No ones stalking, don't be childish. We were obviously in the same thread.
"We are in a game of alliance vs alliance and may the better team win. Grind hard for those top defenders, rank them wisely, strategize your placement, develop your skills and put them to the test in WAR. All this is lacking in the new system." When I said this I was pretty clear about mentioning skills. I didn't make it the main focus since there were other deciding factors to add as well to maintain the competitive edge. All combined is what makes a strong alliance.
You made the argument that an alliance that develops all this is deserving of some type of "handicap" because you need more skill to beat a bigger alliance. As if to suggest that a bigger alliance automatically has more skill just cause they are "bigger." Thats false, I'll have to suggest you read the comments (since you mention you didn't) on our standing of skill and how in the old system we did use skill to beat alliances bigger than us. We can't now, which returns us to your comment about "complainers are losing." People aren't complaining so much about losing as to how we are losing. We are all well aware that in war we are gonna lose, you will always fight a better alliance at some point and theres plenty to learn from it. In this new system all the flaws are giving the "handicap" in favor of the bigger alliance. When both teams max diversity, 100% explore, and drop all bosses than the higher rated wins. There is nothing to accept from that and improve on other than knowing that in those cases no matter what you do, you lose. If you think that was something that also happened in the old system than you are mistaken.
Competitive's get with no effort? WTH does that even mean? Competitive players are competitive because they put in the most effort. If they didn't put in effort than what would classify them as competitive?
Kabam wanted diversity and Everyone was begging for diversity.
I am unaware of even a single instance where a player begged for defender diversity. What people complained about was two-fold: one: being forced to face the same specific defenders constantly that they felt were not balanced as alliance war defenders, and two: being subjected to what they felt was very predictable defense placement, which made alliance war more monotonous than it should be.
The first complaint is not a diversity complaint at all: the root underlying complaint is a complaint about defender balance, not defender diversity. The second complaint is a diversity complaint but it is NOT a complaint about wanting the maximum number of different champions to be used on defense. It was a complaint about PLACEMENT being PREDICTABLE. Nobody, and I mean nobody said they wanted to see every single champion placed on defense.
Since the complaint was about defenses being predictable, forcing players to place one of every single defender and placing different defenders even at the expense of placing relatively ineffective defenders, doesn't address that complaint at all. It replaces one kind of predictable placement with another kind of predictable placement. The fact that we are placing more different defenders is irrelevant.
About people complaining because some Wars are lose just because DD points, well it will happen no matter the system. In the former system we lost Wars despite we had more kills just because the other team had High Rated Defenders. I.e. maybe it was the exact same thing because they had maybe some "specials" high pi champs and we were screwed. Even, if they had just normal champs but ultra maxed then the fair we should won anyway because we were skillest beating stronger enemies and it was easier for them; but we lost and nobody cried because it was already the system.
No matter the system, if you can find a guilty for the lose you will do it, but people is prone to do it just when a new "unfair" system is released.
In every system, some alliances will have an advantage over others. The question is what advantages are reasonable for a competition. What advantages encourage or emphasize competition. Because while the devs can do whatever they want, given the design of the game the obvious reason for alliance war to exist is to differentiate itself from alliance quest in creating an additional competitive platform using defense placement. An alliance war in which the defensive side of the war is no longer intended to be competitive is essentially alliance quest. In alliance quest all alliances are competing against each other by gauging their attack performance against a standard (scaling) defense placement: the AQ maps.
So while the decisions on what will and will not be incentivized are the devs to make, and some players will like them and some will not like them just as a matter of preference no matter what they do, we can still judge objectively if the way the devs incentivize player actions in AW are internally consistent: if they are good design decisions regardless of what players prefer. And if the devs decide to strongly emphasize attacker performance and de-emphasize defender performance in AW, it is fair to ask what the game design purpose of AW is. Because the logical reason is rooted in the primary difference between AQ and AW: defense placement. If the primary difference between AQ and AW is defense placement and AW is intended to be an alliance competition, it is reasonable for strong defense placement to be a reasonable competitive advantage under the AW system. If a designer decides that is not a reasonable competitive advantage and wants to shift away from that, they've undermined the design reason for AW to exist. That has nothing to do with player preference. Whether players liked it or hated it, I would have been stating that was a bad decision on the part of the devs either way.
Sure, some players just don't like change and some are probably complaining specifically because something changed in a way they didn't like. But I believe there are problems with AW that transcend those preferences. When I hear players complain that they ranked up some champs and now they have to rank up different champs that complaint is a valid complaint but it is not a specific complaint about the structure of the new system: it is a complaint about the fact the system changed in a way that affects which defenders are more valuable. But when I hear players complain that AW isn't fun or interesting anymore, that's not a complaint about having to change their rank up decisions. That's a complaint that cuts to the heart of the reason for AW to exist: it is a complaint that 15.0 makes defenses less interesting, which then makes attacking them less interesting. That's not a complaint about rank up, and it isn't even a complaint about fairness. It is a complaint about the fact that for many players the interesting aspect of AW was we pit our best attackers against your best defenders in the closest thing to a head to head competition that currently exists in the game. 15.0 basically says Kabam doesn't want alliances to try too hard to beat the other alliance's attackers with their defenders. They want the competition to be indirect, where we win if our attackers are better than your attackers, or else if we are about the same on attack then whoever places the broadest roster wins.
