Why do you think AW is already significantly monetized? I don't think it is if you approach it the right way and with like minded members.
Keep in mind, most players don't spend on anything at all. Just because most players don't have to spend, doesn't mean there's no monetization going on. The industry average is a conversion rate of 3-5%. That means out of a million players playing MCOC (plus or minus) about 50k of them are spenders. When we talk about monetization, we're *always* talking about the top 5% of people spending, because everyone below the top 5% is spending zero.
There aren't many people spending on war, just like there aren't many people spending on crystals or other offers. But as with everywhere else, the game makes up for it by charging those 5% a lot for what they get.
I'm looking at the design of war, not how it is played. We're seeing war in a very distorted state from its intended design, including its intended monetization. We're seeing war during a period where players are getting huge amounts of free potions. And we're seeing war during a period where players are diverting substantial amounts of glory to potions, which is clearly a situation the developers did not strictly speaking intend. That's why they are trying to separate the AQ and AW potion economy. It isn't *explicitly* to make potions more expensive. It is to eliminate this cross use of resources from AQ to AW.
The devs tend to balance around averages. This isn't an uncommon game designer tool. The problem is when you balance around averages, half of everyone is below average and half are above average. The people who buy less than the average amount of potions is going to come out ahead with the new system. The people who buy more than average will come out behind. The people who buy a lot more than average will get squeezed. The high cost of potions and harsh limits are a consequence of balancing around averages. Basically, to the devs one player spending more and one player spending less is everyone spending the same. However, the people spending more don't see it that way.
To some extent, squeezing the players who want the most and need the most is just how monetization works. Someone has to pay, and generally the game places that burden on the people who want the most out of the game. In general, the principle is fine. But here, I think war itself doesn't handle potions correctly and thus puts too much squeeze on too many players, and the attempt to shift potions to loyalty has exposed a lot of problems that were being hidden under a flood of glory.
I really like this idea, but for lower alliances there would really need some way for officers to see who is revive hungry. Back when we did war a couple of years ago, Silver, it was fairly commonplace for a single IMIW to rack. up 20 or 30 kills. This idea shifts that implicit pressure from the player, who feels bad about their skills or performance to officers as they try to divine who is leaking all the points.
I realise this would then mostly negate the easy win of higher participation, and I'm sure there's a better solution, I just suspect there will be unintended player responses to a free revive war economy.
Getting war shy players to join and enjoy war and finish their paths would be a definite win however.,
There are pros and cons here, but in my opinion we already track item use in war. There's no reason we can't or shouldn't track auto-revive usage. And interestingly, in this system auto-revive counts are exactly the death counts a lot of players have asked for. It doesn't directly give you lost attack bonuses, because we can't distinguish between someone dying eight times to one defender and four times each to two defenders, but same is true for item use itself now. Under this system you'd have more information about what was going on, not less.
I’d personally prefer no revives and no potions in AW. Their existence and abundance has normalised 100% exploration and low death rates, it hardly feels like war. Without potions and revives there’d be less need for tie breakers as there’d be a greater spread and diversity of war results, and it would be a more pure competition based on skill and strategy.
But people have gotten too used to 100% completion, and almost treat it like an entitlement or an an expectation, which drives the current appetite for potions and their potential as a source of income.
I get it, and I can even agree to a large extent. I'd be fine with a zero potion *solo* competitive mode for example. But it is important to remember that alliance war is not a pure competition, it is a game mode. Competitive game modes have to balance the needs of the competition and the needs of engagement. If not enough people want to play the game mode, it doesn't matter how riveting the competition is. And we should be asking if it is extracting a cost elsewhere that it isn't paying for. Alliance war breaks up a lot of alliances. Alliances are good for game engagement. If the people who like alliance war are getting that game mode on the backs of other people who are quitting the game, that's a price that should be reviewed.
Every major sport deals with this. There are lots of rules in, say, (American) football that are there not to enhance competition but to improve its viability as a spectator sport. If no one is watching, there is no sport. And no one is going to get top 1% rewards in alliance war if there is no 2% playing.
