Alliance Wars Discussion 2.0

Hey All,

Since so much has changed since we first introduced the new Alliance Wars Map and scoring method, most of the information contained within is no longer relevant. We're starting a new discussion thread on Alliance Wars here.

You can still find the old thread archived here.

Comments

DNA3000

Kabam Miike wrote: »

Hey All,

Since so much has changed since we first introduced the new Alliance Wars Map and scoring method, most of the information contained within is no longer relevant. We're starting a new discussion thread on Alliance Wars here.

You can still find the old thread archived here.

Although the details have changed, and some of the current strategy that players are employing in alliance wars have changed, the fundamentals haven't changed for me, which is actually my point. Each iteration is tweaking numbers but not addressing my actual complaints, and I think the complaints of many players. I think they are important enough to reiterate here, the original post in context is here: https://forums.playcontestofchampions.com/en/discussion/comment/187572/#Comment_187572

1. If two alliances explore the same amount and kill the same amount of nodes, we want the system to award more points to the alliance that did so with better performance, by some measure of performance. We do not want this to be considered a "tie" when there are other ways to determine which side was the better attacker.

2. When an alliance places defenders, for every node on the map there should be more than one obvious "best defender."

3. For every node on the map, there should be a strong incentive to place the strongest possible available defender, even if that defender won't be an obvious path-stopper.

4. Pure ties should be rare, and wars should almost never be decided by factors that were determined before the attack phase started.

I think it is important to note that the original changes in 15.0 AW created problems with all four of these items, and every successive change failed to significant alter them, except for the worse. In particular, the successive increases in map strength is recreating the circumstance we all thought Kabam was trying to eliminate from the original 14.0 war where alliances were placing show-stopper defenders on certain nodes designed to cripple the opponent by making it extremely difficult or impossible to pass that node.

I find it irrational that Kabam takes away defender kills because they don't want us to stab our opponents with kill points, then hands us node 42 to eviscerate the entire opposing alliance with the right defender. 16.0 seems to be 14.0 only worse. It appears to make all the changes in 15.0 pointless. What's the point in making portals if some paths will be unpassable? What's the point of encouraging people to attack and then creating black hole nodes that swallow up attackers? Why get rid of defender kill points if we are just going to go back to placing defender gods in the blockade nodes?

16.0 might be just an iteration of 15.0, but on the player side the strategic situation has shifted dramatically. In practice, you might as well have kept 14.0 and just added Act 5 nodes to it and called it a day, and war would be functioning more or less as it is now, only with better scoring.

Qwerty

it seems like the solution/direction kabam is going is to just increase the difficulty of the nodes until people need to spend wildly to 100% the map, or they just see how far they can go.

this is a lazy, band-aid fix.

defender kills still need to come back, or at least some form of it. war will continue to be frustrating and boring until that happens.

NinjaWarrior99

Still disappointed and unhappy. Any war we we lose is always 100% to 100% with defender rating being the deciding factor and the other alliance always having significantly less defender kills.

Summary - opponents are not as good but because they spend a lot on potions they can win.
Request - Bring back points for defender kills

Voluntaris

"So much has changed"?

New AW released, both alliance 100%, both full diversity, win comes down to who has highest Defender Rating.

Now?

Both alliance 100%, both full diversity, win comes down to who has highest Defender Rating.

#BringBackDefenderKillPoints

Plantesan

@Kabam Miike apologies for the harshness of my previous comment in the first thread.

With the new nodes the team is pushing through, are there plans to discard the champ class symbols for the defensive champs?

It probably won’t change much when it comes to higher tier alliances clearing the map, but it would at least create a small amount of suspense, wouldn’t it?

Kabam Miike

R_I_C_E wrote: »

"Defender Rating and Diversity the tie breaking mechanisms that we had always wanted them to be."

THIS IS EXACTLY WHAT WE DO NOT WANT.

The tie-breaker should be based on Skill.

I repeat. The tie-breaker should be based on Skill.

One. More. Time. The tie-breaker should be based on Skill.

Top Tier alliances will always have perfect defender diversity.

It should NOT come down to who has the highest rated champs.

The tie-breaker should be based on Skill.

Why should the tie-breaker be whoever has the strongest team?

