Congrats to ReneDescartes [290] for leading <Escapism> to victory in the January 2017 clan competition and securing a 17th George Washington platinum trophy! Monthly energy has been reset and a new round has begun.
| rank |
clan |
owner |
energy month |
|
1
|
|
<Escapism> |
ReneDescartes [290]
|
|
4,204,122 |
(x4.92) |
|
2
|
|
<Pirate Haven> |
The Pirate [173]
|
|
4,026,348 |
(x5.18) |
|
3
|
|
<PMS> |
Mentos [39]
|
|
2,214,976 |
(x2.66) |
|
4
|
|
<Eternal> |
Shoegazer [103]
|
|
2,159,559 |
(x2.44) |
|
5
|
|
<Malicious Villainous> |
The Wilderness [44]
|
|
1,859,641 |
(x2.12) |
|
6
|
|
<Reaper of souls> |
diablek [271]
|
|
1,510,322 |
(x1.72) |
|
7
|
|
<duk> |
jerro [100]
|
|
940,313 |
(x1.06) |
|
8
|
|
<Xenoblade> |
shadow_rith [37]
|
|
928,872 |
(x1.05) |
|
9
|
|
<In Extremis> |
Redless [306]
|
|
928,840 |
(x1.04) |
|
10
|
|
<Platinium Squad> |
jezz [342]
|
|
921,959 |
(x1.04) |
Also see:
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boring but still nice. Gratz guys
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"On to the next one" and "boring"? You do sound bored. Here's the question of the hour for you. If winning 27 times is so "boring" then why do you bother? If you are as bored as you seem to be then wouldn't it be better to find something not as "boring" to do? But then you have "winning" down so that it really is too easy and "boring" so why not keep going because you really don't spend that much time here anyway.
Instead of being a bore with the way you nonchalantly dismiss others in the game by saying "on to the next one" like nobody else is even in the game. Why don't you say something like this: "Hey you scored 4 million energy and thats a pretty good amount, congrats."
Will you still be in this game when you are the only ones left here because that seems like the way this game is headed...
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Not everyone in escapism has 27 wins. I've only won 6 top clan plats (5 with escapism) so it's honestly not boring at all yet
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Was nice being able to score a tight race at the end.
Instead of being a bore with the way you nonchalantly dismiss others in the game by saying "on to the next one" like nobody else is even in the game. Why don't you say something like this: "Hey you scored 4 million energy and thats a pretty good amount, congrats."
There seems to be a lot of assumption in there about the nature of Sully's comment.
Will you still be in this game when you are the only ones left here because that seems like the way this game is headed...
That question answers itself. If we're still left, inherently we'd still be in the game.
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Looked close towards the end of the month, almost considered scoring myself. Good job pirates, if you and PMS team up we'd have some interesting months.
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Gratz escapism everybody chips in consistently, You guys should join Eternal :)
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I already teamed up with MV this month shall be fun
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Good job pirates, if you and PMS team up we'd have some interesting months.
That doesn't look like it's going to happen. Honestly the competitors against Escapism are too divided overall. Bazza, fifty, and Pothead make up Eternal (sorry if I missed anyone), Mentos, Luthrin (kinda) and someone else makes up PMS, Pirate and Cosby (maybe 1-2 others) make up Pirate Haven, and Mentos, Luthrin and Wild make up MV. So overall there is a grand total of 11 or so people even competing against Escapism.
Escapism currently has Samulii, Fishwick, Myriad, Lyrad, TheCause, malix, Apex, Rene, Esv, Zord, Sully, Gpof, shoy, and Benny if he ever comes back. I might even be missing a few people. That's a good 14 people or so to fight against. Combine that with the fact they own the majority of dumper clans on this game, thousands of dollars worth of bots and stars invested (hell, that's just Benny), and ratio whores etc. up the wazoo, I don't see anybody beating them at all for a long time to come if they actually try.
And no, this isn't a "I hate Escapism" comment Fishwick, I'm just pointing out the obvious and putting into perspective for others. Also, congrats to both Escapism and Pirate Haven for trying hard in January.
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Yea it's an uphill battle at face value for sure, but they would definitely make a force to be reckoned with if banded together. Theoretically, if they were to group up and each score an average month for themselves all at once, I think we'd lose honestly.
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You're not entirely wrong Zal, but listing me and Benny fot example is like listing Shoe and Rivan for Eternal. I don't actually have a PC I could score on at the minute, and have no real plans of scoring again.
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I dont even get mentioned either x)
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Yea it's an uphill battle at face value for sure, but they would definitely make a force to be reckoned with if banded together. Theoretically, if they were to group up and each score an average month for themselves all at once, I think we'd lose honestly.
