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

TomieCzech

This new war is still a pile of BS. We lost the previous war by 13 points and this war we're not gonna win, because we know they'll get us by defender rating!!!!

What's the point of fighting a war when the result is predetermined by the PI of the defenders! Considering all of us by now are able to place all unique defenders and clear the map 100%.

The removal of defender kills is BS, the reasons behind it even bigger BS. We're short three nodes this war and that's fair, but we're not spending a single unit, because we are not blind or stupid and can do the math to know even if we do we won't win. So no, it's not working, it's not encouraging us to spend more.

The true reason behind the removal of defender kills was to encourage spending in the war and the same goes for the portals, where more players can spend on single difficult node.

You guys at Kabam are just a bunch of greedy liars. You can't even give us the true reasons behind the changes and feed us some BS about how much more fun it will be for us to play. I wonder who's wrong here, I've talked to several alliances at 10 mil rating and none is enjoying this new war map and experience the same issues.

This war is about waiting for energy and about luck, to see which Alliance ends up having higher defender rating or makes a mistake during placement period placing a duplicate defender.

LOL to you guys! Great game design!!

unknown

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World Eater

Zeke_the_Xbot wrote: »

Why or better question who made this node design it’s already annoying to get RNG on your side against NC but a node giving him full immunity as well really?

There was a similar node like that in the last AW Map, it made any hero "immune to negative status effects" and it included mirror image as well. It's a challenge. You can still incinerate, you can still shock. You can bring heroes who minimize evade.

Etaki_Lirakoi

MikeHock wrote: »

Zeke_the_Xbot wrote: »

Why or better question who made this node design it’s already annoying to get RNG on your side against NC but a node giving him full immunity as well really?

There was a similar node like that in the last AW Map, it made any hero "immune to negative status effects" and it included mirror image as well. It's a challenge. You can still incinerate, you can still shock. You can bring heroes who minimize evade.

It depends on the tier, our team still has the full immunity node.

GbSarkar

Etaki_Lirakoi wrote: »

MikeHock wrote: »

Zeke_the_Xbot wrote: »

Why or better question who made this node design it’s already annoying to get RNG on your side against NC but a node giving him full immunity as well really?

There was a similar node like that in the last AW Map, it made any hero "immune to negative status effects" and it included mirror image as well. It's a challenge. You can still incinerate, you can still shock. You can bring heroes who minimize evade.

It depends on the tier, our team still has the full immunity node.

Tier 3+ is debuff immune

LeNoirFaineant

I have an idea... Defender Kills

Lurker

Buffing nodes and trying to make it "hard" to 100% the map will lead to only 1 thing. Shell alliances. It will eventually be cheaper for strong alliances to drop down and beat the weaker alliances with their guaranteed "defender rating win" (without buying the items kabam wants us to buy) causing weaker alliances to spend less on items when they have 0% chance to win. Alliance war will still not be any fun but thank god I have an excuse to rank up 5 of my trash champs!

DNA3000

Lurker wrote: »

Buffing nodes and trying to make it "hard" to 100% the map will lead to only 1 thing. Shell alliances. It will eventually be cheaper for strong alliances to drop down and beat the weaker alliances with their guaranteed "defender rating win" (without buying the items kabam wants us to buy) causing weaker alliances to spend less on items when they have 0% chance to win. Alliance war will still not be any fun but thank god I have an excuse to rank up 5 of my trash champs!

If you are fighting a weaker alliance, diversity isn't the way to go. Someone in the thread repeatedly attempted to make the dubious claim that a motivation for removing defender kill points was that 6* defenders would generate too much kills. That assertion was laughable, but ironically in 16.0 that becomes an interesting question to ponder. How many people playing in remotely competitive alliances think that the 16.0 version of war doesn't make this situation massively worse? How many want to start seeing 6* Green Goblins and Magiks on defense with the current map?

Once a defender gets strong enough and sits on a strong enough node, it doesn't matter if it gets defender kill points or not. It doesn't matter if it gets diversity points or not. It just straight up kills the attackers on the other side and causes them to give up trying.

