Alliance Wars Scoring Update: Coming December 13th

Comments

• Kabam Miike Moderator Moderator › Posts: 8,269

  December 2017

  Removed Stats
  
  Attacker Kills
  
  First, we are removing points granted for Attacker Kills. Since we initially made changes to Alliance Wars, we’ve heard from many players about this scoring system - that the removal of Defender Kills has resulted in some undesired additional effects. Mainly, that as long as someone was willing to use Potions and Revives, they could fight a Defender as much as possible with little to no negative impact on their Alliance, or no benefit to yours. To further address this, we are adding two new stats to the scoring system of Alliance Wars: ‘Attack Bonus’ and ‘Defenders Remaining.’ More details on these can be found in the ‘New Stats’ section.
  
  Defenders Placed and Defender Rating
  
  We are also completely removing all points for ‘Defenders Placed’ and ‘Defender Rating’ from Alliance Wars. Our primary reasons for this are twofold:
  
  Both of these result in a points-based punishment of the weaker Alliance in any given matchup.
  Those scores are defined before a war begins, and there’s nothing an Alliance could do to overcome them with skilled play or smart Defender placement. This was not our intention when making the initial changes to Alliance Wars, but based on player feedback we realized this was in fact the end result.
  
  The weaker Alliance already has a bigger challenge to overcome since they have weaker Champions and less ‘Defenders Placed’, and punishing them for having lower PI or placing less Defenders meant that disadvantage is harder to overcome than it should be. If you go to a War with fewer players than the other Alliance, having fewer players should be what makes it harder to win. ‘Defenders Placed’ is also somewhat redundant with the new ‘Defenders Remaining’ stat detailed in ‘New Stats’.
  
  The same goes for ‘Defender Rating’; Summoners already had to deal with fighting a stronger Alliance, so we don’t want to make this challenge harder to overcome by giving the other Alliance more points before a fight has even been fought. This also means that the previous method of using a Boost before placing your defenders no longer provides an explicit Point advantage.

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• Kabam Miike Moderator Moderator › Posts: 8,269

  December 2017

  Points Value Changes
  
  Defender Diversity
  
  We are reducing the points awarded per unique Defender from 50 to 30, meaning it will award a maximum of 4,500 Points per Alliance War instead of 7,500. This is primarily to further emphasize Diversity as a tie-breaking statistic. It will still matter (as it does now) who Alliances bring into a War, but the order of importance in terms of point breakdown places Diversity firmly in last place now, with only 2.5% of all available points coming from Defender Diversity.
  
  Exploration
  
  Points awarded for node exploration have been cut in half, from 300 Points per node to 150. This is being done to provide significant emphasis to ‘Defenders Remaining’, although exploration will still yield the 2nd most amount of potential points, behind ‘Boss Kills’. A few more notes on why we made this change:
  
  We want to make sure that engaging in fights awards more points than just walking around a map.
  The Alliance War map has a large amount of empty nodes, many being portal entrances and exits, and navigating through those shouldn't win a war over taking a shorter path that actually has Defenders along it.
  You will still want to explore as much of the map as possible. As you explore you will be defeating Defenders and reducing the opposing Alliance’s ‘Defenders Remaining’ score, so exploring is still important, but there will be additional emphasis on defeating your opponent’s Defenders.
  

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• Kabam Miike Moderator Moderator › Posts: 8,269

  December 2017

  New Stats
  
  In order to correct some of the unintended results of our changes, and to achieve our design goals for the mode, we’re adding the following new Stats to the Alliance Wars scoring system.
  
  Attack Bonus
  
  Each node that can have a Defender placed on it in an Alliance War map will now begin with 240 Bonus Points available to the Attacking team. Each time one of your Alliance’s Champions is lost to that node, those bonus points go down by 80 points. Here’s how that works:
  
  The Defender is defeated on the first fight.
  - Attacker earns 240 Bonus Points in addition to any other points earned from node exploration, Boss Kill, etc.
  The Defender is defeated on the second fight.
  - Attacker earns 160 Bonus Points in addition to any other points earned from node exploration, Boss Kill, etc.
  The Defender is defeated on the third fight.
  - Attacker earns 80 Bonus Points in addition to any other points earned from node exploration, Boss Kill, etc.
  The Defender is defeated after more than 3 fights.
  - Attacker earns 0 Bonus Points but still earns any other points earned from node exploration, Boss Kill, etc.
  Attacker walks through a node that could have a defender on it but doesn’t (i.e. an empty node - this does not include portal entrances/exits or other nodes where you can’t place a Defender):
  - Attacker earns 240 Bonus Points in addition to any other points earned from node exploration.
  
  We’re introducing this statistic for a few reasons:
  
  - To explicitly award points for skilled play and proper planning.
  - To emphasize smart defender placement as a way to deny your opponent points, not as a way for them to give you points.
  - Balance a decision for Alliances to guarantee Diversity points vs placing strong Duplicate Defenders to try and deny your opponent points.
  - To avoid the mentality of not caring about whether you live or die in an encounter because it can simply be overcome using consumables.
  
  Note: We are currently working on some UI improvements that will make monitoring and accounting for the Attack Bonus easier to do. This will come in a future update.
  
  Defenders Remaining
  
  We’re also adding something called ‘Defenders Remaining’. When a war finishes, each Defender remaining on the map will award that Defender’s Alliance with 250 bonus points. This means there’s 37,500 points available from ‘Defenders Remaining’ at the start of an Alliance War, assuming 50 Defenders have been placed in each Battlegroup. If you do not place a Defender, you lose the points you would have earned had they been placed and not killed. Essentially, for every Defender you don’t place, you miss out on possible 250 points. Here’s how this might look in a war:
  
  - Alliance 1 places 150 Defenders (50 in each Battlegroup)
  - Alliance 2 places 150 Defenders (50 in each Battlegroup)
  - Alliance 1 Defeats 100 of Alliance 2’s Defenders
  - Alliance 2 earns 12,500 Points ((150-100) x 250)
  - Alliance 1 earns any Attack Bonus points and any exploration points based on their performance.
  - Alliance 2 Defeats 140 of Alliance 1’s Defenders
  - Alliance 1 earns 2,500 Points ((150-140) x 250)
  - Alliance 2 earns any Attack Bonus points and any exploration points based on their performance.
  
  We’re adding this for the following reasons:
  
  - Emphasize smart Defender placement as a way to earn points for yourself.
  - Move the emphasis away from Defender Diversity, and establish it as the tie breaker it was meant to be.
  - Emphasize the importance of winning a fight to earn points through Attack Bonus points, and deny your Opponents points for Defenders Remaining.
  - Give smaller Alliances a chance to catch up by thinking strategically and playing skillfully. For Example: If your opponent starts the match with 10 more defenders that you, you are still able to get a higher Defenders Remaining score then them by defeating 11 more defenders than them.

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• Kabam Miike Moderator Moderator › Posts: 8,269

  December 2017 edited December 2017

  This is a lot to take in, so we wanted to ensure we included a breakdown of how points will be earned in Alliance Wars after December 13th, and how all this breaks down into potential points per instance of Alliance Wars:
  
  
  So in Summary, our goals with this new Alliance Wars scoring system were:
  
  - Killing the Boss and exploring should always be key.
  - Fighting should always be better than not fighting.
  - Diversity should be a tie breaker, not where a large portion of total points come from.
  - Skill should be a major contributing factor in the outcome of an Alliance War.
  
  We know you’ll have plenty of questions, so feel free to ask in the Discussion thread here.
  

  Post edited by Kabam Miike on December 2017

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