Yes, but putting aside differences is pretty hard sometimes. I mean, if all of those people got along, why are there 3 different clans? There could be a good battle but even with an equal amount of people to fight with you'd have to have something to attack. So sometimes it doesn't really matter if you -want- to score 500k, sometimes you don't have the time or want to put in the effort to make the dumpers or whores to make it happen in a close month like this where everything is quickly taken. It would have to be a highly coordinated effort regardless.
You're not entirely wrong Zal, but listing me and Benny fot example is like listing Shoe and Rivan for Eternal. I don't actually have a PC I could score on at the minute, and have no real plans of scoring again.
Looked close towards the end of the month, almost considered scoring myself.
LIAR! lol.
I dont even get mentioned either x)
I donut no hoo u r x)
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Mr Zal 2 seems to be on the right track with his assessment of how things are in this game. I'll go further and say this as a suggestion. Instead of having "the other" clans band together, why doesn't escapism split up and form 4 or 5 separate clans. Then they could really dominate and sweep the top 5 or maybe it would be a toss up with some real competition for a change. Who knows.
Don't want to do that because you like dominating while spending a minimal amount of time to accomplish your monthly monopoly? Then how about this for a suggestion.
@ ender:
Why don't you do some serious updates to this game to even out the competition or at the least make the race for 2nd place be more fun. Mr Zal is correct that there is not enough energy targets if "the others" did band together so why bother with banding together.
Ender, you need to make some changes because the game is dying or at the least it is very stale. Why should people create a bunch of whore clans because the clan that created the whores doesn't get any benefit out of it. Everybody else beats up on them. Change that.
1). Make it so clans can declare war.
2). Eliminate the energy trophies and do #3.
3). Just like in bots 2. The clan(s) that have a war with a whore clan gets double the energy of say 20, others get 10. Period, no other energy numbers. Maybe increase whored clan bots energy generation so that the rape limits mean something again.
It would be fun to negotiate wars again I think.
This might promote more interest and it might help even out the domination that one clan has month after month. At least do something instead of doing absolutely nothing all the time. The energy system the way it is now is a failure for everyone other than escapism. I hate to say it but floR had a better system with the wars and all. I know you love real wars but real wars does not work.
@ Escapism You can argue all you want against this (and other suggestions) but doing that only proves one thing. You dismiss EVERY suggestion made by other players because changing things around might either end your domination or make it harder to maintain every month.
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Escapism don't split up cause we're a group of players that enjoy playing together. The best times I've had scoring were when we lost to Eternal in the massive months when its a big team effort. Winning is not the most important thing. Good example is Gpof, he left an Eternal that had won the majority of the years months to join us cause he preferred playing with us. Winning isn't everything.
You can say "Oh Escapism don't want change" all you want, but the converse is true too. You're asking for change cause you think (wrongly) its the only way you can win. Eternal previously had this "dominance", but to a much larger extent. Escapism formed and tried to beat them, lost, and tried again, lost, tried again and finally won (mostly cause Neps quit). Last month was ridiculously close, and we couldn't really rally much more effort from anyone, if Pirates recruited 1 or 2 more scorers, instead of them all being split among clans, they'd win.
That being said, as long as the best players in the game are in Escapism (and imo, the majority of them are, though most aren't really active, as much as you may think they are), they'll find a way to dominate regardless of what rules you propose. If clans had to declare war again, it would be just a few months until Escapism had the best set of war/whore clans possible and we'd be back to mini groups of players moaning that they can't win. Except now we've wasted the very little development time we get from Ender with nothing to show from it.
I'm all for things that make the game more interesting, I'm so bored of it I haven't played in at least a year, but making changes that do nothing but appease people who can't be bothered to put the effort in to win is pointless and a waste of dev time. Ender wanted this game to be about real wars, come up with suggestions to make that work. Not something, like your current suggestions, that can be abused just as much as the current system, if not more. It'd be no time at all time a specific clan had the best setup in the game, and now they get DOUBLE the energy from having a good infrastructure? Seems even more unfair than at the minute.
For what its worth, I think right now is the absolute best time for a "new" clan to win the title. It's possible, as Zal showed us with that month where they doubled Escapisms score. Escapism haven't scored above 5m for over a year and we're pretty inactive. If clans dont push and let our active players keep close all month, of course we'll give it a push and get the free month. But if we're way behind 10 days in, we really don't have the manpower or desire to catch up big leads. Although, as the winning streak gets longer it is going to be tempting to try and beat Eternals, so who knows if that attitude will change.
