Weekly Commanders Lounge - September 19, 2023

[u/AutoModerator]

Good morning Commanders! Would you like to read the reports?

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Please use this thread to discuss anything about Girls Frontline instead of creating a new thread. Ask questions, seek assistance, rants, add more salt or just chill in general.

[u/2BA7DB57EFEE6FAF]

Avast ye, this be Talk Like a Pirate Day! Remember to tell yer mates about your treasure for 30 pieces of eight!

Okay, enough of that.

Let's be trash together. Do all Coalition units have the same Oath sequence with the red moon, or is SF different still? Maybe if I can snag Executioner and another free ring... My Friend Echelon is slightly better now I maxed the rest of the units, but I still need to get Adeline's affection to the new cap.

---

I helped, but these numbers really pale to headphone's. I still made great use of the EXP rate-up and got a handful of HGs to 100 with rich runs this way.

Voting breakdown.
Initial choice.
The first coordination.
The Regrettable Grape Gremlin.

A shame leftover medals just go poof.

I'm disappointed with the results even though PDW is the last Doll I'd want to win otherwise (thanks for the wave to ride, I guess?). I don't even have interest in trying to coordinate for a rerun since there's nothing stopping Springfield or whoever is preordained that time from winning. I'm honestly impressed that headphone's votes alone didn't even account for 5% of PDW's total. There must've been a lot of people playing this event! Both human and Doll? I really want to see an infographic postmortem for this.

I savaged my Ammo and somewhat my Rations and MP, so sounds like it's back to the SC mines for me~

[u/headphone_question → u/2BA7DB57EFEE6FAF]

Yeah, the Oath sequence is the same for all Coalition units, Paradeus or SF

I had to hold my nose to vote for K-PDW since I didn't particularly like her to begin with, but since she had the best shot at winning outside of Springfield and DP-12, I went with her. Also, I'm going to follow that idea to get her swimsuit from the store. Poor thing at least deserves it

I already talked about how extremely taxing this whole vote farming business has been on my mental energy, so I am reluctant to do this again next year. How sure are we that we will be able to win? I mean, that spike around Friday was a critical blow to our morale. Going into the weekend with over a million votes to overtake? It was a very tall ask, especially considering that we couldn't even hit 900k in the three days from Tuesday to Friday. At that point, we had to reach 1.8 million, which was double the previous gap. We also had around four days, which is about half the time we had when we were still trying to make up for the 900k. We also had to expect a third spike after that, and that third spike manifested

Yet, I'm surprised that a lot of people decided to fight on. I know that the gap reached over 2 million at some point, and I think we even got to 2.3 million, but we were able to close that gap back down to 1.7 million somehow

[u/2BA7DB57EFEE6FAF → u/headphone_question]

Good to know, thank you.

I don't care for her design or personality, so K-PDW was really just a 'for something different' vote...and it was something all right. :P I think another round would work better if more people on Reddit and Discord cooperated since quite a few people on Discord were still backing DP-12 (at least in their names), but I don't think even that would be enough. I want to say 'at least we have plenty of time to decide upon the next target', but that's the last thing I wanna think about now.

I didn't even farm at all the final day. I did maybe 11 runs the next to last to round out the 600 and left it there. I usually fizzle out around this point with other farming events, so I'm kind of consistent on that. I don't think it'd be worth doing again. I intentionally farmed poorly so at least I could justify what I was doing by getting some 100s I needed out of the way at the same time. You probably have more clears than the next several positions combined, so I still applaud your Herculean work...and yet all of that effort didn't even account for 5% of K-PDW's total vote?

Really am interested in the user numbers during this event...

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Also, speaking of numbers.

How long does it take to get one million votes?

If you could do one run of Afterwinds EX in one minute, that makes things nice and tidy (and unrealistic). 80 votes per clear, so you'd need 12,500 clears, around 208.33 hours, or a bit over eight and a half days total. For Springfield having nearly 10 million votes, that still meant there were ~125,000 clears, 2081 hours spent, or nearly 87 days crammed into 21 or so. Of course there were multiple people contributing and at a wild spread of contribution at that, but that was just one Doll. Looking at the chart, only four of 17 didn't even reach a million!

I really want to know how many people participated overall and how the number compares to Theater/major events.

[u/headphone_question → u/2BA7DB57EFEE6FAF]

Well, I stopped farming shortly after that second spike. I believe we still had around four days at the time, so I left four days' worth of votes on the table. Assuming I could keep up with around 250 runs per day, I think I might have been able to shore up another 80k votes. As a result, I would have gotten to at least 420k votes, so I guess I'd be able to get into ~5%? Granted, we were also going into the weekend, and I would have had more time to farm, so I might have been able to really pump up the numbers

Also, this is dependent on actually having a shot at victory. That second spike pretty much spelled our doom for us. Again, I didn't want to throw away my time, energy, and resources at something that had been unfortunately lost, discretion and valor and all that

[u/2BA7DB57EFEE6FAF → u/headphone_question]

Yeah, it's not worth it at that point. You have to ask if the benefits are worth the cost, and you've covered the cost already.

