2047 Leagues
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*sam* Posted Sep 11, 2008, 3:23 pm |
I'm currently implementing some of the items that have recently been discussed.
1) From 2047, the 'major' leagues (Somerset racing, deathracing, arena combat) will be 4 months long, not 12. 2) Many of the leagues now have sponsors who will give your gang a training boost for the year that you are the league title holder (you'll see them linked from the league's webpage) 3) There will be hardware prizes (chassis and weapons) offered for the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd placed finishers in some leagues 4) All track/arena event prizes will be increased |
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Alocalypse Posted Sep 11, 2008, 3:35 pm |
I think 4 months is way too short, especially if there's going to be rare items awarded for winning.
I think they could even still stay 12 weeks as long as the prizes are valuable enough or if there were some halfway prizes at 6 months... |
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*sam* Posted Sep 11, 2008, 3:39 pm |
We'll see how it goes Alo... I'm not sure that 4 weeks is too short. It will increase the need to play with other veterans each week to boost your points, and will increase the risks of losing these events.
We often see one or two gangs running away at the top of the leagues by week 4, at which time they might as well be finished. We can change it for 2048 if it doesn't work. |
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Ivan Kerensky Posted Sep 11, 2008, 3:53 pm |
I do think that 4 month is not enough. That mean a league finish every month and 4 event is a bit low to get after the leader.
6 months would be nicer.... 8 month very good.... I took the current combat league quite late but I manage to earn enough points to reach 10th position... Gimme 2 or 3 more weeks I could have managed better perhaps 
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Alocalypse Posted Sep 11, 2008, 3:56 pm |
With just 4 weeks I'm also worried about the rarity of whatever items you put as prizes...
Still it feels too much could come down to luck and being online for the high-points races over consistancy. It's pretty much guaranteed that you can't win with less than 80 maybe even less than 88 points if it's just 4 weeks and the prizes are upped... |
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*jimmylogan* Posted Sep 11, 2008, 3:59 pm |
My feedback on this...
I don't do much racing as I'd rather spend my time traveling between towns. A shorter league WILL allow someone like me the opportunity to jump in on a whim and be more likely to stick around. If I know I have to be consistent for more than 4 RL weeks, I either a) won't bother joining or b) will just do one or two and not concern myself with the league aspect. I think it's a positive. JL |
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simonmaxhill Posted Sep 11, 2008, 4:13 pm |
I like the shorter league schedule. It makes me feel like I could actually compete in a league.
I still want the lowest or two lowest scores to be tossed, though, so I can go on vacations and still be in the running. |
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*Tinker* Posted Sep 11, 2008, 4:14 pm |
4 moths is equal to a year game time right? so sounds good to me, even though I have no experience in the matter, and if this gives NPC gangs an advantage.
When does it start? |
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Alocalypse Posted Sep 11, 2008, 4:19 pm |
It starts next week, 4 months is equal to 1/3rd of the game year, one in-game month is 1 week in real time. |
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*sam* Posted Sep 11, 2008, 4:20 pm |
It's slightly confusing as we're mixing weeks/months in our discussion. 1 week Real Life = 1 month DW-time We're talking about 4 weeks real life, or 4 months Darkwind time for the major leagues.
Just after midnight server time, this Saturday. That's when January 2047 starts. |
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collinsense Posted Sep 11, 2008, 4:40 pm |
the time frame for the league is great. also how much will the first place cash prize be? could it be around 10000 or higher?
this way, the cash potential of a race will get closer to the cash value of a scout and also bring more human players into the races. |
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Valiance Posted Sep 11, 2008, 4:42 pm |
Collinsense,
The prize for coming first in the Somerset Combat League is currently $360,000. It's worth more than a scout :-) |
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collinsense Posted Sep 11, 2008, 4:54 pm |
no, i meant the prize money for an individual race. if i were alo, i would worry about the overall prize money. that is out of my league. | ||||||
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*sam* Posted Sep 11, 2008, 4:57 pm |
I was going to double them from what they are now collin, so we're looking at about 5-6k for a win. 10k seems a bit high? | ||||||
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Nojj Posted Sep 11, 2008, 5:04 pm |
5k for a win seems good as it might prompt more people to race.
