**Mastery Loadouts**
Due to issues related to the release of Mastery Loadouts, the "free swap" period will be extended.
The new end date will be May 1st.
Due to issues related to the release of Mastery Loadouts, the "free swap" period will be extended.
The new end date will be May 1st.
15.0 Alliance Wars Update Discussion Thread
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Comments
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.
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,
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.
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 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.
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.
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"
That's funny! Thank you for the compliment.
Or...just powerlock him?
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
Better be one heck of an evader since that node is immune to stun and get that power lock on him quick.
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.
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.
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?
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?
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.
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.
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.