So while everyone has their own ideas of what would make the perfect alliance war competition, it is important to keep in mind that it is in the best best interests of everyone who wants alliance war to continue if the game mode included things they don't like but other people like, because that's how you protect the long term future of the game mode.
Honestly, I read the title and immediately got what you meant. I don’t hate how it is now, but I 100% would understand a shift to the type of war that you describe.
Also, bringing up an excellent point: should there be a game mode where we aren’t allowed revives?
Technically, we aren't allowed to use revives in arena or battlegrounds. In those game modes, the fight is won or lost, period.
It is probably not a coincidence that both modes have a casual element to them. You can be a hard core arena grinder and you can be a hard core battlegrounds player, but in both cases you can pop into the mode for a few minutes and be done with it. I say this is likely not a coincidence because a revive is (outside of war) something you use to preserve your effort. If you get this far and then die, you're reviving so you don't have to start over. Not starting over only makes sense in content that can take a while to complete. Reviving in a game mode where everything is over in a few minutes is less likely to be meaningful. Not impossible, just less likely.
What is even this. First you're defending P2W content and how things should be P2W and monetizable, for the sake of revenue. The concept of "it's money and it's a company so it's fine".
And now you come up with this? Sure the changes to AW potions aren't any good, but this is riddiculous. Or perhaps money by itself isn't now enough to give you what you want?
Ingredients
* 1 egg yolk * 3 tablespoons fresh lemon juice * 1 tablespoon minced garlic * 1/2 teaspoon Worcestershire sauce * 1/4 teaspoon red pepper flakes * 1 tablespoon Dijon mustard * 2 anchovy fillets, mashed * Scant 1 cup vegetable oil * 1/3 cup extra-virgin olive oil * Salt and freshly ground black pepper * 1 large head romaine lettuce, cleaned and cut into 1 to 2-inch pieces * Freshly grated Parmesan * 2 cups croutons
Directions
1. In a medium bowl, whisk together the egg yolk, lemon juice, garlic, Worcestershire, pepper flakes, mustard, and anchovies. Slowly whisk in the oils to emulsify. Season, to taste, with salt and pepper.
2. Place the lettuce in a large bowl. Sprinkle with Parmesan and black pepper. Drizzle with desired amount of dressing and toss well. Sprinkle top with croutons.
Dying here. Can't breathe.
I can't even tell if he typed this out on his own or copy pasted from the internet lmao
if I'm Kabam and I'm about to drop the cash cow known as Battlegrounds which I know is the future of this game, why would I care about a legacy product like AW which I also know will still generate revenue from the 1% top spenders?
My reply would be: because it is an alliance mode.
Battlegrounds is a solo mode (more or less). If it is good that's great. If it is bad, everyone will ignore it. That's what happened to Dungeons, enough so that Kabam was willing to revamp it into Incursions, which may not be the most popular game mode around but it sucks a lot less than Dungeons did. But whether Incursions is a success or not, doesn't really matter in the grand scheme of things. The people who like it play it. The people who don't like it don't. And you don't see lots of people complaining about it either way. The same will ultimately be true about Battlegrounds.
But if alliance war is bad, you can't just arbitrarily ignore it. Your alliance might still run it. Players have the choice to accept it, or quit their alliances, or be kicked - basically the choice they have now. Solo game modes can survive or fail on their own merit. But alliance game modes can rip alliances apart. They can guilt players into spending more on the game than they are comfortable with, and eventually grow to resent it. Alliances are themselves an engagement tool, a way for us to play with a small group of people that we presumably care about more than the millions of anonymous nobodies that surround us in such a large game. But alliance game modes that bring more stress than they are worth are a net negative. They cost the game more players and more good will from the game than they are worth.
If you get rid of alliance war, you will be getting rid of a game mode that many top tier players explicitly play for. If you don't fix it you'll continue to leave a festering problem that causes more pain than benefit. So even if you don't care about war, it is still probably worth trying to address its issues.
