[Question/Suggestion] Alliances: Do they cost too much?

[Belle Hibiki]

The recent thread about some members trying to create a possible Alliance got me thinking about how we don't see more threads like it. Alliances seem to be an idea that fell by the wayside when the reset hit. Why is that?

There are no doubt multiple factors behind this shift. Lack of interest in the metagame from former RagBlack and XTC members, lack of drive from people struggling with new characters, the absence of any apparent need to actually have a headquarters (in character, at least), etc. are all issues that have probably exacerbated the apparent apathy towards this formerly core feature.

But the main issue is price. An Alliance headquarters costing 7000 zeni just to build is, now that we know how much zeni people actually earn on average, simply insane. Sage has often commented on how it requires less effort to earn a T1 than it does to buy a headquarters. In actuality, a person is more likely going to be able to afford a T2 and be well on their way to buying T3 before scraping together enough zeni to plop down some buildings somewhere.

I believe all members are currently Rank 1 in their respective jobs, earning 300 zeni as the maximum possible reward. This increases to 400 after four jobs because you rank up to 2, then 500 eight after that when you rank up to 3. Assuming max reward, an individual would need to run 17 max-yield quests to afford a headquarters. Even with a conservative estimate of 8000 word jobs and an average of 4 characters per word, that's 362 XP. You can buy T1, T2, and be 163 away from buying T3 with that kind of XP.

But hey, Headquarters are Alliance locations, so one guy shouldn't be trying to do this all by his lonesome, right? Actually, even if you have a coordinated group there's a significant workload. Having more individuals farming Zeni means less ranking up for each, which means more quests required overall. Assuming a 5-man coordinated group tackling the money grind for a headquarters, each person must contribute 1400 Zeni, meaning approximately 4 max-yield Rank 1 job quests, or 20 in total over the entire group. (Approximately because they come up 200 zeni short in this scenario, but one can assume for the sake of argument that they dig into their starting / already existing zeni for that).

Assuming that all five players complete their four jobs each, not falling into inactivity, giving up, or getting distracted by something else, they will finally be able to afford a Headquarters in a couple months.

Oh, and by now they've each earned 83 XP under the previous assumptions of XP yield, so they all have Tier 1.

And this is just to buy the headquarters. I haven't even talked about the Meeting Room yet, which is another 5000 zeni just so that you can have a forum.

I didn't really have a problem with the prices before because I didn't really have any concept of how hard it was going to be to get Zeni, but these prices now seem egregiously expensive.

In my opinion, prices for these commodities need to be slashed. Other, personal devices like Booster Patches can stay at their current price, and perhaps the Item Delivery system of Headquarters needs to stay expensive because it provides a real tangible IC benefit. But people shouldn't have to go through these hoops just to form an Alliance.

And now, some questions:

1) What does staff think about the current state of Zeni? Are you comfortable with the rate of earnings?

2) How often, in Staff's assumptions, are players supposed to be doing job quests? Every one in a while, or are players expected to justify a "job" in as many threads as they can?

3) Are Alliances meant to be this hard to form? If so, when would you like to see the first? In the current iteration of Chubbs, how important do you think Alliances are to the game?

[Kaden]

1) What does staff think about the current state of Zeni? Are you comfortable with the rate of earnings?

The tricky thing about this question is that, to me, it's very much related to the second. In order to really judge rate-of-gain, we need to have people actively trying to get it. More than a couple people have come out saying "I don't even bother trying to turn in a Job because I don't think it's worth it" and then turn around and say it's too hard to get zeni. Hopefully mine aren't the only eyebrows raised by that.

I think part of the above problem actually stems from the previous set-up we had. It's been a while since someone has actually needed to do something OOC to gain, say, zeni.

Theoretically, I have no problems with the rate-of-gain. Obviously there's not a lot of data to mine, so it's difficult to say whether or not that theory proves true or not. (Some might say the lack of data should be telling, but I, again, maintain that it's not actually a problem with the system.)

2) How often, in Staff's assumptions, are players supposed to be doing job quests? Every one in a while, or are players expected to justify a "job" in as many threads as they can?

As often as possible. The system is specifically set up to allow anything to be turned into a job quest. We've even made recent changes to make doing so more desirable.

3) Are Alliances meant to be this hard to form? If so, when would you like to see the first? In the current iteration of Chubbs, how important do you think Alliances are to the game?

