2 changes made to war system, both involved buffs to nodes.
After the 1st time you buffed nodes pages among pages were argued that we needed changes to the scoring system. Please point out the changes you made that were from the majority feedback to show us you are listening.
The node changes were directly linked to players being worried that their rosters were no longer useful in Alliance Wars because of Diversity. This pointed to a problem where the Map was not providing enough of a challenge, so that Defender Diversity was making the decisions on who won, and not acting as the tie breaker.
As we said, we're still looking into more revisions that may need to be made after, but this was based on your guys feedback.
"Based on your guys feedback" ..and where can we see this feedback? Because nothing i have read in this huge thread of nagative feedback relates to the changes you are making.
Defender diversity being the deciding factor is taking skill out the game. We play in tier 1 and 100% all 3 groups most wars. Most of the time we lose because the 12m+ alliances we face have higher defender rating. You think making it harder will change things? No. Alliances have resources to use which allows them to 100% all bg's...which still gives you the same problem!!
This is why defender kills should return. It brings skill back into the contest and gives the alliances with a lower defender rating a chance of winning against bigger alliances. There needs to be other factors that determine the winner other than "who has the bigger wallet".
Who comes up with these ideas?? Listen to your players who know your game best.
It may be quite possible that I am focusing on the lesser of two evils ATM. The first(my primary concern list) is the fact that in 2017,
1) we have been tormented by constant bugs occurring and taking much longer to correct them(still some that sit unresolved) than anticipated, while new content continues to be rolled out, to be immediately discovered that new bugs and glitches are popping up.
2) changes to game mechanics without any notice
3) announcments being fairly consistently made that contradict information previously given
4) actions taken on player accts both game and forum without any prior notice nor reasons given
5) announcements made with the Boss Rush intro this week that stated CR is following the games standard progression, that when exposed to be incorrect and request made for some clarity, no response whatsoever. When finally someone comes forward and makes a statement, its along the lines of a simple "my bad, everything is following the status quo", which is debatable whether that is even correct.
6) the questionable "inclusion to the fix process", of suggestions made by the majority player base sharing the same views do not appear to have been included or considered at all.
And my second concern is AW and the current snafu with scoring and the tweaking(which is still ongoing after 2wks) of it into a bland uninspiring waste of time of the one last saving grace of MCOC for many players I know because of the fact it includes the continued cooperation with our alliance mates(friends for many).
Put it simply, there has been too much consistency in the display of substandard levels of quality control and unprofessionalism interacting with the player base(customers) whether we spend currency or not, everyone who has a valid acct is a customer and many of us are spending currency for a service we chose and its my opinion that we deserve better than what we have been given this year. Customer relations is a direct extension/reflection of a quality product/service, and it may be time to reevaluate where the game, forums, and everyone involved stands.
Everyone is being foolish thinking their comments will make any difference and actually get defender kills or any iteration of that to come back. I'm sure kabam understands the logic of why defender kills should be added back, it's common sense, but they will keep refusing to address it until the $ causes them to. They obviously must be making more money in the new version of war so why change it back in their minds. The only thing that will make a difference is if all the players unite for another boycott mcoc for at least AW. Money is the only thing that talks to them, and until the players stop spending, kabam will only keep trying to push out new versions to delay or convolute the issue.
Kabam - I do not know whether you are familiar with the business idiom "Pigs get fat, hogs get slaughtered" but you have recently gone down the path of the latter, which is a dangerous place to wander.
See you guys THINK that everyone hates the new system but really the only people on here are the ones that hate it. The people that like it don't come on here and they just play cuz they have no problem with the new system.
So don't think that EVERYONE hates the new update. Cuz that's not true
Stop changing everything all the time. We enjoy playing, but these days you have to spend a bunch of money just to compete. I thought this was a free game?
You guys make it harder for alliances that doesn’t spend to compete with big pocket alliances.
Stop changing everything all the time. We enjoy playing, but these days you have to spend a bunch of money just to compete. I thought this was a free game?
You guys make it harder for alliances that doesn’t spend to compete with big pocket alliances.
Stop changing everything all the time. We enjoy playing, but these days you have to spend a bunch of money just to compete. I thought this was a free game?
You guys make it harder for alliances that doesn’t spend to compete with big pocket alliances.
it is free to play. doesn't mean you can win everything though.
Ok if Kabam won't bring back defender kills, would it be possible to include a mechanic to alter how many points an attacking kill gets? For example, if you kill them without getting KO, you get 75 pts, 50 if you lose one champ, 25 if you lose 2, 0 pts if you lose three or more fights to the defender. This reintroduces skilled play to aw and gives a better tiebreaker than defender rating or diversity. The point values aren't gamebreaking, but still makes alliances think about placing diversity vs "good" defenders. There is still incentive to push for 100% and the boss kills because that's where the real points are, but creates a mechanism for getting there as efficiently as possible.
At this point, I'm just repeating myself, and I've explained my view. I'm offering my opinion through the reference of what I support and what I do not. 3 I've already explained that I would have to know more about it, but I'm concerned it may be the same. I've explained this 3 times now. 4 is absolutely related to 1. Bringing Defender Kills and having them take effect after the first 3 Champs are used means one must use Items, unless there is another way to use more than 3 Champs I am unfamiliar with. Ergo, penalty for having to use Items, compounded by Defender Kills. There are some suggestions I am intrigued by, some I would want to know more, and some I am not for because they are variants that have the same effect. I am not in support of those aspects, and I will see a spin because the end result is the same.
Bottom line is, I do not support any penalty for Item Use or Defender Kills. They could make those the defining metrics tomorrow, and I would still not support it. I would play, obviously. I wouldn't be in support of it. I'm really not interested in going over it again. I said I was considering my own suggestions, and I offered my view based on my thoughts. I'm pretty sure it was as clear as possible.
This posted twice because I edited the first one and it went into Moderation, so I had to retype.
