Doesn't matter. 10, 20, 30. You can make a list of Champs in the BG and count the doubles. If it's too much, assign an Officer to oversee a BG. That's why we have them. It's not hard to make sure there are unique Defenders. It's just not the same as relying on popular opinion based on Defender Kills.
Relying on popular opinion based on Defender Kills? What does that even mean? It's grammatically correct, and the words all mean something individually, but no intelligible thought seems to have been expressed.
The thought being expressed is the notion that in 14.0 players were placing defenders based on the number of defender kills people were told they could achieve, instead of doing so based on their own scratch work of making a list of unique defenders.
This so wildly fails to match the experience of most players that it doesn't seem remotely reasonable that is the thought being expressed, but that's the closest semantically correct version I can muster.
Since even @Kabam Miike has explicitly stated that the goal of placing a defense is to kill the other side, the Church of the Emasculated Defender contains exactly one parishioner, so this is not something that I believe is worth trying to place on a logically consistent footing.
I said both systems required planning Defense. Therefore the argument that keeping track of Diversity is too daunting is not really accurate. The comment made was that placing a good Defense would still be a focus. The difference from the former meta being that Defender Kills are not adding Points for said Defense. What I meant by popular Champ choices was the same Champs over and over that gain the most Defender Kills. That focus is what created not only the introduction of Diversity, but also the removal of Defender Kills. Simply because the newer Champs were bringing kill numbers to the point that it changed the grounds of War. Evident by the numerous comments made about Defender Kills being the crux of War. In actuality, Points are the crux of War. Nodes were increased to add more of an element of difficulty. Penalizing the opponent by having metrics for Kills had created issues as Champs were added, and Kills increased. Those are the points I made. Not that everyone just went on word-of-mouth. The focus of War had become Defender Kills. It has been changed to be more in tune with their goals.
Wrong. The focus of war in 14.0 was boss kills and full 100% exploration in the most efficient manner possible. This included the metric of defender kills. When new champs are added, everyone had the option to place them where they might be effective, therefore the argument that it was unfair is wrong. Both alliances in a war had the same map.to work out a strategy to stop the opposing alliance from exploring the map.
I don't like the phrase "the focus of (the) war" because it implies something that doesn't match reality to me: that there was a singular element of the war people focused on. But in 14.0, the "focus" such as it is was to win the war. But the strategy employed to do so was always a multipronged one. Overall, the goal was to make more points. But in 14.0, I think most players were not thinking about points in a discrete way at all. They were thinking more high level: try to complete as much of the map as possible, try to defeat all three bosses, try to place the hardest possible bosses on your own map, and then try to halt the progress of the other side by strategically placing the hardest possible defenders to kill.
I honestly do not believe most players were *directly* thinking about trying to rack up the most defender kills, simply because that calculus doesn't seem to be the obvious thought process. The obvious thought process is to place the defender that is hardest to kill. If you think about it, it is *impossible* to "generate" kills. Defenders don't go out and kill attackers. Attackers attack defenders and sometimes die. If a defender gets twelve kills, that is *only* because the other side chose to revive over and over again. That's not something within our control as defense placers. We can only try to place the most indestructible or otherwise nasty defender on a node. Then it is up to the other side to decide how many attackers they are willing to throw at it.
I *never* thought about how *many* defender kills I was trying to get. In fact, I wasn't trying to get any defender kills. I was trying to place defenders that would stop the attackers. If I stop them, then by definition I won't get many defender kills. Unless the other side chooses to spend past them.
In some tiers, I understand that spending past a node to complete the map is expected and almost mandatory. But that's not true in all tiers. The idea that war was "about defender kills" doesn't reflect how I think most defense placers were thinking. I would rather the defender simply cause the other side to give up. I win, they lose, but no one spends money. I'd be happy with that.
For me, it was and still is about strong defenders. How many kills the defender gets is one metric for judging how strong a defender is, but not the only one and not the most trustworthy one. That's why war *cannot* be only about defender kills. Magik might get six kills on node 42 while Ultron gets three on node 24. But if Ultron is unbeatable on 24 and attackers simply give up and go around him, then he's the stronger defender. The kill count is not what matters. What matters is how much trouble that defender gives the other side. You could even argue that a defender with a lot of kills is a defender the attacker is encouraged to spend past. That's good, but the defender that scares the attacker away completely is better.
Again, in some tiers there is no such defender, and in some tiers most people spend whatever it takes to get past a node. In those tiers and in such situations, defender kill count more closely correlates to how good a defender is. But even there, that correlation is not 100%. Where the defender has to be placed to generate those kills, and how that affects the other side's pathing, also plays some role. A defender that can get four kills on the edges might be more valuable than one that can get eight in the middle, because there are more options for the attacker to traverse the center and much fewer to get to the two outside edge bosses.
The only way we could have won this war was that we had 98-100 different defenders. There is 109 playable champions in this game and I can asure you, my alliance does not have all all of those.
Well, not to quibble but you misunderstand how diversity is calculated. You just need each bg to have 50 unique defenders... which isn't any less stupid a metric for winning, it's just more achievable than you think. You just need a spreadsheet and a deep commitment to wasting a lot of time organizing your rosters.
Terrible that this is what it's come to.
Apparently you've never had to rearrange 30 people in 3 BGs before. Organization has always been present. Not all Allies just jump in and place who they want where they want. Not if you want to win. I've been doing it every War I open. There's always forethought required, especially if you have new Players or someone switches up their Defense.
I usually don't engage you , but you have no clue what you're talking about. Spare me your pathetic, baseless judgement.
