The Issues with War Season 46
Thoye3
Member Posts: 96 ★
First I want to start by saying I think MCOC has had an amazing year overall with great content, champs, and events. However I believe this war season has missed the mark by a large margin. What I say below is coming from someone who plays in a master's alliance so I know my experience may differ from most people. I do feel like these issues affect most alliances that boost and push in war (likely platinum 4 alliances and up). As I am sure many people are aware the tactic for this war season is significantly more challenging than the previous one (and the previous couple tactics honestly). This has resulted in the following:
1. The average death count has tripled. This may be a conservative estimate based off first war results. I know people will adjust to the tactic and get slightly better, but at best alliances death counts will be double from last season. My understanding is that this was intentional as they wanted to increase the difficulty of war "slightly". This has been clearly overshot and I disagree with the idea that more deaths makes war less stressful. People typically feel pretty bad when they die and if they are dying more it will have them think negatively about war in general (and more likely to not want to participate in war at all). Also if an alliance loses 1-0 or 12-11 and you were one of the deaths you will still feel just as bad knowing your death cost the alliance the war.
2. Created a tactic where you will take almost guaranteed block damage. This can of course be avoided if you can full dex specials while rooted (which is very difficult), but some specials cannot be fully dexed even by the best players. This obviously results in a significant potion cost to heal back up (especially if you die). Now if you are in an alliance that just uses 40% revives this is probably not an issue, but for alliances that do require you to heal up to a certain percent before going back into a fight this can be extremely costly. This may be by design to increase people's spending on units or just as a way to make the tactic more challenging, but obviously the result is people spending more resources (whether that is loyalty or units). This is obviously extremely frustrating for players especially as a lot of the time it is completely unavoidable.
3. Potion sizes remain the same and with close to the same loyalty cost. This has been an apparent issue forever now, but compounds with the increased difficulty in tactic (which requires more potions). The size of potions have remained nearly the same amount since 6* champs have been released and we now have people running around with 7* R3s in war. I initially started playing high tier war when 6* R3 were the highest champs out and the potions were the same sizes then. A 6* R3 champ has about 1/2 the health of a 7* R3 (before any boosts are applied). This obviously results in more potions being required to heal up your champs and you run the real risk of running out of items in war. The potions need a massive facelift to be similar in value to the current rank and star level of champs.
4. End of season rewards remain the same. With the increased difficulty and increased resource requirements maybe this could have been offset by a major increase in rewards to make all the effort worth it. This unfortunately did not occur outside the victory bonus which lets be honest is not remotely significant enough to account for the new resource cost. People are probably going to be using at minimum double the amount of resources they would use in a typical season (again for alliances that require more than just 40% revives) and the rewards just do not match that change at all.
5. War season over the holidays. This has been beat to death so I don't want touch on it too much, but having all these major challenges/issues for war also occur over the holidays does not help the problem obviously.
To be completely transparent I am in one of the master's alliances who have decided to not push this season (which there are several) and 100% feel this is the right choice based off the above issues. There are already conversations occurring about reducing effort next season as well with the tactic as currently designed because of the massive resource cost that would be required to push masters. If war is going to remain this challenging from a resource and gameplay perspective I imagine many people will quit playing war all together or take a major step back in terms of effort. As a whole I don't hate the design of the tactic/nodes, but I believe it would make a lot more sense in a BG setting vs war, where you are not stuck spending resources after every fight to heal back up. This is obviously just my opinion, but I am interested to see how other are feeling about this war season.
TL;DR
War currently has the following issues: tripled average death count, tactic where you are guaranteed to use potions, potions sizes remain the same, end of season rewards remain the same, and war over holiday season.
1. The average death count has tripled. This may be a conservative estimate based off first war results. I know people will adjust to the tactic and get slightly better, but at best alliances death counts will be double from last season. My understanding is that this was intentional as they wanted to increase the difficulty of war "slightly". This has been clearly overshot and I disagree with the idea that more deaths makes war less stressful. People typically feel pretty bad when they die and if they are dying more it will have them think negatively about war in general (and more likely to not want to participate in war at all). Also if an alliance loses 1-0 or 12-11 and you were one of the deaths you will still feel just as bad knowing your death cost the alliance the war.
2. Created a tactic where you will take almost guaranteed block damage. This can of course be avoided if you can full dex specials while rooted (which is very difficult), but some specials cannot be fully dexed even by the best players. This obviously results in a significant potion cost to heal back up (especially if you die). Now if you are in an alliance that just uses 40% revives this is probably not an issue, but for alliances that do require you to heal up to a certain percent before going back into a fight this can be extremely costly. This may be by design to increase people's spending on units or just as a way to make the tactic more challenging, but obviously the result is people spending more resources (whether that is loyalty or units). This is obviously extremely frustrating for players especially as a lot of the time it is completely unavoidable.
3. Potion sizes remain the same and with close to the same loyalty cost. This has been an apparent issue forever now, but compounds with the increased difficulty in tactic (which requires more potions). The size of potions have remained nearly the same amount since 6* champs have been released and we now have people running around with 7* R3s in war. I initially started playing high tier war when 6* R3 were the highest champs out and the potions were the same sizes then. A 6* R3 champ has about 1/2 the health of a 7* R3 (before any boosts are applied). This obviously results in more potions being required to heal up your champs and you run the real risk of running out of items in war. The potions need a massive facelift to be similar in value to the current rank and star level of champs.
4. End of season rewards remain the same. With the increased difficulty and increased resource requirements maybe this could have been offset by a major increase in rewards to make all the effort worth it. This unfortunately did not occur outside the victory bonus which lets be honest is not remotely significant enough to account for the new resource cost. People are probably going to be using at minimum double the amount of resources they would use in a typical season (again for alliances that require more than just 40% revives) and the rewards just do not match that change at all.
5. War season over the holidays. This has been beat to death so I don't want touch on it too much, but having all these major challenges/issues for war also occur over the holidays does not help the problem obviously.
To be completely transparent I am in one of the master's alliances who have decided to not push this season (which there are several) and 100% feel this is the right choice based off the above issues. There are already conversations occurring about reducing effort next season as well with the tactic as currently designed because of the massive resource cost that would be required to push masters. If war is going to remain this challenging from a resource and gameplay perspective I imagine many people will quit playing war all together or take a major step back in terms of effort. As a whole I don't hate the design of the tactic/nodes, but I believe it would make a lot more sense in a BG setting vs war, where you are not stuck spending resources after every fight to heal back up. This is obviously just my opinion, but I am interested to see how other are feeling about this war season.
TL;DR
War currently has the following issues: tripled average death count, tactic where you are guaranteed to use potions, potions sizes remain the same, end of season rewards remain the same, and war over holiday season.
5
Comments
I think the whole “we wanted a harder season” thing is great and understandable. But discuss or tell your player base that before you put an extremely bad tactic out. Looks very money grabby from my standpoint with how difficult the tactic is.
Seemed like it could have been an easy “you know what, we didn’t want to delay the season but the tactic isn’t good and we’re going to give you guys a break while we tweak it for next year”, and that would have been the easiest good guy move in the world…. And they didn’t make it.
I’d almost bet the tactic is tweaked for next season though.