Any change to scoring that takes attacker effectiveness into account is simply defender kills in different words. Reducing attacker kill points for failing gives you less points. This is the same as giving you no points and the enemy some points, you could have it bottom out at 0 and not actually change the score, but for every fight the opponent does better they receive more points. It might help on a node that becomes a tough roadblock while the rest of the bg clears fine, but the net result is the same. The less nodes you fail on the more points you get. The more nodes they fail on the fewer Points they get.
It's all interchangeable variations on the same theme: offensive effectiveness needs to count in some way. And this requires adjusting the score based on success vs. failure.
Any change to scoring that takes attacker effectiveness into account is simply defender kills in different words. Reducing attacker kill points for failing gives you less points. This is the same as giving you no points and the enemy some points, you could have it bottom out at 0 and not actually change the score, but for every fight the opponent does better they receive more points. It might help on a node that becomes a tough roadblock while the rest of the bg clears fine, but the net result is the same. The less nodes you fail on the more points you get. The more nodes they fail on the fewer Points they get.
It's all interchangeable variations on the same theme: offensive effectiveness needs to count in some way. And this requires adjusting the score based on success vs. failure.
I thought about that too, and I see what you're saying. But I think it's a different mindset as an attacker when choosing whether to spend items to push forward or not. One of the main reasons they removed def kills was they didn't want people to get discouraged about giving the other team points and just give up. Here there's an upper limit to the maximum number of points lost (given to the other team, however you want to look at it) so I think people would be more inclined to keep trying because the value of each node explored is worth the points lost on the kill, especially if it leads to a boss kill.
Alternatively, make it a bonus point category. Leave attacker kills at 50 or whatever it is now and give however many points for "attacker efficiency" or something like that.
I'm beyond frustrated with AW now, it was fine and working and you guys broke it for no player driven reason, now you are gradually making it more of a frustration-fest.
The whole point was to remove frustrating insta-kills, instead you go down the route of adding **** like bane nodes, have you lost the plot of what we are after? Just add in slashed tyres, caltrops and thorns and make me really hate your map, just get it done instead of death by 1000 cuts.
Addition of nodes like power shield however, fantastic! actually interesting and great for specific champs, well done, thankyou.
Here are some actual good ideas, please pick something and do it
Start the map with 5 energy and the ability to hold 7 energy. Its not AQ, me logging in every hour shoudnt be a requirement, its as boring as hell.
Reduce travel on the map, I want a fight every single tile/unit of energy I use, no waste, no faffing I want to actually fight for once.
Ramp up all nodes to have at least +200% health and attack across the map, I want fights that can timeout, currently only the boss fights are fun, everything else is a waste of time and junk (also remove half health timeout penalty and make it strategic, i lose my health down to 75%, 50%, 25% depending on which threshold I'm nearest, below 25% is half health.)
Bring back defender kills points
Reduce the value of diversity points
A new metric which rewards point at very low value for each point of health removed from the enemy defence team made by our attackers
Actually buff old champs so they aren't complete garbage if you want to make us use them, either that or delete them from the game, give owners compensation and re-introduce them as reworked improved characters that aren't awful and a waste of my time and effort collecting them. The game has moved on from 2 years ago.
Instead of giving 4 star shards, give glory and add to the glory store class specific 4 star shards chosen by the player so an actual incentive to win. I currently simply do not care about any new 5 or 4 star champions, I have enough heroes and half on them are garbage, I want to aim for the interesting ones for something to do.
for more that I read all the complete thread I do not find nadien asking to modify nodes and increasing its difficulty. all the latest modifications from where they come from? if they say they listen to the opinions of the community and are attentive to make this war more fun ????. the only thing I see is increase the difficulty to invest and spend objects and I do not see nadien asking for that but I read the whole thread. every time you see the difficulty and the rewards continue to be the same !!! what is the kabam strategy ??
its all smoke and mirrors to appease the masses, behind the scenes there doing what ever they feel like regardless of the feedback. No one has asked for what they have done, but were told we did. The only conclusion that can be drawn is their asking for our feedback to make us think we have a say in the process, but really its not even being considered as they already have there own plans and there just trying to ease the backlash by pretending their listening
i mean it seems pretty cut and dry, uddles of feedback has been provided over the last few weeks, but yet the updates have contained none of it.
Like a few others have said, its a waste of time even being in this thread, i believe the only reason this thread still exists is because they want us to vent in here to keep it contained, its is clearly not being used for feedback
So i am worried as all of us of the current situation in AW.I read a few comments from the past pages as well, @DNA3000 comments are the ones who caught my eye(as always!).Regarding the comment with the suggestions,I totally agree as the rest say that the basic problem is that we need a metric to value our defence and skills.That said i still believe the best way is the DEFENDER KILLS!!
To explain this i will compare it with the proposed suggestions by DNA:
--- [edited to fit posting limits] ---
To Conclude i like the suggestions from everyone ,and i mostly agree with DNA comments.I am not trying to neutralise his/her proposals but i am trying to point why(in my opinion) Defender Kills are and always will be the Fairest way to measure the skills of each Alliance and award a winner!!!
The point of those suggestions was not to necessarily claim any of them are intrinsically better than defender kills, it was to propose alternatives to defender kills that did not have the one property that @Kabam Miike stated was problematic with defender kills: in some circumstances defender kill points can discourage a player from using attackers that are still alive.
@Kabam Miike in a different post confirmed that it was still the valid objective of Alliance War that the opposing alliance should attempt to "stop" the other alliance from progressing on the map. So Kabam is not, as some people have suggested, trying to deliberately engineer AW so that both sides can attack with impunity. They just do not want players to give up while they actually have viable attackers remaining.
All of these suggestions are in some sense equivalent to defender kills, in the sense that all benefits accrued to one side are de facto penalties on the other side. The 20,000 points we get for a boss kill is in effect a 20,000 point penalty on the other side for failing to stop us from killing their battlegroup boss. But all of these suggestions contain the property that so long as an attacker has live defenders there is no reason to stop fighting. Fundamentally you can do this in one of two distinct ways. First, you can make the points the attacker gets for defeating a node a function of the attacker's performance. In this way, the "penalty" is hidden within the attacker kill points. Since dying on a node only reduces the value of the node, but the value is zero if the player doesn't actually kill it anyway it is never a good idea to stop attacking. If you die, the node value is reduced, but if you stop the node value is zero. The obvious choice is to continue attacking.