TL;DR:
- Be careful with meh-suggestions, they just waste dev time. Dominant players will find a way to dominate any system. Best way is to make new dominant players, rather than try to find an environment that existing players can't dominate
- #1 spot is ripe for the taking, but its an uncoordinated effort at the minute. The #2 spot hasn't been the same clan since August 2016, different clans are putting in subpar effort every month, instead of banding together one specific month and smashing us
- The game really isn't all that unfair at the minute. Theres a ton of energy available at lower levels (and much more if Zal wants there to be :p) and its much more efficient to score at those levels. Dumping is only a better idea than normal scoring when all the lowbie energy has been exhausted, which it isn't at the minute.
Haven't typed that much in a long time!
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The comments about Escapism being unbeatable remind of the way people used to talk about Eternal. For those that weren't around for the early days of bots4, they were the original "unbeatable" clan, winning the first 17 months straight of the game's existence. They're still a strong clan and are still the most-winning clan, but after 6+ years of this game's existence, we're on track for that to change in 2017.
Regarding more competition, I wholeheartedly agree that this is needed for the game. A close-fought month always leads to more activity which makes everything better all around. While tweaks to the monthly competition could make that happen, I think my efforts might be more effective in the long-run if I focus on new player attraction and retention. A big part of the problem is that there is pretty slim pickings for "serious" competitive players. I think that's largely a function of the number of people that get exposed to the game, so in order to grow things, increase competition, make months more interesting, and so on, my hope is that the efforts on new player attraction/retention will help with that.
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Dominant players will find a way to dominate any system. Best way is to make new dominant players, rather than try to find an environment that existing players can't dominate
As much as I agree with the majority of what Fish said, this stood out for me. People who get to the top are there because they're willing and able to adapt. No matter what system there is, there's always going to be an efficient way of going about it. Said players will find that method and use it to the best of their ability.
The only way to prevent that is going back to old clanscore, which leaves very minimal room for innovation. Minimum con whores at higher levels and hard hitting bots as scorers is about as efficient as it gets. Once you have enough bots to attack for 24 hours straight, it just comes down to who has the most time to dedicate to scoring. I don't care too much for that barebones level of play, but I will admit it might make more competition.
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Dominant players will find a way to dominate any system. Best way is to make new dominant players, rather than try to find an environment that existing players can't dominate
As a counterpoint to Gpof's agreement, what if instead the system's focus was on making it simple enough that any new player can join in quickly without much thought? We don't have a tutorial really. We tell people what to do up to level 20 then let them do whatever. They aimlessly train or fight various bots without probably even knowing what ratio is. People get sent a clan invite and don't even know what a clan is for. When they join a clan they get bombarded with information about energy, ratio whores, how to get your weapons to 0 condition, dumpers, win dumpers, whores, stars, buying and selling, builds, what the best strategies are, how long it'll take to become a good player or what a good player even is, and on top of it all, gets greeted by a fairly dead main forum that only seems active when I or a few others want to talk.
So without a person like me or Fishwick or Gpof to guide new players, there is no real way they could ever learn to be "dominating" players. Essentially it is up to us to want to mentor new people, the few that for some reason or another are attracted to an old text based game. We could change that. When the game was younger I tried to make threads that were more helpful to new people (holy, it's been nearly 5 years) and even tried making a site with Jans once but I/everyone else essentially gave up seeing the lack of new players and the constant supply of Ender roundabouts to every question we had.
And I'm sorry if this seems mangled, I didn't read everything you guys said lol. I have played bots for 15 years with nothing much to show for it and so have Gpof, Ender and Fishwick. Ender may have bots4, but it is really just a slight variation of bots2 with a bit too much focus on perfection versus fun. Things like adding RPG elements, a story, skills, making a full fledged game, PVE, those seem to be dead, such fun ideas that I've spent 15 years talking to floR and Ender about to varying degrees. We've all focused on preventing autoclickers, how to make clans bigger or smaller, how much energy should things produce, how many platinums and buffs do you want, yatta yatta yatta. Such boredom. And that's pretty much how I can sum up my experience on bots4 lol.
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@ Fishwick How to you know "what I'm thinking". Be more open minded and realize that the points aren't all about you and your clan. My point boiles down to the following, "there is not enough energy targets to fight". Your reply to that is always, "then why don't you make more whores", we (escapism) did. Fine I say.
Then I tried to offer up a solution that has been made probably hundreds of times before and that is to bring back wars. IMO, "once you make your own whore clans" you essentially have no control over them because everybody (that doesn't have any energy targets to fight either) will use them up and the owner clan still has nothing to fight.
(It seems) like Escapism isn't effected by this too much because most of their whores are high level that can just be dumped and fought when they want to make the whores easy to fight. I guess we all have to do that then don't we. Some people don't have thousands of dollars to spend on a game with limited if any payback to do what you can do.