You seem to be misunderstanding the point of a tie-breaker. We agree that Alliance Wars should have an aspect of skill, and we agree that we have not hit that yet. We are continuing to work towards it, and if you take a look at the post we made today, we indicate that we are not done yet.

NevvB

Whats the point of the discussion when nothing the majority is saying is even being acknowledged. You guys make it seem like we have the ability to give our input but the decisions have already been made.

unknown

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Qwerty

Kabam Miike wrote: »

R_I_C_E wrote: »

"Defender Rating and Diversity the tie breaking mechanisms that we had always wanted them to be."

THIS IS EXACTLY WHAT WE DO NOT WANT.

The tie-breaker should be based on Skill.

I repeat. The tie-breaker should be based on Skill.

One. More. Time. The tie-breaker should be based on Skill.

Top Tier alliances will always have perfect defender diversity.

It should NOT come down to who has the highest rated champs.

The tie-breaker should be based on Skill.

Why should the tie-breaker be whoever has the strongest team?

You seem to be misunderstanding the point of a tie-breaker. We agree that Alliance Wars should have an aspect of skill, and we agree that we have not hit that yet. We are continuing to work towards it, and if you take a look at the post we made today, we indicate that we are not done yet.

besides continuing to make nodes harder, what else is kabam doing to make war at least as fun and dynamic as it used to be?

World Eater

http://forums.playcontestofchampions.com/en/discussion/31764/aw-will-be-harder-after-maintenance-yay

Thread asking about increased rewards now that there's a harder map and thread get shut down. Maybe it was poorly worded, but we've endured 2 freaking months of changes and nonsense while a lot of our feedback has been brushed aside.

"We have not yet hit the intended goals that we have placed for Alliance Wars, and so we are not yet ready to update the Alliance Wars rewards."

That's ok; I'm not ready to ever spend on your bug filled game.

Fabi1989

You destroy that Game more and more....
U dont know what your Player Want....
Please just listen to your Player....is that so hard?

LeNoirFaineant

Kabam Miike wrote: »

R_I_C_E wrote: »

"Defender Rating and Diversity the tie breaking mechanisms that we had always wanted them to be."

THIS IS EXACTLY WHAT WE DO NOT WANT.

The tie-breaker should be based on Skill.

I repeat. The tie-breaker should be based on Skill.

One. More. Time. The tie-breaker should be based on Skill.

Top Tier alliances will always have perfect defender diversity.

It should NOT come down to who has the highest rated champs.

The tie-breaker should be based on Skill.

Why should the tie-breaker be whoever has the strongest team?

You seem to be misunderstanding the point of a tie-breaker. We agree that Alliance Wars should have an aspect of skill, and we agree that we have not hit that yet. We are continuing to work towards it, and if you take a look at the post we made today, we indicate that we are not done yet.

The post you made today acknowledged that something is still missing. You know what that something is, but for some strange reason Kabam has planted their flag and made no defender kills their hill to die on. Without defender kills simply making the map harder will only mean that it'll be the same garbage defensive rating which determines the outcome in some cases, and it'll be which side is willing to use more potions in others. It still won't be skill. The other thing that will happen is more alliances will get frustrated having to outspend the opponent to win and they will alliance jump for lower tier wars so they can beat up on weaker alliances. This new iteration does nothing to solve the problem, and if, as you say, you find that the last iteration got closer to the goal, then the goal is garbage.

chunkyb

This discussion will be as useless as the last, unfortunately. Thousands of replies with good content from players who want a good, fun, challenging, and competitive game were FULLY ignored. The only thing more ridiculous than aw2.0 is the iterative process of adding a few new buffs and constantly saying "we're getting closer". And as long as we're just getting closer but not there yet, we really can't possibly look at war rewards yet. That comes at the end. *wink, wink*

If you can't see they don't care about your input now, you never will. This is the game parents play with children.. Child wants to go to the park, parent says we need to do this and this and then we'll see if we can go. This is the relationship we're all in now. Being placated to death while you watch your favorite game fall apart for moronic reasons while trolls and sad wannabe mods spam their unknowledgeable takes.

So save your breath. The plan is already laid out and we're marching towards it. You honestly think it takes 2 weeks of monitoring war and meetings/discussions to come up with the idea of adding a few nodes? Pfft. That's ridiculous even for them.