Second, you can give credit for defender kills but not at the moment the attacker dies. For example, if Kabam doesn't want players to give up while the attacker still has live attackers then you can apply a penalty only if the player revives an attacker. In effect that delays the defender kill penalty until everything is dead.
And something i wanted to add,changing the nodes of the map to add difficulty is a good first step.I am also not sure why there was so much whining about Thorns,i mean yes electro was mostly placed there but yet again with a champ decreasing defending ability you could still come out of it with very little damage taken,and that was quite like facing a duped Dormammu(not on a boss node where you will eventually die) .Took this specific example to explain that some tough nodes(even annoying ones) might give champs even more utility so we won't choose the same set of attackers in each war.Lastly I had also saw a previous comment(some days ago) from DNA again about buffing nodes and that it would be like searching a number above 9 and lower than 5.Thats true but only if you had to use the same number for the lower tier maps as well as the higher ones.I believe that they can found way to buff the node as needed to provide the necessary completion in lower maps and buff them in different ways for the higher maps!
The problem with buffing nodes isn't in buffing nodes, it is in trying to *only* buff nodes. Let's try an analogy. Let's say we want to have a race to see which one of us is the faster runner. To do this, we need a distance to run and something to time us. Whoever has the better time wins. Simple enough. But we have two decisions to make: what distance do we run, and how do we measure our race times.
If we make the distance too short it will be too difficult to tell who's faster. If the race is held over ten feet, then our times will be so close together that the winner could just be whichever one of us got the better time on the stopwatch because the person clocking us twitched faster on that race. You can't easily tell the difference between 1.056 seconds and 1.062 seconds. Conversely if the race is five thousand miles, it will also be difficult to tell who is faster because the winner will be the person that sleeps less, not the one that runs faster. We need an appropriate distance to run that is long enough to easily tell who runs faster, but not so long that our running speed isn't the most important factor. In the same way, if we want to make an Alliance War in which the most skilled alliance attackers generally win, we need a war in which it is hard enough to complete the map that we can tell the difference between two attackers, but not so hard that it crushes both and attacking skill is no longer the dominant factor: luck and potions become the dominant factor. Difficulty is important: it cannot be too hard, and it also cannot be too easy. Right now I think it is a little too easy (prior to the next set of changes).
But the other thing we need is a way to measure run times. A stop watch makes sense: it is very accurate. If we take the stopwatch away and force someone to count seconds aloud, the accuracy of our times gets worse and someone can win even if they are not the fastest runner, just because his time is better due to inaccurate time counting. And what if we don't even allow the time keeper to count, we just ask them to tell us who *looks* faster when they watch them? Then it gets even worse: the guy that looks faster wins even if they aren't actually faster.
This is what happens when you take away defender kills and don't replace them with something. We can no longer tell as easily who is the better attacker because we took the stopwatch away. If both runners finish the race at all within the time limit, they are "equally fast."
You need a good task to judge a competition on, and you need a good way to measure that competition quantitatively. The map nodes provide half the baseline competition (and defender placement, crippled by diversity points, provides the other half of that). Boss kills, map explore, and defender kills provide the metrics to measure the competition. You want good nodes and good points, just like you want a good race track and a good stopwatch.
So when I say that tweaking nodes won't solve the competition problem alone, what I'm saying is that if you take the stopwatch away, no amount of adjusting the size of the racetrack will make the actual racing competition any better. Kabam is trying to find a racetrack in which it is so obvious who is faster that we don't really need to clock them, we can just watch them cross the finish line and know who's faster. Does that seem like it has any chance to work?
See you guys THINK that everyone hates the new system but really the only people on here are the ones that hate it. The people that like it don't come on here and they just play cuz they have no problem with the new system.
So don't think that EVERYONE hates the new update. Cuz that's not true
I think there are people that like the current system for various reasons. But I predicted that most of the people that liked the 15.0 changes would come to dislike the system eventually for a couple of reasons I predicted.
1. I said that some players would like the new system because the nodes were made so easy that it would become easier to complete the maps, and players not interested in strong direct competition would like that aspect of it. But I also predicted that the very ease of the new system would combine with defender diversity making maps too easy and Kabam would react by increasing the map difficulty to be even higher than it originally was in 14.0. MMO developers are very predictable in this regard.
2. I said that some players would like the new system because it would eliminate or reduce the likelihood that they would face multiple copies of the hardest defenders. But I predicted that many of these people would come to hate the natural evolution of AW that the system forced: the only way the system could censor out duplicate strong defenders was by forcing alliances to place maximally diverse defenses, and the only way to do that was through very strong almost dictatorial placement management. Players were going to be straight up told what to place. Alliances that didn't do this would start to lose until they either adopted this strategy or fell far enough down the tiers to meet up with much weaker foes (and get much lower rewards).
These shifts take time, and Kabam is constantly changing AW as these shifts are happening. The one thing I can say to people who like AW now, is that AW won't remain looking like it does now: Kabam is already changing things in ways the people who liked easier wars are going to start to detest, and the other alliances are still adjusting to the new meta.
Last 10 wars of ours have been decided by small margin of points based on ONLY defender base rating difference, either on our favor or against us. I feel like the game loses its challenge and it is becoming quite easy and not much fun anymore. I don't come to forums often but here I am and just wanted raise my voice as a community member.
Hope the game will become more fun and competitive.
Sincerely,
D.
See you guys THINK that everyone hates the new system but really the only people on here are the ones that hate it. The people that like it don't come on here and they just play cuz they have no problem with the new system.
So don't think that EVERYONE hates the new update. Cuz that's not true
I think there are people that like the current system for various reasons. But I predicted that most of the people that liked the 15.0 changes would come to dislike the system eventually for a couple of reasons I predicted.