I think if you have the right defenders for the right nodes, if you think the other side is significantly weaker, you should ignore diversity and place blockade. For all other nodes and all other champs you should just place for diversity first and rating second. But "the right defenders on the right nodes" is basically 14.0 again, just a less fun version of it.

DNA3000

At every turn, it seems Kabam seems to have completely failed to account for a simple fact: players will actually try to win the war by any means necessary. It is the only way to make any sense out of any of this.

I asked @Kabam Miike a question in the previous thread: given the changes in 15.0, how should a player judge defenders when deciding which ones to place. His answer seemed ludicrous to me at the time, but I now see it as making a weird kind of sense if I simply remove the part of my brain that reminds me that AW is a competition not a performance art. He said basically: same as always: pick the defenders you think will have the best chance to stop the opponent from beating you.

That's amazing. 15.0 adds an entire new points system that gives a tremendous advantage to an alliance that places more diverse defenders, and yet @Kabam Miike said we should ignore that and just place as we always did. To me, that's nonsensical. Of course we should actually factor in the diversity points, right? Isn't that what they are there for?

I'm beginning to realize, actually no. Kabam keeps calling diversity points and rating points "tie breakers." That's also nonsensical to me because they are not tie breakers in any sense of the term. But what if, again, I remove the part of my brain that reminds me that AW is a competition? Then sure, if I choose to ignore diversity points and place defenders like I always did in 14.0, diversity points would then be just a small factor on top: it would only alter the outcome of what used to be close matches in 14.0.

In other words, if we all just collectively forgot that the 15.0 changes ever took place and continued to fight as we did in 14.0, then the changes in 15.0 might actually work. They presumed we would all play along and not change at all, while war could change around us.

That's not how competitions work in the real world. In the real world, we read the new rules and we change our behavior accordingly. We start placing fully diverse defenses to fully leverage those points because we see that the nodes are so weak that it doesn't matter much if that defender is Nightcrawler or Luke Cage. The object always was, and always will be, to win, and that means scoring the most points possible. Kabam thought we wouldn't make a mockery of AW by placing nonsensical defenses that could be easily killed just to score points, but that's the point of a competition, to score more points than the other guy.

Kabam is treating us like lab rats, not like human competitors. They don't think we will take their rules and scour them looking for an advantage. They think we will play the game the way it is designed to be played, rather than the most advantageous way to be played They think we are performing a dance and will not alter the choreography.

I think Kabam has a romantic idea of what AW is, a weird romantic idea that perhaps some players share. War is about doing this or doing that. War is about winning. And as long as the alliances that participate in war believe it is about winning and always act to maximize their chances of winning, Kabam is not going to understand why their changes don't work. Why players keep claiming they are not working when they think they are working. They don't understand that what we like about AW and what has the best chance of winning are currently two different things, and competitive players will always choose the path of maximizing the chance of winning, all while complaining about how it isn't enjoyable.

In PvE, we all play however we want. We all have different playstyles and we can choose to play in efficient or inefficient ways. We are responsible for whether we like playing or not, because we control how we play. But in PvP, we can't simply choose to play in an inefficient way because we like it, because the game will punish us when we lose a lot. Kabam doesn't seem to understand that in PvE you decide what you like, and then you play in the way you will most likely like. But in PvP, in a competition, you play in the way you will most likely win, and then you decide if you like it or not. There's no metric to show them this, so I fear this is something they are simply incapable of learning. Metrics can only show participation. They cannot show whether players actually like the product they are producing.

I'll bet 16.0 looks just great to Kabam. Their metrics probably show that wars are fully competing less often, that players are placing a more diverse set of defenders, and attackers are stopping in the middle of a path with alive attackers less often. It doesn't show that blockade defenders are becoming the optimal defense strategy, that alliances with the "right defenders" are now winning wars in a manner similar to how mystic defenders dominated 14.0, and how often the war psychologically appears to have been decided by non-competitive sources of points. And I wish that problem was solvable.

