15.0 Alliance Wars Update Discussion Thread

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  • nuggznuggz Member Posts: 124
    Hey Everybody,

    Thank you for waiting patiently as we worked behind the scenes to continue to improve the new Alliance Wars. We’re still making some adjustments, and want to re-emphasize that this will be an iterative process - one that we are dedicated to. We have greatly appreciated all of the constructive feedback Summoners have provided us with, as well as those that have urged their fellow players to grant us some time to look into both your comments and the way that Alliance Wars is currently running.

    At this time, we can say that we have made a decision to keep Defender Diversity dependant on individual Battlegroups, and not based on the entire Alliance, as originally intended. This is something that many of you have requested, and something that we agree is better for players. This way, we’re shifting away from having to focus on your entire Alliance’s rosters, and to only those you are playing with directly.

    We are still working on some things behind the scenes to ensure that we hit our goals that we wanted to achieve with this new iteration of Alliance wars, including the fact that Defender Diversity is meant to be a tie breaker, and not deciding the war. We will continue to make more iterations and adjustments until we have fulfilled our goals of making Alliance Wars more fun and engaging, as well as making the mode more varied, and to address concerns you all brought up.

    Stay tuned! We will have more information to share with you next week!

    @Kabam Miike

    Can you give us more information on what you mean by changes, and what else will be worked on.

    I haven't seen anything being elaborated on in regards too;

    Node difficulty
    Reward changes

    And most importantly, you had mentioned that diversity would eventually mean that the champs we are now placing will become more usefull than what they were prior. Does that mean the previous useless champs will be getting bumped on abilities, or nodes in aw will grant extra abilites to what we call useless champs. Like nodes that give a champion the ability to evade, heal, unstoppable, etc...
  • This content has been removed.
  • andrade5184andrade5184 Member Posts: 307 ★★
    RyGoku wrote: »
    Are 5* and 4* champs considered the same or different for diversity?

    the same
  • DNA3000DNA3000 Member, Guardian Posts: 19,640 Guardian
    The idea of useful or not useful is based on how many Kills they got in the old system. Those Champs aren't actually useless. They're not the so-called "Top Tier", named so because of the Kills they amassed. That's part-and-parcel with the need for Diversity to begin with.

    Stop saying that already. It is 100% not true. It's not a matter of opinion either. Certain Champs are better at attacking and certain champs are much harder to kill than others. This is a fact, and not debatable. There is a reason why people have trouble fighting Dormammu and not Kamala Khan, and why people bring Starlord to offense instead of Colossus. If it weren't true then people would just rank up Champs based on whether they liked the character or not. Or rank up at random. Every champ can be used in arena equally. What sets one apart from the other is their ability to be effective in other areas of the game. They are not all created equal, nor are the all equally useful.

    The whole point of Alliance Wars is to prevent the opponent from killing your Boss in each battlegroup, and to kill the opposing alliance's Bosses. If this were not the case then they wouldn't award 20,000 points for a Boss kill (a great deal more than anything else in AW). Therefore, in AW, any champ that is harder to kill, and/or causes you to use more items, is MORE useful than a Champ who doesn't. And any champ who allows you to more easily defeat the opponents' defenders is MORE useful than a Champ that doesn't. A Champ that does neither is inherently LESS useful. The problem is rewarding people (via diversity points) for bringing poor, non-useful, defenders to AW. If you are going to do that then you've completely changed the mode and eliminated one of the two objectives. If you want to keep that, fine, but call it something else...it sure isn't Alliance WARS.

    I think most players would agree that not all champs are equally useful for all tasks. GroundedWisdom is making the argument that we were judging "usefulness" based on number of kills and you seem to be at least nominally agreeing with him on that point: that the point of AW was to get kills so of course kills are what matters. GroundedWisdom is suggesting that players simply need to adjust to the new meta where kills aren't the point of AW.

    I would argue that kills don't have to be the point of AW, and that isn't at the heart of most players' complaints. Suppose I were to change the scoring so that defenders got points not for kills but for damage dealt to the attackers. The more damage the defender inflicted the more points the defending alliance got. This is a different kind of meta and it changes things. For one thing, it actually changes the values of the attackers. Wolverine is not as good of an attacker in this new meta because even if he kills everything and even if he ends the fight at full health he could have given a ton of points to the enemy. Iceman becomes an even better defender now because even if he dies he deals a lot of damage right up front which guarantees him at least a few points.

    This is a different AW than 14.0. Kills are no longer counted. But there is still the idea that players can engage with the game. We can think about attackers and choose what we think are the best attackers based on real choices we arrive at by looking at the capabilities of the champions. There is actual skill and strategy for picking and placing defenders. In this hypothetical the point of AW would no longer *necessarily* be about killing anything in particular, and some players would complain about the change, but I don't think people would be complaining to the extent they are now, or about the same things they are now.

    That's what I meant when I said above points don't matter, at least not in this context. I think players are genuinely upset about basically being told your thoughts and your ideas and your choices don't matter anymore when it comes to defense placement. There is one correct way to place, and it has nothing to do with your opinion about how the champions work. I don't think AW is "supposed" to be about kills, but it is supposed to be about something. Something the players are supposed to be involved with. If the alliance leader is making a spreadsheet and telling everyone exactly what defenders to place, that can't be right. We took the play out of gameplay.

    I'm not so much disagreeing with you as trying to make the point there's a deeper problem here that goes beyond what war used to be and what our opinions about what an alliance war should be focused on. I'm saying 15.0 isn't focused on the wrong thing, but on nothing.
  • HuluhulaHuluhula Member Posts: 263
    Waldo wrote: »
    The rules changed today. @Kabam Miike you posted as doctrine that defender diversity wasn't working as intended and would be fixed as soon as possible 10 days ago. This was in regards to points being score per battle group and not per alliance. After posting that, a lot of us took you at your word and ranked up champions that are undesirable, very low tier champions. I don't expect rank down tickets to go out, but there should be a way to revert those specific champs ranked in the last 10 days back to what they were. We did this based on what you said, not game theory or a gamble.