1. I said that some players would like the new system because the nodes were made so easy that it would become easier to complete the maps, and players not interested in strong direct competition would like that aspect of it. But I also predicted that the very ease of the new system would combine with defender diversity making maps too easy and Kabam would react by increasing the map difficulty to be even higher than it originally was in 14.0. MMO developers are very predictable in this regard.
2. I said that some players would like the new system because it would eliminate or reduce the likelihood that they would face multiple copies of the hardest defenders. But I predicted that many of these people would come to hate the natural evolution of AW that the system forced: the only way the system could censor out duplicate strong defenders was by forcing alliances to place maximally diverse defenses, and the only way to do that was through very strong almost dictatorial placement management. Players were going to be straight up told what to place. Alliances that didn't do this would start to lose until they either adopted this strategy or fell far enough down the tiers to meet up with much weaker foes (and get much lower rewards).
These shifts take time, and Kabam is constantly changing AW as these shifts are happening. The one thing I can say to people who like AW now, is that AW won't remain looking like it does now: Kabam is already changing things in ways the people who liked easier wars are going to start to detest, and the other alliances are still adjusting to the new meta.
I’m actually quite curious as to what you believe kabam is trying to achieve, what do you think their end game is at the end of all of thos
I’m actually quite curious as to what you believe kabam is trying to achieve, what do you think their end game is at the end of all of thos
Kabam is, as most MMO developers are, extremely opaque in general. But I can make a guess based on the facts available and my understanding of how MMO companies in general work.
The most important thing to an F2P MMO company isn't actually money, at least not directly. It is engagement. They need more people joining the game every day and they need to engage them (and the existing players) once they have them. Engagement is a catch-all term that basically means "make them want to play as much as possible." Anything that helps engagement is a good thing in general, anything that hurts engagement is a bad thing in general (there are always exceptions to the rule of course). MMO monetization experts have a ton of spreadsheets that tell them that if they get this many players and their retention rate is this number and the overall engagement metrics are this or that, then they will ultimately earn some amount of money on average from those players. Cash is the result, but engagement (and player count) is the actual target.
Why does Kabam seem to be so concerned about players "giving up" during AW? Because it hurts engagement. Every time a player decides to give up on a part of the game, that's a player you've come closer to losing. The developers probably want a competitive war, but the Powers That Be want every piece of the game to be engaging, or at least not disengaging.
The problem is that Kabam has now run into a problem every MMO eventually faces: true PvP. The arenas are kind of PvP and AQ rankings are kind of PvP, but AW is much more direct PvP. The only thing more direct would be face off duels which I don't think the game technology can support (I believe a dev at NYCC confirmed this). PvP is intrinsically disengaging, because it pits some players against other players. AQ is more cooperative than competitive. Most of your interactions with the game in AQ are to cooperate with your alliance mates. You are only competing with other players in a vague sense. But In AW you are being challenged on offense by the defensive placement the other alliance is trying to use to literally knock you out of the game. That's what direct PvP is.
I don't think Kabam understands this as a company. I'm sure individual devs do. But the company as a whole looks to be trying to do the impossible: create a universally engaging direct competition.
If they figure out how to do that, they'll be the first ones on Earth to do that, because I think that's impossible. Head to head competition is by definition disengaging, because the objective in a head to head competition (that's anything remotely like how MCOC works) is for one side to stop the other side from making progress, which ultimately means getting them to stop playing the game (at least that part of it).
What do I think Kabam is trying to achieve? The TL;DR answer to your question is: I think they are trying to achieve the impossible. They need to decide if there is a place for head to head competition in MCOC. If the answer is yes, they need to bring back elements of AW that are disengaging, like defender kills (or a palatable variation thereof). If the answer is no, they should really scrap the idea of AW and work on making AQ a better experience.
Incidentally, I'm sure it will occur to someone to ask, if engagement is so important, why piss off all of us? Because we are a tiny, tiny, tiny subset of players. Everyone that posts on the forums and the subreddit combined is probably less than 1% of the playerbase. When Kabam says they are concerned about players giving up, I'm sure they have a report that says 31% of all alliance wars end with one side having at least 4 players with at least one live attacker that attempted to attack the current node once and then never again. That sort of thing. MMO development groups don't guess, and they don't act on anecdotes alone. They act on datamining, and on the statistics their game engine gives them. Sometimes those reports are misleading or incomplete, but that's what they generally act upon.
Anyway, that's my theory on what's going on. Illogical, but not inexplicable.
@DNA3000
If that's the case then they should do what Quickshot Gaming said... bring defender kills back to the "expert tiers" of AW. This way they can satisfy us hardcore MCOCers with a skill based scoring system and also keep their engaging quota with the bottom tiers
There's no point in providing feedback here, they aren't listening and don't care what you think as evidenced by 113 pages of negative feedback. We had a similar outrage when 12.0 released and they just did damage control with shiny objects. As soon as the next great thing came out, people stopped talking about it.
To Conclude i like the suggestions from everyone ,and i mostly agree with DNA comments.I am not trying to neutralise his/her proposals but i am trying to point why(in my opinion) Defender Kills are and always will be the Fairest way to measure the skills of each Alliance and award a winner!!!
The point of those suggestions was not to necessarily claim any of them are intrinsically better than defender kills, it was to propose alternatives to defender kills that did not have the one property that @Kabam Miike stated was problematic with defender kills: in some circumstances defender kill points can discourage a player from using attackers that are still alive.
@Kabam Miike in a different post confirmed that it was still the valid objective of Alliance War that the opposing alliance should attempt to "stop" the other alliance from progressing on the map. So Kabam is not, as some people have suggested, trying to deliberately engineer AW so that both sides can attack with impunity. They just do not want players to give up while they actually have viable attackers remaining.
All of these suggestions are in some sense equivalent to defender kills, in the sense that all benefits accrued to one side are de facto penalties on the other side. The 20,000 points we get for a boss kill is in effect a 20,000 point penalty on the other side for failing to stop us from killing their battlegroup boss. But all of these suggestions contain the property that so long as an attacker has live defenders there is no reason to stop fighting. Fundamentally you can do this in one of two distinct ways. First, you can make the points the attacker gets for defeating a node a function of the attacker's performance. In this way, the "penalty" is hidden within the attacker kill points. Since dying on a node only reduces the value of the node, but the value is zero if the player doesn't actually kill it anyway it is never a good idea to stop attacking. If you die, the node value is reduced, but if you stop the node value is zero. The obvious choice is to continue attacking.
