In response to Kaeli:<br /> <br /> <i>In terms of trialing, they are.<br /> That's the point.<br /> TP is ABOUT trialing. Having a 100 TP dog is not supposed to be as rewarding as having a 1,000 TP dog. That's the long and skinny of it. Lower TP dogs are breeding stepping stones to higher TP dogs, if that's what the breeder wants to pursue. </i><br /> <br /> That doesn't have to be the point is what I'm trying to get at. I think the system would benefit if the trials were changed to be more inclusive rather than exclusive.<br /> <br /> <i>This applies to low TP dogs, too. Creating an unfair advantage for a dog with, say, 5999 TP over a dog with 6001 TP is absurd, in my opinion. If you want higher TP to play with higher TP dogs, breed up to it. That was the entire point of Alacrity's TP system. </i><br /> <br /> Isn't that 'unfair advantage' what is supposed to motivate the person to keep breeding for higher TP dogs? That is the motivation for people who currently have low TP dogs. If your dog is at the bottom of a bracket, you keep breeding until you have dogs at the top of the bracket. It's just divided up so that you don't have 20 people all sitting on top of 1 bracket raking in cash like we do now.<br /> <br /> <i>I don't see any of these people complaining. They have MANY options which don't require a lot of training sessions or time to try and make their "nest egg"; Games, frisbee, beauty contests, lottery, etc. In fact, a lot of newbies get high TP, trained dogs through things like the Pound Project and the Newbie Raffle.<br /> <br /> There is a HUGE learning curve on Ala; this is something we do not deny. The problem isn't really illustrated well with the trial system, though.</i><br /> <br /> Maybe they're probably too busy trying to overcome Ala's steep learning curve to comment in the forums. I don't know how we can expect someone to be able to make solid contributions to this discussion when they are still trying to learn how the site works.<br /> <br /> Pound Project and Newbie Raffle are great places for new folks to get a start, but are they constantly run? I know when I joined, I was delighted to find the Newbie Raffle, only to realize upon visiting the thread that the person running it was on hiatus and it did not open it again for weeks. So yes, if a newbie is fortunate enough to join when these things are actually being run, then that's great. However, there is no guarantee that they always will be consistently open.<br /> <br /> As it is now, I guess if someone played their games every day and just saved their money up without buying any dogs, and sold what training sessions they had, they could eventually make a decent chunk of change. But... that's not really playing the game as it was intended. Additionally, from what I can tell, the payouts from the games have not risen to match the current rate of inflation. $45 for guessing in the number game doesn't go very far. If they were adjusted so that the earnings correlated with the current economy, then yes I'd say that new folks definitely are not at a disadvantage.<br /> <br /> <i>Definitely not. Do you understand how much trialing can take place in 7 weeks? How much money can be made while higher TP dogs are still in training? Not to mention that I can effective compound this problem each and every week if I'm not focusing on a high TP dog. This applies to your response to both my second and third paragraphs. </i><br /> <br /> Right. If payouts are adjusted so that lower TP dogs make significantly less than maxed out higher TP dogs do, this shouldn't be an issue over the trial career of a dog. As it is, Option 1 on the official poll does nothing to slow down capped dogs from earning money. And as someone also mentioned, Option 2 can be negated by only running dogs in the middle levels... and not even bothering with capped dogs anymore.<br /> <br /> <i>Calling honest competition unfair is silly to me. We have the current win-based tier system in place to help combat this, but the fact that there will be better dogs than yours is simply a fact of life. Not everyone can win. That's just the way that life works. </i><br /> <br /> That's just the thing, the current set-up is not honest competition. We have grand-champions competing against backyard-circuit dogs. It's like 21 year olds facing off against 5 year olds in a game of soccer. Would people sit by and say 'this is what's fair" while the 5 year olds get stomped into the dirt? No. I don't understand why it's viewed as acceptable here. I don't believe everyone should win, but I do believe that everyone should be able to compete on a fair playing field. Let the 5 year olds go up against the 5 year olds and the 21 year olds against the 21 year olds.<br /> <br /> --------------------------<br /> <br /> In response to Jackdaw:<br /> <br /> <i>My personal viewpoint is that the tier system can be negated through implement of new activities that do not focus on dog TP, but rather other traits.<br /> <br /> Conformation shows, lure coursing, complete revamp of the beauty system, etc.<br /> <br /> It would actually be more enjoyable for all to participate and give users new goals that are not TP related.</i><br /> <br /> If these things were actually being implemented now or within the next 2 months, I might agree. But who knows when this will be? In the meantime, there is nothing else.<br /> <br /> <i>For a tier system to work, the entry fees would also have to be scaled or static so that low TP dogs will constantly profit.<br /> <br /> If everything can be done on a lower account setting with less training sessions I do not think there would be a financial reason to raise high TP dogs, being it would ultimately be more costly to earn the amount back.<br /> <br /> It would actually make more sense at a certain point simply to sell the training sessions for profit or turn the account into a mass production of lower TP dogs with the use of Prairie dogs and Spring fawns to guarantee wins by capping the bracket (this is assuming we remove the flaw of the trial TP gain which can bump dogs from one tier to another and losing all trials at that point).</i><br /> <br /> The amount a dog can profit in each TP tier just needs to scale accordingly with the tier they're running in. You can make a little cash at the low level, you can make a little more cash at the next level, you can make the most cash in the highest levels. The point is not to make it so that someone running foundies can make as much as someone running a capped dog. The point is to make it so that someone running foundies can still make *something* back. The amounts at the lower levels need to be just enough to motivate the player to want to breed for higher TP to make more cash, but not so much that they are content with the amount they earn at the lower levels. It's all about balance.