I love how we've now come full circle and have mystic wars again. The even better part is that the nodes are harder than they were in the previous version.
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.
I was thinking in terms of evaluating the likelihood of the opponent being strong enough to defeat a well-placed blockade, but in very high tiers this might be something you have to always assume is true. And if you drop down far enough then the other side becomes so much weaker that I think either strategy works: full diversity will be impossible to defeat because of the point spread, and blockade will be impossible to defeat because it is too strong. But of course if you can win on points with certainty that's the way to go, because you can always spend your way past a blockade but you cannot spend your way past diversity points (at the time).
At the very top many general statements about war become difficult to make, simply because there are fewer alliances running up to saturation levels of roster strength (you can only be so strong, because there are limits the game imposes on how high you can rank how many champions). There are fewer real situations you can really face, of which I'm not currently directly experiencing, being in a more mid-tier war alliance.
Which is something else to always keep in mind. No one has the ability to know what the strategic situation is in every tier of war, and certainly not me. A good war system should be able to accommodate all of those tiers equally well, when the meta-gaming situation is very different for them.
The only way we could have won this war was that we had 98-100 different defenders. There is 109 playable champions in this game and I can asure you, my alliance does not have all all of those.
Well, not to quibble but you misunderstand how diversity is calculated. You just need each bg to have 50 unique defenders... which isn't any less stupid a metric for winning, it's just more achievable than you think. You just need a spreadsheet and a deep commitment to wasting a lot of time organizing your rosters.
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.
Maybe not intentionally, but players did. The problem was that it was too easy to highlight the situation where both sides 100% the map and thus the war was being decided on rating and diversity points. Because players emphasized 100%, the devs countered by making the map harder to reduce that possibility.
I was always saying that 100% map completion was just an edge case, not the actual problem. And I was worried that the response to complaining about 100% map completion was going to be to crank up the difficulty until that was no longer possible consistently. But I'm just one person, and that's what seems to have happened.
Long before the map difficulty became hard enough to seriously challenge the ability of the top alliances to 100% complete the map, it was going to devastate lower alliances. At any tier below the top, the nodes are now strong enough to make blockades effective, and blockades not only put MD defenses back on the table they also add in other defender/node combinations equally good. If you don't have the right attacker and put it on the right path, the right defender can virtually halt an opposing alliance.
If they keep cranking upward until the top alliances notice, the rest of the alliances will be having difficulty just reaching the bosses. This highlights some other critical design errors with the map, which have been lost due to how bad the scoring system and node strength has been jumping around between. For example, by placing most of the hard nodes closer to the center and also concentrating the links there you make it far less likely that an alliance will complete the map at anything less than 100% - because if you can do the center, you can obviously do the edges. Because the center is so interlinked, it is a big pile of all or nothing in large part (anything is possible, but in the general case this seems to be true). The option to complete at less than 100% isn't really there, so it encourages wars to be won by show-stopping paths and nodes. No defender kills and no easy partial map completes means wars reward players who think in terms of all or nothing.
I've even been moving to placing some (not all) of my strongest defenders in the middle, not the boss nodes, and I hear this is something that is also happening in higher tiers. Because when the war is basically all or nothing, your best shot at winning is to cause the other side to fail to clear the middle, which then means your boss is going to be buffed at the end. A buffed second tier defender is just as good if not better than an unbuffed first tier defender on a boss node.
The only way we could have won this war was that we had 98-100 different defenders. There is 109 playable champions in this game and I can asure you, my alliance does not have all all of those.
Well, not to quibble but you misunderstand how diversity is calculated. You just need each bg to have 50 unique defenders... which isn't any less stupid a metric for winning, it's just more achievable than you think. You just need a spreadsheet and a deep commitment to wasting a lot of time organizing your rosters.
Terrible that this is what it's come to.
Apparently you've never had to rearrange 30 people in 3 BGs before. Organization has always been present. Not all Allies just jump in and place who they want where they want. Not if you want to win. I've been doing it every War I open. There's always forethought required, especially if you have new Players or someone switches up their Defense.
Has anyone asked/addressed any potential deviations in the matchmaking process? I have seen some threads pop up here and there but no sure answers from anyone. Over the past 2-3 weeks we have been getting insane matches in AW through matchmaking. We have been tossing around the idea it might be based on prestige because that currently seems to be one of the only consistent metrics we have had in common with the alliances we have been getting matched against. Apologies if this has been addressed and missed.
The only way we could have won this war was that we had 98-100 different defenders. There is 109 playable champions in this game and I can asure you, my alliance does not have all all of those.
Well, not to quibble but you misunderstand how diversity is calculated. You just need each bg to have 50 unique defenders... which isn't any less stupid a metric for winning, it's just more achievable than you think. You just need a spreadsheet and a deep commitment to wasting a lot of time organizing your rosters.
Terrible that this is what it's come to.
Apparently you've never had to rearrange 30 people in 3 BGs before. Organization has always been present. Not all Allies just jump in and place who they want where they want. Not if you want to win. I've been doing it every War I open. There's always forethought required, especially if you have new Players or someone switches up their Defense.
Speaking as someone who runs a battlegroup, and does all the final placement for that group, and has in the past arranged *every* group or at least validated placement for the entire alliance, saying that organization was always present is completely missing the point of diversity calculations. There is no comparison between "please place your strongest defenders and I will put them on the best nodes" and "okay, Bob, I want you to rank up your Agent Venom and Colossus and Katie please place Spider Gwen, Thor, Captain Marvel, Iron Patriot, and Carnage because last time we lost by 42 points due to diversity."
