This is long. Read it anyway.
I'll do the easy part first. Culticon, it takes a lot more than letting your human side show on the boards for you to lose chain manager status. I've done it before, Heatmiser has voiced a dissenting opintion or two, etc.
I'm not sure how to answer the first couple of posts in this thread. I hate jumping back and forth between posts, so will just quote and answer Kazsam and Thorgrim as part of a self-contained reply.
Kazsam said:
The new 100 m chain is a nice idea, but realistically we all admit the xp you recieve will be purely from your vassal , there is no such thing as chain anymore,
Yes, the xp you receive will be (almost) purely from your vassal now. I had stated shortly after the allegiance changes were announced that chains as we knew them were over, that the new chains will really just be getting an assigned vassal, but that chains would continue to exist for those folks who want a producing vassal but don't want to do the work it takes to recruit and retain high producing vassals. The idea behind the chains now is to get one good, working, vassal and levy an xp requirement on them that yields enough xp to the patron to make the hassle of being in a chain worthwhile.
Kazsam said:
Sooooooo... why is the new chain listing as it is???
The characters were sorted by xp, just like I stated I was planning on doing in the announcement post here, and quoted below:
http://www.lastdynasty.net/board/viewtopic.php?t=9096 Right now I am planning on splitting the applicants into two different groups, the Crazy-High group made up of those characters whose XP production over the past three months have been far above the norm, and the Rest-Of-Us who sign up to make the 100 million quota.
Kazsam said:
The person at the top will recieve no more xp than trhe person at the bottom, so after 19 mnths in ld and at top of chain under whiskee (who i have continued loyalty bonus with) im pissed to be finding im now 9th down from the top!!!
Top does NOT mean more xp, but it does IMO show my loyalty to LD , i could have gone ff to ruthless, LSD, Ages along time ago if i had been xp orientated,(and maxed all my skills out) but i wasnt i stayed loyal to LD like alot of other people, and how am i being rewared ?? by being moved DOWN in placement on th new 100 m chain
The person at the top WILL receive more xp, if all of the top producers are grouped together. The chain listing as published sorts the characters by xp production. You are #9 because that where your xp numbers put you. As far as showing your loyalty and not going to Ruthless or any of the xp-only chains, I'm glad you didn't. You're fun to hunt with, to chat with, and you're an asset to the clan. At the same time, every other member of the chain could have gone to Ruthless,etc. too. I'll rant about loyalty at the bottom of my reply. Regarding being rewarded? You are neither being rewarded nor being punished by being placed in the listing where you are. I went back as far as I could in the ACStats database, which ended up being a few days after the allegiance change patch. With the changes to the passthrough rate that had happened I couldn't go back any farther than that. Placement was based on past xp production. Kazsam is #9. Oof is #21. We are where we are supposed to be.
Kazsam said:
unTil now i hav fully supported the chain managers decsisons, but now i really dont see where they are coming from,
I am VERY unhappy about my new placement in the new 100 M chain and my reason for being there. !!!
We (mostly me this time) are coming from the place I said we would, by sorting by xp production, then grouping and sorting based on those numbers. The placement by xp is based on feedback from managers, from looking at the production numbers (which showed a clear direction on where to go) and the fact that chain rules ARE different now. The loss of the 93.75% passthrough dramatically changed what can and can't happen in a chain.
Thorgrim said:
I too have to agree 300% with Kaz on this one. I'm very disapointed. Perhaps its just Ego talking, and even though I stand to lose my loyalty bonus by leaving Muneman and swearing to Kaz, I'm highly disappointed with BOTH our placements. Ive been in the clan, and the chain for almost 2 years. HIGHLY disapointed.
It is just ego talking. Ego is not necessarily a bad thing, but, yes, it is your ego talking. The production numbers don't suggest placing you and Kazsam being at the top. Emotions, yes, but the numbers, no. I'll answer your reference to loyalty time in the chain and placement at the end of my reply.
Thorgrim said:
Its always been my dream to rise to the top of a chain. For me, its a prestige point. I've allways looked to people at the top, and aspired to be there. Guys like Trinity Willow, Seabrook, Kaz. Please rethink your decision! I would like to see Kaz keep her spot, and Loyalty bonus, and See me swear to her. (I hear she gives nice gifts to vassals!) No, thats not true, But I have gotten some axe's off of her.
PLEASE CHAIN MANAGERS. rethink this. If its no big deal, then why shouldn't you change it?