That is the devs' choice to make, but don't blame the players for it because no significant number of players were asking for that. That one is entirely on the devs. And own that decision and admit it to the players so we can stop trying to make suggestions on correcting errors that aren't actually errors but just the natural consequence of the strange new non-competitive competition that Kabam seems to have decided they want to implement.
Defender diversity is so bad because if you are in a pro alliance you will probably use the best champs for defense like jugg or electro and so will all your teammates, now if you do that you will get a less chance of winning!
Just try to explain me. What the minibosses doing in this case. Thier nodes not linked to boss node anymore? Really? Great update. Great bug.
It's a bug? What tier are you in?
Tier 10
And this happen since last server maintenance was made. Previous AW was in same tier 10 and everything was right. Now! No links from nodes 50 47 44 42 to minies. And a lot nodes doesn’t have a buffs or abilities. Just 25% attack or so for example node
25
If people want the skill to be rewarded then many things should be change in this game. For example, the stronger should get less points than the weakers (because you need more skill for beat stronger enemies than weaker ones), Wars should be matched according to the strength of the members instead the Wars Rating (good bye swaping and shell alliances for easy rewards for no skill), Arenas should have a real and effective bracket system and everyone should be in the pool with similar fishes (because the guy doing 3x more series for score the same is struggling more than a fat fish), etc.
As you seem to have observed, skill is not the only thing that is incentivized in this game. Progress is also rewarded. Players are encouraged to grow their rosters because different champions have different utility: having more champions increases the likelihood you will have a stronger set of options for a particular task. It is obvious that the game encourages progress by presenting the players with different challenges that make some champion abilities more useful and rewarding.
The question is when an alliance with a stronger roster faces an alliance with a weaker roster, should the alliance with the stronger roster have a intrinsic advantage for possessing the stronger champions and using them on offense or defense, or should the alliance with the weaker roster gain an advantage for defeating stronger champions in combat. And to answer that question, we should look at how the game itself works everywhere else. First, as a general rule no one gets more rewards for being the underdog. For a given opponent your rewards are based essentially on the strength of that opponent, not on your attacking strength. So whether that opponent is twice your rating or half your rating, you will get about the same rewards for defeating it (there is a subtle complexity to how arena points are calculated but that doesn't undermine this point significantly). This suggests an idea that is reinforced elsewhere: the player is not penalized for bringing the best possible attacker to face a particular opponent, because the game encourages players to build a large diverse roster from which to pick such attackers from.
So if someone brings down Maestro with a 3*, you are not penalized for using a 4* or 5* because the game doesn't want to discourage you from actually trying to build a stronger roster and actually use it. It takes less skill to defeat Maestro with a 5* than a 3*, but the desire not to penalize stronger attacker choices overrides that in the game. All other things being equal, we should expect that alliance war would follow that same general principle.
So the points you get are not affected by the strength of your attackers relative to the defenders or relative to the strength of the opposing alliance's attackers. But what about the defender strength? In normal content we get more rewards for defeating stronger opponents. Should an attacking alliance gain more points for defeating a strong defensive placement than an attacker that defeats a weaker one? That would be true except that AW specifically allows players to place the opponents from their own rosters. Defense placement is also a roster selection process just as attacking is. If we recognize that not penalizing players for roster selection on offense overrides the desire to reward situational skill in general, then that same principle should apply to defense placement. We should not penalize players for placing the best possible defense even if that makes things harder on the opposing alliance when they attack. Giving the opposing alliance more points for killing a stronger defense is tantamount to penalizing the alliance for making the best possible roster selection. That violates the principle that roster progression and ideal selection from your roster is not generally penalized, even to reward more skillful play.
In this game, progress is rewarded first, and that includes and is especially true for roster growth. Skillful employment and use of that roster is rewarded second. In an inverted game where skillful play was rewarded first and use of roster was rewarded second, it would not be as time consuming or affected by random chance to grow your roster. Instead, we'd have ways to recognize and progressionally reward skillful achievements. We'd be an accomplishment-based progressional game rather than a roster-based progressional game.
In other words, we'd be collecting trophies instead of champions.
Kabam wanted diversity and Everyone was begging for diversity.
Wrong.
Everyone who either isn't competitive or is terrible at the game wanted diversity. THose people shouldn't have a voice in the direction this game goes.
Kabam could have forced Diversity by buffing old champs and making better nodes in the AW, where bringing in a champ you wouldn't normally on defense, could maximize the use out of new nodes. Maximizing the node by getting defensive kills.
So if they gave Abomination a new way to poison champs, then put him on a enhanced ability node, not a enhanced poison node. He would get kills there, in theory.
Either way you look at it, it's supposed to be a war. You should be able to place your best defenders to defend you side. You dont want to just send any champ to defend your side, you want you top guys doing that. The old system at least had skill involved. You had to create a strategy for defense, a strategy for attack. There is no skill involved in this new AW what so ever... This new AW is basically just creating Alliance Quest maps for each other and whoever can place the more diverse and higher rated champs will win. The outcome of the war can literally be decided in the first minute that the attack phase started.. asumming both sides placed max diversity, who ever has the higher defender rating will win.. I'll say this again, it's a damn shame what Kabam did to AW... it was my favorite part of the game and now it's a sad reflection of what once was.
Kabam wanted diversity and Everyone was begging for diversity.
Wrong.
Everyone who either isn't competitive or is terrible at the game wanted diversity. THose people shouldn't have a voice in the direction this game goes.
Actually, can anyone point to a single post on the forums or the subreddit where a player explicitly asked for all of the champions to be equally represented on defensive AW maps? Because I can't find one.