If you don't like this ridiculous **** we're having to deal with... Just reply with "defender kills". Forever. Because anything else is wasting your time. Hell, that's wasting time too but at least it'd be fun to see a thread full of those replies and it'd make it a little more difficult for the trolls to respond.

Oh yeah. You want things to be done differently? Say so with your wallet.

RagamugginGunner

Thousands of posts have fallen on def ears. AW is still garbage. The least you can do is increase the rewards, like you said you would.

Kocheese

chunkyb wrote: »

This discussion will be as useless as the last, unfortunately. Thousands of replies with good content from players who want a good, fun, challenging, and competitive game were FULLY ignored. The only thing more ridiculous than aw2.0 is the iterative process of adding a few new buffs and constantly saying "we're getting closer". And as long as we're just getting closer but not there yet, we really can't possibly look at war rewards yet. That comes at the end. *wink, wink*

If you can't see they don't care about your input now, you never will. This is the game parents play with children.. Child wants to go to the park, parent says we need to do this and this and then we'll see if we can go. This is the relationship we're all in now. Being placated to death while you watch your favorite game fall apart for moronic reasons while trolls and sad wannabe mods spam their unknowledgeable takes.

So save your breath. The plan is already laid out and we're marching towards it. You honestly think it takes 2 weeks of monitoring war and meetings/discussions to come up with the idea of adding a few nodes? Pfft. That's ridiculous even for them.

If you don't like this ridiculous **** we're having to deal with... Just reply with "defender kills". Forever. Because anything else is wasting your time. Hell, that's wasting time too but at least it'd be fun to see a thread full of those replies and it'd make it a little more difficult for the trolls to respond.

Oh yeah. You want things to be done differently? Say so with your wallet.

So I'll quit when u quit B... Just let me know brother. Will never win with kabam. Unless we spend of course, and nothing will change until the addicted whales change. They won't be happy until they don't have a game. 90% are we? Have nots versus haves? Well history shows how that works time and time again.

LeNoirFaineant

@Kabam Miike here is a suggestion for the game team. Since we are in the midst of an iterative process of tweaking, monitoring, and further tweaking, on the off chance that maybe the overwhelming majority of the player base might be on to something, why not incorporate defensive kills in the next iteration? Maybe you will find a happier player base. Perhaps you will find a rash of discouraged players quitting the war after one death and you can scrap it again, but we both know that won't happen...

DNA3000

Kabam Miike wrote: »

R_I_C_E wrote: »

"Defender Rating and Diversity the tie breaking mechanisms that we had always wanted them to be."

THIS IS EXACTLY WHAT WE DO NOT WANT.

The tie-breaker should be based on Skill.

I repeat. The tie-breaker should be based on Skill.

One. More. Time. The tie-breaker should be based on Skill.

Top Tier alliances will always have perfect defender diversity.

It should NOT come down to who has the highest rated champs.

The tie-breaker should be based on Skill.

Why should the tie-breaker be whoever has the strongest team?

You seem to be misunderstanding the point of a tie-breaker. We agree that Alliance Wars should have an aspect of skill, and we agree that we have not hit that yet. We are continuing to work towards it, and if you take a look at the post we made today, we indicate that we are not done yet.

Kabam seems to be misunderstanding what a tie-breaker is. A tie-breaker is something used to decide the winner of a competition when the normal scoring results in a tie. Neither defender rating nor diversity points are tie-breakers because they aren't used to break ties: they are used to score points. Defender rating and diversity points are tie-breakers in the same sense that three point shots in basketball are tie-breakers. Which is to say, I don't think anyone in the thread understands what Kabam means when they say they want those things to function as tie-breakers, because they aren't only used to break ties.

And to be blunt, we don't agree that AW should have an aspect of skill. The players complaining about skill aren't asking for some "aspect" of skill somewhere, they are asking for the primary deciding factor for AW to be player attacker skill. The current version of AW doesn't judge player attacker skill beyond map exploration. When two alliances make the same progress, the game doesn't judge which one completed that progress more skillfully.

The 100% completion situation is just a special case of the problem. By cranking up difficulty Kabam is just hiding the problem behind a convenient obfuscation. Two alliances that only complete 99%, but one has three times the defender kills as the other, aren't "tied" in terms of judging skill. But the game deliberately ignores that and decides the war based on things completely unrelated to skill.