"Hard" is a relative term in this case. As you explained above, it only takes four quests from a group of people in order to be able to buy an alliance. I don't think there is anything hard about that at all. I, myself, have completed four quests and, really, could turn in at least one more from the thread the two of us are currently in. That's more than my share of an alliance.

Not too long ago, Trafford went and turned in a bunch of quests an got a decent chunk of zeni that would put him pretty close to his chunk of an HQ, I bet (don't remember the actual numbers).

How important alliances should be is a difficult thing to answer. Mechanically, I think they're more of a late-game tool. HQs and Item swaping isn't something people are supposed to be able to do right out of the gate.

Obviously, though, alliance mean more than just game mechanics to other people. The importance to some is entirely emotional/sentimental. No real way to account for that, though, so... I'll just stop there.

Hopefully I answered those satisfactorily. If you have any other questions, feel free.

[Belle Hibiki]

The tricky thing about this question is that, to me, it's very much related to the second. In order to really judge rate-of-gain, we need to have people actively trying to get it. More than a couple people have come out saying "I don't even bother trying to turn in a Job because I don't think it's worth it" and then turn around and say it's too hard to get zeni. Hopefully mine aren't the only eyebrows raised by that.

I think part of the above problem actually stems from the previous set-up we had. It's been a while since someone has actually needed to do something OOC to gain, say, zeni.

Theoretically, I have no problems with the rate-of-gain. Obviously there's not a lot of data to mine, so it's difficult to say whether or not that theory proves true or not. (Some might say the lack of data should be telling, but I, again, maintain that it's not actually a problem with the system.)

Obviously any data we bring to the table right now will be anecdotal at best. The whole point of me breaking down the math of it was to try to put the operation in some sort of perspective to judge personal experiences against.

I don't necessarily see what you raise your eyebrows at, so maybe I'm missing something. If getting zeni is hard to do and it yields what many people feel isn't worth it (assumedly it takes too much of it to do anything), people are going to give up before even trying. This isn't unusual. This isn't even unexpected.

I think the fact that so few people have jumped onto the Job bandwagon is telling for the complete opposite reason, and I'll explain why this might be below.

As often as possible. The system is specifically set up to allow anything to be turned into a job quest. We've even made recent changes to make doing so more desirable.

Leaving aside the obvious impossibility inherent here (not EVERYTHING can be a job quest - see Warm Hands), I think there's a fundamental problem with asking/expecting people to do as many job quests as possible. It has to do with perception.

No one has fun doing the same thing over and over in a game, particularly money grinding. Eventually you get sick of it. And while Chubbs does allow you do do a huge variety of things to make money, I don't believe a player is going to necessarily feel like they have a great deal of freedom while engaging in RP under this system if they know they're expected to whore every thread for money.

They realize that their RP is not simply for the fun of roleplaying itself or writing in general, but an eventual means to an end. Even if they enter into it for fun, the real tangible "payoff" is at the end. XP is automatic, so people don't pay attention to it after a while, but zeni has to be solicited for and faces judgment based reduction, which makes it feel much, much more important.

If I had to ask staff to judge/grade 90% of my threads so that I can get money, I think I'd just get fed up and sick of the whole system very, very fast. I already don't like it, and practically all my threads have generated zeni. Feeling like you're shooting yourself in the foot just because you wanted to do a thread which isn't a job quest strikes me as something that could become "not fun" very quickly.

My 2 cents there. And I realize this is probably the weakest part of my post because most of it is speculation on psychological voodoo.

"Hard" is a relative term in this case. As you explained above, it only takes four quests from a group of people in order to be able to buy an alliance. I don't think there is anything hard about that at all. I, myself, have completed four quests and, really, could turn in at least one more from the thread the two of us are currently in. That's more than my share of an alliance.

Not too long ago, Trafford went and turned in a bunch of quests an got a decent chunk of zeni that would put him pretty close to his chunk of an HQ, I bet (don't remember the actual numbers).

How important alliances should be is a difficult thing to answer. Mechanically, I think they're more of a late-game tool. HQs and Item swaping isn't something people are supposed to be able to do right out of the gate.

Obviously, though, alliance mean more than just game mechanics to other people. The importance to some is entirely emotional/sentimental. No real way to account for that, though, so... I'll just stop there.

Hopefully I answered those satisfactorily. If you have any other questions, feel free.