I've been in too many races where its been me vs NPCs |
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Dr Mathias Posted Sep 11, 2008, 5:09 pm |
Lets just see how it goes. Its only 12 weeks, right? It can be adjusted after that and none of these changes are going to cause a massive earthquake. If it gets some in-town mayhem going, lets do it! | ||||||
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*jimmylogan* Posted Sep 11, 2008, 5:18 pm |
WOW! I had no idea... I will definitely assign a crew member to that league from now on... JL |
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collinsense Posted Sep 11, 2008, 5:38 pm |
10000 might not be too high. my reason being that for the average scout, it is normal to at least get two cars and after repairs, even with the new mean low prices, you can still get 10000 as profit.
I did not race much after i discovered scouting because it was really hard to make substantial money from racing. |
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Nekojin Posted Sep 11, 2008, 6:38 pm |
Looks good to me. 12 week leagues are far too long; if you have anything that prevents you from playing for a week out of that time, you may as well just quit at that point. Not many people have the attention span to race one half-hour race per week for three months straight. | ||||||
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Alocalypse Posted Sep 11, 2008, 7:27 pm |
I support the idea of having longer leagues and 2 lowest races wouldn't count.
Or changing the system so it's 3 races per 3 weeks (with 3-4 3-week periods during the whole league) or whatever suits people best. For a 4-week league I think something like Northern Summer would work best. If the goal is to get people to race together then this is the best way. It's been said before that the current system discourages racing as doing more than 1 race per week is bad and you end up with a lot less potential joiners for the events because of that. I think my semi-ladder league system idea is the only one that might improve things, but the problem really is that we lack players and tweaking the system will only give minimal results. I think with the short 4-week leagues they will get progressively worse the more players you add because there's going to be more and more ties... |
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t0rp0r Posted Sep 11, 2008, 9:04 pm |
I'll wait to see how a 4-week league runs. I think in some ways it's even harder to catch up than in the long leagues, although granted if you have someone that plays every single week and you miss even one week it's much harder to catch up. I would support keeping longer (6-8) week leagues with the "drop lowest 2 scores idea).
What I'd really like to see if we do shorter leagues is having the races scheduled more consistently. There could still be some random races scattered throughout the week, but I like the idea of something like "The Big Thursday Night Bloodbowl" ... of course, "night" being relative to time zones. 
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*sam* Posted Sep 11, 2008, 10:53 pm |
Yes, except players don't bother even trying in the 12-week leqagues. They see someone 12 points ahead and figure they're uncatchable.
That's exactly what many of our leagues already do though, isn't it? Elmsfield Classic, Northern Summer, Northern Combat, etc. |
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t0rp0r Posted Sep 11, 2008, 11:30 pm |
That's probably true. Having the 2 lowest scores dropped would still help this, i think, because then if someone missed a week they wouldn't immediately drop down 5 or 10 spots in the rankings.
From what I've seen it seems like these leagues are "too" limited in the number of events ... and this could be a problem with the other leagues if they are scheduled, now that I think of it. Which is to say, if the events are always held at 6 p.m. every Thursday and you work every Thursday night, you'll never get to participate. A mix of scheduled and "semi-random" events would help, but there's still the matter of trying to determine a good time for the scheduled events that works for enough people. There's no pleasing some people. 
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Capt. Zeppo Posted Sep 12, 2008, 12:28 am |
That's a cool idea. Maybe the League Badge could appear as a decal on the chassis? As for the length of leagues -- 12 weeks can be a little long, but 4 weeks is pretty short. Maybe 8 weeks? Frankly, I think the best solution is the one we have: a variety of leagues, some long some short. Maybe 8 week and 4 week leagues? Leagues need to have a variety of times for each week's events so that there is usually at least one event that falls in a player's time zone; I believe the recent Northern Summer League was like this. A league that is at the same time of day for every event will exclude players from certain parts of the world from competing. This happened to me actually; I signed up for the Gateway Autumn Meltdown League, only to find that all the events occurred during my drive home from work. I feel anything we can do to get more folks involved in the leagues is a good thing. They are an under appreciated part of the game. |
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Ivan Kerensky Posted Sep 12, 2008, 1:02 pm |
If you do 4 weeks long league with dropping the 2 worst score you could just as well do a lottery to choose the winner...