There's a difference between asking for different forests and asking for every tree in the forest to be different.
That last paragraph is the key here. No more competition. You killed war and for what? To entice us to grind out more champs? To buy more crystals? Naaaaaah I haven't done that before and I sure won't be doing it now. Especially not to place them on trash nodes in a mostly predetermined match up.
To hell with diversity. I won't be wasting resources on one single beauty pageant defender. I'll continue to rank the champs I need for other aspects of the game and slow my progression and curb my interest in the game.
I always loved war because it was a competition. So I was excited when I got champs that would give me an edge in war. Now, I don't care. I'm only playing because it's habit. Without fun and competition being injected back into the game, that habit won't last much longer.
Congrats? 3 "players" are happy they get to show off the fact they've 4/40'd every single champ they've ever gotten except that one special unduped 5/50. Hooray for the collectors that'll always have 5.2 to look forward to..
Everyone who either isn't competitive or is terrible at the game wanted diversity. THose people shouldn't have a voice in the direction this game goes.
I wouldn't say that. I believe a good game should strive to have something for everyone. But it should recognize that because players are different and want different things, and those things are often mutually contradictory, they cannot make everything for everyone.
There are parts of the game that are not very competitive, except against once's self. The story quests are not competitive. You can do them at your own pace and at your own comfortable progress level. You can do RoL with 3* champs or you can wait to do it with 5* champs (or even 6* champs). You can adjust the difficulty of the game to some extent by choosing when your roster is strong enough to do them. You get the same rewards either way.
Some parts of the game are indirectly competitive. Arena milestones are not competitive but arena rank rewards are indirectly competitive. You compete against the entire field of arena grinders and get rewards based on where you place overall. At no time are you in direct competition with another player, you are only in competition with all players as a whole.
Alliance Quest is also indirectly competitive. You are competing with other alliances for the best rank rewards. But even totally non-competitive alliances can get something out of AQ. They can get milestone and completion rewards. They get less rewards than the highest tier alliances, but if they genuinely aren't competing with them that should not matter.
Alliance War is more directly competitive, although that direct competition is between alliances and not players. Each alliance is attacking the other alliance's defenders. How hard the content you face is something dictated by the opposing alliance. How well you do is determined by your performance against those defenses. Your fate is ultimately dictated not by the game itself but by the actions of your opponents. The only rewards you get are rewards for beating the other alliance (or the consolation prize for losing).
That part of the game is, at least obviously to me, targeted at the players that want direct competition. Therefore, it should be the needs and desires of those players that should be the most important. Someone that says they don't want content to be "too competitive" should play the parts of the game that are targeted at indirect or no competition. They should not dictate the competition parameters for the directly competitive parts of the game.
People throw the word "fair" around a lot when it comes to discussions about alliance war. But the most important fairness criteria we should be discussing is whether the players that want head to head tough competition deserve to have a portion of the game that addresses that desire. If the answer is yes, then those players' voices should be heard.
We should no more allow players that don't want tough competition to dictate the parameters of the only direct head to head competition in the game any more than we should allow players that want tough competition to inject it into the story quests. That is not fair. It violates the idea that different player groups should have some part of the game that tries to address their desires. If the game had head to head competition all over the place, then it would be fair for the less competitive players to ask for a place of their own. But the reverse is happening. The only piece of tough head to head competition is being taken away.
Everyone should have a voice. But those voices should be fairly balanced. In my opinion, so long as there exists only one place where tough head to head competition exists in the game, that place should not compromise that competition for the benefit of players that don't want it.
This is getting ridiculous. In the old system our alliance consistently faced (and beat) alliances 1-3 million higher rated. Now we are in our 3rd war in a row that we will lose JUST because of defender rating.
These wars have all been over the moment they started.
Why does this make sense to anyone at Kabam?
Bring back defender kill points.
Reduce diversity points.
You were able to fix the exploit of not placing any defense in a couple days. Why is it taking weeks to figure out that you need to add defender kills back?
Everyone who either isn't competitive or is terrible at the game wanted diversity. THose people shouldn't have a voice in the direction this game goes.
I wouldn't say that. I believe a good game should strive to have something for everyone. But it should recognize that because players are different and want different things, and those things are often mutually contradictory, they cannot make everything for everyone.
There are parts of the game that are not very competitive, except against once's self. The story quests are not competitive. You can do them at your own pace and at your own comfortable progress level. You can do RoL with 3* champs or you can wait to do it with 5* champs (or even 6* champs). You can adjust the difficulty of the game to some extent by choosing when your roster is strong enough to do them. You get the same rewards either way.
Some parts of the game are indirectly competitive. Arena milestones are not competitive but arena rank rewards are indirectly competitive. You compete against the entire field of arena grinders and get rewards based on where you place overall. At no time are you in direct competition with another player, you are only in competition with all players as a whole.
Alliance Quest is also indirectly competitive. You are competing with other alliances for the best rank rewards. But even totally non-competitive alliances can get something out of AQ. They can get milestone and completion rewards. They get less rewards than the highest tier alliances, but if they genuinely aren't competing with them that should not matter.
Alliance War is more directly competitive, although that direct competition is between alliances and not players. Each alliance is attacking the other alliance's defenders. How hard the content you face is something dictated by the opposing alliance. How well you do is determined by your performance against those defenses. Your fate is ultimately dictated not by the game itself but by the actions of your opponents. The only rewards you get are rewards for beating the other alliance (or the consolation prize for losing).
