anonrerising | Love, Drama, Dragons.

OP
Considering banks are there to support the entire flight, forbidding spending it like this just "hides" the treasure and forces individual players to shoulder the burden that should have been spread among multiple players, both donating treasure and taking in dragons. I'm an old fashioned gal and believe dom is a team play, and this goes directly against.

^ this.

my interest in mercing is less about making money (im always asleep/at work when merc orders come in anyway lmao) and more about seeing each flight pull out all the stops and use a bigger variety of strategies. i just think it makes things more interesting that way, instead of limiting the strategies a team uses.

Seriously, agreed. I'm not criticizing because I want profit. I'm critical because it makes it out of sight out of mind. And any figures on this battle will be invalid to being the true cost of the battle without that.

Except they aren't "forcing" anyone to do anything. If both flights aren't buying mercs with dom money, it makes the fight fair. If individual players choose to buy mercs, it's literally a choice. Just because you don't like it, doesn't mean that it goes against team play. Dom teams are allowed to set the terms for battle. Nature and Plague decided that they'd like to spend their flight bank money on something besides mercs. It's not that big of a deal. It's not even that uncommon, they just decided to announce it instead of leaving people wondering.

fyi, being this obtuse about the definition of the word "force" to try and make your argument isn't the least bit convincing, and just makes you sound disingenuous

Just because you don't agree with an argument doesn't mean that someone is obtuse or disingenuous. Is this how you interact with everyone who disagrees with you? Because defaulting to questioning someone's intelligence and integrity just makes you seem like a defensive asshole with no real ability to debate a subject.

psst, not OP, just someone who thought a thing bore pointing out. since you clearly don't want to hear it, have fun with your current conversational style! I'm sure you convince a lot of people this way lmao

Never heard someone criticize someone's "conversational style" before. You are clearly someone who enjoys insulting people instead of engaging in actual constructive debate. You do you, sweetie. :)

My question is, like, what are the orgs of the losing flight supposed to do when they start losing? Buy expensive dragons off the AH with flight funds? Cross their fingers and hope their members start mercing? Train more? Training more is a good idea but not always enough!!

That all being said, I don't think the payout cap isn't as debilitating to OOF involvement as people are making it out to be. A potential 17.5kt return on what should be a 5kt investment (and what, you can hold like 400 dragons in your hibden?) is like, good? That's still very good and worth your time.

SA I don't think the payout cap IS as debilitating. Got lost in the double neg there my b

It doesn't really seem like either flight has the reserves to do any of that, tbh. Also, I thought the next bonus coli exp event was going to be this week, but it seems it'll be next week, which means people can train higher than usual. If they can't sell for a good price, people might just exalt fodder themselves instead of going to the trouble of finding someone online and selling. I'm wondering how likely it is for Earth to beat them both just by profit pushing while the exp is good.

ayrt

Not a chance - Earth is basically Beastclans Reloaded when they don't have an organized push ongoing. Any flight that's actually committed to winning can (and has) beat their default (or even fest/notn) exaltation levels without hosting a raffle/pb. I don't think Earth has ever profit-flipped a flight that's hosting a non-battle raffle or pb by accident and next week's payouts will most certainly be at least on par with those. (Seriously, even if they only hit like, 12kt for a level 5 those are still damn good payouts compared to most of the year even if they're piddly for a battle).

If Earth actually decided to push, a different story, but the chances of them intentionally trying to rain on the parade are also near zero.

"Any flight that's actually committed to winning can (and has) beat their default (or even fest/notn) exaltation levels without hosting a raffle/pb."

I don't think that's been proven, and I'm skeptical that it's true (at least these days). Some flights have done solo conquests and succeeded (like Wind), but to use mine (Nature) as an example, it's either taking OOF dragons in some form or profit pushing, no in-between, and no matter how hard it feels like we're trying (I always train my ass off and pre-hoard through IF programs, and I see many others say the same), even if we're the only flight with any kind of a push going, we get beat by Earth. Maybe we could do better if we called it a solo conquest, but I feel like the flights that do that have IF raffles at the very least.

This isn't an anti-Earth rant or a dom ratio rant or a rant at all really. But I still don't think the quoted statement necessarily holds.

I asked once why Plague called it "IF conquest" and got told that if they put a push under "profit", people trained to lv8-10, while the average drops to 6 when word "conquest" is included and there is more participation overall.

ayrt

Huh, interesting, thanks! If it's not being too nosy, can I ask if there were IF raffles in those pushes?

Like, I get why announcing an IF conquest without some kind of incentive is risky; if you do try that and then don't pull it off, it demoralizes everybody, where profit pushes aren't expected to be successful for anyone besides Earth/Light/Water. (Although I think it used to be different.) But it would provide some good data if it were occasionally attempted, and would be almost as exciting as a battle (but much cheaper!).

(Traditional conquest/fest pushes are boring as hell, imo. Yeah, you get a week of benefits, but as long as you put in a modicum of effort it's a foregone conclusion, so there's no reason to get hyped or keep your eyes peeled on the dom standings.)

Aryt

There are raffles, usually around 20-25 packs. Mostly stuff that is somewhat easily replacable (Genes, coli bosses, Joxar tokens, eliminates) and some lv25 dragons, ocassionally some art.

That said, there is usually around 3-4 weeks preps time where they encourage hoarding fodder. I'm not sure if we can impromptu start a push on Monday and win on a random week.

ayrt

Thank you for the info! Planning and hoarding do seem to be important elements regardless.

ayrt

Sorry! When I said raffle/pb I definitely meant OOF raffles specifically - and was thinking of an IF raffle being included in the "actually comitted to winning" part. So I'm talking about solo conquests or eventful profit pushes.

Let me actually look at the Dom Watch archives and see what flights have placed higher than Earth on a push without OOF raffle or PB...

2022: Water (x2), Arcane
2021: Lightning (x2), Fire (x2), Wind (x6), Arcane (x3), Light (x3), Water (x2), Plague (x4), Ice (x2)

So yeah, your experience is real but unique to Nature/Shadow.

ayrt

"When I said raffle/pb I definitely meant OOF raffles specifically"

Gotcha, and yeah, that makes sense. I usually don't scrutinize the Dom Watch links closely enough on non-OOF-participation weeks to see if there are IF raffles, so I don't know how common it is for solos.

And thank you for the data, interesting to see. (Also, dang, Wind. I thought I was already impressed by your annual IF-only House Cup victory, but that's some awesome stealth powerhousing you've got going on there.)

I think IF raffles are the standard for a conquest that doesn't have an oof raffle or PB! Some flights like Arcane have an IF raffle for almost all of their pushes (including profits, I think)!

& Yeah, Wind is a bit of a sleeper threat. I think they're going to smash Lightning in May and people might not expect that despite their handy victory against Plague in 2020 & their very consistent placing in 2021.

nayrt

Lightning actually just did this, we had a profit push last week without any sort of raffle (we had a fundraising one but it wasn't related to exalting dragons) and we beat Earth. Just to provide some proof that it is possible!

ayrt

Cool, I wasn't aware of that, congrats to you guys!

Love, Drama, Dragons.

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