New Alliance Medals: Suggestions and Observations

Consider how much prestige was given out in the last tournament. 100 prestige each to 100 players in an alliance is 10,000 prestige in total for the alliance - only a small fraction of that is required to mint badges and reward the players who made the most difference. You could also expect future alliance tournaments to reward sums of prestige to the alliance pool.

If every player contribute 1 prestige each, that will be 100 prestige - which can be used to award 2 players. The idea of the medals is to honour a few players that an alliance wants to honour, not to give out badges to all players.

If a player sets out to "buy" a medal by setting up an alliance and minting and awarding a badge for himself, it is expensive. But it still wouldn't be prestigious like a medal awarded by a well known alliance like Invictus or RES.

Imbuing medals with magical properties is a dangerous leap, because it would be a form of pay-to-win. Increasing your numerical advantage in-game by spending real world money must be done very carefully. Ofcourse this is already in-game via spending prestige to increase attack power, so maybe it doesn't matter. 

The price of the medals seems appropriate and right. The main concern here is that you can only earn 1 prestige a day per player without spending money. Almost seems like a slap to the face for any players that don't spend money. I think the whole community would appreciate additional ways to acquire prestige. I think weekly alliance achievements that reward alliance pool prestige would go over extreamly well. Examples: 

• 90% of Alliance members complete 5 quests in each of their towns within 7 days. - Reward (2 x #of Members) Alliance Prestige
• Alliance population grows by 20%(Total population of all alliance members 7 days ago/Total population of all alliance members today) in 7 days - Reward  (2 x #of Members)  Alliance prestige
• Alliance land owned grows by 20% - Reward  (2 x #of Members)  alliance prestige
• Geomancy production spells stay on alliance towns for 90% of the 7 days - Reward  (1 x #of Members) Alliance Prestige
• Runic Protection stays on alliance towns for 90% of the 7 days. Reward  (1 x #of Members) Alliance Prestige

I am not forsure how to incorporate diplomatic and military goals into these reward system, but I think these achievements/weeklys  would encourage gameplay and co-operation within alliances. Alliance would have a means to earn alliance prestige without paying for it, and any alliance that decides they would like prestige faster/easier can purchase it the old fashioned way. 

Also these weekly's must be semi-difficult to attain. This isn't like the 1 a day prestige that is given. These prestige points must be earned.  This effectively gives each alliance member responsibility to do their share of the work to ensure prestige gets apointed. It would then be up to the alliance leaders on how to handle those that aren't carrying their weight. It also gives a way for alliances to harass each other by sabotaging their efforts to earn the free prestige. 

Our alliance is concerned about the cost but I absolutely understand Albatross's points about the fact that these things cost, and also gameplayer's point about the fact that the medals should be something which is prized.

The problem for me and my alliance mates is that the factor which is being used to make this prized is ultimately 'money'. This is understandable as I understand the concept of people not working for free and I think we should support the game. But if you have an alliance which worked off free accounts they could get by keeping their account as a prestige account by claiming free prestige... they would have very little left to donate to medals and the like. In order to be competitive on a free to play account you do need to ensure your account is a prestige one so that you can build effectively.

So, it boils down to money as the rate limiting factor on whether an alliance can 'afford' to buy medals or not. And once other alliance prestige spends come into play this will be the case increasingly so. I do think a balance needs to be struck and I would honestly like to hear from the developers to understand why they have priced it in the way that they have, because I personally think the costs are pretty extortionate... but I may have a different understanding with some explanation.

I do think the medals are brilliant and maybe we could think about alternative ways of paying for them? Prestige is one way. There are also resources, gold etc... which could pay for medals and make them equally difficult to get for an alliance without having to go down the prestige path.

Will we be using them in Invictus?

I'm not sure, to be honest... we would love to as we have developed a new ranking and reward system for our alliance which acknowledges a range of different aspects of play and we were hoping we could attach medals to this system.