To be honest, its too much work for me to seriously entertain at my tier. But I know that there are alliances who spreadsheet this out and know exactly which defenders each and every member is going to place ahead of time, and are instructing them on which defenders to prioritize ranking to maximize rating points. If I wanted to do that, I'd be playing Eve Online.
Or to put it simply, in the past there wasn't a lot of forethought, there was afterthought. Given what my members placed, what's the best strategic way to place them. I worked with what I had. I discussed what was good in general, but I didn't tell people straight up what to place unless they asked my advice. Now, I'm explicitly telling people to place strong defenders first (I'm using hybrid blockade) and then diverse second, and to do that each member has to check what was placed and then place differently. That's a pain, but it is a small amount of pain for each member, not a gigaton of pain concentrated on me to collect everyone's roster and then decide on placement ahead of time.
The only way we could have won this war was that we had 98-100 different defenders. There is 109 playable champions in this game and I can asure you, my alliance does not have all all of those.
Well, not to quibble but you misunderstand how diversity is calculated. You just need each bg to have 50 unique defenders... which isn't any less stupid a metric for winning, it's just more achievable than you think. You just need a spreadsheet and a deep commitment to wasting a lot of time organizing your rosters.
Terrible that this is what it's come to.
Apparently you've never had to rearrange 30 people in 3 BGs before. Organization has always been present. Not all Allies just jump in and place who they want where they want. Not if you want to win. I've been doing it every War I open. There's always forethought required, especially if you have new Players or someone switches up their Defense.
Speaking as someone who runs a battlegroup, and does all the final placement for that group, and has in the past arranged *every* group or at least validated placement for the entire alliance, saying that organization was always present is completely missing the point of diversity calculations. There is no comparison between "please place your strongest defenders and I will put them on the best nodes" and "okay, Bob, I want you to rank up your Agent Venom and Colossus and Katie please place Spider Gwen, Thor, Captain Marvel, Iron Patriot, and Carnage because last time we lost by 42 points due to diversity."
To be honest, its too much work for me to seriously entertain at my tier. But I know that there are alliances who spreadsheet this out and know exactly which defenders each and every member is going to place ahead of time, and are instructing them on which defenders to prioritize ranking to maximize rating points. If I wanted to do that, I'd be playing Eve Online.
Or to put it simply, in the past there wasn't a lot of forethought, there was afterthought. Given what my members placed, what's the best strategic way to place them. I worked with what I had. I discussed what was good in general, but I didn't tell people straight up what to place unless they asked my advice. Now, I'm explicitly telling people to place strong defenders first (I'm using hybrid blockade) and then diverse second, and to do that each member has to check what was placed and then place differently. That's a pain, but it is a small amount of pain for each member, not a gigaton of pain concentrated on me to collect everyone's roster and then decide on placement ahead of time.
Both, really. Forethought and afterthought. There is assessment. I was addressing the idea that it's work to keep track of Diversity. There's always been thought work involved with Defense.
The only way we could have won this war was that we had 98-100 different defenders. There is 109 playable champions in this game and I can asure you, my alliance does not have all all of those.
Well, not to quibble but you misunderstand how diversity is calculated. You just need each bg to have 50 unique defenders... which isn't any less stupid a metric for winning, it's just more achievable than you think. You just need a spreadsheet and a deep commitment to wasting a lot of time organizing your rosters.
Terrible that this is what it's come to.
Apparently you've never had to rearrange 30 people in 3 BGs before. Organization has always been present. Not all Allies just jump in and place who they want where they want. Not if you want to win. I've been doing it every War I open. There's always forethought required, especially if you have new Players or someone switches up their Defense.
Speaking as someone who runs a battlegroup, and does all the final placement for that group, and has in the past arranged *every* group or at least validated placement for the entire alliance, saying that organization was always present is completely missing the point of diversity calculations. There is no comparison between "please place your strongest defenders and I will put them on the best nodes" and "okay, Bob, I want you to rank up your Agent Venom and Colossus and Katie please place Spider Gwen, Thor, Captain Marvel, Iron Patriot, and Carnage because last time we lost by 42 points due to diversity."
To be honest, its too much work for me to seriously entertain at my tier. But I know that there are alliances who spreadsheet this out and know exactly which defenders each and every member is going to place ahead of time, and are instructing them on which defenders to prioritize ranking to maximize rating points. If I wanted to do that, I'd be playing Eve Online.
Or to put it simply, in the past there wasn't a lot of forethought, there was afterthought. Given what my members placed, what's the best strategic way to place them. I worked with what I had. I discussed what was good in general, but I didn't tell people straight up what to place unless they asked my advice. Now, I'm explicitly telling people to place strong defenders first (I'm using hybrid blockade) and then diverse second, and to do that each member has to check what was placed and then place differently. That's a pain, but it is a small amount of pain for each member, not a gigaton of pain concentrated on me to collect everyone's roster and then decide on placement ahead of time.
Both, really. Forethought and afterthought. There is assessment. I was addressing the idea that it's work to keep track of Diversity. There's always been thought work involved with Defense.
But that's ignoring the details to make a correspondence claim that isn't true. That would be like Kabam charging everyone a thousand dollars a month to play the game, and me saying that, well, when you think about it, we all pay to play the game anyway, either time or money, so nothing's really changed.
No one is saying "its work to keep track of Diversity." They are saying it is a completely different kind of work, of a far more intrusive nature, and an order of magnitude more effort, than what AW involved in the past. Those distinctions are the point, not the fact that "work" is somehow involved.
The only way we could have won this war was that we had 98-100 different defenders. There is 109 playable champions in this game and I can asure you, my alliance does not have all all of those.