That part of the game is, at least obviously to me, targeted at the players that want direct competition. Therefore, it should be the needs and desires of those players that should be the most important. Someone that says they don't want content to be "too competitive" should play the parts of the game that are targeted at indirect or no competition. They should not dictate the competition parameters for the directly competitive parts of the game.
People throw the word "fair" around a lot when it comes to discussions about alliance war. But the most important fairness criteria we should be discussing is whether the players that want head to head tough competition deserve to have a portion of the game that addresses that desire. If the answer is yes, then those players' voices should be heard.
We should no more allow players that don't want tough competition to dictate the parameters of the only direct head to head competition in the game any more than we should allow players that want tough competition to inject it into the story quests. That is not fair. It violates the idea that different player groups should have some part of the game that tries to address their desires. If the game had head to head competition all over the place, then it would be fair for the less competitive players to ask for a place of their own. But the reverse is happening. The only piece of tough head to head competition is being taken away.
Everyone should have a voice. But those voices should be fairly balanced. In my opinion, so long as there exists only one place where tough head to head competition exists in the game, that place should not compromise that competition for the benefit of players that don't want it.
Very well said. Although you left out those poor unfortunate souls that don't like playing on alliances. Knew a guy that was been playing since day 1 everyday and has no interest in alliances. Tried to buy deals every now and then but poor guy couldn't progress. Had 1 r5 I think he said and a couple scattered t4cc. 1 5 star too I think. But no way could he get it to r4 anytime in the near future seeing how you need 7 of the same class to do it. So he quit the game shortly after the release of act 5. Felt bad for the guy. He played a lot. Never had a chance to compete in the t4cc arenas. We are forced to play in an alliance if we want the best rewards.
I feel the part of the equation that defender diversity is hurting the most is the 5* 4/55 champs. Our alliance spent so much of last year working towards getting the best 5* defenders to 4/55. Now we have a bunch of Magiks, Juggernauts, and Spidermans. The problem with diversity per battlegroup is we can now only use one of each of those champs per battlegroup even though we have like 3 or 4 per battlegroup. I feel like the change of diversity per battlegroup has taken away a lot of what we worked so hard for over the last 6-12 months. We are now not placing our strongest defenders because they are not diverse. IMHO there are 2 options. Option 1 - lower the max diversity to 40 champs per battlegroup. This will allow us to have up to 10 duplicate champs of our strongest and hardest to fight defenders without sacrificing a perfect diversity score. Or Option 2 - Give us 5* rank down tickets. Even if that was only 1 ticket and even if it only let you go from rank 4 to rank 3. At least then we could get a diverse set of 4/55 5* champs to put into our defense.
Also please bring back defender kills in some sense. Skill really does need to play a part in war.
You could still keep diversity with the return of defender kills.
It's simple. You scale down the points earned from defender kills to 25pts per kill so that defender diveristy still out weights defender kills so allainces don't fall back to the same champs defense like it was.
But it'll still allow allainces that are slightly more skilled to beat allainces that jusy have a huge rating.
This is a contest after all.
The new system in this case
Both allainces explore 100%
Both alliances place max champs/diveristy.
The only winning factor is defender rating.
Which is what the majority of us are dealing with
So if you were to keep the diversity rating points at a high scale and bring back defender kills with a massive scaled down point system. The new system would still function fine and still allow some sort of a skill aspect to determine aw wins/loses
Everyone who either isn't competitive or is terrible at the game wanted diversity. THose people shouldn't have a voice in the direction this game goes.
I wouldn't say that. I believe a good game should strive to have something for everyone. But it should recognize that because players are different and want different things, and those things are often mutually contradictory, they cannot make everything for everyone.
There are parts of the game that are not very competitive, except against once's self. The story quests are not competitive. You can do them at your own pace and at your own comfortable progress level. You can do RoL with 3* champs or you can wait to do it with 5* champs (or even 6* champs). You can adjust the difficulty of the game to some extent by choosing when your roster is strong enough to do them. You get the same rewards either way.
Some parts of the game are indirectly competitive. Arena milestones are not competitive but arena rank rewards are indirectly competitive. You compete against the entire field of arena grinders and get rewards based on where you place overall. At no time are you in direct competition with another player, you are only in competition with all players as a whole.
Alliance Quest is also indirectly competitive. You are competing with other alliances for the best rank rewards. But even totally non-competitive alliances can get something out of AQ. They can get milestone and completion rewards. They get less rewards than the highest tier alliances, but if they genuinely aren't competing with them that should not matter.
Alliance War is more directly competitive, although that direct competition is between alliances and not players. Each alliance is attacking the other alliance's defenders. How hard the content you face is something dictated by the opposing alliance. How well you do is determined by your performance against those defenses. Your fate is ultimately dictated not by the game itself but by the actions of your opponents. The only rewards you get are rewards for beating the other alliance (or the consolation prize for losing).
That part of the game is, at least obviously to me, targeted at the players that want direct competition. Therefore, it should be the needs and desires of those players that should be the most important. Someone that says they don't want content to be "too competitive" should play the parts of the game that are targeted at indirect or no competition. They should not dictate the competition parameters for the directly competitive parts of the game.
People throw the word "fair" around a lot when it comes to discussions about alliance war. But the most important fairness criteria we should be discussing is whether the players that want head to head tough competition deserve to have a portion of the game that addresses that desire. If the answer is yes, then those players' voices should be heard.
