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15.0 Alliance Wars Update Discussion Thread
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A war decided by diversity and rating is not a war. How long is kabam going to ride this train????
Well, first of all correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't we used to get defender rating points in the old war? I thought it was something similar to what we have now. I don't remember very many complaints about defender rating points in the old system even though theoretically speaking it could have swung the results of a close war.
I think the difference is that in 14.0 the amount of points you could get for all combat-related activities - mainly killing nodes, exploring paths, and defender kills - swamped the amount of points you could get from defender placement and defender rating most of the time, so defender rating points were seen as a small adjustment to the overall score. I think if we change the points system in any way that returns the emphasis to combat results and combat performance - whether that is with defender kills or some other way - people will not care about defender rating points and we won't need to do much about them. If we reverted AW back to 14.0 we'd still have rating points but they wouldn't be a problem.
I think the focus on rating points now isn't that people intrinsically are opposed to rating points. I think the problem is that the difference in rating points is huge compared to the difference in combat points in many cases now in 15.0.
It might be helpful to compare 14.0 and 15.0 directly, because I think many of us might have forgotten precisely what the 14.0 details were. I looked up a couple internet sources and I believe this is correct:
14.0 scoring
Boss kill: 20,000 per group
Exploration: 877 per 1%
Defender kill: 100 per
Attacker kill: 50 per
Defender placed: 50 per
Defender rating: 0.002 per rating point
If we analyze this scoring system, we can make some observations. First, each defender placed is worth 50 points, but each attacker kill is worth 50 points. So in fact, ignoring rating for the moment, each killed defender is worth zero: the placer gets 50, the attacker gets 50, and the net overall score remains even. The largest influence on scoring is (besides boss kill) defender kills. And defender kill points are not really a measure of defender strength but rather attacker performance. The attacking side that dies the fewest times will have a huge scoring advantage.
To a first order approximation, whoever kills the most bosses wins. The point difference is just too high to overcome most of the time. When that is tied, exploration and defender kills then come into play. Whichever side explores the most with the least kills wins. And the ratio is pretty high: 8.8 to one. An exploration percent is worth 8.8 attacker deaths. I believe there were 65 traversable nodes (55 defender nodes, 10 empty nodes) which means each node was worth about 1349 points, or each defender node was worth 1595 points. It was always worth attacking a node almost no matter how many deaths it took because it was worth more points than the defender kills would likely generate.
Defender rating is going to be somewhere in the vicinity of 1000-2000 points for most wars, and the difference in defender rating is likely to be a small fraction of that value, probably 200-400 points maximum. For most wars, the defender rating difference was going to be less than one node of exploration or just a handful of defender kills. It would tend to matter only when both exploration and defender kills were very close (or balanced out).
And to be honest, the side placing the higher defender rating defense is very likely to be placing the stronger defense in 14.0 anyway, and likely to be generating more kills. It would take a higher skill level on the other side to overcome that point advantage, but any significant higher skill could do so: it would only take a a few less attacker deaths to overcome those defense side points.
In 14.0, defender rating was a small number compared to defender kills and exploration. And in closely rated matches it was likely worth just one or two kills. I think that is a palatable advantage.
In 15.0, those hundreds of points are no longer counterbalanced with defender kills, and since defense placement for diversity makes an easier map traversal it is no longer counterbalanced with exploration points. If exploration is closely matched then the dominant sources of points are diversity points and rating points. And for most reasonably likely wars diversity points are going to be on the order of a few hundred points apart and rating points are going to be a few hundred points apart. The two are going to decide a lot of wars far more often than rating did in 14.0.
So basically, I think if we somehow change war scoring so that attacker performance is emphasized again, defender rating points won't matter. Maybe even diversity points won't matter. But changing them alone can't help. So I think either way they aren't a problem worth thinking about too much except as part of a holistic change to overall scoring where they need to change to make some other idea work right.
We should be hearing updates very often, similar to v12 updates. The fact that the current AW system is broken and Kabam doesn’t show any sense of urgency to fix it just blows my mind. Saying they need data collection, iteration and feed back is the lamest excuse I’ve heard. It is quickly making players lose their interest in the game and if they don’t fix this nonesense they will lose a lot of their player base.
Kabam says they love their player base but their actions show no respect towards their players. We deserve better than this
I think your math is off a little, each tile was worth 450 points, plus 50 for the defender, meaning you could die 5 times and break even. 23% exploration equaled one boss kill, if you had 97% and two boss kills you could beat your opponent with 73% and 3 boss kills, assuming defender kills were the same. If they had given up more then you could make up a percentage point per 6 kills or so. I'm not 100% sure, but that's how we used to calculate on whether we needed 3 boss kills or not
That's impossible now, unless you stack your defense so strong that you stop the other team dead and hope they don't revive while you have to hit 100% against their diverse defenders. If they are matching you on exploration, you just give up; that's the same thing they said they wanted to get away from with defender kills.
