**KNOWN AW ISSUE**
Please be aware, there is a known issue with Saga badging when observing the AW map.
The team have found the source of the issue and will be updating with our next build.
We apologize for the inconvenience.
Please be aware, there is a known issue with Saga badging when observing the AW map.
The team have found the source of the issue and will be updating with our next build.
We apologize for the inconvenience.
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15.0 Alliance Wars Update Discussion Thread
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if you dont want 100% exploration upgrade the other nodes too
if you want a skill decision who win add defenderkills, maybe with just 10 points per kill.
this may help to avoid that Wars are decided on rating and diversity, our last 5 Wars was with full diversity (150) and both alliances explore 100% so that the rating decided who wins what leads to better masteriers decide over the win or who has more 5* rank4, from the 5 Wars 3was decided with less then 50 points but the enemy have a lot more defender kills.
They use more Suicides masteries what lead to more rating and more suicide def kills, but only rating is important so they win...
If you guys understand how defender kills impact wars then why is Diversity the tie breaker and not defender kills?
If all things being equal then the alliance who did it better should win.
I don't think I'm the only one when I say I just don't see where you're headed with all this and you could save me and a lot of people some time by letting us in on the master plan and how you intend on getting there.
This is scary... We are REALLY TIRED of you revisioning stuff while we have to adapt spending resources and money. You promised that our now useless characters would have been useful again. Please explain how this "new" war make them useful, thanks.
More engaging and difficult? You completely removed thorns, slashed tires, start with power nodes, and the ability to place repeat defenders that were difficult to beat previously.
The problem with this system is that in any given tier of AW, there are a lot of defenders that don't really get any kills. Then there are a few that get just a couple. And there are a very few that get a lot. One property that the original system had but your system lacks is the notion of an assist. If you place a strong defender that deals a lot of damage but doesn't get the kill, you could still ultimately benefit from that if the next defender finished the attacker off. So imagine the case where you place a bunch of Icemen all over the place and then unique strong defenders immediately after each Iceman on those paths. The Icemen might not get any kills, but you don't actually want them to. You want them to soften up the attackers and then have the unique champions after them finish them off. They get the kill, they are unique, they get the most points. It still encourages you to place a lot of copies of Iceman on the map.
Maybe that's a good thing. Under the right circumstances that could add a kind of tactical thinking to placement, but I point it out to demonstrate that there are a lot of weirdness to scoring that can happen if you tie uniqueness to kill directly, because in actual play it often isn't the champ you screw up against that kills you, it is the next one.
I'm also concerned about the way the numbers work. I acknowledge you point out that your proposed formula may need to be tweaked, but let's say you think Magik can get three kills. If we place one Magik we get three kills. If we place two Magiks we get six kills by we divide by two and end up with three points again - same as before. No matter how many Magik's we place we get the same amount of defensive kill points. But Magik is also a potential path-stopping champ: she can theoretically wipe out an attacker and terminate that path. So she is worth placing a lot of, because in this case there's no penalty for doing so. There's no advantage either, but it is always better to place a Magik than a defender that won't get a kill. It is sometimes worth placing a defender that can also get kills. But even then that is likely to be very situational.
My concern with this issue is that while it encourages a larger variety of champions than now, it doesn't seem to encourage more variety than 14.0, and it also encourages consistent placement of the same champs on the same nodes to get the same kill pattern. That might cause map placement to become monotonous again.
It is better than what we have now and probably better than what we are getting in the next iteration, but it still needs work to become competitive with what 14.0 was already offering players.
That is tantamount to saying that if a basketball team plays too good defense it is not fair to the offense of the opposing team because the first team's offense doesn't have to work as hard as the second team's offense. That perverts the definition of what a competition is when both sides control both offense and defense.
Mike, I'd like to make one point about energy to show that we actually have less than we did with the old maps.
In the old maps we got a new point of energy every 1.5 hours. Since there was a max of 5 energy, that meant that it took 7.5 hours to fill the meter. Now that it only takes 1 hour per energy, we hit max energy in 5 hours.
The problem is sleep. Since the war lasts 24 hours, almost everyone is going to go to sleep at some point. Most people need around 7 hours of sleep, so the old system had no waste for most people. The new system will waste at least a couple of energy for most people.
The same thing is true for work. Someone who works an 8 hour job, plus a little time for commuting, would lose 1 or 2 energy with the old system. With the current system, that same person would lose about 4 energy.
When you announced the new maps, changing the timer to 1 hour and the map size to 150% bigger sounded like an even trade. However, it isn't. Going from 7.5 hours to fill the meter to 5 hours to fill the meter causes people to waste more energy.
Could the team consider making the max energy level higher?
Exactly. In old war, it wasn’t the nodes that typically stopped people. It was the defender. A status immune she hulk isnt that tough. A status immune duped spidey or max md magik/juggs is. That’s where kills came from generally.
I made a post about this asking for Kabam's advice to mid-tier alliances who have thus far climb up the tiers with a combination of skills, units and tactical defensive placement. We have in the past beaten alliances with much higher defender rating than us because we have a much better defense and were also able to plow through their defense with lesser deaths. Now what do we do when we face the same alliance again? We can have the same more defender kills and we can still plow through their defense with minimal deaths but they are gonna win in the end because they have a higher defender rating and defender diversity points if we decide to field our old school defenders.
If we decide to go for max diversity we will lose because of defender rating. Either way we lose. I know I'm probably gonna get warn for tagging but hey @Kabam Miike, how do you suggest us mid-tier alliances deal with this? Do we simply pray to god and hope our opponents mess up? Because now we don't have a say anymore in the outcome of the war. It is entirely up to our opponents even if we 100% explore all 3 battle groups.
