Thoughts and Suggestions on newly Announced AW Updates

A few initial thoughts for consideration on the announced changes for AW:

1) Masteries will be a huge issue. Having them lock in at a specific time of day does not give players flexibility to prepare proper defense masteries. If this change goes through, this will be a huge quality of life reduction for players.

2) AW defense is and should continue to be strategic. We've always been able to see our +/- to have some idea who we are facing and prepare our defense/bans for our predicted opponent. You are removing the strategy aspect to defense and I think this is a horrible loss for the enjoyment of war preparation and strategy.

Proposed solutions.

1) Mastery loadouts for defense (like we have in BGs). Have people set their mastery loadout and lock it in for their defense placements until they actively go and change the loadout. This way people do not need to worry about making sure they are set one specific way at an exact point in the day.

2) Keep a "defense planning" phase after matchmaking. Shorten this to half of the current placement phase to allow the officers to prepare defense for their match. Then add a planning phase to take up the other half of current placement phase where you can see the opponents locked in map to allow proper time for officers to prepare attack (this concept is good, but at the cost of any defense planning is not worth it). This would allow the intended objective of giving officers more time to prepare an attack, rather than needing to be available at one specific time of day, without completely sacrificing the defense planning.

Comments

pseudosane

While i agree with mastery loadouts, (it HAS to be a thing now), the second point, i totally disagree with. targeted bans/ placements will be gone now, as will the calc room, which all in all is a good thing.

Beewee

While i agree with mastery loadouts, (it HAS to be a thing now), the second point, i totally disagree with. targeted bans/ placements will be gone now, as will the calc room, which all in all is a good thing.

Just curious as to why you think thats a good thing

GinjabredMonsta

Why are they slow rolling mastery load outs? This is something people have asked for for a while now, why not just finally do mastery load outs game wide?

Coppin

Why are they slow rolling mastery load outs? This is something people have asked for for a while now, why not just finally do mastery load outs game wide?

Because it cost units...

Beewee

Yeah I agree though with the whole mastery part of defense. There needs to be some sort of mastery load out/presets otherwise of set and forget it'll be set and stress of whether it accidentally loaded with suicides from the day you did war attack

GinjabredMonsta

Why are they slow rolling mastery load outs? This is something people have asked for for a while now, why not just finally do mastery load outs game wide?
Because it cost units...

That’s a whole other issue on its own

Mackey

What are the suggestions? It's ridiculous that the only way they're dishing out that info is by a livestream 🤦‍♂️

Treinin

What are the suggestions? It's ridiculous that the only way they're dishing out that info is by a livestream 🤦‍♂️

They are removing the placement phase - you will have a pre-set placement/bans and when your match starts the placement will occur automatically (with whatever masteries people have on at the time of the matchmaking). You will go directly to attack phase (2 days) with no opportunity to change placements/bans.

Crusaderjr

havent seen the full break down list.

BUT i saw they want to extend attack phase to 2 days?? b/c it helps tier 1/2 wars?? i really hope they arent extending all other tiers b/c honestly im not trying to wait 2 days for loyalty and shards.

There seems to be some decent other changes, just hope kabam dont do what they normally do and forget all the timed resources and events that depended on the original methods. such as AW side objectives and loyalty boosts reload time and cost.

besides that fewer aq is awesome, just hope the calculations for placements and prestige all work as intended.

Treinin

havent seen the full break down list.

BUT i saw they want to extend attack phase to 2 days?? b/c it helps tier 1/2 wars?? i really hope they arent extending all other tiers b/c honestly im not trying to wait 2 days for loyalty and shards.

There seems to be some decent other changes, just hope kabam dont do what they normally do and forget all the timed resources and events that depended on the original methods. such as AW side objectives and loyalty boosts reload time and cost.

besides that fewer aq is awesome, just hope the calculations for placements and prestige all work as intended.

The overall length of the war will remain the same - just taking the day you spent in placement phase and adding it to attack phase.

Adjerius

How does this new "set and forget" persistent map design work for 1- and 2-BG alliances that don't always have the same 10 or 20 players every time?

Unless I'm missing something, eliminating the placement phase seems like an enormous oversight for any alliance that doesn't know in advance exactly who all is going to participate. If the intention is to force those alliances to start coordinating more, it's not going to fly very well.

