Hey all,

I have been toying with an idea to promote growth and friendly competition between the members of my alliance.

The idea is essentially a contest to see who can attain the most growth over a period of time. As you would expect with a contest I want to include a reward for the winners.

I can go into more detail about how I plan to do the scoring and stuff but what I really want to hear from the people here is whether or not it would be within the rules. I understand the push/pulling rules in that you can only give another player 1 days production per planet.

I was hoping that there might be an exception or other legal solutions for the case of entry fee collection and prize distribution. My production is quite high compared to the rest of my alliance but if everybody participates it may run pretty close.

The plan is to charge an entry fee for the contest in value of around 3 times the players overall points (less fleet points for fairness) in metal equivalent. The fees would be sent to my planet in galaxy 1. After all the fees are collected they would be loaded into ECs and sent at 10% speed on an ACS Defend mission to g9, thus defining the length of the contest. When the prize money lands winners of the contest would be determined and then prize res distributed.

Could this be a sanctioned method of encouraging friendly competition within an alliance? It would even make sense to register such contests on the forums here like we do for alliance wars so the admins and such are aware of it.

Any thoughts on this would be great.

Tentatively Moving this. If you want it moved back to Gen. Discussion, just let me know.

Thanks Weresloth, I was planning on getting a feel for what people thought before making the game suggestion but this works too.

Are there any thoughts on the actual idea rather than where the post belongs?

Well for one, how would you define 'growth?' It'd be hard to have a constant if one alliance has, say, 5 members whereas the other has 30 something. New people joining the alliance would also skew it.

Or is that the point?

The point would be to encourage individual growth between each of the members of the alliance. It was intended to be used internally to the alliance but if there is support for it we could also arrange similar contests between many members on the whole server. That greatly increases the amount of administration needed to run the contest though.

What I've noticed is that the ability to gain points is relatively proportional to the number of points a person already has. To make it fair for members of all sizes I would use a normalized growth. Calculated as (EndingPoints)/(StartingPoints).

I've been thinking of using Overall points minus fleet points because fleet points change depending on where your ships are (in the air or on the ground). To go even further you could award smaller prizes to each points category. So you would award prizes to largest growth in defenses, research and buildings as well as overall points (less fleet score again).

The idea is to encourage each member to do as much raiding as they can and put as much res into growth as they can over the course of the contest.

Additionally you could award fleet prowess by posting CRs and tallying total damage. Attacker losses could also be taken into account here by subtracting losses from the total damage dealt.

Our alliance has a private forum that we've set up for our alliance related things and I was planning to manage things there. Given support for the idea though I don't see why we couldn't use this forum to manage the contest.

fretboardfreak wrote:...I understand the push/pulling rules in that you can only give another player 1 days production per planet...

This was probably just a typo, but to be sure, the rule is one HOURs production per planet per day.

Where I stand on this suggestion is that I do not think it is a great idea. But this is just my opinion, I am sure many other people think differently. I have been in some alliances that have had these Intra-alliances contests. I think that this could be managed independently and the Leader of the alliance will decide what the contests rewards are and such. I also do not think that using this forum is such a great idea to keep track of the contests. This is for ZE in general, not the alliances. I believe that when you do this you could keep track of this privately. And even though there are the pushing/pulling rules, there are other rewards you could use. Some things such as, "The alliance member that recruited the most into the alliance this month gets a promotion." They could have more say in the alliance, but of course this is just my opinion.

Thanks for the clarification SpacemanSpiff, I didn't catch that.

I think I understand your point EndGame01 but I think you're missing mine. I agree that this would be best done individually within an alliance. However, rank and recruitment are not the end results that I'm looking for. I'm looking for a way to encourage and reward competitive empire expansion.

The point of these contests are to encourage point gain on a member by member basis. To see who can gain the most points in defenses, buildings and research relative to their size.

We already have a reward system for recruitment in our alliance. I want to reward the members of the alliance who are doing the most productive raiding and who can earn themselves the most points in a defined period of time. A logical reward for a contest of this type is resources and just like you would pay money to enter a darts or pool tournament I want to charge an entry fee to generate the prize res.


I want to be clear, this suggestion is not necessarily about the contest itself. What I'm looking for is a sanctioned method for collecting and distributing prizes. We could split up all of the fees and prizes amongst a number of members of the alliance so that we all stay under the pushing/pulling rules but that creates a logistical nightmare.

The idea is that we could post on the forum here to say that our alliance will be running such a contest and FretBoardFreak (or whoever) will be collecting and distributing the entry fees and prize resources. Thus, the one person who is doing the collecting and distributing would be exempt from the push/pulling rule only once for the sake of the contest.

How about instead of resources, the prizes could be rubies? That gives more of an incentive as well as having people buy more rubies.

Weresloth wrote:How about instead of resources, the prizes could be rubies? That gives more of an incentive as well as having people buy more rubies.

That is also a good idea. The more I think about it, this suggestion is better than I first thought. I had to reread it, this may be a nice little incentive for alliances.