And you cripple the player that are in timezone with not many other people because they will only finish the league with 80 pts and no more...
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Alocalypse Posted Sep 12, 2008, 1:06 pm |
The current league title holder can already use a league decal on their stock cars in town events. Dropping the worst 2 races is definatley something only for the longer 8-12 week leagues and not for the 4-week stuff. |
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Mad Mike Posted Sep 12, 2008, 9:44 pm |
higher prizes for races and hardware for leagues?
wow. i did intown events for 3 months straight to earn 200K before subscribing... now people can do it in half the time, i feel ripped off!
Ill be arranging all player races like we did one day, 28 points in one race! |
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Valiance Posted Sep 14, 2008, 11:13 am |
Sam,
I'm very confused by the leagues. on the main page, they say that they are all running January to December. The Combat league says that it runs Sept - December. We're in January, and it has the only events active. (I presume everything is meant to be game month, not RL month) The Somerset Race League which is meant to be live (it says "Current Standing January 2047) has no events and no entrants. In other words, all of the rubrics seem to be contradictory. What is the story? |
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*sam* Posted Sep 14, 2008, 11:30 am |
I forgot to update that.. will do later. I have a nice leagues chart kindly made by Dr M that I'm going to use there too.
Hrmm, looks like the events daemon still thinks it's December, I'll have a look at that. Will have to zero any existing combat league points. |
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Alocalypse Posted Sep 14, 2008, 4:46 pm |
Now that the leagues and prizes are revealed I'd like to make the following comments:
I think most people would rather opt for cash instead of the buccaneers which are offered for a lot of 2nd and 3rd place prizes. There's plenty of other more desirable muscle car chassis that people might actually want (Moray, Osprey, Pike, Flail...) and to make the prize slightly "cooler" it could even be a NPC configuration chassis with junk on it. The prizes for the Northern Semi-pro are appaling, the prizes for the Northern Summer are too good and not relevant to the event (a buzzer is a combat, not a DR chassis). I would switch the item prizes for those two. Giving a Heavy Laser for the winner AND runner up in the combat league is probably too much and doesn't motivate competition as intensely as it could... Otherwise it's all good and this is something that people have been asking for a long time 
Also can you shed some more light on the training bonuses that we'll be getting from that? It could be a huge motivator to get people who otherwise only scout into the leagues and make it an important part of the game. EDIT: the league schedule on the events page looks nice, but it should have a real world time reference at the bottom (preferably with exact dates). |
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Dr Mathias Posted Sep 14, 2008, 7:45 pm |
I was a little surprised at the amount of cash offered in some of the prizes... pretty high!
I'd chime in with Alo on the HLaser as being odd as 1st and 2nd prize both. I think a normal laser would be a good second prize, or a RGM or CC. Maybe change it up next time, cant show us this stuff and then take it away! By the way I had another dream last night, with a Turin encounter in the wilderness. Something's wrong with me. |
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*sam* Posted Sep 14, 2008, 10:25 pm |
I'll tighten up the calcs behind the hardware prizes the next time around.
I haven't worked out the details yet. Maybe a job for the DW Rules Committee, if we form it? 
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Alocalypse Posted Sep 14, 2008, 11:58 pm |
Bah, when I noticed the sponsors popping up on the 2046 leagues I was hoping to get some of that for those too.
I think it'd be ok to change anything during the first week at least. |
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4saken Posted Sep 15, 2008, 12:08 am |
ok, i've done two events in SS combat that i finished first in, one before the change and one after, but i still dont see myself as having any points listed, even though i am shown as placed... | ||||||
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Alocalypse Posted Sep 18, 2008, 8:28 pm |
Maybe it's worth bringing back quali's for these races, with a long 12-month league your luck with starting positions is likely to even out, but with just 4 you could get a streak of bad ones (not like you wouldn't be utterly screwed if you didn't place 1st in every race anyway).
The races are less frequent now and there's plenty of no-league races to do for people who just want to race casually. And yes, I'm slightly bitter about starting last (even though I can't blame my loss entirely on that.)
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