**Mastery Loadouts**
Due to issues related to the release of Mastery Loadouts, the "free swap" period will be extended.
The new end date will be May 1st.
Due to issues related to the release of Mastery Loadouts, the "free swap" period will be extended.
The new end date will be May 1st.
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Alliance Wars Discussion 2.0
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That's where you assume too much. I have experience with 3 BGs. It's stressful, but not undoable. You really can't make judgments from what I've been through in the last two years. We're talking about the energy it takes to keep track of Diversity. Not the Rank of Defenders. Which is why I said it doesn't make a difference what Tier you're in. Diversity is the same at any Tier. You can keep asserting I don't know what it's like, but that is what we were talking about.
You can claim you're one of the Dallas Cowboy cheerleaders if you want to. But when you start talking about how you're the best chainsaw juggler in the group for the last thirty years, I am going to be skeptical.
Oh yeah... A peewee football coach isn't gonna get far telling an NFL coach what he needs to do on defense
Totally agree that people have to be respectful but you can't make all of these accusations of how AW should be played when you haven't really played anywhere near the top. Well, I guess you could but you shouldn't be surprised when nobody takes your statements seriously. I could be wrong but any Grounded Wisdom I search for in-game is nowhere near the top 3 tiers in AW but I could be wrong, maybe your in-game name is something else?
That is what is eliciting such a violent reaction at least in my opinion. Nobody wants to hear basketball tips from somebody that's 4 feet tall.
Personally I'm not at Tier 1, but I have been steady at Tier 3 and as high as Tier 2. AW in its current iteration is broken and making it tougher to explore isn't the way to fix it. Some other metric needs to be added in or taken out but at the moment the feeling of defeat Kabam was trying to get rid of is even more prevalent. If the ultimate goal was to remove that feeling then they failed, that simple.
I don't agree that there was that feeling pre 12.0 but I can guarantee it is there now. There are some blockade defenses I've seen that are borderline impassable without heavy item use. You can argue that if you don't want to spend items that you shouldn't win or collaborate with your team better but at the end of the day you reach a point where it's pay to win.
Guys please stop responding to the one who shall not be named because that would be a violation of the forum rules. The aforementioned individual derails every important discussion thread without contributing to it, doesn't bring up any suggestions that would be helpful, and defies basic logic and reasoning when attempting to make a point.
The individual is essentially filling the forums up with spam, people responding to said individual are also just filling the forums up with spam. You cannot teach someone who does not want to be taught.
If we could please discuss only Alliance Wars in the Alliance War discussion thread that would be much appreciated.
P.S. if any of the Kabam moderators read this please include a feature that stops you from receiving notifications from people on your ignore list. Because if you keep getting notifications from them, they're not actually being ignored.
In my opinion, 15.0 AW was a complete mockery of competition. Competition in any significant form simply didn't exist. But in 16.0, it does exist. The nodes are now hard enough that even without defender kill *points* there are still reasons to focus on defender kills: blockade defenses are intended to generate enough kills to stop the other side or weaken them enough to make them unable or unwilling to spend the effort to kill the bosses at the end. If both sides choose blockade then both sides have to bring their A-game on offense, and both sides need to try to generate as many defensive kills as possible. Defenders that are good at generating kills on strong nodes are worth placing strategically again.
What we have is 14.0, but with harder nodes, larger maps, and more all or nothing defenses where kills only matter if they completely stop an attack. In other words, it is 14.0 only harder, and with a greater emphasis on ultrahard defenders.
One of the many ironies of the current AW dev cycle is that out of all the players in the game, 16.0 punishes the players that actually liked 15.0 the most. It returns a semblance of 14.0 to the players that liked 14.0, but in a twist it does so by removing some of the things we liked about 14.0 and putting back everything we thought was broken in 14.0. 16.0 is familiar, because it amplifies the worst problems of 14.0.
Bad competition is better than no competition I suppose. The really scary thing is the devs aren't done yet. And I honestly can't say if their next step will be to tone down the nodes to try to find a knife edge balance that doesn't exist, which will probably ruin or significantly weaken the current level of competition, or crank up the difficulty even higher in a misguided quest to eliminate 100% map completion. And the funny part is, whichever way they go, odds are AW will be worse. Its not easy to make things bad and also put things into a state where changing difficulty both higher or lower is both worse. It almost sounds mathematically impossible, but there it is.
The topic of what Tier I'm in has nothing to do with it. I said I have a good understanding of how to organize Wars. I also said the success rate is there. The rest was assumptions and conjecture. It's highly possible to have a good success rate if you plan accordingly and play within your capabilities and range. The conversation turned into a roast because people took my comments and made them into more than I said, just to put me on the spot.