I offered up an easy solution and it would in no way effect escapisms or anybody elses win monopoly. It would in effect actually help escapism. The suggestion of bringing back wars and let the clan that owns the whore clans give out wars or not to whom ever they want was a very nice feature in Bots 2. It required the clan owner to negotiate with other clans if you wanted to better your chance of competing. All that would need to be done is to adjust the amounts of energy that could be gotten if you have a war or don't with a whore clan.
How is the above going to effect escapisms domination that escapisim and Ender do not want to hurt? It's not going to. What it will do is bring back something to the game that should never have been taken out in the first place. Maybe make some adjustments to it sure. Building whore clans so your clan can benefit more than the competition would motivate people to build more energy producers and it would increase competition.
@ Ender, You keep saying that your main goal is to bring more people in to the game. Ok then, exactly how are you going to do that again? I must have missed it. Like Mr. Zal said in his post, what are all of these new people going to do? Theres virtually nothing to do other than train up to level 20 and then join a clan. Most people might only be casual players and they aren't going to want to build the games infrastructure.
Ender, I understand that you have a job, a family and life outside of Bots. If you don't want to try to improve things for the people that are already here (while probably attracting new players and increasing competition) then just say so and leave the game the way it is now. (Oh, I forgot, you are already doing that. My bad.) Or just don't say anything and keep it going until somebody hacks the server and the game ends with nothing said just like the way floR ended it.
This isn't about escapisms domination or trying to make it easier for the competition its about doing small things to give everyone in the game some satisfaction and to improve the experience. Make a whore clan? Why? So the competition can beat the crap out of them before the owner clan can get to it? Yea sure.
You know what? Why bother making any suggestions because nobody wants any changes simply because it might effect their own personal goals and satisfaction. Have a great day, Project XYZ is done.
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I do agree Zal, it is pretty complicated if you want to be efficient and "dominate", you basically need the smothering embrace of a clan mentoring you, or you need to be Pothead. It's not a game that'll keep most players coming back for more for about a year until they're really good, so maybe there are things we need to do that make it simpler and more appealing. Maybe something to make #2 and #3 spots more appealing. If you get 2 newb clans fighting for 2nd or 3rd, maybe they'll stick around and decide to go for #1 the next month. A plat for the top 5 scorers of #2? A plat for top scorer of #3? Could be abused for plat farming, but at least it'd make competition.
Project, it's not about Escapisms domination, no change Ender makes will stop the best players winning, whether its us or not. Please stop thinking all of my opinions are formulated to make my clan be #1 instead of #2.
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Maybe even something as drastic as removing repair costs when scoring. Its tedious for all players, but gives established players with a kudo whore an advantage. I dunno if it'd stop lowbies scoring but if they break their bot, can never win again maybe it scares them off?
Ender, maybe set up some analytics of some sort that identify exactly what is happening before bots never get played again, though this is massive and open ended. We can't really speculate what scares "noobs" away cause we basically live in a different world to them.
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I know bots stars makes money for Ender, but if there will be a competition to win perm stars, instead of plats.. i'm sure there will be more active players trying to win that month
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@ Ender, You keep saying that your main goal is to bring more people in to the game. Ok then, exactly how are you going to do that again? I must have missed it.
Sorry yeah, details on this are a little scarce. I have a big personal doc with all my ideas in this area, but I've only shared bits and pieces here and there. I think this thread probably has the most info if you want to get the general gist though. Basically there will be a way to play the game without registering.
If we get to the point where new players are joining, playing the game for a week, and then disappearing...I'd be ecstatic to have that problem. Then I can turn my focus towards tutorials, working in ways to teach new players advanced techniques, and so on. At this point though, new players simply aren't trying the game at all. The vast, vast majority of players are former bots2 players. My current goal is to fix this.
Ender, I understand that you have a job, a family and life outside of Bots.
This is a true statement (example: it's 11:45pm right now and I just got home 30 minutes ago...waking up at 7am tomorrow), but it's also kind of irrelevant for most players. We're all busy and we all have commitments - most people just come on here to have fun, so the personal life of the admin doesn't really matter in that sense. :) I try to get onto the game forums and respond to things daily and also try to carve out time to do development work. I know folks will always want updates faster than I can provide them (a good problem to have IMO), but as I've stated in the past, make no mistake - I intend to support this game for a very long time. It's my personal project and if you stick around long enough (or leave and come back later, either is fine), I promise the features I talk about will eventually make it into the game (like tournaments, which used to be the token vaporware feature).
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Maybe even something as drastic as removing repair costs when scoring.
Stop, I can only get so erect.
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Stop, I can only get so erect.
What if I told you we could also make all showroom items appear 100% of the time, no camping required? And unlimited buffs again!
Now I'm getting aroused.
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