Introduce the fort fighting NPCs for hire

Do you support this idea?

  • Total voters
    30
  • Poll closed .
Clever Hans

Clever Hans

Well-Known Member
Idea title:
Introduce the fort fighting NPCs for hire

Details of idea:
Town hats (founders and councillors) from the digging town and from fort owning town would be able to use the money in town treasury to fill their side of battle with NPC toons.

Depending on the number of free spots in the fort, it would be possible to hire the NPCs in the following way (both the regular players and hired NPCs would show up in the ranking screen and the rankers would have an option to rank the regular players over NPCs) :

10000$ - adds NPCs as 5% of total number of ranks in defense / attack
15000$ - adds NPCs as 10% of total number of ranks in defense / attack
25000$ - adds NPCs as 20% of total number of ranks in defense / attack

Reasons for submitting:
In most of the worlds, it is not possible to fill even the small forts and the battle activity is at the all time low. This change would help to balance the fort fights and filling the fort battles in otherwise inactive worlds. It would also give an additional option to spend the town funds.
 
Beefmeister

Beefmeister

Well-Known Member
i will vote no considering i don't like anything like this in other games i play. although, when it would really be necessary, i'd vote yes
 

Annie-Bell

Well-Known Member
solitaire ff's? nah think game can do better. What made game unique was people all doing common activity same time (ff's), think keep supporting keeping players signing up and interested in game. Trying to balance with npc will be inno nitemare and wont make all happy anyways.

There are few worlds can be saved! focus on those!

Also the inno awesomia in dead-ish worlds is good idea (thanks for chance for events!) and is reminder of ff's can be fun

Also heard alot talking about that classic world .. wasnt there but people seemed to enjoy! can some of these worlds be converted? idk thought.
 
PrancingPurplePony

PrancingPurplePony

Well-Known Member
how would these NPC be programed, just to rush or defend the flag?
How do you keep them from taking up a space that a live player wants/needs during the battle?
We already have the chance of offliners that are not where they need to be.
I don't know programing, but it seems that would be a massive undertaking to try to make them useful for more than cannon fodder.
 
Bill Boy Jack

Bill Boy Jack

Member
PrancingPurplePony said:
how would these NPC be programed, just to rush or defend the flag?
How do you keep them from taking up a space that a live player wants/needs during the battle?
We already have the chance of offliners that are not where they need to be.
I don't know programing, but it seems that would be a massive undertaking to try to make them useful for more than cannon fodder.
Click to expand...
The maze solving algorithm is already implemented in the fort fights. Meaning if you have your arrow in a square and another player has it in the same spot the one with higher rank moves there first and then the other next / around it or the one with higher leadership bonus. The NPC could work in the same way but not about the flag. That’s a decision a real human can make. They could instead be damagers that will always be behind the front lines and march towards with all other real players.

IMG_9318.jpeg
IMG_9319.jpeg
 
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martoru

Banned
pvp play fill with npc.. that is first time i see such ideea in my over 20 years of playing :)))))))))))))

such ideea will make me quit ff
 
Goober Pyle

Goober Pyle

The West Team
Fort Balancing Strategist
It’s something that has been done for awesomia battles on markets like Denmark where there were no FFs at all outside of the GM awesomia battles.

It’s also something that was done as part of a massive GM contest/event on .net c2014 back when the market was large enough to support a large number of supporters/event managers to play as NPCs.

At present this would only be considered as a short term event harkening back to the c2014 event using unmanaged NPCs — battles like those on .dk (aka “foley battles”) are viewed as a death knell for fort fighting so are off the table.
 
Clever Hans

Clever Hans

Well-Known Member
Goober Pyle said:
It’s something that has been done for awesomia battles on markets like Denmark where there were no FFs at all outside of the GM awesomia battles.

It’s also something that was done as part of a massive GM contest/event on .net c2014 back when the market was large enough to support a large number of supporters/event managers to play as NPCs.

At present this would only be considered as a short term event harkening back to the c2014 event using unmanaged NPCs — battles like those on .dk (aka “foley battles”) are viewed as a death knell for fort fighting so are off the table.
Click to expand...
What I mean here is a mix of real fighters and NPCs (to fill some of the free spots, especially on inactive worlds) so I think the setup would be similar to 2014 "Chinese toons" event.
 