We're talking about the War system in general. Specifically Diversity, and keeping track of it. This is a discussion. It's not Ranked and based on where people are at. For some reason, that point needs to be made repeatedly because people seem to think they can shame people out of the conversation and push them out of it because of what Tier they're in.
I wouldn't say it's completely broken. The metrics have changed. It doesn't include Defender Kills anymore. I'm not in agreeance that they're necessary for an element of skill because the Map itself takes skill. The harder the Nodes, the more skill or takes. The argument has been made that people can buy Wins now, but Items have been used all along. War was never about a measure of skill based on Defender Kills. The Players took it there. They used to be part of the metrics. Now they're not. It's not about separating those that do and do not die. It's about working with your Ally to gain more Points than your opponent. Whatever form those Points come from.
They may have further changes to make, but I'm not convinced it's totally broken or that far off from where it's going.
It really doesn't matter who is in what tier: that's kind of missing the point and why I was laughing at the notion I suggested anyone was in any particular tier when the exact opposite was true.
It is possible for someone in any tier to speak intelligently about AW across all tiers. At least I hope so: it is something I strive to do. But to do so, you first have to demonstrate you're willing to *learn* what AW is like in other tiers, both above and below you, and to study the facts carefully and incorporate the facts into your thinking. A good understanding of how AW works is something you can approach, by seeing to what degree you can make reasonable predictions about things you haven't directly witnessed or haven't occurred yet, and the degree to which your observations appear to be consistent with everyone else's.
You don't have to agree with everyone else about matters of judgment or opinion. There's been plenty of disagreement along those lines between otherwise knowledgeable posters. But you do have to have a world view that is consistent with the facts. You have to make statements you're willing to allow close scrutiny upon. And you have to not hide behind semantics or unfalsifiable ambiguity.
I think anyone that does that is worth listening to, regardless of what tier they are in. Anyone who does the exact opposite should have their statements judged accordingly.
Just like focusing on 100% map completion was the wrong target, what someone's tier is is also the wrong target in my opinion. The right target is: do they make statements that someone else can constructively build upon. "Constructively build upon" is an important criteria, because it implies everyone a) knows what they are trying to say, b) believes it is relevant to the discussion, and c) offers an avenue for someone else to agree, disagree, or amplify the discussion around.
My own personal rule is: be informative, be interesting, be amusing, be responsive, or be quiet. I try to make sure at least 90% of my posts fall into one of those categories.
And I'm sorry if it seems like I'm talking about myself a lot, but that's because there's no forum rule that prohibits critiquing yourself.
you must have a water cooled keyboard to keep the heat generated by your extreme typing in check.
"Be verbose" is not one of my rules, but it does seem to be my hobby.
Its a symptom of the fact that I try to think about what a reader might find confusing, ambiguous, objectionable, or erroneous and I try to anticipate that in my posts. Sometimes I anticipate a little much.
Also, I'm a tier 1 typer. I'm only in tier 1 because there's no tier zero. If typing was a valid AW defense, I would win on diversity points, exploration points, and defender kills. The enemy alliance would run out of money and then fall asleep before they reached the end of my defense, and then I would teabag them with a pair of thesauruses.
Thesauri?
Apparently both are valid. Although my tier 1 thesaurus is so powerful it should really be a Tyrannothesaurus. With Arc Overload.
Relying on popular opinion based on Defender Kills? What does that even mean? It's grammatically correct, and the words all mean something individually, but no intelligible thought seems to have been expressed. Out of curiosity were you against defender kills before Kabam scrapped them? I've seen many many many many posts you've written and don't recall one that was against defender Kills prior to the change.
The thought being expressed is the notion that in 14.0 players were placing defenders based on the number of defender kills people were told they could achieve, instead of doing so based on their own scratch work of making a list of unique defenders.
This so wildly fails to match the experience of most players that it doesn't seem remotely reasonable that is the thought being expressed, but that's the closest semantically correct version I can muster.
Since even @Kabam Miike has explicitly stated that the goal of placing a defense is to kill the other side, the Church of the Emasculated Defender contains exactly one parishioner, so this is not something that I believe is worth trying to place on a logically consistent footing.
I have gone through 30% of comments of other players, trying to get an idea of punctual proposals, as well as your explanations you gave on certain items of concern.
Based on my experience in Tier 5-3 and other comments above, I have thought of the following proposed fixes to improve the immediate state:
1)Bring back defender kills points, making them work similar to how Defender Points are awarded, giving you just some extra points, not significant as in AW 1.0.
Note: For opening the next item, my view on why Defender Kills didn't work awesome before is because it didn't have something to balance out and benefit the opponents. Simply put, true attack skill was left out of rewards. Exploration could be achieved with ally suport, but performance in is not being measured.
