The power distribution doesn't really change significantly over time and there's no real fight for the very top position(s). The subtop studios keep switching positions depending on who leaves or joins at the moment... You see one studio rise to a certain position, then they loose some crucial members and fall down and maybe later they manage to gain a few reinforcements and rise again... But overall, these are all only cosmetic power shifts... Biggest changes actually happen when some studio dissolves altogether.
What could really help to pour some new energy into the status quo would be the introduction of proper studio merges that would offer an actual incentive for different groups of players to stop playing in their own little sandboxes and instead band together to create something greater.
How to make this happen? Well, that’s what this thread is here for - to offer some ideas and suggestions how to make such a prospect viable, attractive and fair. At the moment, merging means to let one studio die out or to try to keep running both studios by either relegating one to the position of an inferior "farm team" or through shuffling the players around periodically. None of these options are optimal. What this game needs is some sort of mechanics that would allow a true merge into one unit without anyone feeling like they had to give up something....
One suggestion might be to allow the newly merged studio to support a bigger rooster than a regular studio can - let's say of 40 or up to 50 members. Of course, there would have to be some kind of penalty to compensate for the higher number of members. This could take the form of both a permanent skill point penalty in studio fights and also a penalty on Temple points collected (either on an individual or overall level).
Allowing the individual studios to somewhat keep their own identity even during their stay in the alliance could make the prospect even more enticing. This could be achieved by letting the merged studios have 2 separate private "chambers" with their own roosters, chats, visual layout etc. On top of that, there could be a main "hall" for everyone to mingle in and also to represent the alliance outwards (this would be the page that every other visitor would see with the whole rooster and common studio name + visuals). The chamber system would also allow for the individual studios to split again at any time into their own units.
Anyway, this is only one of different possible suggestions that I came up with just now in order to give different groups of people some actual motivation to merge and thus make the game more competitive... But this thread is open for any other and better ideas.
Edited by Amberson, 09 June 2018 - 16:08 PM.