As a minor addendum to this post - a reminder that we have two permanent raid times for the DB TOR guild . One on Tuesday nights, one on Saturday nights (which is when we're holding tonight's flashpoint comp!). Both are at 7 PM American Eastern time, which is midnight GMT right now. Be there every week if you're interested in running with us!

Oooh I got mentioned! o-o ty Handsome FIST-man!

Woo! a Crescent without trying! :P

Psh. 21 of 24 stars in the last eight missions. You worked for that Cresecent. Nicely done.

That is a sexy-looking pie chart. Thank you, Val; I suddenly love the DB again.

See? Isn't everything better when it has a pie chart?

Bah humbug. Why cut cf for pazaak? The only reason it was high is because it is of the competition. Most don't touch the game many other times.

And then you get folks like me, who don't have time for other games and rely on pazaak to get comps or cfs.

Cutting the numbers in half will only make the game even less desirable to play. No point playing if one gets half the award they'd get for doing roughly same time in other games, like Diablo III, etc

Brimstone, I don't think it's the volume, it's the time it takes to get them. (i.e. leveling out the values so that if you spend an hour playing pazaak you'd theoretically get the same amount of cfs as if you'd been playing an hour of some other game.)

I think it's the perceived lack of skill, more than anything. Personally I don't think slashing the rewards for our (by far) most active pvp game is a great way to go about balancing the equations in any sense. I think Frosty showed us quite well that skill trumps all in the end, by coming up to 5th having played around a tenth of the total games that the people who placed above him had in in FL3.

Pazaak may be without perceivable skill, which is debated by some, but even in that you make the trade. You trade knowledge of having to spam your way out, vs. having to play your best. Both avenues have merit imo, but meh, looks like it's getting nerfed anyways.

At least at this point brim, JA is so old that some smart phones may be able to run it soon?

Every game goes through an up and down cycle compared to JA, tbh. I remember when Pazaak came out and it was first set up so that you were only getting CFs when you'd done best of 5. This is still an improvement over that - you're getting twice the CFs of what you'd have earned then, maybe a bit more.

And, to be fair, pazaak is the game of choice for the weekly PoB for a reason - it's fast and easy PvP score in ways that no other game can match because of sheer volume of matches. See Rial's 8 or 9-week streak of Pendants.

Also - tablet JA/JO would be badass. You could totally get a keyboard and mouse for it. :P

I agree with my Master. There is a level of skill involved in pazaak knowing when to hold at 18/19 or when to risk it for a biscuit. Also the skill you need to be able to play higher cards effectively. I can't see why it's being nerfed as I also get most of my CF's from the game and this cut will make the game not worth playing at all. So long, Pazaak, you were a great friend....

For some reason I'm getting the feeling that people aren't reading the rest of the sentence.

With these numbers in mind the CF awards for Pazaak have been halved, to bring them in line with JA as this is the standard we have tried to align all gaming with.

Pazaak isn't going to be awarding half the amount of CFs per time spent of all the other games. Its going to be on target for the first time in a while. D3 and other games have been reduced multiple times to get/keep them in line with this target.

I think it's good that Pazaak has been cut down. I'd like to see more people play different PvP games for the PvP scores, and Pazaak in the long run is still worth a good amount of CFs for the time you play it. The mechanics of Pazaak are also a heck of a lot easier than say... Starcraft, which has you pretty much planning out your whole game right when you decide what race you're playing and who you're playing with/against.

All 'n all, the games are starting to get more on par when it comes to the time spent/CF count ratio. Good to see.

Respectfully, Val, I did read the other part of the sentence. And I still think it's a terrible idea.

I'm assuming that as part of the statistics done up for FL3 (and on the whole) that an analysis was done for how many unique people play JA vs Pazaak vs D3 vs TOR. I would love to see whose throats we're cutting to keep a minority of gamers happy because their game of choice is less efficient at earning CFs.

As mentioned above (and by your graph), Pazaak is BY FAR the most played game in the Brotherhood. Part of that is because it actually rewards people for their time. I don't understand why we are trying to push members away from it to a different game.

The question that seems most important to me is why Pazaak is so popular compared to the other platforms. Is it popular because more people enjoy playing it than other games or is it popular because it gives out CFs faster than other games? If it's the former then reducing the CFs is the wrong answer. If it's the latter, then bringing it in line with the other games is appropriate. What should have accompanied the pie chart are some data about how many CFs were awarded per capita for each of those games over the same period of time. I'm not an expert on DJB gaming by any means, but my sense has been that Pazaak gives out more CFs per hour than other games, so its popularity may simply be a result of people optimizing their time for competitions.