I have a feeling most people disagreeing with this didn't read it. I read the first section and was like lol... then I kept reading and realized how much this actually makes sense and how it would actually give players more choice.
The only positive I can hope for to come of this potion fiasco is a change to the meta where survivability and healing becomes much more important. Go go Diablo! Make aw manageable!
I like this, but one thing that leaves me wondering a bit is how it would affect lower-tier wars. For my alliance, we don't win or lose a war depending on whether or not we died anywhere or not, but (generally) whether or not we got further than the opposing alliance in terms of 100%'ing the maps.
What I mean is that this sounds like a great idea for alliances where everything hinges on those individual deaths. This still penalizes that, while allowing everyone to keep going at the same time. However, for my alliances and others at our level, that isn't the main thing that wins or loses us our wars. If everyone would revive automatically, there would be nothing stopping people from pushing through a carefully placed roadblocking champion. Those champions stand there in order to stop progression and win the defending alliance the war. Under this new system, it would drastically change how these wars are won. You could simply brute-force your way through these defenses.
I'm not saying this is a bad thing, necessarily. I also think that AW runs the risk of being quite toxic and I'm definitely for everything that alleviates that toxicity. This could be one such solution. However, I simply think it's worth pointing out that the wars are played and strategized differently depending on which tier you're at. Any change would affect these tiers differently. If the playing field is leveled, that would also mean that there could be less of an opportunity for higher-tier players within the alliance to pick up the slack of the lower-tier players. If that were to happen for my alliance, that would lead to a pretty dramatic shift and the lower-tier players would really need to level up in order to not "drag down" the others.
But it's definitely an intriguing idea. I'm not opposed to it; I'm just not immediately sold on it either.
But it's definitely an intriguing idea. I'm not opposed to it; I'm just not immediately sold on it either.
Fair enough. At this point, I appreciate anyone thinking seriously about how this changes war, especially in their own circumstances. The point is to try to get people over the hurdle of the assumption this is crazy or impossible, and ask what if?
As to lower tier war, this does change the dynamics of 100% exploration. That’s deliberate, and such wars would have to gravitate away from road blocking metas to a new meta of quality of exploration in general. The hope is that the payoff for that change is a more accessible game mode.
I have a feeling most people disagreeing with this didn't read it.
Perhaps, but when see my post has generated a bunch of agrees AND a bunch of disagrees AND a bunch of insightfuls, it is at least grabbing people's attention. And just like the game itself, if you want to reach the people who will give your ideas the thought you think they deserve, you have to cast as wide a net as possible to reach them. Not everyone will like your ideas. Not everyone will give them a fair shake. But if you want people to spend their valuable time thinking about your posts, you have to accept you won't get universally positive attention.
The guy who flagged it literally seconds after I posted it, I'm pretty sure they didn't give it serious thought. But I'm guessing there are valid disagrees in there from people who, for whatever reason, read it, thought about it, and decided they didn't like it. They are entitled to that opinion.
This is an interesting idea. For me AW is my favourite game mode and everything else such as act 7 completion is about getting top champs to use in tier 1 AW. I think all the potions should be free and boosts, which are vital in high tier, available to buy for loyalty and units. The 20% and 30% boosts need adding to the unit store also. The worst part of war is when you die. Not just because you can cause your alliance to lose, but the amount of potions needed to get back in can wipe you out for future wars, even more with the new costs. This just causes stress and takes the fun away.
Basically, make revives free and unlimited, and three changes happen to war:
1. Casual players can participate in war without getting trapped into a situation that forces them to spend. It’s important to keep bringing in fresh players, and you can’t start by punishing the weaker and newer players right off the bat by charging them. That’s how you lose players.
2. Top tier players will still spend on potions to *prevent* dying. A free revive isn’t something they are going to want to take advantage of, ever, because they are never going to risk dying if they can avoid it. *But* if they die, they will not have to blow their entire potion stash to return to full health. They already lost attack bonus, we aren’t going to punish them further. That means they can still use their limited potions in a way that maximizes their points: healing small damage and lowering the risk of dying, like they normally do. Their strategic options don’t suddenly get vaporized.
