Join the new world

A bit late due to RL issues but as I gathered the information already and consider it a waste if I would do nothing with it I’m publishing it now. I limited the article a bit due to the publication already done by Djirtsdew here.

Before it started
After the Epic Warfare Tournament was announced MoD and (from what I've seen mainly) MoF prepared a plan how to maximize our profit. MU’s were contacted by our MoF Trannsvaal and instructions were given. Within DAF all regiments had a chat started by their Captains or the commanders via which communication was done. Regiment 6 for instance had a very lively chat via which, among other things, players were pointed towards Epic battles.
Also non MU members were contacted by MoF to point them to the importance of smart acting.

For DAF’s regiment 6, the regiment consisting of division 3 and 4 fighters, a sheet was created in which they could find the various scenarios one could have depending on the available energy regeneration players have available (depending on having bought the Power Pack) and the available hours per day one could fight combined with the average prestige points per hit one could score. This was of course specifically focused on D3 and 4 as D1 and most D2 players shouldn’t fight. The latter was key to success. Our D3 and 4 players could use the sheet to help them decide whether or not to fight. Letting players that would do a lot of fighting do so and players that were not able or for which it, X/S wise, was not smart should not fight at all for a week.
Sadly our government didn’t communicate a clear goal but with DAF we soon came to the conclusion every player fighting should aim for 17.500 prestige as a minimum. Something that could easily be achieved and would provide the player doing so with a profit in Energy Bars of roughly 200 pieces.

To support smart fighting gov decided to reward players that actively aided our country in the tournament. They did do so in two ways and this was communicated upfront to all MU’s and most individual players that were no member of a MU. Players not fighting for a week would be rewarded with 0,4% of the gold gained (when we would earn 5.000 one would get 20) and players fighting AND ending above 5.000 prestige would also gain a percentage of the gold depending on the amount of prestige they reached and the total that was done. Sadly this set target was way too low to reach a top 10 position if you would have asked me upfront. (As it turned out I would have been wrong; If every fighter that fought actually would have reached 5.000 prestige we would have ended in the top 10.)

If it would have been up to me and a reward had to be given I would most likely have opted for a system in which the minimum prestige gained would be related to the average we scored. That would most likely have caused players to push harder as the bottom value would rise constantly during the tournament. Given the performance of most players however I doubt it would have made a big difference.

Personally I find it ridiculous to reward players when asked to serve their country by either not fight for a week or by fighting a lot for which an abundance of EB’s would be earned. Serving your nation in itself should be enough and on top of that players actively fighting would be rewarded by the EB’s. To give you an idea; I spend 241 EB’s but earned 1.140 so during the tournament I gained 899 EB’s. As you might know you can also buy them. The gold equivalence of these 899 EB’s, on discount, is roughly 1.200 gold! Of course not all players will reach the amount of prestige I have reached.
On a side note; I’ve also seen players that will have used way more EB’s then I did due to the fact they didn’t spread their damage but did drop it once or twice a day. A stupid way of fighting but due to real life for a lot of players the only way to do it. When it comes to gaining EB’s that will put you back a lot and you might end up not, or hardly gain EB’s. From our countries perspective it’s commendable as it helped compensate for the players that fucked up. The most clear examples I’ve seen are Garmr and RikW.

Had you done the easy to reach amount of 17.500 prestige as D3-4 fighter you would have gained the earlier mentioned 200 EB’s which is equivalent to 273 gold. So why on earth would a fighter need a reward? A player training and not fighting for a week would be missing out on a few EB’s indeed. But in my opinion the gold earned as a nation should benefit all players by further implementing a solid commune system providing weapons, food or gold to players depending on they needs they have at certain stages of their development.
Did I claim the reward? Yes of course I did. Although there is no need given the EB's gained it would be rather stupid to not claim part of the reserved share.

The tournament itself
When the tournament started it became clear soon (well after the admins solved the issues of course) this tournament would be mainly focused on D4 when it came to epic battles. Contrary to the previous EWT where it was mainly D1-2 that had epic battles this time it was almost solely D4. At least the first 4 days. So D1-3 players in doubt should have known soon after the start it would be tough to reach high amounts of prestige and therefore it would be wise not to start fighting. Sadly however it also became clear soon that, despite all the communication on beforehand several players neglected our countries needs and did minimal hits. I gathered all prestige info on a daily basis and it’s very sad to see players act like they did. Had it been players that you never hear of and always play their own game I could live with it. But this tournament showed players that find themselves very active and knowing how the game works also did hit. Arcanic Mindje being the most sad example of them all. Being our former CP, criticized upfront by me for being not active enough, he now once again proved this by hitting a very low amount of prestige on day one and be absent the rest of the tournament.

