15.0 Alliance Wars Update Discussion Thread

Summoners!

Our 15.0 Update is just about a week away, and with it, it's bringing a huge change to Alliance Wars! Check out everything you need to know about the Brand New Map, Scoring Changes, and new boosts in the Loyalty Store here: http://forums.playcontestofchampions.com/en/discussion/17902/15-0-alliance-wars-update/

Comments

WOK

IMO, @JJW should be immediately given a contract and "headhunted" to become a lucratively paid senior advisor to Kabams game research and development team!

mutamatt

the problem with trying to balance diversity scoring and defender kill scoring is that its a delicate balance. once the "trick" is found it will be figured out and exploited. they cant think of everything, this current system was figured out and exploited immediately.

defender kills are necessary, for AW to remain competitive. if you want diversity you will need to force it on alliances. put a system in place that only allows a max of 3 of a given champ in a bg before that champ is locked out of placement. 3 is a fair number and people wont complain about needing rank down tickets.

another thing i know they wanted to encourage was continuing attack, even when a loss was imminent. In order to do this they need to re balance the victory and participation awards. my current AW gives 518 5* shards fir victory and 182 for participation. the ratio is 3:1 highly favoring victory, so teams would save items for a war they could win.

making the balance of these awards 1:1 would greatly encourage exploration despite an imminent loss. in this case the losing team could win 350 shards for max exploration no matter the kill count, a win would still grant them 700 as it would have before. if you wanted to keep the same shard payout total, losing with max exploration would net nearly 300 shards, the winning side would get 600 total.

Heywood

Draco2199 wrote: »

I don't understand what the big problem with AW is, it's working fine after fixing the kill points. Everyone is crying about diversity although ALMOST EVERY SINGLE PERSON WAS COMPLAINING ABOUT ALL THE MYSTIC DEFENDERS EVERYWHERE. Kabam gives you what you asked for and makes it a penalty for placing all mystic and no ones happy still. I like it, its working fine. You want to win 100% and be diverse. Enough said.

My alliance is going to have 150 diverse champs this next war.
If I see a duplicate champ, we win.

When they make diversity among all 3 BG's my alliance is going to place 105 unique champs. If you don't have Kang, we win.

That is absurd.

It is broken, and a lame ass response to nerfing MD,

Cantstopwontstop

MyTaffy wrote: »

This thread is basically pointless. If they do, they will tell you. If you find many threads about RDT or AW Div, that probably means NO to your questions.

Your comment is pointless... if you don't agree with what everyone saying don't comment something completely unconstructive. Cause now it just looks like you're looking for an argument which NO ONE here is gonna give you... just because you're perfectly fine with mediocrity doesn't mean the rest of the community is, sorry.

Beholder_V

Kabam Miike wrote: »

NemesisThantos wrote: »

I like how Kabam Miike is ignoring the main point of the posts he is quoting. Removing defender kills makes them more $$$, plain and simple. Just admit it

We have addressed that a few times. As we said, that was not the goal with the change. The goal with the removal of Defender kills wasn't to increase the use of Potions or Revives, but to relieve the feeling of defeat that comes with taking one shot at a defender, losing, and feeling that you're now helping the other Alliance, so you stop playing, even though you have 2 perfectly good attackers still there.

Defender kills was only a factor in deciding wars when things were razor close and one team burned through a ton of revives to take down a boss or sub-boss. The scenario you described I have NEVER seen. I think the general consensus was that your initial 3 champ "lives" are fair game. Reviving, especially without fully healing, made it riskier because you could contribute to the other team's points if you ended up dying again. I think most people actually appreciated this facet of war because it penalized people who tried to "buy" a win, kept it more skill-related. No matter what your true intentions were, it can't be too difficult to see how people might draw the conclusion that this was done specifically as a money grab, since you've removed that penalty from the big spenders.

King_turd123

Not sure if kabam fully considered my possible feelings of defeat when they instituted The (unit) Collector.

