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Constructive Feedback on Alliance War Difficulty
Danxor
Posts: 97 ★★
Not sure what happened to my post it seemed to disappear immediately, and I don't see how this violates any rules so re-posting. I assume forum did something weird.
This post is going to cover the current state of Alliance War difficulty, highlight the good and the bad that have come with it, and provide some potential ideas on how to improve things going forward that hopefully can align with Kabam's goals and provide everyone a better experience.
Having war deaths occur at the highest of skill levels and difficulty is healthy for war, having wars decided on which alliance is able to build the best defense, and have then have their attackers dismantle the opponents defenses the best is important. We ideally don't want to be in a world where the best players are just using nuke champs to fight for lowest clear time to win a tiebreaker because the nodes are so easy no one dies.
With that said, tuning war to the difficulty that Masters players are challenged leads to very high death counts at lower skill levels and ends up with a large amount of the community dissatisfied. The tiering system of nodes/maps attempts to alleviate this, but even with that this tactic has seen a huge step up in difficulty at all levels.
So while this may be an unpopular opinion, I think that the increased difficulty is healthy for the mode and I welcome it to stay, but we need some changes to compensate for it.
To solve for these problems, I propose that Alliance War health potions need to be re-balanced and addressed, there are many ways to approach this, but with proper balancing of these, the cost burden of death can be reduced to something reasonable that players are willing to participate in. I am going to list out a variety of ideas I have had, and I think a combination of them may be needed to help fix the cost to value of war to make players more than happy to welcome in the new difficulty.
At Tier 2 winning a war provides ~80k loyalty, losing ~45k loyalty, so on average if an alliance goes 6-6 a player earns ~62k loyalty war
1. Reduce the price of the 9,500 single heal potions from 20,000 loyalty to 5,000 loyalty. Thus cutting the cost of them to 1/4th. This will make healing up a dead champion cost significantly less, and be more reasonable for a player to do. Healing a champion to full after a 40% revive will cost 20-30k loyalty, about half what the player would earn for the war on average. Allowing a player to die twice and still break even in war expenditures.
2. Change war Healing potions to be percentage based or add new ones that are, I know this has been discussed and is likely a no go, but if you create a 30% heal potion and price it at 15k loyalty, a 40% revive + 2 30% heal potions full heals a champ for 30k loyalty. If a player is good and lives in a fight at 10% health its 45k to full heal that champ for an additional fight. This aligns well with the current loyalty gains.
3. Remove the cost scaling on Alliance War health potions in the store, remove the cap on purchase cost per day. As war is getting more difficult, players are spending closer to the 15 items a war they are allotted, and the cost scaling is just compounding the loyalty problems. On top of that the big healing potions buying 5 a day allows for 10 to be bought per war, which is less than our item cap so if a player is having to heavy heal they are falling behind the amount purchasable. If there was no cap and they were a bit cheaper, war is still balanced because of the item cap in war. This just makes it less of a burden to remember to buy healing potions for war daily.
4. Increase Item use cap at lower tier wars, not sure how much this will move the needle any unless some of the above changes are made, but since players are expected to die more in lower tier wars due to not being as strong of players when facing these nodes, they end up hitting the item cap more quickly and are forced to just 40% revive through everything, adding the option to spend more items at lower tiers may be used by players if the loyalty cost of the heals was reasonable.
@Kabam Miike for vis.
This post is going to cover the current state of Alliance War difficulty, highlight the good and the bad that have come with it, and provide some potential ideas on how to improve things going forward that hopefully can align with Kabam's goals and provide everyone a better experience.
Current War State
As the community as a whole can attest, the new level of difficulty the global nodes brought into war this season was a step up from what we have seen in the past. While the majority of the feedback about this node has been negative, I think that the change has brought about something very positive. At the very top level of war, even alliances like GT40 are taking deaths in wars. It has long been that the top alliances could go a whole season with single digit death numbers, now with the increased difficulty deaths are happening.Having war deaths occur at the highest of skill levels and difficulty is healthy for war, having wars decided on which alliance is able to build the best defense, and have then have their attackers dismantle the opponents defenses the best is important. We ideally don't want to be in a world where the best players are just using nuke champs to fight for lowest clear time to win a tiebreaker because the nodes are so easy no one dies.