The former system worked much better than this one does. There is only one possible setup you can use to give you your best shot at winning, and the outcome is decided before the war starts. It's nowhere near as much fun or strategic, and skill is not rewarded. It isn't really a completion, which is what the heart of pre 15 war was.
Mike that might be because it seems pressure is the only way things happen.
There have been excellent suggestions that have come out of this discussion by the player base, and requests that have been around for so long players are just frustrated to the point of quitting or not wanting to take part in AW anymore.
The Dexterity / MD interaction change has been requested for as long as I can remember players realizing that every evade counted as new and fed MD.
The player base has for the most part rejected Defender Diversity. If you really want it to be a tie breaking metric then how about 1 point for the team that has most diverse defenders overall?
Defender kills needs to be added back. Yes maps have a tendency to get 100% explored, but the idea with defender kills would be to help discourage 100% exploration. because unless there's a real benefit to reviving such as at a Boss or mini, the opposition will be less likely to revive.
Some alliances are just placing defenders now and letting the time expire to collect loss rewards because the rewards for a win just do not outweigh the time to do the map now.
The new system is not the best but it’s playable.
Like someone said earlier, they could ruin war in one big change, but suddenly fixing it takes months
It seems like they'd rather piss off their players and let AW die than admit they were 100% wrong about diversity and defender kills.
It’s people like this, that haven’t figured out how to play around MD that are the problem
I think most would agree MD itself isn't the problem... the interaction between Dexterity and MD is the problem since Dexterity would count as new buff every single time you evaded.
If you evade and trigger dexterity a few times without ever hitting an opponent. It come across magik you would push them past a bar of power and start dying for evading, or end up with a Juggs/UC that spends nearly an entire fight unstoppable.
Sorry for being the noob here but what does MD mean?
It wasn't the MD/Dexterity interaction that caused issues alone. There were many issues.
OK thank you...... and what is that may I ask?
Unfortunately, this is typical for how MMO development works. When it works it works, when it doesn't work it just doesn't work.
A project like this generally starts with a problem statement. Alliance War needs work because blank. Greatly simplifying things, blank turns into a list of problems, the list of problems turns into a set of metrics that can quantify the problem, a redesign is created that is intended to address those problems, the design is implemented and pushed out. Then the game is run with the new design and data collected on those very same metrics to see if they are improving. If they get to where the devs want them to go, they are done (as done as anything is ever done in an MMO). If not, the tweak parts of the design and go again: test, measure, repeat.
Typically, the major design and implementation work happens in one long phase under development conditions completely different from what's going on when the devs are just tweaking things, so they don't just redesign things. It is always design, implement, datamine, review, tweak, datamine, review, tweak. This loop doesn't go back to design often, and datamine generally takes a significant amount of time: at least a week, sometimes a month or more.
The fact that Kabam has gone relatively quiet tells me there's a good chance they are in a tweak, datamine, review, tweak loop. There's nothing to talk about while data is being collected. And since the tweak loop doesn't generally make major design changes (there are complex operational reasons this is generally true) and since I know only design changes are going to address the problems I perceive in the current version of war, I'm unwilling to simply wait and see.
Keep in mind: I defended the devs when it came to the equally controversial balance changes to Dr. Strange. I thought they cut too deep, but I said then and I continue to say that sometimes the devs design/tweak/datamine/tweak methods are the only way they can really get to where they want to go, and Strange was an example. I think it was obvious his healing was cut too drastically, but that's something you can iterate to a better solution. I wish it could be done better and faster, and many people still think he's cut too deep, but no process can guarantee the devs will agree with the players on what needs to be changed. The point is when you're tweaking numbers anyway, iteratively tweaking numbers is a legitimate way to try to find the right ones.
But here, tweaking numbers is not the right way to solve the problems AW has. So datamine-driven iterative tweaking isn't going to get there no matter how many iterations and no matter what metrics are being monitored.
Maybe they've gone back to the drawing board and that's why they are quiet. I suppose it is possible. But if they were doing that, there's no reason to keep that a secret. The most logical reason for being quiet is they still believe that they can datamine their way to a solution and they are just waiting for the good news to come from the game data.
You think it is frustrating not knowing what's going on. It ain't less frustrating when you have a pretty good guess.
I don't think this is necessarily generating revenue. The higher diversity defense placements are also easier to kill. Combined with the easier nodes, I'm mostly just walking through my paths. I'm one of the stronger attackers in my alliance so that's not a universal thing, but my experience is that in making the attack phase easier, it is likely that less players are spending less units on less potions in Alliance War. Yes, you can buy victories. But I don't think as many alliances have to buy completions now.
Win or lose, I'm spending measurably less on war now. I don't think I'm a wide outlier.
Here’s another example of why defender kills are needed the way the scoring is discourages skill and strategy and where the winner is the ones that spend cold hard cash to get suicide masteries and boosted
I think you make a great point, but what you are missing is that this has opened the door for weaker alliance to beat stronger alliances (7M vs 10M). That is why we continue to see alliances losing when they dominate the defender kills colum (120 vs 100). These alliance are not walking through like you. They are buying their way through and winning on diversity rather than skill.