Is it time yet...?
 

To finally switch up the gang system, and i do not mean start a draft system.

4 Gangs and keep Era Police the way it is.


Yes Plz:noob:

Sounds exactly like what we have right now.
Given that only 4 of the non-EP gangs are active.

The current system plays out just like a 4 gang system. I think we should definitely give the draft system a go and see how it plays out.

Like they say "don't knock it till you've tried it".

It may work or it may not but i am excited to give it a go.

@Tim

What's the latest on it?

If you want the current gang system to truly be like that, put the member limit at 25

then it's back to 2 stacked gangs and a bunch of pointless reject gangs that are nothing but an annoyance / free points. That is the point of the draft system, so gangs are no longer unevenly stacked and every week its actually competitive. Lets just kick it into motion already, we need something to breath life into the server stat.

I've been talking with Seth about the possibility of doing something as an interim solution while the new draft system (among other gangy things) are finished up. We could keep the current overall system and start making some tweaks for now (narrow down the number of gangs and give bases to the surviving gangs possibly).

The draft system itself is close, but Tim wanted to add more new things with it. We should definitely consider something else in the meantime until Draft system is ready for a trial period.

Easy solution to milk the **** out of what we have until the draft system.

Cut it down to 2 gangs. Tell people each player will get an MVP coin if their gang finishes top. Also tell them you need 500 points before you're even considered getting into gang events. Crazy raiding for a week or to until Tim releases draft system.

I still hate any idea of a draft, random teams for gangs is ****ing stupid.

You don't even pk when you're in the #1 gang for months at a time.
We usually had to summon you away from digging shells then wait for you to stop QQing about a shell TNT and grab a gun to participate in events.

It's not even random teams, they're selected methodically by the captains. If you don't like who they pick, or none of them are your friends.. go earn the spot yourself it's really that simple.

Rogue must be Staff again, he only turns into a d-bag when hes staff.

hes mad he got fired

I think the idea of 4 gangs is great with a 15 member limit and have incentives for gang bases..Make it so that it will not be abused but when you actively hold bases and X amount of gang members are on you gain points for your gang by holding bases and actively being in them..In turn i'd say turn the "Never get kicked due to idle" off as well...These are just ideas...I also think you should be able to up your member limit with points...It wouldnt be cheap, but wouldnt be godly expensive..This would give incentive to raid and pk more due to being able to in turn get a higher number of members in your gang. I also think you should be able to buy modifications for your gang gun such as changing certain things such as how many bullets it shoots. I also think gang bases should be able to be purchased with upgrades such as Higher defensive walls. Maybe unlimited ammo, Higher HP doors, Armor boxes for your gang...Etc etc...so there is incentive to raiding. Make an honor system as well that goes along with gangs so when you hold bases and win raids you gain honor and honor can be spent on things in a different shop.

3 gangs maximum, and gang limits (if needed) no lower than 25

A hard member limit on gangs is not the right way to approach things.

Whichever gang is the best ends up being stacked. This has been observed in every iteration of the gang system. If the member limit is high then the strong gang is even stronger, if it's too low then less active gangs just seem inactive.

What you should have is a sliding scale for gang membership based on a player ranking system. A combination of hours played in the last # of days and kills (or k/d) that generates a "heat" score for each player in a gang. If the total score for your gang is too high then you need to drop a member or two, or hold back on gang activity for a while until your heat drops....
So a top gang might have 10 or 12 skilled & active members, while another gang might be able to have 18 or 19 not so active and not as skilled members.

gangs used to work fine without member limits... you need good leaders who reward loyalty, know how to raid and who to hire

Gangs used to work fine, we used to have player count way higher to support gangs. Now we don't.

it's been worst. but with a 15 member gang limit it's obvious that large (therefore longlasting) raid will never occur

Why is that obvious?
Large raids could happen with 15 v 15... Not sure I saw many bigger raids than that even when Era was hitting 220 players daily.

Let's be realistic here. During them days 100 of them were RC's. :asleep:

Staff team was way smaller back then.

Depends which time zone we are talking about. I don't recall knowing you or seeing you before 07 or 08.

I remember Era use to have too many players that sometimes you had to wait to connect because it will say the server is currently full. This was when Chrisz, Kadar, Ningnong, Chris Rain, Jenn, Rick and everybody else staff back on early stage or classic release era

You mean time frame? Or 'era'?

Just about all of them... the staff team of late has been huge in comparison. There used to be a few admins and small team of devs. The same core staff over the past 3-4 years has been probably 20+ people. There's people who simply login once every few months and get a RC multiple times for no reason at all (Exolia, Reese, Fewyn, Zach, etc.)

Then you throw in that ETA gets RC now, and they split GBA into 3 seperate ****ing positions when the whole thing together wasn't enough work for me and I had to be PRA too while handling half of the ETA duties (actually lol'd when I saw them get separated). There's individual admins for LAT, Gani, GFX... they even hired sound guys again to do :themes. Honestly, all this work can be outsourced or done by one guy. The PR team used to be tight knit with maybe 4 active people there for years per term.. now they hire 8 new dudes every other month.

Hell they gave Nas a job, Amber is PSA, and they summoned me and told me to go on RC like a week ago.. no one has asked/assigned me to do anything yet. :asleep::asleep:

Awhile back MD would hire anyone who gave him 5 bucks (literally).. and Fidel had free reign to be a dictator because the PWA are MIA.

3 years ago, GC got fired within 12 hours for trying to actually build a decent team... Chris Vimes ran the server with legitimately 4 RC'd staff members (it looked like GK) and there was a average player count >125 still.

So naw.. I've never seen the team bigger or more free-run than in the most recent administrations; which ironically boast the lowest player-counts.