With that said, tuning war to the difficulty that Masters players are challenged leads to very high death counts at lower skill levels and ends up with a large amount of the community dissatisfied. The tiering system of nodes/maps attempts to alleviate this, but even with that this tactic has seen a huge step up in difficulty at all levels.
So while this may be an unpopular opinion, I think that the increased difficulty is healthy for the mode and I welcome it to stay, but we need some changes to compensate for it.
Solutions for Increased Difficulty
With the increased difficulty the average number of deaths even at T2 war when clearing has gone up significantly. The amount of chip damage that players take and need to heal between fights is also going up, this is causing the total amount of loyalty that people need to spend to compete at wars to far exceed the loyalty they are brining in. Many alliances are choosing to just go the cheap route of 40% revives and not caring, this is hurting the mode and needs to be course corrected.To solve for these problems, I propose that Alliance War health potions need to be re-balanced and addressed, there are many ways to approach this, but with proper balancing of these, the cost burden of death can be reduced to something reasonable that players are willing to participate in. I am going to list out a variety of ideas I have had, and I think a combination of them may be needed to help fix the cost to value of war to make players more than happy to welcome in the new difficulty.
At Tier 2 winning a war provides ~80k loyalty, losing ~45k loyalty, so on average if an alliance goes 6-6 a player earns ~62k loyalty war
1. Reduce the price of the 9,500 single heal potions from 20,000 loyalty to 5,000 loyalty. Thus cutting the cost of them to 1/4th. This will make healing up a dead champion cost significantly less, and be more reasonable for a player to do. Healing a champion to full after a 40% revive will cost 20-30k loyalty, about half what the player would earn for the war on average. Allowing a player to die twice and still break even in war expenditures.
2. Change war Healing potions to be percentage based or add new ones that are, I know this has been discussed and is likely a no go, but if you create a 30% heal potion and price it at 15k loyalty, a 40% revive + 2 30% heal potions full heals a champ for 30k loyalty. If a player is good and lives in a fight at 10% health its 45k to full heal that champ for an additional fight. This aligns well with the current loyalty gains.
3. Remove the cost scaling on Alliance War health potions in the store, remove the cap on purchase cost per day. As war is getting more difficult, players are spending closer to the 15 items a war they are allotted, and the cost scaling is just compounding the loyalty problems. On top of that the big healing potions buying 5 a day allows for 10 to be bought per war, which is less than our item cap so if a player is having to heavy heal they are falling behind the amount purchasable. If there was no cap and they were a bit cheaper, war is still balanced because of the item cap in war. This just makes it less of a burden to remember to buy healing potions for war daily.
4. Increase Item use cap at lower tier wars, not sure how much this will move the needle any unless some of the above changes are made, but since players are expected to die more in lower tier wars due to not being as strong of players when facing these nodes, they end up hitting the item cap more quickly and are forced to just 40% revive through everything, adding the option to spend more items at lower tiers may be used by players if the loyalty cost of the heals was reasonable.
Conclusion
Overall I believe that higher difficulty wars is a good things for making the top tier wars competitive and make skill, planning, and deaths matter. But the fallout of this is detrimental to the player base once you move beyond the higher skilled players in the game. But properly addressing the cost and efficiency of healing potions then the increased difficulty would make sense for all players and make War a challenging game mode that the majority of alliances will see is worth participating in.@Kabam Miike for vis.
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increased item cap = increased capacity for spending
it's what's holding them back from making it even more painful
The community has adjusted to certain “expected” death levels, so there really needs to be detailed communication from the game team about what death levels a tactic is targeting. To dive into specifics, let’s say we’re talking about GT40. The norm and expectation has been zero deaths across the board. As such, players can feel obligated to spend to levels that can maintain that expectation. This isn’t healthy because it moves AW further towards P2W on the spectrum. However, if Kabam announce “summoners, we expect this tactic to average 10 deaths per war in t1, 25 in t2, 40 in t3, etc,” it gives us the opportunity to see how the tactic is tuned and give better feedback in off-season.
JMO.
