I don't have issues with the map change, in fact I welcome the change because it means that all my members when they make their first movement in the morning and start with 5 energy they will be able to reach the first linked node on their path no matter which path they take. Only time will tell if Tier 2 is actually longer than the existing map of if it really costs the same amount of energy to move.
What I don't like about the proposed changes however is 3 new nodes: "ebb and flow-knockdown", "ebb and flow-intercept" and "window of opportunity-stun". These provide in my opinion too hard of a challenge for AW.
Can someone please tell me 1 counter to darkhawk on eb and flow knockdown. I dont think any champion can beat that within 3 minutes. @Kabam Miike
Void and Torch would work. Not everyone is probably going to give counters when asked though as part of new AW is being able to figure out these counters as an alliance and using it to beat other alliances initially.
There are plenty of other more worrying combinations tbh though. Darkhawk on Ebb and Flow would be annoying but manageable but some of the other combos will be downright almost impossible.
No they wouldn't read the node, every debuff gets removed every time protection activates. Yes they could do it but not in 3 mins
Void admittedly would be trickier but Torch would work. Then there also champs who have guaranteed crits like Wasp who could lay down at least one good heavy in the 6 second window and start a new cool down. Even Modok could do some work.
It would be interesting if they clarified if the fury passive refreshes on each knockdown or if a new one procs. If it refreshes then you could potentially knock them down continuously for a while without having to worry about debuffs being removed.
Can someone please tell me 1 counter to darkhawk on eb and flow knockdown. I dont think any champion can beat that within 3 minutes. @Kabam Miike
Void and Torch would work. Not everyone is probably going to give counters when asked though as part of new AW is being able to figure out these counters as an alliance and using it to beat other alliances initially.
There are plenty of other more worrying combinations tbh though. Darkhawk on Ebb and Flow would be annoying but manageable but some of the other combos will be downright almost impossible.
No they wouldn't read the node, every debuff gets removed every time protection activates. Yes they could do it but not in 3 mins
Void admittedly would be trickier but Torch would work. Then there also champs who have guaranteed crits like Wasp who could lay down at least one good heavy in the 6 second window and start a new cool down. Even Modok could do some work.
It would be interesting if they clarified if the fury passive refreshes on each knockdown or if a new one procs. If it refreshes then you could potentially knock them down continuously for a while without having to worry about debuffs being removed.
Modok could maybe work yes but doesnt darkhawk reduce crit damage by 100% and his shield will pretty much be permanently active as you are knocking him down, you would have to use torches pre fight but yes I could see him doing it with active but it would still be really close
Still remember the AW iteration when hardly any alliance outside t1 was finishing the full map. Talking about the map with slashed tires etc. It was ok for middle tier alliances to just do 6 paths and rest was bonus territory.
Then it changed and 100% became easier and now alliances are mentally programmed to 100%. AW is as difficult as you want it to be. You just have to find the right alliance for your level (in terms of skill and money).
But with rewards being buffed, dropping down just increases the gap between people willing to pay and those who aren't. I'm not saying that there shouldn't be a gap, because obviously they're willing to spend money, but increasing the gap day by day just makes it worse.
That ship sailed a very long time back ... if you agree with micro transactions impacting a competitive mode, then that's really it .. you either have to grind and get your boosts and revives or pay. Same for niche champion acquisition. I was a bit miffed when Thing came out and he was the boss as I had to boost up to get a solo on him; there was no way to solo him without attack boost. But then I dropped down to Plat 4 where it was ok to give 1 or 2 deaths to bosses.
If everyone is so mad at AW, who are these alliances in Master and platinum brackets?
They're mostly people who want the challenge and are willing to pay. Or really skilled folks. The AW you were talking about had no seasons. It was just a normal game mode. With seasons, the reason to clear has increased. Niche champs will always be there. That's how the game is. But just adding niche nodes and then niche champs makes the game boring. Grinding to get boosts is all fine. Where are you going to get the champs? Specific nodes need specific champs. Add the defenders on that, and the pool decreases. That's the problem people have been having with war, and the Map doesn't help. And as someone said above, these are just 1-2 nodes on the side that will stop a 100% like before. Basically can stop upto 3 people itself. There was a reason they changed the old war. And hidden nodes.