3. Middle tier players get both benefits. They can choose to play more casually and throttle down spending, using the free revive mechanic to keep them in the game or they can play more aggressively like higher tier players play so long as their potions hold out. The free revive acts as a safety net for players trying to make the transition upward from more casual play to more hard core play.
The rest of it is *why* doing this makes sense, and why it isn’t inconsistent with the way the game works in general or the way the game is monetized. In other words, it doesn’t break some important rule about how the game is balanced , and it isn’t something Kabam must reject out of hand for business reasons.
@DNA3000 I think your argument for why this idea makes sense is fantastic. It wouldn't affect me in my current state as I'm not playing competitive war anymore for now, but if Kabam implemented something like this it would make moving up more attractive.
I'm genuinely curious how much a change like 100% health revives or massively shifting the potion economy would affect revenue honestly. I personally don't feel that AW is a high revenue game mode. I don't know many players involved in it that spend money to sustain it personally. That's obviously a very small sample size but it is a sample in a very small number of players comparatively to the whole in the more competitive end of it. I honestly have no idea how that shifts as you move down the tiers but I truly don't know many competitive AW players that spend directly on AW participation.
This has always been one of the things I understand least about their direction in resource economy. AW may not have massive direct expenditure but it has indirect costs at competitive levels that increase based on having more players engaged. More players competing means that going for new defenders or attackers and the resources to rank them become that much more enticing. Participation shouldn't be the gateway, winning should. I just feel that's a bigger win for both players and the devs.
I’ve always seen the other game modes feeding into AW which is where it’s value to the company comes from, perhaps it’s more nebulous and harder to define than other modes. All content effectively leads into AW: High prestige = high AQ score = better rank up materials Rank up materials = better defence Buying Cavs/offers = more options/higher sig defenders/attackers etc.
I'm genuinely curious how much a change like 100% health revives or massively shifting the potion economy would affect revenue honestly. I personally don't feel that AW is a high revenue game mode. I don't know many players involved in it that spend money to sustain it personally. That's obviously a very small sample size but it is a sample in a very small number of players comparatively to the whole in the more competitive end of it. I honestly have no idea how that shifts as you move down the tiers but I truly don't know many competitive AW players that spend directly on AW participation.
This has always been one of the things I understand least about their direction in resource economy. AW may not have massive direct expenditure but it has indirect costs at competitive levels that increase based on having more players engaged. More players competing means that going for new defenders or attackers and the resources to rank them become that much more enticing. Participation shouldn't be the gateway, winning should. I just feel that's a bigger win for both players and the devs.
I’ve always seen the other game modes feeding into AW which is where it’s value to the company comes from, perhaps it’s more nebulous and harder to define than other modes. All content effectively leads into AW: High prestige = high AQ score = better rank up materials Rank up materials = better defence Buying Cavs/offers = more options/higher sig defenders/attackers etc.
I think that's a matter of perspective: which game modes are more important to you sit on the top of the pyramid. But you can say the same thing about arena: more champs and higher ranked champs and higher sigged champs equals more points, equals more ability to earn more champs.
The game modes interconnect in a network, and which ones feed into the others depend on which node on the network you think is the top. That's really a reflection of the fact that the game's foundation is a champion collection game. The game starts with chasing and collecting champs, then investing in them, then using them. The game modes are part of what makes champs valuable to collect and invest in which fuels the chase for more champions and the resources to level them up.
All game modes contribute to overall progress. As to what game mode an Alliance focuses on most, that's subjective. War has a scoring metric that includes finishing Fights without a K.O. Having participated in discussions all along during the formulation of the current setup, I understand that's the objective, but it's not the only metric. 3 Attack Bonuses per Node allow for a range of outcomes overall. It's the Alliances that place expectations on their Players. You must heal to full, you must not die, you must....etc. The system itself rewards people entirely appropriately when they fail. It's also not that tight. You can take Ls and maintain your Bracket, to an extent. Sometimes it's crucial, and other times a full 3 BG clears are enough to maintain status quo. It's not the entire focus or amalgamation of the game. It's an aspect just like others.
