**UPDATE - iPAD STUCK FLICKERING SCREEN**
The 47.0.1 hotfix to address the issue of freezing & flashing lights on loading screens when trying to enter a fight, along with other smaller issues, is now ready to be downloaded through the App Store on IOS.
More information here.
The 47.0.1 hotfix to address the issue of freezing & flashing lights on loading screens when trying to enter a fight, along with other smaller issues, is now ready to be downloaded through the App Store on IOS.
More information here.
15.0 Alliance Wars Update Discussion Thread
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Comments
That is the spin, the just aren't being upfront with their real motive
Just like I predicted, we lost the war because of defender rating. Thanks Kabam! This is so fun! Change war back please. Bring back defender kills, lower diversity points. It's the only way
@Kabam Miike look please. this is what this new system does. we played perfectly, and we lose because the other alliance is 14m and we are 9m and they have higher rated defenders. This. Is. Not. Fair.
All we ask is that you can really give us a timely notification if the scoring of diversity is going to change. It honestly takes a lot of time to make sure everyone has diversity in my alliance (can't say the same for others). So for example, if you (Kabam) drops the bomb that it is going to change in the next 24 hours, we will scramble to get that update applied to our defense setups. That will not be cool, not at all.
Kabam is many things, but eloquent is not one of them. What Kabam Miike means, or rather the dev principle I think KM is trying to relay to us, is that the developers want defender diversity to be a small effect that is unlikely to cause an alliance that performs much better than the other alliance to lose, but when the war is very close then diversity can swing the balance between two roughly comparable alliances that perform similarly. It is not intended to be literally a tie breaker.
The problem is that the players are not perceiving diversity points that way, they are perceiving them more like a bowling handicap where one side starts off with more points (you can't see that initially, but that's ultimately what is happening) and then if both sides perform identically the other side basically wins by default. Players are seeing that as a victory being stolen if it ever affects the results of the war.
I should mention I don't believe that is an unfair perception.
The idea of useful or not useful is based on how many Kills they got in the old system. Those Champs aren't actually useless. They're not the so-called "Top Tier", named so because of the Kills they amassed. That's part-and-parcel with the need for Diversity to begin with.
While I don't believe you intentionally lied, it was still a lie just the same. Do the right thing here guys, we all know it can be done without pushing out a slew of 4 & 5 star rank down tickets. There has to be a way to target these champs ranked over the last 10 days.
Please stop spamming as it is against the rules. Thx
This is a semantic quibble which I am more than happy to eliminate. The problem people are expressing when they talk about useful or not useful defenders can be expressed in a precise way that unambiguously articulates the problem.
14.0 Alliance War presented a system whereby the decision on which champions to place as defenders was based entirely upon their combat defensive strength, which I define to be how difficult they are for an opposing alliance to defeat when placed on a particular node. This then automatically creates a situation where the opposing alliance must decide which champions to use as attackers based on their offensive combat effectiveness, which I define to be their ability to defeat the likely defenders the attacking player is likely to face on the nodes they are likely to traverse.
In this situation, the choices made by both alliances are focused almost exclusively on the results of individual combat sessions: how well do attackers attack, and how well do defenders defend. Within this arena, the two variables on which alliance will likely gain an advantage are a) how well they chose champions from their respective rosters and b) how effective are the combat skills of the attacking player. Most players would consider this to be a reasonable situation to present to players in an environment intended to be a competition.
15.0 changes those rules in such a way that the situation it presents is anticompetitive: it devalues the skills of the attacking player and also devalues the strategic thinking involved in deciding defensive placement. Our ability to fight a fight and our ability to choose defenders and nodes to place them on are the only two gameplay elements of an Alliance War. Instead, 15.0 creates artificial scoring systems that devalue the capabilities of defenders and devalue the skills of the attacking players.
