Reduction of Baronies - Discussion

[PrlUnicorn]

Apologies to Hope here. I quote to keep track of who I was addressing at any given time so I don't have to sift through the pile and and figure it out later who I was addressing.

An interesting idea though it should be noted that tournaments with title prizes usually garner more attention from the community compared to those without, as well as chances for non-tournament events allowing for regulation increases should they be multi-week events. But it could be fun during periods of rapid challenges.

As for usage of challenge rights.. perhaps expanding their purpose could work. Allowing a challenge right to break a grace period (A Warlord using 2 challenge rights to challenge for a Barony instead of 1), or increasing the maximum of challenge rights able to be held to 3 but keeping cycle reset of 2 per cycle without rollover and making a grace break require 2 challenge rights along with the single (1) right to issue the challenge.

This would create the carrot on the stick that requires regulation to gain that third challenge right as well as allowing the Warlord an option to break into the challenge game. Anyone can gain lost challenge rights by dueling in regulation currently: To regain Challenge Rights a Warlord must duel in regulation Duel of Swords matches. For every five (5) duels won a Challenge Right will be awarded to the duelist.

This could at least act as a counter should a reduction happen.

I remember a similar discussion coming up before on challenge rights. Having challenge rights used to break grace or intervene on challenges ends up in huge tangles with the perks of alignments. However, you did get my attention with the grace breaking idea. We have the King's Decree and a separate grant that allows someone to intercede. Why not an earned (and opt out) grant (criteria to be determined) to allow the holder to break a Loyal's grace? Why opt out? Because it would allow a recipient, that's not interested in challenging, to decline and have the grant offered to someone else.

[PC]

And due to that it has created a narrative that the Barons have more influence then what is afforded to them officially from the Duel of Swords position. While I understand there are those who enjoy the concept, there are also those who dislike that dueling is - in a way - being forced upon them on an overall level. In the past there were major conflicts between the Dueling community and Non-Dueling community due to this and I am sure there are still some who dislike the idea.

The Blackest Night, from an official Duel of Swords standpoint at the time ( seen here: viewtopic.php?p=192801#p192801 ) , was seen as a private citizen pushing their influence onto others and that the Barony itself held no power or right to do so, and any and all grievances made toward the sport would be ignored. For the Dockside example they are allowed the usage of a warehouse as their Manor and that it is certain players who have deemed that it is more.

While players can do what they like I only hope that official parties show that there is indeed a difference; to tell those who may not wish to participate that they are not wrong in their understanding of the Barons influence.

Quoting to Add:

Perhaps this narrative could have very well shifted with the change of Rings of Honor becoming a new single community of Rhydin.org and separating from the other website, as well as a large swath of the active community being comprised of those participating within the dueling game. Though this seems to be a much larger subject, but still tied to district issues should reduction happen. It's something to think about, I guess. I still worry deeply though for those wanting to have no interaction with dueling.

[Partly Cloudy]

And due to that it has created a narrative that the Barons have more influence then what is afforded to them officially from the Duel of Swords position. While I understand there are those who enjoy the concept, there are also those who dislike that dueling is - in a way - being forced upon them on an overall level. In the past there were major conflicts between the Dueling community and Non-Dueling community due to this and I am sure there are still some who dislike the idea.

The Blackest Night, from an official Duel of Swords standpoint at the time ( seen here: viewtopic.php?p=192801#p192801 ) , was seen as a private citizen pushing their influence onto others and that the Barony itself held no power or right to do so, and any and all grievances made toward the sport would be ignored. For the Dockside example they are allowed the usage of a warehouse as their Manor and that it is certain players who have deemed that it is more.

While players can do what they like I only hope that official parties show that there is indeed a difference; to tell those who may not wish to participate that they are not wrong in their understanding of the Barons influence.

