Leither Yiltron
KILL-EM-QUICK
RISE of LEGION
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Posted - 2013.01.15 22:28:00 -
[1] - Quote
Mav posted this in a thread recently. My reply grew too long and a bit off-topic to what he was originally consulting, so here's its own thread.
Mavado V Noriega wrote:
corp battles still a joke atm , u have ppl puttin up 100K contracts yet go full tryhard in full proto gear........like wtf?
no one wants to risk anything but everyone wants to be rewarded i dont get it.
There's a really simple explanation for this one: Anybody playing corp battles at the moment doesn't care about the rewards, and never will.
You mention the collateral cost of full prototype suits; those things cost around 200k ISK apiece fitted correctly. In a game where they're matched, you're probably going to lose on average 5 per player. Long series of explanations short, you have an expected loss every time you pony up for one of these battles. Just using some very loose estimates with prototype gear, it's around 8 million ISK for 8 players. The estimates are conservative; you'll probably suffer more ISK loss as a corp in a closely matched game.
So every time you go into a corp match in Dust, you have the expectation of losing 8 million ISK. You then have an expectation of gaining some back if you win. The following might be a simplified model of how corp battles work, but it can at least provide some insight:
Let's say KEQ has a 60% win rate against the particular corp we're preparing to battle. We're also prepared to go 8 million ISK in the hole just to fight. Under a simplified model, it will take around 11 million ISK collateral for us to EXPECT to break even on the suit cost. The thing to note here, though, is that these kinds of distributions can only model really large data sets. Put more appropriately, is KEQ sitting on enough in-game ISK to stomach the cost of a "really bad day"? Assuming two battles' outcomes don't have an effect on one another (they probably do rather drastically), you get more than a 1/8 chance that in fighting two battles, you'll lose both of them. These numbers start to look imposing. If you lose 2 battles in a row at the expected even point, you lose a "lot" of ISK. (lot is in quotes because Dust/Eve etc.). In this case, more than 1/8 of the time I'll lose not just 16 million from suits in those two battles, but I'll lose an additional 22 million from the collateral, for a rousing total of 38 mil. In the best case, where we win both, I'll make 25.8 million.
The point is that in the short term, these types of contracts are totally impractical. If I don't have the ISK to feasibly continue playing 11 million collateral matches at a 60% win rate for a long effing time, there's a very substantial possibility that I will lose everything and be unable to play profitable matches before I see the long-term profit in the venture. Did I say long-term profit, I meant the long-term drawing even.
And that's the biggest of the kickers. You have to take out an even bigger collateral to expect profit in the long run. These are amounts that are insane to try to reach. Not to mention the fact that there's a huge logistical mess in this entire scenario; the corp gets all the victory earnings, and distributing them to all participants (even with a tax percentage) is annoying. Individual profit in the long run would be less than 1/8th of the total income under this system with a properly high collateral number.
So here's the final point to seal the deal: The amount of profit that you would expect to get from any one match is marginally irrelevant compared to the suit cost under this whole line of logic. Looking at it a different way, the amount of farming time that 8 players would have to put in to give themselves an appreciable nest egg of ISK to run "profitable" battles for long enough to see returns on them is huge. Even calculating at around 1 million per game for all 8 players (profit, remember), you're looking at at least 100 games if not more to get to the desired amount. And I'm desperately low balling the gear costs of each of these battles.
So yes, everybody puts in 100k contracts while simultaneously taking in their best gear. This is because they wanted to play a corp battle. They also don't risk more because the real "risk" of playing in a corp battle is guaranteeing that you're going to lose a chunk of ISK in the way of gear. Adding additional "risk" into the equation by taking a bloated contract collateral doesn't help anything unless you're sitting on more than 100 million as a corp on top of having good gear.
The current collateral system is borked. The simple solution is to sit down and get corp battles to pay out some money to individual players based on what was destroyed in the match, ala the current public match rewards system. Give the winners more, the losers less, and distribute it evenly among corp members. Take some of the lost ISK out of the pot. Leave in the old system to do what it's meant to do: prevent players from scheduling matches they can't attend. With these incentives in place, Dust becomes less about playing a loser's game with every corp battle and more about actually winning. The current "collateral" costs simply don't take into account that the real, constant collateral is gear loss.
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TL;DR by one of the most inspired orators of our times, FreeBeers:
Free Beers wrote:summary? cliffs notes?
corp battles are only content other than ambush/skirmish pub matches. We are tired of the pubs and corp battles are a negative since they are a losing financial prospect no matter what you do.
CCP wants corp battles to be isk sinks for EVE but they seem to have forgotten that dust mercs are getting screwed over in the deal. All together this makes a already ****** game content wise even worse.
there i said all of what you should/could have said in 3 lines |
Leither Yiltron
KILL-EM-QUICK
RISE of LEGION
417
|
Posted - 2013.01.16 03:04:00 -
[4] - Quote
slap26 wrote:Leither Yiltron wrote:Hey guys, I borked the original math in a slight way that makes a really significant difference. The amount for an expectation of breaking even is 58 million, not 11 million. who is losing 58 mil in a match? look at it from a winning perspective, big contracts you cover the cost of your gear with a little left over in the corp wallet
Yeah, if you win. 58 million is the required cost to EXPECT to come out even over a large number of matches. |