Link to my original post: https://forums.playcontestofchampions.com/en/discussion/23837/assistance-needed-how-do-we-play-alliance-wars#latest
I think you're missing the point, getting 100% was something we did regularly in the old map. It took skill, coordination, and even items. But if our opponents did it too, we could count the kills and say we did better. I want to face strong defenses, and for my defense to be tough. That was the fun challenging part of the game. Without it, I won't keep playing much longer. I know, I know, people will just say go ahead and quit then.
Disagree. People can advance without spending. In fact, many Players have Resources expiring because they are selective with who they Rank. Resources that are meant to be used. Totally their prerogative. It's still not absolutely necessary to spend. All that does is speed up the process.
Now if anything they could bring back defender kills but only give us 5 points for each kill. They would also bump defender diversity back up if they did that though.
At the risk of being repetitive, please explain how map changes are going to accomplish this. You say you want players to think about which defender to place on which node. But what the node does or where it is doesn't matter directly. What matters to the players is "if I place this defender here, what will the result be: good for me, or not good for me."
How do you expect a player to make that decision? Under 14.0, that question had an easy answer: place the defender that will get the most kills. Kills give points, and the more kills the defender gets the greater the chance the defender will also blockade the path. That's logical. That's how we made our decisions.
You say Kabam is adjusting the nodes to make them harder. No matter how easy they are or how hard they are, what should the players be thinking about which defender is better or worse? The only thing we can possibly think in 15.0 is "try to place a defender that can stop a player dead. If that can't happen, then it doesn't really matter what we place." But trying to stop an attacker from continuing to try to attack is your stated reason for removing defender kills. If we aren't allowed to compel an attacker to stop attacking, if we don't get points for defender kills, what's left to judge?
Kabam's position seems to be that if the nodes are harder, then it will matter which defenders get placed. But it only matters if being harder matters. And in 15.0, "harder" only matters if you stop the attacker cold. If you just kill him a couple times, that doesn't affect the war.
A defender isn't better because it hits harder or because he has a difficult to evade special attack or because he regenerates health. That's incidental. A defender is better if it helps us win a war. A defender has one and only one way to ultimately do that. Change the score. We don't get points when it kills an attacker. We only get points if the entire attacking alliance gives up on that path. Short of that, the only points we get is on placement. Nothing about the defender capabilities affects placement points.
Think about it. It's not an accident. The whole goal was to increase revenue via AW.
Surely that's the point of War? That the stronger alliance will win? Or are you so blinded by your own contrariness that you can't see that?
Our goals were to make Alliance Wars more diverse, engaging and fun. We've said this before. I know you're going to believe whatever you want to believe, but I promise you, that was not at all our goal here.
When we removed Defender kills, it's because we didn't want players to simply give up after a fight. Not playing should never be the optimal strategy. We wanted everybody to fight for the very last node. Stuck because your Alliance mate couldn't take down the link to the node in front of you? Well fight it anyways! See if you can take it down!
We've said before that getting this mode to where we want it to be will be an iterative process. So if there are more iterations that need to be made, we will. But first, we've got to get through a few days of War until we can see how this is working out.
@Kabam Miike would love to see you respond to @DNA3000 's well written and thought out posts, rather than ones like you responded to above
Why not just have 3 point metrics: exploration, boss kills and defender kills.
Whoever clears the the map while doing it in style wins.
Maybe I'm over simplifying things, but I know for a fact that they are over complicating things.
Nobody is stopping after 1 fight. If they really can't kill the defender, they don't deserve to win. It's a war. You play to win the game!
Your first two paragraphs contradict each other. Removing defender kills and adding diversity make AW much more boring and too similar to AQ. There is no competition now because the winner is already pre-determined. There is simply no acceptable version of AW that doesn't involve defender kills.
IMO this update changes nothing except the amount of money spent on pots due to more KO's. They need a tie breaker as 100% exploration and 100% diversity will always mean the team with the highest defender rating will win. No skill reward at all
But that’s the thing. You can still not permit the same defenders per bg and have this metric. This whole theory that they don’t want people to “give up” by counting defender kills is really nonsensical at this point. If the other alliance 100%’s the map...you have to 100% the map to win. The only way it makes sense is if the less than skilled alliance believes that even if they 100% the map they willl lose on defender kill points.
But what this doesn’t answer is the obvisou: why would an alliance that knows the war winner will come down to defender rating and the other alliance is stuffed with 5* r4 champs, meaning they will automatically win, have any motivation to keep fighting?
The difference would be HOW that 100% was achieved @Kabam Miike Was the 100% achieved by item use by lower skill or lower ranked champs? Or was it achieved with no items/low kills. With defender kills you have to be careful of your paths and super attentive to what champs are placed. I'm all for the diversity metric but not without defender kills. If you took the nodes In a more specialized direction where less used champs could be highlighted more it would make it more fun. Honestly flat markups of health and attach and unblockable specials are pretty boring. But if spider Gwen were unblockable and unstunnable it would at least be interesting. Or have curse nodes like act5. Anything more interesting than "power gain is now 2.0 instead of 1.5". Yawn.
You are focusing on "what" too much. A lot of top tier alliances will 100% no matter what. It is the how you win that makes it fun. Watching an alliance waste 20 lives on one node while being behind in exploration was exciting. A lot of times you wouldn't know if you won or lost it was so close. Now we just run the map like it's a daily quest. We will do the same after the change.
Skill matters. Strategy matters. I think that's been lost in some attempt to make us use Luke cage or abom more often. The most skilled alliance should win. Not the biggest. Not the most diverse. And right now and after tomorrow the most skilled stands a good chance of losing. I hope you can see that.