I know exactly what I'm talking about. I'm not new at this. I've been organizing Wars since they began. The large majority of the few losses I've seen were because people didn't follow instructions, so I'm pretty sure I have some base knowledge. Taking cheap shots at me is not a constructive way to have a conversation. It's really not hurting me any.
If you've only seen a few losses since AW began, you're in tier 1.
First of all, not all Alliances play steadily. If I can't foresee the availability of Players and the power to organize a Win, I don't open a War. Secondly, I've had more than one Ally. What Tier someone is in has nothing to do with an understanding of Wars in general. I'm very happy that people take pride in where they are at. That's no justification for using it to discredit someone's understanding in a theoretical discussion. I could care less what people think of me. I know what I'm talking about, and that's enough. Having an understanding of the entire War schematic means looking at how it operates at all Tiers. Not just Expert level.
The justification for questioning your credibility is that you keep making statements that are at best astronomically improbable and more likely are completely impossible. No one wins almost every war they are in. That's statistically impossible, and pretty much everyone reading knows this. It is not something it would even occur to me to exaggerate, because in bracketed PvP the only way for this to be true, even accounting for alliance jumping, is to be the literal best player within the game. Even then, the absolute best alliances in the game are probably winning not a huge amount more than 50% of their matches, because either they are matched against similar strength alliances or they are deliberately dropping down to lower brackets. Either way, they can't win every time.
I'm just really astounded you don't realize how deep a hole you are digging. You don't even understand why I mentioned tier one, even though I'm pretty sure everyone else does. I'm not making fun of your tier: I don't know what that is. I'm pointing out the obvious: that only the absolute best players on the absolute best alliances can make the claim that they've only seen a few losses in AW and have been playing since the beginning, and even then it would be a stretch. Jumping alliances doesn't help, because no one keeps jumping into eternal winners.
Your story is that you almost always win, you always jump into winning alliances, and you are always taking over their alliance set ups when you do. That's Mary Sue territory.
I don't claim to be a tier 1 alliance war player, and I have to defer to tier 1 players when it comes to how they play. I don't claim to have won nearly every war, because that's impossible: I win maybe slightly more than 50%, because my alliance has slowly crept upwards from tier whatever to about tier 6 currently. I care about credibility, so I'm honest about the basis of my opinions. I'm not hard to find in-game, so what I say is mostly verifiable. And if I didn't care what people thought about my opinions, I wouldn't post them on a public forum. That would be a waste of my time.
The numbers speak for themselves. I don't have to prove anything. The rarity is when we lose. I know how to organize a Win and I know how to respond in the moment when Attack is active. I don't care what the statistical probability is. I've seen our Streaks, I've fought our Wars. I have nothing to prove. The point I'm making is that I know what I'm talking about and I have the experience. The implication was that I know nothing. Let's call a spade a spade. No matter what I say it will be argued against and dissected because I'm for the removal of Defender Kills. That's the bare bones of it.
Whats your alliance tag?
That's not the topic of the subject and I'm not sharing my information. The purpose of the Thread is to discuss War. Not to pony up or put others on the spot.
Hmmm. Hardly ever lose a war but doesn't want anyone to see what the alliance is... sounds reasonable to me lol
If you can't deduce why I respect my own privacy, of all people, then I'm afraid I don't know what to tell you. Bottom line is, I'm not sharing my information and I won't be provoked into doing so. The topic is War. Not me. I'm moving on in the discussion.
If you don't want people to talk about you, don't talk about you. The moment you make a claim about you, you make it fair game for people to challenge that claim.
Although the moment you make a claim about anything, you make it fair game for people to challenge that claim. That's what adults do when they participate in public discussions. Every time I make a statement, I presume that if someone believes it is wrong they will challenge it, and hopefully in a conclusive way. It has happened many times before, and I don't see anything wrong with that.
It is basically blood in the water for someone to open a topic, then claim it is unfair to discuss that topic beyond their own statements about it.
Talking about me doesn't affect me. The number of people who focus a topic on any comment I make is the issue. That changes the discussion and brings it off-topic. I made a statement. Any statement I make is brought through the ringer. You've done this yourself. The issue is not people talking about me. I could care less. I'm bringing the conversation back to why we're here. If you hadn't noticed, there is always comment after comment on anything I say, and we're not here to put me on the spot. We're here to discuss War.
And the logic in the post goes round and round, round and round, round an round. And the logic in the post goes round and round, til I scratch out my eyes.
One thing that nobody has brought up is the Alliance War map layout itself. It's nine individual paths with portals that allow members to help each other, but at the cost of neglecting to remove linked nodes that link to the mini bosses. So war is really a summation of nine individual performances and one member on standby to see where help is needed the most. The old map prior to the latest major revision to war was far superior in that it was faster and allowed decisions to be made as a team as to how the map was brought down. In many cases 100% was not the norm because the map did not force you to go for an all or nothing result. You could take certain nodes or skip them, but now with nine distinct and unique paths it leads you to an all or nothing result, hence the many 100%-100% scores where it comes down to tie breaking parameters like diversity and defender rating.
If Kabam explores a more creative map layout that takes elements from the original map it may help alleviate the tie-breaker problem. Kabam made changes that were too drastic and broke something that was perfect and made something that feels sub par and incredibly frustrating to play.
Guys leave the individual observations out and let's focus on solutions and proposals. I have added some two days back, it would be great so see constructive comments to build on if your belive then to be good ideas.
One thing that nobody has brought up is the Alliance War map layout itself. It's nine individual paths with portals that allow members to help each other, but at the cost of neglecting to remove linked nodes that link to the mini bosses. So war is really a summation of nine individual performances and one member on standby to see where help is needed the most. The old map prior to the latest major revision to war was far superior in that it was faster and allowed decisions to be made as a team as to how the map was brought down. In many cases 100% was not the norm because the map did not force you to go for an all or nothing result. You could take certain nodes or skip them, but now with nine distinct and unique paths it leads you to an all or nothing result, hence the many 100%-100% scores where it comes down to tie breaking parameters like diversity and defender rating.