When players complain that they are being forced to place "less useful" defenders it is not valid to claim that they were only "useful" given the old scoring system, because that's not what players are talking about. They are trying to say that in 14.0 they used to consider the properties of the defender before placing that defender. In 15.0, none of the properties of the defender are being considered. You can buff Luke Cage or nerf Magik, but neither of those things really changes their usefulness as defenders in 15.0 for the most part because their value has nothing to do with *any* of their properties except literally their names.
You are focusing on "kills" as if the scoring system is completely arbitrary and the devs are free to choose any system at all and it is all equally good. But the players aren't complaining that the 15.0 scoring system ALTERS the value of the defensive champions. Except for what gets placed on boss nodes, 15.0 ERASES the value of defensive champions. It literally, and I mean literally doesn't matter what those champions are. Their uniqueness is worth far more than anything the defenders can actually do on defense. THAT's what players are complaining about.
As long as you keep mentioning scoring, I don't think you understand the issue. You think people are complaining that Nightcrawler used to be valuable because he got a lot of kills and now because we don't score kills Nightcrawler is less valuable and Luke Cage is more valuable. You are mistaken. Luke Cage is not more valuable. Except for boss nodes, everything has almost no value. Why are people placing Luke Cage? Is it because of his signature ability? Because of his physical resistance? Because of his animations? Because of anything having to do with the champion at all? Nope. It is because we don't have a defensive placement with that name yet. We are placing Luke Cage because "Luke Cage" is not the same name as "Spider-Gwen." The names are different, so we place him. Exactly one of him.
That erasure, that feeling that literally nothing about the defender matters except its name, is the real source of the complaint. You can talk about scoring, but that complaint is not a scoring complaint. At its heart, it is the result of the scoring changes but not about the scoring changes. It is about being told you as a player have been taken out of the equation. Don't bother thinking about the champions. Don't study them. Don't even look at their property sheets at all. None of that matters. Place one of each. That's all that matters.
No matter how AW is scored, if that property still exists that will still be a problem, completely independent of scoring. Add defender kills, eliminate defender kills, change the scoring in any way you want. If this problem still exists, nothing about scoring matters.
@Kabam Miike
Can you give us more information on what you mean by changes, and what else will be worked on.
I haven't seen anything being elaborated on in regards too;
Node difficulty
Reward changes
And most importantly, you had mentioned that diversity would eventually mean that the champs we are now placing will become more usefull than what they were prior. Does that mean the previous useless champs will be getting bumped on abilities, or nodes in aw will grant extra abilites to what we call useless champs. Like nodes that give a champion the ability to evade, heal, unstoppable, etc...
the same
Stop saying that already. It is 100% not true. It's not a matter of opinion either. Certain Champs are better at attacking and certain champs are much harder to kill than others. This is a fact, and not debatable. There is a reason why people have trouble fighting Dormammu and not Kamala Khan, and why people bring Starlord to offense instead of Colossus. If it weren't true then people would just rank up Champs based on whether they liked the character or not. Or rank up at random. Every champ can be used in arena equally. What sets one apart from the other is their ability to be effective in other areas of the game. They are not all created equal, nor are the all equally useful.
The whole point of Alliance Wars is to prevent the opponent from killing your Boss in each battlegroup, and to kill the opposing alliance's Bosses. If this were not the case then they wouldn't award 20,000 points for a Boss kill (a great deal more than anything else in AW). Therefore, in AW, any champ that is harder to kill, and/or causes you to use more items, is MORE useful than a Champ who doesn't. And any champ who allows you to more easily defeat the opponents' defenders is MORE useful than a Champ that doesn't. A Champ that does neither is inherently LESS useful. The problem is rewarding people (via diversity points) for bringing poor, non-useful, defenders to AW. If you are going to do that then you've completely changed the mode and eliminated one of the two objectives. If you want to keep that, fine, but call it something else...it sure isn't Alliance WARS.
I think most players would agree that not all champs are equally useful for all tasks. GroundedWisdom is making the argument that we were judging "usefulness" based on number of kills and you seem to be at least nominally agreeing with him on that point: that the point of AW was to get kills so of course kills are what matters. GroundedWisdom is suggesting that players simply need to adjust to the new meta where kills aren't the point of AW.