Well, not to quibble but you misunderstand how diversity is calculated. You just need each bg to have 50 unique defenders... which isn't any less stupid a metric for winning, it's just more achievable than you think. You just need a spreadsheet and a deep commitment to wasting a lot of time organizing your rosters.
Terrible that this is what it's come to.
Apparently you've never had to rearrange 30 people in 3 BGs before. Organization has always been present. Not all Allies just jump in and place who they want where they want. Not if you want to win. I've been doing it every War I open. There's always forethought required, especially if you have new Players or someone switches up their Defense.
Speaking as someone who runs a battlegroup, and does all the final placement for that group, and has in the past arranged *every* group or at least validated placement for the entire alliance, saying that organization was always present is completely missing the point of diversity calculations. There is no comparison between "please place your strongest defenders and I will put them on the best nodes" and "okay, Bob, I want you to rank up your Agent Venom and Colossus and Katie please place Spider Gwen, Thor, Captain Marvel, Iron Patriot, and Carnage because last time we lost by 42 points due to diversity."
To be honest, its too much work for me to seriously entertain at my tier. But I know that there are alliances who spreadsheet this out and know exactly which defenders each and every member is going to place ahead of time, and are instructing them on which defenders to prioritize ranking to maximize rating points. If I wanted to do that, I'd be playing Eve Online.
Or to put it simply, in the past there wasn't a lot of forethought, there was afterthought. Given what my members placed, what's the best strategic way to place them. I worked with what I had. I discussed what was good in general, but I didn't tell people straight up what to place unless they asked my advice. Now, I'm explicitly telling people to place strong defenders first (I'm using hybrid blockade) and then diverse second, and to do that each member has to check what was placed and then place differently. That's a pain, but it is a small amount of pain for each member, not a gigaton of pain concentrated on me to collect everyone's roster and then decide on placement ahead of time.
Both, really. Forethought and afterthought. There is assessment. I was addressing the idea that it's work to keep track of Diversity. There's always been thought work involved with Defense.
But that's ignoring the details to make a correspondence claim that isn't true. That would be like Kabam charging everyone a thousand dollars a month to play the game, and me saying that, well, when you think about it, we all pay to play the game anyway, either time or money, so nothing's really changed.
No one is saying "its work to keep track of Diversity." They are saying it is a completely different kind of work, of a far more intrusive nature, and an order of magnitude more effort, than what AW involved in the past. Those distinctions are the point, not the fact that "work" is somehow involved.
No more than keeping track of Nodes and Champs that correspond with them. It's not that complicated to list Champs that are in a BG and count the duplicates.
If they keep cranking upward until the top alliances notice, the rest of the alliances will be having difficulty just reaching the bosses. This highlights some other critical design errors with the map, which have been lost due to how bad the scoring system and node strength has been jumping around between. For example, by placing most of the hard nodes closer to the center and also concentrating the links there you make it far less likely that an alliance will complete the map at anything less than 100% - because if you can do the center, you can obviously do the edges. Because the center is so interlinked, it is a big pile of all or nothing in large part (anything is possible, but in the general case this seems to be true). The option to complete at less than 100% isn't really there, so it encourages wars to be won by show-stopping paths and nodes. No defender kills and no easy partial map completes means wars reward players who think in terms of all or nothing.
I've even been moving to placing some (not all) of my strongest defenders in the middle, not the boss nodes, and I hear this is something that is also happening in higher tiers. Because when the war is basically all or nothing, your best shot at winning is to cause the other side to fail to clear the middle, which then means your boss is going to be buffed at the end. A buffed second tier defender is just as good if not better than an unbuffed first tier defender on a boss node.
I think I said this before, and now I think I was wrong. You can do the minibosses by skipping some or all of the first platform with middle lanes. Doing so avoids nodes 23 & 24, which are some of the brutal nodes (given the wrong attacker/defender combinations). E.g https://imgur.com/cpOPfen
You still have to deal with a few map 5 nodes spread elsewhere, but I personally don't find much which competes with Masochism and Buffet for difficulty. (I haven't played against Arc Overload with GG or Nebula or the like, so it's possible that's painful. But I have done the left side recently, and Bane isn't bad there.)
Looking at the map carefully, you appear to be correct. If you decide up front to skip nodes 23 and 24 you can skip those two paths and forfeit node 29. You still have to deal with node 34 through 37 (35 and 37 are nasty in my opinion: 35 is the power gain/power shield combo and 37 is degen) in the middle, and of course 42 and 44 which are on the right not the center.
So it is possible to skip half the center, I stand corrected. Although I'm wondering if this is a good strategy. You can skip the center entirely, or you can just go for it. Because the hard nodes are at the end of the paths, if you go for it and fail, you lose those attackers for the end game but it costs you only a few of nodes of exploration. You're still going to go around and pick up nodes 28 and 30 and continue the top-center anyway.
So the question is, even if you think node 24 (for example) is "unbeatable" should you still take 12-18-24 to open up 10-16-23 for someone else and pick up all that explore, even if you get stopped at 24. Stopped at 24 costs you three hops I guess: 24, the portal, and the landing node. Skipping the path entirely costs you 7 nodes, and maybe the center also, 6 more nodes.
Is saving an attacker and concentrating on the bosses worth potentially losing 13 nodes of explore? That sounds like a lot. By my count there's about 95 nodes on the map. 13 is almost 14% of the total explore points available, plus maybe 6 of the 54 kills on the map for about 11% of that total. Dying on 24 costs you three nodes of explore and one kill, or 3% explore and 2% of the kills.