Klipp

What are the suggestions? It's ridiculous that the only way they're dishing out that info is by a livestream 🤦‍♂️
They are removing the placement phase - you will have a pre-set placement/bans and when your match starts the placement will occur automatically (with whatever masteries people have on at the time of the matchmaking). You will go directly to attack phase (2 days) with no opportunity to change placements/bans.

I don’t like this, we don’t need two days to attack. Most of the time we are done in the first 10 hours. We also have alliance members all over the place and only 13 people that participate in war.. sometimes they may not place for 12 hours of the placement because of their location. Obviously want to see more about this but this may be the end of war for our group.

Furrymoosen

What are the suggestions? It's ridiculous that the only way they're dishing out that info is by a livestream 🤦‍♂️
They are removing the placement phase - you will have a pre-set placement/bans and when your match starts the placement will occur automatically (with whatever masteries people have on at the time of the matchmaking). You will go directly to attack phase (2 days) with no opportunity to change placements/bans.

I don’t like this, we don’t need two days to attack. Most of the time we are done in the first 10 hours. We also have alliance members all over the place and only 13 people that participate in war.. sometimes they may not place for 12 hours of the placement because of their location. Obviously want to see more about this but this may be the end of war for our group.

They will place defenders once for the season and then it will be automatic every war. No more waiting for players to place defenders and no more having anyone forget. You can still finish the attack phase in 10 hours if you want. The length of war in total will be no different, just made easier on the defense side of things.

Furrymoosen

How does this new "set and forget" persistent map design work for 1- and 2-BG alliances that don't always have the same 10 or 20 players every time?

Unless I'm missing something, eliminating the placement phase seems like an enormous oversight for any alliance that doesn't know in advance exactly who all is going to participate. If the intention is to force those alliances to start coordinating more, it's not going to fly very well.

You bring up a fair point, but I will say that coordinating who is joining is kind of a bare minimum to AW to some degree. It’s gonna have to be unique to each alliance, but these are also changes you can make over the course of the 48 hour attack phase and get done and finalized ahead of the next war so that it all happens automatically. Is there more to communicate? I guess so, depending on how little that alliance communicates currently. But preparing ahead of time is also going to be a good bit easier.

Klipp

What are the suggestions? It's ridiculous that the only way they're dishing out that info is by a livestream 🤦‍♂️
They are removing the placement phase - you will have a pre-set placement/bans and when your match starts the placement will occur automatically (with whatever masteries people have on at the time of the matchmaking). You will go directly to attack phase (2 days) with no opportunity to change placements/bans.

I don’t like this, we don’t need two days to attack. Most of the time we are done in the first 10 hours. We also have alliance members all over the place and only 13 people that participate in war.. sometimes they may not place for 12 hours of the placement because of their location. Obviously want to see more about this but this may be the end of war for our group.
They will place defenders once for the season and then it will be automatic every war. No more waiting for players to place defenders and no more having anyone forget. You can still finish the attack phase in 10 hours if you want. The length of war in total will be no different, just made easier on the defense side of things.

We only run 1 bg, and mix in about 13-14 people. How does the system know who is going to be available to place and join war? That’s my main concern. This seems geared towards 3 full bgs not the alliances that run 1 or 2.

Furrymoosen

What are the suggestions? It's ridiculous that the only way they're dishing out that info is by a livestream 🤦‍♂️
They are removing the placement phase - you will have a pre-set placement/bans and when your match starts the placement will occur automatically (with whatever masteries people have on at the time of the matchmaking). You will go directly to attack phase (2 days) with no opportunity to change placements/bans.

I don’t like this, we don’t need two days to attack. Most of the time we are done in the first 10 hours. We also have alliance members all over the place and only 13 people that participate in war.. sometimes they may not place for 12 hours of the placement because of their location. Obviously want to see more about this but this may be the end of war for our group.
They will place defenders once for the season and then it will be automatic every war. No more waiting for players to place defenders and no more having anyone forget. You can still finish the attack phase in 10 hours if you want. The length of war in total will be no different, just made easier on the defense side of things.
We only run 1 bg, and mix in about 13-14 people. How does the system know who is going to be available to place and join war? That’s my main concern. This seems geared towards 3 full bgs not the alliances that run 1 or 2.

You are correct, most of these changes are geared toward high level war players.
The answer is, the same way it did before. While one war is going, you can get the players/defense set for the next war, then once that war starts it will all place automatically. So as long as the communication is where it needs to be, you basically have 48 hours to get defense set instead of 20. Whatever defense you initially setup can be changed as needed. If your war is usually just a free-for-all then it will definitely be harder, so communication and organization may have to come up a bit.