Menkent

DNA3000 wrote: »

performance art

Yes, this is exactly it. If anyone on their end seriously played these changes never would have been made. Or if they'd listened to community feedback at any time over the past months. Or if they'd done a beta test for a major change (except they don't play and thus didn't realize it was a major change). Or et cetera.

TomieCzech

@Kabam Miike

Do you ever read the feedback from the forum?

You guys at Kabam keep fiddling with the war mode yet the feedback is still the same! What does it mean?

A - Keep going, this is the right direction.
B - Hold on a sec, it doesn't seem to work. Let's change the direction.

Which one do you think it is?? B maybe????

Or do you only listen just to the one whiner who complained about losing his first champ on the first node, so you removed the defender kills and made it so every team now clears 100% and 1-25 pts in defender rating now decides each war???

After reading all the feedback you guys should read, I think you are just a bunch of people who need medical attention in regards of your mental health. I don't think any healthy individual would be able to get where you are with such detailed and amazing feedback your player base has been feeding you with.

Pathetic and sad - especially considering you've been receiving it free of charge. You don't need to pay any smart individual or team to test the game mode for you before you release it to us.

DNA3000

Menkent wrote: »

DNA3000 wrote: »

performance art

Yes, this is exactly it. If anyone on their end seriously played these changes never would have been made. Or if they'd listened to community feedback at any time over the past months. Or if they'd done a beta test for a major change (except they don't play and thus didn't realize it was a major change). Or et cetera.

MMO developers live in a very strange trap that I sort of understand but not really. This trap goes like this:

1. Calculations don't always tell the whole truth, so you have to test.

2. Tests don't always tell the whole truth, so you have to see what the live players think.

3. Once it is live you can't really make dramatic changes.

There's a corollary called the feedback paradox.

1. We don't discuss things not yet announced.

2. Once it is announced, it's too late to stop it from happening.

Menkent

@TomieCzech he reads it. I got a warning last week for what he perceived as name calling. But the thread isn't apparently here to gather feedback. It's to keep all out whining about what a mess they've made of war in one place so the forum doesn't get cluttered with new threads every day.

unknown

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TomieCzech

That's just pathetic. I often wonder why do I still bother playing this game, when all I'm getting lately is middle finger from Kabam. I've never experienced anything like this, so blunt and offensive, thinking we won't notice anything while they're #@&$ing us over. Why do you guys bother? Lol

FAL7EN

You’re doing great Kabam team! Keep up the good work, I love the changes!!

LeNoirFaineant

DNA3000 wrote: »

Lurker wrote: »

Buffing nodes and trying to make it "hard" to 100% the map will lead to only 1 thing. Shell alliances. It will eventually be cheaper for strong alliances to drop down and beat the weaker alliances with their guaranteed "defender rating win" (without buying the items kabam wants us to buy) causing weaker alliances to spend less on items when they have 0% chance to win. Alliance war will still not be any fun but thank god I have an excuse to rank up 5 of my trash champs!

If you are fighting a weaker alliance, diversity isn't the way to go. Someone in the thread repeatedly attempted to make the dubious claim that a motivation for removing defender kill points was that 6* defenders would generate too much kills. That assertion was laughable, but ironically in 16.0 that becomes an interesting question to ponder. How many people playing in remotely competitive alliances think that the 16.0 version of war doesn't make this situation massively worse? How many want to start seeing 6* Green Goblins and Magiks on defense with the current map?

Once a defender gets strong enough and sits on a strong enough node, it doesn't matter if it gets defender kill points or not. It doesn't matter if it gets diversity points or not. It just straight up kills the attackers on the other side and causes them to give up trying.

I think if you have the right defenders for the right nodes, if you think the other side is significantly weaker, you should ignore diversity and place blockade. For all other nodes and all other champs you should just place for diversity first and rating second. But "the right defenders on the right nodes" is basically 14.0 again, just a less fun version of it.