Second, you can give credit for defender kills but not at the moment the attacker dies. For example, if Kabam doesn't want players to give up while the attacker still has live attackers then you can apply a penalty only if the player revives an attacker. In effect that delays the defender kill penalty until everything is dead.
And something i wanted to add,changing the nodes of the map to add difficulty is a good first step.I am also not sure why there was so much whining about Thorns,i mean yes electro was mostly placed there but yet again with a champ decreasing defending ability you could still come out of it with very little damage taken,and that was quite like facing a duped Dormammu(not on a boss node where you will eventually die) .Took this specific example to explain that some tough nodes(even annoying ones) might give champs even more utility so we won't choose the same set of attackers in each war.Lastly I had also saw a previous comment(some days ago) from DNA again about buffing nodes and that it would be like searching a number above 9 and lower than 5.Thats true but only if you had to use the same number for the lower tier maps as well as the higher ones.I believe that they can found way to buff the node as needed to provide the necessary completion in lower maps and buff them in different ways for the higher maps!
The problem with buffing nodes isn't in buffing nodes, it is in trying to *only* buff nodes. Let's try an analogy. Let's say we want to have a race to see which one of us is the faster runner. To do this, we need a distance to run and something to time us. Whoever has the better time wins. Simple enough. But we have two decisions to make: what distance do we run, and how do we measure our race times.
If we make the distance too short it will be too difficult to tell who's faster. If the race is held over ten feet, then our times will be so close together that the winner could just be whichever one of us got the better time on the stopwatch because the person clocking us twitched faster on that race. You can't easily tell the difference between 1.056 seconds and 1.062 seconds. Conversely if the race is five thousand miles, it will also be difficult to tell who is faster because the winner will be the person that sleeps less, not the one that runs faster. We need an appropriate distance to run that is long enough to easily tell who runs faster, but not so long that our running speed isn't the most important factor. In the same way, if we want to make an Alliance War in which the most skilled alliance attackers generally win, we need a war in which it is hard enough to complete the map that we can tell the difference between two attackers, but not so hard that it crushes both and attacking skill is no longer the dominant factor: luck and potions become the dominant factor. Difficulty is important: it cannot be too hard, and it also cannot be too easy. Right now I think it is a little too easy (prior to the next set of changes).
But the other thing we need is a way to measure run times. A stop watch makes sense: it is very accurate. If we take the stopwatch away and force someone to count seconds aloud, the accuracy of our times gets worse and someone can win even if they are not the fastest runner, just because his time is better due to inaccurate time counting. And what if we don't even allow the time keeper to count, we just ask them to tell us who *looks* faster when they watch them? Then it gets even worse: the guy that looks faster wins even if they aren't actually faster.
This is what happens when you take away defender kills and don't replace them with something. We can no longer tell as easily who is the better attacker because we took the stopwatch away. If both runners finish the race at all within the time limit, they are "equally fast."
You need a good task to judge a competition on, and you need a good way to measure that competition quantitatively. The map nodes provide half the baseline competition (and defender placement, crippled by diversity points, provides the other half of that). Boss kills, map explore, and defender kills provide the metrics to measure the competition. You want good nodes and good points, just like you want a good race track and a good stopwatch.
So when I say that tweaking nodes won't solve the competition problem alone, what I'm saying is that if you take the stopwatch away, no amount of adjusting the size of the racetrack will make the actual racing competition any better. Kabam is trying to find a racetrack in which it is so obvious who is faster that we don't really need to clock them, we can just watch them cross the finish line and know who's faster. Does that seem like it has any chance to work?
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My god!!DNA3000 I Agree on everything you said and i really hope the Kabam guys notice your comments!!
I was sure you wanted to suggest and not to claim they are better solutions than defender kills,i just went on to explain why (in my opinion) defender kills is the best/fairest choice mostly for everyone watching these forums and of course the Kabam guys!Again Well done on saying everything in a perfect comment,and lets all hope they will understand what needs to be fix and do it right!!!
@DNA3000
If that's the case then they should do what Quickshot Gaming said... bring defender kills back to the "expert tiers" of AW. This way they can satisfy us hardcore MCOCers with a skill based scoring system and also keep their engaging quota with the bottom tiers
I suggested an alternative way back as a possibility, although I'm not 100% sure of the practicality of it. Make two events: AW current (15.0 rules) and AW classic (14.0 rules with defender kills). Call them AW standard and AW expert. Let alliances decide which one they want to participate in. If enough alliances participate in both, keep both for the players that like the harsher competition verses the ones that don't. This would require that enough alliances participate in both "brackets" to make them viable.
Comments
"Based on your guys feedback" ..and where can we see this feedback? Because nothing i have read in this huge thread of nagative feedback relates to the changes you are making.
Defender diversity being the deciding factor is taking skill out the game. We play in tier 1 and 100% all 3 groups most wars. Most of the time we lose because the 12m+ alliances we face have higher defender rating. You think making it harder will change things? No. Alliances have resources to use which allows them to 100% all bg's...which still gives you the same problem!!
This is why defender kills should return. It brings skill back into the contest and gives the alliances with a lower defender rating a chance of winning against bigger alliances. There needs to be other factors that determine the winner other than "who has the bigger wallet".
Who comes up with these ideas?? Listen to your players who know your game best.
1) we have been tormented by constant bugs occurring and taking much longer to correct them(still some that sit unresolved) than anticipated, while new content continues to be rolled out, to be immediately discovered that new bugs and glitches are popping up.
2) changes to game mechanics without any notice
3) announcments being fairly consistently made that contradict information previously given
4) actions taken on player accts both game and forum without any prior notice nor reasons given
5) announcements made with the Boss Rush intro this week that stated CR is following the games standard progression, that when exposed to be incorrect and request made for some clarity, no response whatsoever. When finally someone comes forward and makes a statement, its along the lines of a simple "my bad, everything is following the status quo", which is debatable whether that is even correct.
