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AngryAraxxor

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Disclaimer #1:

First and foremost I'd like to make clear this is NOT a thread about whether or not the disqualification of Divine Resilience from the clan cups was justified. The cup is over and all I care about is that every clan gets a fair opportunity to fight in next year's cup.

Disclaimer #2:

I would like to stress to any jmods reading this that this thread is meant to attack the rule set itself, not the people who designed it. A good designer can make bad design decisions just as much as a bad designer can make good ones.

The following posts are about how I believe that the mass recruitment rule itself is inherently flawed/badly designed, and what Jagex could and should do better next time in terms of changing the way it works and supporting the cup participants that have to deal with it. The rule set in question I'm referring to:

http://i.imgur.com/oJWN8Y9.png

With a punishment of: instant disqualification from all cups.

1. The designer's perspective

As a game design student the first thing that comes to my mind about creating a rule set for any game, game within a game, or in this case contest - is that no rule should ever be made without having a good underlying reason for making it. Having pondered about the mass recruitment throttles for a while, these are the reasons I could come up with (please correct me if I'm wrong or missing something):

- To prevent clans from getting a false impression of what their next match up is going to be like
- To stop attempts from clans at filling themselves up with a lot of "filler bodies" that leave again after the cup and as such do not give an accurate representation of the clan

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08-Oct-2015 23:57:24 - Last edited on 31-Oct-2015 17:16:05 by AngryAraxxor

AngryAraxxor

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[cont.] One of the reasons why I believe the rule set in its current form is broken is because it doesn't do a very good job at fulfilling either of those underlying conditions:

1. Matched
Recruitment doesn't affect 20v20s, unless the clan didn't have 20 active people to begin with. Sizing up your opponent for these is done solely by looking at skill, and making a team of completely new people doesn't affect your chances of winning the cup. If anything, it will make them lower against the currently well-established warring clans.

2. Fullout
The main way of sizing up your match up for a fullout war is usually not to look at "total invites', but instead to consider member count, net member gain/loss, and perhaps overall clan activity. Yes, kicks can influence the perceived net gain, but please don't underestimate the amount of active people who leave the clan during the cup. Recruiting to keep numbers steady is completely different from recruiting to have the biggest team possible.

The 20% rule doesn't really account for the sizing up part at all, as it's aimed to be a measuring tool for the competition as a whole rather than the time it takes to size up your opponent (no one other than Jagex would be checking it).

Filler bodies aren't an argument until after the cup ends, although I know this is probably the most headache-inducing thing to keep track of. Because what if these "fillers" actually decide they like the clan and want to stay? What if these people actually have been warring with the clan team for a long time, but didn't see a reason to join the actual clan yet as the warring scene normally is FC-based? These people all would be giving an accurate representation of the clan, yet are all automatically treated as a filler by the cup system, regardless of background or future. ¸¸¸¸¸¸„‹•°Member of

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08-Oct-2015 23:57:29 - Last edited on 31-Oct-2015 17:52:11 by AngryAraxxor

AngryAraxxor

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2. Programmers like to think in numbers

I can see why a coder would think a simple way of gauging mass recruiting would be to write an algorithm for checking the exact amount of people that join and then continue to only base their judgement off that tracker. The code may even be completely flawless, cool!

But how does a player go about precisely tracking this information without getting any feedback or tools from Jagex? The solution my clan had for this was to completely lock down recruitment (as in, no attempts from us to recruit any new people whatsoever), and queue up the people who were still waiting to get in. We then invited them in carefully regulated portions and did our best to stay far under the 10/week limit (5.5/week average). We used Blasty's clan logger tool combined with Runeclan to track anyone who could have slipped through our system, but somehow still got MASSIVELY different results from the numbers that Jagex told us they had. How? We don't know, because giving us feedback on where exactly we went wrong to see if our trackers messed up somehow, doesn't seem to be a thing. ¸¸¸¸¸¸„‹•°Member of

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08-Oct-2015 23:57:32 - Last edited on 31-Oct-2015 17:55:01 by AngryAraxxor

AngryAraxxor

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3. Clan intent

"Mass recruitment" implies that a clan is actively searching for and attempting to recruit (a vast amount of) new members. It should never the case that one the most well-organized warring clans in RS tries everything in their power not to break this rule, yet somehow still does.

Now, finding out clan intent sounds like a vague action that could be hard to perform, but I personally believe that this should still be a factor when investigating a breach of this rule. Has the clan in question done any active forum recruiting? Did they approach anyone in-game and tell them about the clan or ask them to join? Or is there actually proof of them telling people they could not be invited because of the cup rules? In our case, this "anti-recruitment" would for example be in multiple places on our recruitment thread as we had to reply to the applicants on there.