So first off, I'll hopefully comfort you a little that this is a massive ongoing conversation in the CCP with the economy and AW teams. It isn't being ignored, and all of your ideas have been suggested and are a part of the conversation. To be clear, that's nothing like a guarantee that any will be put into place, but just so you know these concerns are being heard and discussed.
I think the main issue here (and this is me speaking on my own opinion and having spoken to some Kabam employees) is that before this season, it would probably have been extremely tough to make the case that loyalty and items needed looking at. We were coming off the back of the easiest T1 tactic in a very long time, Decay countered sugar pill so absolutely, and it also made 25% of the map easier by countering path 9, champs that apply debuffs/passive DOT like Mysterio/Kindred, unstoppable and evade, power gain etc. So people just weren't dying, and that means that it would likely be hard to find data that supported a change in consumables for war
I think (and not that this makes the current situation fine) that we kind of needed a really tough season to come along to inspire change with items, because these issues were there before. A year ago we were healing up 40-50k R3 6* champions with 15 items in one war, that allows for around 4 deaths before iteming out. Now we are healing 100-110k R3 7*s and that items you out after 2 deaths for example. These issues were here during Decay, and during conduit etc, but we weren't dying 4 times in a war. So there was not really the data (anecdotal or otherwise) to support changing items.
Again, this doesn't make it fine now, I'm just trying to explain why I think we are in this situation.
But now that we are here, what should be done? As for your ideas OP, I think some have potential, but I think some would actually make war worse.
1. Reduce the price of the 9,500 single heal potions from 20,000 loyalty to 5,000 loyalty.
I fully would support a reduction in price of potions. I think it's preferable to increasing war pay-outs, since that affects 7 star loyalty crystal economy, boost purchasing, mastery stuff etc. I'd probably disagree with quartering the cost, but i appreciate it's not really the point to haggle over specific numbers. The overall point of reducing cost is one i agree with.
2. Change war Healing potions to be percentage based
I don't think this would be a good change at all. If I'm using Wiccan and you are using Sasquatch. If we both end the fight at 90% health, who played worse? I might have taken a combo on block and lost that health, you might have eaten a special 3, or 3 combos and lost that health. The sasquatch player then gets to use the same number of items as the wiccan player after playing far, far worse. Or more importantly, the Wiccan player needs to use an item because of a blocked hit. Because of this, lower health pool champs are disincentivised to be used even more than they currently are, because while % potions make healing up from KO a little easier, it makes chip damage that these lower HP champs take completely unsustainable in war. We're already incentivised to bring chunky, safe, tanky champs to war. I wouldn't want a change that makes war less diverse personally.
I think % based potions are brought up as a "something must be done" option, because potions haven't been updated to just heal more because we are on R3 7*s instead of 6*s. But it's not actually better in my opinion. I think (and not necessarily you OP) that some people think % potions would be a fix-all and make any healing problems go away, but that's just not a realistic expectation. Shifting to % potions would be just that, a shift. It would have to be balanced in such a way there's still a challenge in item management in war. Items becoming % based and also strong enough to not worry in the same way we do now just isn't going to happen. They w ould be balanced so that it's just shifting some of the issues we have now are still there, because it is meant to challenge us as players
I think basically, I feel that if you lose half of a 145k HP Boosted R3 Sasquatch in war having taken 75k damage, you should probably have to spend more to heal them than if you take 34k damage with a 68k HP wiccan. That's the "punishment" for taking so much damage. Your advantage, is that you can take more than Wiccans max health and still be on 50% and finish the fight, I don't think big tanky champs need more incentive to be used in war.
3. Remove the cost scaling on Alliance War health potions in the store, remove the cap on purchase cost per day
I'm fine with cost scaling being removed in theory. But just remember that cost scaling allows potions to be cheaper at the start. Our current L4 potions go from 20k to 50k scaling. If the economy team looked at removing that scaling while having the same or similar impact, it wouldn't turn into 20k for all 5. That's the difference between 162k for 5 and 100k for 5, a pretty substantial change. To have the same impact, potions would cost 32k the whole way through, which would allow you to jump in and buy 5, or 10 if they got rid of the daily cap whenever you wanted.