When Kabam finally buffs the nodes to the point that alliances aren't routinely completing 100% Kabam will have just made it harder to see the problem and complain about the problem, but the problem will still be just as bad. Is that the goal?

I_am_Groot

I'm in the first page. Yay.

Flames and waves of bs are coming.
I'll be eating my popcorns reading another things else.

becauseicant

Buffing nodes over and over until the war map is filled with mini-boss equivalents is not the solution to fixing alliance war. By continually buffing nodes until they are next to impossible to defeat you are creating the exact same problem of discouraging players from even bothering to fight nodes, which I will remind you is the main justification for the AW re-design to begin with. Great suggestions given to you by the community are going ignored based upon this core design choice and yet your designers continue to develop more ways to stop players from wanting to fight.

It's been said time after time but it's worth repeating - we want SKILL to determine who wins an alliance war. The only way to achieve that is to have some metric in the system that determines who played more skillfully. Regardless of how you want to implement such a metric, such as defenders kills or reduced attacker points or damage taken or item use point penalties or items remaining bonus or any of the great community suggestions, we simply need it to exist in the system with enough point value to determine a winner in the vast majority of alliance wars.

Defender Diversity does not take skill, it is exceptionally easy for any alliance to place 50 different champions.
Defender Rating does not take skill, a bigger wallet means more units for boosts and mastery swaps for every war.
And yet these two factors determine who wins wars in the vast majority of cases.

If you want to encourage Defender Diversity in a meaningful way you have to balance your game in a way that makes many champion types and classes viable on defense. Is everyone using Mystic champs? Lets take a look at mystic dispersion and dexterity. Is everyone using evasion champs? Lets see if the mechanic is working as intended. No one is placing tanky champions? Maybe armor isn't effective enough. Is everyone placing regen champs? Maybe the nodes give too much healing. No one places Skill champs on defense? Lets put in some class specific nodes.

Defender Rating should serve very little purpose in determining a victor in a skill-based war system, however if you insist on keeping it then it absolutely needs to be unaffected by boosts and a conversation needs to take place regarding mastery swapping before and after placement. Why do alliances receive the rating bonus without the penalty of having to use suicides in the attack phase? Should alliances that have more suicide masteries unlocked have such an advantage over those that don't?

Alliance war is no longer fun or exciting because the core mode activities - choosing defenders, placing defenders, and fighting the enemy defenders - no longer have a significant impact on the outcome.

Superman69

Please Miike, can you tell me just this one thing.
In the previous thread, you wrote Node 24 is working 'As Intended'

After 12.0 AW changes, wasn't all regen supposed to be based on base health, and not modified. So why are Buffet (24) and Arc overload triggering regen based on Modified health in higher tiers?

BigPoppaCBONE

These AW shenanigans brings to mind "The Producers".
Springtime for A-Dub: A Kabam Miike joint.

There must be some profiting outcome to running the Marvel license to print money into the ground, I just can't see it.

unknown

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LeNoirFaineant

War was the best part of the game for a lot of people prior to this shift. I don't know one person who feels that way now. You turned it on it's head for the sake of curing a problem that didn't actually exist, at least not to the degree that it required fixing, and you've made it into one more chore. It's honestly discouraging to hear that you think you are closer to the goal, because it isn't any better and no progress has been made from where I'm sitting. Do what you want with the story mode etc., but alliance war ought to be for the players to test their skill against other groups and it ought to be fun. Even in the old system it was always annoying that you were at a huge disadvantage against groups less skilled but willing to spend. I get that spending is good for your bottom line, but so is a happy player base. It looks like the end game is War should be pay to win and skill should be irrelevant, and it sucks.

FrodoT_Baggins

Suggestion:
lower points in defender rating, same points for diversity. NEW POINTS FOR ITEM USED (e.g. full points being 45000, for three groups, 30 players each 15 items. For each item used, remove 100 points.)
Just some suggestions

DNA3000

Superman69 wrote: »

Please Miike, can you tell me just this one thing.
In the previous thread, you wrote Node 24 is working 'As Intended'

After 12.0 AW changes, wasn't all regen supposed to be based on base health, and not modified. So why are Buffet (24) and Arc overload triggering regen based on Modified health in higher tiers?

