Now that tanking has been squashed, time to look at Shell Alliances.
Aryl
Member Posts: 1,302 ★★★★
Possible solution:
Introduce Rating Degeneration for tiers 1-10.
During Seasons, if an alliance does not enlist for matchmaking they suffer a degeneration in points based on their current war tier.
I do not see any flaws in this, so please point them out if you notice them.
The degen only affecting tiers 1-10 protects smaller alliances that wish to only participate in wars occasionally.
The degen during seasons allows alliances of all tiers to take an AW break during off season.
Degen based on enlistment ensures alliances which failed to find a match not suffer the degen.
Alliances will either have to enlist and fight or not and suffer degen. This forces Shell Alliances to either suffer a degen or fight a war with no participants and lose... both resulting in a loss of rating.
Thoughts?
Introduce Rating Degeneration for tiers 1-10.
During Seasons, if an alliance does not enlist for matchmaking they suffer a degeneration in points based on their current war tier.
I do not see any flaws in this, so please point them out if you notice them.
The degen only affecting tiers 1-10 protects smaller alliances that wish to only participate in wars occasionally.
The degen during seasons allows alliances of all tiers to take an AW break during off season.
Degen based on enlistment ensures alliances which failed to find a match not suffer the degen.
Alliances will either have to enlist and fight or not and suffer degen. This forces Shell Alliances to either suffer a degen or fight a war with no participants and lose... both resulting in a loss of rating.
Thoughts?
13
Comments
1. A lot of people take a break from AW in between seasons, like my alliance. Gives us time with our champs freed to tackle Variant and story that we couldn’t have with our champs locked in AW.
2. Master rank 1&2 alliances completely left their alliance to join a shell alliance, the original alliances have low accounts. That’s the real problem now.
A freeze/lockout to participate in AW on exiting & rejoining accounts in coming back into the alliance at the start of the season after leaving at the last seasons end would be nice. Like the treasury lockout but say for 3-5 wars as punishment.
🐻
But hey I can't think of any counters for this shell movement that I think of as really good, short of Kabam just finding and punishing shell alliances somehow.
Maybe temporarily or permanently restricting those players from participating in AW, depending on how long they've been in those shell alliances? Those guys would basically have the entire AW segment of the game shut off. So those guys wouldn't be able to start an Alliance War, or contribute to that war in any way. The only problem I can see with that is that the shell just has to recruit one person to help them tank while they have the lockout (for temporary bans), and then bam they have easy matches for the next war... it's not perfect but hey I'm trying.
If the top tiers want to cheese AW let them have it. The rewards aren't worth the effort in my opinion.
What if they enlist, but only one battlegroup? How many tier one alliances fight in only one group? Probably not a lot: many of them might even be shells. So if the game would have to match you against other tier 1 alliances enlisting one group, sometimes you'll run into a tough alliance and sometimes you'll just run into another empty shell. All you have to do now is win a few against the other shells to compensate for the losses against tier 1 alliance with actual tier 1 accounts in them, and you're back to where you started. If you were intending to lose, say, three or four wars to lower rating deliberately, a total record of 4 wins and 8 losses basically does the same thing. That might still be doable without difficulty if you avoid the genuinely competitive alliances by enlisting less than three full battlegroups. And you can't force alliances to fully enlist.
I can't predict with certainty how this would all fall out, but I can see the potential to create a new collusion opportunity where shells trade off losses to maintain the desired rating delta.
There's 9 Alliances in the top 50 for war rating that did not participate in Season 10. Some haven't participated since Season 7. Yet, due the percentage system, they get counted in as Tier 1. Which takes away a Tier 1 slot from an ACTIVE Alliance. Without the Tier 1 multiplier, a Platinum 1 Alliance doesn't have a prayer to move up to Master. This trickles down throughout the tiers BTW.
While the idea of a degenerative war rating during the Season seems like a good idea, but it does have the ability to exploited just the same. They need to find a way to do 2 things here. First and foremost, create a way to NOT count in an inactive Alliance for the Season tier wise. Second, find a way to make Shell Alliances ineffective or a prerequisite that would shut them down. However, this is MUCH easier said than done without further infringing upon legitimate Alliances.
Let's say they did something simple like the degenerative rating. This would be tantamount too tanking without any effort. At a certain point though, they'd be forced into action, keeping their rating viable to start the next Season. That's not too hard to avoid. Annoying, but avoidable. There's also been an idea thrown out there that would reset the rating to 0 if the Alliance was inactive for a full season. Again, easily avoided, but effective for getting rid of those dead Alliances that are taking up slots in various tiers. Doing that could potentially deflate the tier cutoffs a bit, and shake up the standings a tad.
As it stands, there's nothing in the rules stating a group cannot move from 1 Alliance to another. Nor should there be because there's legitimate situations where this happens due to shotty leadership. Penalizing legitimate players for the actions taken by those who can't play straight up isn't right. While the introduction of the locked ratings in the Off Season for tiers 1-5 kind of blows for those of us who play straight up, it made sense to do it. I just hope the next action taken to shutdown foul play doesn't bonk the legit players too hard. Any other ideas on how this could be tackled without reprisals falling upon those that play straight up? (Please, keep it civil and respect eachother when giving criticism)
Those swapping now either 1) didn’t realize multiplier change (wasn’t announced - assume what they show now is live), or more likely 2) still swapping for purposes of AQ 7x5 donations and buying donations. Until they get m7 donations down into a more reasonable level (or more ways to earn things like loyalty / faster gold / BC earn speed) people will continue to look for ways to do this.
As for shells taking up slots for higher multipliers, I previously brought this up and pretty sure a mod claimed their formula for tier placement would somehow consider that and they would be excluded from impacting others. Whether or not this is true is another story.
You would have to win the entire season to get back to a lower or on par rating. Breaking even would be the best case scenario here, and that doesn't cut it for top tiers.
One of my previous posts made me realize this wouldn't be much of an issue as shell alliances that suffer an entire season of war rating loss would remove the actual benefit of a shell alliance... meaning, there would be no point in it.
A solution to tanking was just implemented so what we should do is have alliance tank from doing nothing while playing in a shell alliance for more rewards. That’s just a win win for the tanking alliances.
Other problem is off-season is a break for more hardcore alliances. You can force them to participate if they want to take a break from the grind as seasons take there toll on alliances.
So in the end this whole plan would accomplish nothing really other than hurting alliances that want a break
Also just caught you said during seasons.... so I get what you are going for but still alliances sometimes take seasons off which I don’t think that’s fair to those alliances.
Kabam needs to looks for deliberate patterns of these alliances and act on it. Only way to not impact others in the game.
Reading is fundamental.
Seriously... how can you actually reply to a topic without reading the post?
@Timone147 @Solrac_2
I would venture to guess that tier 1 alliances are not willing to just completely forgo AW, it is more of a feeling of rewards for p2 p3 are good enough for a 0 effort/cost season.
Taking that knowledge, one proposal is there could be some sort of metric to gate participation in 2 and 3 bg wars. For example, alliances with a high turnover ratio (defined by kabam), be locked out of 2bg and/or 3bg wars for extended periods. This would solve most of the shenanigans that remain.
I still don't understand those people disagreeing and defending this behavior.