I'm basically just saying be careful asking for this, because it would likely come with an initial cost increase. That makes it better for some people (those who tend to buy a lot of items) but a lot worse for those who buy fewer. Someone who only bought 2 potions a day, which is pretty reasonable to go through a masters season with if you have 25 L4s at the start of the season, meaning about 85 potions total, is 7 potions a war - they'd end up paying 64k for those two daily potions instead of 42k they were paying before. Maybe they don't make it exactly the average of the escalating cost, but removing the escalating is almost certainly going to come with an initial price increase*, so you're making some people's lives harder.
(* of course this is assuming they don't just decide to reduce cost of items in your option 1 by removing escalating costs)
4. Increase Item use cap at lower tier wars
I'd say increase item cost all around the board. Completely agree with this though, like i said before, we used to be able to heal 4-5 deaths, now 1-3 is completely iteming us out. Champions have doubled in health and we still have the same level health pot sold for war (level 4s) and still have to heal with 15 items. Item cap needs to be increased, because people are at serious risk of just iteming out because of a double KO to one fight.
It’s nice that there is a discussion but it’s all got that beta test feeling to it when I hear it described that way.
I do need to disclose that I’m probably a bit saltier than normal with this being pushed during holiday breaks where nothing could be done rather than delaying the season and getting data from off season wars too…
This is going to be an unpopular thing to say on the surface, and I don't really have all that much skin in the game anymore, but I'll offer this warning anyway.
Suppose Kabam decided to allow alliances to buy AW points directly with loyalty. Say you spend 10,000 loyalty and you get 10 AW points. If you think your opponents are 160 points ahead of you, you could just spend 170,000 loyalty and get ahead of them. Of course this would be horrible.
Except that is what health potions are, with one caveat I'll get to. If you do an AW fight and you end up at 10% health, you're probably going to die in the next fight and lose an attack bonus. You're effectively losing 80 points, or alternatively you're giving your opponents 80 points (it matters for season points, but in terms of the head to head match up it is basically the same thing). But you can buy back those 80 points by just healing up. You spend loyalty (or units) to get AW health potions, and you're back to full and now you won't lose those 80 points. You've just bought AW points with loyalty. The health potions were just the intermediary for that process.
The exception of course is if you die. If you die, you've lost those points with no way to get them back. So AW health potions can be used to buy AW points, but only if you don't die. You can lose any amount of health you want as long as you don't die, and you can use loyalty to never lose any points. In theory, in any AW meta where the average player takes any amount of damage short of death, you can spend loyalty to buy back any points you might have lost. This is highly problematic, because if everyone didn't die or if death was very rare, then wars would no longer be about AW performance, because ending a fight with 90% health and ending a fight with 5% health would generate the same scoring. The fight that ends at 5% would just be more costly. But in terms of deciding wars, as long as both sides are willing to outspend each other, the difference in skill would be immaterial.
Of course, there's a limiting factor here. Even if you're willing to outspend your opponents, that can get very expensive because health potions cost a ton of loyalty, and once you run out of loyalty you're now spending units to buy victories. As with everything in this game, cash gets you a lot, but actually having to spend cash as opposed to a game currency places significant downward pressure on most players to refrain from profligate spending.
But suppose that changes, and health potions are now practical to use to reverse significant health loss across a wider range of alliances and alliance skill levels? Then what? You get the scenario above, where wins are being bought more often than they are being won. If you are the Kabam alliance war designer you're then left with the last design option: cause the players to die more often. This neutralizes the spending advantage by costing players points *before* they can buy them back with health potions. In other words, the cheaper health potions get, the harder war will have to get. And this change is unlikely to be proportional, because as mentioned, there's no difference in scoring between a fight that ends at 90% health and one that ends at 50% health and one that ends at 5% health. Difficulty is more of a threshold than a continuum here.
An optimist would interject here that none of this is a problem, because we can just balance the potion costs and the difficulty simultaneously to find the magic point where players spend less to heal up, but don't tip the difficulty too far in the opposite direction. The problem here is that besides being extremely optimistic, it is also highly circumstantial. It would be amazing bordering on a miracle if a balance point could be found that makes the majority of players happier than they are now in one war tier. It is impossible this will happen simultaneously in all tiers, because they all require completely different balance considerations. Some tier might end up sitting in the perfect spot, but all the others higher and lower will either find wars trivialized - which the devs won't allow - or (and this is more likely) a lot more difficult to compensate for the potion costs (I am, of course, talking mostly about wars that are at least at intermediate maps - maps lower than that flatten out in difficulty very rapidly).
