Potential for AW Seasons to be won by bribery
benjamin_lee
Member Posts: 37
One alliance's total AW score in each AW match includes a component for "defenders remaining". Theoretically one alliance could offer gifts to the other alliance to leave some defenders left standing. This need not even necessarily be for throwing the match, but even just asking them to leave 5 or 10 defenders alive, could give the first-mentioned alliance an undue advantage. Especially considering this score is accumulated over many wars.
Yes it is true that it would not be in the interest of the other alliance to leave some defenders left standing since they would lose out on points. But that may well be possible once the war is decided because the offering-alliance has too high an attack bonus to overcome. Also, it cannot be ruled out that some alliances may well offer ridiculous sums in gifts in order to secure the slightest advantage.
I guess what I am driving at is this: to make AW rig-proof, the AW score that an alliance can get must be determined only by whateverthat alliance can do, and not be influenced by the other alliance.
Yes it is true that it would not be in the interest of the other alliance to leave some defenders left standing since they would lose out on points. But that may well be possible once the war is decided because the offering-alliance has too high an attack bonus to overcome. Also, it cannot be ruled out that some alliances may well offer ridiculous sums in gifts in order to secure the slightest advantage.
I guess what I am driving at is this: to make AW rig-proof, the AW score that an alliance can get must be determined only by whateverthat alliance can do, and not be influenced by the other alliance.
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Comments
All kabam needs to do though to prevent this though is make it so defenders remaining subtract from your own score instead of adding to the opponents. But that is unlikely to happen soon and we’ll see how the defenders remaining manipulation plays out especially in the top 20.
I think you are overthinking this one a little too much. A problem like you describe would be very hard to police and it is a problem that could affect all alliances, not just the top alliances. Plus points reign supreme in seasons, so no amount of gifts (at least not for a top alliance) would be enough for an alliance to accept a bribe since those points that you miss will ultimately hurt your chances at ranking higher at the end.
The problem though is even if you were serious then the other 9 members of your battlegroup and the other 29 members of your alliance have to agree too or you might be up a creek without a paddle.
Let's both leave "X" Defenders up, so our score is boosted.
We will still compete within the new parameters, however, we know that we BOTH will be advantaged to increase our score. Win or lose, its still more points.
Still embodies alot of trust in the other alliance, however, much like the 3* war days, if there was some sort of unity, it could skew things considerably.
The problem though is that the logic behind it is flawed. I get 250 points for one defender remaining. However, if I can take the next node then I get 150 points for the node plus 240 points (or 160 on second try) if I can beat that defender in one shot. Why would a top tier alliance give up 310 points or 390 points for 250 points? It's a ridiculous notion when you consider that the multiplier for those points at the top tier is that much more too.
I was so looking forward to someone sending supportive math. Thank you!
Fact of the matter is, there is no in game gifting that can compare to the rewards for doing the best you can in AQ/war. Therefore, bribery is pointless.
If its a couple of them who want to get the alliance in trouble, they just take paths without back ups and throw the same, or leave minis unkilled. Whats the point you are making? There is absolutely no way to monitor out of game chat or any form of bribery in any game or sport.
Who would do it, or bother to care about it though?
As before, the problem with the score calculation is that it is inherently flawed insofar as the actions of the other alliance affects your raw score and that it is possible to influence their actions after the match up has been revealed.
Lots of people saying potions = T2A/T5B. Clearly this scenario will not be a problem between any of the top 20 alliances. But beyond that, nobody can rule out the possibility that even 1 extra defender remaining score is obtained by promising gifts.
With respect, there is a point of difference between what you are suggesting and the possible giving of extra points in AW. When one alliance throws AQ, SA or any other game-wide competition, they are not giving points directly to one other alliance to get an advantage over every other alliance. What they are doing is to remove themselves from the race; every other alliance then moves 1 spot up. E.g. if number 5 alliance 'throws' AQ, then number 6 becomes 5, number 7 becomes 6 and so on. Everyone else benefits.
