anonrerising

yeah... honestly, i wonder how a battle with limited prizes and set payouts would go? would it disincentivise the "profit off another flight" mindset by limiting the profit to be made?

people just wouldn't contribute as much, unfortunately. hibden means people can save hundreds of (levelled) fodder indefinitely, until a profitable moment comes up. the money is what gets people to actually contribute to OOF dom things. things like the concept of "supporting" a flight and badges can help but imo the big exalters wont care otherwise.

In my experience as a person who has ordered mercs for their flight in the past - The battling flights do not accomodate ridiculous prices. I've turned down a lot of offers of bad prices from mercs companies.

Not trying to devalue your perspective or anything, Anon, but as someone involved I've never once felt pressured into paying a price I didn't agree with for leveled dragons during a push.

it's all good, neither of our experiences are universal.

Back when Mercs were revving up and becoming more popular I remember turning down a lot of offers at first too and even shaking my head at the prices thinking that NO ONE of either flight would be crazy ass enough to cave into it. My paranoia told me to keep a close eye on the spreadsheets and lo and behold I saw multiple members of the other flight taking up the orders and snatching up leveled dragons and I felt that I no choice but to compete with them. I can't really blame the other flight too much as they only flipped with my flight a few times and they MIGHT have been desperate for more "oof support" or something and were willing to put up with the prices. They ended up losing anyway though.

At that point in time I was hoping that mercs wouldn't catch on because they were annoying to deal with but they did anyway. It left a bitter taste in my mouth as I saw them pop up more and more often until every flight had their own organized merc group. Oh well, that era of dom was fun while it lasted. :)

ayrt

Haha you do whatever you need to to flip, you know? I was around but not quite involved with mercs at that time. Now that every flight is in the game, it's usually easy to take your business elsewhere if a particular flight won't negotiate to a level you're okay with.

I think with dom we're just at that place that is reached in games that haven't been changed for a long time where we're too efficient. Staff should shake things, up not because their original algorithm was bad, but because we've been given too many years to optimize it.

People have been whining and crying about how dom is expensive since the dawn of the site. They used to complain that raffles were bad because they made the other flights feel entitled to profit off of dom. And hoo boy, you should have seen the fit people threw when public buys/fast lanes were invented.

That's why the hateboner for mercs is stupid: because they've never been some kind of aberration from how dom works. They simply happen to have developed later than most other dom strategies, and are thus the most popular one to shit on. If mercing had somehow never happened, I guarantee something else would have come along and disillusioned you instead.

The irony here is that mercs developed as a direct response to flights who agreed not to raise buy prices during dom battles. Spoiler alert: the fodder floor went up, anyway.

So the proposed solution (i.e. dom battles with fixed limits or buying agreements) is what started that whole train in the first place... because train-exalters who liked dom and normally would have sold to a buy thread couldn't find an efficient market for their leveled dragons.

I'm a droplet. We gave folks their money. I just made a very hard limit on how much I'd spend if my own cash. Bank money and time, I spent though.

I profited using my own funds early on. I just don't have enough money to be able to throw around without a care.

Yeah! Now that you say this I bet one of the reasons merc prices were so close to PB prices in WvE is because Water and Earth actually kept their payouts proportional to the floor for most of the week.

Mercs ARE a price control strategy too. It's saying "I'm willing to pay this price for 500 dragons now without increasing our buy/raffle prices and committing to 1000s of dragons at this price."

Good point!

The flatview link goes to the latest page (i combined flatview/latest)- unless you're wanting latest page with nested comments, which I can do, no problem!

I actually founded one of the Merc companies back then before I burned out on the site. This is why they exist. The floors were rising too high for reasonable profitability. So they sold to flights like that. And if you were reasonable, someone would buy. Whether it was the flight or someone set on a raffle prize.

Came back later to find the person I handed it off to sort of rolled it into the flight's Dom organization. Which actually works far better than what I had.

At this point, QuirkyJunimo really is well known, given how often they are posted on saltminerising with "QJ please stop holy shit" posts.

DA

I would really appreciate a latest page with nested comments, I always found that link to the be the easiest to read!

it would come down to the power of the exalters in each flight, so a bigger/less dom-heavy flight would be at a huge disadvantage if they cant buy OOF. mercs would still privately happen, though.

(I am the one who asked about QJ being the wellknown spammer)

Honestly when I first saw that square, I had two people come to mind. QJ was one, TV was the other (and what happened to TV? they disappeared it seems)

DA

this, exactly -- we've optimized the system, which is partially why earth is ridiculously powerful now, there's a feedback loop where the heavy exalters cluster there. i'm partially dreading the dom revamp whenever it comes but mostly i'll be thrilled to figure out new strategies, it'll be a much needed breath of fresh air

> Mercs ARE a price control strategy too.

this is v true, allows flights to budget and plan more easily during a battle

I think what's wrong with dominance today is that each Flight has a buying power that's linerally scaled. That seems fine but it doesn't account for how mercs are a thing. That's why Earth and the smaller flights always win. Instead of using a linear function, it should be a negativve quadratic one to give larger flights a chance. At least it would shake thigns up. But the admins are too incompetent to realize that.

10000% this

staff please hire math whizzes to redo the dom algorithm. the linearity isn't working anymore.

God this would be amazing. But quite honestly it doesn’t seem like the staff give a single fuck about dom balance so I doubt we‘ll see any significant changes to the system.

I really suck at math, but a negative quadratic would mean both the smallest and largest flights get a bonus, evening them out to a middle term?
Shadow may have 86k users, and Earth may have 18k, but that doesn't mean shadow also has 4 times as much active dom users

that's part of the problem, each flight has a diff proportion of active players. i think bigger flights may have more inactive players and casual players.

Inactives already don't count. It's the casual and the profit above all else types that sell out of flight that make calculations strange. (I refuse to be the dick that calls folks who play different a problem.)

Done!

BINGO

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AYRT

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The problem with dominance

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