Suggestion: Leaderboard based on AP per hour

spoqster · June 2015

Dear AvA team,

as you are experimenting with different scoring mechanisms in different campaigns, have you considered trying out a leaderboard that is based on AP/hour, rather than total AP?

Such a campaign could be very popular with players who have full time jobs or cannot play as much as others for some other reason.

@ZOS_BrianWheeler

WRX · June 2015

Would encourage less playing except during primetime with a top group. I would still like to see it on the leaderboards.

ToRelax · June 2015

Let's see...
Currently you can be on top with either focusing a lot on AP farming, with a good group during prime time, or simply time commitment, as long as you get more AP / hour than most players.
Obviously, these can fall together, and will often do so especially on the most crowded campaigns.
This change would make time invested meaningless, if not even harmful. If it's not harmful, that wouldn't have to be a bad thing from my perspective, but I am sure many think otherwise here. However, the only way to get on top of the leaderboard then would be AP farming, even if you could get the same AP ratio every hour of the day. And I really dislike that idea.

spoqster · July 2015

ToRelax wrote: »

Let's see...
Currently you can be on top with either focusing a lot on AP farming, with a good group during prime time, or simply time commitment, as long as you get more AP / hour than most players.
Obviously, these can fall together, and will often do so especially on the most crowded campaigns.
This change would make time invested meaningless, if not even harmful. If it's not harmful, that wouldn't have to be a bad thing from my perspective, but I am sure many think otherwise here. However, the only way to get on top of the leaderboard then would be AP farming, even if you could get the same AP ratio every hour of the day. And I really dislike that idea.

But why do you dislike AP farming, @ToRelax? Surely calling it AP farming does not make it sound very pretty. But maximizing AP is what a good commander does, because the amount of AP you get is (or at least should be) a measure for how well a group is performing in PvP. You get AP for accomplishing feats of strategic relevance and for killing players. If maximizing AP promotes bad strategic decisions, there simply is a problem with how AP earnings are calculated.

I agree with you, that investing time shouldn't be harmful, but I believe many players will welcome the existence of at least one campaign where time invested is not meaningful or at least less meaningful.

Currently the situation for many players looks like this (not all serious):

You play all night when the campaign resets and by the end of the night you are in the top ten of the leaderboard. While doing that you have lots of fun but basically wreck you sleep cycle.
The next day you wake up only to find you have been overtaken by some energy-drink popping freak who apparently didn't sleep more than 3 hours.
You play more hours over the weekend, making up some spots in the leaderboard, but every hour you spend outside drinking with your friends, wrecks your AP score. God forbid you spend time with your family.
Once you go back to work on Monday it's all over. No way to catch up. Ever. And I won't even begin to wonder about the reasons for making a 30 day campaign...

So why not just try using AP/hour-based leaderboards in one campaign and see if it is popular or not?

I just can't understand why MMOs have to discourage casual players. Casual players - as in players who do not play 40 hours a week - are the absolute majority. Why not give them a context where they can compete amongst themselves? To put it into sports language, why not create separate amateur/casual and pro/hardcore leagues. I'd be completely happy to compete in the casual league, and ignore the pro league until I quit my job and dump my girlfriend at the same time and then rage-play for a month straight.

ToRelax · July 2015

spoqster wrote: »

ToRelax wrote: »

Let's see...
Currently you can be on top with either focusing a lot on AP farming, with a good group during prime time, or simply time commitment, as long as you get more AP / hour than most players.
Obviously, these can fall together, and will often do so especially on the most crowded campaigns.
This change would make time invested meaningless, if not even harmful. If it's not harmful, that wouldn't have to be a bad thing from my perspective, but I am sure many think otherwise here. However, the only way to get on top of the leaderboard then would be AP farming, even if you could get the same AP ratio every hour of the day. And I really dislike that idea.

But why do you dislike AP farming, @ToRelax? Surely calling it AP farming does not make it sound very pretty. But maximizing AP is what a good commander does, because the amount of AP you get is (or at least should be) a measure for how well a group is performing in PvP. You get AP for accomplishing feats of strategic relevance and for killing players. If maximizing AP promotes bad strategic decisions, there simply is a problem with how AP earnings are calculated.

I agree with you, that investing time shouldn't be harmful, but I believe many players will welcome the existence of at least one campaign where time invested is not meaningful or at least less meaningful.

