The Problem With Alliance Wars! (And How it Keeps Getting Worse)

Alliance Wars have been out a long time & garnered a lot of hate through the years. It’s a high stress mode that only the most hardcore seem to really enjoy. But let’s get constructive & drive into the problems, & see of ways that could possibly solve these 3 main pain points.

⚫︎ The Cost Is Too High
The cost to Pots is nice these days thanks to Glory, but boosters are another story. And in cases where 1 fight can cost you a war, & where a war can cost a season, you are always going to want to boost.
Proposed Solution...

Make normal boosters unusable for AW, aside from “AW specific” Boosters. Additionally, make this boosters attainable through Loyalty instead of Units. This way there is no pay wall, & no huge item cost since you get Loyalty from AW anyways, so the more you play AW, the more boosts you get for it. This system is already in place for some boosters such as Invulnerability Boosts & this has worked out extremely well.

⚫︎ It Ruins Defensive Champions

About 2 years ago, I’m willing to bet that people would’ve sold their right eye for a 6* Terrax. We all saw this years ago with similar champs like Korg & Dormammu. So what happened? Diversity. When Kabam released Terrax, they specifically said this champion was created mostly for defense, not offense. Only problem is, the Diversity system renders champions based around defense almost useless, since only one can be used per Battle Group.
Proposed Solution...
Do away with Diversity. The need for diversity is a problem of the past, back when every node in AW was identical. Now with Defender Tactics, this is no longer an issue. Only thing I would change, is force alliances to use different defender tactics every war. This way, they will want to change up their defenders, without Wars growing stale fighting the same defense on the same nodes.

⚫︎ The Competitiveness Is Lackluster
The competitiveness is lackluster, because 99.9% of the time, you are fighting opponents you don’t even know or care about. Competition comes from fighting friends & fellow players you know, not random opponents.
Proposed Solution...
Allow alliances to start a war against a specific alliance, as long as they are in the same tier. This way the competition stays real, & you can even rematch if the opponent (or yourself) is a sore loser. This is strictly an option though, & wars with randomized opponents should also continue to be on the table.

There are obviously other problems people might have with Alliance War. Some people might not like the rewards, & others might not like the competitiveness in general. So what do you think? Let’s talk...

Comments

KnightZero

Removing Diversity is a terrible option. We have faced alliances with 110 diversity etc in war, and it's just facing the same stupidly hard Defenders all over the Map. You remove diversity and you'll just see maps riddled with Thing/KM/NF/Void/Korg/Domino etc everywhere.

jaysavage

This all sounds cool but will probably never happen. Also where I live the timezones for AW are terrible. If they could extend AW attack 30 mins- 2 hours it would help SOOO many players.

Hilldar

Walking away from war was the best decision I have ever made. Enjoy the game so much more without that headache and stress and have champs available for endgame content. Just running map 5 you can buy 2 full t5B with glory each month. That’s more than you get from war rewards where you use all your glory for health pots anyways. No brainer for me but everyone is different and has different priorities.

OGAvenger

The only logical option at this point is for Kabam to totally start from scratch on the entire AW feature of the game.

Worknprogress

There's actually a whole lot of boosts in the new solo crystals. Grinding those out regularly can seriously reduce the cost of seasons.

Also removing diversity is a horrible idea as has been stated. It just turns into maps stacked with absolutely awful defenders which are just a giant pain with defensive tactics

danielmath

There's actually a whole lot of boosts in the new solo crystals. Grinding those out regularly can seriously reduce the cost of seasons.

Also removing diversity is a horrible idea as has been stated. It just turns into maps stacked with absolutely awful defenders which are just a giant pain with defensive tactics

yup, i haven't used a single unit on boosts since the solo crystal change, and removing diversity is a hard pass, only players who don't do war could ever think this is anything other then a completely horrid idea

Realm_Of_Rah

Do away with Diversity. The need for diversity is a problem of the past, back when every node in AW was identical. Now with Defender Tactics, this is no longer an issue. Only thing I would change, is force alliances to use different defender tactics every war. This way, they will want to change up their defenders, without Wars growing stale fighting the same defense on the same nodes.

No god no...I don't want to fight 10 Korgs/Green Goblins/Hyperions/Things. Diversity is amazing and necessary.

Agent_X_zzz

Removing Defender Diversity may be the worst thing I have ever heard.

LilMaddogHT

⚫︎ The Cost Is Too High

Really?... I have never once considered buying these AW specific Attack, Health, Health/Attack boosts. With the recent changes to the 7hr solo events providing 15% Attack boosts multiple times a day and then all the solo shards you can get that yield so many boosts in the Supreme solo crystals, I have more than enough boosts to where I can triple boost for pretty much every single fight on the map that I take...