I would argue that kills don't have to be the point of AW, and that isn't at the heart of most players' complaints. Suppose I were to change the scoring so that defenders got points not for kills but for damage dealt to the attackers. The more damage the defender inflicted the more points the defending alliance got. This is a different kind of meta and it changes things. For one thing, it actually changes the values of the attackers. Wolverine is not as good of an attacker in this new meta because even if he kills everything and even if he ends the fight at full health he could have given a ton of points to the enemy. Iceman becomes an even better defender now because even if he dies he deals a lot of damage right up front which guarantees him at least a few points.
This is a different AW than 14.0. Kills are no longer counted. But there is still the idea that players can engage with the game. We can think about attackers and choose what we think are the best attackers based on real choices we arrive at by looking at the capabilities of the champions. There is actual skill and strategy for picking and placing defenders. In this hypothetical the point of AW would no longer *necessarily* be about killing anything in particular, and some players would complain about the change, but I don't think people would be complaining to the extent they are now, or about the same things they are now.
That's what I meant when I said above points don't matter, at least not in this context. I think players are genuinely upset about basically being told your thoughts and your ideas and your choices don't matter anymore when it comes to defense placement. There is one correct way to place, and it has nothing to do with your opinion about how the champions work. I don't think AW is "supposed" to be about kills, but it is supposed to be about something. Something the players are supposed to be involved with. If the alliance leader is making a spreadsheet and telling everyone exactly what defenders to place, that can't be right. We took the play out of gameplay.
I'm not so much disagreeing with you as trying to make the point there's a deeper problem here that goes beyond what war used to be and what our opinions about what an alliance war should be focused on. I'm saying 15.0 isn't focused on the wrong thing, but on nothing.
I just managed to take out a Nightcrawler boss where pre v15, I would congratulate myself registering even 10 hits. I wonder in addition to the above, why was the nodes made easier?
I have a theory. I believe that Kabam perceived that AW had a problem where alliances were getting matched up against other alliances that were so much stronger than them or alternatively higher skilled than them that when they went on attack it was basically hopeless. Attacking players would run into nodes that they not only couldn't kill, but so obviously couldn't kill that they just gave up.
This is worse than just losing because this can become a progressive problem. When a player gives up it hurts the entire battle group. Soon the members of that battlegroup are less likely to push hard when they keep discovering their efforts are wasted because someone else just gives up. Soon it is whole allliances that are being discouraged from competing in AW because too often the whole thing falls apart too quickly. And the more of these alliances that stop competing, the more that the remaining alliances that are competing become stronger on average. You are statistically more likely to run into a juggernaut because all the push overs are sitting on the sidelines. And then you start giving up.
So the problem - as I'm theorizing Kabam saw it - was that players were being discouraged too strongly when on attack, and this was causing a chain reaction of progressive non-participation or half-hearted participation. Kabam felt that win or lose, it would be better if at least the attacking side managed to finish the attack phase most of the time. That way they would at least be encouraged to push on and see what the final result would be.
Three things stand in the way. First: if the attackers are running into three Nightcrawlers, two Magiks, and a Juggernaut, the odds of them being stopped cold rise substantially. Not many defenders are strong enough to be singularly scary, but everyone is placing a disproportionate number of them. Second: some nodes just straight up kill players. Thorns, slashed tires, etc. These nodes can kill a path dead and stop further progress. And third, if you are pretty good in general but there's a few things you have trouble defeating and you run into one, you're roadblocked. It isn't easy for someone else to help you, especially if you only need help with that one node. Plus, you don't want players to give up voluntarily because they think someone better will come along.