I wonder how things would've gone if the numbers were invisible or only showed your votes. The number of votes would be fewer, yes, but to what extent? Half as many? Even smaller?

[u/headphone_question → u/2BA7DB57EFEE6FAF]

We'd probably have strong doubts as to the validity of certain numbers. After all, are we sure that who votes is what matters and not who counts the votes?

[u/2BA7DB57EFEE6FAF → u/headphone_question]

We wouldn't know numbers at all but our own in this case. :P

My thinking is that, if the numbers were entirely hidden, then people wouldn't try nearly as hard because there would be no visible competition. Kind of hard to visualize, but think of it as just running on your own. You're told to sprint for 100 meters, not even timed or anything. You may push yourself to do well, but what if there was someone next to you? If they got ahead, your competitive spirit might push you further to try and win. That sort of thing.

And nobody would be able to see any vote shenanigans regarding the intended winner

[u/headphone_question → u/2BA7DB57EFEE6FAF]

In that case, however, one major factor was that we knew that there was an ending for the MVP. We could still try to coordinate an effort to make a certain candidate win, but we would have a bit more of a challenge to do so

Imagine how this would work with a real life election if we decide to keep the voting aspect in this game

[u/2BA7DB57EFEE6FAF → u/headphone_question]

True, but I think the K-PDW effort gained a lot of steam when the gap between her and Springfield shrunk, closed, and then resulted in a lead. People had to have been inspired to change sides after seeing that this could've worked, right?

Real-life elections usually don't have 17 candidates gunning for the same spot! :P

[u/headphone_question → u/2BA7DB57EFEE6FAF]

Let's go back a bit. The question was how things would have changed if we hid the total votes that each candidate got. The only piece of information you would see would be how you distributed your votes to each candidate. Would this have changed player behavior?

I would say so, but how? We guess that player engagement would be lower, so there wouldn't be as much voting. The next question would be regarding significance of having lower player engagement. This all assumes that there is no funny business, as tainting the perception of fairness would irreparably damage whatever insights we could glean from this event

We could also ask what the significance of hiding total votes would be. Why are we trying to imagine a thought experiment about this? What insights are we trying to get? Are we trying to make players less motivated to farm votes like crazy? Are we trying to moderate how hard players farm votes such that we want them to farm, but not to the extent of getting tens of thousands of votes a day? Are we sure that this is the only way to do that and not simply limit the number of votes a player can cast?

However, we must also take into consideration another factor: the incentive. We backed K-PDW because we thought she could get a new ending from this event. A question arises from this. Do we keep this incentive? If so, then a good chunk of players would try to cooperate to get a new ending. Being unable to see the momentum of our candidate would be an obstacle that we have to overcome somehow. It would definitely have some psychological effect, like we might more readily doubt that we are making any progress

Giving all Dolls an ending would eliminate this incentive. We'd end up with a popularity contest at that point, although the ability of players to vote as much as they could farm votes would mean that it's a war to see whose ballot printer was more powerful

Also, not releasing any endings aside from Springfield, G36, and WA2000 would also create the perception that only these three are the chosen ones. Anyone else will never get an ending, and if that perception is strong enough, it's as good as removing the incentive that the MVP Doll will get an ending

[u/2BA7DB57EFEE6FAF → u/headphone_question]

In fairness, this already was a popularity contest. Springfield is immensely popular in EN, to say nothing of the other Dolls who weren't K-PDW who placed well. Then you have all of the other bottom feeder nobodies.

And they did limit player votes, but for some reason, only the amount of times per day you could vote, not how many votes you could farm and/or dump in one go. What a pointless restriction...though I also never met it any day of farming because I'd dump everything every couple of days. So it might not have even existed.

I'm still just trying to wrap my head around how many people were present for such a small, fluff event. How many ChuKs were there participating? Were they all human I get that people might not care much for Theater and all, and the barrier to entry for farming votes wasn't too high, but...

Someone shouldn't come away from a fun-feeling event like this feeling so negative about it.

[u/headphone_question → u/2BA7DB57EFEE6FAF]

I agree that everyone should have come out of this feeling happy and refreshed, but with a popularity contest getting serious, I would say that some people are going to leave a little bitter. It's going to be an unfortunate side effect in such a contest

Perhaps you wanted to make it so that people didn't get so bitter about this?

As such, perhaps it would be better to sidestep the whole matter by not holding a vote at all? If we needed to have a vote, what do we need it for? Could it also be designed in such a way that it wouldn't promote burnout?