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Resetting the Forts

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The-Iceman

Staff Sergeant
I would like to propose that the Forts are reset and a cap is put on the amount of Forts that 1 town can own
The amount of forts that can be owned by 1 town should be decided by the community via a vote of somewhere between 1 and 5
I would like to request a Polling thread to be set up by xShteff to allow everyone to vote for how many Forts a town should be allowed to own
That will give a lot more towns the motivation to try to obtain a Fort and put the fun back in fort fighting
It might be prudent, not to allow a town to transfer a fort to another town, then the only way to obtain a fort is to dig it and win the battle to own it
Or there is a possibility that the forts will be transferred to unbalance the ownership again
 
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DeletedUser4311

Guest
At this point, i agree with iceman because beta is at the brink of death because there are no fort fights anymore.
For my self, i'm playing this game for fun and without serious fort fights, this game got no fun anymore.
I we should do something for resurrecting this game and make it fun and great again.
 

DeletedUser2845

Guest
Good idea Ice.Add some rewards...chests,money....etc,and ppl will join FF.
 

DeletedUser4312

Guest
Good idea.
We want fort battles.
Save beta server.
 

DeletedUser4313

Guest
I have been fort fighting on beta a bit last month, but it seems the other team never wants to let go of any of the forts. There is always a spy (cant really stop it, but it is just a game, why cheat) and the other side always knows where to place thier defenders. It is kind of worthless to try and have a fort fight when that happens. It would be nice to have good fort battles again on beta, it is the testing server.
 

DeletedUser3460

Guest
2500 odd accounts on beta, If the genuine concern of this topic is fort fighting then the community needs to organize battles first before they worry about fort ownership, not sure why the community wants InnoGames to come to the party when the community is absent from their own party, giving towns forts by default will not help get people to battles, I suspect it will have the opposite effect, it will make players even more complacent and reluctant to participate in battles.
 

DeletedUser500

Guest
I have been fort fighting on beta a bit last month, but it seems the other team never wants to let go of any of the forts. There is always a spy (cant really stop it, but it is just a game, why cheat) and the other side always knows where to place thier defenders. It is kind of worthless to try and have a fort fight when that happens. It would be nice to have good fort battles again on beta, it is the testing server.

The main reason why I stopped leading battles on beta was because the "other side" doesn't play fairly, including the use of spies, and also are only concerned about owning all the forts, and not using them in any sort of testing that we need to do as the beta community. They've used spies for a long time and we never had the online numbers to change our position after he's given the "other side" our starting position. Short of banning those that spy in fort battles, there's nothing we can do to stop that, it's too demoralising to put effort in again when you see the stronger side, by far, using spies.

If there's some sort of limit on numbers of forts a town can own, I feel like it should be 1 large fort per town over a certain population (maybe 15 or 20 players), mediums and smalls should be up fought over like normal. I do like the idea of letting the community decide where that limit should be though.
 

DeletedUser3460

Guest
Aren't the forts currently available to attack? I don't quite understand how ownership of forts can effect testing on a beta server given that there is a server fort in the middle on the map and I am not sure spying is such a big issue (I have never been instructed on where to set based on intelligence), as an attacker you either start West, South or East, and although it may make some difference in a poorly attended battle but otherwise defenders can't get LOS on everyone if the battle is well attended regardless of intelligence. I am also not sure what limiting fort ownership will do to overall motivation, if a town can only own one fort what is their incentive to dig? You'll just end one with a small alliance doing battle with another small alliance with player participation just slightly higher than the MPI's so basically longer versions of adventures. Sounds like player attendance is the issue for now, not fort ownership.
 

