Concerning BP Stuff:
Piano, sorry that I didn’t directly respond to the post that you made in council. If I’m being entirely honest, I have a tendency to not want to share my personal opinions for a fear of people saying “well the council didn’t agree with me so they just didn’t tell the developers my opinion.”
believe it or not this was actually mentioned to me once....
Which isn’t entirely true - I do mention most of the concerns listed (or the most popular ones) to the devs - including that one****. And usually there is some discussion about those perspectives in skype or in the forums, and what we think about them. But…. I also give my own opinions to the devs when giving your opinions.
I'm not in council anymore, so I'm not as worried about sharing my perspective.
The response to the BP changes did have some controversy - you weren't alone in your opinions... but from people I talked to it was majority positive feedback. Part of the reason they left the 20% was from concerns made by others about valid self-killing: getting rid of excess troops, clearing out allies towns when they go missing, etc.
Probably the biggest complaint I read, even coming from people that don't like cannibalism, in response to the BP change was that you can run festivals, use gold, or self-kill on enemy troops and come up with the same results - and that the only huge benefit is bp rankings. I have my own personal opinion on that: yes, there are other ways to do it. So people should just use those methods.
I'm also not sure if there is any validity to this, but I think self-killing can give players a pretty big head start at the very beginning of the game, in comparison with running festivals. When you have a plethora of cities built up festivals become a lot easier to run and that gap closes, and are probably more or less on par with self-killing, but the immediate impact is pretty big. At least, that was my experience after doing a festival and theater only CP gain. Self-killing is also partially dependent on your alliance, though, more members = more bp.
I also actually care about fighter rankings, and I would much rather see them represent people who are actually fighting and not self killing. I know that with gold using it is skewed anyways, but a lot of the time when it comes to end games I see the players who are actually fighting and not using
as much gold end up in the very top rankings. Or at least, players who allege that they don't use as much gold. Bragging rights or not, I still would like to see it.
Rachel brought up another thing, and that was that if it's within the rules it's a viable strategy. Personal again, don't really agree with that viewpoint. Part of that is I like to think of war games as 'realistic' as possible - and if I were to go to my friends' house and kill all of them, my other friends probably wouldn't sit around and wait for me to do the same. They'd probably stop being friends with me. I don't think of exploiting loopholes as necessarily fair versions of strategy. Frequently in games when you see a loophole, bug, glitch, etc. is found and people use it enough, the developers will go back and modify it so that people can't do it as much. Maybe not making it explicitly 'against the rules', but from my view it's their way of saying 'you aren't supposed to be doing this, although we don't want to make it 'illegal' because it can still be used in viable situations.'.
also at one point Rachel said it "does not take away from other players".... I would agree and disagree with that. I think on the surface no players are physically impacted by that, or at a huge disadvantage. But I also think you would be surprised how much some people care about their fighter rank and get upset when other people overtake them for not actually 'fighting' enemies. Using Piano as an example, and I don't mean this poorly on you because it's actually really impressive, but just trying to give my perspective: on Tegea he has 26 million bp, almost all attack.... which is really impressive and might be the biggest total I have ever seen.
(Like actually. that might be a world record for Grepo) The next closest is Tanno at 16 mil, and in third place is *MGK* of SSS at 9mil abp and 6 mil dbp, 15mil total. Now, I don't know MGK or Tanno, and don't know if they do the self-killing thing or what. But, if not, that gap between self killing and enemy killing is pretty huge. And frankly, if I was MGK or Tanno.... I would be kind of upset. This might be the greatest game they've ever played... they could be the best players contending in the server and almost unbeatable... but they still aren't going to be #1 in fighting by a long stretch. And they might not feel as much need for competing against each other because they know the number 1 spot is impossible to reach. They would each need to rack up literally 10mil+ bp to catch up. Now, I can't speak for them obviously, and they might not care at all, but I would be upset if it were me.
Those are just my perspectives on it anyways
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edit:
**** to clarify this point. By most I mean if 20 people all vaguely say the same thing, I try to summarize said thing, take it to inner council skype to discuss it, and then post to devs.