<br /> <br /> And people do make a lot of money off selling training sessions now. I don't believe it would be much different with TP sectioning. Yes, people will max out brackets. That's why it's important to make sure that the dog is not earning back many times the amount that was put into it -- which I guess is the issue we are facing now with high TP dogs. :)<br /> <br /> I think if the TP gain dogs get from trialing is kept in place, that will serve as a natural 'retirement' for dogs who may be running constantly because they are at the top of a bracket. It'd be one more motivation for people to continue breeding to the cap, and would prevent people from dominating one bracket for eternity.<br /> <br /> <i>Through the explanation the benefit of having high TP dogs under tier would be to make more money at the tier, but it would have to factor in the costs to produce that dog compared to the lower tiers and comparable profits with expenses/time/effort considered.</i><br /> <br /> Right. The profits assigned to the lower tiers should reflect that less effort/time etc. is put into the dogs, but it should still exist in some form.<br /> <br /> <i>All dogs in the low to mid-range of tiers are best retired than trained and will become worthless. Even if the entrants are hidden, if there is a dog that has 499.99 TP + Kitsune in a tier that caps at 500 TP, there is no real point to it.</i><br /> <br /> Isn't that also motivation for breeding higher TP dogs? The whole idea is to breed higher and higher dogs so... dogs in the low to mid-ranges will still have worth as breeders. And couldn't it be made so that if a dog has a TP boosting companion equipped, the system takes that into account and forces that person to compete in the correct bracket they should be in? And... that is assuming that every single dog in the bracket is close to the cap, which may or may not be the actual case in any given scenario.<br /> <br /> <i>Users feel foundation dogs are worthless in trials because in reality they are. They were intended to create new bloodlines and not to win trials. It is the whim of the player that wants to garner wins for them and it is not something that can really be catered to and skewing game balance for pride and preferred gameplay alone, but that is my opinion.</i><br /> <br /> They're only worthless because that is how the current trial system makes them. It's not only foundies that are treated that way, it seems like it's anything below 500TP. Even if the dog may be someone's custom -- something that bones/real-life currency were spent on -- in the trials they are considered garbage.<br /> <br /> <i>In summary, while I think the suggestions for tiers can be valid with a great deal of changes and work, I would see the same effort towards building several new features on Alacrity that do not focus on TP as a more reasonable route and would be more friendly for beginner users still setting up their accounts to trial.<br /> <br /> The pros of creating alternative event outweighs the need for tiers.<br /> <br /> This is not to avoid a problem, because I don't believe there is a problem if higher TP dogs beat lower TP dogs. I think it is the intended nature of the gameplay. It was never meant to cater to low TP dogs to begin with, as a means to push users to buy items, better their account, and train/breed better dogs.</i><br /> <br /> Alternative events would be great if they currently existed, but the major con about them is that there really aren't any yet. And when they are created, then it will be a time before bugs are worked out and the new systems are smoothed out so that they run as intended. Even then, there is a decent possibility that something will have been missed or overlooked that once again leaves a group of players out.<br /> <br /> Also, this is a dog agility sim. It's kind of lame if some dogs can't have a decent run because someone else decided that is what's fair.<br /> <br /> <i>This is again, my own opinion and views that is not intended to attack or put down your own. I would love to hear yours on a reasonable level if it can be concluded that an alternative event would be a bad idea as well as the necessity for low TP dogs to win.</i><br /> <br /> I know that everyone wants to feel like they have a piece of something special, but I can't agree with that when it comes at the cost of others' ability to enjoy the game as well. I don't think it is dumbing down the playing field if trials are changed so that everyone has an opportunity to enjoy the game on all levels. By restricting only certain levels of dogs to be able to succeed in trials, game-play is being restricted to only select groups of people. I don't see how that's fair when the site's features should be equally accessible to everyone. No, I am not saying that low TP dogs should be able to make the same income as high TP dogs, but they should at least be afforded the pleasure of bringing in a few wins just as higher TP dogs are.<br /> <br /> I think it would be frustrating to people to basically be told 'oh you have this type of dog, so you can only do these certain things on the site' while other people with the 'right' dogs can basically do whatever they want. I believe that would create another rift between players. We already have low tp vs. high tp dogs. Do we really need more? Trialers vs. frisbee catchers vs. flyballers vs. beauty contest winners? I guess it sounds sort of silly, but it can happen. :P It's best if all dogs can do all of the things on some level, than only do a few select things.<br /> <br /> The ultimate goal is to get as many users as possible fully engaged with the site. By placing restrictions on which types of dogs can do what, that growth is being discouraged because people are now being sectioned off into dog event types (TP/secondary stats/etc). I don't know if the plan is to allow users to make as much money in other events as people can in trials, but that's something that needs to be taken into consideration too. That could also lead to inflation later on down the line... and then we'll be sitting in debate threads discussing how to fix those new unforeseen issues. :P <br /> <br /> But like you said, it's more enjoyable when everyone is included. Why leave some out?