If Kabam explores a more creative map layout that takes elements from the original map it may help alleviate the tie-breaker problem. Kabam made changes that were too drastic and broke something that was perfect and made something that feels sub par and incredibly frustrating to play.
Actually it would be awesome if various maps could be implemented and work as random layouts. That could even be taken to address another layer of difficulties to tier the war better.
The only way we could have won this war was that we had 98-100 different defenders. There is 109 playable champions in this game and I can asure you, my alliance does not have all all of those.
Well, not to quibble but you misunderstand how diversity is calculated. You just need each bg to have 50 unique defenders... which isn't any less stupid a metric for winning, it's just more achievable than you think. You just need a spreadsheet and a deep commitment to wasting a lot of time organizing your rosters.
Terrible that this is what it's come to.
Apparently you've never had to rearrange 30 people in 3 BGs before. Organization has always been present. Not all Allies just jump in and place who they want where they want. Not if you want to win. I've been doing it every War I open. There's always forethought required, especially if you have new Players or someone switches up their Defense.
I usually don't engage you , but you have no clue what you're talking about. Spare me your pathetic, baseless judgement.
I know exactly what I'm talking about. I'm not new at this. I've been organizing Wars since they began. The large majority of the few losses I've seen were because people didn't follow instructions, so I'm pretty sure I have some base knowledge. Taking cheap shots at me is not a constructive way to have a conversation. It's really not hurting me any.
If you've only seen a few losses since AW began, you're in tier 1.
First of all, not all Alliances play steadily. If I can't foresee the availability of Players and the power to organize a Win, I don't open a War. Secondly, I've had more than one Ally. What Tier someone is in has nothing to do with an understanding of Wars in general. I'm very happy that people take pride in where they are at. That's no justification for using it to discredit someone's understanding in a theoretical discussion. I could care less what people think of me. I know what I'm talking about, and that's enough. Having an understanding of the entire War schematic means looking at how it operates at all Tiers. Not just Expert level.
The justification for questioning your credibility is that you keep making statements that are at best astronomically improbable and more likely are completely impossible. No one wins almost every war they are in. That's statistically impossible, and pretty much everyone reading knows this. It is not something it would even occur to me to exaggerate, because in bracketed PvP the only way for this to be true, even accounting for alliance jumping, is to be the literal best player within the game. Even then, the absolute best alliances in the game are probably winning not a huge amount more than 50% of their matches, because either they are matched against similar strength alliances or they are deliberately dropping down to lower brackets. Either way, they can't win every time.
I'm just really astounded you don't realize how deep a hole you are digging. You don't even understand why I mentioned tier one, even though I'm pretty sure everyone else does. I'm not making fun of your tier: I don't know what that is. I'm pointing out the obvious: that only the absolute best players on the absolute best alliances can make the claim that they've only seen a few losses in AW and have been playing since the beginning, and even then it would be a stretch. Jumping alliances doesn't help, because no one keeps jumping into eternal winners.
Your story is that you almost always win, you always jump into winning alliances, and you are always taking over their alliance set ups when you do. That's Mary Sue territory.
I don't claim to be a tier 1 alliance war player, and I have to defer to tier 1 players when it comes to how they play. I don't claim to have won nearly every war, because that's impossible: I win maybe slightly more than 50%, because my alliance has slowly crept upwards from tier whatever to about tier 6 currently. I care about credibility, so I'm honest about the basis of my opinions. I'm not hard to find in-game, so what I say is mostly verifiable. And if I didn't care what people thought about my opinions, I wouldn't post them on a public forum. That would be a waste of my time.
The numbers speak for themselves. I don't have to prove anything. The rarity is when we lose. I know how to organize a Win and I know how to respond in the moment when Attack is active. I don't care what the statistical probability is. I've seen our Streaks, I've fought our Wars. I have nothing to prove. The point I'm making is that I know what I'm talking about and I have the experience. The implication was that I know nothing. Let's call a spade a spade. No matter what I say it will be argued against and dissected because I'm for the removal of Defender Kills. That's the bare bones of it.
Whats your alliance tag?
That's not the topic of the subject and I'm not sharing my information. The purpose of the Thread is to discuss War. Not to pony up or put others on the spot.
Hmmm. Hardly ever lose a war but doesn't want anyone to see what the alliance is... sounds reasonable to me lol
If you can't deduce why I respect my own privacy, of all people, then I'm afraid I don't know what to tell you. Bottom line is, I'm not sharing my information and I won't be provoked into doing so. The topic is War. Not me. I'm moving on in the discussion.
If you don't want people to talk about you, don't talk about you. The moment you make a claim about you, you make it fair game for people to challenge that claim.
Although the moment you make a claim about anything, you make it fair game for people to challenge that claim. That's what adults do when they participate in public discussions. Every time I make a statement, I presume that if someone believes it is wrong they will challenge it, and hopefully in a conclusive way. It has happened many times before, and I don't see anything wrong with that.
It is basically blood in the water for someone to open a topic, then claim it is unfair to discuss that topic beyond their own statements about it.
Talking about me doesn't affect me. The number of people who focus a topic on any comment I make is the issue. That changes the discussion and brings it off-topic. I made a statement. Any statement I make is brought through the ringer. You've done this yourself. The issue is not people talking about me. I could care less. I'm bringing the conversation back to why we're here. If you hadn't noticed, there is always comment after comment on anything I say, and we're not here to put me on the spot. We're here to discuss War.