    While I don't believe you intentionally lied, it was still a lie just the same. Do the right thing here guys, we all know it can be done without pushing out a slew of 4 & 5 star rank down tickets. There has to be a way to target these champs ranked over the last 10 days.
    Shoulda waited like the rest of us.
  • winterthurwinterthur Member Posts: 8,058 ★★★★★
    DNA3000 wrote: »
    I think players are genuinely upset about basically being told your thoughts and your ideas and your choices don't matter anymore when it comes to defense placement. There is one correct way to place, and it has nothing to do with your opinion about how the champions work. I don't think AW is "supposed" to be about kills, but it is supposed to be about something. Something the players are supposed to be involved with. If the alliance leader is making a spreadsheet and telling everyone exactly what defenders to place, that can't be right. We took the play out of gameplay.

    I'm saying 15.0 isn't focused on the wrong thing, but on nothing.

    I just managed to take out a Nightcrawler boss where pre v15, I would congratulate myself registering even 10 hits. I wonder in addition to the above, why was the nodes made easier?
  • DNA3000DNA3000 Member, Guardian Posts: 19,640 Guardian
    winterthur wrote: »
    DNA3000 wrote: »
    I think players are genuinely upset about basically being told your thoughts and your ideas and your choices don't matter anymore when it comes to defense placement. There is one correct way to place, and it has nothing to do with your opinion about how the champions work. I don't think AW is "supposed" to be about kills, but it is supposed to be about something. Something the players are supposed to be involved with. If the alliance leader is making a spreadsheet and telling everyone exactly what defenders to place, that can't be right. We took the play out of gameplay.

    I'm saying 15.0 isn't focused on the wrong thing, but on nothing.

    I just managed to take out a Nightcrawler boss where pre v15, I would congratulate myself registering even 10 hits. I wonder in addition to the above, why was the nodes made easier?

    I have a theory. I believe that Kabam perceived that AW had a problem where alliances were getting matched up against other alliances that were so much stronger than them or alternatively higher skilled than them that when they went on attack it was basically hopeless. Attacking players would run into nodes that they not only couldn't kill, but so obviously couldn't kill that they just gave up.

    This is worse than just losing because this can become a progressive problem. When a player gives up it hurts the entire battle group. Soon the members of that battlegroup are less likely to push hard when they keep discovering their efforts are wasted because someone else just gives up. Soon it is whole allliances that are being discouraged from competing in AW because too often the whole thing falls apart too quickly. And the more of these alliances that stop competing, the more that the remaining alliances that are competing become stronger on average. You are statistically more likely to run into a juggernaut because all the push overs are sitting on the sidelines. And then you start giving up.

    So the problem - as I'm theorizing Kabam saw it - was that players were being discouraged too strongly when on attack, and this was causing a chain reaction of progressive non-participation or half-hearted participation. Kabam felt that win or lose, it would be better if at least the attacking side managed to finish the attack phase most of the time. That way they would at least be encouraged to push on and see what the final result would be.

    Three things stand in the way. First: if the attackers are running into three Nightcrawlers, two Magiks, and a Juggernaut, the odds of them being stopped cold rise substantially. Not many defenders are strong enough to be singularly scary, but everyone is placing a disproportionate number of them. Second: some nodes just straight up kill players. Thorns, slashed tires, etc. These nodes can kill a path dead and stop further progress. And third, if you are pretty good in general but there's a few things you have trouble defeating and you run into one, you're roadblocked. It isn't easy for someone else to help you, especially if you only need help with that one node. Plus, you don't want players to give up voluntarily because they think someone better will come along.

    Now look at 15.0. The nodes are easier, so it is less likely attackers will get stopped. There are more "cross over points" so players can trade or help paths. There is a huge penalty for placing more than one of any strong defender that can show stop a path. And defender kills are taken away, so players have no incentive to give up while they still have live attackers, so they don't stop in a path voluntarily. I believe the unstated goal is to make sure attackers finish most of the time. And if you are doing everything possible to help players finish on attack, seems obvious that scoring is going to be a lot closer than it was before, especially with defender kills gone. Of course, you can just tell players that there's a "tie breaker" so that's not a problem.

    I think the whole "players were giving up" thing wasn't a lie, but it was only a small part of the problem. I think the real problem is one they didn't want to express out loud: they wanted everyone to "win" just one side more than the other.
  • andrade5184andrade5184 Member Posts: 307 ★★
    The idea of useful or not useful is based on how many Kills they got in the old system. Those Champs aren't actually useless. They're not the so-called "Top Tier", named so because of the Kills they amassed. That's part-and-parcel with the need for Diversity to begin with.

    Stop saying that already. It is 100% not true. It's not a matter of opinion either. Certain Champs are better at attacking and certain champs are much harder to kill than others. This is a fact, and not debatable. There is a reason why people have trouble fighting Dormammu and not Kamala Khan, and why people bring Starlord to offense instead of Colossus. If it weren't true then people would just rank up Champs based on whether they liked the character or not. Or rank up at random. Every champ can be used in arena equally. What sets one apart from the other is their ability to be effective in other areas of the game. They are not all created equal, nor are the all equally useful.

