I've been watching this thread since it appeared but have refrained from commenting until now because I'm in a weird position where I'm not quite sure what to say about it. But I was asked to give my input, so here goes. I actually have a draft of a post I was going to put up related to this topic, but instead I'm going to yank out a core idea of it and post it here. This will start off looking like I'm talking about something totally different, but I promise anyone who survives long enough will see it come back to the thread topic. But if you're reading this on the bus and need the Cliff Notes, TL;DR at the bottom.
Anyone who's read my posts for a while knows I have issues with Alliance War. They are varied and extensive, and a subject for another time. But one of them has to do with how Alliance War is balanced and iterated. The short version is that in my opinion Kabam doesn't properly promote competition, it gets in the way of competition.
Full disclosure: I am not a tier 1 AW player. I've basically retired from competitive war, and even at my peak I was only a tier 5/6 player. But I am familiar with how tier 1-5 wars are played, and at least the broad strokes of the meta play (boosting, assignment, etc). Much of this stuff I've bounced off of tier 1 players, and while they don't all agree with my opinions, I've gotten enough feedback to know I'm not completely off in left field.
In trying to keep this under a hundred pages, the core idea is escalation. In a competition, if I try harder to win, I would expect my opponents to try harder to beat me, up to a point. So starting from zero, if I try to win wars without using potions, I expect my opponents to use potions to try to beat me. This forces me to use potions to level the playing field, or even tilt it in my direction. Eventually we're both using the maximal amount of potions and boosts to tilt things in our favor. Of course, this wouldn't be true for every single player. Some players are stronger than others and wouldn't need as much consumables. Some would have lower pain points on spending. But as a general statement, if you give sticks to both sides, we should expect both sides to swing them at each other to win.
So is huge spending inevitable in competitive war, not just at tier 1, but throughout all of the reasonably competitive tiers? It would be interesting to run an experiment in which we hand both sides a huge amount of free potions and boosts, and see if everyone burns them up in an escalatory fashion. Does giving both sides even more weaponry continue the war escalation upward? Does everyone continue to spend, over and above the initial freebee arsenal?
In an ironic twist, Kabam has been running this experiment for some time now. They've been giving free potions and boosts for AQ and AW for more than a year. We've had plenty of time to see what that injection of extra weaponry does to war. And at least as far as I can see, it hasn't escalated war at all. It has deescalated war. People are, in general, spending less on war. It would be as if you gave away free weapons in a war zone and everyone decided to stop fighting each other and sell them on eBay.
This seems counter-intuitive, but I have a theory that goes back to the beginning of when war started getting iterated. We think of war as having two sides to it: us, and them. But in my opinion, it doesn't. It has *three* sides to it: us, them and Kabam. Kabam is the third side in every war, and it is an unwanted participant. The nodes, the tactics, all of the difficulty that Kabam pumps into war is not seen as part of the defense. It is perceived as referees interfering with the game. Because of that, all the extra potions aren't escalating the war between the two alliances, it is instead being used against the third wheel in the war: Kabam.
This is admittedly a bunch of psycho conjecture. Potions are fungible, people are varied and complicated, and no simple theory is going to explain how every single person fights wars. But I believe that as a general over-arching subconscious idea, people do not feel like the majority of the price they pay to participate in wars is going towards defeating the enemy. They feel it is going towards overcoming Kabam's difficulty designs. And that's why players don't just take the free stuff and continue to spend on top. Some do of course, but the average behavior is closer to "good, now I don't have to spend to overcome this nonsense" and then they fight the war against the enemy alliance with much less stress and pressure to perform perfectly.
If I'm right, it means two things. First, when the free compensation potions disappear, there will be a serious whiplash among players who will perceive the alliance war game mode to be much more hostile than it was before, and much less interesting to participate in than before. Tier 1 alliances are still going to be tier 1 alliances, but people in general will participate less, and those that do will do so with less enthusiasm. You'll see more semi-retired sleep walking alliances that just start wars for the easy rewards but don't try hard, just fall in rating until they are assassinating low tier alliances. Fewer and fewer participants will actually participate in it as a genuinely competitive game mode. We have actually been seeing that for a while in my opinion, but the free potions have slightly slowed the trend, and their absence will, I believe, accelerate it.