The reason why so many of your posts draws refutation has nothing to do with you, and everything to do with the fallacy of so many of your posts.
One thing that nobody has brought up is the Alliance War map layout itself.
I did, several times. The fundamental problem with the map is that it is inconsistent with offering as many options as possible for the attacker to complete the map and the defenders to prevent 100% completion. Although it is possible to complete the map without fully exploring it, those options are limited. The more limited they are, the more the pressure exists to fully explore.
Partial completions should be much easier than full completions. RIght now partial completions are almost as hard as full completions, which makes them usually nonsensical to pursue unless forced.
Because the map structure doesn't allow for a lot of completion options, the difficulty increases are more global than they need to be. They are making it almost universally harder to traverse the map. If Kabam wants to encourage alliances to attempt completion and they want to encourage defenses to more aggressively stop 100% completion, they should make it possible for an alliance to complete the map while encountering *zero* so called "hard" nodes. There should then be optional exploration paths that have increasingly harder nodes to test stronger attackers, so that the map differentiates between bad attackers, good attackers, and great attackers. They could simultaneously return the "easy mode" of 15.0, while also adding even harder nodes than the current 16.0 version. All alliances could still do *something* to finish.
To make this work, you need to make sure three additional things are true. First, the difficulty of a path should be obvious. If it isn't obvious, players can't decide on what to do and what to skip and the option itself is worthless. Second, there has to be a way to bail out of a path. If an alliance has to commit to a path whether they can complete it or not, that forces them to make the difficult choice on whether to attempt harder difficulties or not right at the start. That's not a good choice to present at the start of the war: the risk is too high if you choose to not attempt 100% and that decision immediately forces a loss. And third, there must be more ways for alliances to distribute their members across all exploration paths. The map currently requires nine separate paths for full exploration, and it has weird limits in some parts of the map. For example, only one path actually leads to the left and right side minibosses. That means if you can't solo those, you run out of options quickly. The problem is it isn't always obvious how many players you will need for which bosses. You can have too many on one side and too few on the other, which again forces alliances to spread out as evenly as possible and spend past nodes when they get stuck.
The map design tries in some small ways to aleviate some of these problems, but it also goes out of its way to exacerbate them in inexplicable ways. You can do a lot with a good map design, but the current map design is far from good. I'd give it a two out of ten.
It does occur to me that "do it yourself difficulty" already exists in the game: in the special event quests with portals.
In those events, like Goldblum's for example, each map has one really long path, but it is segmented with portals periodically. At the end of every segment the player has the option to decide to skip the rest of the path and go straight to the boss. In those events, you can rerun the map and do the paths you skipped to eventually get 100%.
AW maps should have more of that property. The devs added portals to allow players to criss-cross paths (and not in the best possible way in my opinion, but still its an option) but the portals aren't used to skip difficult parts of the map.
Take the center of the map, which we were talking about earlier. You can route around the first stage of the center, but you still have to plow through the dense highly interlinked second stage in order to remove the links to the center miniboss. So that section is not optional in the sense that if you skip it you make it harder to finish at all. But if there was a way to leapfrog over that section to the miniboss and there was no link - or the link was *after* the portal's landing pad, then it would be a valid option to skip that section.
It makes more sense in general to offer a way to skip stage two rather than stage one. You're still at full strength before you start stage one. You won't be able to judge well if you need to skip a section until you do some fights to gauge difficulty. If stage one really beats you up, maybe it becomes worth it to skip over stage two.
This oversimplifies things greatly, because the center section requires (at least) three players working together to clear it, and so the option to run or skip is a complicated one, but it illustrates the idea. The tools exist to make AW more interesting and they are even being used by the devs in other content. They just need to decide to use them in AW. Correctly.
The only way we could have won this war was that we had 98-100 different defenders. There is 109 playable champions in this game and I can asure you, my alliance does not have all all of those.
Well, not to quibble but you misunderstand how diversity is calculated. You just need each bg to have 50 unique defenders... which isn't any less stupid a metric for winning, it's just more achievable than you think. You just need a spreadsheet and a deep commitment to wasting a lot of time organizing your rosters.
Terrible that this is what it's come to.
Apparently you've never had to rearrange 30 people in 3 BGs before. Organization has always been present. Not all Allies just jump in and place who they want where they want. Not if you want to win. I've been doing it every War I open. There's always forethought required, especially if you have new Players or someone switches up their Defense.
I usually don't engage you , but you have no clue what you're talking about. Spare me your pathetic, baseless judgement.
I know exactly what I'm talking about. I'm not new at this. I've been organizing Wars since they began. The large majority of the few losses I've seen were because people didn't follow instructions, so I'm pretty sure I have some base knowledge. Taking cheap shots at me is not a constructive way to have a conversation. It's really not hurting me any.
If you've only seen a few losses since AW began, you're in tier 1.
First of all, not all Alliances play steadily. If I can't foresee the availability of Players and the power to organize a Win, I don't open a War. Secondly, I've had more than one Ally. What Tier someone is in has nothing to do with an understanding of Wars in general. I'm very happy that people take pride in where they are at. That's no justification for using it to discredit someone's understanding in a theoretical discussion. I could care less what people think of me. I know what I'm talking about, and that's enough. Having an understanding of the entire War schematic means looking at how it operates at all Tiers. Not just Expert level.
The justification for questioning your credibility is that you keep making statements that are at best astronomically improbable and more likely are completely impossible. No one wins almost every war they are in. That's statistically impossible, and pretty much everyone reading knows this. It is not something it would even occur to me to exaggerate, because in bracketed PvP the only way for this to be true, even accounting for alliance jumping, is to be the literal best player within the game. Even then, the absolute best alliances in the game are probably winning not a huge amount more than 50% of their matches, because either they are matched against similar strength alliances or they are deliberately dropping down to lower brackets. Either way, they can't win every time.
