Known Darkfriend scalp awards trial.

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Elysia
Posts: 7908
Joined: Sun Feb 15, 2015 1:29 pm

Known Darkfriend scalp awards trial.

Post by Elysia » Sun Sep 11, 2022 4:11 pm

For the past few Known Darkfriends being active (Axxye, Cera, Lisennet, Meren, Nevaeh, Teveyl, Vannor, Xephiroth etc.) we have seen LS suffer. People huddle in clanrooms, they stop actively socializing on globals even more and group activities become less inclusive. Random encounters leading to small (RP) interactions are reduced. Aside from the game being a multi-user dungeon, so it becoming more single player mode when people clam up out of caution, the game only does well when LS does well, so you can see why these things are in conflict with one another.

At the same time, Known Darkfriend is supposed to show that you can kill more than you die. We see Known Darkfriends mostly pursuing the lesser threats. This week, an imm was snooping a guy who was trying to DRINK his FLUID as he was being pursued. Arguably, killing the new isn't really a demonstration of skill.

We've been discussing Known Darkfriends on and off upstairs and we have reached consensus on trying the following as a temporary trial:

Instead of auto-awarding, the mob who handles scalp turn ins for Known Darkfriends, now logs the entries. Imms will manually award based on the following criteria:
  • unclanned: 0 altqps
  • clanned rank <5: 1 altqps
  • clanned rank 5+6: 2 altqps
  • clanned rank 7+8: 3 altqps
  • Gaidin, Red Ajah, Wolfbrothers: 4 alt qps
  • Other Known Darkfriend: 10 alt qps and 10 alt qps deducted from the one who died
The idea of siccing Known Darkfriends on eachother comes from the "culling of the weak" and eternal competition the Shadow seems to foster. Maybe it will work, maybe it won't. That's why this is a trial. Preliminary length is 1 month, but we may have to adjust things as we go.

EDIT: there was a feature that allowed Known Darkfriends to lock in their achievements. Since you can now drop further if you die, this has been removed for the duration of the trial.

Elysia
Posts: 7908
Joined: Sun Feb 15, 2015 1:29 pm

Re: Known Darkfriend scalp awards trial.

Post by Elysia » Mon Oct 10, 2022 4:57 pm

And this trial has come to an end.

We did notice that with no more rewards for unclanned, people actually started picking higher ranked targets and that's a definite plus. Also, Red Ajah and Gaidin were targeted more often, since they yielded more. The same goes for darkfriends killing darkfriends.

We went into this trial with the idea of "what can we do while we wait for coding stuff?". Well, and then coding stuff happened. That means it's the most sensible thing to now revert to old rewards and see what the effects of the "kill light and kill dark" have. As such, Ilsae now auto-awards for war scalps and heads again, just like before.

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