Currently the situation for many players looks like this (not all serious):
You play all night when the campaign resets and by the end of the night you are in the top ten of the leaderboard. While doing that you have lots of fun but basically wreck you sleep cycle.

The next day you wake up only to find you have been overtaken by some energy-drink popping freak who apparently didn't sleep more than 3 hours.

You play more hours over the weekend, making up some spots in the leaderboard, but every hour you spend outside drinking with your friends, wrecks your AP score. God forbid you spend time with your family.

Once you go back to work on Monday it's all over. No way to catch up. Ever. And I won't even begin to wonder about the reasons for making a 30 day campaign...

So why not just try using AP/hour-based leaderboards in one campaign and see if it is popular or not?

I just can't understand why MMOs have to discourage casual players. Casual players - as in players who do not play 40 hours a week - are the absolute majority. Why not give them a context where they can compete amongst themselves? To put it into sports language, why not create separate amateur/casual and pro/hardcore leagues. I'd be completely happy to compete in the casual league, and ignore the pro league until I quit my job and dump my girlfriend at the same time and then rage-play for a month straight.

I don't like AP farming because AP is not what I play for, it's that easy. If taking a keep or running solo does not yield as many AP then so be it, I don't care. I also see why you don't like how important time commitment is, I feel the same about it, but I certainly find it much better than if anyone trying to get emp has to focus on AP gains even more.
And that includes open doors for some AP trading, even when considering your proposal, one would have to make that a lot harder to pull off since you don't even need to do it for an extended period of time then anymore, to reach #1 on the leaderboards.

That said, choices are good, so if ZOS was able to ensure fair play (and today we are far from that), I wouldn't mind if the leaderboards would work that way on some campaign.

AhPook_Is_Here · July 2015

Psychologically it might make a difference but the difference of D*R*T vs D*R/T is nothing in terms of equation balance, just a different way of labeling things that will be ranked identically.

frozywozy · July 2015

spoqster wrote: »

ToRelax wrote: »

Let's see...
Currently you can be on top with either focusing a lot on AP farming, with a good group during prime time, or simply time commitment, as long as you get more AP / hour than most players.
Obviously, these can fall together, and will often do so especially on the most crowded campaigns.
This change would make time invested meaningless, if not even harmful. If it's not harmful, that wouldn't have to be a bad thing from my perspective, but I am sure many think otherwise here. However, the only way to get on top of the leaderboard then would be AP farming, even if you could get the same AP ratio every hour of the day. And I really dislike that idea.

But why do you dislike AP farming, @ToRelax? Surely calling it AP farming does not make it sound very pretty. But maximizing AP is what a good commander does, because the amount of AP you get is (or at least should be) a measure for how well a group is performing in PvP. You get AP for accomplishing feats of strategic relevance and for killing players. If maximizing AP promotes bad strategic decisions, there simply is a problem with how AP earnings are calculated.

I agree with you, that investing time shouldn't be harmful, but I believe many players will welcome the existence of at least one campaign where time invested is not meaningful or at least less meaningful.

Currently the situation for many players looks like this (not all serious):
You play all night when the campaign resets and by the end of the night you are in the top ten of the leaderboard. While doing that you have lots of fun but basically wreck you sleep cycle.

The next day you wake up only to find you have been overtaken by some energy-drink popping freak who apparently didn't sleep more than 3 hours.

You play more hours over the weekend, making up some spots in the leaderboard, but every hour you spend outside drinking with your friends, wrecks your AP score. God forbid you spend time with your family.

Once you go back to work on Monday it's all over. No way to catch up. Ever. And I won't even begin to wonder about the reasons for making a 30 day campaign...

So why not just try using AP/hour-based leaderboards in one campaign and see if it is popular or not?

I just can't understand why MMOs have to discourage casual players. Casual players - as in players who do not play 40 hours a week - are the absolute majority. Why not give them a context where they can compete amongst themselves? To put it into sports language, why not create separate amateur/casual and pro/hardcore leagues. I'd be completely happy to compete in the casual league, and ignore the pro league until I quit my job and dump my girlfriend at the same time and then rage-play for a month straight.

I personally would like to see faction score points be associated with players just like alliance points are.

Faction score points would determine who gets emperorship and rewards at the end of the campaign.
Aliance points would let you buy gear and Cyrodiil items from siege/quartermaster vendors.