6) the questionable "inclusion to the fix process", of suggestions made by the majority player base sharing the same views do not appear to have been included or considered at all.
And my second concern is AW and the current snafu with scoring and the tweaking(which is still ongoing after 2wks) of it into a bland uninspiring waste of time of the one last saving grace of MCOC for many players I know because of the fact it includes the continued cooperation with our alliance mates(friends for many).
Put it simply, there has been too much consistency in the display of substandard levels of quality control and unprofessionalism interacting with the player base(customers) whether we spend currency or not, everyone who has a valid acct is a customer and many of us are spending currency for a service we chose and its my opinion that we deserve better than what we have been given this year. Customer relations is a direct extension/reflection of a quality product/service, and it may be time to reevaluate where the game, forums, and everyone involved stands.
Kabam - I do not know whether you are familiar with the business idiom "Pigs get fat, hogs get slaughtered" but you have recently gone down the path of the latter, which is a dangerous place to wander.
So don't think that EVERYONE hates the new update. Cuz that's not true
You guys make it harder for alliances that doesn’t spend to compete with big pocket alliances.
You thought wrong ke-mo sah-bee
Is...is this a joke? Netmarble owns both games, this game has gone downhill since Netmarble bought Kabam.
it is free to play. doesn't mean you can win everything though.
This posted twice because I edited the first one and it went into Moderation, so I had to retype.
It's all interchangeable variations on the same theme: offensive effectiveness needs to count in some way. And this requires adjusting the score based on success vs. failure.
I thought about that too, and I see what you're saying. But I think it's a different mindset as an attacker when choosing whether to spend items to push forward or not. One of the main reasons they removed def kills was they didn't want people to get discouraged about giving the other team points and just give up. Here there's an upper limit to the maximum number of points lost (given to the other team, however you want to look at it) so I think people would be more inclined to keep trying because the value of each node explored is worth the points lost on the kill, especially if it leads to a boss kill.
Alternatively, make it a bonus point category. Leave attacker kills at 50 or whatever it is now and give however many points for "attacker efficiency" or something like that.
The whole point was to remove frustrating insta-kills, instead you go down the route of adding **** like bane nodes, have you lost the plot of what we are after? Just add in slashed tyres, caltrops and thorns and make me really hate your map, just get it done instead of death by 1000 cuts.
Addition of nodes like power shield however, fantastic! actually interesting and great for specific champs, well done, thankyou.
Here are some actual good ideas, please pick something and do it
Start the map with 5 energy and the ability to hold 7 energy. Its not AQ, me logging in every hour shoudnt be a requirement, its as boring as hell.
Reduce travel on the map, I want a fight every single tile/unit of energy I use, no waste, no faffing I want to actually fight for once.
Ramp up all nodes to have at least +200% health and attack across the map, I want fights that can timeout, currently only the boss fights are fun, everything else is a waste of time and junk (also remove half health timeout penalty and make it strategic, i lose my health down to 75%, 50%, 25% depending on which threshold I'm nearest, below 25% is half health.)
Bring back defender kills points
Reduce the value of diversity points
A new metric which rewards point at very low value for each point of health removed from the enemy defence team made by our attackers
Actually buff old champs so they aren't complete garbage if you want to make us use them, either that or delete them from the game, give owners compensation and re-introduce them as reworked improved characters that aren't awful and a waste of my time and effort collecting them. The game has moved on from 2 years ago.
Instead of giving 4 star shards, give glory and add to the glory store class specific 4 star shards chosen by the player so an actual incentive to win. I currently simply do not care about any new 5 or 4 star champions, I have enough heroes and half on them are garbage, I want to aim for the interesting ones for something to do.
its all smoke and mirrors to appease the masses, behind the scenes there doing what ever they feel like regardless of the feedback. No one has asked for what they have done, but were told we did. The only conclusion that can be drawn is their asking for our feedback to make us think we have a say in the process, but really its not even being considered as they already have there own plans and there just trying to ease the backlash by pretending their listening
i mean it seems pretty cut and dry, uddles of feedback has been provided over the last few weeks, but yet the updates have contained none of it.
Like a few others have said, its a waste of time even being in this thread, i believe the only reason this thread still exists is because they want us to vent in here to keep it contained, its is clearly not being used for feedback
The point of those suggestions was not to necessarily claim any of them are intrinsically better than defender kills, it was to propose alternatives to defender kills that did not have the one property that @Kabam Miike stated was problematic with defender kills: in some circumstances defender kill points can discourage a player from using attackers that are still alive.
@Kabam Miike in a different post confirmed that it was still the valid objective of Alliance War that the opposing alliance should attempt to "stop" the other alliance from progressing on the map. So Kabam is not, as some people have suggested, trying to deliberately engineer AW so that both sides can attack with impunity. They just do not want players to give up while they actually have viable attackers remaining.
All of these suggestions are in some sense equivalent to defender kills, in the sense that all benefits accrued to one side are de facto penalties on the other side. The 20,000 points we get for a boss kill is in effect a 20,000 point penalty on the other side for failing to stop us from killing their battlegroup boss. But all of these suggestions contain the property that so long as an attacker has live defenders there is no reason to stop fighting. Fundamentally you can do this in one of two distinct ways. First, you can make the points the attacker gets for defeating a node a function of the attacker's performance. In this way, the "penalty" is hidden within the attacker kill points. Since dying on a node only reduces the value of the node, but the value is zero if the player doesn't actually kill it anyway it is never a good idea to stop attacking. If you die, the node value is reduced, but if you stop the node value is zero. The obvious choice is to continue attacking.
Second, you can give credit for defender kills but not at the moment the attacker dies. For example, if Kabam doesn't want players to give up while the attacker still has live attackers then you can apply a penalty only if the player revives an attacker. In effect that delays the defender kill penalty until everything is dead.