Annie-Bell

Well-Known Member
shouldnt we be talking about how to keep actual live players in game?

i havent been paying much attention to new worlds (vegas,kansas,montana) as had been focusing on keeping daily battles in juarez (pls come help us there btw, AOW we need people who luv game like us to keep it going) ... but glanced at start of event and ff's in new worlds and like 20 - 30 people a side in newest worlds .. shouldnt we be asking questions of why cant even fill smalls and fix it?

visualize adding npc to worlds where people stop playing even new worlds would be near impossible to make everyone happy, impossible for inno to manage and will be bombarded with complaints as they do with other stuff.

keep people in game!!! hu hu hu!
 
Clever Hans

Clever Hans

Well-Known Member
Goober Pyle said:
Here is an old, on point thread:

Click to expand...
Would it be possible to try something like this again in one of the upcoming events? Or as special edition of Awesomia fights?

p.s. The link you posted was NPC dueling event. I will try to find the thread for Chinese NPC toons.

p.p.s. I managed to find some of NPC fights on TheWestForts back from 2013, you can check the replays here:

After each fight, few players that were randomly picked got special rewards:
 
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Kidd Kalypso

Kidd Kalypso

Well-Known Member
I am with Annie on this one.....either fix the worlds.....aka MERGE. The thought of tossing some npc's to keep forting alive is silly. They should do that in order to fill an adventure, especially when it is a quest requirement. TBH, inno only keeps this game active in order to milk peeps with nugget purchases. I just find hilarious that y'all are looking at the bright side of npc's in fort battle........
 
Clever Hans

Clever Hans

Well-Known Member
Kidd Kalypso said:
I am with Annie on this one.....either fix the worlds.....aka MERGE. The thought of tossing some npc's to keep forting alive is silly. They should do that in order to fill an adventure, especially when it is a quest requirement. TBH, inno only keeps this game active in order to milk peeps with nugget purchases. I just find hilarious that y'all are looking at the bright side of npc's in fort battle........
Click to expand...
I don´t believe that merging would manage to fill the fights. We are past the point when migrations could help to bring enough players to keep the FFs full on the inactive worlds. And even if they close some of these (and not a single world has been closed since w1), those are mostly players that have accounts on multiple worlds. The biggest issue is that there are almost no new players joining nowadays, besides the vets restarting on new worlds or returning players.
 

DeletedUser15368

Clever Hans said:
We are past the point when migrations could help to bring enough players to keep the FFs full on the inactive worlds.
Click to expand...
You're probably right about that tbh, but we still have about 12 more worlds than we can support as a player base.

Clever Hans said:
The biggest issue is that there are almost no new players joining nowadays, besides the vets restarting on new worlds or returning players.
Click to expand...
I would normally argue that we get plenty of new players, the issues is retaining them.
Montana is the first time we've actually not had a lot of new players, which is very encouraging because now there's even fewer reasons to open a new world and instantly kill off the last one.

Kansas 31k
Las Vegas 16k
Montana 5.6k

Also one can click Here, scroll down to the Battle quality score per month chart, and click back-and-forth between each individual world on the key on the right, and see the timeline of how each new world killed the last one after El Dorado.
 
Clever Hans

Clever Hans

Well-Known Member
lulumcnoob said:
You're probably right about that tbh, but we still have about 12 more worlds than we can support as a player base.


I would normally argue that we get plenty of new players, the issues is retaining them.
Montana is the first time we've actually not had a lot of new players, which is very encouraging because now there's even fewer reasons to open a new world and instantly kill off the last one.

Kansas 31k
Las Vegas 16k
Montana 5.6k

Also one can click Here, scroll down to the Battle quality score per month chart, and click back-and-forth between each individual world on the key on the right, and see the timeline of how each new world killed the last one after El Dorado.
Click to expand...
I would argue that these numbers are highly inflated by multi accounts that are mass created around Dotd and Christmas sale and then deleted shortly after. Christmas sale ending is also usually a time when the activity goes downhill on the new world before the next one starts.

@Migrations, check the recent example of Juarez. Migrations to J have been opened for almost 3 months now, yet the battles are still 30 vs 30-40 and less than 10 migrating players joins the fights (480 players listed on the ranking screen, it was more than 500 when the migrations started).
 
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ScarletKisses

ScarletKisses

Well-Known Member
PrancingPurplePony said:
how would these NPC be programed, just to rush or defend the flag?
How do you keep them from taking up a space that a live player wants/needs during the battle?
We already have the chance of offliners that are not where they need to be.
I don't know programing, but it seems that would be a massive undertaking to try to make them useful for more than cannon fodder.
Click to expand...
I understand the concerns but if the FF leader had control of them that would be awesome :D
 
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