    The whole point of Alliance Wars is to prevent the opponent from killing your Boss in each battlegroup, and to kill the opposing alliance's Bosses. If this were not the case then they wouldn't award 20,000 points for a Boss kill (a great deal more than anything else in AW). Therefore, in AW, any champ that is harder to kill, and/or causes you to use more items, is MORE useful than a Champ who doesn't. And any champ who allows you to more easily defeat the opponents' defenders is MORE useful than a Champ that doesn't. A Champ that does neither is inherently LESS useful. The problem is rewarding people (via diversity points) for bringing poor, non-useful, defenders to AW. If you are going to do that then you've completely changed the mode and eliminated one of the two objectives. If you want to keep that, fine, but call it something else...it sure isn't Alliance WARS.

    thank god someone who finally makes sense. i feel like im trying to teach calculus to new born babies most of the time talking in these forums i was beginning to think i was the only logical thinker that the trolls didnt chase away yet
  • chunkybchunkyb Member, Content Creators Posts: 1,453 Content Creator
    DNA3000 wrote: »
    winterthur wrote: »
    DNA3000 wrote: »
    I think players are genuinely upset about basically being told your thoughts and your ideas and your choices don't matter anymore when it comes to defense placement. There is one correct way to place, and it has nothing to do with your opinion about how the champions work. I don't think AW is "supposed" to be about kills, but it is supposed to be about something. Something the players are supposed to be involved with. If the alliance leader is making a spreadsheet and telling everyone exactly what defenders to place, that can't be right. We took the play out of gameplay.

    I'm saying 15.0 isn't focused on the wrong thing, but on nothing.

    I just managed to take out a Nightcrawler boss where pre v15, I would congratulate myself registering even 10 hits. I wonder in addition to the above, why was the nodes made easier?

    I have a theory. I believe that Kabam perceived that AW had a problem where alliances were getting matched up against other alliances that were so much stronger than them or alternatively higher skilled than them that when they went on attack it was basically hopeless. Attacking players would run into nodes that they not only couldn't kill, but so obviously couldn't kill that they just gave up.

    This is worse than just losing because this can become a progressive problem. When a player gives up it hurts the entire battle group. Soon the members of that battlegroup are less likely to push hard when they keep discovering their efforts are wasted because someone else just gives up. Soon it is whole allliances that are being discouraged from competing in AW because too often the whole thing falls apart too quickly. And the more of these alliances that stop competing, the more that the remaining alliances that are competing become stronger on average. You are statistically more likely to run into a juggernaut because all the push overs are sitting on the sidelines. And then you start giving up.

    So the problem - as I'm theorizing Kabam saw it - was that players were being discouraged too strongly when on attack, and this was causing a chain reaction of progressive non-participation or half-hearted participation. Kabam felt that win or lose, it would be better if at least the attacking side managed to finish the attack phase most of the time. That way they would at least be encouraged to push on and see what the final result would be.

    Three things stand in the way. First: if the attackers are running into three Nightcrawlers, two Magiks, and a Juggernaut, the odds of them being stopped cold rise substantially. Not many defenders are strong enough to be singularly scary, but everyone is placing a disproportionate number of them. Second: some nodes just straight up kill players. Thorns, slashed tires, etc. These nodes can kill a path dead and stop further progress. And third, if you are pretty good in general but there's a few things you have trouble defeating and you run into one, you're roadblocked. It isn't easy for someone else to help you, especially if you only need help with that one node. Plus, you don't want players to give up voluntarily because they think someone better will come along.

    Now look at 15.0. The nodes are easier, so it is less likely attackers will get stopped. There are more "cross over points" so players can trade or help paths. There is a huge penalty for placing more than one of any strong defender that can show stop a path. And defender kills are taken away, so players have no incentive to give up while they still have live attackers, so they don't stop in a path voluntarily. I believe the unstated goal is to make sure attackers finish most of the time. And if you are doing everything possible to help players finish on attack, seems obvious that scoring is going to be a lot closer than it was before, especially with defender kills gone. Of course, you can just tell players that there's a "tie breaker" so that's not a problem.

    I think the whole "players were giving up" thing wasn't a lie, but it was only a small part of the problem. I think the real problem is one they didn't want to express out loud: they wanted everyone to "win" just one side more than the other.

    Actually testing and/or playing the game could help shine light on the fact that this wasn't an actual widespread issue that needed a fix.
  • RagamugginGunnerRagamugginGunner Member Posts: 2,210 ★★★★★
    winterthur wrote: »
    DNA3000 wrote: »
    I think players are genuinely upset about basically being told your thoughts and your ideas and your choices don't matter anymore when it comes to defense placement. There is one correct way to place, and it has nothing to do with your opinion about how the champions work. I don't think AW is "supposed" to be about kills, but it is supposed to be about something. Something the players are supposed to be involved with. If the alliance leader is making a spreadsheet and telling everyone exactly what defenders to place, that can't be right. We took the play out of gameplay.

    I'm saying 15.0 isn't focused on the wrong thing, but on nothing.

    I just managed to take out a Nightcrawler boss where pre v15, I would congratulate myself registering even 10 hits. I wonder in addition to the above, why was the nodes made easier?

    I think that they made it easier on purpose to force everyone to go 100%.
  • DNA3000DNA3000 Member, Guardian Posts: 19,640 Guardian
    chunkyb wrote: »
    DNA3000 wrote: »
    winterthur wrote: »
    DNA3000 wrote: »
    I think players are genuinely upset about basically being told your thoughts and your ideas and your choices don't matter anymore when it comes to defense placement. There is one correct way to place, and it has nothing to do with your opinion about how the champions work. I don't think AW is "supposed" to be about kills, but it is supposed to be about something. Something the players are supposed to be involved with. If the alliance leader is making a spreadsheet and telling everyone exactly what defenders to place, that can't be right. We took the play out of gameplay.

    I'm saying 15.0 isn't focused on the wrong thing, but on nothing.

    I just managed to take out a Nightcrawler boss where pre v15, I would congratulate myself registering even 10 hits. I wonder in addition to the above, why was the nodes made easier?

    I have a theory. I believe that Kabam perceived that AW had a problem where alliances were getting matched up against other alliances that were so much stronger than them or alternatively higher skilled than them that when they went on attack it was basically hopeless. Attacking players would run into nodes that they not only couldn't kill, but so obviously couldn't kill that they just gave up.