The problem with buffing nodes isn't in buffing nodes, it is in trying to *only* buff nodes. Let's try an analogy. Let's say we want to have a race to see which one of us is the faster runner. To do this, we need a distance to run and something to time us. Whoever has the better time wins. Simple enough. But we have two decisions to make: what distance do we run, and how do we measure our race times.
If we make the distance too short it will be too difficult to tell who's faster. If the race is held over ten feet, then our times will be so close together that the winner could just be whichever one of us got the better time on the stopwatch because the person clocking us twitched faster on that race. You can't easily tell the difference between 1.056 seconds and 1.062 seconds. Conversely if the race is five thousand miles, it will also be difficult to tell who is faster because the winner will be the person that sleeps less, not the one that runs faster. We need an appropriate distance to run that is long enough to easily tell who runs faster, but not so long that our running speed isn't the most important factor. In the same way, if we want to make an Alliance War in which the most skilled alliance attackers generally win, we need a war in which it is hard enough to complete the map that we can tell the difference between two attackers, but not so hard that it crushes both and attacking skill is no longer the dominant factor: luck and potions become the dominant factor. Difficulty is important: it cannot be too hard, and it also cannot be too easy. Right now I think it is a little too easy (prior to the next set of changes).
But the other thing we need is a way to measure run times. A stop watch makes sense: it is very accurate. If we take the stopwatch away and force someone to count seconds aloud, the accuracy of our times gets worse and someone can win even if they are not the fastest runner, just because his time is better due to inaccurate time counting. And what if we don't even allow the time keeper to count, we just ask them to tell us who *looks* faster when they watch them? Then it gets even worse: the guy that looks faster wins even if they aren't actually faster.
This is what happens when you take away defender kills and don't replace them with something. We can no longer tell as easily who is the better attacker because we took the stopwatch away. If both runners finish the race at all within the time limit, they are "equally fast."
You need a good task to judge a competition on, and you need a good way to measure that competition quantitatively. The map nodes provide half the baseline competition (and defender placement, crippled by diversity points, provides the other half of that). Boss kills, map explore, and defender kills provide the metrics to measure the competition. You want good nodes and good points, just like you want a good race track and a good stopwatch.
So when I say that tweaking nodes won't solve the competition problem alone, what I'm saying is that if you take the stopwatch away, no amount of adjusting the size of the racetrack will make the actual racing competition any better. Kabam is trying to find a racetrack in which it is so obvious who is faster that we don't really need to clock them, we can just watch them cross the finish line and know who's faster. Does that seem like it has any chance to work?
I think there are people that like the current system for various reasons. But I predicted that most of the people that liked the 15.0 changes would come to dislike the system eventually for a couple of reasons I predicted.
1. I said that some players would like the new system because the nodes were made so easy that it would become easier to complete the maps, and players not interested in strong direct competition would like that aspect of it. But I also predicted that the very ease of the new system would combine with defender diversity making maps too easy and Kabam would react by increasing the map difficulty to be even higher than it originally was in 14.0. MMO developers are very predictable in this regard.
2. I said that some players would like the new system because it would eliminate or reduce the likelihood that they would face multiple copies of the hardest defenders. But I predicted that many of these people would come to hate the natural evolution of AW that the system forced: the only way the system could censor out duplicate strong defenders was by forcing alliances to place maximally diverse defenses, and the only way to do that was through very strong almost dictatorial placement management. Players were going to be straight up told what to place. Alliances that didn't do this would start to lose until they either adopted this strategy or fell far enough down the tiers to meet up with much weaker foes (and get much lower rewards).
These shifts take time, and Kabam is constantly changing AW as these shifts are happening. The one thing I can say to people who like AW now, is that AW won't remain looking like it does now: Kabam is already changing things in ways the people who liked easier wars are going to start to detest, and the other alliances are still adjusting to the new meta.
Hope the game will become more fun and competitive.
Sincerely,
D.
I’m actually quite curious as to what you believe kabam is trying to achieve, what do you think their end game is at the end of all of thos
Kabam is, as most MMO developers are, extremely opaque in general. But I can make a guess based on the facts available and my understanding of how MMO companies in general work.
The most important thing to an F2P MMO company isn't actually money, at least not directly. It is engagement. They need more people joining the game every day and they need to engage them (and the existing players) once they have them. Engagement is a catch-all term that basically means "make them want to play as much as possible." Anything that helps engagement is a good thing in general, anything that hurts engagement is a bad thing in general (there are always exceptions to the rule of course). MMO monetization experts have a ton of spreadsheets that tell them that if they get this many players and their retention rate is this number and the overall engagement metrics are this or that, then they will ultimately earn some amount of money on average from those players. Cash is the result, but engagement (and player count) is the actual target.
Why does Kabam seem to be so concerned about players "giving up" during AW? Because it hurts engagement. Every time a player decides to give up on a part of the game, that's a player you've come closer to losing. The developers probably want a competitive war, but the Powers That Be want every piece of the game to be engaging, or at least not disengaging.
The problem is that Kabam has now run into a problem every MMO eventually faces: true PvP. The arenas are kind of PvP and AQ rankings are kind of PvP, but AW is much more direct PvP. The only thing more direct would be face off duels which I don't think the game technology can support (I believe a dev at NYCC confirmed this). PvP is intrinsically disengaging, because it pits some players against other players. AQ is more cooperative than competitive. Most of your interactions with the game in AQ are to cooperate with your alliance mates. You are only competing with other players in a vague sense. But In AW you are being challenged on offense by the defensive placement the other alliance is trying to use to literally knock you out of the game. That's what direct PvP is.
I don't think Kabam understands this as a company. I'm sure individual devs do. But the company as a whole looks to be trying to do the impossible: create a universally engaging direct competition.
If they figure out how to do that, they'll be the first ones on Earth to do that, because I think that's impossible. Head to head competition is by definition disengaging, because the objective in a head to head competition (that's anything remotely like how MCOC works) is for one side to stop the other side from making progress, which ultimately means getting them to stop playing the game (at least that part of it).