We should no more allow players that don't want tough competition to dictate the parameters of the only direct head to head competition in the game any more than we should allow players that want tough competition to inject it into the story quests. That is not fair. It violates the idea that different player groups should have some part of the game that tries to address their desires. If the game had head to head competition all over the place, then it would be fair for the less competitive players to ask for a place of their own. But the reverse is happening. The only piece of tough head to head competition is being taken away.
Everyone should have a voice. But those voices should be fairly balanced. In my opinion, so long as there exists only one place where tough head to head competition exists in the game, that place should not compromise that competition for the benefit of players that don't want it.
Very well said. Although you left out those poor unfortunate souls that don't like playing on alliances. Knew a guy that was been playing since day 1 everyday and has no interest in alliances. Tried to buy deals every now and then but poor guy couldn't progress. Had 1 r5 I think he said and a couple scattered t4cc. 1 5 star too I think. But no way could he get it to r4 anytime in the near future seeing how you need 7 of the same class to do it. So he quit the game shortly after the release of act 5. Felt bad for the guy. He played a lot. Never had a chance to compete in the t4cc arenas. We are forced to play in an alliance if we want the best rewards.
The key words are "if we want the best rewards." In almost any game, if you want the best rewards you have to do all of the things that award the best rewards. But nothing prevents you from playing alone. Yes, you will advance slower. But you will advance. It might not be fast enough for you, but even players who are members of alliances and do everything in all parts of the game complain about not being able to progress fast enough for them. You have to have reasonable expectations when you play limited parts of an MMO or limit your game play in other ways. That's just life.
In general, the best and highest rate of return in an MMO comes from playing in groups. Rarely if ever is solo play seriously competitive with grouped play. That's just the nature of most MMOs. They are making the conscious decision to forfeit the players who want to play solo and need a high rate of return on their gameplay. This is one of those areas that is very difficult to address everyone's desires because of the desire for MMOs to incentivize group play. Most dev teams that start off by saying they do not want to incentivize group play end up making single player games.
Defender rating is such a stupid concept it doesn't deserve to be in a war.
The strength of your defence shouldn't be based on PI, it should be based on how many attackers your defence kills. If you reward defender kills you automatically reward a strong defence in a way that everyone can understand.
Instead, you have defender rating based off PI but everyone knows PI isn't correlated with the strength of a champion, whether on defence or attack.
You could still keep diversity with the return of defender kills.
It's simple. You scale down the points earned from defender kills to 25pts per kill so that defender diveristy still out weights defender kills so allainces don't fall back to the same champs defense like it was.
But it'll still allow allainces that are slightly more skilled to beat allainces that jusy have a huge rating.
I don't think it does that. The defender kill points are essentially one fifth of the diversity points. This means there's almost no incentive to place defenders any differently than they are now, unless you believe the defender can get at least five kills. Meanwhile if another alliance has a defender placement advantage of several hundred points (diversity plus rating) it will take dozens of kills to make up the difference. You're going to have to be more than slightly skilled. You're going to have to be significantly more skilled.
What this does is act as a way to decide very close fights where both sides have similar skill and similar defensive points by a small margin of defender kills (or attacker defeats, same thing). So you'll be able to call the match as decided by skill. But honestly I believe the close losses are just the obvious corner case of the problem that is easy to highlight. It is just as bad when the fight is decided by defender points and it is *not* close at all. Most players I think do not want AW decided by defensive placement whether it is close or not. This suggestion only resolves the issue of when the fight is very close.
It also does not address the fact that a major complaint is that 15.0 AW forces players to place defenders without regard to their combat effectiveness, which is an artificial constraint that eliminates a competitive element of AW. I don't think anyone minds defensive diversity. What they mind is being told they have to create it by being told what to place to maximize diversity at the expense of losing the part of the game where you think about the combat effectiveness of the champions. If the players were encouraged to place diverse defenses because the nature of the game was changed so that there was an actual tactical advantage to placing diverse champions relative to repeated strong performance champions, something they could decide on their own how to balance tactically, there would be far less opposition in my opinion.
Defender Kills: 100 points
Diverse defender kills: 50 points
If you have two or more of the same champ in a BG their kills count for 100 points each. If you only have one of a champ in a BG their kills count for 150 points.
Now you have to use strategy on who to place and where so the best alliance wins.
I would love to know what kabam actually plans on doing. Some hint of a fix. Anything besides letting us know that diversity is staying and that it won't be fixed right away.
Defender Kills: 100 points
Diverse defender kills: 50 points
If you have two or more of the same champ in a BG their kills count for 100 points each. If you only have one of a champ in a BG their kills count for 150 points.
Now you have to use strategy on who to place and where so the best alliance wins.
I'm not sure if that is a perfect solution to the issue of adding strategic decision making to defender placement. But I do know the devs are likely to restate their issue with defender kill points: it discourages players from attacking hard nodes. I'm not saying I agree with that position. I don't. But so long as the devs maintain that position you don't need a solution to the diversity problem, you need a solution to the problem of the devs refusing to reinstate defender kill points.
Diversity should be a multiplier for defense kills. More diverse defense gets a higher multiplier, thus more points for kills. It adds a little strategy back, at least. Do we go for a strong defense and get more, less valuable, kills, or a diverse one which will get fewer kills, but more points for each. That took me 30 seconds to come up with, so I'm sure it could be improved but damn does it sound better than the current system and it gets that diversity metric included?
Comments
Just try to explain me. What the minibosses doing in this case. Thier nodes not linked to boss node anymore? Really? Great update. Great bug.
It's a bug? What tier are you in?
