Warrior General Games

I was thinking this morning that one of the problems have having dots and bots spend multiple seasons in plateau is that it becomes about the destination instead of the journey.

When GLB1 was new, the climb to decline was ten seasons long. During that whole time, the endgame wasn't the focus, the focus was on each team trying to win each season. Once teams started hitting the plateau, the entire focus of the game became on winning at the highest level and nothing else mattered. Doubling the problem was the focus that gearing your builds to winning each season meant that you couldn't be competitive in the minor leagues (which was never true, but it was an excuse that many people used... yeah, you might not win gold in S1-3, but the ALG gains and the maximization that you use for building for the endgame will make you able to win any other season). I always enjoyed the steady process of building from the beginning, developing rivalries in the elite leagues and then letting other teams take my dots in the WL while I built my rookie team again.

If the endgame is the goal, then the building process is the "pain in the ass thing that you have to do while getting your player back to plateau". If winning each season is the goal, then your plateau seasons should just be "other seasons" not the be all and end all of GLB.

We already have numerous teams talking about their farm teams to keep their teams in Vet stocked with new talent. This means that there is "the real team" and the "team that those players are just on to get to Vet". This mentality soon leads the top teams to the ridicule of the journey back to vet... lolminors.

Without plateau, the journey is all there is. There is no climb to the top of a huge cliff followed by an equal amount of time just hanging out and looking at the view. There is just the climb, and the competition on the way to the top.

I know people want to see their players that they have been building perform at the top of the game for longer... but I think the idea that players are "unfinished" and then "finished" is destructive to the game. It is likely too late now to do anything about it, but if it were me, I would have added two more seasons of growth (keeping the number of SPs the same), backloaded more of the SPs to the end of the life of the builds, and eliminated the plateau completely. "Finished builds" could have been dropped into the legends league.

That way the game is all about the climb to the top... who can do the best they can do for the X seasons that they have.

In the alternative, the building process could just be done away with. You get 3 seasons + boosts, 175,000 SPs to assign + up to 10 boosts + 10 AP to spend plus boosts and you just go. Eliminate the build process entirely. If the game is about plateau, then the seasons in the minors are the GLB equivalent of grinding. All RPGs make you do it, no one really likes it.

At any rate, hopefully they think long and hard about this when Mighty Brawlers is being developed.

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tl;dr version:

One of the things that killed GLB1, plateau and the long rise to get there, was implemented in GLB2.

I speculate that it is too late to change things for GLB2, but predict similar issues arising.

I think the difference is that dots can compete at every level build wise and even with farm teams i know that the goal has been to win each level for the two farm teams i coach

I haven't played GLB1, but the "long rise" to plateau is a lot less long too isn't it?

Originally posted by mrm708
I haven't played GLB1, but the "long rise" to plateau is a lot less long too isn't it?

For sure... five seasons is a lot less, but the question is whether those five seasons will become things that teams "have" to go through to get their players to where they want or if they remain a vital and important part of the game.

I've kinda thought it might be nice to take the extra SA points midseason from journeyman and professional and swap them with a rookie and sophomore SP star. Getting more SAs sooner would probably make it more fun earlier. As it is, we see some builds with just one SA all the way until nearly the end of seasoned.

Glb1 player growth has a lot of things wrong with it that all contribute to the growth seasons becoming pointless. Many of them do not exist here.

The big provlem was that deviating from your build plan partway through was a disaster (or at least felt like one) so you made a 10 seaaon plan because you had to then you watched it and hoped you didnt make a mistake. Not very exciting. Here you might make a plan but you can build to it on any order to adjust your player performance season to season and still hit your end plan. You arent on rails.

Also the league and laddet system is superior here and with ladder rating carrying over there is value on winning early even if your goal is to win at vet level.

I dont think it will be as much of a problem here.

I think not having training or ALGs in GLB2 makes a huge difference.

I use the inspect element trick with all my builds to get a picture of the endgame. Then, I build for what I need. If I put some points into toughness or intimidation, it's not going to ruin my veteran build by making my player too slow. That way, you can have a relatively rounded build until plateau.