2)So to improve the skill balance factor, add "Clean Defeat" points for attackers, awarded to those that don't die in combat. This creates a balance scenario between how defeats and victories happen. Timeouts should not reward the points, as considering them could be abused if not taken into account. From a "revenue' standpoint this would incentivate use of items, enough to get pass a next node by seeking a survivability scenario. This could also add to gold rewards
3)I believe in the purpose of diversity to avoid massive mystic and auto passive damage enemy deployments. This is what is was made for and it is OK, it is working. The issue still not addressed in my opinion, is that it interacts with placed defenders & defeated adversaries scores. If points for defeated adversaries are removed from score, then you avoid the hole of having less points attacking due to incomplete placement of the other alliance, balancing out the equation to reward the better coordinated alliance that did full and diverse placement, which is fair. For me that is the easy fix. Note: Keep the count of killed opponents for the gold rewards!
4)To add further tie breaking, points could be awarded for mini boss defeats to add other tie breaking. Certain scenarios exist in Tier5 and below in which defeating a boss without the minibosses is feasable, and extra points could go to those that choose the challenge of full clear.
I think the above creates more skill based scoring mechanisms, addressing main issues and really rewarding the better alliance in all senses, not just how powerful defenders are. Node difficulty increases being designed can help to hinder 100% exploration efforts, but this was never the point. The point is about how to make skill more tangible in the end result.
Hopefully these proposals can be analyzed and taken to consideration, I believe it would help to put AW 2.0 in a good spot!
I said both systems required planning Defense. Therefore the argument that keeping track of Diversity is too daunting is not really accurate. The comment made was that placing a good Defense would still be a focus. The difference from the former meta being that Defender Kills are not adding Points for said Defense. What I meant by popular Champ choices was the same Champs over and over that gain the most Defender Kills. That focus is what created not only the introduction of Diversity, but also the removal of Defender Kills. Simply because the newer Champs were bringing kill numbers to the point that it changed the grounds of War. Evident by the numerous comments made about Defender Kills being the crux of War. In actuality, Points are the crux of War. Nodes were increased to add more of an element of difficulty. Penalizing the opponent by having metrics for Kills had created issues as Champs were added, and Kills increased. Those are the points I made. Not that everyone just went on word-of-mouth. The focus of War had become Defender Kills. It has been changed to be more in tune with their goals.
From what I hear, this isn't universal but the strategic focus on war has definitely shifted back to generating defense kills, because the implicit points accrued due to a high kill count is enough to swing a win. Diversity defenses are still used, but there's little strategic thinking to diversity defenses, just logistics. So I think the more strategically minded players are switching to blockades and just plain strong defenses if for no other reason than the one you mention: it gets wins, and it there's some element of entertainment even when you lose.
Its kind of funny to me that generating defender kills used to be mostly calculated to generate points, and now because kill points have been removed and the developers seem unwilling to even discuss alternatives, defender kills are seen as almost a visceral punishment to inflict upon an opponent. It is a strange sort of indirect revenge, I suppose.
In a broad sense, I think those are fairly clear, at least to me. However, MMO developers don't aim for broad goals, they aim for very precisely specified ones, whether those exactly match their intent or not. I wish I was in the room when they discussed this design, because every MMO design change is pushed and pulled by different developers with different ideas and objectives, and sometimes what we get is not what any one developer thought was a good idea but a weird compromise between sometimes conflicting goals. I wish I knew what those were.
If this is all coming from a single person, then I wish I could adjust the medication.
Whats your alliance tag?
That's not the topic of the subject and I'm not sharing my information. The purpose of the Thread is to discuss War. Not to pony up or put others on the spot.
Hmmm. Hardly ever lose a war but doesn't want anyone to see what the alliance is... sounds reasonable to me lol
If you can't deduce why I respect my own privacy, of all people, then I'm afraid I don't know what to tell you. Bottom line is, I'm not sharing my information and I won't be provoked into doing so. The topic is War. Not me. I'm moving on in the discussion.
If you don't want people to talk about you, don't talk about you. The moment you make a claim about you, you make it fair game for people to challenge that claim.
Although the moment you make a claim about anything, you make it fair game for people to challenge that claim. That's what adults do when they participate in public discussions. Every time I make a statement, I presume that if someone believes it is wrong they will challenge it, and hopefully in a conclusive way. It has happened many times before, and I don't see anything wrong with that.
It is basically blood in the water for someone to open a topic, then claim it is unfair to discuss that topic beyond their own statements about it.
This iteration is a thinly veiled attempt at buying wins.
Wrong. The focus of war in 14.0 was boss kills and full 100% exploration in the most efficient manner possible. This included the metric of defender kills. When new champs are added, everyone had the option to place them where they might be effective, therefore the argument that it was unfair is wrong. Both alliances in a war had the same map.to work out a strategy to stop the opposing alliance from exploring the map.