Ebb and flow knock down seems a bit much, I mean 6 seconds isn’t enough time and against champions like darkhawk this is just an insta timeout, also hazard shift seems a bit bad because there are only 5 Champions immune to incinerate and poison and none are used often in war so it is really just a quake and ghost node and any node that you need one of the two most broken champions in the game for is a bad node in my eyes.
I think cutting the points would bring zero because somebody has to be in t1 2 etc U cut the points and the same alliamces will be in the same leagues only with half points I dot understand that
That's exactly my point. Cutting the WRP in half for everyone doesn't do anything because everyone will still experience the same grossly overpowered Matches. Season 19 is just going to be sacrificed for people so the system can balance. It's going to be an unfair bloodbath.
it needs to happen. 10mil rating alliances do not deserve to be above 30mil alliances becuase in no world would the 10 mil aalliance ever win if they fought each other. the system that has allowed small allies to leapfrog larger allies because they never fight is an unfair handicapped system and has no place in a system where everyone is fighting for the same ppol of rewards.
so this needs to happen and should have happened a long time ago.
No. It does not "need" to happen. Those Alliances fight their own fair Matches and earn their own way to wherever they are. They Match, and fight, and put every bit of effort in they can. A month's worth of Wars to work towards the end goal. The fact that a fair fight is a foreign concept to some is ridiculous to me, but the truth is they didn't leapfrog anywhere. They earned it through the Points they earned in their own Matches. Now people are bitter that they can't peck them off. There are other solutions and it absolutely does not need to happen. Those people played the system fairly and earned what they earned based on their own performance. It does not need to happen. Those Alliances represent many people who put every effort they can into Seasons. Forcing them to do Wars that they absolutely cannot win as something that "has to happen" is totally disrespectful and caters to one demographic alone. The demographic that can't get past their Ego because Allies smaller than them are earning big Rewards. There would have been other options. Making them fight Wars they literally can't win and ruining their Season when they're working just as hard as anyone else is just flat-out cruel. Everything makes a difference during the Season. Every Alliance you do that to has 30 people putting in their best efforts and what you're talking about is Wars that no matter how hard they try, they can't win. I mean literally can't. Numerically can't. You're talking to the wrong person if you're trying to sell the idea that this kind of mistreatment is necessary. Yes, I use the word mistreatment without any kind of dramatics. The people working their butts off to earn Rewards in Season are being mistreated because people complained about who else was getting what. It's altogether unfair. If you don't care about the efforts that hundreds if not thousands of people put into a Season, that's your shortcoming. I do.
your logic makes no sense when talking about a system that award rewards based on a leaderboard. a system that allows alliance X to finish in 1000th place while alliance y finishes in 5000th place when inf the two alliances ever fought alliance X would have no chance and be destoyed by alliance Y is a total farce.
imagine a sports competition. where someone finishes in first place because they only played the bottom teams and won all matches while a team finishes last because they only played the top teams. HOW IS THAT FAIR? teams fighting for spots in a leaderboard need to have the ability to reasonably beat all those below them. an alliance should not be ranked 10th overall because they are the best 10 million rated alliance. because they only fought other 10million alliances, while a 30 million alliance finishes 100th becuase they did not do well against other 30 million alliances. if these two alliance ever fought we know who would win.
a system that segregates alliances into pools based on alliance ratings only works if each pool has their own set of rewards.
most people know this, even kabam know ths hense why they are changing the system.
once again you are very very out of touch with the community and you have a poor way of looking at the system.
TL:DR if a 2million alliance wins 10/2 season because it only fought other 2 million alliances, while a 40million alliance loses 3/7 season while fighting only other 40million alliances. the 2 million alliance does not deserve to finish higher on the leaderboard and get better rewards becuase they were fighting in different competitions.. different competitions cant have the same pool of rewards.
I'm not out of touch with anything. I presented ideas on how to accommodate that. There are other ways. Forcing people to ruin their Season by fighting Wars they are guaranteed to lose, just to balance the system, makes them nothing but collateral damage. That's more inappropriate than getting higher Rewards.
Maybe I'm just naive but i had really high hopes for a real change after all the feedback you got from the community. One of the feedback was making war less stressful but the new changes are making war much worst.
Hidden nodes: I don't think they have any place in this game, especially with the hundreds of champs out there, and all the newer champs that are focused on their defensive abilities. Even with the scouter lens mastery\bot you still need to choose your team before you join and now you need to think about any possible counters, not mentioning bringing counters for the other fights\boss when unlike regular quest you can bring only 3 champs and you can't just restart the map.
