LS War shortening idea.

[Ashlee]

My timeline is much clearer. 2017 - CW vs Lancers, no resolution. Eternity of warrants.

Not quite true. Lancers aren’t allowed to war with southern nations from a RP standpoint, even if the CW decided to declare war on us. Imms have gone to great lengths to remind Lancers that o ur sole duty is defending the Blightborder. At the conclusion, Lancers pardoned essentially every CW except Pial and maybe one other, who I believe were asked to do quests for a pardon but never followed through.

[Atienne]

Wars are absolutely too long. Farming the general is how you win wars.

I think there should be a limit of one banner per boot and the emphasis should be on pk scalps. You could still win a war with banners but going to war with mobs seems silly.

That’s my opinion from experiencing 5 wars and losing none mainly due to banners.

This isn’t a bad idea either.

[Reyne]

Limiting banner turn ins either with a straight cap per boot/day/week or even as a function of % of PK points would help curtail the "farming generals and avoiding PK otherwise" a lot I think.

Throwing out some brainstorming:

Like fine hit the general but your overall warscore is going to get normalized through (for example) 85% PK points and 15% banner points. So if you hit the general 10 times but killed no one versus they couldn't ever get a general banner but killed 3-4 then you might very well still lose.

Or "banner points will only be counted up to 20% of your PK points" so if you have 50 PK points and 50 banner points then you're only getting 10 banner points actually."

[Atienne]

Limiting banner turn ins either with a straight cap per boot/day/week or even as a function of % of PK points would help curtail the "farming generals and avoiding PK otherwise" a lot I think.

Throwing out some brainstorming:

Like fine hit the general but your overall warscore is going to get normalized through (for example) 85% PK points and 15% banner points. So if you hit the general 10 times but killed no one versus they couldn't ever get a general banner but killed 3-4 then you might very well still lose.

Or "banner points will only be counted up to 20% of your PK points" so if you have 50 PK points and 50 banner points then you're only getting 10 banner points actually."

I am partial to a weighted system. The difficulty will be finding the correct balance. This might even be determined on an individual war basis, considering clan activity.

Being a member of what many consider a “dead clan” it is an annoyance knowing that it’s possible for someone else to try and start a war and probably win just because no one is around to defend. If you can only do the general once or twice a boot and it’s weighted lighter than playerkill scalps, it would definitely give someone a shot to defend and if not win (because face it, one guy can’t be around all the time) at least make the margin of victory closer than 100-200 points.

That brings up another point I just thought about. What about reworking victory conditions? A war of attrition where both sides are very close in points? Why should one give 2 or 3 demands just because they lost by a small number of points? Why not tie the victory conditions to scoring way more points than the other side? We already have it set up something like this, right? If you score with 100 points more, you get an extra demand, 200 points more you get another one, etc.

Only winning by 50 points and demanding a patrol or 20k gold seems kind of silly, considering it’s not a complete blowout - how do you justify that the “loser” can’t just run the patrol off after a few weeks of conscription / amassing reinforcements?

What else could be done? Maybe tie the strength of the patrol or the amount of gold demanded to the margin of victory. Most other demands could also be evaluated based on the margin of victory. Look throughout history: most of the craziest outcomes were after complete, uncontested victories. Sacking of Rome? WW2? Compared to what happened elsewhere, like in Vietnam, or Iraq maybe?

Or, if Staff or Watchers could make it harder to hit the cities for the less active clans, that would probably help a lot. Just because only one or two people play very sparingly doesn’t mean the country doesn’t have a big enough army to defend.

Obviously, this is mostly about lesser active clans and how they can defend themselves. Being from one of those, I was lucky enough that when we got attacked, we were able to rally enough people. However, that’s not always going to be the case. It would be really nice if someone or something could step in during those times to give one or two people a chance against the world.

[Elysia]

I don't really want to complicate things with when people can do what. It just makes the tallying harder.

Since a fair few people agreed that wars are too long/ too draining, I went ahead with the ultimatum idea. War post in Announcements has been edited to reflect the change.

[Mhaliah]

I am really at a loss that people think general farming is winning wars in the current system. Are the war tallies under the current point system available somewhere?

[Tirric]

I want to say they get posted on ToL whenever a war finishes, so you could probably dig through those to see the results of past wars.

[Elysia]

The war tallies are posted on announcements, but the long and short of it is:

pk scalps = 10 points
generals = 5 points

[Mhaliah]

Ah. I was looking in ToL for them. Thanks Elysia.

This post has nothing to do with the war shortening. I just wanted to crunch some numbers from the Wars that have been fought after the implementation of the 5/10 points for banner/scalp. To illustrate a point for those who think that banners are skewing the wars to allow active clans to bully inactive clans.

SS v. *DoTS*
SS banner points: 20. SS scalp points: 230. % of SS points from banners: 8.0%
DoTS banner points: 40. DoTS scalp points: 280. % of DoTS from banners: 12.5%

DoTS v. *Companions*
DoTS banner points: 5. DoTS scalp points: 80. % of DoTS from banners: 5.8%
Comp banner points: 50. Comp scalp points: 140. % of Comp from banners: 26.3%

Winged Guard v. *Dragonsworn*
WG banner points: 10. WG scalp points: 80. % of WG from banners: 11.1%
Dsworn banner points: 35. Dsworn scalp points: 140. % of Dsworn from banners: 20.0%

QG v. *BT*
QG banner points: 50. QG scalp points: 60. % of QG from banners: 45.5%
BT banner points: 30. BT scalp points: 440. % of BT from banners: 6.4%

In all cases the side with the most PK scalps has won the war. So if banner points for both sides are disregarded the outcome of the war remains unchanged. In all cases if just the winners banners points are disregarded but the loosing side keeps all points from scalps and banners, the outcome of the war remains unchanged.

Thus, BANNERS ARE IRRELEVANT to the outcome of the war.

[Viellain]

Perhaps war has changed. I was involved in 5 or 6. Most of the pk scalps came from general hits. If wars are decided by pk scalps now then what’s the point of the general?

Keep the personal qp rewards and ditch the banner altogether.