1. "Only" is just as relative a term as "hard," if you want to play it that way. Soldier of Fortune and A Friend In Need were "only" two quests, but it took a lot of time for me to get them out to a point where I was satisfied (months, actually). And I like to think that I'm not a terrible writer.

2. As to you, you're the strongest character on this site, 300 CA above 2nd place, who is 400 CA above 3rd place, who is 700 CA above 4th. 4th place and below is where jumps become less extreme and the huge majority of the site resides. To presume that your personal experience with job quests is in any way a barometer for the average member of Chubbs is somewhat disingenuous, wouldn't you agree?

3. Trafford certainly has a big chunk of change right now, enough to pay for his segment of an HQ. However, it should be noted that 250 of that is his starting zeni; he's only actually earned about 1200, so he's still a job quest away from earning the total that I listed.

Not saying it makes your point invalid, just pointing out that he'd be using ALL the zeni he has made up to this point in the entire game to pay. I think that's a little messed up, but YMMV.

4. I think you're slightly underestimating the difficulty of trying to wrangle five players into doing an extended activity like that. I don't think I can honestly name five people on the entire SITE who haven't had large breaks between posting because RL issues come up, they lost interest in writing for a while, etc.. Maybe if you could clone 4 more of yourself it wouldn't be a problem; but otherwise it's like trying to herd a very unpredictable quartet of cats. From a distance. Through your computer.

5. I can totally appreciate that you want HQs and item swaps to be late game. This is why I suggested keeping the upgrades that actually provide tangible benefits expensive. I just think it's slightly ridiculous that Alliances have to go through all this to get a forum, and a forum is, in my opinion, one of the main benefits to having an Alliance.

[Kaden]

The first half of your post mostly is on one issue, so I'm not going to bother with quotes for it.

Perception really is at the heart of the "Job" issue. Sadly, only so much can be done about that. I raise my eyebrows because people have said they don't want to go through this much trouble. What I was referring to there is not the entire process of writing a Quest, but just the act of posting to get a grade. It requires very very very little work. I think that was just a point of clarification, though, so let's move on.

Obviously we don't want people to feel like RPing is work. That's why we're trying to make Quests as accessible as possible. No, not everything is going to be a quest, but I didn't actually say "everything" I said "as often as possible." Shadow Play is actually a pretty good example. The entire thread doesn't have to be a Quest, but from when Belle's DB was stolen up through where we beat Rock (from the first post to the beating the first "boss" for those who haven't read it) makes a great quest.

It certainly didn't feel like work to get it posted, and there's nothing stopping us from turning it in for a zeni reward (I actually planned on doing exactly that once... something on the staff forum is squared away). The fact that I have to go to a forum and say "can we have zeni for this?" doesn't make RPing any less fun for me. Nor does the prospect of doing it later have any affect on my desire to RP.

Now, as you pointed out (and I'm jumping around a little bit here) using myself as an example is somewhat disingenuous. However, I argue that it is disingenuous only in that I'm ahead of the curve. I don't have some magical power that does that for me, it's a result of using the system the way it is intended to be used. As someone who helped make the system I obviously am in an advantageous position when it comes to understanding the ins and outs of Chubbs, but I don't think it's really that complicated.

The staff (at least I know I have) have said time and again that people just need to be active and turn in their quests. And that's exactly what I've done. No more, no less. Again, I'm willing to stipulate that I'm an outlier when looking at the actual data, but it's the process that is important here.

Limitations were taken off of the Job system specifically to allow people to avoid grinding. Yeah, repetition is necessary in that you have to RolePlay and then you have to ask for it to be graded, but I... just don't see how that could be considered a grind. It's not like we're asking people to spam dailies for faction (you'll have to excuse me if that wasn't an accurate colloquialism, my WoW-speak isn't exactly top-shelf).

Yes, we're putting the burden on the player to come up with their own quests to fit their character into, but how much of a burden is it really? People seem to be looking at it as a proactive system whereas I see it as a reactive system.

From the proactive point-of-view you have a player looking at it and saying "ok, great, now I have to do [X] in order to make any money." Where as, looking at it reactively, you'd say "I just finished writing, so why I'll call posts [X] through [Y] a quest and get some money for it."