I was bored, so I went back through the last ~800 PvP matches submitted (going back to the start of FL3) and made lists of unique players per game.

By my count: Pazaak - 63 JA - 22 SC - 14 ToR - 4 D3 - 3

You're correct, Scion, that Pazaak is a faster route for CFs, but that's not a reason for handicapping it. It's a source of activity for this club, plain and simple. Cutting it's value means that those who are using it simply for CFs will stop using it or move away from it, which is completely counter-intuitive for a club that's based on activity.

If we want to make all activities in this club perfectly equal in terms of rewards vs time, why are we not handicapping JA in comparison to fiction? The time and effort required to write a quality 500 words (for a single Cluster) vs winning a single JA or Pazaak match (for a single Cluster) is significantly different.

If we handicap one activity because it's easier to get rewards, then maybe we need to look at all activities in this club on that basis.

But that would be ridiculous, because rewarding activity is how this club stays vibrant.

One reason to handicap some games in comparison to others, but not fiction, is because fiction does not grant Clusters of Fire.

Given that there is a fixed number of CFs to obtain GMRG ranks, it is important to keep the relative earning potential per time spent of games even, I think.

I don't have enough experience with Pazaak to comment on this change in specific, but the general spirit behind it is one I am strongly in favor of. While it may cut activity to Pazaak in the short term, it maintains the theoretical integrity of the structures of awards we have in the club. Pazaak will likely remain popular because I suspect people werent just playing it because of the CFs it granted, but because of its accessibility.

Just throwing this out there... pvp score is not impacted by the amount of CFs awarded. So, if the initial issue that was complained about was pazaak dominating competitions that rely on pvp score (all of them?), then simply halving the CFs won't do anything. This feels like a reactionary move made to quell the complainers without investigating the actual issues with pazaak as a platform.

Kenath - This isn't about keeping any specific group of gamers happy. There is a system for gaming that playing a game for an hour should yield about 12 CFs. When something is out of alignment with that it gets adjusted. Look back over the last year and see how many times we've reduced D3 or other CFs because they came out of alignment. You've acknowledged in your response to Scion that Pazaak was a faster route to CFs, which puts it on my "fix" list. Regarding your gaming vs fiction example, that's just silly. The two activities reward a different type of cluster (Fire and Ice), there's no reason to level them.

Mav - Spot on.

Aidan - You're right about PVP Score and I acknowledged that we're still working on the PVP Score piece of Pazaak. Its not as simple as me changing a multiplier for a Gaming Submission. It will take some coding to resolve. When it does get sorted expect it to take a similar hit like CFs did. Regardless of that though, the CF change was necessary and was not a "move made to quell the complainers", I'm well aware of the implications of faster matches of Pazaak right now.

I agree with these changes and think it's the first step in balancing our gaming. Pazaak is still better off than it was a year and a half ago.

Pazaak is/was out of balance period. I don't think the CF payout was the issue PVP score is. The reason pazaak was played so much in FL3 is because you had to play it to be competitive. I loathe pazaak with the fury of 1000 suns but I'm pretty much forced into it during pvp competitions. The sheer amount of matches one can hammer out during gorefest or a vendetta is insane. And can any of the Pazaak defenders seriously say with a straight face that the skill required is even remotely in the same ballpark as JA, Star craft, X WA or the other tier 1 platforms?

The old CF payout was actually fine because, all things being equal it's harder to get the number of matches to get a bigger payout, whereas one can grab a buddy and hit the daily CF cap in one of the PVE platforms fairly easily. Pazaak's PVP score is what needs a nerf.

I'd rather see an implementation like "Pazaak can only be played 6 times a day instead of 12 times a day" for PVP events than see a nerf in the CFs. Pazaak is the most widely used platform we have. Why?

• It's FREE
• It's Playable by anyone with a web browser
• It's easy and has almost no learning curve.
• It offers some hope of winning a game to those who otherwise have no hope.

Oh, now sure, we can complain about that last point. But bottom line is, if you ask me to go up vs. Frosty and Cethgus and Quejo all day long in JA? I'm just not going to play, because losing repeatedly and forever without any legitimate hope of improvement is not any fun for anybody.

