Hello Lords and Ladies! With our latest announcements regarding Stake Your Claim, there have been many questions and concerns about the long term “vision” of Stake Your Claim, and why we’re doing this.
We’ve collected questions from the community so we can go into greater detail here. Read on to hear more about
- The greater vision for Stake Your Claim (SYC) and how this will fit into the kingdom lifecycle
- How we determine pairings
- And newly evaluated pairings for our first SYC based on initial feedback
Let’s jump right in!
So what’s the plan with SYC?
Stake Your Claim was envisioned to be a major kingdom lifecycle event that can be used in conjunction with merge to continue to not only properly manage kingdom populations, but also continue to give players fresh inter-kingdom competition for the foreseeable future on Game of Thrones Conquest.
SYC technology is very powerful. We’re starting small with 2 kingdoms and would eventually like to go bigger. However, with such a powerful tool, we need to start small, and learn as we go.
It is important to understand that once you go through one SYC, your kingdom’s journey is not over.
We’re adding a new Kingdom Lifecycle event into the mix, not replacing. Your kingdom can still be merged, or go through yet another SYC event down the line. Again, this is just another adventure on your path of conquest.
Furthermore, with the ability to properly manage kingdom populations, and bring kingdom power more inline with each other, this opens the door to more kinds of intra-Kingdom competitions (Kingdom vs Kingdom). Creating even more competitive opportunities, and giving Kingdoms new rivals!
More avenues of competition
Our goal with Game of Thrones: Conquest is to invest into ways to give our players, and their allegiances even more ways to compete, both within their kingdoms, as well as against other kingdoms. Our recent KvK tournament is an example of possible ways we want to further experiment with how kingdoms compete. One of the largest hurdles we had to overcome in pairing kingdoms was the sheer difference in the number of players in each kingdom. By using SYC it will become more feasible to create exciting competitive avenues down the line.
This kingdom match up doesn’t look right to me. How do you select your pairings?
Several factors come into play when pairing kingdoms. As Stake Your Claim was created as a population management tool, population across all of the kingdoms being split is going to be an important factor, as well as the power distribution within those kingdoms.
All of these metrics are stack ranked and a match is made. In our first attempt, as we are looking to break apart kingdoms, we decided that total population between the two kingdoms would be the single highest driving factor, with power distribution used to validate that compatibility. When looked in that lens… the combination of 832 and 805 landed us in a very conservative sweet spot for our first Stake Your Claim.
But what about player power?
A very common misconception is that players in older kingdoms are more powerful than younger kingdoms. While that can be true, the kingdoms in our first SYC cohort are actually very similar in how powerful their individual players are.
To illustrate this, let’s take a look at all of the players in our SYC kingdoms, keep 21 and above, and remove their troop and title power. As you can see the distributions of power are very similar, in fact the median power (lines inside the boxes) of all 6 kingdoms are roughly the same
When you break this down even further to just keep 34 and 35… the numbers become even more alike:
Open to Reevaluating
We like to remain open to new information and build in time to revisit our priorities based on the most up to date information we have. Even as we announced the initial pairings we were digging deep into the impact of power density in allegiances, and how to properly evaluate that across the population. Traditionally in merges, we look at kingdoms as a whole when pairing. However, with Stake Your Claim, it’s more about how individual allegiances, across all of the kingdoms in the event, compare to each other.
Allegiances in older kingdoms have many more high power keeps in their ranks than younger kingdoms. When quantified in data, 805 and 832 were not as competitive of a match with this method of comparison. This echos the sort of feedback we were hearing from the community in terms of what they were considering ‘competitive.’ It is, of course, always a push and pull of an individual kingdom’s politics, or kingdom feel, and how that manifests in data. We’re hopeful that this evaluation method is more in-line with player expectation however.
As you can see, in this chart when looking at power within allegiances (again, ignoring Troop and Title power), there is a significant drop off after the top 3 allegiances in regards to power. While we can never predict exactly how things would play out, most likely the top 3 would each spread to one of the new kingdoms and effectively have little to no competition. Granted, there are a lot of social dynamics at play that we cannot account for… but this would be the most likely outcome.
Based on all of these learnings, we made the decision to reprioritize our pairing metrics, placing much more emphasis on allegiance power distributions. When re-analyzed, we have made the determination that the first SYC pairings will be the following:
805 and 828
We will also be turning off friend codes for 805, 828, and the following kingdoms we suspect will be participating in the next rounds of Stake Your Claim if it is successful:
832, 1128, 834, 829
The goal is to further mix these kingdoms up in the future via merges and Stake You Claim events with even more kingdoms both being split and being created.
You will soon be losing the ability to quantify your kingdom by the number of merges it has gone through. Nailing down our analysis and matching algorithm is key, as future matchups will not be as obvious. Again, the goal is to give our players engaging matchups and competition for a long time to come!
Can you explain in more detail how kingdom capacity works?