Okay, that’s fair. I get that Barons were not intended to have that kind of influence (and that the power has since been assumed, but is not actually granted). And I also understand that some might feel that dueling is being forced upon them. I’ve heard that mentioned over the years, too, and I felt that way myself at different points, so I certainly empathize with the people who feel that way now. It’s not my intention to force anything on anyone, to be clear. I would never want to do that and that’s one reason I default to being overly cautious, asking so many questions, and trying to consider as many angles/factors as possible.

Staff members certainly have my empathy, too, since you guys have to wade through it all and try to find some kind of balance between what is, what people desire, and maximum creative freedom for everyone. I’m honestly not sure what I’d do in your shoes.

[Hope]

So there are a few points I could add to the discussion and I'll do my best to do it as succinctly as possible here. First, thank you Alasdair and the DoS team for bringing this to us to discuss and have a thorough dialogue with you on it.

So there is a lot that has been posted in this thread thus far and it's not possible for me to touch on every idea and detail and if something completely contradicts anything I post, feel free to correct me.

On Alasdair's opening post these were the big take-aways I read:

In the past, DoS used to have many more active duelers than either sport, and having more titles made sense, but this is no longer the case. Reducing the number of Baronies would put us better in line with our sister sports, and I believe this would better match the current number of active participants we currently have.

To back this up Alasdair later posted:

DoS has 38 duelers that are WL or higher

However, 8 are currently inactive.

This would put the DoS count at 30.

DoF currently has 5 titles that can be challenged for, and 37 eligible duelers, not counting the Diamond.

They have 6 inactive duelers

This would put the DoF count at 31.

DoM currently has 4 titles that can be challenged for at any time, and 35 eligible duelers

This would put the DoM count at 35.

This checks out with what he opened the thread with, that in fact, the playerbase is very evenly split amongst the 3 sports.

Next:

DoS is also very politically motivated, and with the number of titles, a good strategy is to lay low to avoid being challenged. Getting actively involved in the politics makes you more of a target. And if nobody is getting actively involved or stirring the pot, the title game tends to stagnate. Reducing the titles would make it more difficult for laying low to be a viable strategy to have a long reign, and may force people to get more involved in either test or challenges.

This is all true as far as I can tell. There was an entire year where an Overlord was challenged 3 times total(one of the WLT prizes went unused for reasons I won't really claim to know).

The reason I'm quoting these is because I don't particularly feel strongly about the reduction argument in either direction. I follow the dotted lines being drawn here. These feel like logical points to me; the playerbase is even amongst all 3 sports, the titles can suffer from stagnation if people choose to keep their head down(which is a viable strategy and people used to get challenged just for this in other times, for even not being present in the venues from what I've heard) and that by reducing titles that would become a more difficult strategy for a long lasting title run and it may get people more active in tests and challenges. I can't really disagree with these point when they're laid out like this.

Short of quoting the entire post I'm going to try to highlight the numbers that really jumped out at my specifically.

-From Jan 1, 2020-Present, Duel of Swords has had 100 challenges across 9 titles. This equates to about 5.5 challenges per title per year.
-From Jan 1, 2020-Present, Duel of Fists has had 47 challenges across 5 titles. This equates to 4.7 challenges per title per year.
-From Jan 1, 2020-Present, Duel of Magic has had 52 challenges across 4 titles. This equates to 6.5 challenges per title per year.

This kind of stuns me when I look at this that there were less challenges per title in DoS over two years than DoM. Mostly because we have not been in a waive-heavy state of DoM for quite some time. I don't have the numbers to back this up and I'm not really asking people to find them unless they're genuinely curious but from what I can imagine, most Towers in DoM do not immediately have their grace waived. When there's 4, the bottleneck does make them more desirable of course, but I can't recall a time in recent DoS history that there have been 7-8 full loyal Barons. Which means that in a sport where anywhere between 2-4 of titles have no grace permanently this feels very strange to me.

From Jan 1, 2021-Present, DoS had 63 challenges across 9 titles. 50 if you remove Overlord. This represents 63% of all challenges in the past two years and is a 170% increase from 2020.