    This is worse than just losing because this can become a progressive problem. When a player gives up it hurts the entire battle group. Soon the members of that battlegroup are less likely to push hard when they keep discovering their efforts are wasted because someone else just gives up. Soon it is whole allliances that are being discouraged from competing in AW because too often the whole thing falls apart too quickly. And the more of these alliances that stop competing, the more that the remaining alliances that are competing become stronger on average. You are statistically more likely to run into a juggernaut because all the push overs are sitting on the sidelines. And then you start giving up.

    So the problem - as I'm theorizing Kabam saw it - was that players were being discouraged too strongly when on attack, and this was causing a chain reaction of progressive non-participation or half-hearted participation. Kabam felt that win or lose, it would be better if at least the attacking side managed to finish the attack phase most of the time. That way they would at least be encouraged to push on and see what the final result would be.

    Three things stand in the way. First: if the attackers are running into three Nightcrawlers, two Magiks, and a Juggernaut, the odds of them being stopped cold rise substantially. Not many defenders are strong enough to be singularly scary, but everyone is placing a disproportionate number of them. Second: some nodes just straight up kill players. Thorns, slashed tires, etc. These nodes can kill a path dead and stop further progress. And third, if you are pretty good in general but there's a few things you have trouble defeating and you run into one, you're roadblocked. It isn't easy for someone else to help you, especially if you only need help with that one node. Plus, you don't want players to give up voluntarily because they think someone better will come along.

    Now look at 15.0. The nodes are easier, so it is less likely attackers will get stopped. There are more "cross over points" so players can trade or help paths. There is a huge penalty for placing more than one of any strong defender that can show stop a path. And defender kills are taken away, so players have no incentive to give up while they still have live attackers, so they don't stop in a path voluntarily. I believe the unstated goal is to make sure attackers finish most of the time. And if you are doing everything possible to help players finish on attack, seems obvious that scoring is going to be a lot closer than it was before, especially with defender kills gone. Of course, you can just tell players that there's a "tie breaker" so that's not a problem.

    I think the whole "players were giving up" thing wasn't a lie, but it was only a small part of the problem. I think the real problem is one they didn't want to express out loud: they wanted everyone to "win" just one side more than the other.

    Actually testing and/or playing the game could help shine light on the fact that this wasn't an actual widespread issue that needed a fix.

    I'm not endorsing Kabam's actions, just presenting a theory as to why they would make the changes they did.

    I will say it is hard for any of us to actually know if this was an actual problem or not, or what Kabam was datamining that suggested to them this was a problem, because by definition if this problem was happening it wouldn't be visible to us, because affected alliances become essentially "invisible" to the rest of the alliances participating in alliance war.

    There's no question in my mind that they tried to fix a bad haircut by setting it on fire. But I'm not willing to say the problem itself didn't exist. It is just that no problem was worth these changes.
  • chunkybchunkyb Member, Content Creators Posts: 1,453 Content Creator
    DNA3000 wrote: »
    chunkyb wrote: »
    DNA3000 wrote: »
    winterthur wrote: »
    DNA3000 wrote: »
    I think players are genuinely upset about basically being told your thoughts and your ideas and your choices don't matter anymore when it comes to defense placement. There is one correct way to place, and it has nothing to do with your opinion about how the champions work. I don't think AW is "supposed" to be about kills, but it is supposed to be about something. Something the players are supposed to be involved with. If the alliance leader is making a spreadsheet and telling everyone exactly what defenders to place, that can't be right. We took the play out of gameplay.

    I'm saying 15.0 isn't focused on the wrong thing, but on nothing.

    I just managed to take out a Nightcrawler boss where pre v15, I would congratulate myself registering even 10 hits. I wonder in addition to the above, why was the nodes made easier?

    I have a theory. I believe that Kabam perceived that AW had a problem where alliances were getting matched up against other alliances that were so much stronger than them or alternatively higher skilled than them that when they went on attack it was basically hopeless. Attacking players would run into nodes that they not only couldn't kill, but so obviously couldn't kill that they just gave up.

    This is worse than just losing because this can become a progressive problem. When a player gives up it hurts the entire battle group. Soon the members of that battlegroup are less likely to push hard when they keep discovering their efforts are wasted because someone else just gives up. Soon it is whole allliances that are being discouraged from competing in AW because too often the whole thing falls apart too quickly. And the more of these alliances that stop competing, the more that the remaining alliances that are competing become stronger on average. You are statistically more likely to run into a juggernaut because all the push overs are sitting on the sidelines. And then you start giving up.

    So the problem - as I'm theorizing Kabam saw it - was that players were being discouraged too strongly when on attack, and this was causing a chain reaction of progressive non-participation or half-hearted participation. Kabam felt that win or lose, it would be better if at least the attacking side managed to finish the attack phase most of the time. That way they would at least be encouraged to push on and see what the final result would be.

    Three things stand in the way. First: if the attackers are running into three Nightcrawlers, two Magiks, and a Juggernaut, the odds of them being stopped cold rise substantially. Not many defenders are strong enough to be singularly scary, but everyone is placing a disproportionate number of them. Second: some nodes just straight up kill players. Thorns, slashed tires, etc. These nodes can kill a path dead and stop further progress. And third, if you are pretty good in general but there's a few things you have trouble defeating and you run into one, you're roadblocked. It isn't easy for someone else to help you, especially if you only need help with that one node. Plus, you don't want players to give up voluntarily because they think someone better will come along.

    Now look at 15.0. The nodes are easier, so it is less likely attackers will get stopped. There are more "cross over points" so players can trade or help paths. There is a huge penalty for placing more than one of any strong defender that can show stop a path. And defender kills are taken away, so players have no incentive to give up while they still have live attackers, so they don't stop in a path voluntarily. I believe the unstated goal is to make sure attackers finish most of the time. And if you are doing everything possible to help players finish on attack, seems obvious that scoring is going to be a lot closer than it was before, especially with defender kills gone. Of course, you can just tell players that there's a "tie breaker" so that's not a problem.