New nodes: When i read about the new nodes, on theory some of them seems much harder especially with combinations of some top defenders (that doesn't need any node to be overpower). it doesn't feels like you were thinking about all the node\defender combinations unless that was your plan... Personally I rather not see a new nodes designed just for AW (like i said the pressure is already high). It's too much stress to fight a new node with new interaction for the first time and trying not to die. one or two weeks of practice is not enough to test all nodes with all defenders and see if there is any strategy to overcome it.
At this point i don't even care what the rewards will be, as the better they are the pressure to push harder in war in any cost will be higher.
So here's what's terrifying to me. The picture and the post messed up the node numbers and link combinations. What does that tell you? It tells you this map with nodes and links isn't even built yet! That was just a picture of what they think it will look like. If it's not built, how can they test it? As players we want/demand that stuff like this is tested! Stop using the player base as testers for you. Test your own content prior to release. We want/demand every node be tested with EVERY defender, with EVERY defensive tactic, with EVERY attacker, and with and without suicides prior to release. This should be common sense. If you want to get better at communicating with your player base, release videos of Kabam employees soloing paths with no boosts or potions proving this content was rigorously tested. Because not getting the node numbers and links right means this isn't even built yet and that's a VERY scary thought.
Trying to fix the matchmaking appears to be the only positive. The new nodes look terrible. It's almost as if nothing has been learned. Example: Community: All these reduce damage by 90% nodes unless you meet some crazy specific criteria are terrible in act 6 Kabam: We hear you. Kabam: Here's 90% reduced damage nodes in war but you can do normal damage for 6 seconds! Also, we'll make those minis hidden...
I just wanted to say thanks for reaffirming my apathy toward joining any war focused alliance. This makes me extremely skeptical towards all the other upcoming updates....
So... for example... my alliance has 22m rating could face more >30m alliance rating if our aw rating closer each other ?
Then... isn't it same with very old one aw matchmaking ? and the conclusion will be : High alliance rating will present in Top tier AW ?
Please enlighten...
In general, the *stronger* alliances should finish higher, and the weaker ones should finish lower, in a reasonable competition. Stronger alliances tend to have stronger rosters and more skilled players. Alliance rating weakly correlates with alliance war strength, so if an alliance has an overwhelmingly higher alliance rating they probably have a significant advantage over yours. But possessing stronger champions is also an advantage the game deliberately promotes. Having stronger champs means you can do harder content, get larger rewards, do higher AQ maps, place stronger AW defenders, and kill more AW defenders while dying less, all other things being equal. In a perfect world, that's what's supposed to happen.
In a perfect and simplified world where there are two 22 million alliances A and B and two 30 million alliances C and D, in direct competition, if A faced B and won, and C faced D and lost, we'd expect the next war to decide who places first to be between A and D, even though A was 22 million and D was 30 million. Because those were the two winners. Their alliance ratings would be completely immaterial. Fairness would demand that A and D face each other in a straight up fight.
That same principle should be extended to a competition with 40,000 alliances. Only wins and losses should count, winners should face winners and loses should face loses, and war rating is just a mathematical way to keep track of the win/loss record. And if it turns out that the highest rating alliances place on top because their roster advantage was insurmountable, that's that. You can advocate to change how war works so that roster has a lower advantage, but you can't eliminate that advantage and you can't rig the system to allow alliances with lower rosters to just avoid ever having to face the alliances that win the most often, because that destroys the concept of competition being about which alliance wins and which loses. It becomes which alliance engineers the most favorable roster situation instead.
Honestly, a tournament-style season system would probably be much better for a lot of reasons, not the least of which would be that it would be much harder for people to argue that the system was unfair. In a tournament, you must go through the bracket, whomever is in your path. Anyone who said that they deserve to be relocated to another bracket because their opponent just had too high alliance rating to be fair would be laughed at. That would probably make it worth it all by itself, to give finality to the notion that alliance properties don't matter, wins and losses matter.
There's an orthogonal problem with Kabam changing difficulty based on rating, but that's a post for another time.
So here's my take on the ten new war node buffs. *Two* make sense to me. *One* is questionable. The rest suck.