With GLB1, you had to do nothing but put points into speed and train it the entire first and second season to have decent speed at the endgame. If you didn't, you were screwed; however, that meant you would always have a dot that moved really fast but did nothing else well. In GLB2, the SP cost for each level of sprinting is constant, no matter what you build and when. Therefore, there's no real point in not rounding out your build and having it be decent. The only fixed part of your build is the level caps, which most good players are careful about getting just right.

I don't think one single thing killed GLB1, it was a bunch of things

Originally posted by Galithor
I've kinda thought it might be nice to take the extra SA points midseason from journeyman and professional and swap them with a rookie and sophomore SP star. Getting more SAs sooner would probably make it more fun earlier. As it is, we see some builds with just one SA all the way until nearly the end of seasoned.

Problem is that skills grow really fast at the start of the game because of their lowered cost, but towards the end of the game you can go five days without applying and only be able to click a few times to spend everything.

I think that having more decent SA options and having bronze and silver being better options would be good for the game. Gold is almost always worth the wait... and there are very very few options that are worth taking.

Originally posted by NiborRis
Glb1 player growth has a lot of things wrong with it that all contribute to the growth seasons becoming pointless. Many of them do not exist here.

The big provlem was that deviating from your build plan partway through was a disaster (or at least felt like one) so you made a 10 seaaon plan because you had to then you watched it and hoped you didnt make a mistake. Not very exciting. Here you might make a plan but you can build to it on any order to adjust your player performance season to season and still hit your end plan. You arent on rails.

Also the league and laddet system is superior here and with ladder rating carrying over there is value on winning early even if your goal is to win at vet level.

I dont think it will be as much of a problem here.

Part of the problem is the ladder carryover... teams aren't going to want to reset to rookie for fear of losing their ELO for when they get back to plateau. Instead, they will build teams of players that funnel the replacement bots that they need up through the rookie system. Then the farm team will keep resetting its ladder rank by going back to rookie. I kind of hate the idea of seeing the same team in Vet for 20 seasons.

I don't know, maybe I'm overreacting or being too cautious about what this game will become if we don't think about what kind of game this is supposed to be.

Originally posted by Time Trial
Part of the problem is the ladder carryover... teams aren't going to want to reset to rookie for fear of losing their ELO for when they get back to plateau. Instead, they will build teams of players that funnel the replacement bots that they need up through the rookie system. Then the farm team will keep resetting its ladder rank by going back to rookie. I kind of hate the idea of seeing the same team in Vet for 20 seasons.

I don't know, maybe I'm overreacting or being too cautious about what this game will become if we don't think about what kind of game this is supposed to be.

I am not so sure. If you have a solid team based build plan that can be competitive throughout the maturation of seasons for your agents, why worry about resetting your ELO?

If you build multiple teams for farm players, you then have to worry about the chemistry impact. That can handicap your success for the majority of one season. Specially if it is a prime position like HB QB TE. You are also asking a lot out of the wallet if you are going to carry 2-3 farm teams for only 1 main team.

I know a number of people that retire their dots when they reach plateau so there's something to this train of thought.

Originally posted by . Ninja
I am not so sure. If you have a solid team based build plan that can be competitive throughout the maturation of seasons for your agents, why worry about resetting your ELO?

If you build multiple teams for farm players, you then have to worry about the chemistry impact. That can handicap your success for the majority of one season. Specially if it is a prime position like HB QB TE. You are also asking a lot out of the wallet if you are going to carry 2-3 farm teams for only 1 main team.

At which point you start having networks form to increase the coaching pool and spread the cost.

Something to think about based on what TT is saying is that what happens when a team is in Vet leagues for 20 seasons? Will teams that reset during that time ever be able to catch up to those life long Vet teams in ELO?

Originally posted by Stixx
Something to think about based on what TT is saying is that what happens when a team is in Vet leagues for 20 seasons? Will teams that reset during that time ever be able to catch up to those life long Vet teams in ELO?



Well, given the way the ELO system works, they would need to win a lot of games to maintain their ELO I imagine... they'd just be losing so much every time they lost to a team with significantly less ELO.

The question is how much ELO dilution you would expect to see from the top of the ladder (long term teams) to the next stage (teams trying to claw their way up). Too much gap would erode the ELO for teams that lost playing down the ladder very quickly, but still might make it a long process for the teams coming up if enough high level wins allows teams to keep up their high ELO by playing down the ladder very rarely (or if there are say 20 long term teams).