Beholder_V

Spidey076 wrote: »

Ok now the thing bothering all of us players are in higher tier aw where already magik as 3 mini boss and one boss with md 5/5 kick the butt of even experience player now they have to face 6 magik now?in 4 boss we already have difficulty to defeat the magik bcz of his limbo way too op and that's just ridiculous.
More mini means more magik and more magik means atleast 2 player on that path to defeat them that means player have to forget exploration.
Now tell me any answer about that @Kabam Miike which every player really want.

I think you're barking up the wrong tree. The reason Magik's Limbo seems so OP is because the interaction of Mystic Dispersion and Dexterity is seriously broken right now. It's just as broken for a tough Juggernaut who can literally be permanently unstoppable if you evade his attacks instead of blocking (which on a sub-boss node is going to kill you) you pretty much give him another bar of power by evading by the time his unstoppable ends. But again, that's not a problem with the map, that's a problem with MD and Dex.

chunkyb

Beholder_V wrote: »

Kabam Miike wrote: »

NemesisThantos wrote: »

I like how Kabam Miike is ignoring the main point of the posts he is quoting. Removing defender kills makes them more $$$, plain and simple. Just admit it

We have addressed that a few times. As we said, that was not the goal with the change. The goal with the removal of Defender kills wasn't to increase the use of Potions or Revives, but to relieve the feeling of defeat that comes with taking one shot at a defender, losing, and feeling that you're now helping the other Alliance, so you stop playing, even though you have 2 perfectly good attackers still there.

Defender kills was only a factor in deciding wars when things were razor close and one team burned through a ton of revives to take down a boss or sub-boss. The scenario you described I have NEVER seen. I think the general consensus was that your initial 3 champ "lives" are fair game. Reviving, especially without fully healing, made it riskier because you could contribute to the other team's points if you ended up dying again. I think most people actually appreciated this facet of war because it penalized people who tried to "buy" a win, kept it more skill-related. No matter what your true intentions were, it can't be too difficult to see how people might draw the conclusion that this was done specifically as a money grab, since you've removed that penalty from the big spenders.

I've played in a few different allis and that scenario has def never happened. You fight your best, you take your lumps, you figure out if the node/possible win is important enough to spend resources on or if you have the ability to send help that way. It all played into the overall strategy of war.

Even reading that scenario is worrisome because it seems like it came out of the ether. And if that's why they implemented these changes, idk what to say. If it was anyone else saying it, I'd say they made it up to create a problem that needed a solution. I will not say that now though. The other thing I might say is that person doesn't war. But again those are only things I might say in other situations and am not saying in this particular situation.

KamalaWantsToPlayToo

King_turd123 wrote: »

Not sure if kabam fully considered my possible feelings of defeat when they instituted The (unit) Collector.

So true! Why don't we just get unlimited free revives and heal pots when questing?

As a matter of fact I think we're all being trolled by Kabam right now. So many people complain about "money grabs" that they gone and done a 180 to the point that people are begging for AW to be more difficult.

When they eventually make it AW again (I'm hoping they do) they're gonna say "remember you all wanted it this way. Don't complain to us"

DrFreaky

This new AW system is a joke, Alliance is now wining by defender rating, and high PI. Really? Something is not right here.

Beholder_V

To put simply, I've seen diversity make a bigger impact deciding a war in the small number of wars since the update than I ever did with defender kills over the entire time the previous system was in place.

NMEONES

For the love of everything sacred in the world... please bring back the old AW.. If that's too much to ask for, then at least bring back the old scoring system. Defender Diversity is horrible. Never mind the scoring of it, just playing vs all these diverse champs is a joke. It's way to easy... some of these champs are not meant to be defenders, no reason we should be forced to use them as such. I said it once before, AW was my favorite part of the game but not anymore.. I feel like it turned into Alliance Quest Wars. Just sucks.

JJW

WOK wrote: »

IMO, @JJW should be immediately given a contract and "headhunted" to become a lucratively paid senior advisor to Kabams game research and development team!