Expanding on this, the specific cup opponent that DQed us told us that they were going to get us disqualified for mass recruiting, long before the cup was even announced! In response, we obviously prepared ourselves as we had no intent of giving them an easy win. Again, something like this could be valid proof for not having the intent to recruit.

Now, you most likely are thinking something along the lines of: breaking the law without intending to doesn't exclude you from being punished. However, that argument doesn't really hold ground in video games, as the idea of intent should really have been implemented on a much deeper level. When designing a competition of this magnitude, and making a rule with this severe of a punishment (instant DQ from every cup), you better make sure that clans who try hard not to break the rule aren't going to break it. Because if they somehow do that would be bad rule design, not something to blame on the end user. ¸¸¸¸¸¸„‹•°Member of

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08-Oct-2015 23:57:35 - Last edited on 31-Oct-2015 18:00:29 by AngryAraxxor

AngryAraxxor

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4. Arbitrary numbers? Feedback is key!

The design choice that flabbergasts me the most, is the idea that having 20% or more of the participants in a cup match be new recruits results in an instant disqualification. Again, from a coder's perspective this may seem like a logical rule. But think about it for a moment. Are you really expecting clans to bring a calculator and a list of everyone who joined the clan in the last couple weeks to every single one of their cup matches, and spend the first couple minutes of their match checking who of their 76 people managed to get in and whether they've possibly gone 0.5% over the limit? Asking them to do so beforehand is physically impossible, because in a fullout war, they aren't going to know the exact people entering the match, regardless of how well prepared they are. With number these high, some may not have or accidently lose their badge, some might DC or crash, some might even be on the war world but not at the camp!

From a designer's perspective, the only way a rule like this can be upheld in a fair way, is to provide real-time feedback in game. Either when challenging the opponent, or right after the match has started, the game should either provide a warning of the sorts:

[WARNING: YOU ARE CURRENTLY BREACHING THE MASS RECRUIT LIMITS. DROP [...] RECENT RECRUITS TO CONTINUE THE MATCH]

OR just not allow the new recruits to enter in the first place.

If this in-game feedback is not technically feasible, or would take too long to implement, the only way to go would be to either be far more lenient on this rule (meaning it is only a very small factor in the judgement process), or to drop it completely. The worst thing you can do as a designer is to punish players for something they didn't know they did wrong. Doing so will only leave players feeling like a great deal of injustice was done to them, regardless of whether your decision was justified or correct. ¸¸¸¸¸¸„‹•°Member of

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08-Oct-2015 23:57:38 - Last edited on 31-Oct-2015 18:10:35 by AngryAraxxor

AngryAraxxor

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5. Conclusion:

From a designer as well as a player perspective, I believe the mass recruitment rule was badly designed and implemented. The solutions I can think of are as follows:

1. Be more lenient and/or consider more factors when investigating a breach, such as clan intent and by how much and how consistently the throttles were breached. You won't get more complaints if you investigate whether clans are actually mass recruiting instead of whether they hit some arbitrary number count.
Calm Enigma said :
Having some basic thresholds such as those used this year is good for setting a basic idea of when a clan needs to be investigated for mass recruiting, not necessarily punished for it. It is worth noting that Matthe is probably aware of this already, seeing that I actually borrowed the word 'investigated' from his guideline for the mass-recruiting rule.
2. Either provide us with your tracking tools, or look at net gain (excl. kicks) instead of total invites - as this is the only clear thing we as clans can currently track with 100% certainty.

3. Most importantly, add clear in-game feedback during the cup matches if the rules stay as they are currently (e.g through warning message or not allowing match to start).

Added after feedback:

4. Make clans post their member lists before each war, so tracking isn't an issue at all. Don't allow people recruited in the past week to enter the match.

5. Drop the mass recruitment rule all together (at least for matched cups)
Subzero said :
There shouldn't be a rule against recruiting for the Clan Cup whatsoever. Rules should be simple black/white rules, and this is one rule that is too ambiguous, and too easily circumvented, for it to be enforceable. ¸¸¸¸¸¸„‹•°Member of

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08-Oct-2015 23:57:50 - Last edited on 31-Oct-2015 18:17:56 by AngryAraxxor

AngryAraxxor

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Counter/closing words:

I can imagine some people would say the simplest solution to avoiding all of this would be: just don't invite anyone during the cup whatsoever! However, I believe that is a very elitist thing to say, as it excludes a lot of people who become curious about warring when the cup is announced, but aren't currently in a participating clan. As a friendly and open community clan focused on reviving the warring scene, Divine Resilience does not support the idea of completely closing the gates for those people (for up to 2 months+ of the year!), as it does nothing but hurt them and reinforce the idea of the warring community being elitist and narrow-minded.