My gut instinct says pursue those paths. If you could route around 24 and it cost you, say, three nodes that might be a viable partial completion strategy. But completely skipping that much of the map sounds like giving up from the start.
"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 is clearly misunderstanding their entire community. Literally every one is saying the same thing. We don't want Diversity to be the tie breaker. WHY? Because there is no SKILL involved. We all want DEFENDER KILLS to be the tie breaker. Just do it already!
"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 is clearly misunderstanding their entire community. Literally every one is saying the same thing. We don't want Diversity to be the tie breaker. WHY? Because there is no SKILL involved. We all want DEFENDER KILLS to be the tie breaker. Just do it already!
Lol you really think they are misunderstanding us?
They know exactly what we are saying and they know exactly what they’re doing.
They are releasing each iteration saying that they are giving is what WE want, shaping a narrative that they’re listening. But in reality they already have their version of aw in mind and are releasing it slowly to get less backlash.
Imagine them releasing this current version of war instead of the easy one they released in the beginning of the change. People would see it as an obvious moneygrab and might have even boycotted war.
"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 is clearly misunderstanding their entire community. Literally every one is saying the same thing. We don't want Diversity to be the tie breaker. WHY? Because there is no SKILL involved. We all want DEFENDER KILLS to be the tie breaker. Just do it already!
Lol you really think they are misunderstanding us?
They know exactly what we are saying and they know exactly what they’re doing.
They are releasing each iteration saying that they are giving is what WE want, shaping a narrative that they’re listening. But in reality they already have their version of aw in mind and are releasing it slowly to get less backlash.
Imagine them releasing this current version of war instead of the easy one they released in the beginning of the change. People would see it as an obvious moneygrab and might have even boycotted war.
That's ascribing a Machiavellian genius to the developers I do not believe is warranted.
Yes, they are pushing a narrative that doesn't appear to fit the facts, and yes I'm pretty sure they know it. But what I see is a dev team that miscalculated badly what their design changes would do and once it went live they were committed to the basic structure of that design and could only make certain kinds of relatively trivial (in terms of work) changes to reshape it, and the changes they made to address the worst problems introduced by the design effectively undid many of the original changes original intent, with the exception of the removal of defender kill points.
Somehow the intended design goal of AW changed from making AW easier for attackers to participate in and the scoring system designed to differentiate close wars based on roster strength and diversity, to making AW harder for attackers to complete the map to reduce the impact of roster strength and diversity, to making AW defense about selecting the right defenders for the right nodes to stop attackers from completing the map. Which is almost, but not exactly, a complete 360 degree loop.
If you are not a strong attacker, the good news is there's no penalty for dying anymore. The bad news is you're much more likely to die. The really bad news is that when you die you're probably still going to cost your alliance the war.
That seems to be two steps forward, three steps backward, and five steps sideways off a bridge.
Lmao plenty of people are able to manage placing 30 defenders in the correct spots. Plenty of people are able to observe and adapt after success/failure of those placements. Not many people can handle 17 tho. Takes a true game master to do that.
And @DNA3000 that's why I added the cold coffee/burning down the house bit. Nobody asked for the abomination we've received. It's almost like one of those bad genie fairy tales.
If you still believe this is close to where you want the war be, can you explain to me which part of this war mode is supposed to be more fun than the old war mode????
I'm calling you out on this pile of ****, @Kabam Miike!
Our Alliance fell apart basically because of these changes and the game is no longer fun to play.
Lmao plenty of people are able to manage placing 30 defenders in the correct spots. Plenty of people are able to observe and adapt after success/failure of those placements. Not many people can handle 17 tho. Takes a true game master to do that.
And @DNA3000 that's why I added the cold coffee/burning down the house bit. Nobody asked for the abomination we've received. It's almost like one of those bad genie fairy tales.
The only way we could have won this war was that we had 98-100 different defenders. There is 109 playable champions in this game and I can asure you, my alliance does not have all all of those.
Well, not to quibble but you misunderstand how diversity is calculated. You just need each bg to have 50 unique defenders... which isn't any less stupid a metric for winning, it's just more achievable than you think. You just need a spreadsheet and a deep commitment to wasting a lot of time organizing your rosters.
Terrible that this is what it's come to.
Apparently you've never had to rearrange 30 people in 3 BGs before. Organization has always been present. Not all Allies just jump in and place who they want where they want. Not if you want to win. I've been doing it every War I open. There's always forethought required, especially if you have new Players or someone switches up their Defense.
I usually don't engage you , but you have no clue what you're talking about. Spare me your pathetic, baseless judgement.
"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.
How about you bring in AQ potions that heal/revive more health and bring in defender kills as well....? That way you give people the option to fully heal a character rather than partial heals that a lot of players do which often costs them a few KOs.... So teams will also get their defender kill points but... The upside for KABAM is if you keep the potion limit to 15 you will get more $$$ per potion used as people choose to fully heal rather than risk giving a defensive kill....
Same Diversity + slightly lower D Rating + 59 more Defender Kills = a 4 point loss. Sounds fair and competative right KABAM?
Why don’t you just admit that your goal is to make both sides use items to 100%. Winner winner chicken dinner for KABAM!
I have to admit, that looks like it stings.
I don't think Kabam is explicitly trying to force alliances to spend units on items. And I don't think they actually are getting more spending across the entire game. For every tier 1 spending more to complete the map, there is probably a couple tier 8s somewhere running into Magiks on 42 and Green Goblins on 24 and just giving up, spending nothing. Since potions cost the same no matter how highly ranked you are for the most part, gaining potions from the few tier 1 and 2 alliances that exist isn't going to earn a lot of extra money if it is costing you potions from the more numerous alliances at lower tiers.