That's funny! Thank you for the compliment.

OnlyOneAboveAll

Has anyone managed to beat Juggs on mini boss node 55 with maxed MD yet? Just wondering since my 4 star is max sig at r4 ready for r5 if it's worth putting him there. My alliance has come across him a few times there (5star r4 also) and most have a tough time taking him down. But since defender kills don't matter anymore can some use 15 level 3 team revives til they inch him down and finally beat him since they can afford it. If not send their teammate 15 level 3 team revives as a gift til they do. Is this allowed? Asking all Kabam mods. Thanks. Was going to use "I" but who am I kidding? I can't afford 15 level 3 revives HAHAHA.

KhanMedina

OnlyOneAboveAll wrote: »

Has anyone managed to beat Juggs on mini boss node 55 with maxed MD yet? Just wondering since my 4 star is max sig at r4 ready for r5 if it's worth putting him there. My alliance has come across him a few times there (5star r4 also) and most have a tough time taking him down. But since defender kills don't matter anymore can some use 15 level 3 team revives til they inch him down and finally beat him since they can afford it. If not send their teammate 15 level 3 team revives as a gift til they do. Is this allowed? Asking all Kabam mods. Thanks. Was going to use "I" but who am I kidding? I can't afford 15 level 3 revives HAHAHA.

Or...just powerlock him?

Team_Sly

I have loved always playing in AW but since the new change has been made I'm finding it very frustrating and you Kabam have now taken away all the excitement of what war use to be, if an alliance has gave it their all and it comes down to the wire why should defender diversity determine the outcome for the win of the war, this is complete cods wallop, who ever thought of this needs to go back and have a good rethink, war is now becoming boring due to this stupid points decision. The fun of playing in a Aw was to take out the other alliance main bosses, then it come down to defender kills, this is now useless, so disappointed in the new changes.

Beholder_V

Again, Juggs on node 55 may suck if you don't have a way to power lock, but that's not an AW problem. That's an MD/Dex problem. No less relevant, just the wrong thread.

nuggz

Seriously. What's the plan here. Everyone in the community has the same champs ranked up for defense. We worked really hard on these champs.

If we had known this was the direction that war was heading we all would not have ranked these champs. (Spidy, NC, magik, mordo, dormu, juggs, hype, etc....)

The diversity scheme can be acclimated but all our resources have been used on all the same champs we were already used to having on defense

OnlyOneAboveAll

KhanMedina wrote: »

OnlyOneAboveAll wrote: »

Has anyone managed to beat Juggs on mini boss node 55 with maxed MD yet? Just wondering since my 4 star is max sig at r4 ready for r5 if it's worth putting him there. My alliance has come across him a few times there (5star r4 also) and most have a tough time taking him down. But since defender kills don't matter anymore can some use 15 level 3 team revives til they inch him down and finally beat him since they can afford it. If not send their teammate 15 level 3 team revives as a gift til they do. Is this allowed? Asking all Kabam mods. Thanks. Was going to use "I" but who am I kidding? I can't afford 15 level 3 revives HAHAHA.

Or...just powerlock him?

Better be one heck of an evader since that node is immune to stun and get that power lock on him quick.

OnlyOneAboveAll

Beholder_V wrote: »

Again, Juggs on node 55 may suck if you don't have a way to power lock, but that's not an AW problem. That's an MD/Dex problem. No less relevant, just the wrong thread.

Actually I am on the right thread seeing how my question was based on defender kills no longer being relevant and one could spend as much items as they could to make the win.

WorkingAsIntended

All I have to say is if defender diversity stays I want my money back for mystic dispersion sense now the more I used it is is now rendered useless upon placing same champs which everyone in all alliances have. This aforementioned making my choices extremely limited.
New war plateau stinks like dog you know what and we're all sick of it. Sad when most of my friends are leaving and we're all just sitting here either waiting or just bored out of our minds.