Emperorship should be given to the one who earned the most faction points doing a combination of the following things :

- Keeps/Outposts/Ressources/Scrolls captures
- Keeps/Outposts/Ressources/Scrolls defenses (when the defense tick occurs)

This would totally annihilate the concept of AP farming unless the said group wanna play the game to earn gold out of it by selling items with a value of 250k for 90k gold like it's going nowadays instead of using AP On sieges and soul gems like they should be supposed to. Problem is.. people don't care at all to win the campaign, all they care for is to raise their alliance rank or to get emperor. Cut their goals in half by forcing them to focus on objectives and strategies to get emperoship and campaign rewards and it's a good step ahead in the right direction imo.

All those groups who play to protect emperor over scrolls would have to think twice before leaving the temples opened.

spoqster · July 2015

frozywozy wrote: »

spoqster wrote: »

ToRelax wrote: »

Let's see...
Currently you can be on top with either focusing a lot on AP farming, with a good group during prime time, or simply time commitment, as long as you get more AP / hour than most players.
Obviously, these can fall together, and will often do so especially on the most crowded campaigns.
This change would make time invested meaningless, if not even harmful. If it's not harmful, that wouldn't have to be a bad thing from my perspective, but I am sure many think otherwise here. However, the only way to get on top of the leaderboard then would be AP farming, even if you could get the same AP ratio every hour of the day. And I really dislike that idea.

But why do you dislike AP farming, @ToRelax? Surely calling it AP farming does not make it sound very pretty. But maximizing AP is what a good commander does, because the amount of AP you get is (or at least should be) a measure for how well a group is performing in PvP. You get AP for accomplishing feats of strategic relevance and for killing players. If maximizing AP promotes bad strategic decisions, there simply is a problem with how AP earnings are calculated.

I agree with you, that investing time shouldn't be harmful, but I believe many players will welcome the existence of at least one campaign where time invested is not meaningful or at least less meaningful.

Currently the situation for many players looks like this (not all serious):
You play all night when the campaign resets and by the end of the night you are in the top ten of the leaderboard. While doing that you have lots of fun but basically wreck you sleep cycle.

The next day you wake up only to find you have been overtaken by some energy-drink popping freak who apparently didn't sleep more than 3 hours.

You play more hours over the weekend, making up some spots in the leaderboard, but every hour you spend outside drinking with your friends, wrecks your AP score. God forbid you spend time with your family.

Once you go back to work on Monday it's all over. No way to catch up. Ever. And I won't even begin to wonder about the reasons for making a 30 day campaign...

So why not just try using AP/hour-based leaderboards in one campaign and see if it is popular or not?

I just can't understand why MMOs have to discourage casual players. Casual players - as in players who do not play 40 hours a week - are the absolute majority. Why not give them a context where they can compete amongst themselves? To put it into sports language, why not create separate amateur/casual and pro/hardcore leagues. I'd be completely happy to compete in the casual league, and ignore the pro league until I quit my job and dump my girlfriend at the same time and then rage-play for a month straight.

I personally would like to see faction score points be associated with players just like alliance points are.

Faction score points would determine who gets emperorship and rewards at the end of the campaign.
Aliance points would let you buy gear and Cyrodiil items from siege/quartermaster vendors.

Emperorship should be given to the one who earned the most faction points doing a combination of the following things :

- Keeps/Outposts/Ressources/Scrolls captures
- Keeps/Outposts/Ressources/Scrolls defenses (when the defense tick occurs)

This would totally annihilate the concept of AP farming unless the said group wanna play the game to earn gold out of it by selling items with a value of 250k for 90k gold like it's going nowadays instead of using AP On sieges and soul gems like they should be supposed to. Problem is.. people don't care at all to win the campaign, all they care for is to raise their alliance rank or to get emperor. Cut their goals in half by forcing them to focus on objectives and strategies to get emperoship and campaign rewards and it's a good step ahead in the right direction imo.

All those groups who play to protect emperor over scrolls would have to think twice before leaving the temples opened.

Very good points. I hadn't even considered that, simply because I never even look at the faction leaderboards. And that is because there is no reward associated.

@frozywozy, I think it's a brilliant idea to couple emperor to the faction points you earn, instead of the AP. It always felt wrong that players should be awarded the emperor title by ganking instead of taking keeps, simply because as a rogue you are not part of the militaristic war effort as such.

Players should be allowed to play as rogues, and they should get rewarded in AP to buy gear, but those efforts should not count towards emperor. Much like it paid off handsomely to be a pirate, while you couldn't have expected to earn a military title doing it.