The two that make sense to me: Strike Counter - Fury and Buff Imbalance - Weakness. Strike Counter - Fury has a skill component (balancing attack charges) and a reasonable penalty if you mess up - defender gets fury passives until you reset the counters. Compare this to Strike Counter - Combat Power Rate. This is like SC-F except if you mess up the charges your combat power rate goes down. Combat power rate is the rate at which you gain power when you attack. Which you need to use specials. If you somehow find yourself with no charges and also no power, you're out of luck unless you have some other way to gain power. This isn't an inescapable problem, but it seems without intrinsic power gain the fight could reach degenerate states. And maybe the final numbers will make this not as bad as it seems. But it is still, from an overarching design perspective, something I wouldn't want to do.
Buff Imbalance - Weakness has a tactical element to it. As it is a debuff, it is something you could use to heal from with Willpower. And Weakness doesn't reduce your ability to throw specials, so you can get out of the weakness debuff. This means the attacker has significant theoretical control over this node's effects, and can attempt to manipulate them to their advantage. On the surface, this is a more balanced punishment/reward node.
Steady Buildup -X does have some pros and cons to it. But they both hinge on the attacker purifying debuffs, which is only rarely something a player can use skill to do (Ghost, for example). Most of the time, this is an ability thing, which means these nodes mandate specific champions more than they mandate more tactical or skillful play. They aren't horrible, but they aren't especially good additions either.
Both Ebb and Flow nodes reduce damage by 90% when their conditions aren't met. in my opinion, this is numbers theater. Alliance war fights are timed. Reducing damage by 90% means you're almost certainly going to time out, so whether the node reduces damage by 90% or 100%, the net result is going to be the same most of the time: a loss. You pretty much have to satisfy the conditions. And unlike the original Aegis node that probably inspired these, you have to keep doing the thing over and over and over and over again. Ebb and Flow - intercept is kind of like Aegis intercept, except you have to be able to do it repeatedly, and it will be inflicted on lower tier alliances now. I suspect the 90% was a way to "counter-balance" the need to reapply every six seconds, and justify applying it to lower tier alliance maps. If so, the whole idea is wrong. The node is harder, but being used lower, and that's an overall increase in pain being inflicted for no obvious reason.
Buff Imbalance - Power Gain suffers from a similar problem as Strike Counter - Combat Power Gain. The "punishment" is to drain your power, and you can end the punishment by using a special attack. This is a gotcha node: screw up, and you're permanently screwed.
Window of Opportunity - Stun, as I said, might as well be called "Intercept or Die." For 12 seconds at a time you can't stun the defender at all, or you'll be stunned for four seconds. Four seconds is a very long time in AW. Twelve seconds is also a very long time in AW, given fights are 180 seconds long. I think if you can't intercept here, you're much more likely to time out if you're cautious or die if you're aggressive.
Hazard Shift - Incinerate/Poison is the one I think is questionable. I guess you can go in there with Iceman or Red Hulk, or Mephisto if you ranked him up, and just ignore the node. Or you can use a strong AAR champ. Otherwise, I'm pretty sure the devs picked those two debuffs because of the very low overlap between them, forcing players to either come up with one of the few double counters, or just lose half the time in the fight. Which again, is an attempt to leverage the clock directly.
In my opinion, the devs should *never* be directly and blatantly leveraging the clock. The clock exists to prevent all sorts of exploits and other problems, so we accept the clock as a compromise. But when the devs say "haha you can't finish in three minutes because I slowed the entire fight down" that's not competition. GG devs you beat me. But wasn't the other alliance supposed to beat me?
So two yes, one eh, and seven I'll pass.
I'm in an alliance that gives up five losses at the start of every season with two battlegroups to give weaker players full participation, then wins six or seven of the rest with one battlegroup. And even that half-hearted effort now has us in tier 7, within striking distance of landing in Hard maps, because as I see it war has devolved into a handful of alliances fighting for real, and the rest of the world not even trying because it is not worth it, and they probably don't even want to win too often, lest they become victims of the next iteration of "make war even more interesting." And this seems to just be more of the same: let's make war even more interesting, because players are just falling asleep bored while fighting in alliance war.
I wouldn't mind seeing these nodes in a Variant quest. But the problem with these nodes in Alliance War is not that they aren't creative enough or interesting enough. It is that they are designed to push people to fail, so that they have some new challenge to climb. I want that in solo optional content. I don't want that in alliance war.