Thorgrim, you swing a really big axe and people will look to that no matter where you are in a chain listing. If Kazsam wants to keep her spot and her loyalty bonus she can, but it means she will stay in the OH. She is currently sworn to Whiskee, and Whiskee isn't going to the new chain, so if she wanted to keep the loyalty bonus it means staying in the OH. If she moves to the new chain her loyalty bonus will be reset regardless, as will yours because Muneman is staying in the OH for now.
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I have something to say about loyalty, the clan, the chain, and rewards thereof. Kazsam, and Thorgrim, and almost every other current chain member need to rethink what is being said about "I should be rewarded." Kazsam stated she's been in the clan for 19 months and at the top of the chain under Whiskee. Thorgrim stated he has been in the clan and chain for nearly two years and that he is highly disappointed in both of their placements. I have a chain listing from shortly after I joined the chain. I was at the bottom of the chain, and neither Kazsam nor Thorgrim is on that listing. It's dated in July of 2002, though I think I remember joining in June. It is back from when it was still the Chain of Pain, or the Private Chain, or whatever it was called at the time, back in the days of manually posting quota. I'm sure there are other characters in the chain now who have been in longer than me.
If placement was about time served Thorgrim wouldn't be #8, Kazsam #9 and Oof #21. Like I stated earlier in this post, any and every character in the chain could have joined one of the xp-only chains out there, so the mere fact of staying in an LD chain doesn't warrant special placement.
Is it about loyalty? Define that for me please. Which takes more loyalty, staying in your spot in the chain, making quota, and getting free xp? Or staying in the chain, making quota, etc, and giving up WAY too much of your game time to help manage the silly chain? You want to talk about loyalty to the clan? Oof was probably number 3 or 4, or something like that in the chain listing when he hit 200. I pulled him from a very nice spot, xp-wise, and anchored him in the bottom position of the OH so that I could help push a little extra XP back into the bottom of the chain that had done so much for me. At the same time that I did that I issued a challenge/plea/request encouraging other chain members to drop back to the bottom as they hit 200. I said that if enough of us did that we could have everyone to 200 within months. Not a single character dropped down and joined me. Dropping to the bottom like I did cost Oof literally billions of XP. Don't talk to me about being loyal to the clan and chain and then say that loyalty should be rewarded.
Now, why was Blue Wizard, Acaddict and Tusami placed at the top and Thorgrim and Kazsam placed in the 8th and 9th spot respectively? Because during the timeframe for which I could gather data the numbers dictated that placement. Blue Wizzard added 794 million xp to the chain in that time. Thorgrim added 276 million and Kazsam added 267 million. That's why Thorgrim is in the chain listing above Kazsam. (To keep things in perspective Oof added 18 million.) Here is an abbreviated listing of the numbers I based chain placement on.
Code: Select all
1 ) Blue Wizard 794M
2 ) Acaddict 750M range
3 ) Tusami 750M range
4 ) Vitos 500M range
5 ) Diabolical Mage 500M range
6 ) Thunderblade 500M range
After that, there was a clear separation between characters
7 ) Illumination 277M
8 ) Thorgrim 276M
9 ) Kazsam 267M
10 ) Iron horse II 267M
11 ) Smiley 228M
and so forth down to
15 ) Neue Regel 117M
Directly under Neue Regel, quota dropped immediately to the 70M, 50M, 40M and lower range.
Could we have arranged characters differently? Sure we could have. Based on what? Time in the chain? Amount given back to the chain? You get in a never ending turmoil if we were to have gone down that particular road. There would always be someone saying CharA has been here longer than CharB, or CharC is more deserving because...
In the past it didn't matter so much if the chain order was strictly performance-based. Someone could slack for a while and no one would notice. We could leave basicaly non-hunting characters like Whiskee (one of Youkay's characters) and Zataki between the top of the chain and the monarch, because 93.75% of the xp passed through and it went a long way before it died off. That isn't true anymore. You want to know who really got screwed over in the allegiance changes? The monarchs. You know what would happen if we put lower producing characters above the highest producing characters in the chain? That 500 million xp difference between Blue Wizzard's output and the next group of people would disappear instead of reaching the monarch. So, would it hurt the chain if we put the top of the chain based on longevity (which still wouldn't put Kaz on the top of the new chain)? No, it wouldn't hurt the chain directly. But it would hurt the monarch. Plus, without timestamps of who has actually been here the longest, rewarding anything except xp output (for an xp chain) doesn't make any sense.
BTW, for what it's worth, Panzerfaust has never complained to me about the xp drying up after the allegiance changes. To me though, it's just common sense that we should take care of the monarch.
/rant off