"We are in a game of alliance vs alliance and may the better team win. Grind hard for those top defenders, rank them wisely, strategize your placement, develop your skills and put them to the test in WAR. All this is lacking in the new system." When I said this I was pretty clear about mentioning skills. I didn't make it the main focus since there were other deciding factors to add as well to maintain the competitive edge. All combined is what makes a strong alliance.
You made the argument that an alliance that develops all this is deserving of some type of "handicap" because you need more skill to beat a bigger alliance. As if to suggest that a bigger alliance automatically has more skill just cause they are "bigger." Thats false, I'll have to suggest you read the comments (since you mention you didn't) on our standing of skill and how in the old system we did use skill to beat alliances bigger than us. We can't now, which returns us to your comment about "complainers are losing." People aren't complaining so much about losing as to how we are losing. We are all well aware that in war we are gonna lose, you will always fight a better alliance at some point and theres plenty to learn from it. In this new system all the flaws are giving the "handicap" in favor of the bigger alliance. When both teams max diversity, 100% explore, and drop all bosses than the higher rated wins. There is nothing to accept from that and improve on other than knowing that in those cases no matter what you do, you lose. If you think that was something that also happened in the old system than you are mistaken.
Competitive's get with no effort? WTH does that even mean? Competitive players are competitive because they put in the most effort. If they didn't put in effort than what would classify them as competitive?
Tier 10
I am unaware of even a single instance where a player begged for defender diversity. What people complained about was two-fold: one: being forced to face the same specific defenders constantly that they felt were not balanced as alliance war defenders, and two: being subjected to what they felt was very predictable defense placement, which made alliance war more monotonous than it should be.
The first complaint is not a diversity complaint at all: the root underlying complaint is a complaint about defender balance, not defender diversity. The second complaint is a diversity complaint but it is NOT a complaint about wanting the maximum number of different champions to be used on defense. It was a complaint about PLACEMENT being PREDICTABLE. Nobody, and I mean nobody said they wanted to see every single champion placed on defense.
Since the complaint was about defenses being predictable, forcing players to place one of every single defender and placing different defenders even at the expense of placing relatively ineffective defenders, doesn't address that complaint at all. It replaces one kind of predictable placement with another kind of predictable placement. The fact that we are placing more different defenders is irrelevant.
In every system, some alliances will have an advantage over others. The question is what advantages are reasonable for a competition. What advantages encourage or emphasize competition. Because while the devs can do whatever they want, given the design of the game the obvious reason for alliance war to exist is to differentiate itself from alliance quest in creating an additional competitive platform using defense placement. An alliance war in which the defensive side of the war is no longer intended to be competitive is essentially alliance quest. In alliance quest all alliances are competing against each other by gauging their attack performance against a standard (scaling) defense placement: the AQ maps.
So while the decisions on what will and will not be incentivized are the devs to make, and some players will like them and some will not like them just as a matter of preference no matter what they do, we can still judge objectively if the way the devs incentivize player actions in AW are internally consistent: if they are good design decisions regardless of what players prefer. And if the devs decide to strongly emphasize attacker performance and de-emphasize defender performance in AW, it is fair to ask what the game design purpose of AW is. Because the logical reason is rooted in the primary difference between AQ and AW: defense placement. If the primary difference between AQ and AW is defense placement and AW is intended to be an alliance competition, it is reasonable for strong defense placement to be a reasonable competitive advantage under the AW system. If a designer decides that is not a reasonable competitive advantage and wants to shift away from that, they've undermined the design reason for AW to exist. That has nothing to do with player preference. Whether players liked it or hated it, I would have been stating that was a bad decision on the part of the devs either way.
Sure, some players just don't like change and some are probably complaining specifically because something changed in a way they didn't like. But I believe there are problems with AW that transcend those preferences. When I hear players complain that they ranked up some champs and now they have to rank up different champs that complaint is a valid complaint but it is not a specific complaint about the structure of the new system: it is a complaint about the fact the system changed in a way that affects which defenders are more valuable. But when I hear players complain that AW isn't fun or interesting anymore, that's not a complaint about having to change their rank up decisions. That's a complaint that cuts to the heart of the reason for AW to exist: it is a complaint that 15.0 makes defenses less interesting, which then makes attacking them less interesting. That's not a complaint about rank up, and it isn't even a complaint about fairness. It is a complaint about the fact that for many players the interesting aspect of AW was we pit our best attackers against your best defenders in the closest thing to a head to head competition that currently exists in the game. 15.0 basically says Kabam doesn't want alliances to try too hard to beat the other alliance's attackers with their defenders. They want the competition to be indirect, where we win if our attackers are better than your attackers, or else if we are about the same on attack then whoever places the broadest roster wins.
That is the devs' choice to make, but don't blame the players for it because no significant number of players were asking for that. That one is entirely on the devs. And own that decision and admit it to the players so we can stop trying to make suggestions on correcting errors that aren't actually errors but just the natural consequence of the strange new non-competitive competition that Kabam seems to have decided they want to implement.
Defender diversity is so bad because if you are in a pro alliance you will probably use the best champs for defense like jugg or electro and so will all your teammates, now if you do that you will get a less chance of winning!