LeNoirFaineant

So we are all placing garbage champs for diversity. Someone screwed up and doubled down on Yellow Jacket so we will probably lose this war even though we will 100% and may have more defensive kills. If only he had placed Kamala instead of Yellow Jacket... what a joke. Fix your garbage war Kabam.

winterthur

TL; DR sorry.

Was there a post to recommend attack champs diversity?

Rather than 3 champs restriction to attack, the number should equal to maximum tiles placeable with defender champs. Each champ can only be used once.

The fourth attack champ will take the HP lost of the first, the seventh attack champ starts with remainder health of the fourth champ.

Viable?

unknown

This content has been removed.

Darkwolf1981

To me it only made sense to remove attacker kills if your not counting D kills. Instead in comes diversity. Now u have guys in u tube telling everybody to use 3*s even in a 10m Alliance. That's not war, that's a fashion show, and i mean no disrespect by saying that. Most of my alliance which I have lead since March 2015 are not into war since the change. The do not want to go to war because now u can have a 6m against a 10m and if they both 100% the 10m can lose based on diversity. In no way is this fun or realistic and im now sitting on a ton of defense hero's I would not use in the rest of the game, besides Arena. I survived the 12.0 update but I am reaching my limit of changes to the game that effects past rank up decisions based on what was going on at that point, but a 360 occurred eliminating their value. I do not care about sarcastic comments to come in reaction to my opinion on just voicing what actual players are feeling along with myself. But if u don't speak up now u have no right to speak up later on.

RagamugginGunner

This system is absolute hell on officers. Kabam you made AW a flipping job now. I am so pissed off.

Run477

There are currently 1800 messages in this thread and kabam keeps closing new threads and saying to post in this thread to keep comments in one place, which is fine, except there are a lot of threads that have posed unseeded questions and I have no idea if they have ever been addressed here (bc it would literally take me a day to try to read through everything here I would assume).

So can anyone answer if kabam has responded to any concerns about:

1.the ease of tiles in new war

2. Responses to why defender diversity feels like a poor decision from many players' points of view bc A as it literally punished alliances that focused on a defensive strategy and B it essentially guarantees the alliances that buy the most crystals and resource packages packages win wars (once they "fix" the problem with the diversity scoring being per bg?

3. Anything about trying to modify the war so alliances can choose between defense vs diversity? Even if slightly weighted for diversity, it still would present a (minor) option if tile difficulty increased and defender kills gave some points (granted with the heavy favor of diversity, defender kills or tile difficulty would have to drastically be increased so not sure if that is an option after all)

The only response I have seen is:

1. They screwed up in scoring bc they wanted diversity alliance wife (a messup literally everyone wished they wouldn't fix it seems)
2. They decreased attack kills to guarantee that defender diversity across the bgs combined with full bg placements and highest defender rating would always win.

So, if kabam has answered any of the top 3 questions, I would love to know. Perhaps kabam could start a "FAQ" thread so the same questions don't keep getting asked and we can point to those answers somewhere?

chunkyb

Well said @Darkwolf1981. Changes likes this make it feel like the hard work and hours you've put into the game have just been stripped away from you overnight. I think that's the main reason for the anger/outrage. That's also lead to people simply leaving the game. Which sucks because for a lot of us, those people are the ones that keep us playing.

The weird thing about this change is that it took everyone a little time to fully realize the scope of it. Which added a rolling build to said anger/outrage.

I realize mods can only say so much and giving us false hope would probably be worse overall.. But the response we've gotten hasn't really done much to calm the situation either. It's a bad place for both to be in. Most of us just want a fun, competitive game again. When it's not fun anymore, why continue? Having friends in the game and enjoying the camaraderie only goes so far tbh. Especially when you feel like you accomplished something by growing your account in a certain way to best manage the game and challenges.. Only to have the script flipped.