    I think the whole "players were giving up" thing wasn't a lie, but it was only a small part of the problem. I think the real problem is one they didn't want to express out loud: they wanted everyone to "win" just one side more than the other.

    Actually testing and/or playing the game could help shine light on the fact that this wasn't an actual widespread issue that needed a fix.

    I'm not endorsing Kabam's actions, just presenting a theory as to why they would make the changes they did.

    I will say it is hard for any of us to actually know if this was an actual problem or not, or what Kabam was datamining that suggested to them this was a problem, because by definition if this problem was happening it wouldn't be visible to us, because affected alliances become essentially "invisible" to the rest of the alliances participating in alliance war.

    There's no question in my mind that they tried to fix a bad haircut by setting it on fire. But I'm not willing to say the problem itself didn't exist. It is just that no problem was worth these changes.

    The example thrown forth by them was an attacker losing one champ and then stopping because they didn't want to hurt the alliance.

    I agree with you that no problem was worth these fixes. But I also feel like we're missing the actual motivation for these changes. Idk what that motivation is, but none of this follows logic as far as how it's being presented imo. It feels like a problem-reaction-solution sorta thing but maybe I'm crazy.
  • DNA3000DNA3000 Member, Guardian Posts: 19,640 Guardian
    chunkyb wrote: »
    DNA3000 wrote: »
    chunkyb wrote: »
    DNA3000 wrote: »
    winterthur wrote: »
    DNA3000 wrote: »
    I think players are genuinely upset about basically being told your thoughts and your ideas and your choices don't matter anymore when it comes to defense placement. There is one correct way to place, and it has nothing to do with your opinion about how the champions work. I don't think AW is "supposed" to be about kills, but it is supposed to be about something. Something the players are supposed to be involved with. If the alliance leader is making a spreadsheet and telling everyone exactly what defenders to place, that can't be right. We took the play out of gameplay.

    I'm saying 15.0 isn't focused on the wrong thing, but on nothing.

    I just managed to take out a Nightcrawler boss where pre v15, I would congratulate myself registering even 10 hits. I wonder in addition to the above, why was the nodes made easier?

    I have a theory. I believe that Kabam perceived that AW had a problem where alliances were getting matched up against other alliances that were so much stronger than them or alternatively higher skilled than them that when they went on attack it was basically hopeless. Attacking players would run into nodes that they not only couldn't kill, but so obviously couldn't kill that they just gave up.

    This is worse than just losing because this can become a progressive problem. When a player gives up it hurts the entire battle group. Soon the members of that battlegroup are less likely to push hard when they keep discovering their efforts are wasted because someone else just gives up. Soon it is whole allliances that are being discouraged from competing in AW because too often the whole thing falls apart too quickly. And the more of these alliances that stop competing, the more that the remaining alliances that are competing become stronger on average. You are statistically more likely to run into a juggernaut because all the push overs are sitting on the sidelines. And then you start giving up.

    So the problem - as I'm theorizing Kabam saw it - was that players were being discouraged too strongly when on attack, and this was causing a chain reaction of progressive non-participation or half-hearted participation. Kabam felt that win or lose, it would be better if at least the attacking side managed to finish the attack phase most of the time. That way they would at least be encouraged to push on and see what the final result would be.

    Three things stand in the way. First: if the attackers are running into three Nightcrawlers, two Magiks, and a Juggernaut, the odds of them being stopped cold rise substantially. Not many defenders are strong enough to be singularly scary, but everyone is placing a disproportionate number of them. Second: some nodes just straight up kill players. Thorns, slashed tires, etc. These nodes can kill a path dead and stop further progress. And third, if you are pretty good in general but there's a few things you have trouble defeating and you run into one, you're roadblocked. It isn't easy for someone else to help you, especially if you only need help with that one node. Plus, you don't want players to give up voluntarily because they think someone better will come along.

    Now look at 15.0. The nodes are easier, so it is less likely attackers will get stopped. There are more "cross over points" so players can trade or help paths. There is a huge penalty for placing more than one of any strong defender that can show stop a path. And defender kills are taken away, so players have no incentive to give up while they still have live attackers, so they don't stop in a path voluntarily. I believe the unstated goal is to make sure attackers finish most of the time. And if you are doing everything possible to help players finish on attack, seems obvious that scoring is going to be a lot closer than it was before, especially with defender kills gone. Of course, you can just tell players that there's a "tie breaker" so that's not a problem.

    I think the whole "players were giving up" thing wasn't a lie, but it was only a small part of the problem. I think the real problem is one they didn't want to express out loud: they wanted everyone to "win" just one side more than the other.

    Actually testing and/or playing the game could help shine light on the fact that this wasn't an actual widespread issue that needed a fix.

    I'm not endorsing Kabam's actions, just presenting a theory as to why they would make the changes they did.

    I will say it is hard for any of us to actually know if this was an actual problem or not, or what Kabam was datamining that suggested to them this was a problem, because by definition if this problem was happening it wouldn't be visible to us, because affected alliances become essentially "invisible" to the rest of the alliances participating in alliance war.

    There's no question in my mind that they tried to fix a bad haircut by setting it on fire. But I'm not willing to say the problem itself didn't exist. It is just that no problem was worth these changes.

    The example thrown forth by them was an attacker losing one champ and then stopping because they didn't want to hurt the alliance.

    I agree with you that no problem was worth these fixes. But I also feel like we're missing the actual motivation for these changes. Idk what that motivation is, but none of this follows logic as far as how it's being presented imo. It feels like a problem-reaction-solution sorta thing but maybe I'm crazy.

    Well, as I said above, I believe what we were presented was a piece of a larger problem I outlined in that post.
  • MagicBentonMagicBenton Member Posts: 291 ★★★
    DNA3000 wrote: »
    The idea of useful or not useful is based on how many Kills they got in the old system. Those Champs aren't actually useless. They're not the so-called "Top Tier", named so because of the Kills they amassed. That's part-and-parcel with the need for Diversity to begin with.

