Elite Dangerous | Community Goals Reward Change

Ozric

Volunteer Moderator
Ozric
Florenus said:
That's a good move, but unfortunately a little too late.
A lot of people signed up with the leading power early on to get additional rewards, starting snowball effect and now the competition is basically over.
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From the very first day the Mahon side of the CG has had consistently 4 times the amount of contributors of the Kaine side. I really don't think you can say people waited to see the winning side and then jumped on.
 

Ian Doncaster

Ian Doncaster
Florenus said:
That's a good move, but unfortunately a little too late.
A lot of people signed up with the leading power early on to get additional rewards, starting snowball effect and now the competition is basically over.
Click to expand...
The competition was basically over after the first few hours, though - by that point Mahon already had a 5:2 lead long before anyone could reasonably have picked their sign-up side based on backing the eventual winner [1]. There's no reason to expect that - even if the overall progress had been completely invisible and everyone decided purely independently - the next 10,000 contributors would be statistically massively different to those first 250.

Sure, people seeing who is winning and picking that side means it's probably going to be a 5:1 win for Mahon rather than a 3:1 or 4:1 win, but that's not exactly taking away any suspense.



[1] Well, okay, people who've been around a while will remember that Kaine has never won a competitive CG in any circumstances and has even managed to lose a non-competitive CG too. In that sense the result was predictable weeks before the CG started. But there's no amount of "making it a fair fight" which will let Kaine overcome that.
 

Rubbernuke

Rubbernuke
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T'kael

T'kael
An early advantage does significantly impact any competitive CG. While I can't say that Kaine would have won, an early push for Mahon certainly discourages contribution by Kaine supporters that perceive themselves to be on the losing side and in danger of losing access to valuable CG rewards. Further, any contributors who wished to support Kaine for the narrative but ultimately chose to support Mahon for the CG rewards cannot easily switch to supporting Kaine at this late hour without losing their earned CG rewards.
 
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Florenus

Florenus
Ozric said:
From the very first day the Mahon side of the CG has had consistently 4 times the amount of contributors of the Kaine side. I really don't think you can say people waited to see the winning side and then jumped on.
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Ian Doncaster said:
The competition was basically over after the first few hours, though - by that point Mahon already had a 5:2 lead long before anyone could reasonably have picked their sign-up side based on backing the eventual winner [1]. There's no reason to expect that - even if the overall progress had been completely invisible and everyone decided purely independently - the next 10,000 contributors would be statistically massively different to those first 250.

Sure, people seeing who is winning and picking that side means it's probably going to be a 5:1 win for Mahon rather than a 3:1 or 4:1 win, but that's not exactly taking away any suspense.



[1] Well, okay, people who've been around a while will remember that Kaine has never won a competitive CG in any circumstances and has even managed to lose a non-competitive CG too. In that sense the result was predictable weeks before the CG started. But there's no amount of "making it a fair fight" which will let Kaine overcome that.
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But that's my point - when you don't care about PP and you see which side has more contributors, you sign up there, which is just as true now (well, before the change anyway), as it was in the first hour.

I fully understand that Kaine was probably on the loosing side anyway - just judging by the PP standings I must assume she has a lot less supporters, therefore much less "hauling power", but those additional rewards for winners just killed any hint of hope for competition from the very start. It meant it was not only Mahon vs Kaine, but actually Everybody vs Kaine.
 
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Ozric

Volunteer Moderator
Ozric
Florenus said:
but those additional rewards for winners just killed any hint of hope for competition from the very start. It meant it was not only Mahon vs Kaine, but actually Everybody vs Kaine.
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I disagree. I also don't think that the majority of people would hold back to see the winning side before contributing.

I also personally think that having CG that offer extra rewards to the winning side isn't a bad thing. I think that the competition normally works well. I guess the main issue in this case is that they're tied to Power Play and we all know how everyone wants everything.
 

Ian Doncaster

Ian Doncaster
Florenus said:
just judging by the PP standings I must assume she has a lot less supporters
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Somewhat, yes - though not by anywhere near the margin those standings would suggest because a lot of it is inherited from the Powerplay 1 position when Kaine didn't exist as a Power at all and when Power size was much less correlated with supporter counts. Since the start of Powerplay 2, Kaine has actually gained slightly more new systems than Mahon has (though Mahon has successfully significantly reinforced more of their existing systems and seems more active overall)

But in all cases 90% of the participants in an unrestricted CG are either going to be from other Powers or none at all. Winters (11th) beat Grom (4th) without any difficulty a few weeks ago, despite Grom being both slightly larger and making more net progress in Powerplay 2. It's really "everyone vs everyone (which has always had a significant Mahon bias)" with specific Kaine and Mahon pledges playing a fairly marginal role [1] either way.

Ultimately the problem is that "competitive" doesn't really work at all with the CG format. Even if there's no quantitative reason in terms of either CG difficulty or rewards to pick one side or the other, people will just "like Mahon more than Kaine" or whatever and if there's a 3:1 bias of that in early players that's going to be representative of the final result so there's not going to be any suspense.

I think there have been just three pairs of competitive CGs where the result has been reasonably close, even then only one of those had actual lead changes after the first few hours, and none of them were at all quantitatively equal in terms of how easy it was for each side to proceed - indeed, the one with the lead changes only happened that way because of something which would widely be regarded as a design flaw...


[1] From the "you were Kaine's 324th-best agent, well done" weekly messages I get, which give a reasonable estimate of how many active players a Power has in any particular week, I think probably >80% of the Kaine side probably are neutral or others, and >90% of the Mahon side likewise.
 

Neilski

Neilski
I just contributed and was surprised to find that I could only sign up for one of the sides... :)
I guess it has been a very long time since I attempted to do that in a competitive CG, cos if I'd ever seen that restriction before, I'd forgotten.

(I chose Kaine, partly due to lower 75% threshold, partly due to better semiconductor supply nearby :D)
 
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