Deacon

it seems confusing to me. i guess i'll have to test it out. but from the small bit i got it just seems confusing and i'm left with "wait .. who was asking for this again??" because I sure wasn't. i never had issues with the defense phase. it's more or less the actual gameplay, node shenanigans etc and how long it is.

but i guess most of you guys wanted a longer attack phase. i've never felt i didn't have enough time but we'll see how it goes.

DNA3000

it seems confusing to me. i guess i'll have to test it out. but from the small bit i got it just seems confusing and i'm left with "wait .. who was asking for this again??" because I sure wasn't. i never had issues with the defense phase. it's more or less the actual gameplay, node shenanigans etc and how long it is.

but i guess most of you guys wanted a longer attack phase. i've never felt i didn't have enough time but we'll see how it goes.

(Most of) the top tier war alliances plan attacks. They cannot start planning until the war starts and they can see the opponent defense placement. So while the attack phase has twenty four hours in it, a significant chunk of that time is taken up by attack planning. And the officers cannot slack on attack planning, because if they slack even once even for a short period of time that sets the entire alliance (or at least that group) behind, which then creates a cascade of issues where one person starts late, so that lane gets cleared late, so someone else can't reach their nodes, so they go to sleep and someone else gets stuck. Highly coordinated wars suffer from this problem.

This coordination pressure has been a complaint that doesn't affect me personally, but I've been hearing about consistently for years. And with things like tactics and trickier nodes and defenders, that pressure has grown over time.

AMS94

2 day attack phase seems unnecessary
We definitely don't NEED 2 days for attack....AW paths are much shorter
Only benefit I see is that it'll give officers enough time to plan the attack more conveniently

I'm a bit skeptical about the defense changes though

Adjerius

You bring up a fair point, but I will say that coordinating who is joining is kind of a bare minimum to AW to some degree. It’s gonna have to be unique to each alliance, but these are also changes you can make over the course of the 48 hour attack phase and get done and finalized ahead of the next war so that it all happens automatically. Is there more to communicate? I guess so, depending on how little that alliance communicates currently. But preparing ahead of time is also going to be a good bit easier.

How important it is to coordinate ahead of time depends entirely on what type of alliance it is.

In my alliance, for example, there is literally zero communication required right now. The high attendance players have in-game assignments defined so that the groups stay reasonably balanced, but the spots always go to the first 20 people who join, regardless of who they are. Once the groups are full, I set the defense. That is the extent of our pre-war planning. Not one word ever needs to be said, and that's the way we like it.

With this change, we are going to have to start making intentional decisions about specifically who joins every single war. That means constantly asking people who's going to be available, and then manually redefining the groups to account for the changes. If we don't get enough responses we'll have to guess, and if we guess wrong, we run the war short-handed.

The only way I see this new system working well for us is if the individual players are given the ability to claim their own spots for each war, like they do now. Which isn't really "set it and forget it" as this is described to be.

SummonerNR

** Questions (and within those, potential Suggestions), particularly as it concerns 1 or 2 BG War Alliances where plans are not pre-set in concrete the same for every war.

— Will the new Joining and Defense Placement timing basically be during the current war's 2 days of attack, to apply for the *next* war. As in, forget the current 1-day Defense Placement day, instead we have the entire 2 days beforehand while the previous War's Attack is going on ?
** And would it be Day-1 of Attack is dedicated for Joining and confirming your 5 Defenders, and then 2nd day of Attack is used for Leadership to actually re-arrange Defense Nodes ?

— If there is some type of “Auto-Place-Defense”, is that basically *remembering* where leadership has put your defenders last time, and when you Join Defense your defenders are (at least, initially) placed on the same spots as last time ?
** If there is any conflicts (like someone already moved a defender to one of your own Previous spots), or from a “less than 3 BG” Ally if people switch around which BG they join and now 2 people have Previous nodes that are the same.
I see 2 possible implementations.
(A) Have nodes during Placement potentially showing multiple defenders there, and thus leadership will be able to see this and would have to resolve the conflict before Attack starts. (and if not resolved, Kabam does like currently if joined but not actually placed, and just randomly assigns any overfilled nodes to other empty ones).
-or (#B)- it leaves both of them, or maybe just the subsequent ones who joined, unassigned to that same node as someone else. But unlike currently, any unassigned defenders *CAN* actually be placed onto the map by leadership.

