Rants: The Weekly Championship, continued

I tend to write my articles very quickly, while I generally have the ideas and opinions fresh in my head. I also tend to rely on a few people who tell me about what goes on in the Korean and Japanese servers. The problem, obviously, is that as with anything that you write on spur of the moment, and with any information that you get from a second hand, you're obviously going to run into a few problems. The first, for the former situation, is that you end up realizing that maybe there's more than meets the eye at a first glance. The second, for the latter situation, is that word of mouth will only get you so far.

For a bit on both points, I'm going to have to thank Leyla for scrutinizing and discussing things with me. Mainly relating to the topic of the Weekly Championships. I also would like to thank a few readers who bring up some good points both in comments, PMs and e-mail (the majority of whom choose to remain anonymous).

Anyways, this rant will focus on continuing the Weekly Championship discussion by adding a little more fuel to the fire. For the discussion that was had about the entire idea, you can read the discussion at:

http://atlantica.ndoorsgames.com/center/ATForum/forums/thread-view.asp?tid=8149

What we've so far determined is that spreading out a lot of gold is probably an easy way to lead to hyperinflation. With items being rather scarce in some situations, and money going out of control from rewards, it would be relatively easy to see prices for a lot of things simply skyrocket. All of a sudden, all that created money wouldn't have all that much value. Not exactly something we want to achieve. What would not be quite so bad is to either hand out the equipment outright, or pay out Battle Points.

Yes, the points you earn from Free League victories that you can trade in to Pointry. I would like to say the idea is genius, but the flaw exists, of course, that with a lot of people able to get these scarce items now, you will have a lot of equipment flooding the market at much lower prices.

... I'm not sure that's so much of a bad thing. Making things more affordable to all players isn't bound to screw up the economy all that much, considering gold is only really actually created when:

• Items are sold to an NPC vendor (including gold coins, etc.)
• Monsters are killed in combat
• Towns pay taxes to their guilds
• Quests

It's also not created in huge amounts, and people still spend the gold in ways that the gold is effectively "eliminated" from the system, such as buying things at fixed prices, going to Goncourt, training skills from skill masters, so on and so forth.

Therefore, the new tournament system can just hand out 64000 points to the winner, 32000 to second, so on and so forth. Perhaps halve the rewards, but make it so that winning at least once nets you way more than a Free League victory. If it happens that Conqueror's Equipment Boxes aren't 4000 points like I suppose they are, all you have to do is more or less scale it so that the victor could ostensibly buy 12 Conqueror's Equipment Boxes with the first prize, because that's more or less what they can do currently with the established market price on, say, Mycenae, compared to the amount of gold they would win if Atlantica Gold Coins were worth 1 million each. If they're about 1200 per box, you could say that 16000 for the first place finisher is about right. Second gets 8000, third gets 4000, fourth gets 2000, fifth through eighth get 1000, top sixteen get 500, top thirty-two get 250, top sixty-four get 125. Want to be nice? Participating at all gives you 62 points. That's about, say, two Warrior's Signs. ~400k if you don't crowd the market. As with the original system I proposed, you can only get up to a maximum of 16000 points total by participating in Weekly Championships, and if at any point you make 4000 points or more during a weekend, you are no longer allowed to participate in Weekly Championships (so you pretty much can't consistently place third or second, for example, to collude to let your buddies get more points than anyone else in the tournament).

Because battle points can only be spent on equipment, then there's no actual monetary crash. In fact, supply increases to meet the demand, so prices can come down a little and more people can afford to deck out in nice equipment to face the much more equipped players at the top of the ladder. Parity for those rising up the ranks could actually be achieved! Sure, the top winner will probably get a lot more equipment in the end, but chances are that he will end up putting his older things up for sale or simply choose to sell boxes to stock up on gold. The second place can buy about half the boxes which will possibly put him up to contend the next time they fight.

Here's where I'll diverge a little from what's discussed, and you can comment on this if you'd like or not -- the probability of it happening is probably low, but it's worth tossing out there. I think that, on top of all this, you could offer a lot more things with battle points. I'm figuring you should probably offer additional items, such as crystals, jewels, growth vials, vials of potential and 100k experience books (which already exist, mind you). You'd probably say, well, why would you want to give all that? The major reason is actually surprisingly because there are times and situations where having other people catch up isn't always just an equipment situation. The wealthiest person in the server probably has no need to obtain any of these items. Not only that, but people who are almost entirely devoted to PvP don't have a particularly easy way to obtain these items short of burning Battle Points off into Warrior's Signs and selling them for profits to buy the crystals with, or to buy quest resets so they can spend an inordinately large amount of time just trudging forward to get the crystals they need to upgrade.

Having people repeat the Cannoneer quest over and over to get Secret Vials of Potential, for instance, is not exactly great when it's literally the only reliable way to get your hands on them. Maybe letting players win lots of fights in the Free League to trade some points for a vial is not that bad of an idea. Options are always nice. Most of the repeatable casket quests that offer huge rewards anyways, such as six jewels that could sell for about a market price of 700k each. That's 4.2 million in gold, which is about what a Conqueror's box would cost. Since the box is worth about 1200, divide 1200 by 6 and you get 300. 300 battle points for a jewel. Simple.

The only problem is that some items probably should be a little harder to get than that. The Cannoneer quest literally gives this instead of jewels, and because there is no market price, it's hard to find out where you would begin to balance it. I would suggest that each vial in this system actually cost about 900, which is about enough for a winner to snatch 17 of the vials in my suggested point schematic.

Growth vials are a completely different beast and I refuse to touch the damn topic related to them without some well-earned sleep. Really, all in all, I think we all saw that the system was kind of busted and came up with a pretty decent, solid way to fix it and make players wealthier without actually causing ridiculous hyperinflation.

Anyways, for tomorrow's schedule I will be editing my review of the Beast Trainer and showing her a little bit more love. After watching a few matches and closely analyzing possibilities, it turns out that she does have a pretty good few uses. Also, Spearmen are probably not worth a 10 in the endgame (likeliest a 9, in my opinion), and after actually going out to watch a few matches I've also seen that the build I've suggested isn't exactly as cream of the crop in Korea as I was first told (hint: when writing and seeking some sort of journalistic integrity, make it a point to NOT go by word of mouth from people who claim to have been "totally there and watching matches unfold" -- confirm your resources). I want to write about the Witch, but I feel as if I haven't explored it enough to give it a good analysis. I may skip her to move to something I definitely am more familiar with, the Exorcist. I also would like to finally get around to finishing this Build Garage article that is just sitting here, staring at me. I haven't forgotten. I promise.

Thank you for reading, thank you for your comments, and most of all, thank you for your criticism. I'm deeply thankful for the latter if only because the only thing it can do is help me improve the quality of the content. Keep your comments, thoughts, suggestions and criticisms coming, whether it be by PM, forum, e-mail or otherwise.