The problem I am highlighting here is different. Because the AW set up is 1 v 1, the alliance that 'throws' AW by leaving defenders remaining intentionally can directly benefit the opposing alliance. This benefit does not go to any other alliance. The opposing alliance has their score bumped up artificially and in relation to every other alliance. The equivalent to this scenario in the AQ or SA situation would be to allow one alliance to buy or gift AQ/SA points to another alliance.
Are you saying it is impossible that this will ever happen? In every conceivable scenario? Or are you just saying that it is unlikely to happen in a small class of alliances, ie the top 20 or 50 or 100 alliances? I can accept the latter, but there is simply no way anyone can rule this out 100%. There is a loophole in the system and it needs to be fixed.
In the risk assessment world there are 3 things to consider: Severity, Detection, and Occurrence. The overall risk of a certain scenario can be then quantified using some form of 0-10 rating scale.
In the scenario you have laid out, the overall severity is basically nothing. If this does happen, the benefiting alliance would receive a very small amount of points relative to all the points they would normally get.
Occurrence has to be very low as well. My guess is this will never happen, but even if it did, it would be 1 in a million at best.
Detection is obviously something kabam simply can't police so that number would be a 10. Unless they write some brand new detection algorithm that monitors war and gifting simultaneously.. but lets be real, they can't even tell if someone is account sharing or not.
Looking at the scenario objectively we can clearly see this is very low risk.
Everyone should stop with the paranoia and conspiracy and focus on what you can do for yourself to get the maximum points you can.
2. There is one major scenario where OP's 'bribery' could come into play. And it only affects perhaps the top 3 alliances so 99% of players here wouldn't care. That scenario is towards the end of this AW season, where we will be constantly seeing the leaderboard and how far ahead alliance 1 is from alliance 2. In a case where they are very close together with only a few more wars to go, the additional 300,000 they could get from 'bribing' their opposing alliance could make the difference from 1 -> 2. And trust me they care more about the top 1 -> 2 rewards than you would think is possible in a mobile game. I wouldn't put it against them to offer cash, odins, or what not to the entire opposing alliance if they agree to not kill any defenders of the top 2 alliance in order to get the 300,000 bonus points.
Of course this scenario is not likely at all and it will probably be clear who the top 1, 2 alliances will be by the 3rd week of this season and I'm just talking out my ass.
Just to summarize the principle behind the numbers @420sam posted, in a technical sense as @HulkSmaaashh suggested the game already subtracts from your own score when you leave defenders remaining, because when you don't kill a defender you lose the points you could have gotten for killing it. Deliberately leaving defenders on the board hurts your own score by taking away your own points as well as adding points to your opponent. That hurts your overall seasonal total, so any alliance doing this isn't just helping their opponet, it is hurting themselves directly.
According to the sample math in the announcement, the win bonus is multiplied by your current tier multiplier:
It is always possible, but it is only possible if you convince a dumb player to act against their interests. For this scenario to work, you would have to be able to convince me to deliberately not attack and defeat defenders I could conceivably defeat so you can get more points for having those defenders still alive. But if I did that, not only would your score be higher, my score would be lower because I would be giving up points I could get by attacking. This would hurt my AW points, which would then also hurt my own alliance's seasonal total, which would hurt my overall end of season rewards.
The system already encourages me to attack as hard as possible, to get as much points as possible, to finish as high as possible at the end of the season. Beyond that, I don't know what else you could do to stop this from being a possibility.
It is not impossible, but the instances to do such are probably very limited. The only scenario I could think where someone would even consider accepting a bribe and throwing a match was if they were already set for their final position and guaranteed that missing out on the extra points would not impact their position. No alliance would do that within the top tiers unless it was the final week of the war season. And even then it is very risky.
I think Kabam's efforts would be much better directed towards making a game that works consistently and addressing more prevalent instances of cheating.
Yeah any alliance who would purposefully not kill any defenders would be hurting their own score and ranking. But the opportunity for bribery is still there in the right situation / if the other alliance is desparate enough. We can see how everything plays out following the leaderboard. The chance of 'bribery' happening is still very unlikely and only towards very specific scenarios at the end of the season where the extra point would make the difference between extra rewards, and most likely only between rank 1 and rank 2 alliance. But after hearing about what lengths some aliances will go to to get rank 1, I wouldn't be surprised if it happened.