I’m sure it’s been suggested before but I want to add a voice to the chorus:
I think alliance events/rewards are great and if you’re an officer or higher you can kick suspected moochers, which mostly resolves the issue of under-active members. However, in addition to the ‘stick’ that will disincentive free-loading, it seems that there ought to be a ‘carrot’ to reward and incentivize those who put more into the alliance events.
I’m sure many ideas exist re how to do this but here are a few that come to mind. (note, any idea should take into account that there will be those aiming to game the system, eg “give the best player in the alliance X, may create an incentive to players to create an alliance of just one’s self”)
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Top 50% of contributors in the alliance get twice as many rewards as the bottom 50%. (ie if the ‘old’ system would give each player 300 alliance points, now it would give half 400 and half 200). The benefit being that you don’t need to be the absolute top of the team to get rewarded. Also, there’s less likelihood of the top alliances hoarding all the best players since players in the bottom half will realize they could get better rewards by being in the top half of a slightly weaker alliance instead.
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Players above the average contribution amount, get an extra reward. Easy to game though–add one or two super weak players and the average will, artificially, plummet, and then almost all players will get this ‘extra reward’. For that reason, a median approach like for #1 is better.
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The top X players in the alliance get an extra reward. Again, can be games by creating a small (one player) alliance though. This could be solved by (a) limiting this to alliances above Y members, or (b) making the reward non-monetary, like a portrait, since that appeals to intense players without giving a relative advantage.
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Alliance events are also semi-solo events. I say ‘semi’ because the solo incentive shouldn’t overshadow the alliance rewards, but it would have certain benefits: (a) solves the ‘what about people who join/leave alliances halfway through’ issue (b) potentially easier to build © since the comparison is not within the alliance but across all players