I'm just really astounded you don't realize how deep a hole you are digging. You don't even understand why I mentioned tier one, even though I'm pretty sure everyone else does. I'm not making fun of your tier: I don't know what that is. I'm pointing out the obvious: that only the absolute best players on the absolute best alliances can make the claim that they've only seen a few losses in AW and have been playing since the beginning, and even then it would be a stretch. Jumping alliances doesn't help, because no one keeps jumping into eternal winners.
Your story is that you almost always win, you always jump into winning alliances, and you are always taking over their alliance set ups when you do. That's Mary Sue territory.
I don't claim to be a tier 1 alliance war player, and I have to defer to tier 1 players when it comes to how they play. I don't claim to have won nearly every war, because that's impossible: I win maybe slightly more than 50%, because my alliance has slowly crept upwards from tier whatever to about tier 6 currently. I care about credibility, so I'm honest about the basis of my opinions. I'm not hard to find in-game, so what I say is mostly verifiable. And if I didn't care what people thought about my opinions, I wouldn't post them on a public forum. That would be a waste of my time.
The numbers speak for themselves. I don't have to prove anything. The rarity is when we lose. I know how to organize a Win and I know how to respond in the moment when Attack is active. I don't care what the statistical probability is. I've seen our Streaks, I've fought our Wars. I have nothing to prove. The point I'm making is that I know what I'm talking about and I have the experience. The implication was that I know nothing. Let's call a spade a spade. No matter what I say it will be argued against and dissected because I'm for the removal of Defender Kills. That's the bare bones of it.
Whats your alliance tag?
That's not the topic of the subject and I'm not sharing my information. The purpose of the Thread is to discuss War. Not to pony up or put others on the spot.
Hmmm. Hardly ever lose a war but doesn't want anyone to see what the alliance is... sounds reasonable to me lol
If you can't deduce why I respect my own privacy, of all people, then I'm afraid I don't know what to tell you. Bottom line is, I'm not sharing my information and I won't be provoked into doing so. The topic is War. Not me. I'm moving on in the discussion.
If you don't want people to talk about you, don't talk about you. The moment you make a claim about you, you make it fair game for people to challenge that claim.
Although the moment you make a claim about anything, you make it fair game for people to challenge that claim. That's what adults do when they participate in public discussions. Every time I make a statement, I presume that if someone believes it is wrong they will challenge it, and hopefully in a conclusive way. It has happened many times before, and I don't see anything wrong with that.
It is basically blood in the water for someone to open a topic, then claim it is unfair to discuss that topic beyond their own statements about it.
Talking about me doesn't affect me. The number of people who focus a topic on any comment I make is the issue. That changes the discussion and brings it off-topic. I made a statement. Any statement I make is brought through the ringer. You've done this yourself. The issue is not people talking about me. I could care less. I'm bringing the conversation back to why we're here. If you hadn't noticed, there is always comment after comment on anything I say, and we're not here to put me on the spot. We're here to discuss War.
The reason why so many of your posts draws refutation has nothing to do with you, and everything to do with the fallacy of so many of your posts.
TL:DR - We find error in any comment you make because we see Defender Kills as necessary and you see them as a problem.
No, the thing is you make lots of posts that people agree or disagree but don't comment much on. But there are some issues like this one where your posts are so out of touch with the experience of every player that it draws lots of comments. And it doesn't help that whereas most people sometimes agree with what Kabam is doing and sometimes disagree, you seem to agree as a matter of policy. Out of curiosity can you link to a post in which you disagreed with the Kabam posistion? @GroundedWisdom Even they wouldn't say they are always right.
No, the thing is you make lots of posts that people agree or disagree but don't comment much on. But there are some issues like this one where your posts are so out of touch with the experience of every player that it draws lots of comments. And it doesn't help that whereas most people sometimes agree with what Kabam is doing and sometimes disagree, you seem to agree as a matter of policy. Out of curiosity can you link to a post in which you disagreed with the Kabam posistion? @GroundedWisdom Even they wouldn't say they are always right.
I don't vehemently agree or disagree based on whether it comes from Kabam. I look at things realistically. I happen to agree with the removal. I've described my own reasons. I don't care who agrees with me, and I don't invest in what a company thinks either. Kabam is not an entity. I support the decision to remove them, and popular opinion does not nullify the reasons in my mind. No doubt people want them. They were winning because of them.
I don't vehemently agree or disagree based on whether it comes from Kabam. I look at things realistically. I happen to agree with the removal. I've described my own reasons. I don't care who agrees with me, and I don't invest in what a company thinks either. Kabam is not an entity. I support the decision to remove them, and popular opinion does not nullify the reasons in my mind. No doubt people want them. They were winning because of them.
It appears to me you may not looking at the AW discussion as realistically as you say. My reasons behind my statement is for the following reasons.
1. When the initial rollout announcement was made regarding diversity and the revised scoring, we were given only 2 reasons for the drastic changes.
Reason#1
"As we said above, one of our major goals with this iteration of Alliance Wars was to promote a wider cast of Defenders that you’ll encounter, instead of the same Champions over and over again. In addition to promoting this with the new nodes that will boost certain attributes like Energy Damage or Bleed, we’re introducing a brand new way to earn points in Alliance Wars".
Reason #2
"That’s not all though, we’re also making a major change to a scoring method that you’re all used to. We’re now removing points for received for Defender Kills, and increasing the points received for Attacker Kills! The goal of this change was to encourage Summoners to continue their assault on the opposing Alliance, without having to worry about giving them more points, and to avoid that feeling of defeat after only trying one fight and being beaten".
