miscellaneous

So I've played for quite some time now, And theres been 2 clans that have been face to face on many occasions, What we need is more competition, and This month I'll try my hardest to out-score the top clan, It will be hard but we will try :)

Goodluck guys and happy scoring!

-Mythology

Good luck ;)

gratz on 3rd place in November :)

Well we are slowly keeping up with you guys, you're pretty hard to compete with xD

That's not how you start a war. Good luck anyway.

Not a war to be honest, Just some friendly competetion, in some ways I know we wont keep up as 80 percent of the clan are my bots that i've been working my arse off on to keep up, I only play maybe half a month before I need to stop xD But hey, I'll give some competetion :D

Haha jesmo, Thankyou xD Going for 3-4M energy this month so see how we go xD

you remind me of me.

You remind me of Alan. No offence

ahh, i forgot about beauty of non-called-for insults. It's wonderful.

Misc so I don't want to over-mod, but be nice boys, competition is healthy and new people aiming for first is always welcome.

I'm being nice, I said no offence ;) good to see some new blood haha

i myself is being nice also what i said was miles from the truth

Well, I didn't make this Thread for everyone to eat each others hearts out, It's just a little extra competetion lads, chill out xD

The "clanrace" at the moment is like Usain Bolt competing the paralympics, but good luck anyway. And if you do come close to winning dont expect people to be happy to see that or feel you deserve it(even if you do).

Trust me, I don't care what people say or do, I don't mind about the whole "winning" thing, it's more of giving the top 2 clans another clan to compete against, this game has only 2 clans that are actually trying for god sake, we need more clans to be earning more and competing against the top 2, so no I don't feel like we "deserve" anything because after all it's just a game, I don't need people to be happy for us IF we do end up winning, Just giving bots another clan to compete against :)

win or lose more competition is always a good thing. Good luck mate

Maybe a clan shake up is needed?

Im not from the USA but from I understand they have a lottery type system in picking there NFL players?

Every player can enter 1 bot into the lottery. Ender creates a cool little piece of SQL genius that creates two random teams with 20 bots in each.

Each month now only has 2 clans to compete but every month has a new batch of players playing together?

*Cowers and hides from the inevitable hail of bullets.

+1 to that.

Nah, people are in clans together to play with each other rather than win. Rivalry's are one of the main reasons we at least have some activity

rivalries is the only thing all human beings without exception are experts at creating.

The problem is there isnt 20 players from 2 clans competing, there is 20+ in one and the rest are maybe 4 at max(players ofcourse not bots), I think reducing the amount of players that can contribute to the monthly energy score to 10 would vastly improve competition and give newer clans much more of a chance, the game isnt active enough to justify the 20 bot rule.

correction: "players"#2=bots

Keeping up with you guys is hard work! I log off for 30 minutes and you get 20-30k up everytime :') Some good competetion so far :)

So I tried keeping up and giving you guys some more competition, but recently I've found out some bad news which results in me having to be up at the hospital every day for a couple of months, good luck guys, I will try to be on as much as I can and catch up but I can't promise nothing, best wishes to all clans for this month and to everyone apart from the top 5, try giving them a run for it, competition is good. Cheers guys.

Hope it isn't too serious and you get better man

I don't think a rule change is needed really, eternal had that period of insane dominance before Rene, Esv, Myriad, Lyrad etc decided to see if they could pull a win off. It meant a lot of recruiting and effort but they pulled it off. Go Mythology \o/

Come on fish its not rocket science you wouldn't agree, as nor would any of escapism for obvious reasons.

My point is over activity on the game not an "I hate escapism" thing (although i kind of do for june you bastards!!!!), when eternal had their dominance the game was much more active and the 20 bot rule was reasonable but i dont think you can say their has been a month in the last year where 20 players have gone head to head with another 20. Even if the rule was brought in i dont have the time to play effectively anymore but as a "neutral" looking in on the game i can see a flaw i think should be corrected, 10 or even 15 contributory players would make the game much more competitive and exciting if you ask me and substantiate the small player base that the game unfortunately currently has.

Also, im drunk. But every letter in my last post came from the heart and my passion for the game.

Eternal are in a little rut right now, partially due to some core members leaving, partially to some taking a break and partially because active Eternal members aren't doing enough. None of that is the games rules fault. Escapism have an energy ratio of under 5 right now, Eternal used to average at least 6-7 on months they weren't even "going for it".

