Think of it, all treasuries do is eliminate inactive clans (which 98% of clans are anyway, don't deny it) to save a few Mb of data on Ender's server. If we didn't have treasuries we'd save tons of hours of training for kudos, have 500+ clans in comparison to the 123 we currently have and have way more energy targets (people quit but the clans don't have to disappear).
All I can see for keeping it is A) it's a way of gaining more members, which is just stupid, just increase it to 50 members max limit or something. 50 people aren't even playing. and B) Ender wouldn't want to delete code for it.
So ya, what do you guys think?
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What about a way to join clans with having to accept? Thatd be neat.
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To answer your question, I've always thought of clan tax as a mechanism for weeding out inactive[*] clans. This isn't because of technical constraints (e.g. storage costs), but rather a desire to avoid the clan list being an ever-growing list of increasingly stale clans. There'd be almost 3,500 today without any auto-deletion mechanism.
[*] For some definition of inactive, obviously. Being considered "active" generally just means someone logged in within the past few months to fill up a clans' treasury.
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If there were 3,500 clans clanned right now, think about all the energy that would be available for players to gather... that would only increase activity.
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dont know about this, this means clans can be supersized as there is no limit, limit is based on clan tax, too many bots and the tax is too much.
Suppose it saves us Escapism members the time to enroll for Tourney as we can just keep them in clan all the time
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make a clan size limit... this would also prevent escapism from having 120+ members during tourny time and winning all the plats (bots2 had a 100 member limit right)
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its fine the way it is, Escapism would still win most categories, but that is not the point here.
I rather have Ender focused on things that are more important
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What exactly are these more important things anyway? According to his to do list, he only has "P5 W5 Energy system overhaul", "P5 W5 Setup Closure Tools", and "P5 W3 Level not checked when accepting clan invite" left to do, whatever the hell 2 of those things are. Oddly enough he's actually finished tournaments on there and hasn't updated that list at all really.
Sure people will want a PvE mode and energy overhaul and stuff, but we know that's not going to happen.
And as I said, a 50 member limit would be alright. I mean, there's only 17 tournament categories, just put your top 17 bots in.
As per the 3500 clans, I know it sounds like a lot, but having that many clans would be helpful for newer players to attack and gain energy over the 5-10 players who just keep their dumper clans around in case they need them. Would it really cause that much of a load on the server Ender? In fact, if there were 3500 clans around, fewer bots would have to be made, which would allow people to focus on one bot more, which might = more activity.
But it's fine, this is just another suggestion of mine I accidentally put in the questions forums lol. Like 95% of my other suggestions, it'll just be ignored. So ya, whatever.
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i know what you mean zal, and i agree things are going too slow.
But xp drops after 400(or even more since last is 180) new EQ and Armour(i got bored of the new stuff already, there is nothing i cant equip) but new EQ and armour for all levels, not only high level would be nice, people could start to experiment again with new build, could even bring back some older players who stopped playing more or less.
And yeah ofcourse PvE, maybe even energy buildup for training, instead of just EPH, anything related to this could be a improvement bust must be carefully implemented to keep the balance.
so for me this treasury thing would not be the highest priority.
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it does not seem like it would be a difficult thing at all to implement, and it would be a positive thing for the community..
just food for thought...
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maybe its not that difficult, but when management is AFK its harder
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Maybe it's just that I make it sound too easy to do. In my mind you delete the treasury code, up the member limit, and that'd be nearly it. It's not that easy since this game isn't made up of just one programming language. All clans therefore have no treasuries and just exist forever and people still have a good member limit to go by.
Oh, and as stated earlier, there -could- be an auto-accept. I think it could be a toggle function like the gaining energy option in the profile. Then main clans can be invite only and whore clans etc. will be able to accept as many as possible. Would make it easier for whore clans. Most people wouldn't just auto join a clan anyway. I think it would be better to do this under a no-treasury system so the 1 person who started the clan doesn't have to worry about 49 other people joining and filling the treasury for them all.
So ya, to me it's just a simplification of a somewhat useless system as it stands. It could be better utilized if you wanted to add more to it too though. It just sucks the way it is I think.
The other stuff you mention I highly doubt would get people back. Alan added all that stuff to his text game and nobody joined that lol. And on other games adding things like equipment or changing certain systems tends to just frustrate people more than entertain them. I mean I've played Maplestory/Diablo 2/Diablo 3 and every time they mess with equipment or changing systems people tend to -leave- more than join.
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:) love the Alan stuff, should have implemented Auto clicking is his game as well since he was pretty good at that
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still things i mentioned might be interesting, maybe it wont bring people back but it might make things more awarding for current/new players, we all love change(depending on the change), we are quite a small community and we do have a huge saying in this i think, maybe Ender should get some volunteers he trusts to help him(not talking about the forum moderators, i live in Romania and back in the 80's this was called comunism.
Im no expert in coding languages so not sure how hard it would be, but i think its important to keep current and future players happy, only way this game can survive(since its already pretty much basic).
