AW pointless when you loose only because of diversity
Calypso96
Member Posts: 57 ★
The picture say it all 
5
Calypso96
Member Posts: 57 ★
Comments
Have to read those rules. Don't have to like it, but got to play by them.
It was however recently buffed a couple Seasons ago, but has been a factor in AW scoring for years.. the idea is simple: The relative difficulty of a defense placement can be altered by spamming whatever players believe are the most difficult defenders.. if you ignore this part of the scoring metric, you are effectively trading guaranteed points (Diversity) for a chance to place an objectively more difficult map in front of your opponents.. you're rolling the dice that your map will be difficult enough to meet or exceed the points you lost to diversity.. essentially, you went all in on difficulty and it didn't work out for you this time
Edit: the reason Diversity scoring was recently buffed was because upon the initial release of #MagicThief there were a few defenders who were arguably unreasonably difficult.. to a point where even top alliances who had been using full Diversity for years actually started to favor adding a few doubles in.. Kabam responded with a buff to Diversity to help offset the new unintended trend the meta had created
Diversity was brought in to discourage alliances from deliberately stacking multiple copies of the same old difficult defenders which created a number of issues including (but not limited to) the same old repetitive boring defender and map setup, the advantage whale alliances had over smaller alliances (where they were able to place multiple copies of the shiniest brand new meta defender that the smaller alliance barely had), and the fact that it creates an imbalance in map difficulty between the two alliances theoretically and therefore an uneven playing field (over and above the unavoidable).
Looking at raw exploration and attack bonus numbers without taking into consideration diversity is misleading and isn’t an objectively fair assessment?! An alliance that stacks multiple duplicates of the trickiest defenders theoretically presents the opposing alliance with a harder map? Therefore attack bonus alone as a reflection of attack skill is not the same between the two alliances and is relative?! Yes you won attack bonus by 17 on raw numbers, but you “handicapped” the other alliance by 33 (diversity differential of 11 x3 attack bonus per defender) by presumably deliberately stacking multiple copies of Onslaught, Bullseye, Serpent etc etc. So theoretically on that they beat you in attack by 16?! (Eg would your alliance have done as well as you did in attack on the same map and same set of defenders they faced or alternatively would they have had even more attack bonus than you did if they didn’t have all your multiples of Onslaught, Bullseye, Serpent etc - I guess we will never know but it is possible … and perhaps even likely?!)
By my assessment it looks like the other alliance beat you both on defence and offence by the above criteria?
And it was a clear win for the other alliance - score wasn’t even close?!
Taking away win bonus - my alliance has lost AWs by 20 points several times?!
1) Stop playing AW. Can't lose if you don't play.
2) Take a few moments and get fully diverse defenders in each BG.
Both are relatively easy to do.
Guaranteed that if diversity was dropped, the title would be “AW is pointless when you lose only due to a full map of Serpent’s, Onslaughts, Bullseyes and Dust”.
Though most high tier wars wouldn’t sacrifice diversity, I would at least like some sort of cost/benefit option to strategize with. They could do this by making diversity either worth 210 points or by upping the limit to 4 attack bonus per node. This change would make it so that the only way a duplicate defender was viable is if it wiped out all attack bonus.
Maybe OP is looking for suggestions to tighten up his alliance's defensive placement strategy.