This is undeniably true. There were definitely more challenges in 2021 than 2020. However what I took away from this was that 13/63 challenges were directly for the Overlord title in 2021. Which is 20.6% of total challenges in the year. Now, it is very much the most coveted title in the sport but when 1/9 titles is harboring over 1/5th the total challenges, I feel like that is kind of a red flag. I could be wrong but I'm fairly certain I took up 8 of those 13 challenges while I had an active Loyal Wall.

There is a lot of context in the conditions behind challenges and I don't think this is a simple case of let's look at numbers and come to a black and white conclusion on the matter. When I look at the numbers I see a different image than what others took away from them. These numbers make me kind of scratch my head a bit when I see them and they don't really convince me that Alasdair's conclusion isn't accurate. Now truthfully I'm just happy Alasdair brought it to us to have this discussion. If there was a barony reduction, I would prefer a number like 6 to keep the politics interesting. Fewer titles than that starts to get a little contradictory(5 would not allow the various alignment stalemate rules and 4 is suffocating (imo).

That sums up kind of how I feel about the main topic of the thread and where I stand on it. As for the minor subject of title retirements; I don't think people should be punished for them unless it is a recurring, harmful sequence. IC or OOC, I think a retirement is well within the rights of the player as long as there is a valid reason and tact employed. If you want to take a barony from someone then immediately retire it when you win as a f*%k you, that's really not okay. In my case, after a year of being Overlord with at least one stint of week to week challenges, I was very fatigued and still am. When I won the Seaside Barony it floored me but to my code I had to accept it. I have been knocked out of tournaments for things that I very strongly wanted to win and the people then bowed out of the entire event the next round, or shortly after, and it really does not feel good. For me to beat people for something and then turn it down- I just don't like that. I didn't like it when it happened to me and I definitely would not enjoy doing it to someone else. Seaside was fun I got to play spoiler as a Renegade and then when I saw other people willing to step up and fill the role, I retired it. I'm ready to take a break from the sport and that's that.

Thanks for attending my ted talk.

[Strawberry]

Short of quoting the entire post I'm going to try to highlight the numbers that really jumped out at my specifically.

-From Jan 1, 2020-Present, Duel of Swords has had 100 challenges across 9 titles. This equates to about 5.5 challenges per title per year.
-From Jan 1, 2020-Present, Duel of Fists has had 47 challenges across 5 titles. This equates to 4.7 challenges per title per year.
-From Jan 1, 2020-Present, Duel of Magic has had 52 challenges across 4 titles. This equates to 6.5 challenges per title per year.

This kind of stuns me when I look at this that there were less challenges per title in DoS over two years than DoM. Mostly because we have not been in a waive-heavy state of DoM for quite some time. I don't have the numbers to back this up and I'm not really asking people to find them unless they're genuinely curious but from what I can imagine, most Towers in DoM do not immediately have their grace waived. When there's 4, the bottleneck does make them more desirable of course, but I can't recall a time in recent DoS history that there have been 7-8 full loyal Barons. Which means that in a sport where anywhere between 2-4 of titles have no grace permanently this feels very strange to me.

Would your feelings about it change (or not) if DoM had 8 titles and only 3.25 challenges per title per year or DoS had 4 titles with 10.25 challenges per title per year. You just said you were exhausted by back to back challenges in your position. That is essentially what is invited if we spread the current challenge volume across half the baronial titles. Lord forbid if challenge volume picked up at all, but more realistically, it likely would drop instead. So while I get people feel numbers don't show the big picture, a lot of the questions we have about the big picture are not really being addressed (may not be suitable for this thread, I get it) so I can really only focus on what parts of the picture are in front of me and that's the proportionate number of challenges between the sports.

Delahada wrote: ↑07 Jan 2022 13:55
What if we allowed Warlords to challenge for vacant baronies, as soon as they are retired and for as long as they remain vacant? We could treat them as both Renegade and Forfeit, ensuring there is no grace period between challenges and engaging the Baron’s Council to elect a champion(s) to defend the title. This would effectively keep them in circulation and should allow for a quicker turnaround, as opposed to waiting for the baronies to be offered in special tournaments or ARTs.