The-Iceman

Staff Sergeant
Aren't the forts currently available to attack? I don't quite understand how ownership of forts can effect testing on a beta server given that there is a server fort in the middle on the map and I am not sure spying is such a big issue (I have never been instructed on where to set based on intelligence), as an attacker you either start West, South or East, and although it may make some difference in a poorly attended battle but otherwise defenders can't get LOS on everyone if the battle is well attended regardless of intelligence. I am also not sure what limiting fort ownership will do to overall motivation, if a town can only own one fort what is their incentive to dig? You'll just end one with a small alliance doing battle with another small alliance with player participation just slightly higher than the MPI's so basically longer versions of adventures. Sounds like player attendance is the issue for now, not fort ownership.
Where exactly does it say that a town can only own 1 fort
Maybe you didn't pay attention to my recommendations
The amount of forts that can be owned by 1 town should be decided by the community via a vote of somewhere between 1 and 5
 

DeletedUser500

Guest
Aren't the forts currently available to attack? I don't quite understand how ownership of forts can effect testing on a beta server given that there is a server fort in the middle on the map and I am not sure spying is such a big issue (I have never been instructed on where to set based on intelligence), as an attacker you either start West, South or East, and although it may make some difference in a poorly attended battle but otherwise defenders can't get LOS on everyone if the battle is well attended regardless of intelligence. I am also not sure what limiting fort ownership will do to overall motivation, if a town can only own one fort what is their incentive to dig? You'll just end one with a small alliance doing battle with another small alliance with player participation just slightly higher than the MPI's so basically longer versions of adventures. Sounds like player attendance is the issue for now, not fort ownership.


There's quests where you have to sleep, having a fort would let you do that in 6 hours instead of 8. There's fort battle balancing that can't be tested properly because the side that always defends aren't interested in testing or giving feedback. Only one side can do manoeuvres, again this can be used for testing something quickly such as item set strength in fort battles. Can't test how fort construction effects various events, like how much event currency you get from fort construction and how to balance that. Recently there were changes to ranking, specifically how councillors in towns that share forts don't get auto-captains anymore, this couldn't be tested in a traditional way, we had to use GM forts.

For Awesomia, the defenders can't use ranks, and the battles won't be full, since beta can only really support small battles at the moment. it's not a good place to test battle related aspects of the game.

Spying was a huge problem. The issue with spies that we had, was that the defenders would stack their onliners on the walls and towers of the side that the attackers started on, and could easily rotate around the walls to follow the attackers with wall/tower bonus and los. They also sent their offliners to tower points on the side that attackers started. Instead of relying on their players ability to move and their leaders ability to react to the situation, they rely on spying, their huge HP and online advantage, while using their spying to have the correct towers to tank attacker's shots. Los isn't an issue for defenders in these circumstances.

Limiting fort ownership, in this instance, could bring some testing back to the testing server. This is not a production server, not a real server, we are here primarily to test new aspects in the game, and we can't do that with some features at the moment. I wasn't saying that a town should only own one fort, just one large fort. Similar to the cancerous "home fort" agreement that a lot of production servers have, however in this case it actually would serve a purpose. But it's not for me to decide what the rules should be on that.

You mentioned player attendance is the biggest issue, but not too long ago we had pretty nice battles on zz1, we had enough players for medium and large battles here, the FFing scene was destroyed when the stronger side decided to take all the forts and not use any of them for testing. If it doesn't end up producing more/better battles, then there's no difference from how things are now, but at least each of the main alliances will have a fort to sleep in and test various aspects of the game when needed.
 

DeletedUser3460

Guest
The sleep issue can be resolved independently if the consensus is that everyone should have the luxury of sleeping at a fort, simply increase the hotel regeneration time of every town to correlate to fort regeneration times, I am still not convinced with the spying aspect, from experience, defenders generally start on walls and towers regardless of intelligence and I am not convinced feedback will differ greatly just because of fort ownership, that's really up to the players and as far as Dev's needing to test something on a test server then surely they can take ownership of their own test server and designate a few forts that they need for testing for whatever period of time they need.
 