Let's be realistic here, I wouldn't expect a Graal# to have played with me prior to 2008 anyway.

Couldn't agree more with the post, although everyone has their style of management, we are still yet to see the full extent to Amsels. I think he is just trying to assign everyone with a job and people to go to, with past management every had a job and went to the manager who did nothing, whilst Amsel has been working on several projects for not only Era.

The sad part is; almost everyone can maintain the current positions, a simple kid with 200 hours could take over Gang Admin or Business Admin, simply put because they're not doing anything with the position but maintaining the current structure.

I mean my word might not be viable to some but lets face it, a lot of the Player Related side of the team is in a twist of chaos, yelling for help.

Hopefully we can see some kind of change soon, the repetitiveness of this game is getting to everyones head.

I didn't want to say "era" as i didn't want to confuse you.

ETA should have RC. What's the point being an administrator without any tools?

GBA was right to be split. All we need is a gangs admin but i would say we don't need a "business admin". That job could be handled by server admins.

I also agree about the Zach etc. Them guys don't know how to do anything hense why they don't do anything. Matter of fact when Zao was manager he pmed me saying "I want to fire Zach but then Alfonso wouldn't work for me". Zach is using Alf to stay on RC. If Zach gets fired then Alf will leave.

Pretty pathetic if you ask me considering Alfonso is a good guy who era needs. We don't need Zach, matter of fact i don't think anyone in the management team even like him.

Even though Nas is a bit of a mental case he has been working so i don't think it's fair to blast him. Amber is to soft for PSA in my opinion, shes a nice girl but i doubt she will do what's expected of her.

I remember asking you what you were suppose to do as i wanted help on something but you didn't even know what you were suppose to do, bad management on their behalf i guess?

Oh and this Graal# is from 08. And not to mention, screamtheriff, sensi,daro etc and other well known accts are mine that stretch back to 01 and 02. :asleep: Do you really think i just came here the last few years and started owning everyone lulz

Don't act like you have knowledge of era's situation if you don't even log the **** on. Most of the time each gang has less than 4 players online.

You must not log on.
I've been PKing the last few days and a few times we've had decent raids going with 6 or 7 people on each side...

Cruciatus got about 3000 kills in the last 3 days, pretty good if they only had 4 players online the whole time...

Tim specifically asked to hire you to work on the new GMAP. If you aren't doing that, then I don't know why you're around. I was pretty sure he'd assigned you to work on some inside levels. If you have nothing to do, I have no problem removing your RC.

Exolia was hired to help take periodic backups of the server because he was always good at getting the files out quickly. It's tougher to do on a Mac (which like all of our current admins use). He's also been helping with some levels in his spare time. Considering he's willing to work without any of the rights that got him in trouble before, I'm not too concerned about having him on.

Fewyn isn't staff o.o

Reese has been pretty active as PR, and Ice made that switch just before leaving (he switched Fal for Reese). Reese is more active than Fal was. Now Ulti makes all PR decisions, so someone is actually in charge of reading applications (no more surprise PR hirings).

Nas' job is LAT. He's never once been in trouble on any server for spawning or server destruction, so I don't see the problem. All he does wrong is curse a lot and throw the N-Word around. He also doesn't have the most positive attitude. None of those are very strong reasons to not let a person develop IMO (though he certainly will never get any powers that can affect player experience without proving himself).

Amber's been around for freaking ever. She's owned PT for the better part of a decade, has been ETA for a long time, and is almost always #1 on the "Most Popular" players list when she's online. I have a tough time seeing why her being PSA is a problem to you either.

GBA is split into 3 pieces now because it's 3 separate logical functions and all 3 are being performed as part-time functions of PRs. If one person controls gangs, guns, and businesses, and has no obligation to the players at all, you end up with someone controlling all major aspects of the game who could care less what players think of his/her work.

Nas did amazingly in my team of PRs (When I was PRA) he had basically the same rights as me and without official word he was basically my PRAA. We would skype for hours daily, working together to fix MANY things, whether it be the economy and all of the spawned/duped money at the time or just creating hats in item DB with me and helping set prices for them in the SR shop. (Many other things I'm just spitting out two)

I feel like he is hated a lot because of his immaturity when he isn't Staff, Nas has been around since the early ages, when **** talking and bantering was the only way to gain respect, It's no surprise that he hasn't adjusted to the new generation that crys to a PR the second they get PKed 3 times out of unstick-me.

Not really sure why I posted this, just sick of seeing him get a hard time by players for no real reason other than his **** talk, which in my opinion is hilarious. The only other player that can make me laugh as hard as Nas is William and it's purely off of the nonsense that they type during non-phased situations whilst PKing.

6 or 7 as the highest number of people raiding is quite lame. This is exactly why such a low gang limit is damaging for gangs

Somebody's getting a little threatened I see.

I never even mentioned your management, it's not completed yet, I'll bash on you when you get done :) . I just brought up a bunch of examples to support my point that the recent staff teams have been much larger (if not freely run) than any were back in the day when Koho claimed about half the server population was RCs.

Higher gang limit is more damaging for gangs. Now they'll feel less pressure to kick people who arent active or arent performing and they'll just keep their buddies in the gang.

Give it a few weeks and you'll see the net result in terms of raiding doesnt change. Once a gang is stacked the other gangs will avoid raiding that gang, and the less active gangs will have small raids against eachother with a few people at a time.

At least with the old system each gang had a few rivals in their general skill group that they could choose from to raid.
Already seeing a divide among the current gangs, and I can't forsee MF or BB sticking around for a raid with BH or LC, so they've only got eachother to raid now. Boring.

A hard limit isn't ever going to ****ing work. Change stimulates short term bouts of activity that people interpret as a result. It has failed so many times already.

That's why you change it every week, in form of a draft.

:D