I don't know why this is so hard to convey. I want an interesting job. But if you show up to my office and pour Coca Cola into my laptop and throw half the notes on my desk into the shredder 15 minutes before I'm supposed to do some critical work, I'm not going to enjoy that. Because you just increased my chances of publicly and spectacularly failing my company and my customer. I want challenges, but I don't want artificial challenges and I don't want crazy challenges when other people are counting on me. I've had those happen occasionally: they make you grow old, and are to be prevented at all costs.
The alliance war designers should ask themselves how much challenge they want when they are closing in on deadlines and the merge window is closing and their work has already been publicly announced and the rest of the company is counting on them. And then give me that. This is not that.
And this is just the new nodes. Hidden mini bosses all over the place, when we've established that hidden nodes eliminate counterplay? This was *settled* two iterations of war ago. Hidden nodes eliminate counterplay. Kabam conceded the point, so seeing all those hidden nodes sends the message they would rather have chaos and random punishment than counterplay.
I pulled back from doing competitive wars a while back, as the only way I could respond to what i saw as unreasonable issues with war. I'm now wondering if the day is approaching when participation on *any* level will be intolerable, because war isn't about beating the other alliance, it is about beating the war designer. And I'm just not good enough to beat them.
@DNA3000 you sir. Are the man. I always like reading your posts because it sounds like what the player base wants. What you said is exactly what I was thinking when I read through the nodes. Thinking “ok so who are we going to exploit hwre and there, oh that’s gonna be a time out, guaranteed 3-4 deaths here” these nodes should be in personal content not when you’re playing against a clock, even if you increase the clock some of this stuff is still going to be annoying.
I thought QOL was important to them. Some folks genuinely stress out over not being good enough for their alliance. That’s unneeded stress for a game. I don’t feel that way, I die I die (I’ll get annoyed but that’s it). I do well I do well. But other folks genuinely care and stress over dying and feel like they let 29 others down.
As an officer, introduction of new maps and new nodes takes a toll on me to organize the defence for my BG. Takes at least half a day to get the placements right especially with these defence tactics change. We run in T4 so it may be tougher for higher tiers. And two weeks does not seem enough time for people to get organised, but it is what it is. I don't even recognize some of these nodes. lol. Back to the drawing board I guess. Hope those third party AW defence tools get updated quick. If the rewards seems not worth the effort, I might just move to an aq based alliance. I am not pulling any flow counters and judging from the map, I am not looking forward to defence tactics announcement. I think if we play one or 2 wars, we may get used to this. But, getting used to difficult content and enjoying the difficult content are two different things.
I think cutting the points would bring zero because somebody has to be in t1 2 etc U cut the points and the same alliamces will be in the same leagues only with half points I dot understand that
That's exactly my point. Cutting the WRP in half for everyone doesn't do anything because everyone will still experience the same grossly overpowered Matches. Season 19 is just going to be sacrificed for people so the system can balance. It's going to be an unfair bloodbath.
it needs to happen. 10mil rating alliances do not deserve to be above 30mil alliances becuase in no world would the 10 mil aalliance ever win if they fought each other. the system that has allowed small allies to leapfrog larger allies because they never fight is an unfair handicapped system and has no place in a system where everyone is fighting for the same ppol of rewards.
so this needs to happen and should have happened a long time ago.
No. It does not "need" to happen. Those Alliances fight their own fair Matches and earn their own way to wherever they are. They Match, and fight, and put every bit of effort in they can. A month's worth of Wars to work towards the end goal. The fact that a fair fight is a foreign concept to some is ridiculous to me, but the truth is they didn't leapfrog anywhere. They earned it through the Points they earned in their own Matches. Now people are bitter that they can't peck them off. There are other solutions and it absolutely does not need to happen. Those people played the system fairly and earned what they earned based on their own performance. It does not need to happen. Those Alliances represent many people who put every effort they can into Seasons. Forcing them to do Wars that they absolutely cannot win as something that "has to happen" is totally disrespectful and caters to one demographic alone. The demographic that can't get past their Ego because Allies smaller than them are earning big Rewards. There would have been other options. Making them fight Wars they literally can't win and ruining their Season when they're working just as hard as anyone else is just flat-out cruel. Everything makes a difference during the Season. Every Alliance you do that to has 30 people putting in their best efforts and what you're talking about is Wars that no matter how hard they try, they can't win. I mean literally can't. Numerically can't. You're talking to the wrong person if you're trying to sell the idea that this kind of mistreatment is necessary. Yes, I use the word mistreatment without any kind of dramatics. The people working their butts off to earn Rewards in Season are being mistreated because people complained about who else was getting what. It's altogether unfair. If you don't care about the efforts that hundreds if not thousands of people put into a Season, that's your shortcoming. I do.
