If someone from GA could please justify the stats they are seeing in the M&M BG, I would love to see the data backing their argument for keeping this M&M bg. Check the stats, GA since you made this mega Midwest and Mountain region and tell me how the playing field is leveled.

Thames, I'll miss you, but I'm sort of heading in that direction myself. Maybe if we all bow out, we can do one big SE Michigan meet up to at least meet once in real life and share some stories.

Jormagund
I simply fail to see the problem with the old state-battlegroup system. I have to tell ya that I care about this game FAR LESS now that I am participating in a regional battlegroup. The chat moves quickly since there are so many more participants, and I simply no longer bother trying to take part.

The social element of the game that I enjoyed is now gone. I occasionally, and without any passion, log in and harvest some energy... and then ask myself why I still bother to play?

I have said the same thing before, in this thread and others, and I will continue to say this. My enjoyment of the game has gone DOWN, because the social aspect and the competitiveness have been horribly reduced by this new mega-BGs.

GIVE US BACK OUR STATE BGs!!

(and I am also on a semi-boycott. I have not purchased mana since the new mega-groups were instituted, and I used to spend at least $28.99/wk, sometimes more. But not gonna spend money on a game that is not fun anymore...)

So, I really don't know what it's going to take to get you to see that people hate these regional BG's. Now that we're losing by 28K-100K a round, there's no point in playing when we already know the outcome. You continue to claim that these new BG's increase social interaction, but there are so many people now that I can't find the group I used to socialize with, so it seems like you shot yourself in the foot. I'm just curious...did you do any sort of research at all when you set the new groups? Did you see how many more Animators than Architects were in the Northeast BG? Apparently not, no way would that make sense...
Even if you do update the game with new levels and spirits and such, all that is overshadowed by the gross miscalculation that is the regional BG system. People are starting threads for state chats, just trying to get back to when the game was fun. Oh well, nobody's listening anyway.

Is there some way we can handicap based on the fact that Arch's are outnumbered by a significant amount in many BGs?

-Justin-
+1 Cali is large, but we would like to include Alaska and Hawaii there too. Seems they are small enought and Cali had great friends there too! Also suggestion, split the great plains to north gp and south gp seems like a little too large.

What they've actually done vis a vis the Great Plains is to put all of the Midwest, as well as what they call "Mountain," into a single 20-state battlegroup. It stretches across all four time zones from Michigan to Nevada and includes 40% of the US by state. It is not clear whether this is due to a server shortage, some other technical limitation, these being the states nobody in Finland has ever heard of, general European failure to understand how big the US is, or sheer hatred of the players in the group.

I can tell you that we Midwest & Mountain Archs have finally won a campaign by 2000 points, after traditionally getting shellacked by 200k-400k points due to a dramatic imbalance in players. we played hard, but even so my preliminary guess would be that the greens have lost more active players than we have, because without a significant numbers shift this kind of change isn't possible.

(Either that, or Grey Area is imposing some kind of balancing mechanism that throttles a consistently winning team's ability to earn points or complete missions - and it would have to be something more dramatic than the buff adjustment we know about. However, our greens haven't noticed anything, and I'd think they would.)

Edited by Seldon (Jan. 9, 2012 19:05:19)

Ever since they did this, there has been SO many crashes, and complaints about lag, i don't see where its "better" in anyway, more people = more problems :/ now we HAVE to hit 7-20k Energy to even hit top 20.