— is such as “Auto-Join-Defense” gonna allow you to NOT DO ANYTHING (not have to actually do Join or Place Defense). That the same people in the same BG as in the current war will be “temporarily” automatically assigned to same BG for next war, with the same Defenders. And that only if you want to change up your Defenders, or if you want to change which BG you go into, would you need to do an actual JOIN and Place ?? Or if you want to commit to your Temporary status, you could do a COMMIT which would lock you into that BG for next war.
** If the number of “temporary” (as in previous war) members who have not done an actual “Commit” plus any new Joiners into a BG, now become more than 10, leadership would have to resolve that by knocking off some non-committed (still Temporary) people from that BG.

— Which leaves another question, will leadership have the ability to actually COMMIT (Join) people to a BG, this being able to Select and Join people to the BG's that leadership wants ? Or even to MOVE existing Joiners over to a different BG if they had joined the wrong one initially (or in spite of leadership plans) ?
** That way, members can have their 5 Defenders already setup in their roster, and Leadership can just pick the members for each BG as they want. Without members having to do anything other that decide on their 5 Defenders.

pseudosane

While i agree with mastery loadouts, (it HAS to be a thing now), the second point, i totally disagree with. targeted bans/ placements will be gone now, as will the calc room, which all in all is a good thing.
Just curious as to why you think thats a good thing

Because it adds unpredictability to the mix? always nice.

Deacon

it seems confusing to me. i guess i'll have to test it out. but from the small bit i got it just seems confusing and i'm left with "wait .. who was asking for this again??" because I sure wasn't. i never had issues with the defense phase. it's more or less the actual gameplay, node shenanigans etc and how long it is.

but i guess most of you guys wanted a longer attack phase. i've never felt i didn't have enough time but we'll see how it goes.
(Most of) the top tier war alliances plan attacks. They cannot start planning until the war starts and they can see the opponent defense placement. So while the attack phase has twenty four hours in it, a significant chunk of that time is taken up by attack planning. And the officers cannot slack on attack planning, because if they slack even once even for a short period of time that sets the entire alliance (or at least that group) behind, which then creates a cascade of issues where one person starts late, so that lane gets cleared late, so someone else can't reach their nodes, so they go to sleep and someone else gets stuck. Highly coordinated wars suffer from this problem.

This coordination pressure has been a complaint that doesn't affect me personally, but I've been hearing about consistently for years. And with things like tactics and trickier nodes and defenders, that pressure has grown over time.

Perhaps. I just don't think it requires that much even in top alliances who have been consistently at the top. They have it down to a science or should I'd suspect. It may have been a problem years ago but you'd think there was some growth in how it was handled. I just never see any videos from top alliances complaining about the length of the attack phase in regards to planning.

I've been in top alliances, Platinum alliances etc and I've done the planning, been planned for etc and it was just never an issues for me/us/the alliance.

Happy changes are coming though and I'm hoping I can get a better grasp on it when it's released. It just seems like we'll be sitting around doing nothing more than usual with a 2 day attack phase.

Worknprogress

it seems confusing to me. i guess i'll have to test it out. but from the small bit i got it just seems confusing and i'm left with "wait .. who was asking for this again??" because I sure wasn't. i never had issues with the defense phase. it's more or less the actual gameplay, node shenanigans etc and how long it is.

but i guess most of you guys wanted a longer attack phase. i've never felt i didn't have enough time but we'll see how it goes.
(Most of) the top tier war alliances plan attacks. They cannot start planning until the war starts and they can see the opponent defense placement. So while the attack phase has twenty four hours in it, a significant chunk of that time is taken up by attack planning. And the officers cannot slack on attack planning, because if they slack even once even for a short period of time that sets the entire alliance (or at least that group) behind, which then creates a cascade of issues where one person starts late, so that lane gets cleared late, so someone else can't reach their nodes, so they go to sleep and someone else gets stuck. Highly coordinated wars suffer from this problem.

This coordination pressure has been a complaint that doesn't affect me personally, but I've been hearing about consistently for years. And with things like tactics and trickier nodes and defenders, that pressure has grown over time.
Perhaps. I just don't think it requires that much even in top alliances who have been consistently at the top. They have it down to a science or should I'd suspect. It may have been a problem years ago but you'd think there was some growth in how it was handled. I just never see any videos from top alliances complaining about the length of the attack phase in regards to planning.

I've been in top alliances, Platinum alliances etc and I've done the planning, been planned for etc and it was just never an issues for me/us/the alliance.