WELL 6 STARS CHANGED THAT
And this happen since last server maintenance was made. Previous AW was in same tier 10 and everything was right. Now! No links from nodes 50 47 44 42 to minies. And a lot nodes doesn’t have a buffs or abilities. Just 25% attack or so for example node
25
As you seem to have observed, skill is not the only thing that is incentivized in this game. Progress is also rewarded. Players are encouraged to grow their rosters because different champions have different utility: having more champions increases the likelihood you will have a stronger set of options for a particular task. It is obvious that the game encourages progress by presenting the players with different challenges that make some champion abilities more useful and rewarding.
The question is when an alliance with a stronger roster faces an alliance with a weaker roster, should the alliance with the stronger roster have a intrinsic advantage for possessing the stronger champions and using them on offense or defense, or should the alliance with the weaker roster gain an advantage for defeating stronger champions in combat. And to answer that question, we should look at how the game itself works everywhere else. First, as a general rule no one gets more rewards for being the underdog. For a given opponent your rewards are based essentially on the strength of that opponent, not on your attacking strength. So whether that opponent is twice your rating or half your rating, you will get about the same rewards for defeating it (there is a subtle complexity to how arena points are calculated but that doesn't undermine this point significantly). This suggests an idea that is reinforced elsewhere: the player is not penalized for bringing the best possible attacker to face a particular opponent, because the game encourages players to build a large diverse roster from which to pick such attackers from.
So if someone brings down Maestro with a 3*, you are not penalized for using a 4* or 5* because the game doesn't want to discourage you from actually trying to build a stronger roster and actually use it. It takes less skill to defeat Maestro with a 5* than a 3*, but the desire not to penalize stronger attacker choices overrides that in the game. All other things being equal, we should expect that alliance war would follow that same general principle.
So the points you get are not affected by the strength of your attackers relative to the defenders or relative to the strength of the opposing alliance's attackers. But what about the defender strength? In normal content we get more rewards for defeating stronger opponents. Should an attacking alliance gain more points for defeating a strong defensive placement than an attacker that defeats a weaker one? That would be true except that AW specifically allows players to place the opponents from their own rosters. Defense placement is also a roster selection process just as attacking is. If we recognize that not penalizing players for roster selection on offense overrides the desire to reward situational skill in general, then that same principle should apply to defense placement. We should not penalize players for placing the best possible defense even if that makes things harder on the opposing alliance when they attack. Giving the opposing alliance more points for killing a stronger defense is tantamount to penalizing the alliance for making the best possible roster selection. That violates the principle that roster progression and ideal selection from your roster is not generally penalized, even to reward more skillful play.
In this game, progress is rewarded first, and that includes and is especially true for roster growth. Skillful employment and use of that roster is rewarded second. In an inverted game where skillful play was rewarded first and use of roster was rewarded second, it would not be as time consuming or affected by random chance to grow your roster. Instead, we'd have ways to recognize and progressionally reward skillful achievements. We'd be an accomplishment-based progressional game rather than a roster-based progressional game.
In other words, we'd be collecting trophies instead of champions.
Wrong.
Everyone who either isn't competitive or is terrible at the game wanted diversity. THose people shouldn't have a voice in the direction this game goes.
So if they gave Abomination a new way to poison champs, then put him on a enhanced ability node, not a enhanced poison node. He would get kills there, in theory.
Actually, can anyone point to a single post on the forums or the subreddit where a player explicitly asked for all of the champions to be equally represented on defensive AW maps? Because I can't find one.
There's a difference between asking for different forests and asking for every tree in the forest to be different.
To hell with diversity. I won't be wasting resources on one single beauty pageant defender. I'll continue to rank the champs I need for other aspects of the game and slow my progression and curb my interest in the game.
I always loved war because it was a competition. So I was excited when I got champs that would give me an edge in war. Now, I don't care. I'm only playing because it's habit. Without fun and competition being injected back into the game, that habit won't last much longer.
Congrats? 3 "players" are happy they get to show off the fact they've 4/40'd every single champ they've ever gotten except that one special unduped 5/50. Hooray for the collectors that'll always have 5.2 to look forward to..
I wouldn't say that. I believe a good game should strive to have something for everyone. But it should recognize that because players are different and want different things, and those things are often mutually contradictory, they cannot make everything for everyone.
There are parts of the game that are not very competitive, except against once's self. The story quests are not competitive. You can do them at your own pace and at your own comfortable progress level. You can do RoL with 3* champs or you can wait to do it with 5* champs (or even 6* champs). You can adjust the difficulty of the game to some extent by choosing when your roster is strong enough to do them. You get the same rewards either way.
Some parts of the game are indirectly competitive. Arena milestones are not competitive but arena rank rewards are indirectly competitive. You compete against the entire field of arena grinders and get rewards based on where you place overall. At no time are you in direct competition with another player, you are only in competition with all players as a whole.
Alliance Quest is also indirectly competitive. You are competing with other alliances for the best rank rewards. But even totally non-competitive alliances can get something out of AQ. They can get milestone and completion rewards. They get less rewards than the highest tier alliances, but if they genuinely aren't competing with them that should not matter.
Alliance War is more directly competitive, although that direct competition is between alliances and not players. Each alliance is attacking the other alliance's defenders. How hard the content you face is something dictated by the opposing alliance. How well you do is determined by your performance against those defenses. Your fate is ultimately dictated not by the game itself but by the actions of your opponents. The only rewards you get are rewards for beating the other alliance (or the consolation prize for losing).
That part of the game is, at least obviously to me, targeted at the players that want direct competition. Therefore, it should be the needs and desires of those players that should be the most important. Someone that says they don't want content to be "too competitive" should play the parts of the game that are targeted at indirect or no competition. They should not dictate the competition parameters for the directly competitive parts of the game.
