Why AW Seasons Was a Bad Idea...
Ghostspider231
Member Posts: 301 ★★★
Now don't get me wrong. I think they needed to up the rewards and make AW more enticing to alliances to participate. But I don't think the seasons was a good idea. All this does is encourage all the top players in lower level alliances to leave and consolidate power with an even smaller group of alliances. It also encourages alliances to kick players to improve their alliance tier. This makes the alliance experience less enjoyable and more like a job. The point of the alliances should be to progress and advance as a group. This has turned almost into a free-for-all.
They need to replace the alliance seasons to make it more individual achievement based. For example the MVPs of each alliance gets a higher amount of rewards win or lose. And make the rewards more attainable quicker. Maybe make them weekly like in AQ and they can be ranked like AQ as well.
These are just some thoughts from an officer tired of losing good team members. Take it for what it's worth.
They need to replace the alliance seasons to make it more individual achievement based. For example the MVPs of each alliance gets a higher amount of rewards win or lose. And make the rewards more attainable quicker. Maybe make them weekly like in AQ and they can be ranked like AQ as well.
These are just some thoughts from an officer tired of losing good team members. Take it for what it's worth.
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Also, the first season is way too long. Hopefully subsequent seasons will be much shorter. Otherwise the rewards from AW seasons may not be worth it.
I agree with you to a point, but the MVP system isn’t a reliable way to determine anything.
is ALLIANCE WAR! the whole alliance deserve the same prizes
I can understand why you think this might address the problem with people leaving alliances for stronger ones, but it is fundamentally nonsensical to make the rewards for an alliance event based on individual performance. That makes it not an alliance event any more, but simply another individual performance event.
And it has the potential to create far worse nightmares for officers. Right now, everyone in the alliance is working together to get the same rewards. If you create a situation where the player that does the most in an alliance war gets more rewards than his fellow alliance members, you put every alliance member in direct competition with each other. Now, how do you fairly place AW defenders, knowing some nodes get more kills? How do you assign paths, knowing some paths are easier and some are harder, some are shorter and some are longer? How do you prevent players from literally kill-stealing nodes to try to grab as much credit as possible.
No alliance reward should ever place alliance members in competition with each other.
Lmao that was your decision to enforce this upon the alliance. If u don’t want to spend then find an alliance that doesn’t encourage spending. There’s many that don’t spend
If you have to ‘spend’ you’re not gonna do great in seasons anyhow.
But as a player, I’ll agree it has made war less fun for me as every war is always “don’t die and clear the map” where we used to be able to take a break here and there.
Reviving and healing doesn't have to cost real money. People just have to stop spending units and glory on nonsense if they can't handle their lanes without items.
I'd suggest weak alliances that want to keep their strong players devise their own incentive programs for that, like no donations or something. Don't give everyone in the game a reason to play selfishly though. I saw that when skirmish rewards came out and officers would put their Thors, Caps, and Wolvies on boss nodes because they thought they'd get a lot more gold for getting kills, but thankfully the alliance I'm in now doesn't do that noob stuff.
Our alliance took the third option: play as many wars as possible win or lose for points (before we only did two a week), try harder to clear the map but don't overspend to get the win every time. It is still a work in progress, but we are trying to find a reasonable balance between option one and option two.
I agree my alliance is doing the same went from 2 wars to 3 a week. We don't make people spend and just encourage everyone to do their best. We win some lose some. Not expecting to get super high rewards but think gold 1/2 is about where we belong
I've played games where members within an alliance do essentially compete among themselves (e.g. the top scorer gets the best prize). However, that only works if the game play supports it.
For it to work here, the maps would have to be totally redesigned to remove any strategic cooperation among the members. The redesigned map would not have paths that are more difficult than others so all paths would be the same and people won't be allowed to place defenders -- otherwise, there would be paths with varying difficulty.
There was an idea suggested a while back in the old forum that does have alliance mates competing against each other. The idea was basically a merger of AQ and Stars Wars Galaxy of Hero's Pit Raids.
You basically fight a boss character (let's use Ultron but it can be anything). This Ultron has essentially a massive ton of health and the event last, for example, 24 hours just like AQ. Players keep attacking this boss over and over again scoring points. Each fight is timed, like 6 minutes, so the goal for individual players is to score as many points as possible in a short period of time. The number of fights a player can have in this 24 hour event can be limited to let's say 5 per 24 hours; otherwise, it would be a grind fest like trying to score 5 million in the 2-star arena every day because alliances would only want players who can score a ton. Since the player is limited to 5 heroes, the more skillful among the group would typically score more points. And unlike AQ/AW, there is no restriction on the number of players that can attack the boss at the same time. So there's no waiting nor trying to "box each other out".
The alliance score is the sum of all the individual players' points taken together and this impacts the individual rewards. The players are ranked by points with the top scorer getting the best prize. The magnitude of the rewards depends on whether the group as a whole outscored the other alliance. In other words, the top scorer of the winning team gets better rewards than the top scorer of the losing team.
That is just an example.
I think everyone understands your point fine. The problem is you cannot do that without creating even more problems, and that's separate from the illogic of focusing on individual performance in an activity explicitly intended to reward group effort.
Plus, if you believe rewarding a single individual for individual performance by some metric, no matter what that metric is you have to assume that you would then lose your second strongest player, because if you need bribery to keep your top player, there's every reason to believe your second best player has the same mindset. And while you've created an incentive for your top player to stay, you've also created an equally large incentive for your second best player to leave - because he could now become the top player in a slightly lower alliance.
The problem is not the method of choosing the rewarded player. It doesn't matter how you choose. What matters is one player will get substantially more players than all the others, and it would then encourage the other players to try to beat each other to get that reward to the detriment of working together, or leave the alliance and find one where they can get that reward. It has nothing to do with how you pick the player to receive the bonus reward. It has to do with pitting alliance members against each other for a reward period.
Sure, it introduces friction and conflict in some alliances right now, but that’s to be expected IMHO. AW Seasons introduced some really enticing rewards. And most alliances right now have already operate in a certain way pre-seasons. With Seasons, they’d have to rethink how they operate - whether you spend more, or you sacrifice AQ or whatnot.
But all this friction would just be momentarily. As to how fast frictions would be resolved would differ from one alliance to another.
If you find your alliance changes to an alliance you no longer enjoy, then part ways civally and move on.
It doesnt mean that if your alliance chose to operate in a certain way, that most alliances would do. That’s just your silo.