@DNA3000 I think your posts are generally fantastic but I don't think you are right on this one. If you drop down for a low AW rating you are fighting on much easier nodes. High alliances that do this are going to 100% the map against weaker opponents on weaker nodes so it wouldn't make sense to try to stop the opponent. You are guaranteed the win with a higher offensive rating and the opponent probably won't push anyway knowing the scoring system gave them an unwinnable match. Plus you can still make the hardest nodes nasty even with diversity when you have that kind of team. We have never jumped. Still slogging it out in tier 1, but I know lots of people who have.

LeNoirFaineant

The crazy thing is that a lot of alliances have scrapped diversity and are placing best defense as they always did, in which case what was the point of all this? War is so broken right now. The first "iteration" post acknowledged that the players weren't enjoying the new version of war. Later posts indicate that we are getting closer to the goal. That makes no sense as clearly the player base is no happier. I know it's hard to admit you were wrong and scrap what you are doing, but making defender kills your hill to die on makes no sense when it's clear that your paying customers want them. Your War experiment has failed. It's failed in every way in which it is possible to fail. It's a failure. It sucks. No one likes it. Bring back the old war and bring back defender kill. Keep the new map if you like, I don't care.

LeNoirFaineant

Oh, and by the way... Defender Kills.

GroundedWisdom

LeNoirFaineant wrote: »

The crazy thing is that a lot of alliances have scrapped diversity and are placing best defense as they always did, in which case what was the point of all this? War is so broken right now. The first "iteration" post acknowledged that the players weren't enjoying the new version of war. Later posts indicate that we are getting closer to the goal. That makes no sense as clearly the player base is no happier. I know it's hard to admit you were wrong and scrap what you are doing, but making defender kills your hill to die on makes no sense when it's clear that your paying customers want them. Your War experiment has failed. It's failed in every way in which it is possible to fail. It's a failure. It sucks. No one likes it. Bring back the old war and bring back defender kill. Keep the new map if you like, I don't care.

That's the difference between their vision and ours. They've indicated they were removing them. That's been constant. They've also made several adjustments as a result of feedback, and no doubt their own findings. They're open to feedback. That doesn't necessarily mean they will change everything people want. Defender Kills are gone. If they were returning significantly, it would have been done by now. For whatever reasons, they're gone. Rarely do they change their goals entirely. They take feedback and apply it to their existing plans. That's what I meant by finding middle ground. There have been countless comments about Defender Kills and they're still maintaining that they're removed, at least for the time being, so I think we can focus on other suggestions.

LeNoirFaineant

@GroundedWisdom you were out on the topic of defender kills last time we spoke and wouln't even state your "reasons" why you thought they caused problems. I think they know that their current version of war is garbage and they don't want to eat crow and aren't bringing back defender kills for that reason, but I do think they will eventually have to suck it up and do the right thing. In the mean time, you can keep championing your no defender kills without a good alternative stance. #Defender Kills

LeNoirFaineant

Oh, and before I forget, Defender Kills.

GroundedWisdom

Spamming Defender Kills is not helping anything. I've listed many reasons why they're an issue. This Thread is a continuation of the previous one, and I've discussed it at length. It really doesn't matter what reasons I state because they're not heard regardless. What matters is they are no longer present, and there was reason enough to remove them.

Acanthus

Lurker wrote: »

Buffing nodes and trying to make it "hard" to 100% the map will lead to only 1 thing. Shell alliances. It will eventually be cheaper for strong alliances to drop down and beat the weaker alliances with their guaranteed "defender rating win" (without buying the items kabam wants us to buy) causing weaker alliances to spend less on items when they have 0% chance to win. Alliance war will still not be any fun but thank god I have an excuse to rank up 5 of my trash champs!

Kabam already modified the matchmaking, you only play against other shell alliances. Source: past 10 wars

GroundedWisdom

Acanthus wrote: »

Lurker wrote: »

Buffing nodes and trying to make it "hard" to 100% the map will lead to only 1 thing. Shell alliances. It will eventually be cheaper for strong alliances to drop down and beat the weaker alliances with their guaranteed "defender rating win" (without buying the items kabam wants us to buy) causing weaker alliances to spend less on items when they have 0% chance to win. Alliance war will still not be any fun but thank god I have an excuse to rank up 5 of my trash champs!