Happy changes are coming though and I'm hoping I can get a better grasp on it when it's released. It just seems like we'll be sitting around doing nothing more than usual with a 2 day attack phase.

You're wildly incorrect if you think that planning isn't a massive issue.

Just the fact that lots of people have to stop in the middle of their work day and hurriedly get a plan out so that a BG can actually start a war is a problem regardless of "having it down to a science" or not. That completely eliminates lots of people from even helping with planning as they just don't have that ability at that time.

Planning for most Master level alliances currently takes anywhere from an hour to 3 or more hours every war depending on the war and planner. Average it out to say 2hrs a war and that's 6hrs a week smack in the middle of people's work day that they have to find. For others in the eastern hemisphere this falls right in the middle of dinner/family time.

Sure this isn't a problem for some people and you could say "well just find someone that can do it in the current window" but that's far easier said than done and is just an unnecessary requirement to have.

Not really sure why anyone would be averse to this change as it changes nothing as far as overall war length. The only even somewhat valid concerns I've seen were how it affects alliances running less than 3 BGs (which seems easily handled as you can sort the following war involvement during the running war) and mastery swaps (which were already an issue so until we get some more info on this specific area I'm not sure it changes all that much outside maybe when people would need to swap)

Deacon

well we'll see. i just find it very odd that's all. i just have never heard of complaints about the length it takes to plan. but i'm a planner so maybe my ears just aren't tuned to it lol. if it helps, good on 'em. but personally i just don't see how this is going to make my job as a planner easier or more fun or improve alliance war in general.

i've never had a problem with planning. they should fix the fun factor and other things as well. i'm not going to enjoy it more because planning is "easier" ya know.

pseudosane

well we'll see. i just find it very odd that's all. i just have never heard of complaints about the length it takes to plan. but i'm a planner so maybe my ears just aren't tuned to it lol. if it helps, good on 'em. but personally i just don't see how this is going to make my job as a planner easier or more fun or improve alliance war in general.

i've never had a problem with planning. they should fix the fun factor and other things as well. i'm not going to enjoy it more because planning is "easier" ya know.

I used to be a planner before i stopped doing it. Every Monday/Thursday/Saturday I had to postpone/ make time for meetings/ RL events so i could plan. I ended up quitting and shutting down my ally due to burnout. This change is LONG overdue. Planning can take anywhere between 30 minutes to 2-3 hours depending on a ton of factors.

TyEdge

Can we please stop hiding AW scores? The map shows exactly how many bonuses are earned/lost and where. We could count diversity if you forced us to. Please just give us the numbers.

pseudosane

Can we please stop hiding AW scores? The map shows exactly how many bonuses are earned/lost and where. We could count diversity if you forced us to. Please just give us the numbers.

how is it hidden?

SummonerNR

Can we please stop hiding AW scores? The map shows exactly how many bonuses are earned/lost and where. We could count diversity if you forced us to. Please just give us the numbers.
how is it hidden?

Opponent Diversity is hidden during attack. You could technically find out by observing each of your Attack maps as soon as Attack starts, and manually observing and counting up any duplicate champs on each map.
But much easier if they would just show us the actual Diversity # for our opponents on the scoring screen while attack is going on.

Attack bonus got easier to manually calculate when they added the individual Bonus Count icons on every node. But still a pain.
Easy to calculate your opponents true Bonus (relative to the shown Defender Kill #) by looking at your own Defense Map's defender roster lineup and checking how many of your defenders have 4+ kills.
But not quite as straight forward to calculate your own team's true Bonus (kill) points.
Again, just show the actual running tally number for Attack Bonus for both sides right on the Scoring screen while attack is going on.

Worknprogress

well we'll see. i just find it very odd that's all. i just have never heard of complaints about the length it takes to plan. but i'm a planner so maybe my ears just aren't tuned to it lol. if it helps, good on 'em. but personally i just don't see how this is going to make my job as a planner easier or more fun or improve alliance war in general.

i've never had a problem with planning. they should fix the fun factor and other things as well. i'm not going to enjoy it more because planning is "easier" ya know.

What level war did you plan? What timezone are you in? If that timezone falls where war starts in the middle of the day, are you fortunate enough to have a job that you can just stop everything you're doing at work for hours multiple times a week for a video game?

Bc I've spent a few years (with some breaks in between) in tier 1 and for the entirety of that time, I have heard complaints from many many of my own BG planners and other planners from other alliances that I know.