I don't have numbers to back that up of course, but that's my current best guess. I think the net effect of jacking up the difficulty in the way they are doing it is netting out to a wash on how much is being spent on war. I know I'm specifically spending less even with the harder nodes and even though I try to take one of the harder paths generally. Mostly that is because I have a decent diverse roster and can bring solid attackers and if I'm going to spend at all it will likely be at the end with the bosses - and by then it is likely I will know whether it is necessary or not because the other alliance has either gone 100% or given up. If they give up and can't proceed past the blockade, that instantly saves me from spending anything past that point.
With 14.0 it was harder to know if the other battlegroup was going to break through and get to the boss until literally just before the end. They could even surprise you right at the end. That happens less often in 16.0, because the map structure seems to make it more easy to tell whether the other side is overmatched or rolling over you.
You make good points DNA. I’ll admit I was reacting from my own experience of toiling away in Tier 2 where we win 1 and lose 2. Almost every time we outperform our opponent with more defender kills. But we lose because of Defender Rating.
This new scoring method is absurd. Their is absolutely NO fair competition taking place. All we are doing is going through the motions of clearing 100% then waiting to see which Alliance gets the shaft.
If you add points for defender kills then you can at least see a concrete factor for a win or loss and not an arbitrary factor of Alliance X having a slightly higher Defender Rating.
Name me ANY competition where a team wins simply because they have better stats on paper. Competitions aren’t won on paper, that’s why you play the game.
You make good points DNA. I’ll admit I was reacting from my own experience of toiling away in Tier 2 where we win 1 and lose 2. Almost every time we outperform our opponent with more defender kills. But we lose because of Defender Rating.
This new scoring method is absurd. Their is absolutely NO fair competition taking place. All we are doing is going through the motions of clearing 100% then waiting to see which Alliance gets the shaft.
If you add points for defender kills then you can at least see a concrete factor for a win or loss and not an arbitrary factor of Alliance X having a slightly higher Defender Rating.
Name me ANY competition where a team wins simply because they have better stats on paper. Competitions aren’t won on paper, that’s why you play the game.
It does occur to me that in a sense, defender kills are a stat. Maybe we should think of all stats as tie breakers the way real world tie breakers work. In the real world, as you say, competitions aren't won on stats, but on "victories." Only when there is a tie do we consult "tie breakers." Suppose wars were decided that way. We look *only* at boss kills. That's the point of the war: to kill the boss. If you have two kills and they have one kill, you win, period.
*Only* if there is a tie do we look at anything else. If there is a tie, then we look at exploration. If you have more exploration, you win. Otherwise, you lose. If it is a tie, then we keep going.
If wars worked that way, what would be a reasonable tie-breaking order?
Would that be acceptable by the majority of the competition-focused players? Would another order be more acceptable? Do we still want to use points to win instead?
There are other models. Consider golf. Suppose we look at each and every node as a "hole" like in golf, and which ever alliance defeats that node in the fewest kills "wins" the node. If both sides kill it with the same number of defeats (including zero) then it is a tie. We could then do something like this:
It is important to note that this version of war factors in better attacker performance while still avoiding the penalty for dying on attack that Kabam is so worried about. If you don't kill the node you lose the node anyway, so you might as well try. And in fact once you die too many times and you know you lost the node you might as well keep going and push on, because you already lost that node, might as well try to push to the next one. But the alliance that defeats the nodes with fewer kills will tend to win overall.
Also interesting to note: in this version of war it is better to have two good defenders than one great one, because no matter what monster you put on 24 it will only give you one "win." But three good defenders on 22, 23, and 24 beats one monster on 24 (two wins to one) so it is important to spread the defensive strength around. This adds another way to win besides diversity points and blockades: capture the most nodes.
In any case, perhaps the problem is not that Kabam wants to make diversity and rating into tie breakers, it is that they did it wrong and should really make everything into a tie breaker. What matters is the order of significance of the tie breakers: what do we consider more important in a competition? Boss kills seems to be obvious. Exploration maybe. Node "victories" seems to be a promising compromise for measuring attacker performance, and diversity and rating don't matter unless bosses tie and then exploration ties and then nodes won ties. They become true tie breakers.
At the point where both sides kill all the bosses and both sides explore the same amount of the map *AND* both sides show similar attacker performance node by node, then maybe it is more acceptable to hand the victory to whichever side racked up the most placement points. At that point I think both sides would be fine with a coin toss anyway (rather than a tie, which is basically a loss for both sides).
Note: I'm aware that if one side "wins" a node 12 defeats to 2, and the other side wins a node 4 defeats to 1, the first side will claim they are better. No scoring system is perfect. But I can still point to golf as a real world example where it is considered fair to win a hole by two strokes or fifty strokes. You win the hole, you move on.
Sorry DNA, I’m not reading that much....😂
Look at the stats of my alliances loss. We only died 76 times....14 less than the starting total of 90. They died 135 times...45 times more than the starting total. We cleaned their clocks. We were clearly the better Alliance.
But in the current scoring format, because their defenders’ PI was 3000 points higher than ours they win by 4 points? It’s absurd. Defender Rating isn’t a performance stat. It’s a roster measurable. Defender Kills on the other hand are performance related. Obviously our defenders were too much for them to beat without multiple revives. Hence....this current format tends to reward the alliances that use items and got lucky with pulling high PI champs.
That’s like a baseball team getting 10 runned but getting the win becsuse they have a higher team batting average.
For that matter, using Boosts only goes so far. The PI can only be inflated so much. If Allies are making it a common practice, then it will still boil down to their Rating because you can only Boost so far. At 0.002 Points per PI, it's really not going to accumulate what I would call an unfair advantage.