That actually sounded stronger in my head. Regardless, I hope the point is coming across. Actually, it's the point I started out with. It's a matter of perspective. There are obviously only so many things that can be done about that. Honestly, if it comes down to it, the system might have to change. I'm not denying that. Regardless of how good it may work in theory, that doesn't mean anything if people won't actually use it.

My hesitation to make any changes, however, does not stem from stubbornness, or some misplaced sense of pride, but simply in that I don't think the majority of members have actually given it a chance to work.

You might be entirely correct that it may be because the act of asking for a grade is too daunting or diminishing, or whatever. I don't think that's the case, though. I think it stems more from laziness or apathy than anything else. No one actually cares to turn in a quest until the moment they need zeni. Then all of a sudden their up in arms because stuff is too expensive and money is too hard to earn.

1. "Only" is just as relative a term as "hard," if you want to play it that way. Soldier of Fortune and A Friend In Need were "only" two quests, but it took a lot of time for me to get them out to a point where I was satisfied (months, actually). And I like to think that I'm not a terrible writer.

The "only" used there was actually intended to be to point out the comparison you made between one person going for an HQ and 5 people going for one. I wasn't trying to diminish the effort it takes to complete quests to strengthen my argument.

A Friend In Need took you about 6 weeks (a little more) and Solider of Fortune took 3 weeks according to the time stamps on the posts. If it took you, and 4 others working at roughly the same rate, 4 or 5 months to get an HQ, would that really be so horrible? That question, of course, leads to another one of your points.

4. I think you're slightly underestimating the difficulty of trying to wrangle five players into doing an extended activity like that. I don't think I can honestly name five people on the entire SITE who haven't had large breaks between posting because RL issues come up, they lost interest in writing for a while, etc.. Maybe if you could clone 4 more of yourself it wouldn't be a problem; but otherwise it's like trying to herd a very unpredictable quartet of cats. From a distance. Through your computer.

I was actually just using the number of people from your first post. The question of how difficult achieving that number would be was never raised. Now that it has been, though, I agree that it's not exactly easy to get 5 people working in a coordinated effort on a site like this. Definitely not impossible, but not a headache I'd be inviting any time soon (he said with great irony).

If I had to make an estimate informed primarily on past experience, and I stipulate that all involved parties are actively working towards meeting their goal, I would say you'd have a "core" of probably 3 players actively posting with one or two others floating in and out of activity to help earn money for an HQ. I think, with that set-up, they should be able to earn an HQ in about 6 months. That's a very off-hand time-line, though. I didn't exactly crunch the numbers for it.

2. As to you, you're the strongest character on this site, 300 CA above 2nd place, who is 400 CA above 3rd place, who is 700 CA above 4th. 4th place and below is where jumps become less extreme and the huge majority of the site resides. To presume that your personal experience with job quests is in any way a barometer for the average member of Chubbs is somewhat disingenuous, wouldn't you agree?

I don't look at myself as an example of where the average member should, but more like an example of what the average member should be doing to get there. Hopefully that makes sense.

I don't expect members to do anything that I'm not willing to do myself, but I guess I expect them to return that to some degree. I see the system as something that works with regular posting and the smallest bit of extra OOC effort. My RolePlaying up to this point would have been exactly the same whether or not the Job/zeni system existed, that's how I think others should treat it as well. Unfortunately, that doesn't seem to be the case.

To make this more of a two-way dialog, what are some of your expectations of how a money system should work? What kinds of benchmarks do you think are reasonable? As I said above, I don't think there's anything wrong with an HQ taking 5 or 6 months of active effort to get (for the purposes of this specific question I'm putting aside whether or not that's the actual case under the current system).

Do think people are actually giving the system a fair shot? If not, how long would you wait before looking to make changes or what kind of criteria would you use to time the implementation of said changes?

Would these changes be just to the numbers (100-300 for a Rank 1 quest, for example) or to the system itself?

EDIT: I'm more tired than I thought I would be when I started that. Sorry for the rambling.

[Ashe]

Kaden, I don't intentionally mean to spam this and you can delete this post if you so choose, but I just want you to look back over this thread and realize that you have done me a proud one here.

[Sage]

Simple reply, since I saw myself mentioned.

I didn't say zeni rate-of-gain was broken on its own.

I said it was retarded you could become SSJ2 but not make enough money to buy a gun in the same time. That's bogus.

I'm not even expecting it to change. Since obviously you've already made your decision. I just think the comparison I drew is... insane.