I really like this idea for a number of reasons.

A) It keeps titles in circulation.
B) It serves as a circular backup plan depending on time constraints of staff. i.e. If they don't have time to run a special tournament, there's a fallback of still being able to be challenged until an ART.
C) It keeps other title holders engaged via the Baron's Council and invites opportunities for play in the form of who plays champion, which easily can become political as the Council could potentially put up a perceptibly tougher opponent for a challenger they dislike or put up a friendly champion for someone they like, etc.
D) Challengers don't have to worry about a test, which can be anxiety inducing feeling like you don't get to fight the person you're challenging. Could invite new challengers into the fray.

[Delahada]

Would your feelings about it change (or not) if DoM had 8 titles and only 3.25 challenges per title per year or DoS had 4 titles with 10.25 challenges per title per year. You just said you were exhausted by back to back challenges in your position. That is essentially what is invited if we spread the current challenge volume across half the baronial titles.

This is what I'm most worried about becoming the reality. Fewer baronies but an increase in challenges equaling more exhausted duelists because of the constant barrage of challenges! Likely activity will decrease, because those who suffered through it will be too tired to bother anymore and nobody is going to want to put themselves in that kind of a stressful position. I completely empathize with Hope for wanting to retire after a year of constant challenges. One year is a remarkable feat and Hope deserves a break. I have absolutely zero ambitions to try to obtain the Overlord title again after only four months. When Ebon won it from me, I actually heaved a sigh of relief, and had a restful good night's sleep for the first time in a while.

[Kalamere]

Personally, I do tend to feel there are too many available titles. This isn't new though, I've felt that way a very long time and really just because I feel like a title should be a more rare commodity rather than something 22-25% of the eligible populace holds. 15%, to me, seems like a better measure (though, I should note, I don't think it's ever been near that low across the history of DoS - certainly not since the 90's)

That said, and my personal feelings aside, we're pretty much within the same basic character to title ratio that we have been for 16 or so years. We've had a lot of ups and downs through both activity and rate of challenge, but if we to look at Challenge Eligible Warlords we're definitely not at a low point, and the ratio of available titles to eligible challengers does not look to be terribly out of whack from what we've experienced in the past.

This is a chart of active warlords (and doesn't count title holders, because that was too hard to dig out) going back to 2005 ("active" using today's rules in that their last dueled date was within 90 days of the standings date)


This chart is how many active warlords there have been per available title (again, excludes those who hold a title, which sways things during times when titles are vacant, but not that badly).


This is, of course, looking only at characters - not players. I think with the no loss rules there are more people today with multiple warlords than there have been in the past, but there's really no way to be sure of that or to attempt to graph it.

So, I dunno. I think one needs to look at the numbers and make sure personal feelings and anecdotal evidence match up. If I get time I'll try pulling out number of challenges across time and see if that shows anything interesting.

[Hope]

Would your feelings about it change (or not) if DoM had 8 titles and only 3.25 challenges per title per year or DoS had 4 titles with 10.25 challenges per title per year.

I'm not trying to be glib but this is a very strange question and I don't really understand the intent behind it. Given the scenarios you just laid out I would probably react how I am now and scratch my head and say this feels weird to me.

You just said you were exhausted by back to back challenges in your position. That is essentially what is invited if we spread the current challenge volume across half the baronial titles. Lord forbid if challenge volume picked up at all, but more realistically, it likely would drop instead.

I very much agree with all of this. Which is why I said this:

I would prefer a number like 6 to keep the politics interesting. Fewer titles than that starts to get a little contradictory(5 would not allow the various alignment stalemate rules and 4 is suffocating (imo).

Also shout out to Kal for giving us pretty graphs with lines and numbers

[Alasdair Galloway]

I again wanted to thank everyone for their thoughts and ideas! We're listening and taking a look at all suggestions offered up.