So its based on roster and dupes not anything else. Sounds fair.
The only way we could have won this war was that we had 98-100 different defenders. There is 109 playable champions in this game and I can asure you, my alliance does not have all all of those.
Well, not to quibble but you misunderstand how diversity is calculated. You just need each bg to have 50 unique defenders... which isn't any less stupid a metric for winning, it's just more achievable than you think. You just need a spreadsheet and a deep commitment to wasting a lot of time organizing your rosters.
Terrible that this is what it's come to.
Apparently you've never had to rearrange 30 people in 3 BGs before. Organization has always been present. Not all Allies just jump in and place who they want where they want. Not if you want to win. I've been doing it every War I open. There's always forethought required, especially if you have new Players or someone switches up their Defense.
I usually don't engage you , but you have no clue what you're talking about. Spare me your pathetic, baseless judgement.
I know exactly what I'm talking about. I'm not new at this. I've been organizing Wars since they began. The large majority of the few losses I've seen were because people didn't follow instructions, so I'm pretty sure I have some base knowledge. Taking cheap shots at me is not a constructive way to have a conversation. It's really not hurting me any.
If you've only seen a few losses since AW began, you're in tier 1.
Comments
B: “Here’s my personal experience showing a good chance of it happening over the course of 3+ weeks.”
A: “I disagree with the idea so disregard your personal experience entirely.”
Points for defender kills please
I was thinking in terms of evaluating the likelihood of the opponent being strong enough to defeat a well-placed blockade, but in very high tiers this might be something you have to always assume is true. And if you drop down far enough then the other side becomes so much weaker that I think either strategy works: full diversity will be impossible to defeat because of the point spread, and blockade will be impossible to defeat because it is too strong. But of course if you can win on points with certainty that's the way to go, because you can always spend your way past a blockade but you cannot spend your way past diversity points (at the time).
At the very top many general statements about war become difficult to make, simply because there are fewer alliances running up to saturation levels of roster strength (you can only be so strong, because there are limits the game imposes on how high you can rank how many champions). There are fewer real situations you can really face, of which I'm not currently directly experiencing, being in a more mid-tier war alliance.
Which is something else to always keep in mind. No one has the ability to know what the strategic situation is in every tier of war, and certainly not me. A good war system should be able to accommodate all of those tiers equally well, when the meta-gaming situation is very different for them.
Terrible that this is what it's come to.
Maybe not intentionally, but players did. The problem was that it was too easy to highlight the situation where both sides 100% the map and thus the war was being decided on rating and diversity points. Because players emphasized 100%, the devs countered by making the map harder to reduce that possibility.
I was always saying that 100% map completion was just an edge case, not the actual problem. And I was worried that the response to complaining about 100% map completion was going to be to crank up the difficulty until that was no longer possible consistently. But I'm just one person, and that's what seems to have happened.
Long before the map difficulty became hard enough to seriously challenge the ability of the top alliances to 100% complete the map, it was going to devastate lower alliances. At any tier below the top, the nodes are now strong enough to make blockades effective, and blockades not only put MD defenses back on the table they also add in other defender/node combinations equally good. If you don't have the right attacker and put it on the right path, the right defender can virtually halt an opposing alliance.
If they keep cranking upward until the top alliances notice, the rest of the alliances will be having difficulty just reaching the bosses. This highlights some other critical design errors with the map, which have been lost due to how bad the scoring system and node strength has been jumping around between. For example, by placing most of the hard nodes closer to the center and also concentrating the links there you make it far less likely that an alliance will complete the map at anything less than 100% - because if you can do the center, you can obviously do the edges. Because the center is so interlinked, it is a big pile of all or nothing in large part (anything is possible, but in the general case this seems to be true). The option to complete at less than 100% isn't really there, so it encourages wars to be won by show-stopping paths and nodes. No defender kills and no easy partial map completes means wars reward players who think in terms of all or nothing.
I've even been moving to placing some (not all) of my strongest defenders in the middle, not the boss nodes, and I hear this is something that is also happening in higher tiers. Because when the war is basically all or nothing, your best shot at winning is to cause the other side to fail to clear the middle, which then means your boss is going to be buffed at the end. A buffed second tier defender is just as good if not better than an unbuffed first tier defender on a boss node.
Apparently you've never had to rearrange 30 people in 3 BGs before. Organization has always been present. Not all Allies just jump in and place who they want where they want. Not if you want to win. I've been doing it every War I open. There's always forethought required, especially if you have new Players or someone switches up their Defense.
Speaking as someone who runs a battlegroup, and does all the final placement for that group, and has in the past arranged *every* group or at least validated placement for the entire alliance, saying that organization was always present is completely missing the point of diversity calculations. There is no comparison between "please place your strongest defenders and I will put them on the best nodes" and "okay, Bob, I want you to rank up your Agent Venom and Colossus and Katie please place Spider Gwen, Thor, Captain Marvel, Iron Patriot, and Carnage because last time we lost by 42 points due to diversity."
To be honest, its too much work for me to seriously entertain at my tier. But I know that there are alliances who spreadsheet this out and know exactly which defenders each and every member is going to place ahead of time, and are instructing them on which defenders to prioritize ranking to maximize rating points. If I wanted to do that, I'd be playing Eve Online.
Or to put it simply, in the past there wasn't a lot of forethought, there was afterthought. Given what my members placed, what's the best strategic way to place them. I worked with what I had. I discussed what was good in general, but I didn't tell people straight up what to place unless they asked my advice. Now, I'm explicitly telling people to place strong defenders first (I'm using hybrid blockade) and then diverse second, and to do that each member has to check what was placed and then place differently. That's a pain, but it is a small amount of pain for each member, not a gigaton of pain concentrated on me to collect everyone's roster and then decide on placement ahead of time.
