The competition was never set up to be "fair". That said, any player can get the 50 and 250 tag merits and any player can finish with a good number of tokens for the token shop. In that sense, the competition is very fair.
As far as finishing in the top 25, only players with solid stats who have spent a lot of time, energy and money will likely end up in those slots. The top 25 are supposed to receive some sort of collectible item and some points, but keep in mind, they will have spent over a billion on FHCs and missed out on 100+ mil in battle stat gains. The collectibles might be worth 1-5 bil.
I still think we will see a couple of below-the-radar lower ranked players, who pulled tags off inactives, finish in the top 25.
If you are unhappy that you think you can't finish in the top 25, get stronger and try again next year. This gives people an incentive to train their stats and level up in the future.
hmm I think 250 dog tags would be hard, especially with the stealing prevention implied, I've got some very strong people in my faction who have alot of difficulties finding them :p
Yeah, you make a very valid point, the 250 is not easy, but there are 538,660 players created in Torn of which maybe 20,000 are active players. Of those active players, maybe 2-4000 might decide to participate, and of those a much smaller number will decide to even try for the 250.
Even if your attacks were only 50% successful, doing 500 attacks over 18 days in order to get the 250 merit comes to 28 attacks per day. Sure, you would also lose some tags every day, but it is very do-able.
Also, being thoughtful about who you attack could significantly improve a players success rate each attack. A thoughtful player could average 75% success. I don't really know because I am not making attacks, but I would imagine most of the tags have been taken from the inactives by now, so players would likely need to take tags from weaker players. Once they uncovered 30-50 weaker people participating, they can just attack those people every day. Higher level players are unlikely to want to attack lower players because of the low point value assigned to the tag.
A nice little side bet would be trying to guess the total number of tags the winner ends up with. I bet it will be over 1000.
The difference is Baldr, if me and some friends put together a team, we would not go against a pro football team for our first outing. We would play against some other people in the neighborhood. See the difference? Also, if the pro team came down to our neighborhood and manhandled us, people would thing they were asses for beating on us. There would be social consequences and perhaps other consequences as well. This game actively rewards people for beating on weaker players. Lets go to a more direct example. A crime boss in real life would not go beat on some little low level street guy, he/she would send some of his minor minions. Why? Not worth their time. This game needs to work harder on making it not worth the time of the crime bosses to mess with us low level street thugs.
No one thinks that a one month old player should be able to directly compete with boddybagger. NO ONE is saying that. They are saying the Boddybagger should not receive encouragement from the game to mess with us.
I don't see how beating on a low level street thug is new and different for bodybagger..... I guess its a different name? whoopee! This is not to say bodybagger does that, but its true for just about every equivalent level you can think of. A 3k old level 79 beating on a little guy is just as bad really. None of those players should be wasting their time on us. Its just that simple and the game needs to actively manage that abuse. This is not to say they should not be able to come kick our behinds if they want to, but the game should not give them cash and tags and other rewards for doing it.
I'm going to copy/paste something I posted in another thread: "It's an attacking-based competition, so of course players with higher stats are going to have an advantage, but this kind of levels the playing field. At least, it gives the lower-stat players a much better chance of holding on to their tags. Sure, they're going to have to work a lot harder since the tags they'll be able to collect will likely have lower point values, but at least they don't have to worry about having all of their hard-earned tags jacked in a single go (like in previous competitions). It's highly unlikely that they'll win, but they can still get the honors and maybe a few tokens.
Personally, I'd rather spend my energy elsewhere, so I'm sitting it out this year. People need to stop making threads whining about it. No-one's forcing anyone to compete, and no-one's really losing anything by not competing. Either put in the effort or shut up. This is a Torn tradition, and this year it's been cushioned and watered-down to cater to less-abled players. Nothing is supposed to come easy in Torn, so let's not nerf our traditions any more than we need to."
Those of us who have been around a while still need our traditions to hold on to. This still needs to feel like Torn to us, and we've invested A LOT of time, energy and money (for a lot of us, REAL money) into the city. Nothing is being handed to us. Nothing is being catered to us, or set up purely in our benefit. What we've got, we earned.
I agree... I think there has to be a fine line between what younger player's like me get handed.... It would only make us expect more and turn out all soft and fluffy...
I have to admit though I do like the taking one dog tag at a time thing... Noobs deserve at least a chance for the merits and a couple of tokens... [:grin:]
I agree completely. It's much more balanced this year, and definitely set up to encourage more participation.
"Unfair" carries the implications of entitlement, but the previous dogtag competitions were impossible to win if you weren't one of the top players. Unfair or not, though, they gave you something to work towards if participating was important to you. Spend the year buffing up and give it your best shot... and if you don't make it, there's always next year, ya know?
The funny thing is, if the table were turned, you wouldn't hear any of these people bitching about it being unfair. Everyone's just salty that they aren't as beast as the people dominating this competition.
You are all still missing the point. No one is saying (at least I am not saying) that it is unfair that there is almost zero likelihood that a newer player can win the tagging competition. I am saying it is unfair that level 70 players have had a 100% rate of taking my dog tags.