Now look at 15.0. The nodes are easier, so it is less likely attackers will get stopped. There are more "cross over points" so players can trade or help paths. There is a huge penalty for placing more than one of any strong defender that can show stop a path. And defender kills are taken away, so players have no incentive to give up while they still have live attackers, so they don't stop in a path voluntarily. I believe the unstated goal is to make sure attackers finish most of the time. And if you are doing everything possible to help players finish on attack, seems obvious that scoring is going to be a lot closer than it was before, especially with defender kills gone. Of course, you can just tell players that there's a "tie breaker" so that's not a problem.
I think the whole "players were giving up" thing wasn't a lie, but it was only a small part of the problem. I think the real problem is one they didn't want to express out loud: they wanted everyone to "win" just one side more than the other.
thank god someone who finally makes sense. i feel like im trying to teach calculus to new born babies most of the time talking in these forums i was beginning to think i was the only logical thinker that the trolls didnt chase away yet
Actually testing and/or playing the game could help shine light on the fact that this wasn't an actual widespread issue that needed a fix.
I think that they made it easier on purpose to force everyone to go 100%.
I'm not endorsing Kabam's actions, just presenting a theory as to why they would make the changes they did.
I will say it is hard for any of us to actually know if this was an actual problem or not, or what Kabam was datamining that suggested to them this was a problem, because by definition if this problem was happening it wouldn't be visible to us, because affected alliances become essentially "invisible" to the rest of the alliances participating in alliance war.
There's no question in my mind that they tried to fix a bad haircut by setting it on fire. But I'm not willing to say the problem itself didn't exist. It is just that no problem was worth these changes.
The example thrown forth by them was an attacker losing one champ and then stopping because they didn't want to hurt the alliance.
I agree with you that no problem was worth these fixes. But I also feel like we're missing the actual motivation for these changes. Idk what that motivation is, but none of this follows logic as far as how it's being presented imo. It feels like a problem-reaction-solution sorta thing but maybe I'm crazy.
Well, as I said above, I believe what we were presented was a piece of a larger problem I outlined in that post.
No, I'm not saying defender usefulness is based on kills at all. I'm saying it is based on their ability to prevent the opponent from getting to (and ultimately killing) the Boss, which is 1 of the 2 objectives in a war. That's why we have 2 components of AW...placement and attack. Electro is super easy to beat, but if you face him with the wrong champ on certain nodes you could take a lot of damage and it hinders your progress towards the Boss...way more than someone like Hawkeye does. Therefore he's more useful for AW defense. But by incentivizing the placement of poor (or less useful) defenders through diversity points they are eliminating 1 of the 2 components of AW (trying to stop the opposition through defender placement). You are partially right, in that the allocation of points or scoring method doesn't matter, but only up until it does something so drastic as to render an entire element of the mode moot (which it has done, as you correctly point out). They don't need to bring back defender kills at all, nor am I arguing for that. There are plenty of other ways to fix this.
You and I have a very similar viewpoint in that they've taken away half of the gameplay in this mode.
I think it is even worse than that. I think attacking and defending are opposite sides of the same coin. When we take away the defensive side, we are also reducing (albeit not eliminating) the attacking side gameplay. Although many AW tiers are still facing defenses that not every player can just sweep aside or spend past, it is true that AW is in general easier for attackers than before. That automatically means that attack phase is less competitive than before.
In the very highest tiers of AW the strongest alliances will probably "fill in" their diverse defenses, and even a maximally diverse defense will still be pretty strong. A 5* ranked up Luke Cage is still not a pushover. But because defenses are weaker, and because I believe it is intentional that attackers are going to fully explore more often than before, there's less competition on attack. Attack becomes less competition and more participation.
It won't happen instantly everywhere, but under the current rules I believe 90% of the defensive side strategy was taken away by 15.0, and at least half the attack side competition will also be nullified over time as alliances evolve to become maximally diverse (again: assuming these rules persisted). So I think 15.0 takes away not half the gameplay, but about 70% of the competitive gameplay.
Miike Spicer is trying to spin it like we actually have input and that they are actually listening.
We have continually lost/won by less than 700 points every time, it's too easy, the formula is flawed and it's getting old very quick.