GroundedWisdom

I have to disagree with removing Diversity and allowing Alliances to choose their opponents.

Mauled

AW's mechanics as they are right now are fine IMO. You get matched based on who's got the same war rating as you which is roughly working out at +/- 10-20 places at P2+, obviously the gap is a bit wider the lower down you go.

Diversity is an important mechanic as it's one of the few ways of breaking a deadlock, wars are won and lost on diversity because attack bonus has been identical. The only other way that I can think of them getting around this is weighting nodes but I don't like the idea of that particularly.

It's the only game mode where your individual thinking/strategising truly has an impact on someone else.

The rewards are a little bit lacklustre in my opinion but I don't play this game for rewards alone, I play the game because it's fun, the rewards should always be a byproduct of the game, not the other way around.

My biggest gripe with AW is the fact the potions still cost 260 glory and have done for months, whilst everything else has dropped in price, making them comparatively more expensive. This has come alongside the fact that now everybody from G2 and up is going to war with an attack team that are R5s and the further up the tree we go we're seeing more and more R3 6*. Healing up a R5 is roughly 4-5 Lv4 potions depending on the healthpool, this is the equivalent of 20% of your weekly glory. That's a massive investment. I dread to think what a boosted R3 6* would cost you. This brings me onto the other issue - the health potions are in dire need of a buff. They should be percentage based. a lv4 should heal 40%, lv3 30%, lv2 20% and the alliance revives should be percentage based as well. I wouldn't resent the 260 glory price tag so much if that was the case.

GroundedWisdom

Incase I didn't stress it enough, selecting opponents is a BAD idea. The last thing we need is more of a way to peck off whoever we want.

GinjabredMonsta

Yeah ima also say that being able to choose your own opponents would probably be taking a step backwards into keeping things fair

Mauled

Yeah ima also say that being able to choose your own opponents would probably be taking a step backwards into keeping things fair

But I wanna fight bronze allies to keep me in P2🧐

GroundedWisdom

Yeah ima also say that being able to choose your own opponents would probably be taking a step backwards into keeping things fair
But I wanna fight bronze allies to keep me in P2🧐

To be fair, the OP said as long as they're in the same Tier, but that's still the same effect. The same Allies who know they will win everytime (fair or not), will pick whoever they want to take out.

DNA3000

The OP's suggestions boil down to:

1. Disallow normal boosts from war.
2. Remove defender diversity.
3. Allow alliances to pick their opponents.

There is no reality where this doesn't make war worse. I hate alliance war: but there's plenty of room for me to hate this version more. Why?

1. Kabam just started basically handing out boosts for free in the solo crystals. The OP would change war by preventing me from using these, and have to spend loyalty to buy completely different ones instead. This is a net negative. And this assumes Kabam would sell them for the trivial loyalty costs suggested by the OP, which seems unlikely.

2. Defender diversity is there specifically to prevent alliances from just placing tons of copies of the hardest to kill defenders. Removing diversity would make war harder for everyone, because that's unavoidable. So while one of the OP's complaints is that war is too expensive, the one thing removing defender diversity is guaranteed to do is make it more expensive. While also preventing me from using those solo crystal boosts I'm currently getting to make war easier.

3. Allowing alliances to pick their competition isn't going to improve competitiveness. Instead, such a feature would be used to specifically try to find advantageous match ups. Because of course it would. Especially in the middle tiers where there are a lot of alliances so you aren't likely to face everyone of similar rating, you could simply try to find the weakest alliances in your tier. This would start a race to see who could jump into the game when match making started and pick a weaker match before some other stronger alliance picked you first.

If the first suggestion is punishing and the second one is counter-productive, this one turns alliance war from a dumpster fire into a nuclear inferno.

TitoBandito187

Diversity... Don't just award points for being diverse, but subtract points for each duped defender. Then scale exponentially (minus points) for each additional dupe of the same defender so that it really hurts. That will ensure diversity at more levels of AW instead of just the higher ones where it really does make a difference as everyone is expected to 100 everytime.

In mid tier, we still face a good deal of the same repeat champ's cause people figure harder fights are more likely to stop someone in their tracks than possibly losing a war by a couple of diversity points. So many Things, Dooms, Korgs, Dominos, Killmongers in every BG.

War should be straight up too. Tone down some of the nodes, but don't allow any items. fights should be challenging, but not require boosts to have a chance if you have the right counters, skill and patience.