You are also all WRONG when you say that we have a choice to not be part of the tagging competition. We are ISSUED a tag which makes us a target for those who are trying to win. If we had the option to display a Red Tag icon and opt out of tagging completely, then I would have ZERO problems with this competition. I don't appreciate that this competition encourages predation on newer players who otherwise would not be worth the time (outside of war) for the more experienced players to go after them. If upon initiation of the tagging competition we could go to the tagging link, click a little box on our tag that turned it red and gave us a red icon that told everyone to leave us alone, I would be far less annoyed. But waking up every morning to find myself mugged for 0-3000 dollars every morning with combat listing one hit kills of 2-3k damage in a single hit pretty clearly tells me what relative levels are hitting me despite not having any tags.
This is supremely annoying and abusive on the part of Ched who could easily code an opt out option. We are not forced to hunt eggs. We are not forced to do Mr./Ms. Torn. We are not forced to do the christmas contest. We ARE forced to participate/be victims of THIS "contest." If you can't tell the difference between these contests, then you are just willfully blind.
HOW does an OPT OUT cheapen what you have earned? HOW does a reduced change for a level 80+ to take a tag from a level 30- cheapen what you have earned?
The thing is, it's not the elite stat players attacking the low levels, it's other low levels doing that. It doesn't make any sense for BodyBagger, or anyone else actually attempting to win the contest, to attack a bunch of level 5's. They're better off attacking other high level/stat players to get the more valuable tags. Plus it also takes away from others who are trying to win also.
besides, I think they are also more intelligent and would be looking at personal stats to see if the person they're attacking might have tags.
I would love the option to opt out... nothing against the contest just doesn't interest me and gets in the way of game play. Would be great if once your dog tag was stolen and if you didn't participate at all THEN you could opt out which would partially get around Cheds "it wouldn't work without everyone participating" thing. If your tag was gone and you hadn't attempted to take anyone elses after 5 days or whatever you could opt out of the rest of the contest? Or something.
That aside...I don't think it is very unfair to be honest, there is a certain element of a game where you have to 'work' for things where making it an even playing field would be shit anyway because people who have worked hard to have an advantage for attacking should retain their advantage in game play. I would love it if there was some kind of calendar of events though, its nice to not have them sprung on you, particularly when it is just not your deal at all.
With the effort that is going in to make these kinds of events happen I really don't think people should be being THAT super critical, awesome to see time being spent on making events that are fun for a lot of people, will always need a bit of tweaking but overall seems like a pretty good thing.
I'd argue that it does not necessarily encourage predation on lower-level players. I mean, yeah, it's going to happen in the beginning as people rush to collect easy tags for the awards, but like many other people have said, it's going to mellow out soon. Why? Two reasons:
1. Low-level players are easy targets. They'll likely have had their dogtags already stripped from them, and the constant attacks/mugs in the first week or so of the competition will have likely discouraged them from participating.
2. Tags taken from low-level players are essentially worthless, as far as score goes. Once the rush for the awards subsides, and the inactives and obvious easy targets are stripped of their tags, the true competitors (the ones going for score - which is how you win the competition and earn tokens), are going to be going after higher-profile targets, since those dogtags will be worth much more. The higher the level of the player, the more their dogtag is worth. The more times a dogtag has changed hands, the more it's worth.
And, yes, you can choose to not participate. No, it won't stop people looking to prey on easy targets (which, again, should subside soon), but it will put less of a target on your back. This year, dogtags record every player that has held on to them. As the competition progresses, dogtags will be changing hands more and more frequently. If your name shows up on a tag that wasn't yours, that makes you a potential target. Eventually, when the easy tags have been claimed, that's how people are going to start picking their targets. If your name is on a tag that isn't yours, that tells them you're participating. You were holding on to one tag that wasn't yours, so you might be holding on to more. You can see where this is going...
If you aren't putting your name on tags, you won't be recognized as an active participant, and people will lose interest in you. If you fly under the radar, and don't give people a reason to look at you (and subsequently see that they can beat you in a fight), you're going to be fine. If you whine about it frequently in the forums, however, people might target you just to spite you. And, don't forget, sometimes a mugging is just a mugging. The whole game isn't put on hold just because people are chasing dogtags. Some of those muggings may just be people trying to steal your cash. Though, from the sounds of it, that wouldn't be a very lucrative venture.
It's this whiney shit that makes older players dislike newer players. You're all soft and you think Torn needs to be 100% puppies and rainbows, and we all need to treat you like delicate little flowers. You expect everything that's difficult for you to be dialed back and set on easy mode because "wah wah the older players have an advantage". This is Torn. If you need to ride with training wheels, you're on the wrong bike path.
We ALL went through this. It is a yearly tradition that we have ALL dealt with. We were ALL new players at one point and time, and yeah, we suffered during the dogtag competition. If you couldn't keep up, you got eaten. That's how it was. And it was a lot rougher. But it's one month out of a year, so we learned to deal with it. It became a rite of passage, of sorts. In the beginning, you get eaten... then you get stronger... then you get hungry. It's how everything in Torn works: you start at the bottom and claw your way up. The only difference between the competition then and now is that they've started passing out elbow pads and safety helmets so that the new players don't get a boo-boo. And yet people are still whining.