At this point, if the players grab torches and march on Kabam mountain and demand cheaper AW health potions, I'm not going to argue against them. But I think the odds of them falling down it and landing in the pit of unintended consequences is extremely high.
I am in an alliance that has been placing in P2 for over a year and recently were getting near the edge of the T1/T2 rating border. So I have experience at moderately high tier war, but I don't know the exact details of how the last few seasons have been going at the highest tiers other than random insights from videos posted from players on their war recaps. As an alliance we choose to take this season a bit less seriously due to the timing, but the few wars we have fully planned and executed, it was still a bloodbath. It hasn't felt great. There is a spot where leadership at these levels has to weigh how hard to push and figure out the correct line for their alliance to take due to the war economy we are currently in.
If your alliance is in a spot where you can push real hard and make P2 for the season, but all of your members are spending all their earned loyalty and anything banked, and possibly units to succeed, or you can coast and get P3 for the season, are the increased rewards worth giving up the loyalty that could be spent on a 7*. Also pushing for P2 in such a deadly and costly meta wears on people, so each alliance right now at all levels is having to make these hard decisions on where to commit their resources. Which arguable is a good thing that hard decisions are being made by players, but if too many alliances all throw their hands up and go 40% revive spam, that is not ideal for Kabam.
we can just buff potions and keep the 15 limit, so why the need for change? if it's hard to balance across tiers, we had tiers back then too.
we have champions with 100-120k health yet the 9.5k loyalty potions seem to be designed for rank 3 6 stars. something has to give and lifting the ceiling on item use or making the map so hard that everyone spends a lot more literally fits the definition of item grab.
remember the war potion backlash when they switched currencies almost 2 years ago? it was designed to give two 6k potions every two weeks, let's avoid this as much as we can.
You could argue that the war economy at the time was a contributing factor to that lock-in. It certainly wasn't the only factor, and it might not have even been one of the more important factors, but it was a factor. And ever since then the devs have been continuing to iterate war, changing nodes, maps, tactics, and not, I believe, to find the best configuration for war, but actually to keep changing it enough to prevent it from finding an equilibrium state again. The devs understand that the players are capable of highly optimizing war, and that always leads to intense pressure to play perfectly and drive deaths to zero and then create the conditions for burn out. The current strategy seems to be to prevent players (at least at the top) from ever getting comfortable with war ever again, so they can never over-optimize war, so there's never again the perception that one mistake is fatal. And in that sort of dynamic environment, they have to be very careful about changing the war economy to make things too easy to just spend to optimal results.
That means sometimes there's going to be easy meta seasons and sometimes very expensive ones, specifically to keep the top players off balance. And the costs are going to be tuned accordingly. This is not something I discuss with the devs on a regular basis, but that's my impression from the outside looking in on how war has evolved, and where its currently going. This does not mean, by the way, that there isn't room for tuning and adjustments. It is entirely possible that with defenses and attack teams moving to 7* rarity that potions costs are now, proportionately speaking, too high. What I am saying is that it is very likely that where potion costs go (or strengths, which is ultimately the same thing) is more likely to be driven by global balance issues than they will be driven by the perceptions of how easy or hard it is to heal up an attacker. The way war is designed, this is supposed to be very hard to do, not something that is just done as a cost of doing business. How hard is the open question.
To put it another way, I think at least in terms of how the designers see it, war has always been broken, it just has been broken in different ways at different times, and there's no example from the past that they would be willing to just go back to as an example of the right way to do anything, given that for any time in the past the things some players think was working fine may have been the cause of other problems they eventually had to deal with downstream. The cost of things is likely to be one of those things they are still looking for the right balance of that not only is perceived as better by the players, but also works properly behind the scenes.