    Stop saying that already. It is 100% not true. It's not a matter of opinion either. Certain Champs are better at attacking and certain champs are much harder to kill than others. This is a fact, and not debatable. There is a reason why people have trouble fighting Dormammu and not Kamala Khan, and why people bring Starlord to offense instead of Colossus. If it weren't true then people would just rank up Champs based on whether they liked the character or not. Or rank up at random. Every champ can be used in arena equally. What sets one apart from the other is their ability to be effective in other areas of the game. They are not all created equal, nor are the all equally useful.

    The whole point of Alliance Wars is to prevent the opponent from killing your Boss in each battlegroup, and to kill the opposing alliance's Bosses. If this were not the case then they wouldn't award 20,000 points for a Boss kill (a great deal more than anything else in AW). Therefore, in AW, any champ that is harder to kill, and/or causes you to use more items, is MORE useful than a Champ who doesn't. And any champ who allows you to more easily defeat the opponents' defenders is MORE useful than a Champ that doesn't. A Champ that does neither is inherently LESS useful. The problem is rewarding people (via diversity points) for bringing poor, non-useful, defenders to AW. If you are going to do that then you've completely changed the mode and eliminated one of the two objectives. If you want to keep that, fine, but call it something else...it sure isn't Alliance WARS.

    I think most players would agree that not all champs are equally useful for all tasks. GroundedWisdom is making the argument that we were judging "usefulness" based on number of kills and you seem to be at least nominally agreeing with him on that point: that the point of AW was to get kills so of course kills are what matters. GroundedWisdom is suggesting that players simply need to adjust to the new meta where kills aren't the point of AW.

    I would argue that kills don't have to be the point of AW, and that isn't at the heart of most players' complaints. Suppose I were to change the scoring so that defenders got points not for kills but for damage dealt to the attackers. The more damage the defender inflicted the more points the defending alliance got. This is a different kind of meta and it changes things. For one thing, it actually changes the values of the attackers. Wolverine is not as good of an attacker in this new meta because even if he kills everything and even if he ends the fight at full health he could have given a ton of points to the enemy. Iceman becomes an even better defender now because even if he dies he deals a lot of damage right up front which guarantees him at least a few points.

    This is a different AW than 14.0. Kills are no longer counted. But there is still the idea that players can engage with the game. We can think about attackers and choose what we think are the best attackers based on real choices we arrive at by looking at the capabilities of the champions. There is actual skill and strategy for picking and placing defenders. In this hypothetical the point of AW would no longer *necessarily* be about killing anything in particular, and some players would complain about the change, but I don't think people would be complaining to the extent they are now, or about the same things they are now.

    That's what I meant when I said above points don't matter, at least not in this context. I think players are genuinely upset about basically being told your thoughts and your ideas and your choices don't matter anymore when it comes to defense placement. There is one correct way to place, and it has nothing to do with your opinion about how the champions work. I don't think AW is "supposed" to be about kills, but it is supposed to be about something. Something the players are supposed to be involved with. If the alliance leader is making a spreadsheet and telling everyone exactly what defenders to place, that can't be right. We took the play out of gameplay.

    I'm not so much disagreeing with you as trying to make the point there's a deeper problem here that goes beyond what war used to be and what our opinions about what an alliance war should be focused on. I'm saying 15.0 isn't focused on the wrong thing, but on nothing.

    No, I'm not saying defender usefulness is based on kills at all. I'm saying it is based on their ability to prevent the opponent from getting to (and ultimately killing) the Boss, which is 1 of the 2 objectives in a war. That's why we have 2 components of AW...placement and attack. Electro is super easy to beat, but if you face him with the wrong champ on certain nodes you could take a lot of damage and it hinders your progress towards the Boss...way more than someone like Hawkeye does. Therefore he's more useful for AW defense. But by incentivizing the placement of poor (or less useful) defenders through diversity points they are eliminating 1 of the 2 components of AW (trying to stop the opposition through defender placement). You are partially right, in that the allocation of points or scoring method doesn't matter, but only up until it does something so drastic as to render an entire element of the mode moot (which it has done, as you correctly point out). They don't need to bring back defender kills at all, nor am I arguing for that. There are plenty of other ways to fix this.

    You and I have a very similar viewpoint in that they've taken away half of the gameplay in this mode.
  • DNA3000DNA3000 Member, Guardian Posts: 19,640 Guardian
    DNA3000 wrote: »
    The idea of useful or not useful is based on how many Kills they got in the old system. Those Champs aren't actually useless. They're not the so-called "Top Tier", named so because of the Kills they amassed. That's part-and-parcel with the need for Diversity to begin with.

    Stop saying that already. It is 100% not true. It's not a matter of opinion either. Certain Champs are better at attacking and certain champs are much harder to kill than others. This is a fact, and not debatable. There is a reason why people have trouble fighting Dormammu and not Kamala Khan, and why people bring Starlord to offense instead of Colossus. If it weren't true then people would just rank up Champs based on whether they liked the character or not. Or rank up at random. Every champ can be used in arena equally. What sets one apart from the other is their ability to be effective in other areas of the game. They are not all created equal, nor are the all equally useful.

    The whole point of Alliance Wars is to prevent the opponent from killing your Boss in each battlegroup, and to kill the opposing alliance's Bosses. If this were not the case then they wouldn't award 20,000 points for a Boss kill (a great deal more than anything else in AW). Therefore, in AW, any champ that is harder to kill, and/or causes you to use more items, is MORE useful than a Champ who doesn't. And any champ who allows you to more easily defeat the opponents' defenders is MORE useful than a Champ that doesn't. A Champ that does neither is inherently LESS useful. The problem is rewarding people (via diversity points) for bringing poor, non-useful, defenders to AW. If you are going to do that then you've completely changed the mode and eliminated one of the two objectives. If you want to keep that, fine, but call it something else...it sure isn't Alliance WARS.