Kabam already modified the matchmaking, you only play against other shell alliances. Source: past 10 wars

That's conspiracy. There's been no mention of altering Matchmaking.

Beowulf

The meta of AW is now a total cluster. It's amazing how manage to continually make it worse with each update @Kabam Miike

Node 24 alone, just LOL

Acanthus

GroundedWisdom wrote: »

Acanthus wrote: »

Lurker wrote: »

Buffing nodes and trying to make it "hard" to 100% the map will lead to only 1 thing. Shell alliances. It will eventually be cheaper for strong alliances to drop down and beat the weaker alliances with their guaranteed "defender rating win" (without buying the items kabam wants us to buy) causing weaker alliances to spend less on items when they have 0% chance to win. Alliance war will still not be any fun but thank god I have an excuse to rank up 5 of my trash champs!

Kabam already modified the matchmaking, you only play against other shell alliances. Source: past 10 wars

That's conspiracy. There's been no mention of altering Matchmaking.

But it clearly happened. Ask any shell alliance about their recent wars. We've matched the same 16+ million rated alliance 3 times in 5 wars in tier4
Our AW history: 14.5 mil, 13 mil, 16 mil("Alliance 1"), 14.5 mil, 16 mil("Alliance 1"), 13 mil, 16 mil("Alliance 1"), 13 mil("Alliance 2"), 16 mil, 13 mil("Alliance 2"). Does this look like like tier 4 to you?

GroundedWisdom

Acanthus wrote: »

GroundedWisdom wrote: »

Acanthus wrote: »

Lurker wrote: »

Buffing nodes and trying to make it "hard" to 100% the map will lead to only 1 thing. Shell alliances. It will eventually be cheaper for strong alliances to drop down and beat the weaker alliances with their guaranteed "defender rating win" (without buying the items kabam wants us to buy) causing weaker alliances to spend less on items when they have 0% chance to win. Alliance war will still not be any fun but thank god I have an excuse to rank up 5 of my trash champs!

Kabam already modified the matchmaking, you only play against other shell alliances. Source: past 10 wars

That's conspiracy. There's been no mention of altering Matchmaking.

But it clearly happened. Ask any shell alliance about their recent wars

First of all, I don't condone it so I'm not interested in conversing with the results of it. Secondly, I'm not subscribing to conspiracy. They are not changing the Matchmaking subversively. It's just conjecture based on results. Perhaps karmic even. If they didn't list a change, it wasn't made.

Acanthus

Yeah I'm not sure why I even responded to this certain individual. Jokes on me I guess

chunkyb

Almost everything about war is either stupid or broken, or stupid and broken. If you can't see that, you either
1- don't play enough to know better
2- just like looking at the cool characters
3- pray nightly that someone will appreciate your posts and offer a job
4- just come here to troll

As for this discussion... Just sit back and look at how ridiculous it is. People are having to define war in order to make sure that kabam and the supporter of aw2.0 know what's being discussed. It's like we're pointing at a blue shirt, asking what color it is, and being told it's red... Over and over again.

And do you know why? It's just to keep you busy and penned in this thread. It'll go for 60 pages with the great majority pointing out valid problems and stating good opinions and almost no one will read it because it's too much to read. And as long as it's all just in here, it'll go unrecognized by the masses.

It's CERTAINLY not being used as feedback. No one has "called" for harder nodes... Simply pointed out war is easy because of the lack of good defenders. That "fix" is like setting the house on fire because your coffee got cold. No one has ever stopped fighting in war because they lost one champ. They MAY have stopped because the war was either won or lost already and there was no need to do more. ALL the reasons for aw2.0 that have been started are just straw men presented to us because there was no valid reason beyond "because we want to".

The great outcry from the players is always for fun, competitive game modes. How has any iteration of war moved us closer to that? The thing is, they've known what they wanted to do. They've implemented it slowly. You think it takes two weeks of meetings and monitoring wars to come up with "hey let's put harder nodes in"? I'm offended they think we're that dumb tbh.

Tl;dr: defender kills