A good way to get a feel for "active" players on the forums, is to look at the bottom of the forum, above the Cbox at the users active in the past 24 hours. While that isn't a "great" measure, it does give you some insight. At the time of posting this, there are 6 spiders active in the past 24 hours, and that's with us getting
A LOT of love int he game right now. Looking that list over, I see 3 normally active names not on there, and 1 not normally active name on the list.
My last post might have had a feisty edge at times. I'm sorry for that, the Spider numbers are something that I have worked
really hard on, in my talks with jay in the private forums.
I will be honest, we have talked and debated into oblivion how to make the Spider a legitimate 'force' in the click game. Jay has spent a lot of time listening to our ideas, probably at times cursing himself for even putting the spider into the game
What we (and I don't want to overstep my bounds, feel free to correct me if I'm wrong, Jay) have come to realize, is that there are two things that are hurting the Spider.
1.)
We are just a small fraction of the playerbase, incapable of putting together the numbers against the rest of the playerbase if it came down to a You vs Us battle royale.
2.) On top of that, "good guy" players will go to extraordinary measure to defeat the Spider when they do "pop up", because they are "the bad guys"
The first assault on the wall was done in the early stages of Castle of the Swift Sword, when the empire was focused on what was turning into an epic scale battle. Clicks were fast and furious during that time, and most of the clicking was being done there. It was obvious that this was a
MAJOR focus point of the game.
With CotSS going on, a battle that ran for 7 weeks and 3 days (52 days total) generated 18525 total clicks, 365.25 clicks per day.
Now, I wont comment on the Empire's side of things, but that conflict was
brutal on Spider's in terms of the items it cost. A lot of time was spent farming chains of actions that would take 3-5 separate actions to end up with 1-2 items that the war actions were taking. It is fair to say that most items spent by the Spider had an approximate fate cost of 45-50 fate, prior to clicking on the job itself to spend it.
This is a rough estimate, as the jobs occasionally granted multiple items, but the job series to make an Undead Legion took 75 fate and 5 items to create a bare minumum of 1, maximum 2 units. But a pretty fair estimate at 45 fate per unit, + items cost is fair.
After the loss there, and the handling of the vote options at winter court (which spider were hard at work using, as we were under the impression that those would have an impact) there was a lot of frustration in the community.
Jay came and talked with us, and we laid out what we thought would allow for the Spider to have a fighting chance in conflict.
A surprise attack (like what we see here) was talked about
Defense against the Spider and their forces carrying some risk of taint was also suggested. This suggestion actually was first put forward by a non tainted player, who stated that facing the spider in the click game didn't carry the same consequeneces that it does in teh RPG, and stories.
An augmentation of the 1:1 ratio was discussed as a way to counteract the small portion of the population that comprises "the bad guys"
So far, I, and (again, I don't want to speak for people unfairly) the Spider, are fairly pleased with what is going on.
Now, without spilling too much, I will say that the empire was going to have a tough road to hoe in the next battle with the Spider anyway. We as a clan have spent time coordinating efforts to make sure that people knew where, how, and what, they should be farming for what would inevitably come to pass, another battle with the Empire.
I think so far, Jay has shown that he listened to what we were saying, and I think that he has a plan in place. Looking about what he talked about us with, and the nature of what "needs" to show up at the battle still (Kyoso No Oni), this isn't over by any stretch of the imagination. I have a feeling that there are 1-2 more updates for this battle before its over.
Jay has given us a "surprise advantage", and augmented the 1:1 at this stage with the Akuma Action counting heavily. So far, I think we are looking good for a "battle royale" with the Empire.
With 11 days to go until at least the FB version of this game goes down, I wuold expect this to get very interesting in the final stages.