I do want to take a moment to clear up something which seems to be something of a misconception in regards to length of time of vacancies and how long titles are put back into play. We'll take a look at the ones from 2020-now, since that's been an established time frame for challenges and vacancies.

Seaside:

Tali retires, 2020-09-04 - 2020-09-25 ( 21 days )

Jaycy retires, 2021-08-24 - 2021-10-04 ( 41 days )

Hope retires, 2022-01-03 - 2022-01-29 (assumed 26 days)

Dockside:

Morgan retires, 2021-09-08 - 2021-09-24 ( 16 days )

Jackson retires, 2022-01-02 - 2022-01-06 ( 4 days )

Old Temple:

Suturi retires, 2021-06-18 - 2021-06-26 ( 8 days )

Jaycy retires, 2022-01-03 - 2022-01-29 (assumed 26 days)

Battlefield Park:

Anya retires, 2021-11-15 - 2021-12-18 ( 33 days )

New Haven:

Bailey retires, 2021-04-13 - 2021-05-07 ( 24 days )

Dragon's Gate:

Nayun retires, 2020-03-15 - 2020-03-29 ( 14 days )

Old Market:

Sal becomes Overlord, 2021-09-03 - 2021-09-24 ( 21 days )

Cadentia:

Na-rae retires, 2020-07-14 - 2020-08-06 ( 23 days )

The 41 day vacancy for Seaside was something that we as staff took as a learning experience. Even though it was announced on 8/26 that it would offered as a prize in the RRC, in hindsight that was too long of a wait.

Beyond that, 10 of the 12 vacancies were filled within 30 days. The average number of days that there is a vacancy is 21. Considering that we have to be mindful of other sports and their events, as well as any possible RP events which will draw players, and holidays, I feel like that's a pretty good turnaround. For example, with the two open rings, we had to recognize that there are three tournaments in a row this month, and we do not want to burn everyone out by adding another within a week's time.

I think there is a valid concern that should the titles be reduced and there's a challenge spree, that people may not able to get one in. People are also worried that it might lead to more challenges, but both can't be the case, right? But let's assume all barons are loyal, and everyone gets challenged including the OL, and everyone defends. That's 6 challenges in one month, and no more can happen. If you're a renegade baron, or an OL without a full loyal wall, the highest number of challenges you could face in a month (assuming no renegade challenge queue) is 2. So where am I going with this? I feel like there would be fewer challenges and less of a barrage, and that it may be more difficult to break a loyal wall or dethrone a loyal baron.

PC brought up the idea of using 2 challenge grants to break grace, and that was something I was thinking of as well, and likely something that we would put in place if we reduced the number of rings. This would help mitigate the difficulty in finding someone to challenge in the case of a majority of loyal barons.

And once again, if we do decide to move forward, it will not be done immediately. There definitely won't be any changes to the number of rings made this cycle. And in the spirit and tradition of previous changes, we would want to involve everyone, title-holder or duelist or not, into the story. I think one of the coolest aspects of DoS is the long history and how it has had these big sprawling stories, and I feel like there's a real opportunity for us to tell one of those stories, while at the same time improving the game and giving even more toys for present and future players to enjoy playing with while making their own mark.

[Strawberry]

Would your feelings about it change (or not) if DoM had 8 titles and only 3.25 challenges per title per year or DoS had 4 titles with 10.25 challenges per title per year.

I'm not trying to be glib but this is a very strange question and I don't really understand the intent behind it. Given the scenarios you just laid out I would probably react how I am now and scratch my head and say this feels weird to me.

You just said you were exhausted by back to back challenges in your position. That is essentially what is invited if we spread the current challenge volume across half the baronial titles. Lord forbid if challenge volume picked up at all, but more realistically, it likely would drop instead.

I very much agree with all of this. Which is why I said this:

I would prefer a number like 6 to keep the politics interesting. Fewer titles than that starts to get a little contradictory(5 would not allow the various alignment stalemate rules and 4 is suffocating (imo).