Both, really. Forethought and afterthought. There is assessment. I was addressing the idea that it's work to keep track of Diversity. There's always been thought work involved with Defense.
But that's ignoring the details to make a correspondence claim that isn't true. That would be like Kabam charging everyone a thousand dollars a month to play the game, and me saying that, well, when you think about it, we all pay to play the game anyway, either time or money, so nothing's really changed.
No one is saying "its work to keep track of Diversity." They are saying it is a completely different kind of work, of a far more intrusive nature, and an order of magnitude more effort, than what AW involved in the past. Those distinctions are the point, not the fact that "work" is somehow involved.
No more than keeping track of Nodes and Champs that correspond with them. It's not that complicated to list Champs that are in a BG and count the duplicates.
Looking at the map carefully, you appear to be correct. If you decide up front to skip nodes 23 and 24 you can skip those two paths and forfeit node 29. You still have to deal with node 34 through 37 (35 and 37 are nasty in my opinion: 35 is the power gain/power shield combo and 37 is degen) in the middle, and of course 42 and 44 which are on the right not the center.
So it is possible to skip half the center, I stand corrected. Although I'm wondering if this is a good strategy. You can skip the center entirely, or you can just go for it. Because the hard nodes are at the end of the paths, if you go for it and fail, you lose those attackers for the end game but it costs you only a few of nodes of exploration. You're still going to go around and pick up nodes 28 and 30 and continue the top-center anyway.
So the question is, even if you think node 24 (for example) is "unbeatable" should you still take 12-18-24 to open up 10-16-23 for someone else and pick up all that explore, even if you get stopped at 24. Stopped at 24 costs you three hops I guess: 24, the portal, and the landing node. Skipping the path entirely costs you 7 nodes, and maybe the center also, 6 more nodes.
Is saving an attacker and concentrating on the bosses worth potentially losing 13 nodes of explore? That sounds like a lot. By my count there's about 95 nodes on the map. 13 is almost 14% of the total explore points available, plus maybe 6 of the 54 kills on the map for about 11% of that total. Dying on 24 costs you three nodes of explore and one kill, or 3% explore and 2% of the kills.
My gut instinct says pursue those paths. If you could route around 24 and it cost you, say, three nodes that might be a viable partial completion strategy. But completely skipping that much of the map sounds like giving up from the start.
Kabam is clearly misunderstanding their entire community. Literally every one is saying the same thing. We don't want Diversity to be the tie breaker. WHY? Because there is no SKILL involved. We all want DEFENDER KILLS to be the tie breaker. Just do it already!
Lol you really think they are misunderstanding us?
They know exactly what we are saying and they know exactly what they’re doing.
They are releasing each iteration saying that they are giving is what WE want, shaping a narrative that they’re listening. But in reality they already have their version of aw in mind and are releasing it slowly to get less backlash.
Imagine them releasing this current version of war instead of the easy one they released in the beginning of the change. People would see it as an obvious moneygrab and might have even boycotted war.
That's ascribing a Machiavellian genius to the developers I do not believe is warranted.
Yes, they are pushing a narrative that doesn't appear to fit the facts, and yes I'm pretty sure they know it. But what I see is a dev team that miscalculated badly what their design changes would do and once it went live they were committed to the basic structure of that design and could only make certain kinds of relatively trivial (in terms of work) changes to reshape it, and the changes they made to address the worst problems introduced by the design effectively undid many of the original changes original intent, with the exception of the removal of defender kill points.
Somehow the intended design goal of AW changed from making AW easier for attackers to participate in and the scoring system designed to differentiate close wars based on roster strength and diversity, to making AW harder for attackers to complete the map to reduce the impact of roster strength and diversity, to making AW defense about selecting the right defenders for the right nodes to stop attackers from completing the map. Which is almost, but not exactly, a complete 360 degree loop.
If you are not a strong attacker, the good news is there's no penalty for dying anymore. The bad news is you're much more likely to die. The really bad news is that when you die you're probably still going to cost your alliance the war.
That seems to be two steps forward, three steps backward, and five steps sideways off a bridge.
And @DNA3000 that's why I added the cold coffee/burning down the house bit. Nobody asked for the abomination we've received. It's almost like one of those bad genie fairy tales.
We had a new member screwing us over by placing low PI and duplicate champions.
This is another war in a row of many, where both teams cleared 100% and the winner was predetermined by the placement of defenders. WTF?!?!?!
It's never determined by the performance of the team!
We were better, scoring 17 defender kills, yet we lost, because of that one idiot and it had nothing to do with our performance.
When are you going to fix it, Kabam?
@Kabam Miike
If you still believe this is close to where you want the war be, can you explain to me which part of this war mode is supposed to be more fun than the old war mode????
I'm calling you out on this pile of ****, @Kabam Miike!
Our Alliance fell apart basically because of these changes and the game is no longer fun to play.
I think you are referring to Monkey Paw stories.
Same Diversity + slightly lower D Rating + 59 more Defender Kills = a 4 point loss. Sounds fair and competative right KABAM?
Why don’t you just admit that your goal is to make both sides use items to 100%. Winner winner chicken dinner for KABAM!
I usually don't engage you , but you have no clue what you're talking about. Spare me your pathetic, baseless judgement.