Each kingdom has a maximum population capacity. Maximum Capacity is dynamic, and is based on several factors, much similar to the ones we explained above. We’re giving players the choice of where they want to go during SYC, but we do need to make sure we end up with 3 balanced kingdom populations by the end.
While the Stake Your Claim event is active, you will be able to jump to any of the newly created kingdoms, regardless of their maximum capacity.
However, once the event ends, that capacity becomes important. At this point, kingdoms that are over capacity will be rebalanced until they are at or below capacity. This process prioritized Allegiances, making sure teams are not split apart. There are more details on the prioritization process below!
Currently this capacity is not shown in-game, however that is something we are looking into based on player feedback.
In the meantime, keep an eye on our official Discord’s #merge-day channel throughout the event for periodic updates on capacity. This is an announcement channel, so if you are the admin of a private kingdom or allegiance Discord server, you can follow the #merge-day channel and get those updates directly in your server. (Click here to learn how!)
How will over-capacity kingdoms prioritize which keeps stay and which are moved?
At the end of Stake Your Claim, the following prioritization occurs to ensure teams are not split up, and kingdoms are not over capacity.
- Players are moved to the same new kingdom as their allegiance leader
- Allegiances that have not moved from the original home kingdoms are distributed to the new kingdoms (smallest kingdom filled first)
- Populations of new kingdoms are then compared
- If the populations are within a set threshold, then no rebalancing is necessary.
- If they are not within the threshold, then they must be rebalanced
- The smallest allegiance from the largest kingdom will be the first to move to the smallest kingdom
- This process repeats until the populations are within the threshold
Discord Stage Stake Your Claim Q&A
In addition to the questions above, we also streamed a live Q&A during our September 2nd Discord Monthly Stage! While many of these questions have been answered above, we have included a summary of questions and answers below as requested. You can also listen to the Discord Stage recording here on the blog.
“How long will these “merged” SYC kingdoms last before we move on to a traditional merge or another SYC event. Are they intended to be short term like 2-3 months? Longer?”
-PipeLayer#7018
We don’t want to set anything in stone until we can evaluate the results of these first Stakes, but our hope is that kingdom lifecycle events will occur more frequently and predictably in the short term with the introduction of SYC.
Keep in mind that Stake Your Claim was never meant to be a replacement to Merge, or even KvK. It’s meant to separate Kingdoms who are too large to Merge, and put them back into the Merge cycle, at a way quicker pace.
“How often will these stake your claim events happen?”
– Shãrky#0001
Whenever necessary. It really depends on how populated a kingdom is, and things like player feedback and when your last Kingdom Merges were!
“What was the reasoning/thought process behind putting 805 and 832 together?“
-Pappy#1001
805 and 832 have very similar distributions of power. Now how they use that power is another story.
Several factors come into play when pairing kingdoms. Mainly the total population across all of the kingdoms being split, as well as the power distribution within those kingdoms.
A very common misconception is that older kingdoms are more powerful than younger kingdoms. While that can be true, the kingdoms in our first SYC cohort are actually very similar in how powerful their individual players are.
[See graphs above]
“[What was the] Reasoning behind the 4th merge being included instead of being merged once more?”
– Blueji#2091
Again, it comes back to population and kingdom power.
The kingdom specified, 832, has reached our max population limit and is unable to continue merging.
Merging that kingdom could cause significant performance concerns and their power distribution is on par with older kingdoms.
“. . .Why [weren’t] all 4 old kingdoms paired together and announced together?”
– Darkowl#8014
We’re taking them one stake at a time. Once we get through the first one we intend to work through the rest as quickly as we can.
Between Stake Your Claim and being eligible for kingdom merges again, you likely won’t have to wait too long for a chance to mix with those other kingdoms though!
“ Will there be any way to know during the event that one kingdom is overpopulated relative to your benchmark?”
– Larandor#5814
At the moment, no. The challenge is that it is not a “set” number. It is dynamic, based on several factors (number of input kingdoms, total available pop, etc..)
We see the value in this request though. We’re going to see if there is some other way we can represent this idea of capacity so players are aware of the general risk of jumping onto a kingdom that has reached its population limit.
“Will players from different kingdoms be able to join established alliances from the other kingdom during SYC?“
– IAmTheStorm#7885
Throughout Stake Your Claim, you are still considered a member of your ‘home’ (or soon-to-be ‘Purged’) kingdom. This means you cannot form allegiances with players from a different home/purged kingdom until after Stake Your Claim is completed.
“Is the 832[&]805 SYC pairing decision a final one?”
– Spitey#3658
No. [ See Above ]
Keeping the conversation going
Thank you to everyone for their feedback and especially to the folks on our official community Discord providing constructive feedback on how they interpret kingdom power. This was clearly a topic that players on these kingdoms were very passionate about, and we are always grateful to players willing to take the time to thoroughly explain their thought processes so we could update our own.
If you want to get in on the conversation, head on over to the #kingdom-merge channel on Discord. As always, thank you for playing!