your logic makes no sense when talking about a system that award rewards based on a leaderboard. a system that allows alliance X to finish in 1000th place while alliance y finishes in 5000th place when inf the two alliances ever fought alliance X would have no chance and be destoyed by alliance Y is a total farce.
imagine a sports competition. where someone finishes in first place because they only played the bottom teams and won all matches while a team finishes last because they only played the top teams. HOW IS THAT FAIR? teams fighting for spots in a leaderboard need to have the ability to reasonably beat all those below them. an alliance should not be ranked 10th overall because they are the best 10 million rated alliance. because they only fought other 10million alliances, while a 30 million alliance finishes 100th becuase they did not do well against other 30 million alliances. if these two alliance ever fought we know who would win.
a system that segregates alliances into pools based on alliance ratings only works if each pool has their own set of rewards.
most people know this, even kabam know ths hense why they are changing the system.
once again you are very very out of touch with the community and you have a poor way of looking at the system.
TL:DR if a 2million alliance wins 10/2 season because it only fought other 2 million alliances, while a 40million alliance loses 3/7 season while fighting only other 40million alliances. the 2 million alliance does not deserve to finish higher on the leaderboard and get better rewards becuase they were fighting in different competitions.. different competitions cant have the same pool of rewards.
I'm not out of touch with anything. I presented ideas on how to accommodate that. There are other ways. Forcing people to ruin their Season by fighting Wars they are guaranteed to lose, just to balance the system, makes them nothing but collateral damage. That's more inappropriate than getting higher Rewards.
So what’s your solution then just let unfair matchmaking continue
There's a number of things you could have done. You could have had separate Brackets for Rewards based on Prestige and continued to have fair Matches. You could have had an adjustment period outside of the Season so it doesn't affect peoples' Season. You could have also separated Season from off-season to prevent it from being manipulated. You could have designed a more balanced system that uses a mixture of both which would eventually balance itself out. I could come up with a number of ideas to prevent people from wasting their efforts during the Season just to appease the top Tier. What you have now is people being set up to fail in the name of the system being "broken", and the only ones who don't see that as a problem are the ones not affected. You have a much larger problem being created to make the most competitive happy, and the ones who will suffer from this are seen as necessary and expendable. That's not fairness. It's placation at the expense of people who are just doing their best in the Wars they are in. Once you start setting them up to fight Wars they will never win, that's just a balancing that's too sick for me to consider necessary.
Sorry if I'm a little charged on this one. I get that people don't think it's fair for them to get the same Rewards. It's the solution that's more unfair for me.
@GroundedWisdom I'm with you on this one. I think the new matchmaking system lends itself to even more manipulation of the system. Shell alliances are going to become even more common in the game with these changes.
I think cutting the points would bring zero because somebody has to be in t1 2 etc U cut the points and the same alliamces will be in the same leagues only with half points I dot understand that
That's exactly my point. Cutting the WRP in half for everyone doesn't do anything because everyone will still experience the same grossly overpowered Matches. Season 19 is just going to be sacrificed for people so the system can balance. It's going to be an unfair bloodbath.
it needs to happen. 10mil rating alliances do not deserve to be above 30mil alliances becuase in no world would the 10 mil aalliance ever win if they fought each other. the system that has allowed small allies to leapfrog larger allies because they never fight is an unfair handicapped system and has no place in a system where everyone is fighting for the same ppol of rewards.
so this needs to happen and should have happened a long time ago.