Second, it will mean that my original conjecture way back when, that Kabam was doing it wrong when they were trying to make wars more "interesting" by making them more difficult because it was extremely damaging to the game mode, and set it on a course where they couldn't iterate out of the hole they dug, because they created a meta where only people willing to accept the "three way war" situation and the costs associated with it were going to like the game mode, and that is a vanishingly small percentage of the player population, would be more or less proven true. Or to put it another way, alliance war might be permanently locked into being a slowly marginalized game mode.
The weird position I'm in, and why I've refrained from commenting on this thread until now, is that I've been thinking about this for a very long time, and a lot of this are things I've discussed with Kabam. However, as those are not public discussions, I've had to eliminate from this post anything that isn't an original idea of mine or might directly reflect those discussions. About the only thing I think it is fair to say is that whenever this subject comes up, I tend to go off on a rant.
TL;DR [and overgeneralized]: People have been using free potions to make alliance war a less hostile experience, and removing them will remind a lot of people why they hate war. This is because consciously or otherwise, most people see the high cost of war as not the price of competition, but rather as the cost the game mode artificially extracts on players before they even fight the opponent. And this demonstrates alliance war is broken as a game mode, because people don't even see it as a competition between opponents, they see it as a survival task of artificial (not opponent created) difficulty that Kabam monetizes.
I've been watching this thread since it appeared but have refrained from commenting until now because I'm in a weird position where I'm not quite sure what to say about it. But I was asked to give my input, so here goes. I actually have a draft of a post I was going to put up related to this topic, but instead I'm going to yank out a core idea of it and post it here. This will start off looking like I'm talking about something totally different, but I promise anyone who survives long enough will see it come back to the thread topic. But if you're reading this on the bus and need the Cliff Notes, TL;DR at the bottom.
Anyone who's read my posts for a while knows I have issues with Alliance War. They are varied and extensive, and a subject for another time. But one of them has to do with how Alliance War is balanced and iterated. The short version is that in my opinion Kabam doesn't properly promote competition, it gets in the way of competition.
Full disclosure: I am not a tier 1 AW player. I've basically retired from competitive war, and even at my peak I was only a tier 5/6 player. But I am familiar with how tier 1-5 wars are played, and at least the broad strokes of the meta play (boosting, assignment, etc). Much of this stuff I've bounced off of tier 1 players, and while they don't all agree with my opinions, I've gotten enough feedback to know I'm not completely off in left field.
In trying to keep this under a hundred pages, the core idea is escalation. In a competition, if I try harder to win, I would expect my opponents to try harder to beat me, up to a point. So starting from zero, if I try to win wars without using potions, I expect my opponents to use potions to try to beat me. This forces me to use potions to level the playing field, or even tilt it in my direction. Eventually we're both using the maximal amount of potions and boosts to tilt things in our favor. Of course, this wouldn't be true for every single player. Some players are stronger than others and wouldn't need as much consumables. Some would have lower pain points on spending. But as a general statement, if you give sticks to both sides, we should expect both sides to swing them at each other to win.
So is huge spending inevitable in competitive war, not just at tier 1, but throughout all of the reasonably competitive tiers? It would be interesting to run an experiment in which we hand both sides a huge amount of free potions and boosts, and see if everyone burns them up in an escalatory fashion. Does giving both sides even more weaponry continue the war escalation upward? Does everyone continue to spend, over and above the initial freebee arsenal?
In an ironic twist, Kabam has been running this experiment for some time now. They've been giving free potions and boosts for AQ and AW for more than a year. We've had plenty of time to see what that injection of extra weaponry does to war. And at least as far as I can see, it hasn't escalated war at all. It has deescalated war. People are, in general, spending less on war. It would be as if you gave away free weapons in a war zone and everyone decided to stop fighting each other and sell them on eBay.
This seems counter-intuitive, but I have a theory that goes back to the beginning of when war started getting iterated. We think of war as having two sides to it: us, and them. But in my opinion, it doesn't. It has *three* sides to it: us, them and Kabam. Kabam is the third side in every war, and it is an unwanted participant. The nodes, the tactics, all of the difficulty that Kabam pumps into war is not seen as part of the defense. It is perceived as referees interfering with the game. Because of that, all the extra potions aren't escalating the war between the two alliances, it is instead being used against the third wheel in the war: Kabam.