I'm not defending the developers here, but apparently the reason why they can claim 24 is working correctly and "as intended" is because buffet is not a champion ability. It is a node buff defined to recover a percent of champion (max) health.

I'm going to go out on a limb here and state that the devs explicitly intend this to happen because they don't want all champions with a heal to scale up everywhere, but they are very deliberately intending on creating a nasty node right there (or rather, a couple of theres) intended to encourage players to play Where's Waldo and find the best champion defenders for those nodes.

I think this is a classic example of understanding the words, but not the spirit, of a complaint. This superficially addresses the problem of MD-everywhere, by handing the players a much more nasty alternative. @Kabam Miike basically told us what is going on here when he said that node 24 is working fine, you just have to bring the right attacker. They made AW into you pick the "right" defender and you win, unless the other side picks the "right" attacker and then you lose. Which is kind of a move-counter-move gameplay option but an extremely reductive one, and fundamentally no different from the thorns nodes they got rid of in AW for I can't imagine what reason now.

Menkent

...and they still think node tweaks are the answer. This is farcical.

Munrolm02

All I see mostly is people wanting a point or two for a Defender kil. I can't believe that no matter how many times I see people asking for Defender kills points it's never acknowledged. Just increasing nodes every update is going to make every node a mini boss LOL. One way to solve it, you lose 5 points per item used for a total of 75 points. That way the other team won't see how many items the other team is using, and at the same time Kabam can still make its money on people buying items.

King_Soundwave6

Don’t fix what is not broken, need those defender kills back even if it’s in a lesser role. Casualties count in war ask any general.

phillgreen

If everyone hates the way War is being adjudicated, things are changed that don't reflect the broader communities desires and the chances of more change mean it is a risk upgrading champs based on today's version of War can I ask the Mod Team why my alliance would even want to participate in it?

We are a casual group looking for more opportunities at gaining resources but having read almost every post on the subject you guys (Kabam) are not really selling it to people like me.

One thing that struck me after it was suggested by someone whose posts reflect a great understanding of what is happening, we are probably better off just matching as often as we can and walking away to get some free stuff rather than actively trying to compete because it sounds less stressful than busting our backside and still losing.

NMEONES

From Previous Thread.
NMEONES wrote: »
» show previous quotes

@Kabam Miike are u kidding me? This changes nothing once again. I can't believe it's taking you guys this long to realize what actually needs to be done. STOP CHANGING THE NODES. YOUR NOT CHANGING ANYTHING. THE MAP WILL STILL BE 100% AND WHOEVER HAS HIGHER RATING AND DIVERSITY WILL WIN. I can't tell you how annoying it is to not push to win an alliance war because you don't know if you'll win because of defender rating. What do you guys not understand about this, I mean u created the damn game. You need to bring back defender kills, at least in tier 1 & 2. We need to be able to win based on skill. Not who has higher rating or a bigger wallet. Get with the program man, this is getting ridiculous.

Kabam Miike
As we said in the very post that you quoted, we know there are still aspects missing, and we are still working on them. We've been looking at a number of options and have been making lots of progress, but this will take further iterations before we hit those goals that both you and we have for AW.

@Kabam Miike You keep telling us you know you aren't hitting the mark of what AW should be. You keep telling us that your working on it, yet every iteration you release does nothing but increase node difficulty. Where is the skill? Where is the reward for a more skilled alliance over an alliance that died 200 times to our defenders? The only thing you guys have gotten right so far was when you admitted that you haven't hit your mark yet. We need to be rewarded for our skill. You just closed the previous AW thread that had thousands of posts telling you to bring back defender kills. We can't keep moving forward like this. You can't just keep buffing nodes and expect us to sit back and be happy about it. Idk how many more times your going to release a new iteration of AW with more buffed up nodes, but enough is enough. Fix the damn problem. Bring back a skill based scoring mechanic. It's been said multiple times, bring defender kills to tier 1,2 & 3. You can leave the lower tiers alone so that you don't "discourage" other players from fighting the nodes when they have 2 champs left.... get it together kabam... enough is enough. We're tired of the smoke and mirrors you keep putting up with these buffed nodes iterations.