Horde discussion

[King Richard]

I'm sure Tim could give us better numbers, but I thought I'd start the conversation. It's the end of an age, and naturally, the size of hordes is being discussed. So, I've done some research and gotten a bunch of numbers I thought might be useful. I have no idea how large the hordes were, but this at least gives us an idea about what we can expect from an LB.

I guess you could estimate the size of the hordes, but I don't remember the formula, and I'm told the one on the wiki is wrong, so I'll leave that for later.

Note: Cities destroyed does not include the 2 that die at the beginning of the LB.

Version	Player Base	# over lvl 80	Cities destroyed by hordes
v14	279	22	8
v13	315	35	4
v12	314	35	11
v11	411	59	8
v10	726	54	1

Now, in v10 there were fewer hordes because the world was only 18 cities, and the only opposition to the light was Tim deciding to kill one army so we couldn't get a perfect sweep. Seems he does a lot of army killing... I believe Hordes were also 3x larger than normal back then too.

v11 was highly contested and the Shadow won. It had the current horde format, but had a different ending to the LB. (v10 did also) The horde phases had no effect on the LB.

v12-13 were mildly contested.

v14 was moderately contested by Tim again, and a few others.

I don't know what I'm trying to say here, but I thought it would be interesting to see this stuff after the discussions we've been having. Are the hordes too strong? Would they be too weak if we had more players? I don't know. I'll just stick to playing the game because thinking this hard makes my brain hurt.

[Tim]

V10 should be 615 for player base I think.

The pattern in the player base makes me sad...

[kaldar]

I'm honestly shocked there were that many players , or more accurately characters. I think a more telling number though is activity of those characters ....... how many, say, got to at least level 20?

For example, this age out of 155 characters, 63 managed to get to level 20. A feat, I estimate , that would take no more than a week into the age.

The issues I see with player retention as well as hordes are parallel to each other. The game is not obvious to play. The wikki is very well written, but directing new players to the wikki should be of utmost importance as most will show up and play for a day or 2 , get frustrated, and leave.

That brings me to the problem with horde strength. Horde strength is determined by number of characters in the game primarily. This does not adequately represent the strength of the player base, as a game with 150 characters, all of which are level 80 and above, would obviously be exponentially stronger than a player base with 150 characters, half of which are level 5 and below.

I'm not sure exactly on the specifics, but I would suggest horde strength be somehow related directly to the total hitpoints of the characters in the game. This way, a level 100 character will count approximately 10 times as much as a level 1.

[King Richard]

V10 currently has 726, but there were probably some that came after. Another big contributor to the number is that people used to play full alts. It was a lot more common for 1 person to have more than 3. I think only Sevane did that this round.

[kaldar]

Does Tim generally mind running queries of the database ?

I would be interested to know, how many unique players this age, have an account with a character above level 20.

This will give us the clearest picture of activity at the moment.

[Tim]

Hmm. The V10 site does have 726, but the database only has 615. I figured since it's 111 off, you just mistyped. Weird. Regardless, only a little over 400 were above level 1, so I wonder if some bots showed up after the game was over...

The other thing to remember about the gave activity decline is that V10 came out about 6 months after AMoL did and we got a boost from getting linked on Dragonmount, so that helped generate a lot of interest in the game. Some new players stuck around for a while, but after a few ages (and admittedly long breaks between ages), most have faded away.

I could run some stats on how many 'active' players we have had in previous ages and compare them to now, but I don't see how more specific numbers will help address the problem: Finding and keeping active players. I agree the complexity of the game is a large hurdle for new players that we can do something about and I hope to address in the next age (will talk about it shortly).

As for tweaking the formula for horde size, I'm not convinced it's a huge problem yet. Yes, the inactivity at the end of this age hurt the Light in saving cities, but so did 1) poor planning in trying to save everything in phase 1 and not saving your turns and 2) getting caught off guard by NVS's army dropping. True, the full population doesn't reflect the number of active characters directly, but I'd argue that there were 22 players above 80 last age (about the same as we have now), but nearly 100 more people. So the hordes last age should have been bigger and there were even more Shadow players last age and only 8 cities dropped.

The same formula is used for the size of ALL hordes in the game, not just the LB ones and I think for the most part they have been sized about right this age (don't remember any complaints before the LB). I've noticed that people tend to get very critical of how the LB works most ages when they are on the losing side (or losing their cities), so I try to wait til the LB is completely over and then try to access how it went. Not trying to blow this off as sour grapes, just trying to be cautious here.

I'd argue that if the hordes were smaller, the LB would have been no fun for you guys at all this age. This is supposed to be a challenge after all.

[kaldar]

I'm not necessarily saying the formula should be tweaked because the hordes this age are "too big". I'm saying, that over the next age we should have discussions about it because the formula does not actually account for the strength of the player base.

Ger actually pointed out to me the formula is heavily weighed with the top account and not the overall player base.

For example, with a single level 100 character in the game and nobody else the horde would look like :

2 * 1045 * (1 + 100) = 211k hit points.

with 100, level 100 characters in the game the horde would look like :

2 * 1045 * 120 = 250800 hit points.

My conclusion is that if the hordes happen to be just the right size, it is by accident and not by design