Keep it up to date and implement some new stuff ones in a while
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This is getting off-topic and this isn't the first time I've talked about this, but my main priority right now is growing the game. There's obviously been churn of existing players, which is natural for any online game, but I think something that's sorely lacking for bots4 is a stream of new players. I mainly attribute this to (a) a poor experience for new players (there needs to be a lower barrier to start playing, more handholding/documentation early on, etc.) and (b) lack of advertising/marketing. The former requires some focus/attention/effort on my part, the latter requires money (which I'm quite willing to put forward considering how generous bots4 players have been with their money).
I'd be happy to discuss whether there should be a clan size cap, how clan tax should be calculated, whether there should be clan tax at all, new equipment, PvE, etc. when there are less pressing concerns. Doing so right now though mostly feels like bikeshedding (or less generously, rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic :-).
Also, Zal, that TODO list you mentioned was scrapped many years ago. That is why its thread has not been sticky for a long time. It is not at all reflective of my intentions/plans.
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Yes yes, all well and good Ender, you have your priorities and whatnot.
But if you could answer one more question, would adding 3400 clans to the clan list cause a large increase in server usage or would it be minimal in comparison? Just asking from a lag perspective.
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and it seems like a pretty simple concept... getting rid of treasures means clans will not expire... if this happens that means there is more energy for players to gather (this will allow new players to have more energy to gather/be able to compete)
with things the way they are.. the only advantage in this game is to people with dumper clans... because as the game becomes less active and clans expire.. you can't contribute without dumpers :(
it makes sense to abolish clan treasury to allow an even playing field for all - there is no gain from clans disappearing, it only leads to the inevitable.
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The difference in storage costs, extra database work, and network latency introduced by 3400 clans vs. 100 clans is infinitesimal.
If you're curious, the lion's share of the game's storage is trophy data (~37%). It turns out that storing individual records of each trophy earned by each bot adds up. Bmail posts come in a distant second place (~15%). Clans involve a very tiny amount of metadata (~0.1%).
And the absolute numbers that we're talking about are still very small anyway - the complete game database is less than 500 MB. The phone in your pocket likely has more than an order of magnitude more storage than this. And to give some perspective, my day job involves processing and storing many terabytes of data every day. :)
tl;dr: Unless this game somehow blows up and there are suddenly thousands of players online at a time, there are absolutely zero potential scaling issues that should come up for technical reasons that are not easily solvable. The dataset is (relatively) tiny.
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Why add extra clans when we can just remove all the clans completely and just compete for wins?
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I agree on the tax for limiting clan sizes (which they don't do a lot).
Could we maybe do it so the max tres is more than 90 days?
Or lower the cost for smaller clans?
I don't spend a bunch of time here, but yet some, an I really hate it when I have to spend time training and training to get money for my main but, not to mention training even more to also keep my treasury full...
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Day by day more and more people are becoming more inactive and clans are closing. This major clan has 1.6 days of treasury left. This one will close any day now.
Won't you please stop the genocide Ender?
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Ender, fill those 2 clans with some money! :(
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Apply and fill up treasury
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I applied with one to Canned, 1 to Pizzas, and this one to Kawaii, but I'm working on leveling it.
So ya, I'll do your treasuries :) Just please accept the bots soon >.>
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I did apply, it was Pachirisu. No worries now ;) I'll do your treasury ^_^
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Oh, back on topic here, even if Ender has "bigger" priorities or whatever, my idea of 50 members + no treasury would also fix a glaring problem with the current treasury system, unlimited slots available for tournaments. Escapism etc. all sign up their bots (right now they have 122 and 0 days of treasury) a few hours before the tournament knowing that A)the clan won't be deleted since it takes 7 days to delete with 0 treasury and B)they'll kick them all out before the clan tax is taken.
A 50 clan member + no treasury would fix this. You could say it's not broken, but having a top 3 clan with 0 days of treasury and 122 members (platinum squad has 77) is just fucking stupid when everyone else is 50 members or so. The system is set up to give the person with most bots the tournament, not the person with the best bots really.
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and then it's plats for everyone bot that finishes in the top 10... all they are doing is stacking plat trophies on all their bots :(
seems very broken to me.
+1 for 50 bot clan limit.
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It's not broken. It's a strategy like using dumpers for scoring. I'm just wondering why others don't do the same and fight for those, as you say, easy plats.
Ah and this sentence...
The system is set up to give the person with most bots the tournament, not the person with the best bots really.
It's not true. Try to enroll 1 million whores and see if you can win the tournament.
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+1 Zal! the game is broken is sooo many ways :(
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This thread has meandered a bit, but in response to the most recent discussion about temporarily-inflated clans during tournaments, I agree. As is typical in online game design, something ended up being used in a way I didn't intend/foresee. I didn't anticipate the way the 7 day clan tax grace period would be used as a loophole to be able to enter a large number of bots into the tournament for a clan.
I'll think about how I want to address this in a way that's consistent with my other goals and intentions for clans, but rest easy (unless the current system works to your advantage, sorry in that case) - I'm on it. :)
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HAHA Escapism, you dirty loopholes
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yeah i like it so much :)
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Or something similar in the fashion that the monthly clan race only accepts the top 20 in the clan towards the clan race, then the tournament fro clans could do something similar.
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