You can complain about the monopolistic oligarchy that is Escapism, but cutting us down to 15 or even 10 bots won't do much. The solution to losing in a game isn't asking for the rules to be changed, its trying to win. The UK didn't moan that the USA and China have a way bigger population in the Olympics, they just tried their best and did pretty well with what they had access to. Escapism (before me) didn't moan that Eternal had tons of active scorers and they had ~4-5, they just carried on scoring and recruiting until they won.

You're just 300k behind right now. You (pothead) personally could have scored double that by this point in the month if you wanted to. We aren't "going for it" this month, so you'd easily have a lead, but that needs effort and risk, not drunkenly whining on a forum :p

Also worth noting that a smaller clan pool would severely gimp Mythology too.

I'm just trying to say from my own experience of making a clan it is ridiculously hard to win and I think making your own clan less of a challenge to new players would result in more activity. But I doubt it will happen anyway so i wont carry on advertising it lol.

I think the problem is the fact we have a really small player base. if you want more competition, you need more people to compete.

I think maybe the focus in clans is a bit too much on competition. You're not going to attract the casual player to play for 10 hours a day and get the highest energy score just for a silly platinum trophy. In today's market that's way too hardcore for most gamers. On top of that they want to be told everything in tutorials, which this game does horribly at.

It's not the game that's disappearing, it's the hardcore gamer demographic that used to be more common 10 or so years ago. There used to be less to do on the internet. Now you can either play this game or go play The Witcher 3 or Fallout 4 or Team Fortress 2 if you want. There's more people who would waste 100 hours writing bad fan fictions now then there is people that would play this game.

So really, increasing/decreasing clan sizes will do nothing. There's plenty of other ways of increasing competition for solo clans though. Perhaps special buffs for solo clans that gives them more energy per fight. Stuff like that.

Also, sorry for hear about your troubles Marley/whatever your name is. Hope things work out for you.

let's all just join one clan then we can all be winners :P

But there will be top20 competition to get shiny trophy lol

It's not the game that's disappearing, it's the hardcore gamer demographic that used to be more common 10 or so years ago. There used to be less to do on the internet. Now you can either play this game or go play The Witcher 3 or Fallout 4 or Team Fortress 2 if you want. There's more people who would waste 100 hours writing bad fan fictions now then there is people that would play this game.

I agree with this for the most part. I think there's still a lot of the hardcore gamers, it's just the majority are on extremely mainstream games like CoD. Regardless if there's more or less hardcore gamers, what is left is definitely diluted by many casuals so at the very least it feels like less in the grand scheme of things.

I agree with a lot of what Black Rock Shooter said too. One way of looking at games is a spectrum. One one end you have Candy Crush - easy to get into, played by lots of people that don't consider themselves gamers, visually appealing. On the other end you have games more like bots4 - hard to get into, harder to learn, yet harder to "excel" at (read: invest a lot of time into).

I've talked about this many times before, but I think there are some things that could be done to make bots4 more accessible - make it effortless to try the game, provide in-game guideance for complete newbies, add real documentation, etc. This is the main big project I've been thinking about now that we finally have tournaments. I think making the game more accessible will only work to a point though - I'm not sure this game can ever not be niche without losing its essence. That being said, I do believe this game could definitely be far more popular with the right combination of newbie-friendly changes and advertising.

Regarding advertising, the good news is that I'm quite willing to spend money on promoting the game. This community has been enormously generous in supporting it financially and I would have to spend a pretty absurd amount of money on advertising for it to ever sink into the red. I don't want to waste money though, so I wouldn't want to do this in earnest until (a) said newbie-friendly changes are made and (b) proper analytics and metric collections are in place to evaluate the effectiveness of said advertisng.

As far as accessibility improvements, starting new bots and such without actually registering would benefit current players too. For the people who make level 3 bots to attack at level 2 etc. Easier for throwaway bots basically, and with said throwaway bots (I assume) not being permanent, reduces the saturation of pointless bots at the very low levels.

Win-win-win situation.

Good stuff has been said on this that I'm not sure I could add more to. However I will say that as the player base grows, you might see social clans pop up, going for a top 10 instead of the top spot just because its easier as a more casual player and more of a social experience.

you can always add more, source_code.

I, myself, think we should add a few chocolate-dipped bacon strips with crushed salted nuts on top. put it in the fridge so the chocolate becomes solid again, and then take it out and that's your dessert.

Me Marley here guys, I'm back with some pretty good news, I'm all clear (Y) had a cancer scare and did 15 days worth of hospital time, wasn't as bad as the surgeons had thought and was a good procedure all up, they cut a lump out of my ribs (lungs), can only hope nothing comes back! :) Will try to keep up with everyone this month, good luck guys :)

how scary! really glad to hear of the positive results and hopefully you never have to deal with such a scare again.