No, you of course would be touchable. You would simply display some sort of red tag icon. People attacking you would therefore only be attacking you for the normal reasons (war, normal mugging, you are annoying, revenge, etc.)
If you're that desperate for an opt out, take a picture of your hand doing a thumbs up in front of your competition page with your ID written on it, showing that you have zero tags in the collection area. Then shove it on your profile or post it to the forums. >.>
Would it make it so that you do not take tags when attacking people? I could see that working. Right now, a lot of people put "Not Participating" in their forum sig to achieve a similar result, but that's not terribly effective for obvious reasons. If the ability to receive/transfer dogtags could be disabled, people could opt out and not have to worry about the competition. Only the people who want to actively participate would be involved. Not a bad idea, but it would make the dev side more complicated, as it's easier to roll out a game-wide dogtag competition rather than give players the choice to opt out. With forced participation (I will concede and call it what it is - forced participation), the devs have a set number of dogtags to work with (one generated for each player), and so can set the bounds and goals statically and let it run its course. If people had the option of opting out, the number of dogtags in circulation would fluctuate (as anyone opting out would have the dogtags they are holding stripped from them, and then removed from circulation), and the competition would have to adjust dynamically, probably requiring manual oversight. But what the hell do I know about that, I'm not a dev. Perhaps it could be done easily. It would be a decent solution to the variable interest in the competition, which always seems to cause a bit of an unhappy outburst.
But, I feel like a game-wide, forced-participation competition such as this brings the community closer together as a whole. Factions cease warring for the duration of the competition, many social divisions fade away, you become exposed to many other players that you likely have not met before (though these may not all be pleasant encounters). And, the final benefit: nothing breeds social cohesion like a shared enemy. In this case, look at all of the people who don't like the competition. Look at all the threads about the competition. All this discussion about the competition. New social contacts. More forum participation. Indirect encouragement to deepen interaction in the Torn community. After all, Torn's strongest asset is its community. It feels like a big game, and has an ever-growing community, but competitions like this draw it tight and force everyone together... even if it is just to voice distaste, or be an arrogant ass (as I tend to be from time to time - my apologies).
You can never be 100% sure they have tags or that you can take a tag after you beat them. If opt-outs were allowed it would narrow down that pool of people being attacked. Now you have tags being exchanged much more frequently, and adding value to the tags a lot faster. However, a lot more energy that is spent will yield in more tags gained attacks and there will be a lot less risk in spending your energy. That will take away a lot of the challenge in finding targets that have tags, and bring the competition down a notch as far as difficulty goes.
Rather than whine about a short stay in the hospital participate. Go attack some inactive accounts. I guarantee you will enjoy it more that way. Go for low level tags, then when people mug you for a 1 point tag they will not waste their energy to do it again. If you collect say five tags a day chances are you will get mugged for a few of them. However, if you get to keep even two tags a day you got you will get a merit, tokens, money, attack won, experience, and enjoy the month.
The people that are spending a lot of their energy are only losing ranks. I have gained almost 300 positions in battle stats since the competition started, I have been able to use some medical items to further my progression towards that merit too. I have had people attack me and walk on me, but I have had people lose as well.
The thing about life is every decision we make has consequences, both negative and positive. Inaction is a decision in itself, and will only result in non-enjoyment during this entire month. So you can continue to martyr yourselves and moan or you can take a stand for yourself and do what you can. This is a competitive game focused around criminal activities, faction wars, drugs, etc. If these things are hurting your feelings perhaps you should check out Webkinz or NeoPets.
Once you've been identified by someone with bigger stats than you, its pretty much pissing in the wind.
I got the 250+ medal last time round by leaving my faction, not posting on the forums, sending no messages, joining the started jobs. Essentially, making it so that your name doesnt appear anywhere to draw the slightests spec of attention to yourself.
Unfortunately, this time around, with the trail of who has owned which dog tag, if one single person takes a tag you've owned, every subsequent person who knows they're participating (and thus takes a tag you've owned) then knows that you're participating too.
The end result therefore is an exponential spread of people knowing you're collecting tags, thus facilitating the migration of tags away from you, towards the high end players (who have tags that have passed through more people (tags are unlikely to go in reverse direction to stats)). I dont think its as winable this time around for lower stats people.
The change seems like a good idea, in reality its pretty imbalanced. It makes a trail for the people who take tags that have been passed through more people, and makes these same tags more valuable. They should really become less so. That way there would be no sense in a pyramid-style funnelling of tags to the top, instead each player would have to find their own breadth of targets and each tag becomes tarnished with a point staying with each person who has owned it (ie, some actual reward for having gone out and picked up a bunch of tags only to have them syphoned away)
..and for that reason, im out.
PS: Re: Penicillin's "Train more and try again next year" idea - Thats stupid, given the way torn's stats works it should read "Go back in time, start playing earlier, train more or hope that everyone in the top 25 reevaluates their decision to keep playing over the course of the next 12 months... and try again next year"