    I think most players would agree that not all champs are equally useful for all tasks. GroundedWisdom is making the argument that we were judging "usefulness" based on number of kills and you seem to be at least nominally agreeing with him on that point: that the point of AW was to get kills so of course kills are what matters. GroundedWisdom is suggesting that players simply need to adjust to the new meta where kills aren't the point of AW.

    I would argue that kills don't have to be the point of AW, and that isn't at the heart of most players' complaints. Suppose I were to change the scoring so that defenders got points not for kills but for damage dealt to the attackers. The more damage the defender inflicted the more points the defending alliance got. This is a different kind of meta and it changes things. For one thing, it actually changes the values of the attackers. Wolverine is not as good of an attacker in this new meta because even if he kills everything and even if he ends the fight at full health he could have given a ton of points to the enemy. Iceman becomes an even better defender now because even if he dies he deals a lot of damage right up front which guarantees him at least a few points.

    This is a different AW than 14.0. Kills are no longer counted. But there is still the idea that players can engage with the game. We can think about attackers and choose what we think are the best attackers based on real choices we arrive at by looking at the capabilities of the champions. There is actual skill and strategy for picking and placing defenders. In this hypothetical the point of AW would no longer *necessarily* be about killing anything in particular, and some players would complain about the change, but I don't think people would be complaining to the extent they are now, or about the same things they are now.

    That's what I meant when I said above points don't matter, at least not in this context. I think players are genuinely upset about basically being told your thoughts and your ideas and your choices don't matter anymore when it comes to defense placement. There is one correct way to place, and it has nothing to do with your opinion about how the champions work. I don't think AW is "supposed" to be about kills, but it is supposed to be about something. Something the players are supposed to be involved with. If the alliance leader is making a spreadsheet and telling everyone exactly what defenders to place, that can't be right. We took the play out of gameplay.

    I'm not so much disagreeing with you as trying to make the point there's a deeper problem here that goes beyond what war used to be and what our opinions about what an alliance war should be focused on. I'm saying 15.0 isn't focused on the wrong thing, but on nothing.

    No, I'm not saying defender usefulness is based on kills at all. I'm saying it is based on their ability to prevent the opponent from getting to (and ultimately killing) the Boss, which is 1 of the 2 objectives in a war. That's why we have 2 components of AW...placement and attack. Electro is super easy to beat, but if you face him with the wrong champ on certain nodes you could take a lot of damage and it hinders your progress towards the Boss...way more than someone like Hawkeye does. Therefore he's more useful for AW defense. But by incentivizing the placement of poor (or less useful) defenders through diversity points they are eliminating 1 of the 2 components of AW (trying to stop the opposition through defender placement). You are partially right, in that the allocation of points or scoring method doesn't matter, but only up until it does something so drastic as to render an entire element of the mode moot (which it has done, as you correctly point out). They don't need to bring back defender kills at all, nor am I arguing for that. There are plenty of other ways to fix this.

    You and I have a very similar viewpoint in that they've taken away half of the gameplay in this mode.

    I think it is even worse than that. I think attacking and defending are opposite sides of the same coin. When we take away the defensive side, we are also reducing (albeit not eliminating) the attacking side gameplay. Although many AW tiers are still facing defenses that not every player can just sweep aside or spend past, it is true that AW is in general easier for attackers than before. That automatically means that attack phase is less competitive than before.

    In the very highest tiers of AW the strongest alliances will probably "fill in" their diverse defenses, and even a maximally diverse defense will still be pretty strong. A 5* ranked up Luke Cage is still not a pushover. But because defenses are weaker, and because I believe it is intentional that attackers are going to fully explore more often than before, there's less competition on attack. Attack becomes less competition and more participation.

    It won't happen instantly everywhere, but under the current rules I believe 90% of the defensive side strategy was taken away by 15.0, and at least half the attack side competition will also be nullified over time as alliances evolve to become maximally diverse (again: assuming these rules persisted). So I think 15.0 takes away not half the gameplay, but about 70% of the competitive gameplay.
  • BadroseBadrose Member Posts: 779 ★★★
    I don't have some long, well stated argument to add...
    After reading some too much long "novel" I'm really grateful to see short replies :D
  • GroundedWisdomGroundedWisdom Member Posts: 36,554 ★★★★★
    DNA3000 wrote: »
    The idea of useful or not useful is based on how many Kills they got in the old system. Those Champs aren't actually useless. They're not the so-called "Top Tier", named so because of the Kills they amassed. That's part-and-parcel with the need for Diversity to begin with.

    Stop saying that already. It is 100% not true. It's not a matter of opinion either. Certain Champs are better at attacking and certain champs are much harder to kill than others. This is a fact, and not debatable. There is a reason why people have trouble fighting Dormammu and not Kamala Khan, and why people bring Starlord to offense instead of Colossus. If it weren't true then people would just rank up Champs based on whether they liked the character or not. Or rank up at random. Every champ can be used in arena equally. What sets one apart from the other is their ability to be effective in other areas of the game. They are not all created equal, nor are the all equally useful.

    The whole point of Alliance Wars is to prevent the opponent from killing your Boss in each battlegroup, and to kill the opposing alliance's Bosses. If this were not the case then they wouldn't award 20,000 points for a Boss kill (a great deal more than anything else in AW). Therefore, in AW, any champ that is harder to kill, and/or causes you to use more items, is MORE useful than a Champ who doesn't. And any champ who allows you to more easily defeat the opponents' defenders is MORE useful than a Champ that doesn't. A Champ that does neither is inherently LESS useful. The problem is rewarding people (via diversity points) for bringing poor, non-useful, defenders to AW. If you are going to do that then you've completely changed the mode and eliminated one of the two objectives. If you want to keep that, fine, but call it something else...it sure isn't Alliance WARS.