This is admittedly a bunch of psycho conjecture. Potions are fungible, people are varied and complicated, and no simple theory is going to explain how every single person fights wars. But I believe that as a general over-arching subconscious idea, people do not feel like the majority of the price they pay to participate in wars is going towards defeating the enemy. They feel it is going towards overcoming Kabam's difficulty designs. And that's why players don't just take the free stuff and continue to spend on top. Some do of course, but the average behavior is closer to "good, now I don't have to spend to overcome this nonsense" and then they fight the war against the enemy alliance with much less stress and pressure to perform perfectly.
If I'm right, it means two things. First, when the free compensation potions disappear, there will be a serious whiplash among players who will perceive the alliance war game mode to be much more hostile than it was before, and much less interesting to participate in than before. Tier 1 alliances are still going to be tier 1 alliances, but people in general will participate less, and those that do will do so with less enthusiasm. You'll see more semi-retired sleep walking alliances that just start wars for the easy rewards but don't try hard, just fall in rating until they are assassinating low tier alliances. Fewer and fewer participants will actually participate in it as a genuinely competitive game mode. We have actually been seeing that for a while in my opinion, but the free potions have slightly slowed the trend, and their absence will, I believe, accelerate it.
Second, it will mean that my original conjecture way back when, that Kabam was doing it wrong when they were trying to make wars more "interesting" by making them more difficult because it was extremely damaging to the game mode, and set it on a course where they couldn't iterate out of the hole they dug, because they created a meta where only people willing to accept the "three way war" situation and the costs associated with it were going to like the game mode, and that is a vanishingly small percentage of the player population, would be more or less proven true. Or to put it another way, alliance war might be permanently locked into being a slowly marginalized game mode.
The weird position I'm in, and why I've refrained from commenting on this thread until now, is that I've been thinking about this for a very long time, and a lot of this are things I've discussed with Kabam. However, as those are not public discussions, I've had to eliminate from this post anything that isn't an original idea of mine or might directly reflect those discussions. About the only thing I think it is fair to say is that whenever this subject comes up, I tend to go off on a rant.
TL;DR [and overgeneralized]: People have been using free potions to make alliance war a less hostile experience, and removing them will remind a lot of people why they hate war. This is because consciously or otherwise, most people see the high cost of war as not the price of competition, but rather as the cost the game mode artificially extracts on players before they even fight the opponent. And this demonstrates alliance war is broken as a game mode, because people don't even see it as a competition between opponents, they see it as a survival task of artificial (not opponent created) difficulty that Kabam monetizes.
Count me in as one of those ppl who has hated Seasons with a passion and had retired from it for about five Seasons. I hesitantly returned coz my Loyalty was running too low. To my great surprise, our chilled T7 wars were actually fun and I gotta attribute that to the compo packages. I imagine I will return to retirement once that ends. Then do a loyalty top up from time to time. But hating it.
Honestly, since all you get from AW is loyalty, AW potions should only be purchased with loyalty, not glory, glory should be for AQ only. But if i have to choose on whether to rank up champs with glory or buy pots for AW, I going with ranking up. Never been a big fan of AW anyway, mainly because you fight the same champs over and over again, no uniqueness. AW gets boring after fighting 20 nick fury, things, korgs, etc. Its like doing act 1 over and over again.
Comments
Anyone who's read my posts for a while knows I have issues with Alliance War. They are varied and extensive, and a subject for another time. But one of them has to do with how Alliance War is balanced and iterated. The short version is that in my opinion Kabam doesn't properly promote competition, it gets in the way of competition.
Full disclosure: I am not a tier 1 AW player. I've basically retired from competitive war, and even at my peak I was only a tier 5/6 player. But I am familiar with how tier 1-5 wars are played, and at least the broad strokes of the meta play (boosting, assignment, etc). Much of this stuff I've bounced off of tier 1 players, and while they don't all agree with my opinions, I've gotten enough feedback to know I'm not completely off in left field.