Which you had agreed to and defended.
With the current changes to node difficulty, it has indirectly flipped the script and made it advantageous once again to place as many of the same "tough" defenders and disregard diversity as pointed out by others before me. Yet you still agree and defend the changes. The only one that can find no fault and agree to 2 contradicting actions is the one that intiated the action. Anyone else IMO would be biased in their opinions and not be considered to be a person who "look at things realistically".
2. Another change that was made that both you and a majority of players had welcomed was the removal of Thorns and Slashed tires due to the unavoidable damage aspect of the node. But now they have added other nodes that are in the same category and has not been recieved favorably by many because of that fact, yet you find nothing wrong or even perculiar about the "flip flopping". Maybe that's just me and I'm alone with this opinion.
3. You commented that you've given feedback with suggestions on improving AW, but so far I've only happened upon a handful of posts that merely ambiguously rephrase detailed suggestions made by others. Its quite possible I may have missed the specific posts you refer to, and if that be the case, I humbly apologize, and would like to request you to repost the comments containing those suggestions.
4. You tend to post comment after comment regarding percieved "personal jabs" directed to you, and repeatedly do so even after the fact you state that you are removing yourself from the discussion. IMO, if you were truly realistic and unattached, should not have been too difficult to ignore and give no response to said "jabs" and remain on topic of the discussion. Again, maybe that's just me.
5. You are fairly involved with responding against many opinions and trying to discredit their legitimacy, yet when undeniable facts are given regarding contradicting statements and actions made by Kabam, I have yet to read a post by you acknowedging them.
Please feel free to direct me with links to your comments that clearly show that I am completely offbase with my opinions. TBH, in some way I hope my thoughts are totally wrong, because it saddens me to think these things about someone that is supposed to be a part of the same community.
Can we just all just agree that Kabam doesn't give 2 sh*ts about skill. It's all about spend spend spend. They make more money by having defender kills not count because alliances aren't punished by having terrible game skills.
At what point is Kabam going to put a stop to this spam from GW?
Seriously enough is enough.
I still do not know ... some people receive penalties for less spam or just for bothering in publications a bit. but I still do not understand as if it has many spam and abuse flags. It seems very strange to me.
There is a difference between having a conversation and spam. They can tell the difference. When people Flag a comment because they don't agree with it, that doesn't make it spam.
@KwAmOn I'm sorry, I didn't see your proposal. It got buried with GW's spam. Can't really take the time to go back through all the nonsense and find it lol.
Spam is not defined by comments we don't agree with made by people we don't agree with.
They suggested the Maps be on a random rotation to make it more interesting. The suggestion came up before. I wouldn't mind it. Might be less repetitive than one Map.
@KwAmOn I'm sorry, I didn't see your proposal. It got buried with GW's spam. Can't really take the time to go back through all the nonsense and find it lol.
Spam is not defined by comments we don't agree with made by people we don't agree with.
They suggested the Maps be on a random rotation to make it more interesting. The suggestion came up before. I wouldn't mind it. Might be less repetitive than one Map.
For the record I am not the one flagging you. I am also well aware of the definition of spam. I stand by my statement
@KwAmOn I'm sorry, I didn't see your proposal. It got buried with GW's spam. Can't really take the time to go back through all the nonsense and find it lol.
Spam is not defined by comments we don't agree with made by people we don't agree with.
They suggested the Maps be on a random rotation to make it more interesting. The suggestion came up before. I wouldn't mind it. Might be less repetitive than one Map.
Mate, the threads had over 400
Comments or something, why you even bothered what they think?
Just let it go, you know you can't win with the majority (even me at times lol)
@KwAmOn I'm sorry, I didn't see your proposal. It got buried with GW's spam. Can't really take the time to go back through all the nonsense and find it lol.
Spam is not defined by comments we don't agree with made by people we don't agree with.
They suggested the Maps be on a random rotation to make it more interesting. The suggestion came up before. I wouldn't mind it. Might be less repetitive than one Map.
The poster posted a reply to another poster that made that suggestion. That wasn't the set of suggestions that particular poster made. @KwAmOn posted last week a set of four suggestions: return defender kill points but at a lower value, increase bonus gold rewards based on defender kills, award bonus points for defeating a node with zero attacker defeats, and increasing the points for defeating a miniboss, analogous to how we get bonus points for killing the final boss on the map.
@KwAmOn I'm sorry, I didn't see your proposal. It got buried with GW's spam. Can't really take the time to go back through all the nonsense and find it lol.
Spam is not defined by comments we don't agree with made by people we don't agree with.
They suggested the Maps be on a random rotation to make it more interesting. The suggestion came up before. I wouldn't mind it. Might be less repetitive than one Map.
The poster posted a reply to another poster that made that suggestion. That wasn't the set of suggestions that particular poster made. @KwAmOn posted last week a set of four suggestions: return defender kill points but at a lower value, increase bonus gold rewards based on defender kills, award bonus points for defeating a node with zero attacker defeats, and increasing the points for defeating a miniboss, analogous to how we get bonus points for killing the final boss on the map.
I see. Well, the first 3 I wouldn't support, obviously. The last one wouldn't really make a difference because assuming that the Points are scaled equally among Mini-Bosses, it would still balance out the same as it is now.
Comments
A day in the life for me
- war starts. Immediately share defender rating with opponent to see who will win. Have had no issues with doing this.
- if higher we clear map with the now unfortunate task of clearing the new stupidly difficult nodes and guarantee the win.