In the table below you can find the final scores of all players that were active in the tournament. Most columns will be self-explanatory. A remark on the mentioning of FOR as a party; That means someone has foreign citizenship and therefore ain’t member of a Dutch party. You’ll notice the coloring in the Total column (the total amount of prestige a player gained during the week). That indicates if a player is above or below our countries average end score of 15,702.46. You’ll also see a coloring in the active column, being the amount of days the player participated in the tournament. When you fought all days its green, with six days yellow and if it’s less it’s red. As communication was very clear we needed you to fight a lot it ain’t done to fight less than 7 day although there could be special circumstances that forced you to miss a day. And as we needed as much prestige as possible from those players also you’d expect them at least to put all ff in. Yet they didn’t.
Several players did perform really bad in respect of scoring daily. ElGorro was the only player that I know that did hit a less than desired amount of days but actually did do a good job and had our average in mind; As he was away with poor internet connection he was not able to participate fully so he deliberated within the DAF team what to do and it was decided he would stay out until he had full internet access to start with. At that point (halfway tournament) we again deliberated and as on average we were performing rather poor it was decided he should step in as he would be easily able to beat the average score and gain EB’s in the process as well. Top job and an example for all (D4) players that messed up!



As can be seen in the table the ratio between above and below average players is very poor. Among the poorly performing players are several players that think of themselves as active and serving our nation and also several of them are highly respected. However if you look at the names you’ll see players like Daniel Parker, Cody Caine, flapoor, Alex the best123 and the afore mentioned Arcanic Mindje that performed very bad. On the other side players like NoTie, Trannsvaal and Walhallah clearly understood the importance for eNL as a nation and did set aside their personal interests and stayed out knowing they were not able to deliver this tournament or it being unwise.

I find it difficult to understand why any player would hit in the way several players did. Hitting that low amounts of prestige harms us all. But of course there are players that just point and click, don’t read anything and therefore have no clue what’s going on. Sad but their choice and it’s almost impossible to do something about it. What I’m unable to understand in any way however is the fact that during this tournament even some government members did hit very poorly as well. It almost becomes tiresome, but Arcanic Mindje is one of them and Laura Andreea also scored ridiculously low.

Now that we’ve seen the overall picture it’s time to look at some details and specific overviews. For instance; How did the several MU’s perform? I’ll include the Chilean Army with this specific overview as well but with the other overviews I’ll leave them out. As some of you may have noticed their top hitter already left the MU. I guess he earned the decorations he wanted and found it to be time to leave again.
Underneath the MU average you also find the averages per party and per division.



Looking at party performance VN is unchanged as one of the on average best performing parties when it comes to fighting. A big change occurred at GPN. Where GPN has been a party that also was performing well when it came to fighting performance they this time performed very poorly.
I’ll leave the other interpretations to you, the reader, when it comes to party performance but I am very disappointed by the performance of BG as they often focus on the need and willingness to fight.

Having a look at the division averages there are no surprises. It’s once again clear in tournaments like this younger players should stay out. Even D3 performed poorly on average and we would have been served best if all D1, 2 and 3 players had stayed out. The best performing D1 player, being thorbekke (No party, no MU) earned 1,615 prestige in 4 active days.

In D2 europecrisseswar (No party, DAF) was the only player that scored above average and actually helped our nation by stepping into the fight for 5 days. Nomadicracer (BG, The Black Sheep) who was active all 7 days didn’t do that bad either but still; scoring around 2/3rd of our countries average disappointed me to be honest and although it didn’t harm our average as much as most D2 players it didn’t help us either.

D3 had 2 players performing above average; svenders (I&W, DAF) and Leo Belgicus (ReL, DAF). And while Odan (I&W, The Flying Dutch) didn’t help improve our average he was the best underperformer. Had he been able to fight all 7 days he would have been on our average.

That brings us to D4. Naturally most players there scored above average. Yet still 8 of them performed very poorly by staying (way) under 5.000 prestige. The only positive thing about that, speaking as 2nd commander of DAF, is that of those 8 only 2 are member of DAF.

Now a final view. There has been some communication of our performance in the tournament using dealt influence. There are two remarks to be made about that; Of course the tournament was about prestige, not about influence so there is no correlation between them both. Also the data used was gathered from egov4you of which we all, well most, know it’s incomplete and therefore not the most reliable source. So let’s take a look at the relevant data from in-game being prestige and the actual total scores. For that data I’ll leave the Chilean Army out as they fought a completely different mission especially during the heavy battles between Chile and Serbia. They were also left out of the influence numbers presented earlier by MoD.
So how did the amount of prestige over time? One would expect a peak at the start, then a drop and an ever increasing rise after that. The first peak should be caused by players entering the tournament making use of Energy Bars to make a quick start and by doing so gain extra health regeneration faster. That was key to reach high prestige. After that players would start doing an ever increasing amount of hits as the amount of energy regenerated would increase with the rising of prestige.
Now let’s take a look at the development of our daily score when it comes to prestige;



As you can see we didn’t have as smooth a graph as theory would predict. There are however a few explanations to it and if you take those into account the graph will look all right.

At the start of the tournament there were several issues that prevented people from fighting. Therefore one can assume prestige score was partly postponed until day 2. Therefore now day 3 is the lowest prestige score day instead of day 2. You see a perfect rise in prestige from day 3 to 4 and 5. However day 6 drops and day 7, albeit the highest scoring day isn’t that high as well. Which both make perfect sense as again there were performance issues. Had those not occurred I’m rather sure day 6 and 7 would have followed the rising line from the days before.
However; looking at the increase of health one would expect a more steep rise in prestige score. I noticed however we had several players that didn’t make full use of their health regeneration. Not a real surprise of course as to benefit at full you needed to empty your health every 1-2 hours and not all players will be able to do so which explains the less than optimal rise in prestige score.

Weekstrom