This will never happen lol. They even increase the price of revives and you want it to be free? Kabam employees are probably laughing reading this post.
This will never happen lol. They even increase the price of revives and you want it to be free? Kabam employees are probably laughing reading this post.
This aged like milk on a hot day lol
I mean technically it’s not free 1 loyalty is still wayyyyy too expensive
You're right! How could I not factor in the cost of 1 loyalty per revive. I am shame
Comments
There aren't many people spending on war, just like there aren't many people spending on crystals or other offers. But as with everywhere else, the game makes up for it by charging those 5% a lot for what they get.
I'm looking at the design of war, not how it is played. We're seeing war in a very distorted state from its intended design, including its intended monetization. We're seeing war during a period where players are getting huge amounts of free potions. And we're seeing war during a period where players are diverting substantial amounts of glory to potions, which is clearly a situation the developers did not strictly speaking intend. That's why they are trying to separate the AQ and AW potion economy. It isn't *explicitly* to make potions more expensive. It is to eliminate this cross use of resources from AQ to AW.
The devs tend to balance around averages. This isn't an uncommon game designer tool. The problem is when you balance around averages, half of everyone is below average and half are above average. The people who buy less than the average amount of potions is going to come out ahead with the new system. The people who buy more than average will come out behind. The people who buy a lot more than average will get squeezed. The high cost of potions and harsh limits are a consequence of balancing around averages. Basically, to the devs one player spending more and one player spending less is everyone spending the same. However, the people spending more don't see it that way.
To some extent, squeezing the players who want the most and need the most is just how monetization works. Someone has to pay, and generally the game places that burden on the people who want the most out of the game. In general, the principle is fine. But here, I think war itself doesn't handle potions correctly and thus puts too much squeeze on too many players, and the attempt to shift potions to loyalty has exposed a lot of problems that were being hidden under a flood of glory.
Every major sport deals with this. There are lots of rules in, say, (American) football that are there not to enhance competition but to improve its viability as a spectator sport. If no one is watching, there is no sport. And no one is going to get top 1% rewards in alliance war if there is no 2% playing.
So while everyone has their own ideas of what would make the perfect alliance war competition, it is important to keep in mind that it is in the best best interests of everyone who wants alliance war to continue if the game mode included things they don't like but other people like, because that's how you protect the long term future of the game mode.
It is probably not a coincidence that both modes have a casual element to them. You can be a hard core arena grinder and you can be a hard core battlegrounds player, but in both cases you can pop into the mode for a few minutes and be done with it. I say this is likely not a coincidence because a revive is (outside of war) something you use to preserve your effort. If you get this far and then die, you're reviving so you don't have to start over. Not starting over only makes sense in content that can take a while to complete. Reviving in a game mode where everything is over in a few minutes is less likely to be meaningful. Not impossible, just less likely.
Battlegrounds is a solo mode (more or less). If it is good that's great. If it is bad, everyone will ignore it. That's what happened to Dungeons, enough so that Kabam was willing to revamp it into Incursions, which may not be the most popular game mode around but it sucks a lot less than Dungeons did. But whether Incursions is a success or not, doesn't really matter in the grand scheme of things. The people who like it play it. The people who don't like it don't. And you don't see lots of people complaining about it either way. The same will ultimately be true about Battlegrounds.
But if alliance war is bad, you can't just arbitrarily ignore it. Your alliance might still run it. Players have the choice to accept it, or quit their alliances, or be kicked - basically the choice they have now. Solo game modes can survive or fail on their own merit. But alliance game modes can rip alliances apart. They can guilt players into spending more on the game than they are comfortable with, and eventually grow to resent it. Alliances are themselves an engagement tool, a way for us to play with a small group of people that we presumably care about more than the millions of anonymous nobodies that surround us in such a large game. But alliance game modes that bring more stress than they are worth are a net negative. They cost the game more players and more good will from the game than they are worth.