One more thing: costs aren't universally higher, or rather it isn't certain that players overall are spending more. Revives are now (essentially) free. In the past, you could argue that the costs to participate in war were excessively high given the way competition works. But now, no one has to spend anything to participate in war or to complete their paths. The only reason to spend is to spend on potions, and the only reason to spend on potions is to gain an advantage against their opponents by in effect buying war points, which not everyone does. It is actually difficult to say if players actually are spending more on war overall, even with higher rarity champs in play because of this, even in higher tiers. Some players almost certainly are, but other are equally certainly to be spending less. How that averages out I couldn't hazard a guess.
You can't just CONVINCE people to spend thousands of units in wars, nobody will buy it.
You are in fact a funny dude. That's almost as funny as telling me to pay attention to numbers.
Let's see how the war goes, I'm 100% OK if Kabam decided to keep the difficulty of wars, just 1 loyalty revives I can still get P1 rewards, why do I care if Kabam doesn't care.
I think it would help a lot - If they dont want to tune down the DEF global as they said already - to give the ATK global a passiv unstoppable while rooted. So that you get more windows to dex more DMG , even after you screwed up before.
Right now i feel like - from everything i hear, that a lot of players have kinda given up with AW modus and gonna either stop playing AW next season, or whole alliances shifting to 40% potions without healing up after death economy - cant be the intended way to kill the most important game mode for alliances by any means.
Sincerely.
the golden age of war is subjective but clearly the sudden drop in t1/t2 participation this season isn't. i understand that optimization and low scoring matches gets boring, which i think was an issue before attacker bans came out, but i disagree that low scoring matches causes extra stress. frustration maybe, but i'd take that over not being able to run the mode.
what causes the most stress to me and i assume many others is sustainability. if we're forced to use items then run out of loyalty and have to start dipping into units (some even having to buy them), that's the difference between being able to run the mode seriously or not.
i don't know what their plan is. you mentioned that they might never want to make players comfortable with a map ever again. doesn't look good right now. t1/t2 teams are just phoning in it and i can't see players deciding to change their minds.
kabam has never successfully forced players into excessive war spending. they added diversity (aug 2017) then removed it (june 2018?) and it caused a backlash so they added it back. when they changed currencies to loyalty and crushed the potion market in early '22, there was a backlash:
sustainability is what keeps the mode alive and players playing. i'm willing to bet they could add game breaking rewards to war and players still wouldn't touch it if it means spending 1-1.5k units a war.
add a r3 gem in masters rewards but demand that players spend 1k+ units a war on potions and they won't do it.
players are okay with transactional stores like cyber monday (up to a point), but game modes can't be transactional. game modes need the illusion of "free" baked into it. good loyalty supply, sustainable potions, cheap enough boosts...
Just don't spend? That's also a tough pill to swallow, because if you don't spend at all in a very tough war, you could just not finish your path at all. You might be willing to give up points, your alliance might even give you the green light to not spend, but to not finish at all is also a very tough one to accept, again, especially at higher tiers.
Or rather, that used to be the case. Not any more. You could decide to not quit and not spend and just do your best, if you decide that Kabam has gone too far with a war meta. You just need to revive your way through. You will likely lose wars you might have otherwise won, but you'll still get something and by not quitting but not spending, you would be sending a much stronger message to Kabam than just quitting. Because when alliances quit war, Kabam gives out less rewards. But if everyone keeps participating but just stops spending, the game gives exactly the same amount of rewards to the players that it would if everyone spent a ton. Those rewards might get shuffled around to different alliances, but the total rewards going out remains the same. In effect, players get to decide how expensive those rewards are.
In a meta most people think is fair, everyone will spend some amount of resources to get those rewards. In a meta where the overwhelming majority think the meta isn't fair, players can and hopefully will collectively choose to spend less, and as a whole Kabam can't penalize them for that, because someone has to get #1 rewards, someone has to get #2 rewards, and so on. That option exists because there's two ways to participate in war: spend a ton on potions, or spend nothing on revives. Players have a choice they didn't used to, that can counterbalance the effects of a meta that is too punishing.
This is not an accidental quirk of the revive change.
Everyone in the alliance agrees that the current route is preferable to trying to deal with the current AW meta, so we have no plans to change the strategy this season or next. Our war rating has dropped pretty significantly, but we're somehow still T4. Hopefully we can squeak out P6, but if we finish in Gold, oh well.