Also, the issues with PVP Score... people really aren't thinking this through with Pazaak. PVP Score is self limiting in pazaak. Why? Because like I have said since Pazaak was introduced... it's a coin-flip. The majority of the time if you play it enough it's going to end up half and half. The way PVP Score works is that wins matter in it, and so do games played. In order to be successful in competitions at pazaak you need to play an unworldly amount of games.

I would like to once again point to Kell and Frosty in FL3. These guys placed 3rd and 5th respectively.

1. Orion 1178 Played, 616 Wins, 562 Losses
2. Mark 762 Played, 414 Wins, 348 Losses
3. Kell 297 Played, 218 Wins, 79 Losses
4. Delak 492 Played, 260 Wins, 232 Losses
5. Frosty 128 Played, 122 Wins, 6 Losses

Yes, you can play Pazaak more. Because the pool of people you can play is bigger. But you have to play more if you want to win, because you're almost guaranteed to lose close to half your matches, making it harder for you to win. If Frosty had started playing a week earlier in the contest (he played his first matches over halfway through) we'd probably have seen him in the top 3. For the record, you can also compare this to poor Raistline (sorry buddy) who played probably the third most matches of FL3. He had 256 wins, 425 losses in 681 matches, and finished with a PVP score 96.23 which was outside the top 5.

My suggestion, though it probably arrives far too late is to try limiting all platforms during competitions to 6 matches a day for a little while. Keep the minimum at 3. See what happens. This allows people to continue playing games they CHOOSE to play at full rewards, but also limits their ability to "spam themselves" into the lead. It also means that people who only wish to play a minimum of a platform are now playing half the amount that someone playing the full amount is.

Rather than take a look at our most active, easy and accessible platform and say "you get less!" thereby alienating people's (rather prodigious) efforts.. try to fix the so called "problem." The problem here, that everyone seems to be worked up about, is people being able to spam their way to too many CFs or too much PVP Score. (Fun fact? All pvp gaming events in the DB with the exception of ladders/brackets have always devolved into spam, no matter what platform is used.)

Limit the spam, save the world.

I agree, ppl started hating me towards the end. :) I'd say minimum 3, maximum 3 during Vendettas. I think this limit will encourage team games once the 1v1 combinations are done. It also eliminates dodging imo, you lose/win 3 with the a guy and then you don't have to worry about it and can hang around #dbgaming for other opportunities.

I like the cut of your jib Yacks, your argument is well researched and well reasoned. The idea of lowering the daily per player, per platform match ceiling from 12 to 6 (or 3 as Frosty suggested) is so crazy it just might work. It's easy to implement as it doesn't require any screwing around with the databse. Such a change would also put things on a more level playing field and encourage more team/ffa gaming and platform diversification.

So right now we're exploring two options.

• First, scaling how much PVP Score is affected by different Gaming Platforms
• Second, a way to only count the first (3, 6, 12?) matches played on a specific platform between two opponents towards PVP Score.

If James finds these changes are able to be successfully made without breaking the site during testing I'll be engaging the Dark Summit mailing list to determine where the what count of matches should be included to PVP Score. I can make an argument for either 3, 6, or 12, although I tend to favor Frosty's approach of 3. Once a limit is put on how many matches count towards PVP Score (calculated by the site automagically) then the limit on matches played in PVP can be removed, allowing people to play as much as they like to earn CFs.

This could all far apart during testing and nothing could come of it, but its a path we're exploring.

But the CF-nerf stays the same?

The PVP score limiting has been discussed, but the CFs earned for Pazaak was too much too quickly. I understand the need for Pazaak as a platform and support it fully. Things should be balanced so earnings are fair across the board. Option 2 is my favorite one to balance things out.

Nerf all the things!

The Pazaak CF balancing will not be changing. It was out of alignment with the system and has been corrected. Undoing that constitutes nerfing every other platform that is currently set to our system. I'm not even considering it as an option. Zero chance.

Nerf all the things!

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ROFLMAO, well I guess that just proves I fail at Markdown and site assets. :P

PvP Score is utterly flawed. It's sheer nonsense that someone with 100 wins could finish behind someone with 50 wins, regardless of platform played. As long as we use this ratio, it's actually beneficial to avoid playing people that will beat us as much as possible.

Well that's almost as ridiculous a statement as needing to nerf CFs for Pazaak :P