- if lower explore and give up when dead
Literally has been like this from day 1 of new map
Epci fail @Kabam Miike like proper epic failure
I don't like the phrase "the focus of (the) war" because it implies something that doesn't match reality to me: that there was a singular element of the war people focused on. But in 14.0, the "focus" such as it is was to win the war. But the strategy employed to do so was always a multipronged one. Overall, the goal was to make more points. But in 14.0, I think most players were not thinking about points in a discrete way at all. They were thinking more high level: try to complete as much of the map as possible, try to defeat all three bosses, try to place the hardest possible bosses on your own map, and then try to halt the progress of the other side by strategically placing the hardest possible defenders to kill.
I honestly do not believe most players were *directly* thinking about trying to rack up the most defender kills, simply because that calculus doesn't seem to be the obvious thought process. The obvious thought process is to place the defender that is hardest to kill. If you think about it, it is *impossible* to "generate" kills. Defenders don't go out and kill attackers. Attackers attack defenders and sometimes die. If a defender gets twelve kills, that is *only* because the other side chose to revive over and over again. That's not something within our control as defense placers. We can only try to place the most indestructible or otherwise nasty defender on a node. Then it is up to the other side to decide how many attackers they are willing to throw at it.
I *never* thought about how *many* defender kills I was trying to get. In fact, I wasn't trying to get any defender kills. I was trying to place defenders that would stop the attackers. If I stop them, then by definition I won't get many defender kills. Unless the other side chooses to spend past them.
In some tiers, I understand that spending past a node to complete the map is expected and almost mandatory. But that's not true in all tiers. The idea that war was "about defender kills" doesn't reflect how I think most defense placers were thinking. I would rather the defender simply cause the other side to give up. I win, they lose, but no one spends money. I'd be happy with that.
For me, it was and still is about strong defenders. How many kills the defender gets is one metric for judging how strong a defender is, but not the only one and not the most trustworthy one. That's why war *cannot* be only about defender kills. Magik might get six kills on node 42 while Ultron gets three on node 24. But if Ultron is unbeatable on 24 and attackers simply give up and go around him, then he's the stronger defender. The kill count is not what matters. What matters is how much trouble that defender gives the other side. You could even argue that a defender with a lot of kills is a defender the attacker is encouraged to spend past. That's good, but the defender that scares the attacker away completely is better.
Again, in some tiers there is no such defender, and in some tiers most people spend whatever it takes to get past a node. In those tiers and in such situations, defender kill count more closely correlates to how good a defender is. But even there, that correlation is not 100%. Where the defender has to be placed to generate those kills, and how that affects the other side's pathing, also plays some role. A defender that can get four kills on the edges might be more valuable than one that can get eight in the middle, because there are more options for the attacker to traverse the center and much fewer to get to the two outside edge bosses.
Talking about me doesn't affect me. The number of people who focus a topic on any comment I make is the issue. That changes the discussion and brings it off-topic. I made a statement. Any statement I make is brought through the ringer. You've done this yourself. The issue is not people talking about me. I could care less. I'm bringing the conversation back to why we're here. If you hadn't noticed, there is always comment after comment on anything I say, and we're not here to put me on the spot. We're here to discuss War.
If Kabam explores a more creative map layout that takes elements from the original map it may help alleviate the tie-breaker problem. Kabam made changes that were too drastic and broke something that was perfect and made something that feels sub par and incredibly frustrating to play.
Actually it would be awesome if various maps could be implemented and work as random layouts. That could even be taken to address another layer of difficulties to tier the war better.
The reason why so many of your posts draws refutation has nothing to do with you, and everything to do with the fallacy of so many of your posts.
I did, several times. The fundamental problem with the map is that it is inconsistent with offering as many options as possible for the attacker to complete the map and the defenders to prevent 100% completion. Although it is possible to complete the map without fully exploring it, those options are limited. The more limited they are, the more the pressure exists to fully explore.
Partial completions should be much easier than full completions. RIght now partial completions are almost as hard as full completions, which makes them usually nonsensical to pursue unless forced.
Because the map structure doesn't allow for a lot of completion options, the difficulty increases are more global than they need to be. They are making it almost universally harder to traverse the map. If Kabam wants to encourage alliances to attempt completion and they want to encourage defenses to more aggressively stop 100% completion, they should make it possible for an alliance to complete the map while encountering *zero* so called "hard" nodes. There should then be optional exploration paths that have increasingly harder nodes to test stronger attackers, so that the map differentiates between bad attackers, good attackers, and great attackers. They could simultaneously return the "easy mode" of 15.0, while also adding even harder nodes than the current 16.0 version. All alliances could still do *something* to finish.
To make this work, you need to make sure three additional things are true. First, the difficulty of a path should be obvious. If it isn't obvious, players can't decide on what to do and what to skip and the option itself is worthless. Second, there has to be a way to bail out of a path. If an alliance has to commit to a path whether they can complete it or not, that forces them to make the difficult choice on whether to attempt harder difficulties or not right at the start. That's not a good choice to present at the start of the war: the risk is too high if you choose to not attempt 100% and that decision immediately forces a loss. And third, there must be more ways for alliances to distribute their members across all exploration paths. The map currently requires nine separate paths for full exploration, and it has weird limits in some parts of the map. For example, only one path actually leads to the left and right side minibosses. That means if you can't solo those, you run out of options quickly. The problem is it isn't always obvious how many players you will need for which bosses. You can have too many on one side and too few on the other, which again forces alliances to spread out as evenly as possible and spend past nodes when they get stuck.
The map design tries in some small ways to aleviate some of these problems, but it also goes out of its way to exacerbate them in inexplicable ways. You can do a lot with a good map design, but the current map design is far from good. I'd give it a two out of ten.
In those events, like Goldblum's for example, each map has one really long path, but it is segmented with portals periodically. At the end of every segment the player has the option to decide to skip the rest of the path and go straight to the boss. In those events, you can rerun the map and do the paths you skipped to eventually get 100%.