People throw the word "fair" around a lot when it comes to discussions about alliance war. But the most important fairness criteria we should be discussing is whether the players that want head to head tough competition deserve to have a portion of the game that addresses that desire. If the answer is yes, then those players' voices should be heard.
We should no more allow players that don't want tough competition to dictate the parameters of the only direct head to head competition in the game any more than we should allow players that want tough competition to inject it into the story quests. That is not fair. It violates the idea that different player groups should have some part of the game that tries to address their desires. If the game had head to head competition all over the place, then it would be fair for the less competitive players to ask for a place of their own. But the reverse is happening. The only piece of tough head to head competition is being taken away.
Everyone should have a voice. But those voices should be fairly balanced. In my opinion, so long as there exists only one place where tough head to head competition exists in the game, that place should not compromise that competition for the benefit of players that don't want it.
These wars have all been over the moment they started.
Why does this make sense to anyone at Kabam?
Bring back defender kill points.
Reduce diversity points.
You were able to fix the exploit of not placing any defense in a couple days. Why is it taking weeks to figure out that you need to add defender kills back?
Very well said. Although you left out those poor unfortunate souls that don't like playing on alliances. Knew a guy that was been playing since day 1 everyday and has no interest in alliances. Tried to buy deals every now and then but poor guy couldn't progress. Had 1 r5 I think he said and a couple scattered t4cc. 1 5 star too I think. But no way could he get it to r4 anytime in the near future seeing how you need 7 of the same class to do it. So he quit the game shortly after the release of act 5. Felt bad for the guy. He played a lot. Never had a chance to compete in the t4cc arenas. We are forced to play in an alliance if we want the best rewards.
Also please bring back defender kills in some sense. Skill really does need to play a part in war.
It's simple. You scale down the points earned from defender kills to 25pts per kill so that defender diveristy still out weights defender kills so allainces don't fall back to the same champs defense like it was.
But it'll still allow allainces that are slightly more skilled to beat allainces that jusy have a huge rating.
This is a contest after all.
The new system in this case
Both allainces explore 100%
Both alliances place max champs/diveristy.
The only winning factor is defender rating.
Which is what the majority of us are dealing with
So if you were to keep the diversity rating points at a high scale and bring back defender kills with a massive scaled down point system. The new system would still function fine and still allow some sort of a skill aspect to determine aw wins/loses
The key words are "if we want the best rewards." In almost any game, if you want the best rewards you have to do all of the things that award the best rewards. But nothing prevents you from playing alone. Yes, you will advance slower. But you will advance. It might not be fast enough for you, but even players who are members of alliances and do everything in all parts of the game complain about not being able to progress fast enough for them. You have to have reasonable expectations when you play limited parts of an MMO or limit your game play in other ways. That's just life.
In general, the best and highest rate of return in an MMO comes from playing in groups. Rarely if ever is solo play seriously competitive with grouped play. That's just the nature of most MMOs. They are making the conscious decision to forfeit the players who want to play solo and need a high rate of return on their gameplay. This is one of those areas that is very difficult to address everyone's desires because of the desire for MMOs to incentivize group play. Most dev teams that start off by saying they do not want to incentivize group play end up making single player games.
The strength of your defence shouldn't be based on PI, it should be based on how many attackers your defence kills. If you reward defender kills you automatically reward a strong defence in a way that everyone can understand.
Instead, you have defender rating based off PI but everyone knows PI isn't correlated with the strength of a champion, whether on defence or attack.
I don't think it does that. The defender kill points are essentially one fifth of the diversity points. This means there's almost no incentive to place defenders any differently than they are now, unless you believe the defender can get at least five kills. Meanwhile if another alliance has a defender placement advantage of several hundred points (diversity plus rating) it will take dozens of kills to make up the difference. You're going to have to be more than slightly skilled. You're going to have to be significantly more skilled.
What this does is act as a way to decide very close fights where both sides have similar skill and similar defensive points by a small margin of defender kills (or attacker defeats, same thing). So you'll be able to call the match as decided by skill. But honestly I believe the close losses are just the obvious corner case of the problem that is easy to highlight. It is just as bad when the fight is decided by defender points and it is *not* close at all. Most players I think do not want AW decided by defensive placement whether it is close or not. This suggestion only resolves the issue of when the fight is very close.
It also does not address the fact that a major complaint is that 15.0 AW forces players to place defenders without regard to their combat effectiveness, which is an artificial constraint that eliminates a competitive element of AW. I don't think anyone minds defensive diversity. What they mind is being told they have to create it by being told what to place to maximize diversity at the expense of losing the part of the game where you think about the combat effectiveness of the champions. If the players were encouraged to place diverse defenses because the nature of the game was changed so that there was an actual tactical advantage to placing diverse champions relative to repeated strong performance champions, something they could decide on their own how to balance tactically, there would be far less opposition in my opinion.
Defender Kills: 100 points
Diverse defender kills: 50 points
If you have two or more of the same champ in a BG their kills count for 100 points each. If you only have one of a champ in a BG their kills count for 150 points.
Now you have to use strategy on who to place and where so the best alliance wins.
I'm not sure if that is a perfect solution to the issue of adding strategic decision making to defender placement. But I do know the devs are likely to restate their issue with defender kill points: it discourages players from attacking hard nodes. I'm not saying I agree with that position. I don't. But so long as the devs maintain that position you don't need a solution to the diversity problem, you need a solution to the problem of the devs refusing to reinstate defender kill points.