No. It does not "need" to happen. Those Alliances fight their own fair Matches and earn their own way to wherever they are. They Match, and fight, and put every bit of effort in they can. A month's worth of Wars to work towards the end goal. The fact that a fair fight is a foreign concept to some is ridiculous to me, but the truth is they didn't leapfrog anywhere. They earned it through the Points they earned in their own Matches. Now people are bitter that they can't peck them off. There are other solutions and it absolutely does not need to happen. Those people played the system fairly and earned what they earned based on their own performance. It does not need to happen. Those Alliances represent many people who put every effort they can into Seasons. Forcing them to do Wars that they absolutely cannot win as something that "has to happen" is totally disrespectful and caters to one demographic alone. The demographic that can't get past their Ego because Allies smaller than them are earning big Rewards. There would have been other options. Making them fight Wars they literally can't win and ruining their Season when they're working just as hard as anyone else is just flat-out cruel. Everything makes a difference during the Season. Every Alliance you do that to has 30 people putting in their best efforts and what you're talking about is Wars that no matter how hard they try, they can't win. I mean literally can't. Numerically can't. You're talking to the wrong person if you're trying to sell the idea that this kind of mistreatment is necessary. Yes, I use the word mistreatment without any kind of dramatics. The people working their butts off to earn Rewards in Season are being mistreated because people complained about who else was getting what. It's altogether unfair. If you don't care about the efforts that hundreds if not thousands of people put into a Season, that's your shortcoming. I do.
your logic makes no sense when talking about a system that award rewards based on a leaderboard. a system that allows alliance X to finish in 1000th place while alliance y finishes in 5000th place when inf the two alliances ever fought alliance X would have no chance and be destoyed by alliance Y is a total farce.
imagine a sports competition. where someone finishes in first place because they only played the bottom teams and won all matches while a team finishes last because they only played the top teams. HOW IS THAT FAIR? teams fighting for spots in a leaderboard need to have the ability to reasonably beat all those below them. an alliance should not be ranked 10th overall because they are the best 10 million rated alliance. because they only fought other 10million alliances, while a 30 million alliance finishes 100th becuase they did not do well against other 30 million alliances. if these two alliance ever fought we know who would win.
a system that segregates alliances into pools based on alliance ratings only works if each pool has their own set of rewards.
most people know this, even kabam know ths hense why they are changing the system.
once again you are very very out of touch with the community and you have a poor way of looking at the system.
TL:DR if a 2million alliance wins 10/2 season because it only fought other 2 million alliances, while a 40million alliance loses 3/7 season while fighting only other 40million alliances. the 2 million alliance does not deserve to finish higher on the leaderboard and get better rewards becuase they were fighting in different competitions.. different competitions cant have the same pool of rewards.
I'm not out of touch with anything. I presented ideas on how to accommodate that. There are other ways. Forcing people to ruin their Season by fighting Wars they are guaranteed to lose, just to balance the system, makes them nothing but collateral damage. That's more inappropriate than getting higher Rewards.
So what’s your solution then just let unfair matchmaking continue
There's a number of things you could have done. You could have had separate Brackets for Rewards based on Prestige and continued to have fair Matches. You could have had an adjustment period outside of the Season so it doesn't affect peoples' Season. You could have also separated Season from off-season to prevent it from being manipulated. You could have designed a more balanced system that uses a mixture of both which would eventually balance itself out. I could come up with a number of ideas to prevent people from wasting their efforts during the Season just to appease the top Tier. What you have now is people being set up to fail in the name of the system being "broken", and the only ones who don't see that as a problem are the ones not affected. You have a much larger problem being created to make the most competitive happy, and the ones who will suffer from this are seen as necessary and expendable. That's not fairness. It's placation at the expense of people who are just doing their best in the Wars they are in. Once you start setting them up to fight Wars they will never win, that's just a balancing that's too sick for me to consider necessary.
I really can’t believe you keep pushing this weird idea you have of fairness.
The previous matchmaking favored those alliances enormously. And the rest of us suffered. It’s too bad now it’s their turn to suffer but it is the best way to make it FAIR.
We already have brackets/tiers. Defined by war rating. The rewards scale basing off those tiers. In “War” There shouldn’t be any other criteria than “War rating”. It’s in the name.
If you want to use prestige then what’s the point of war rating? Use prestige brackets, gain points during season and get your rewards. Does that sound familiar? Yeah. It’s AQ. Where skill is non existent.
Plenty of alliances had the benefit of prestige matchups for a long time. This probably sounds harsh but time to suck it up for a season, the benefit (at higher prestige alliances detriment) has already been banked.
Comments
What's the "checks and balance" node? It's a new one or already in the game?
