Right now these 4 Film Trophies are in the hands of 4 smaller studios. I'll keep contact with the ones I know in there to see what effects they have on "publicity" - if they don't visit the forum themselves. You need to keep in mind though that one Film Trophy costs your studio -20% skills in studio fights. If you're not familiar with Trophy costs: an energy trophy costs your players 10% skills and a courage trophy (duels) costs them 7% in skills during a studio fight. These are the penalties the top 10 trophy-holding studios in UK2 now have:
Apart from B&H, BG, D30 and PPP no-one has been able for quite some time to have trophies on hand that give a larger penalty than 20%. The trophies these studios now have, are pretty much what they are all capable of holding. Unless something major would change. Replacing 2 or even 3 of these maintainable trophies for "only" 1 film trophy (in order to actually keep it for a while) is not as easy as it sounds. Trust me. In the past 6 months B&H had to fight for each trophy, and then for actually being able to keep that trophy.
Didn’t know that the penalty is 20%... But even though in general I understand your points, I still view the trophies as a more of an advantage than a disadvantage. If it was the other way around, they wouldn’t all be concentrated in the top studios and all the weaker studios wouldn’t be immediately targeted whenever they got a hold of any trophy.
The trophies help you to progress and become stronger more quickly, they help you to finish more missions in a day, to be more successful in the Temple etc. Ok, there’s a downside to it in that the more trophies you have, the weaker you are in studio fights, even though it can be reduced by the trophy stickers to a certain degree. The weaker you are the less likely you are to hold the trophies... But who will take them from you, if there’s only a bunch of studios who are progressing at the fastest rate and constantly getting stronger than all the rest? It’s a never ending spiral of success and most of these new game features, even if I like them, only amplify it. For example, the studio that gets the most diamonds in the Temple can buy the new mission booster the most easily which in turn helps them to become even stronger in the Temple.
You also have the option to keep a certain trophy mix in your possession, use it to your maximum advantage and after a while release a particular trophy or replace it with another that is more effective, so in the long-term you gain much more than you lose.
And I do get that there’s a lot of work behind it, that the trophies don’t just fall out of the sky, but you have to earn them. You have to be active, invest real money etc., but as I said, after a while you find yourself in a spiral of success, where you don’t have to do more than other people playing the game, but get much more in return for your effort... Yeah, if you put in enough of an effort as a player, the top studios will notice you after a certain time a invite you to join them, but this only solidifies the hegemony of the already superior studios and weakens the competition in the game.
A thing to consider by developers would be to introduce more trophies, so that it would be impossible for the top studios to hold them all. Maybe the individual trophies could even offer various degrees of advantage (i.e. 20 extra energy vs. 10 extra energy) and the penalty rate could be determined by the individual characteristics of a studio (just like a progressive tax rate). I don’t want to take the trophies from the top studios, but it could be fun for the weaker ones, if they had something to fight for and compete with each other in their own “lightweight” category as well…
That one extra film a day could equal 40 energy (2 energy trophies).
If that one is a SP film, the Film Trophy gets you more than the energy Trophies, yes.
But I'd prefer having a steady, stable supply of extra energy over making one extra film a day.
And I do think most people in the top studios would agree.
The thing is that we’re not talking only about the advantage that comes from more energy here… As I said previously, the movie trophy gives the individual players a significant boost in the BBAs if it in fact does increase the visibility of their covers by 70%. There’s a potential flip side to it too, though... If the other players recognize your advantage and the higher amount of repeated sucess that comes from it, they might just decide to vote against you, just like some players prefer to vote for their team mates regardless of the cover quality...
I know that I’m starting to get annoyed by the same looking covers of a couple of people that started to appear at the top all the time recently. Not gonna name anyone (I will just say that it isn’t someone from B&H – I genuinely like most of the successful covers that you guys produce 
), don’t know if other people really like those covers so much or if there’s some voting manipulation involved, but I’m not happy with this trend and how other, in my oppinion better looking covers don’t get the deserved rewards and recognition because of it.
Edited by Amberson, 11 July 2017 - 14:24 PM.