What do I think Kabam is trying to achieve? The TL;DR answer to your question is: I think they are trying to achieve the impossible. They need to decide if there is a place for head to head competition in MCOC. If the answer is yes, they need to bring back elements of AW that are disengaging, like defender kills (or a palatable variation thereof). If the answer is no, they should really scrap the idea of AW and work on making AQ a better experience.
Incidentally, I'm sure it will occur to someone to ask, if engagement is so important, why piss off all of us? Because we are a tiny, tiny, tiny subset of players. Everyone that posts on the forums and the subreddit combined is probably less than 1% of the playerbase. When Kabam says they are concerned about players giving up, I'm sure they have a report that says 31% of all alliance wars end with one side having at least 4 players with at least one live attacker that attempted to attack the current node once and then never again. That sort of thing. MMO development groups don't guess, and they don't act on anecdotes alone. They act on datamining, and on the statistics their game engine gives them. Sometimes those reports are misleading or incomplete, but that's what they generally act upon.
Anyway, that's my theory on what's going on. Illogical, but not inexplicable.
If that's the case then they should do what Quickshot Gaming said... bring defender kills back to the "expert tiers" of AW. This way they can satisfy us hardcore MCOCers with a skill based scoring system and also keep their engaging quota with the bottom tiers
The point of those suggestions was not to necessarily claim any of them are intrinsically better than defender kills, it was to propose alternatives to defender kills that did not have the one property that @Kabam Miike stated was problematic with defender kills: in some circumstances defender kill points can discourage a player from using attackers that are still alive.
@Kabam Miike in a different post confirmed that it was still the valid objective of Alliance War that the opposing alliance should attempt to "stop" the other alliance from progressing on the map. So Kabam is not, as some people have suggested, trying to deliberately engineer AW so that both sides can attack with impunity. They just do not want players to give up while they actually have viable attackers remaining.
All of these suggestions are in some sense equivalent to defender kills, in the sense that all benefits accrued to one side are de facto penalties on the other side. The 20,000 points we get for a boss kill is in effect a 20,000 point penalty on the other side for failing to stop us from killing their battlegroup boss. But all of these suggestions contain the property that so long as an attacker has live defenders there is no reason to stop fighting. Fundamentally you can do this in one of two distinct ways. First, you can make the points the attacker gets for defeating a node a function of the attacker's performance. In this way, the "penalty" is hidden within the attacker kill points. Since dying on a node only reduces the value of the node, but the value is zero if the player doesn't actually kill it anyway it is never a good idea to stop attacking. If you die, the node value is reduced, but if you stop the node value is zero. The obvious choice is to continue attacking.
Second, you can give credit for defender kills but not at the moment the attacker dies. For example, if Kabam doesn't want players to give up while the attacker still has live attackers then you can apply a penalty only if the player revives an attacker. In effect that delays the defender kill penalty until everything is dead.
The problem with buffing nodes isn't in buffing nodes, it is in trying to *only* buff nodes. Let's try an analogy. Let's say we want to have a race to see which one of us is the faster runner. To do this, we need a distance to run and something to time us. Whoever has the better time wins. Simple enough. But we have two decisions to make: what distance do we run, and how do we measure our race times.
If we make the distance too short it will be too difficult to tell who's faster. If the race is held over ten feet, then our times will be so close together that the winner could just be whichever one of us got the better time on the stopwatch because the person clocking us twitched faster on that race. You can't easily tell the difference between 1.056 seconds and 1.062 seconds. Conversely if the race is five thousand miles, it will also be difficult to tell who is faster because the winner will be the person that sleeps less, not the one that runs faster. We need an appropriate distance to run that is long enough to easily tell who runs faster, but not so long that our running speed isn't the most important factor. In the same way, if we want to make an Alliance War in which the most skilled alliance attackers generally win, we need a war in which it is hard enough to complete the map that we can tell the difference between two attackers, but not so hard that it crushes both and attacking skill is no longer the dominant factor: luck and potions become the dominant factor. Difficulty is important: it cannot be too hard, and it also cannot be too easy. Right now I think it is a little too easy (prior to the next set of changes).
But the other thing we need is a way to measure run times. A stop watch makes sense: it is very accurate. If we take the stopwatch away and force someone to count seconds aloud, the accuracy of our times gets worse and someone can win even if they are not the fastest runner, just because his time is better due to inaccurate time counting. And what if we don't even allow the time keeper to count, we just ask them to tell us who *looks* faster when they watch them? Then it gets even worse: the guy that looks faster wins even if they aren't actually faster.
This is what happens when you take away defender kills and don't replace them with something. We can no longer tell as easily who is the better attacker because we took the stopwatch away. If both runners finish the race at all within the time limit, they are "equally fast."
You need a good task to judge a competition on, and you need a good way to measure that competition quantitatively. The map nodes provide half the baseline competition (and defender placement, crippled by diversity points, provides the other half of that). Boss kills, map explore, and defender kills provide the metrics to measure the competition. You want good nodes and good points, just like you want a good race track and a good stopwatch.
So when I say that tweaking nodes won't solve the competition problem alone, what I'm saying is that if you take the stopwatch away, no amount of adjusting the size of the racetrack will make the actual racing competition any better. Kabam is trying to find a racetrack in which it is so obvious who is faster that we don't really need to clock them, we can just watch them cross the finish line and know who's faster. Does that seem like it has any chance to work?
[/quote]
My god!!DNA3000 I Agree on everything you said and i really hope the Kabam guys notice your comments!!
I was sure you wanted to suggest and not to claim they are better solutions than defender kills,i just went on to explain why (in my opinion) defender kills is the best/fairest choice mostly for everyone watching these forums and of course the Kabam guys!Again Well done on saying everything in a perfect comment,and lets all hope they will understand what needs to be fix and do it right!!!
I suggested an alternative way back as a possibility, although I'm not 100% sure of the practicality of it. Make two events: AW current (15.0 rules) and AW classic (14.0 rules with defender kills). Call them AW standard and AW expert. Let alliances decide which one they want to participate in. If enough alliances participate in both, keep both for the players that like the harsher competition verses the ones that don't. This would require that enough alliances participate in both "brackets" to make them viable.