    I think most players would agree that not all champs are equally useful for all tasks. GroundedWisdom is making the argument that we were judging "usefulness" based on number of kills and you seem to be at least nominally agreeing with him on that point: that the point of AW was to get kills so of course kills are what matters. GroundedWisdom is suggesting that players simply need to adjust to the new meta where kills aren't the point of AW.

    I would argue that kills don't have to be the point of AW, and that isn't at the heart of most players' complaints. Suppose I were to change the scoring so that defenders got points not for kills but for damage dealt to the attackers. The more damage the defender inflicted the more points the defending alliance got. This is a different kind of meta and it changes things. For one thing, it actually changes the values of the attackers. Wolverine is not as good of an attacker in this new meta because even if he kills everything and even if he ends the fight at full health he could have given a ton of points to the enemy. Iceman becomes an even better defender now because even if he dies he deals a lot of damage right up front which guarantees him at least a few points.

    This is a different AW than 14.0. Kills are no longer counted. But there is still the idea that players can engage with the game. We can think about attackers and choose what we think are the best attackers based on real choices we arrive at by looking at the capabilities of the champions. There is actual skill and strategy for picking and placing defenders. In this hypothetical the point of AW would no longer *necessarily* be about killing anything in particular, and some players would complain about the change, but I don't think people would be complaining to the extent they are now, or about the same things they are now.

    That's what I meant when I said above points don't matter, at least not in this context. I think players are genuinely upset about basically being told your thoughts and your ideas and your choices don't matter anymore when it comes to defense placement. There is one correct way to place, and it has nothing to do with your opinion about how the champions work. I don't think AW is "supposed" to be about kills, but it is supposed to be about something. Something the players are supposed to be involved with. If the alliance leader is making a spreadsheet and telling everyone exactly what defenders to place, that can't be right. We took the play out of gameplay.

    I'm not so much disagreeing with you as trying to make the point there's a deeper problem here that goes beyond what war used to be and what our opinions about what an alliance war should be focused on. I'm saying 15.0 isn't focused on the wrong thing, but on nothing.

    What I'm saying is the extremity of such opinions left a whole host of Champs on the bench, so-to-speak. I'm aware of the concept of good Attackers/Defenders. To imply that the rest are useless and that Ranking depends solely on AW usefulness highlights the problem created. The point of Diversity is to encourage people to use a more diverse Roster. Now, it's not the concept of good/bad Defenders that I am pointing out. It's the result of taking that idea to the extreme. As in, to the point of BGs full of said Champs, and regarding the rest as useless. Now, they may have had diminished usefulness in the old system, but that more unilateral value is the point of making Diversity present. It's about creating a platform where we are using a more full Roster. I know what people mean by saying good/bad. What I'm saying is the changes are related to the hyperfocus on that. It's a more unilateral way of looking at Champs. I don't see that as a bad thing when the extremity has caused subsequent issues that inevitably happen when Players try to maximize Rewards and secure their position. Unfortunately, prolonged use of that system affects the paradigm as a whole.
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  • AnonymousAnonymous Member Posts: 508 ★★★
    @Phantom I agree with most of your statement and completely understand why you make the point of giving rdts. However, this will change the entire prestige system. Most top alliances will rank down those Ronans, cyclops, and magnetos (along with a few others) that were ranked initially to give their alliance a boost in prestige. While others waited for their right champs to rank up for utility and prestige. This is the main argument against rdts.

    Again, I fully respect your point and it is valid, I just think it's a bad idea because of the amount of change it will make to prestige.
  • UC439UC439 Member Posts: 261
    How about considering diversity points only when there's a tie?

    Bring def kills back, check scores w/o considering diversity first. See if there's a tie, only then go up to check diversity.

    That way diversity can become only a "tie breaker"

    Say w/o diversity an alliance scores 100, another does 120, then the later is the winner. No matter if the former have 70 points in diversity n the later have 40. But if both scores 100 w/o diversity, then the former will be the winner!

    But to make this work we need def kills back
  • BrandoniusBrandonius Member Posts: 292
    How much wood could a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck Kabam devs the wood?
  • PhantomPhantom Member Posts: 228
    Anonymous wrote: »
    @Phantom I agree with most of your statement and completely understand why you make the point of giving rdts. However, this will change the entire prestige system. Most top alliances will rank down those Ronans, cyclops, and magnetos (along with a few others) that were ranked initially to give their alliance a boost in prestige. While others waited for their right champs to rank up for utility and prestige. This is the main argument against rdts.

    Again, I fully respect your point and it is valid, I just think it's a bad idea because of the amount of change it will make to prestige.

    Exactly. As I said, I am not a fan of RDTs. Rank ups are always meant to be permanent. But Kabam has made it so we can't use who we ranked up in some cases. I don't think RDTs should be sent out. I'd much rather have Diversity removed. But it has to be one or the other. They can't nullify the point of our rank ups without letting us reverse that decision.
  • andrade5184andrade5184 Member Posts: 307 ★★
    Anonymous wrote: »
    @Phantom I agree with most of your statement and completely understand why you make the point of giving rdts. However, this will change the entire prestige system. Most top alliances will rank down those Ronans, cyclops, and magnetos (along with a few others) that were ranked initially to give their alliance a boost in prestige. While others waited for their right champs to rank up for utility and prestige. This is the main argument against rdts.

    Again, I fully respect your point and it is valid, I just think it's a bad idea because of the amount of change it will make to prestige.

    my counter argument for this is that if progression in the game stopped at r4 5* champs then i feel you would be right, however we already know very soon we will be able to r5 5* champs as well as not too long after that 6* champs are coming. also there are new champs introduced every month with the majority of them topping prestige in there class so i feel all you guys against rdt will not effect the game as bad as your thinking, and whats more unfair the chance that rdt will be used as unintended or that guys with little resources used all there resources to rank up strictly defense champs to help there ally win wars and now they have champs that they only intended for that reason wasting away on that bench while at the same time they will need to rank different champs now to win wars again so they are using up twice the resources for half the purpose
This discussion has been closed.