Alliance AW vs AQ

Parfanity

I am the leader of a Gold 3 Alliance. Have been noticing a lot of Alliances making war optional, and focusing on AQ as the rewards are obviously better than AW rewards. Some of my members are discussing the idea, and currently some of our stronger members are pushing for it.

Can someone explain to me what would be the pros and cons of taking a backseat on AW and only focusing on AQ.

Also, how long is a AW Season typically ? Because one idea I have for those members who want war to be optional is only doing 1 war a week, possibly 2 up to 5. Since 5 wars is all you need to get season rewards? Correct ?

Any help would be appreciated.

spaceoctopus

We've gone down to 1 BG wars all the time. At gold 3 your looking at getting one war season crystal, which (on average) nets you 1k t5b shards and 1k t2a shards. Most alliances can get about 10k t5b shards from the glory store in the same time it takes to run a full season (4 weeks with a 2 week break).

DNA3000

Parfanity wrote: »

Can someone explain to me what would be the pros and cons of taking a backseat on AW and only focusing on AQ.

In my opinion, the bottom line is cost/benefit plus a little psychology. The simple thing is: an activity in the game is worth it (in terms of rewards: you could do something just for fun) if the amount of stuff you put in is less than the stuff you take out. If you do Uncollected with zero potions the rewards are well worth it. If you spend thousands of units to try to complete it every month, it might not be worth it.

Both AQ and AW have rewards and costs. But for most alliances, the psychological pressure to perform in AQ is lower, relative to AW. In AQ, your players basically have to outplay their own prestige. In other words, the difficulty of any AQ map depends on your alliance prestige. That does go up over time, but for the most part AQ is about as difficult this week as it will be next week. You can get used to that. You can even "outlevel" it sometimes, becoming strong enough relative to your alliance's map difficulty that AQ becomes easy. Even if it does, it doesn't really get any harder. You can kick back, run AQ, and collect those rewards. If it is difficult for you today, you can get better tomorrow and it will get easier over time.

AW isn't like that for most players. There's more pressure to perform in a lot of alliances. AW can vary wildly in difficulty from one war to the next, depending on the strength of your opponent. And it is very difficult to get comfortable with AW, because unlike with AQ the reward for getting better is winning more often, and that means stronger opponents. War tries to match alliances that are similar in strength, and while it doesn't always succeed it does so quite often. If you're always fighting alliances of similar strength, you can never relax. It will always been a tough 50/50 fight. And while an alliance can do Map 5x5 and complete it 100% every time, in AW someone wins and someone else loses. Every day that wars are fought, half the alliances lose no matter how good they are or how much they spend.

You can make AW *exactly* like AQ. Just be willing to lose. Don't spend, or set a budget for all your players, and if they max out on the potion budget just be willing to give up and lose that war. If you do, AW can be just as "worth it" as AQ. Even more worth it, because the funny thing is that you have to perform in AQ or you don't get any rewards but win or lose you always get *something* in AW.

Thing is: most people can't do that. They can't just walk away from a war and lose. Everyone has to try to win, and when you're trying harder, your opponent is also going to try harder. That's what makes war often not worth the effort. You and your opponents can theoretically put unlimited effort into winning a single war whose rewards do not go up just because you both spend a fortune. And that's why AW is often not worth it.

Parfanity

Wow thanks for the response.