In trying to keep this under a hundred pages, the core idea is escalation. In a competition, if I try harder to win, I would expect my opponents to try harder to beat me, up to a point. So starting from zero, if I try to win wars without using potions, I expect my opponents to use potions to try to beat me. This forces me to use potions to level the playing field, or even tilt it in my direction. Eventually we're both using the maximal amount of potions and boosts to tilt things in our favor. Of course, this wouldn't be true for every single player. Some players are stronger than others and wouldn't need as much consumables. Some would have lower pain points on spending. But as a general statement, if you give sticks to both sides, we should expect both sides to swing them at each other to win.
So is huge spending inevitable in competitive war, not just at tier 1, but throughout all of the reasonably competitive tiers? It would be interesting to run an experiment in which we hand both sides a huge amount of free potions and boosts, and see if everyone burns them up in an escalatory fashion. Does giving both sides even more weaponry continue the war escalation upward? Does everyone continue to spend, over and above the initial freebee arsenal?
In an ironic twist, Kabam has been running this experiment for some time now. They've been giving free potions and boosts for AQ and AW for more than a year. We've had plenty of time to see what that injection of extra weaponry does to war. And at least as far as I can see, it hasn't escalated war at all. It has deescalated war. People are, in general, spending less on war. It would be as if you gave away free weapons in a war zone and everyone decided to stop fighting each other and sell them on eBay.
This seems counter-intuitive, but I have a theory that goes back to the beginning of when war started getting iterated. We think of war as having two sides to it: us, and them. But in my opinion, it doesn't. It has *three* sides to it: us, them and Kabam. Kabam is the third side in every war, and it is an unwanted participant. The nodes, the tactics, all of the difficulty that Kabam pumps into war is not seen as part of the defense. It is perceived as referees interfering with the game. Because of that, all the extra potions aren't escalating the war between the two alliances, it is instead being used against the third wheel in the war: Kabam.
This is admittedly a bunch of psycho conjecture. Potions are fungible, people are varied and complicated, and no simple theory is going to explain how every single person fights wars. But I believe that as a general over-arching subconscious idea, people do not feel like the majority of the price they pay to participate in wars is going towards defeating the enemy. They feel it is going towards overcoming Kabam's difficulty designs. And that's why players don't just take the free stuff and continue to spend on top. Some do of course, but the average behavior is closer to "good, now I don't have to spend to overcome this nonsense" and then they fight the war against the enemy alliance with much less stress and pressure to perform perfectly.
If I'm right, it means two things. First, when the free compensation potions disappear, there will be a serious whiplash among players who will perceive the alliance war game mode to be much more hostile than it was before, and much less interesting to participate in than before. Tier 1 alliances are still going to be tier 1 alliances, but people in general will participate less, and those that do will do so with less enthusiasm. You'll see more semi-retired sleep walking alliances that just start wars for the easy rewards but don't try hard, just fall in rating until they are assassinating low tier alliances. Fewer and fewer participants will actually participate in it as a genuinely competitive game mode. We have actually been seeing that for a while in my opinion, but the free potions have slightly slowed the trend, and their absence will, I believe, accelerate it.
Second, it will mean that my original conjecture way back when, that Kabam was doing it wrong when they were trying to make wars more "interesting" by making them more difficult because it was extremely damaging to the game mode, and set it on a course where they couldn't iterate out of the hole they dug, because they created a meta where only people willing to accept the "three way war" situation and the costs associated with it were going to like the game mode, and that is a vanishingly small percentage of the player population, would be more or less proven true. Or to put it another way, alliance war might be permanently locked into being a slowly marginalized game mode.
The weird position I'm in, and why I've refrained from commenting on this thread until now, is that I've been thinking about this for a very long time, and a lot of this are things I've discussed with Kabam. However, as those are not public discussions, I've had to eliminate from this post anything that isn't an original idea of mine or might directly reflect those discussions. About the only thing I think it is fair to say is that whenever this subject comes up, I tend to go off on a rant.
TL;DR [and overgeneralized]: People have been using free potions to make alliance war a less hostile experience, and removing them will remind a lot of people why they hate war. This is because consciously or otherwise, most people see the high cost of war as not the price of competition, but rather as the cost the game mode artificially extracts on players before they even fight the opponent. And this demonstrates alliance war is broken as a game mode, because people don't even see it as a competition between opponents, they see it as a survival task of artificial (not opponent created) difficulty that Kabam monetizes.