How about you bring in AQ potions that heal/revive more health and bring in defender kills as well....? That way you give people the option to fully heal a character rather than partial heals that a lot of players do which often costs them a few KOs.... So teams will also get their defender kill points but... The upside for KABAM is if you keep the potion limit to 15 you will get more $$$ per potion used as people choose to fully heal rather than risk giving a defensive kill....
I have to admit, that looks like it stings.
I don't think Kabam is explicitly trying to force alliances to spend units on items. And I don't think they actually are getting more spending across the entire game. For every tier 1 spending more to complete the map, there is probably a couple tier 8s somewhere running into Magiks on 42 and Green Goblins on 24 and just giving up, spending nothing. Since potions cost the same no matter how highly ranked you are for the most part, gaining potions from the few tier 1 and 2 alliances that exist isn't going to earn a lot of extra money if it is costing you potions from the more numerous alliances at lower tiers.
I don't have numbers to back that up of course, but that's my current best guess. I think the net effect of jacking up the difficulty in the way they are doing it is netting out to a wash on how much is being spent on war. I know I'm specifically spending less even with the harder nodes and even though I try to take one of the harder paths generally. Mostly that is because I have a decent diverse roster and can bring solid attackers and if I'm going to spend at all it will likely be at the end with the bosses - and by then it is likely I will know whether it is necessary or not because the other alliance has either gone 100% or given up. If they give up and can't proceed past the blockade, that instantly saves me from spending anything past that point.
With 14.0 it was harder to know if the other battlegroup was going to break through and get to the boss until literally just before the end. They could even surprise you right at the end. That happens less often in 16.0, because the map structure seems to make it more easy to tell whether the other side is overmatched or rolling over you.
This new scoring method is absurd. Their is absolutely NO fair competition taking place. All we are doing is going through the motions of clearing 100% then waiting to see which Alliance gets the shaft.
If you add points for defender kills then you can at least see a concrete factor for a win or loss and not an arbitrary factor of Alliance X having a slightly higher Defender Rating.
Name me ANY competition where a team wins simply because they have better stats on paper. Competitions aren’t won on paper, that’s why you play the game.
It does occur to me that in a sense, defender kills are a stat. Maybe we should think of all stats as tie breakers the way real world tie breakers work. In the real world, as you say, competitions aren't won on stats, but on "victories." Only when there is a tie do we consult "tie breakers." Suppose wars were decided that way. We look *only* at boss kills. That's the point of the war: to kill the boss. If you have two kills and they have one kill, you win, period.
*Only* if there is a tie do we look at anything else. If there is a tie, then we look at exploration. If you have more exploration, you win. Otherwise, you lose. If it is a tie, then we keep going.
If wars worked that way, what would be a reasonable tie-breaking order?
Bosses
Exploration
Defender Kills
Attacker Kills
Defender Diversity
Defender Rating
Would that be acceptable by the majority of the competition-focused players? Would another order be more acceptable? Do we still want to use points to win instead?
There are other models. Consider golf. Suppose we look at each and every node as a "hole" like in golf, and which ever alliance defeats that node in the fewest kills "wins" the node. If both sides kill it with the same number of defeats (including zero) then it is a tie. We could then do something like this:
Bosses
Exploration
Nodes "won"
Defender Diversity
Defender Rating
It is important to note that this version of war factors in better attacker performance while still avoiding the penalty for dying on attack that Kabam is so worried about. If you don't kill the node you lose the node anyway, so you might as well try. And in fact once you die too many times and you know you lost the node you might as well keep going and push on, because you already lost that node, might as well try to push to the next one. But the alliance that defeats the nodes with fewer kills will tend to win overall.
Also interesting to note: in this version of war it is better to have two good defenders than one great one, because no matter what monster you put on 24 it will only give you one "win." But three good defenders on 22, 23, and 24 beats one monster on 24 (two wins to one) so it is important to spread the defensive strength around. This adds another way to win besides diversity points and blockades: capture the most nodes.
In any case, perhaps the problem is not that Kabam wants to make diversity and rating into tie breakers, it is that they did it wrong and should really make everything into a tie breaker. What matters is the order of significance of the tie breakers: what do we consider more important in a competition? Boss kills seems to be obvious. Exploration maybe. Node "victories" seems to be a promising compromise for measuring attacker performance, and diversity and rating don't matter unless bosses tie and then exploration ties and then nodes won ties. They become true tie breakers.
At the point where both sides kill all the bosses and both sides explore the same amount of the map *AND* both sides show similar attacker performance node by node, then maybe it is more acceptable to hand the victory to whichever side racked up the most placement points. At that point I think both sides would be fine with a coin toss anyway (rather than a tie, which is basically a loss for both sides).
Note: I'm aware that if one side "wins" a node 12 defeats to 2, and the other side wins a node 4 defeats to 1, the first side will claim they are better. No scoring system is perfect. But I can still point to golf as a real world example where it is considered fair to win a hole by two strokes or fifty strokes. You win the hole, you move on.
Look at the stats of my alliances loss. We only died 76 times....14 less than the starting total of 90. They died 135 times...45 times more than the starting total. We cleaned their clocks. We were clearly the better Alliance.
But in the current scoring format, because their defenders’ PI was 3000 points higher than ours they win by 4 points? It’s absurd. Defender Rating isn’t a performance stat. It’s a roster measurable. Defender Kills on the other hand are performance related. Obviously our defenders were too much for them to beat without multiple revives. Hence....this current format tends to reward the alliances that use items and got lucky with pulling high PI champs.
That’s like a baseball team getting 10 runned but getting the win becsuse they have a higher team batting average.
So its based on roster and dupes not anything else. Sounds fair.
If you've only seen a few losses since AW began, you're in tier 1.