DeletedUser500

Guest
The sleep issue can be resolved independently if the consensus is that everyone should have the luxury of sleeping at a fort, simply increase the hotel regeneration time of every town to correlate to fort regeneration times, I am still not convinced with the spying aspect, from experience, defenders generally start on walls and towers regardless of intelligence and I am not convinced feedback will differ greatly just because of fort ownership, that's really up to the players and as far as Dev's needing to test something on a test server then surely they can take ownership of their own test server and designate a few forts that they need for testing for whatever period of time they need.

The sleeping thing is a good point, but really not the overall point of this thread. Forts are dead on beta and we can either do nothing about that, or do something about it. If it gets more people interested in fort battles, since they have something to defend without just getting steamrolled by the stronger alliance and losing their fort, might be enough to get some players back into it, and by proxy, more players who could give feedback when needed.

For meaningful testing, we need an active fort fighting community, it's no use just saying the devs should take over some forts when they need to test something, if there's still no players interested in testing. So yes, it's up to the players to have that interest, and up to the players to attend battles and give constructive feedback, but due to the conditions on the server at the moment, there's no fort fighting community. There's currently two GM forts on the server, and contrary to your belief that they will be used for testing, they were only used to exploit the anti-spam feature we have on beta (again, needed thanks to the lovely FFing community we had here), and block the other alliance from attacking your forts in prime-time.

And as an off-topic side note, you might not see the spying as a huge issue, but you weren't fighting against a team that uses that in every battle, every day, for months. When they stack their entire team on one side because they know the attackers are coming from there, there's no point in even showing up as an attacker and that's what happened in the end, we stopped bothering to come to battles where the, already much stronger, opponents cheat and they could take all the forts with little opposition.
 

DeletedUser3460

Guest
I am not discouraging your attempts to try something to regenerate interest in fort fighting on the beta server, I am just disagreeing on the process, I was at a few of them bigger battles (as a defender) that you mentioned and never once was I instructed on where to set based on intelligence or for that matter see any intelligence relayed in battle chat prior to battle (not saying it has never occurred or that's it's not confined to an inner circle), I don't see it as a big issue if battles are well attended which brings us back to the issue at hand, getting players to attend battles and by giving town's forts that they cant lose, why would you even bother to attend knowing that you can't lose the fort because the attacker has filled their quota of forts? A better solution might be to introduce fort points similar to veteran points and use the fort points to buy unique buffs/products/items only obtained through fort fighting otherwise it opens up a can of worms, my level 1 dueling set is not as good as my opponents level 4 dueling set therefore I can't test dueling properly, my labor points aren't as high as the next persons therefore I can't test drop rates accurately etc etc.
 

DeletedUser4219

Guest
This can be good in dying worlds (like beta). For example where was only 100 fights in 2016.
But dont use it on active worlds, because it will kill the fights.

The big and strong towns (alliances) obtain the forts.
In my world four alliance own all of the forts. (my town has 17) There are medium fort fights every night. We assign ranks, do the leading. We deserve forts.
Now, give them to weak towns. They dont have active leaders, enough warriors, they cant deduce a fight. There are 42 forts, but how many strong town ?
If some dusty village will have a fort, it does not mean that there will be a fight for it. Big towns wont fight with them, other small towns will have their own fort.
Perhaps it cause sometimes a 4 vs 5 fort fight, but strong alliances will be angry, because they lost a lot of forts.

"not to allow a town to transfer a fort to another town, then the only way to obtain a fort is to dig it and win the battle to own it"
So the stronger alliance cant give forts to the other alliance.. so they cant dig from them... so they have to make some fake fights.......

Big towns will reach the maximum fort number very soon, and what can they do after that ?
But it is irrelevant, because there are several towns in the strong alliances, so it is a dream that weak independent towns will get forts for a long time.
 