GroundedWisdom

KhanMedina wrote: »

Cantstopwontstop wrote: »

zero7 wrote: »

GroundedWisdom wrote: »

Hulk_77 wrote: »

Fixing War is simple and does not need to be a complex overhaul. I will lay it out real quick:

1) Make 2 portals able to hit the leftmost mini-boss (currently only 1 does)

2) Keep diversity internal to battle groups. Its current state is apparently a bug, but it also makes the most sense. I does not grant advantage to alliances who have champs like a Deadpool or Kang, and each attacker is only fighting in one battle group anyways. Spreading it across the whole alliance is an incredible headache to manage as well. Plus, with less than 150 champs (107 currently I think), this would reward having 50 different defenders in each battle group vs having 100 unique defenders jammed into 2 BGs with the third BG filled with nothing but Magik, Dorm, Nightcrawler, etc. Which is where the meta will trend, and it will be complete unfair for whichever BG ends up drawing that opponent's BG.

3) Change scoring to the below:

Points Breakdown:
Node Exploration: 300 per Node (equals out to before, when it was 450)
Boss Kill: 20 000 Points
Defenders Placed: 50 per Defender Placed
Defender Diversity: 125 per Unique Defender
Defender Rating: 0.002 per PI
Attacker Kills: 150 per Kill (please note this only works with diversity INTERNAL to BGs, not alliance wide)
Defender Kills: 50 per Kill

This points breakdown actually leaves a skill element (not dying) and makes diversity matter. And as for not attacking because you're afraid you'd die... clearing the node in less than 9 deaths is still a net point gain for the attacker, so it shouldn't be a big deal. Without defender kills, the skill element is completely gone, and war's outcomes are determined before the first punch is thrown. Which simply put, just isn't any fun. This is a game, right?

The above setup challenges an alliance to make the best possible defense it can while also using 50 diverse champs in each battle group, which is great for variety and will make war less boring. It also keeps skill a factor. If you can clear the map in less deaths than your opponent, you can beat an opponent that is more highly ranked than you. Which is how war should be.

Finally, the above will work, but I would also consider adding a few new buffs to some nodes. Specific to groups, like "Robots gain X on this this node", "Inhumans gain Y on this node", "Villians gain Z on this node". We have all of these tags on our heroes, use them!

The scoring system is an idea, but the problem with adding Defender Kills into the metrics again is it creates the same issue. It contradicts Diversity, and also makes it possible to KO into a Loss again. That would be two of the objectives of the changes. Basically, teams would opt to use the same Defenders regardless, and the KOs would be the focus.

the ko's should be the focus. do you actually play this game? seems like you spend more time on the forums than playing.

He doesn't.

He specifically said he stopped playing awhile ago and just comes on here to bother people. Sucks, because you replies more than the real players and they're probably basing things off of his untested ideas assuming he's the voice of the people.

He never said that at all. "He" plays the game and speaks for himself. He also understands the game overall, and looks at the whole picture, not just one demographic.

DNA3000

GroundedWisdom wrote: »

Deadbyrd9 wrote: »

@GroundedWisdom that depends on how many kills. I've soloed 5* boss magiks so it's easy for a strong champ to get kills. More strategy will be involved using the right amount of diversity and strong defenders plus once alliance diversity is implemented here will be duplicate champs on defense

That may be the case for some, but the idea is to allow people to make an effort without having to be penalized or giving up when faced with an opponent much higher than them. There's no easy way to implement it and promote Diversity. Unless the Points are about 5 per KO, in which case it would be more for the interest factor than an actual game-changing metric.

Honestly, the more I think about it, the more I think the idea is a bad idea. Not subjectively, but objectively.

A good game designer should always be asking why they are putting anything into their game. Game designers are building something, and like all builders there should be a purpose to what they build. If you're just being simplistically reactionary, you're no longer doing good game design.

