AW Seasons, Vacations and Team Players

Hey mods,

In 2016, I took a two-week vacation during which my Internet access was very spotty. It was around the time Beast and Nightcrawler entered the contest, and while I was away, you guys dropped a mandatory patch. Ultimately, I asked my alliance to kick me so they could have an active 30th player. Sure, I lost some rewards, but not a huge deal.

In 2017, my phone got wrecked and because I didn’t want to be a liability for AQ/AW, I removed myself from my alliance until I got a new functional phone. Missed out on rewards for AQ/AW/SA and had to accept a blackout period upon my return.

This summer, I’m looking at a potential 2 week vacation, again with spotty access. If I’m going to be a team player, once again, we’re talking AQ/AW/SA rewards lost and a black-out period. We’re also now looking at potentially losing AW Seasons rewards if my vacation falls in the window of 5 wars preceding the end of the cycle. It’s starting to feel like a steep price to pay for doing the decent thing and taking myself out so they can have someone active running content alongside them while I’m gone.

More importantly, that’s a pretty big incentive for any alliances that resort to piloting and account sharing to keep doing it, so that players don’t lose potential rewards for living their life and doing the right thing.

Just wanted to start a discussion, see if others have given this some thought and maybe inspire Kabam to look into this. Maybe if a player steps down and doesn't join another alliance prior to their return, the 'penalties' can be reduced?

Comments

Wayntos

Really! "so that players don’t lose potential rewards for living their life and doing the right thing" Sounds like the game is your life. Their no excuse for account sharing period. Then all of a sudden everyone is on vacation. People put way too much into this, its just a game and one in a billion get paid to play.

project314

Two things:

1) The game isn't my life. I'm saying a black-out or no rewards in certain cases doesn't feel like an adequate measure if a player is simply going on hiatus, to return to the same alliance.

2) I'm not saying account sharing is right, my account has never been used by another player since I started playing about 3 years ago. What I'm saying is that the current system will maintain account sharing because you will have players who want time off but who won't want to lose potential rewards.

Voluntaris

When I vacation I make sure to have internet access.

DNA3000

project314 wrote: »

I'm not saying account sharing is right, my account has never been used by another player since I started playing about 3 years ago. What I'm saying is that the current system will maintain account sharing because you will have players who want time off but who won't want to lose potential rewards.

That's essentially the reason why everyone who cheats, cheats. They want something they can't get by following the rules, so they break the rules. Lots and lots and lots of players have lives, take time off, take breaks, balance their time, play the game within those limits, and don't cheat. There is no special person anywhere for whom that's not possible. It is not a question of time or energy or life situation. It is a question of having reasonable expectations and the mental attitude that they would rather have less than cheat their fellow players.

I can understand not wanting to hurt your alliance. That is the one aspect of the situation I have sympathy for. In fact, I would fully support a way for a player to temporarily go offline and have their alliance somehow fill in the gap while that player themselves gets completely blacked out for rewards. That's selfless. But asking for rewards when you aren't actually playing, no matter what the reason is for not playing, is selfish.

For example, hypothetically speaking I would support a system that did this. Suppose that I know I'm going to be out of contact for a while. I set a flag in the game that says I'm offline. The game then puts my account into offline status for at least one full day - 24 hours from that moment. The game then randomly selects one player from my alliance to be my proxy during that time. During that 24 hour window my proxy can only do the following things: log in for calendar rewards, enter and play AQ, enter and play AW. Any rewards earned other than calendar are not accrued: I don't get them. Any rewards for any AQ or AQ entered during the black out are also void, even if I return before they are over. If I return and reset the flag, I'm still locked out for the minimum 24 hour period, but I can return at any time after that. The offline status has a maximum of two weeks duration, after which you're reset to normal automatically. You cannot be offline permanently. Every 24 hours, a new random proxy is picked: the same person can't be the proxy continuously.

This would allow a player to be offline for a period of time while their alliance could continue to run AQ and AW during their absence. They wouldn't lose calendar rewards, but their account couldn't earn anything else. The opportunity for an alliance to try to use this to gain an advantage are limited by the fact that the "pilot" is chosen randomly, and the account itself gets no rewards so few people would volunteer to do this for no good reason. Pilots can't hurt the account they are piloting while they are doing so, they can only fight in alliance events. They can't buy, sell or transfer assets. And because the piloting is happening in an auditable way by the game, if the pilot does something illegal like use mods, then Kabam will know who to correctly punish.

That's an incomplete idea, but something like that I would consider to be potentially fair. The player that steps away gains nothing from doing so, but the alliance they are in has a temporary remedy for continuing to function in alliance events.

project314

Okay, here's my issue, DNA.

Let's say an AW season is 30 wars.

2 players in the same alliance go on vacation, off the grid, for two weeks, each of them misses 6 wars.

Player 1 misses wars 19 to 24. He'll rejoin after, he'll be eligible for season rewards.

Player 2 misses wars 25 to 30. He'll rejoin after, but he won't be eligible for season rewards.

Both players will have participated in 24 wars in the season, but unlucky timing will mean that one of them will walk away emptyhanded. Kinda sucks for the second guy.

Obviously, leadership can choose to keep the second guy as an inactive account so he won't lose his season rewards. As leader, I'd push for that. Personally though, I wouldn't feel right extending that priviledge to myself.

DNA3000

project314 wrote: »

Okay, here's my issue, DNA.

Let's say an AW season is 30 wars.

2 players in the same alliance go on vacation, off the grid, for two weeks, each of them misses 6 wars.

Player 1 misses wars 19 to 24. He'll rejoin after, he'll be eligible for season rewards.

Player 2 misses wars 25 to 30. He'll rejoin after, but he won't be eligible for season rewards.

Both players will have participated in 24 wars in the season, but unlucky timing will mean that one of them will walk away emptyhanded. Kinda sucks for the second guy.

Yes, it does suck for the second guy. But that "unfairness" is a direct consequence of the rules of AW and isn't specifically a consequence of people taking time off. I can join an alliance and do the last six wars, and I get the same season rewards as everyone else that fights thirty. Is that fair? Well, according to the rules of the game, that is currently intentional. When you join, when you leave, and when problems arise will affect your rewards, deliberately so, in many ways besides the one you mention. It might be not ideal, but that situation is just one among many, many others that are simply part of the game.

In any event, as I mentioned previously I wouldn't mind a solution that allowed alliances to keep temporarily inactive players around due to unavoidable problems. In this situation, I would allow the player to receive seasonal rewards while offline provided they *actively* participated in the minimum prerequisite wars (five). They would still not receive the actual participation rewards for any war they were offline for.

Blax4ever

Shorter seasons would have fixed that issue. Many players advocated for a shorter season due to the many issues that popped up during the first season.

Kabam decided to focus on piloting, which was an issue that many blamed for their underperformance in season 1. When the way the tiers were calculated was probably more of an issue along with inconsistent match making.
Piloting is part of a larger issue with the game not the sole issue. In other games that are Alliance/Clan/Faction based an individual’s contribution is meted our according to their participation so if takes a week to do a raid and you miss a few days it would be reflected in your overall score and your final ranking on the team.

People will jump into a thread for the sole purpose of being a contrarian, ignoring the main part of your argument and pretty much just to see their words typed out on a screen. I wouldn’t engage too much with them it’s a waste of time.