DeletedUser4219

Guest
A better solution might be to introduce fort points similar to veteran points to buy unique buffs/products/items only obtained through fort fighting

This is a better idea ! There should be fort fight points. You get bonds for performance, this would be for activity. You get 1 for every online round. (offline players get 1 point in 5 rounds)
unique buffs, products, items, avatars, some new and really very strong fort fight sets, weapons. (but you have to work for it, for example,1 piece of the set cost 5000 points, and you get 1 point for 1 online round.)
Towns should be rewarded too. There was 15 players from the town in the fight ? The town gets 15 points. By points the town can decorate and paint the buildings, activate new levels on the shops, activate new and unique buildings, higher-level hotels and town hall. (for example 1000 pieces to activate the tailor level 16, 2000 for level 17.. town hall level 11 nead 3500 points...)
This would activate the towns and the players, and motivate onto the fight.
 

jarograv

Reservist
My $0.02...

There doesn't appear to be any short-term plans of making large scale changes such as new FF formulas that would require testing via full battles. This is a test server. I agree completely with papa's point that if players want better battles, they need to promote battles on an alliance level and start drumming up attendance as is done on every other server and as was done here previously when there were decent battles. At this stage any comments about the need to make admin level changes to have battles here that are balanced and fun are moot because if large scale tests are going to be done, they won't be done on a server that has so few active FFers. I imagine they'll be done on .pl servers again in full larges and mediums. Any tests that may need to be done on the beta servers relating to battles involve things like ranking, functionality of new set bonuses, and set balancing issues. These are things that can be tested with a smaller community and should be the focus of the discussion.

I do agree, there needs to be more people testing these new features as they come out and having more towns that own forts as well as having more battles would help this. Setting a fort limit alone does not solve these issues and will not revitalize FF'ing here since there will still be the same issues as mentioned earlier in this thread about it being an uphill battle for one side as they go against a team that uses what some consider unfair tactics. There were discussions back when we did need more full battles for testing which lead to special rewards for participating which solved the issue of attendance far better than setting a fort limit would. I see no way that limiting the amount of forts a town could have would encourage more participation. There are better solutions to the problem such as providing greater incentives for people to attend battles.

For example, most the testing involves new items. When do new items come out? Tombolas. So why not incentivize with tombola related rewards (these would be beta server only incentives) such as more event currency, and more bonds for tombolas that don't involve event currencies. There may be other solutions that are simple like this and that solve the problem of creating a better test environment better than a fort limit could.

Now let's say this did pass and the fort limit was set at three forts. The obvious goal here is to make it so that a certain town doesn't own 34 forts. What is stopping that town that is already at their fort limit from asking an alliance mate to dig for them? We could easily be in the same situation after a limit is in place where the majority of forts are instead just spread over 10 towns in one alliance.

One thing mentioned in this thread is that the towns would need to have 15+ members in order to dig battles, that way we could avoid asking a one person town to dig on behalf of your town. Looking at the rankings, there are only 12 towns with more than 15 members on zz1. That means there wouldn't be enough towns in order for all forts on the map to be owned assuming there are no town mergers happening. I do however like the idea mentioned that each town over 15 or another specified number of members gets a large fort. That provides a fort for calling maneuvers for each town that has a sufficient number of testers to merit transferring the fort to them. How I imagine this would work is initially all large forts would be transferred to each town currently at the specified number of members while the remaining excess large forts would be transferred to a dev town for holding until another town reaches the specified number of players. These forts would be protected and if a town grows to be over the specified number of players and wants one, they can send a ticket to ask support to transfer the ownership of a fort to them. This is a fairly simple solution that solves issues relating to being able to test new features and items via maneuvers.

Fort points... you mean bonds? Anyways, now we are really getting off topic if we are changing to a whole new system of rewards and shops. :P

Lastly, sleep is a non-issue... seriously go spend an extra 2 hours in a town hotel if it's required for a quest.

Sorry for the long post, but I think I covered everything I wanted to talk about :D

TL;DR:
  • Solve the issue of there not being enough players testing new features through attendance incentives such as increased event currency and bonds.
  • Solve the issue of not being able to call maneuvers for testing through wider distribution of large forts.
 
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