Alliance War has an obvious purpose to why it exists in the game. It is a competitive event where the competitors are alliances, and the competitive field is based on each side building a map for the other to attempt to complete. The offensive side of Alliance War is actually no different from AQ or even questing. The game mechanics and the game play are all but indistinguishable from AW attack. We don't do anything different when we attack. What makes AW different from AQ is that it is we players that create the map, not the devs, through defense placement. That then makes every war potentially different because different alliances can choose to place different defenders in different places in theory.

When Kabam decides that they want to encourage players to attack by eliminating all penalties you can possibly accrue through attacking, they are altering a fundamental reason for AW to exist in the first place: they are weakening the competitive element of determining which side is the better attacker. And when they devalue placing the best possible defense in favor of immense benefits to defender diversity, even at the expense of the defenders being viable combat opponents, they are almost completely eliminating the defensive competitive element of AW.

If as a game designer you are concerned that at certain levels of AW the players have theory-crafted the best possible defense so that the defensive placement becomes monotonous - in other words the players aren't creating sufficiently different defenses to challenge opponents - then the solution is to incentivize diversity by redesigning the map so that the players themselves *compute* a more diverse defensive placement as being optimal. That preserves the competitive aspect of defensive placement while reinforcing the reason for players to be given the ability to place defenders in the first place: to make defensive maps more interesting than static maps such as exist in AQ.

*Directly* rewarding diversity to the point of destroying the incentive to place optimal strength defenders is actually self-annihilating. If Kabam wanted to increase diversity specifically because the intent of player-driven placement was to challenge opponents in a different way than static AQ, then devaluing good defenders cuts off AW's nose to spite its face. Instead of having a less diverse defensive competition you now have no defensive competition at all. Diversity without competition is meaningless in this context.

None of this was necessary, because there are obvious solutions that work much better. Kabam says they do not want players to stop attacking if they still have viable attackers - they basically do not want players to sit on their hands when they could attack. But for the attack phase to be competitive, there must be a way to judge who is attacking better. The obvious solution is to eliminate the penalty for losing an attacker, but create a penalty for "creating" an attacker - essentially penalizing reviving attackers. That preserves a way to judge better and worse attackers while completely eliminating the penalty for losing an alive attacker.

And directly awarding points for defender diversity is, and I do not say this often - lazy and wrong. The only valid way to incentivize defender diversity without destroying the reason for AW to exist in the first place is to redesign the maps or the defensive environment to amplify different defender properties so that the players themselves *conclude* that there are different optimal defender placement strategies. That isn't easy, but it isn't impossible either. I theory-crafted one idea when discussing this with someone last week: attacker counter-debuffs. Suppose that the attackers were allowed to pick, say, five different global debuffs that would be applied to the defenders throughout the war. Some would be class-specific: debuffing all mystic or skill defenders in certain ways, and others would be capability-specific: reducing the effects of all bleeds or all defensive accuracy. If they were stackable, players could on their own deincentivize overloading mystic defenders by stacking up a lot of mystic global debuffs. That would then create a situation where the players would not want to place as much mystic defenders, creating a move-countermove scenario where any one strategy for defense placement would, if it got too popular, be countered by everyone picking the best global debuffs to counter that placement. Players would have to try to pick defensive strategies that were different or surprising to catch their opponents off guard.

In any player verses player competitive environment, your best weapon as a game designer is move-countermove. You do not alter the rules of the game to discourage players from doing things you don't want them to do. You hand the players a new move that counters that move, and let them rock-paper-scissors their way out of it themselves.

It is easy to say "well, this is what they wanted to do" as if that absolves everything. Sometimes, it is just about what the game designers ultimately want their game to be, and there's no objective argument against that subjective choice. But this isn't one of those situations in my opinion. No matter what anyone argues the devs intended to do, there's no escaping the fact this was one of the worst ways to attempt to do it.

And incidentally, the fact that they changed attacker kill points so quickly, and so obviously to the non-diverse defender value, says nothing good about just how much thought went into the 15.0 system. That is a smoking-gun of a not well-thought out system, because that was so obvious of a numerical problem that shouldn't have escaped even the smallest serious review of the system mechanics.