Also shout out to Kal for giving us pretty graphs with lines and numbers

I don't think it's a strange question, it's pretty straight forward. You said it felt weird that DoS had slightly fewer challenges per title than DoM despite having twice as many titles (paraphrasing here). So I put them into equal framework of what it may look like if you spread the current volume across twice as many DoM titles or half as many DoS titles. If there's something unclear about that, I'd love to hash it out further once I stop heart-eyeing over Kal's graphs.

[Kalamere]

I won't lie, the results in these graphs surprised me. I'm actually going to go back and do some spot checks to make sure it's all accurate (and I'll explain my methodology at the end if anyone cares). What I'm seeing though is that not only are there more challenges in recent times than we have had historically, but that 2021 holds the record for most challenges in a year since we moved from Baron ring numbers to Baron district names (I really don't have any useful data for this prior to ~2005).

This is the number of challenges per year:



This is harder to look at, but is a chart of challenges per month. I did this one just because we could see a one month peak for something like the old Halloween challenge grants and I wanted to see if that was visible here. We do actually see this out of range peak, with 11 challenges issued in Jan of 2021 - it's the highest month on record. But, that said, the remainder of the year still isn't bad, with most months being above average.


I think (if my numbers are right) that this draws a picture of historically high challenge numbers in DoS. Are they all being made by the same character or player? Are they of a sort that builds any interest in the sport or play? I have no idea, and honestly that last bit is terribly subjective.

These are just more wood for the fire and you can take the numbers to mean what you will. I'm just putting the data on display.

Methodology
Every baron history page lists out the events that baron saw. It's not visible on the page, but each event begins with a meta tag that indicates what sort of event that was. I use these tags to generate the Baron Records Page. Tags are things like {C} for challenge, {D} for defense, {F} for forfeit, {T} for tournament. I pulled down every entry that was a {C}hallenge or {D}efense.

Also, every entry ends in a link to the challenge posting. I can take that and look up the date that post was made from the database (which is actually stored in epoch time, but works just as well) and convert that to a year and month or just a year for the 2 graphs above. I figured those would be way more useful than looking at a day by day stream which would mostly be 0's and 1's.

This means 2 things:
a. The date used in these charts is the date of the post I grabbed. Usually this will be the date of challenge, which I think works. In some rare cases it will be the date that the result was posted, if that was done in a different thread and is the one the historian at the time decided to link to.
b. Any baron note that does not have an associated post couldn't be tracked. That said, there aren't that many of those. I fixed a handful this morning to get them in and the 8 that were left were cicra 2004-2005 for initial entries to the barony. Pretty sure that won't matter, but could have thrown off 2005 numbers.

[PC]

2022 just started. I expect double the numbers.

Don't disappoint.

[Jake]

What if we allowed Warlords to challenge for vacant baronies, as soon as they are retired and for as long as they remain vacant? We could treat them as both Renegade and Forfeit, ensuring there is no grace period between challenges and engaging the Baron’s Council to elect a champion(s) to defend the title. This would effectively keep them in circulation and should allow for a quicker turnaround, as opposed to waiting for the baronies to be offered in special tournaments or ARTs.

I like this idea.

--Matt

Me too

[PrlUnicorn]

What if we allowed Warlords to challenge for vacant baronies, as soon as they are retired and for as long as they remain vacant? We could treat them as both Renegade and Forfeit, ensuring there is no grace period between challenges and engaging the Baron’s Council to elect a champion(s) to defend the title. This would effectively keep them in circulation and should allow for a quicker turnaround, as opposed to waiting for the baronies to be offered in special tournaments or ARTs.

I like this idea.

--Matt

Me too

This would also give the Baron's Council more play value and activity as a group.

[Tasslehofl Momus]

I like this idea.

--Matt

Me too

This would also give the Baron's Council more play value and activity as a group.

To flesh out this idea, I have a question...
What if the Baron's Champion wins? What then?