AW maps should have more of that property. The devs added portals to allow players to criss-cross paths (and not in the best possible way in my opinion, but still its an option) but the portals aren't used to skip difficult parts of the map.
Take the center of the map, which we were talking about earlier. You can route around the first stage of the center, but you still have to plow through the dense highly interlinked second stage in order to remove the links to the center miniboss. So that section is not optional in the sense that if you skip it you make it harder to finish at all. But if there was a way to leapfrog over that section to the miniboss and there was no link - or the link was *after* the portal's landing pad, then it would be a valid option to skip that section.
It makes more sense in general to offer a way to skip stage two rather than stage one. You're still at full strength before you start stage one. You won't be able to judge well if you need to skip a section until you do some fights to gauge difficulty. If stage one really beats you up, maybe it becomes worth it to skip over stage two.
This oversimplifies things greatly, because the center section requires (at least) three players working together to clear it, and so the option to run or skip is a complicated one, but it illustrates the idea. The tools exist to make AW more interesting and they are even being used by the devs in other content. They just need to decide to use them in AW. Correctly.
TL:DR - We find error in any comment you make because we see Defender Kills as necessary and you see them as a problem.
I don't vehemently agree or disagree based on whether it comes from Kabam. I look at things realistically. I happen to agree with the removal. I've described my own reasons. I don't care who agrees with me, and I don't invest in what a company thinks either. Kabam is not an entity. I support the decision to remove them, and popular opinion does not nullify the reasons in my mind. No doubt people want them. They were winning because of them.
It appears to me you may not looking at the AW discussion as realistically as you say. My reasons behind my statement is for the following reasons.
1. When the initial rollout announcement was made regarding diversity and the revised scoring, we were given only 2 reasons for the drastic changes.
Reason#1
"As we said above, one of our major goals with this iteration of Alliance Wars was to promote a wider cast of Defenders that you’ll encounter, instead of the same Champions over and over again. In addition to promoting this with the new nodes that will boost certain attributes like Energy Damage or Bleed, we’re introducing a brand new way to earn points in Alliance Wars".
Reason #2
"That’s not all though, we’re also making a major change to a scoring method that you’re all used to. We’re now removing points for received for Defender Kills, and increasing the points received for Attacker Kills! The goal of this change was to encourage Summoners to continue their assault on the opposing Alliance, without having to worry about giving them more points, and to avoid that feeling of defeat after only trying one fight and being beaten".
Which you had agreed to and defended.
With the current changes to node difficulty, it has indirectly flipped the script and made it advantageous once again to place as many of the same "tough" defenders and disregard diversity as pointed out by others before me. Yet you still agree and defend the changes. The only one that can find no fault and agree to 2 contradicting actions is the one that intiated the action. Anyone else IMO would be biased in their opinions and not be considered to be a person who "look at things realistically".
2. Another change that was made that both you and a majority of players had welcomed was the removal of Thorns and Slashed tires due to the unavoidable damage aspect of the node. But now they have added other nodes that are in the same category and has not been recieved favorably by many because of that fact, yet you find nothing wrong or even perculiar about the "flip flopping". Maybe that's just me and I'm alone with this opinion.
3. You commented that you've given feedback with suggestions on improving AW, but so far I've only happened upon a handful of posts that merely ambiguously rephrase detailed suggestions made by others. Its quite possible I may have missed the specific posts you refer to, and if that be the case, I humbly apologize, and would like to request you to repost the comments containing those suggestions.
4. You tend to post comment after comment regarding percieved "personal jabs" directed to you, and repeatedly do so even after the fact you state that you are removing yourself from the discussion. IMO, if you were truly realistic and unattached, should not have been too difficult to ignore and give no response to said "jabs" and remain on topic of the discussion. Again, maybe that's just me.
5. You are fairly involved with responding against many opinions and trying to discredit their legitimacy, yet when undeniable facts are given regarding contradicting statements and actions made by Kabam, I have yet to read a post by you acknowedging them.
Please feel free to direct me with links to your comments that clearly show that I am completely offbase with my opinions. TBH, in some way I hope my thoughts are totally wrong, because it saddens me to think these things about someone that is supposed to be a part of the same community.
There is a difference between having a conversation and spam. They can tell the difference. When people Flag a comment because they don't agree with it, that doesn't make it spam.
Game developer is quite adamant to not bring back Defender kills (though the larger community still hopes that should come back).
Just have to wait to see what iteration mechanism is up next.
Also, to note the issue with hiding Defenders is not yet in place.
Spam is not defined by comments we don't agree with made by people we don't agree with.
They suggested the Maps be on a random rotation to make it more interesting. The suggestion came up before. I wouldn't mind it. Might be less repetitive than one Map.
For the record I am not the one flagging you. I am also well aware of the definition of spam. I stand by my statement
Mate, the threads had over 400
Comments or something, why you even bothered what they think?
Just let it go, you know you can't win with the majority (even me at times lol)
I'm pretty sure you do not actually recall what the list of that poster's suggestions were.
I scrolled up on the same page. That was the suggestion I saw. That's as far as I want to dig.
The poster posted a reply to another poster that made that suggestion. That wasn't the set of suggestions that particular poster made. @KwAmOn posted last week a set of four suggestions: return defender kill points but at a lower value, increase bonus gold rewards based on defender kills, award bonus points for defeating a node with zero attacker defeats, and increasing the points for defeating a miniboss, analogous to how we get bonus points for killing the final boss on the map.
I see. Well, the first 3 I wouldn't support, obviously. The last one wouldn't really make a difference because assuming that the Points are scaled equally among Mini-Bosses, it would still balance out the same as it is now.