Forward

We want to spend some time today talking about the current state and future of Alliance War. The recent unhappiness regarding the difficulty of the Defense Tactic this season has spurred a lot of conversation amongst our players, and the dev team has been listening.

Thanks in part to feedback from many in the community (shoutout to our Content Creators in particular), we identified a number of issues with the mode and got together to discuss them last week. Unfortunately, solutions to many of these issues are deeply rooted in the design of the mode itself and are not something we can fix quickly.

However, we can action on some of these issues immediately, which is what this post is about!

Season 47

Before we get into the exact changes to the potion economy, we want to remind you all that we still have a change coming to modify health potions across the game to scale with Boosts, and are hoping to have this ready for launch in March. This would see an effective increase of up to 55% in how much health all potions recover when boosted. That effectively upgrades the potency of all Alliance War potions in competitive Alliances by a full level.

Additionally, we will make Tier 5 potions available for purchase in the Loyalty store during Season 47 (likely early February). We planned this to go live with the release of the potion-boost update, but we feel it’s best to get this change to you sooner rather than later.

Next, we’re making a QOL improvement to how potions in the Loyalty Store are purchased. Currently, each level of potion must be bought one by one, with an escalating cost and a daily refresh. This means that a player who wants to buy 7 war potions each week at the lowest possible price has to check in with the store every day. We will instead have the Alliance Potions refresh weekly, and the first 7 potions are all the same low price within that week. The overall price will be the same, but it will be much easier to get full benefit from the lowest price point and much cheaper to buy multiple potions above that point quickly.

Let's talk about deaths in AW

Given that deaths are the main determiner of who wins in High-Tier war, having a certain (controlled) number of deaths happen is important. If a War has no deaths (or an equal number of deaths), then tiebreakers determine who wins, which is very unsatisfying. Few or no death Wars also make playing the mode unnecessarily stressful - no one wants to be the one who makes a small mistake, dies, and singlehandedly causes the War to be lost.

On the other hand, very high death Wars are also unfun and resource intensive, for obvious reasons.

In the past year, and especially in High-Tier War, we’ve been trending too close to the ‘too few deaths’ side of this spectrum. Season 46 has successfully introduced a healthier amount of deaths into Tier 1 War, and we’re happy with how that’s sitting now that top alliances have come to better understand and counter the tactic. However, Alliances in Tier 2 and below are dying more than we would like. Because Tier 1 and Tier 2 play on the same map with the same nodes, as an interim measure, we will be tuning down both versions of the tactic by decreasing the potency and duration of the Daunted passives.

Season 48

Looking a little farther into the future, the largest change we plan to make is to create a new map for Tier 1. Alliance War has reached a point where it isn’t fair to either Tier 1 or Tier 2 to have them play by the same set of rules, and so we’re splitting up the maps they play on, so the nodes and tactics can be tuned independently. It’s possible that this new map will require some adjustments to our Tier Multipliers.

To reiterate, we feel the current Crush 2.0 tactic landed where we wanted it to for Tier 1, so expect the next tactic for that level to feel similar, but things will be easier for Tier 2, and for everyone on the Challenger Map. We don’t have any planned node changes for this new Tier 1 map yet, but you can expect those in the future.

Another change coming in Season 48 is improved access to the 7-Star Loyalty Crystal.

The Loyalty store was never intended to directly compete with Season Rewards but rather to supplement them for less competitive alliances. Having a 7-star crystal with exclusive champions that is only available in the Loyalty Store creates a conflict of interest for our players, who have to choose between fighting for better season rewards, which often involves investing Loyalty in potions and boosts, or saving their Loyalty for the 7 Star Crystal.

We don’t want you to have to make that choice, so starting in Season 48, we will be introducing 7* Loyalty Shards and adding them to Season Rewards (replacing some of the generic 7* shards), so that our summoners who place high on the leaderboards will also have access to this exclusive pool even if they can never afford to stockpile the Loyalty for it.

Some details still need to be worked out here, including if and how many champions will be added to the limited pool to keep it appealing, but our Masters and Platinum players should look forward to opening these exciting crystals more often in the near future.

A minor note, but we are also hoping to have Loyalty Skirmish rewards fixed by Season 48. As many have noticed, these gold and Loyalty bonuses pay out uniformly across battlegroups, rather than individually, meaning that players who take more fights aren’t currently getting the extra Loyalty we intended for them to. Fixing that will be an important step towards reducing the press of the Loyalty economy where it falls heaviest.

Looking Ahead

Lastly, we want to reiterate that these changes here are far from the last work we will do on Alliance Wars.

We are committing to spending time this year to re-examine the design of the mode in the hopes of making it better than ever, and we look forward to sharing more when we can.

We’re excited about some of these early ideas, and we think you will be, too!