If you get rid of alliance war, you will be getting rid of a game mode that many top tier players explicitly play for. If you don't fix it you'll continue to leave a festering problem that causes more pain than benefit. So even if you don't care about war, it is still probably worth trying to address its issues.
What I mean is that this sounds like a great idea for alliances where everything hinges on those individual deaths. This still penalizes that, while allowing everyone to keep going at the same time. However, for my alliances and others at our level, that isn't the main thing that wins or loses us our wars. If everyone would revive automatically, there would be nothing stopping people from pushing through a carefully placed roadblocking champion. Those champions stand there in order to stop progression and win the defending alliance the war. Under this new system, it would drastically change how these wars are won. You could simply brute-force your way through these defenses.
I'm not saying this is a bad thing, necessarily. I also think that AW runs the risk of being quite toxic and I'm definitely for everything that alleviates that toxicity. This could be one such solution. However, I simply think it's worth pointing out that the wars are played and strategized differently depending on which tier you're at. Any change would affect these tiers differently. If the playing field is leveled, that would also mean that there could be less of an opportunity for higher-tier players within the alliance to pick up the slack of the lower-tier players. If that were to happen for my alliance, that would lead to a pretty dramatic shift and the lower-tier players would really need to level up in order to not "drag down" the others.
But it's definitely an intriguing idea. I'm not opposed to it; I'm just not immediately sold on it either.
As to lower tier war, this does change the dynamics of 100% exploration. That’s deliberate, and such wars would have to gravitate away from road blocking metas to a new meta of quality of exploration in general. The hope is that the payoff for that change is a more accessible game mode.
The guy who flagged it literally seconds after I posted it, I'm pretty sure they didn't give it serious thought. But I'm guessing there are valid disagrees in there from people who, for whatever reason, read it, thought about it, and decided they didn't like it. They are entitled to that opinion.
1. Casual players can participate in war without getting trapped into a situation that forces them to spend. It’s important to keep bringing in fresh players, and you can’t start by punishing the weaker and newer players right off the bat by charging them. That’s how you lose players.
2. Top tier players will still spend on potions to *prevent* dying. A free revive isn’t something they are going to want to take advantage of, ever, because they are never going to risk dying if they can avoid it. *But* if they die, they will not have to blow their entire potion stash to return to full health. They already lost attack bonus, we aren’t going to punish them further. That means they can still use their limited potions in a way that maximizes their points: healing small damage and lowering the risk of dying, like they normally do. Their strategic options don’t suddenly get vaporized.
3. Middle tier players get both benefits. They can choose to play more casually and throttle down spending, using the free revive mechanic to keep them in the game or they can play more aggressively like higher tier players play so long as their potions hold out. The free revive acts as a safety net for players trying to make the transition upward from more casual play to more hard core play.
The rest of it is *why* doing this makes sense, and why it isn’t inconsistent with the way the game works in general or the way the game is monetized. In other words, it doesn’t break some important rule about how the game is balanced , and it isn’t something Kabam must reject out of hand for business reasons.
All content effectively leads into AW:
High prestige = high AQ score = better rank up materials
Rank up materials = better defence
Buying Cavs/offers = more options/higher sig defenders/attackers etc.
The game modes interconnect in a network, and which ones feed into the others depend on which node on the network you think is the top. That's really a reflection of the fact that the game's foundation is a champion collection game. The game starts with chasing and collecting champs, then investing in them, then using them. The game modes are part of what makes champs valuable to collect and invest in which fuels the chase for more champions and the resources to level them up.
It's the Alliances that place expectations on their Players. You must heal to full, you must not die, you must....etc. The system itself rewards people entirely appropriately when they fail. It's also not that tight. You can take Ls and maintain your Bracket, to an extent. Sometimes it's crucial, and other times a full 3 BG clears are enough to maintain status quo.
It's not the entire focus or amalgamation of the game. It's an aspect just like others.