What I don't like about the proposed changes however is 3 new nodes: "ebb and flow-knockdown", "ebb and flow-intercept" and "window of opportunity-stun". These provide in my opinion too hard of a challenge for AW.
It would be interesting if they clarified if the fury passive refreshes on each knockdown or if a new one procs. If it refreshes then you could potentially knock them down continuously for a while without having to worry about debuffs being removed.
And as someone said above, these are just 1-2 nodes on the side that will stop a 100% like before. Basically can stop upto 3 people itself. There was a reason they changed the old war. And hidden nodes.
One of the feedback was making war less stressful but the new changes are making war much worst.
Hidden nodes:
I don't think they have any place in this game, especially with the hundreds of champs out there, and all the newer champs that are focused on their defensive abilities. Even with the scouter lens mastery\bot you still need to choose your team before you join and now you need to think about any possible counters, not mentioning bringing counters for the other fights\boss when unlike regular quest you can bring only 3 champs and you can't just restart the map.
New nodes:
When i read about the new nodes, on theory some of them seems much harder especially with combinations of some top defenders (that doesn't need any node to be overpower). it doesn't feels like you were thinking about all the node\defender combinations unless that was your plan...
Personally I rather not see a new nodes designed just for AW (like i said the pressure is already high). It's too much stress to fight a new node with new interaction for the first time and trying not to die. one or two weeks of practice is not enough to test all nodes with all defenders and see if there is any strategy to overcome it.
At this point i don't even care what the rewards will be, as the better they are the pressure to push harder in war in any cost will be higher.
Community: All these reduce damage by 90% nodes unless you meet some crazy specific criteria are terrible in act 6
Kabam: We hear you.
Kabam: Here's 90% reduced damage nodes in war but you can do normal damage for 6 seconds! Also, we'll make those minis hidden...
I just wanted to say thanks for reaffirming my apathy toward joining any war focused alliance. This makes me extremely skeptical towards all the other upcoming updates....
In a perfect and simplified world where there are two 22 million alliances A and B and two 30 million alliances C and D, in direct competition, if A faced B and won, and C faced D and lost, we'd expect the next war to decide who places first to be between A and D, even though A was 22 million and D was 30 million. Because those were the two winners. Their alliance ratings would be completely immaterial. Fairness would demand that A and D face each other in a straight up fight.
That same principle should be extended to a competition with 40,000 alliances. Only wins and losses should count, winners should face winners and loses should face loses, and war rating is just a mathematical way to keep track of the win/loss record. And if it turns out that the highest rating alliances place on top because their roster advantage was insurmountable, that's that. You can advocate to change how war works so that roster has a lower advantage, but you can't eliminate that advantage and you can't rig the system to allow alliances with lower rosters to just avoid ever having to face the alliances that win the most often, because that destroys the concept of competition being about which alliance wins and which loses. It becomes which alliance engineers the most favorable roster situation instead.
Honestly, a tournament-style season system would probably be much better for a lot of reasons, not the least of which would be that it would be much harder for people to argue that the system was unfair. In a tournament, you must go through the bracket, whomever is in your path. Anyone who said that they deserve to be relocated to another bracket because their opponent just had too high alliance rating to be fair would be laughed at. That would probably make it worth it all by itself, to give finality to the notion that alliance properties don't matter, wins and losses matter.
There's an orthogonal problem with Kabam changing difficulty based on rating, but that's a post for another time.
I thought QOL was important to them. Some folks genuinely stress out over not being good enough for their alliance. That’s unneeded stress for a game. I don’t feel that way, I die I die (I’ll get annoyed but that’s it). I do well I do well. But other folks genuinely care and stress over dying and feel like they let 29 others down.
The previous matchmaking favored those alliances enormously. And the rest of us suffered.
It’s too bad now it’s their turn to suffer but it is the best way to make it FAIR.
We already have brackets/tiers. Defined by war rating. The rewards scale basing off those tiers.
In “War” There shouldn’t be any other criteria than “War rating”. It’s in the name.
If you want to use prestige then what’s the point of war rating?
Use prestige brackets, gain points during season and get your rewards. Does that sound familiar? Yeah. It’s AQ. Where skill is non existent.
This probably sounds harsh but time to suck it up for a season, the benefit (at higher prestige alliances detriment) has already been banked.