**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.
Comments
At the highest competitive levels, really tier 1, the meta has squeezed that choice to the point where potions are used basically in a mandatory and proactive way to not just reduce the chance of dying, but to attempt to eliminate it completely. On the one hand, that's expensive. On the other hand, if you make it cheap then potions themselves become pointless. And not only that, but without correspondingly large changes to the design meta, that won't help tier 1 players, because if the devs can't chip you down because you have unlimited health potion usage (effectively), then they'll redesign the maps so that the fights don't damage you, they kill you outright by scaling the difficulty higher and higher until they get a death count that's satisfactory.
Before you tackle the problem of expensive health potions in tier 1, you have to tackle the fundamental problem of how the devs intend to allow tier 1 alliances to fight it out. The current design meta is to increase difficulty until enough deaths happen for most wars to be decided on scoring and not tie breaking, and so that a single death is not usually the overt single deciding factor. Cheap potions would have the side effect of making tier 1 war vastly harder under those design conditions. It is that root situation that in my opinion needs to be tackled, and it is a problem that has been around for years. The high cost of potions is just an inevitable consequence of that problem which is catching up to players now.
Remember how someone said: If the costs outweigh the pleasure, it's time to jump off.
I think this phrase fits our situation.
Then there are mid-tier players that do not boost constantly, do not heal constantly, but are more likely to die, both because they aren't spending on potions constantly and also because they tend to be lower skilled players. These players are not as harmed by high health potion costs, because their potion use is more flexible: they can use them, or not, situationally. Dying once or twice is also not the end of the world for most players competing at this level. The more serious problem is the fact that mid-tier alliances tend to be more heterogenous. Tier 1 alliances have nothing but tier 1 players. But a tier 6 alliance might have tier 4 caliber players and tier 8 caliber players. The tier 4 players will be cruising along, while the tier 8 players might be suffering high potion and revive costs. Some of them might be ultimately kicked, but most mid tier alliances are not going to just kick everyone who dies slightly more often. They might prefer to keep the alliance together and tolerate the lower caliber players. But the problem is those players can item out and literally be unable to complete paths. This is a much more stressful situation. Losing is one thing, failing to even complete your path is another.
At this tier, low cost (and unrestricted) revives would help a great deal. They would allow players to keep their alliances together and play together even if they have to take losses. Remember: in alliance war you don't lose forever, you just lose until you drop to a level where you start to win. Eventually they will stabilize at a tier where the average player is fine, the highest players are cruising easy, and the lowest players are struggling. But with cheap revives, they won't be forced to spend anything while they are struggling. They can just do their best and keep going.
My guess is for every tier 1 alliance, there are twenty mid tier alliances like this.
Finally, there are the alliances that have no problem with alliance war costs, because they've decided to straight up give up on the game mode because of its various problems. Many of these alliances have simply decided that given the issues with alliance war, AW is simply not worth its costs. But with cheap revives, there's now a "free to play" alliance war option. Or rather, a much more realistic one. At the moment, you can choose to play completely for free, if you're willing to just stop where you die and quit. But that's unpalatable to many players for many reasons. There's now an option where an alliance can choose to do "zero spend alliance war" even if they have a wide range of players, and without forcing players to just die in front of a difficult fight and quit the game mode.
This might be the biggest potential win of the cheap revives. The whales in this game come from the free to play players. People pick up the game, decide they like playing it, and then just a few people out of every hundred decide to spend on it, which is how the game survives. If this game became hostile to free to play players, eventually it would have no whales either. The competitive war players also have to come from somewhere. If a player never gets to play war because their alliance hates it and refuses to touch it, many such players will never know if they like it. And most players can't or won't just jump directly into a competitive alliance just to try war out. The people who love alliance war comes from the group of players that like alliance war, and the players who like alliance war comes from the group of players that play alliance war. If you want a healthy game mode, one of the things you have to do is be accessible to the playerbase.
Cheap revives recreates something that used to exist before war seasons. It creates a reasonable on ramp for more casual free to play alliance war. Psychologically, that was much harder post-seasons. Cheap revives should help open that door again.
The people who say this doesn't fully address tier 1 concerns are right: it doesn't. It is one step in addressing the negative effects of the high costs of war. It tackles the easiest problems (in my opinion) in that they have the least controversy surrounding them - assuming you're willing to accept the thought process behind them. The issues surrounding balancing the high costs of top tier competition while preserving the high level competition is a trickier problem to solve, and probably won't be fully solved immediately. Tier 1 players do die occasionally, and when they die reviving and returning to full health was an immense burst of cost. The cheap revives will significantly lower that cost. It takes some of the pressure off, but not all of it. But some is better than before.
I also understand that this is a GAME. For some, it would be “better” for them to die and save the loyalty (or units). I’m not advocating just dying and then reviving for significantly less, but it is a better use of loyalty.
My alliance runs “causal war”. We try to win, we do revive, heal and boost when needed. And yes, we are mid tier with a wide variety of skill. Some of us use 1 or 2 boosts and that’s it. Some use boosts, potions and revives every war. This “new” system is not balanced. If I need to heal a champ, I still have to spend 75k loyalty. If a tier 1 player needs to heal his champ, he is spending 75k loyalty. The difference is they are getting enough loyalty to heal up multiple champs each war, I am not. Yes yes, I could “get better” or move up. Point is, I don’t want to. I enjoy low stress causal war. I still need to finish my path and we need to clear the map.
This is a step in the right direction, as I said. But until they make potions more affordable or more available (add them to the victor crystal maybe), AW will still be impossible for the majority of players to move up in.
But I think if pots can made percentage base, it may solve some issues. Or just introduce them along with regular pots. R4 and r3s have large hp pool than 5/65s. It may not solve everything but I feel I can change something good towards the players.
375 units for an invul boost lol? That’s what, £15 for a 3 minute boost?
Just like @Kabam Miike admitted that Cyclops is the most effective champ
If you won't change the above, consider... Add the level 3 or 4 AW health potions with a 20% drop rate to the superior crystals. This way we can get boosts and AW health potions from there as an alternative.
Placing 2* defenders from dodgy alts just to minimise diversity points loss already annoys me.
Yes, having a short BG should disadvantage us against a full BG, which it does if the opponent decides to take as many tiles as possible (and I'm ok with that) but 6r3 defenders on boss island vs 5r4 attackers (some not even that high) should be worth something, now that advantage is gone with the revives as they are now.
We will probably stop ranking pure defenders because of it.
Disclaimer: I don't take war that seriously, find it boring and haven't played at all this season because I was waiting to see what happened when compensation pots ended. Turns out it will be way worse for us.