Next to that, it doesn't make much sense to expect warring clans, which already aren't that popular among the community in general, to undergo a complete recruitment lockdown for 1/6 of the year, every year, only out of fear of being disqualified from the cup. So no, not inviting anyone at all isn't the way to go either as far as I'm concerned.

Thank you to anyone who managed to read this far!

Questions for you, the CLF:

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- Which points do you agree with, why?
- Which points do you disagree (or not completely agree) with, why?
- Do you have any other comments or feedback about the mass recruitment rule, perhaps past experiences or other suggestions you'd like to make?
-----------------------------------------------

I spent over 8 hours writing this and would appreciate any and all feedback as long as it's constructive! You do not have to follow the specific template.

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08-Oct-2015 23:57:53 - Last edited on 10-Oct-2015 17:36:37 by AngryAraxxor

Calm Enigma

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Which points do you agree with, why?
1 - Tracking invites for compatibility with mass recruiting is something that can be easily overlooked or miscalculated, it may be useful for clans to see how they stand on that front at regular intervals. However, I assume it would take a lot of time to develop and maintain a system to achieve this, which may or may not be worth it. Furthermore, it could also encourage clans to try and live on the margin and try to exploit the rule.

2 - Mass recruiting is a very tricky subject that can't really be made black or white with thresholds. Ideally, an algorithm for passing judgement on it should also take into account the amount of recruits a clan would invite regardless of the competition and the impact of pre-conceived mergers, among several other measures. Needless to say, getting an accurate result for every clan is unrealistic. Having some basic thresholds such as those used this year is good for setting a basic idea of when a clan needs to be investigated for mass recruiting, not necessarily punished for it. It is worth noting that Matthe is probably aware of this already, seeing that I actually borrowed the word 'investigated' from his guideline for the mass-recruiting rule. It is very likely that clans disqualified for mass-recruiting were investigated further after it was recognised that they had breached the guidelines. -

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09-Oct-2015 11:57:04

Calm Enigma

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Which points do you disagree (or not completely agree) with, why?

1 - AngryAraxxor said :
]The main way of sizing up your match up for a fullout war is usually to look at member count and net member gain/loss. For example, two new recruits joining, and two active members leaving the clan, results in a net gain of 0. However, by cup rules, this actually counts as getting 2 recruits, as only "total invites" are looked at. This also means that two people joining and leaving again in the same week, once again counts as getting two recruits, even though at the end of the day there was no increase in fighting strength whatsoever.
This is unfortunately not true. If mass-recruiting were to be based on net gain/loss, clans would just kick their inactive members and replace them with the newly-recruited, active ones for the competition. The total number of clan-members would remain the same, but the amount who would participate in the competition would increase substantially.

2 - AngryAraxxor said :
Filler bodies aren't really an argument until after the cup ends, although I know this is probably the most headache-inducing thing to keep track of. Because what if these filler bodies actually decide they like the clan and want to stay? Are they then promoted to "real clan mates"?
Ideally, clans in the JCup should really compete in as similar a state as they were in at the announcement of the competition. To illustrate, here is the rule that was used in the Oldschool Cup and in some past Cups:
"Only those members listed as members of your clan when you registered can be used during a clan battle."
Of course, with the advent of official clan memberlists, tracking changes became more easy so this rule could be relaxed. This is shown in the 20% rule, which I actually like - it allows clans to recruit, as it only takes into account those exploited for the competition for its definition. -

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09-Oct-2015 11:57:16

AngryAraxxor

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Thank you for your feedback Calm!

Calm Enigma said :
This is unfortunately not true. If mass-recruiting were to be based on net gain/loss, clans would just kick their inactive members and replace them with the newly-recruited, active ones for the competition. The total number of clan-members would remain the same, but the amount who would participate in the competition would increase substantially.

I can completely see the point you're making, but would argue that a way to deal with this would be for jagex to compare the total invites to people getting kicked when investigating the net gain in mass recruiting (not the people leaving on their own, as they were obviously active). I would say this would be a better balanced system than the current way of only looking at total invites, as the latter is not as clear of a measuring tool and causes severe tracking issues.

The main reason I even bring up net gain at all is those tracking issues. We, the players , need a clear way of telling whether we are breaching the rules or not.

Calm Enigma said :

Ideally, clans in the JCup should really compete in as similar a state as they were in at the announcement of the competition. To illustrate, here is the rule that was used in the Oldschool Cup and in some past Cups:
"Only those members listed as members of your clan when you registered can be used during a clan battle."

I agree this would be a sensible solution - tracking issues like we have in this competition would not be a thing if this was the case. ¸¸¸¸¸¸„‹•°Member of

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09-Oct-2015 12:55:46 - Last edited on 09-Oct-2015 16:01:04 by AngryAraxxor

Forums

Jcup - Mass Recruit Feedback

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