice read kudos to you cpl for taking the time to not only write that out and get those thoughts down so we can have a discussion but on top of that you formatted it which was the last little finishing touch to a master novel that being said you made some great points and brought up some very valid concerns so well in fact they don’t really need to be gone over again so instead what I am going to try and do is play devils advocate because we truly gain an understanding by looking at all sides.

But before I get to your points I just want to say that the overall thought process of the recent officer bonus was to promote a more level playing field. So it is with this goal that I may end up theming a lot of my responses to the points that have been presented here.

Your initial post about recruiting while yes one can see it that way it really depends on who you are in fact recruiting. If we assume that the bonus us going to be structured the same as era 2 and old the bonus or lack of as some of you have been saying only kicks in if they stay signed in. that means even if you manage to recruit one of those backpage officers he still has a high rate of dropping off this leaving you with nothing. This becomes even more important when it comes to large amounts of them. Got 15 officers? If 4 sign in its not such a reduction. Now before anybody says anything yes I will admit that this means you have a lack of incentive to actually make sure they continue to sign in when you have a large officer count but the notion that you are always going to be getting this max degradation is just not true in any account but a main and a few accounts such as master recruiters like carpool here who we all know wont be deterred by this mechanic because he understands that recruiting for the alliance has a greater long term benefit.

And that entails the other important issue really is the mains, and I agree this kind nerfs them but on the flipside they have massive trickle so at this point you have a tactical choice to make do you grow and risk getting jumped by a rival alliance looking for war? Or do you sacrifice some or all trickle to maintain a larger more protected account? Granted for a main the end conclusion will always be the same and it was touched on in your example 3 regarding the sr main that discharges all his officers. But let’s be honest for a moment this is not a new advantage this is essentially what they already do now. In era 2 you had 4 front runners for the top spot and era 3 will no doubt be the same, it won’t matter if you discharge all your officers a t the end because so will your rivals totally negating this as a final tactics for mains for those who would traditionally be in the running anyways, in fact one could argue this adds even more strategy as those end of age calculations have to take into account the extra time to discharge, and discharging 50 officers take a little time, too early and you could lose tbg advantage too late and you wont get the full effect.

Also if we eliminate truly competitive edge of end of era bonus for the top ranking mains all we are left with is a potential series of smaller accounts who otherwise might not get to rank near the top catching these discharging officers which is a win in my opinion, makes them happy makes them more likely to come back if they are seeing gains on era to era ranks and retention is the name of the game. And an added bonus if these discharged officers are actually clickers and are discharged early enough to maybe get a couple of clicks in for those that are catching them.

The last two paragraphs also kind of touch on the scenario in example two the RL main who discharges a month out. Sure he can discharge a month out take the stats gain, and if he is not warring I damn hope he is way way far ahead as he is just lost potentially a month worth of growth and last era numbers that would have been a huge and I mean huge tff loss. I mean it’s all a competitive strategy, and everybody is looking at the bottom line of how it effects them at any given time and looking at how this adjustment is hurting them rather than how they can use it to hurt their enemies and competitors.

I think that pretty much covers all your examples cause I mean example one yea that’s kind of a shit situation. I mean I get it I get the mechanics behind it but still just a shit situation even more so if the person who recruits ten officers is not in an alliance. But I can say that if hes treated his officers well and they communicate no reason he cant do the same thing, he just runs the same risk as a main does by using the max banking strat.

Not going to touch on abuse like its been said I think we can all figure out what the tactics are to take advantage of the new changes. And seeing as all the ones I can think of more or less revolve around the same tactic the idea of officer approval nips that one right in the butt no more needs to be said.

Now for my conclusion because frankly its late and I am getting tired all I am going to say is this. This new restructuring is the koc equal to the handicap in golf or bowling. the better you do the less you start with, and even with a higher handicap the masters still win, they win on pure skill, when the chips are down they just find a way, and thats what we need to do is just find a way.

i took it to mean .. with one officer you get .6 bonus .. with two officers you get .6 and .5 bonus .. with three you get .6 plus .5 plus .4 .. etc. and with 10 officers you will end up with ... a bonus of about 3 plus your original 1 .. so 4 .. but i might be wrong. if after you get 10 officers you only get your initial 1 .. that sucks.

bloodpirate wrote: ↑5 years ago i took it to mean .. with one officer you get .6 bonus .. with two officers you get .6 and .5 bonus .. with three you get .6 plus .5 plus .4 .. etc. and with 10 officers you will end up with ... a bonus of about 3 plus your original 1 .. so 4 .. but i might be wrong. if after you get 10 officers you only get your initial 1 .. that sucks.

It's the latter...you start off with 60% bonus for 0 or 1 officers and then it goes down to 0% bonus when you hit 10 officers.

"Officer bonus starts at 1.6% and decays after each individual officer count untill 10 officers are reached"

That does not necessarily mean it goes to 0% at 10, as bon has already alluded to...