Alliance War Experiences and Feedback

We had our first alliance wars today, two alliances ranked about #30 and I will share some data and some perspectives from beta testing. I hope that others can their experiences and suggestions here.

First and foremost, it was a lot of fun! We have an international team but many from the US, and the other team was Brazilian. Due to the time change, they took the lead first, it was even for a while, then we took a small lead at the end. It was exciting and there was a lot of enthusiasm and strategy discussion.

Here is some data that may suggest improvements in the future.

The breakdown in scoring points was as follows (does not add exactly due to rounding errors), shown as a percentage of total points scored with each attack by all players on both teams combined.

Round 1: 32%
Round 2: 25%
Round 3: 20%
Round 4: 13%
Round 5: 6%
Round 6: 5%

It appears that a substantial number of points were scored after the halfway point. However, these points were concentrated in a few people. The remainder had 1* heroes, and these were completely ineffective against the first team defense and revenge bars. There was some frustration at this issue, and I expect that this frustration will be worse once alliance wars rolls out to less developed players.

For our alliance, 23/30 teams were attacked by the other teams, the remaining 7/30 were not involved at all in defense. 11/30 teams were hit 1-3 times, usually one kill by one of the top opposing players. However, 12/30 teams received 83% of the hits from the other team. Especially in rounds 3-6, their strategy was to hit our weakest members over and over, even with the delay after revival (our strategy was similar at that point). This may be the case for a lot of wars, and IMHO it should be rectified by some means such as increasing the revival time or one of the suggestions below.

During the beta testing, several suggestions came up, and these may ameliorate some of the problems.

ā€“Every team in the alliance must be killed before any are revived - most really liked this suggestion

ā€“Multiple defense teams (1st, 2nd, 3rd, etc. so you would not always fight the first team) ā€“ people were split on this suggestion

ā€“Reduce or eliminate the revenge bar for the last three attacks

ā€“Reuse of some heroes (i.e. 3* and lower) ā€“ a lot of controversy over this suggestion

There are separate threads for loot, but hopefully they are keeping it low out of a sense of fairness to those who are not participating, and it will increase once the entire rollout is complete. One can only hope that I will do better than a mana potion and bear bannerā€¦at least one person in my alliance got a sturdy shield, and some got four items.

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It was certainly an interesting experience and no matter how i prepared, I still made two crucial errors. I still had fun although we lost the battle. Could you do me a favor though? Please refrain from selling the 30 fully trained up Trainer heroes during the AW battles? It may have been a coincidence and I am aware that not everyone gets the sale when it populates to me, but the attacks started up again right after the sale populated on my screen. I was pretty certain that the other alliance was pretty much out of gas by that point. Letā€™s try to make certain that people canā€™t purchase a ā€œrefillā€ please?

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Just want to make sure Iā€™m understandingā€¦ Half way through the war, they tried to sell you 30 usable heroes?

If soā€¦ Wow. Just wow.

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That is exactly what happened. It didnā€™t affect me though. I have enough usable heroes to make 10 usable 5 hero teams with one hero left over (Horghall, Iā€™m pretty certain he doesnā€™t count anyway). But not everyone has a bench as deep as mine at least until 30 trainer heroes go up for sale during the battle. Iā€™d still rather have my bench, but if I didnā€™t Iā€™d rather have a fully trained hero than a newly summoned 2 star to toss into the fray.

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what Gene postet about the tactical strategy Iā€™ve heard from others exactly the same ā€¦only going for the weak ones even wait for them to revive again. So I think your first suggestion has a good point.

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That is pretty much what happens. The revive timer needs adjusting if they want to inspire people to attack anyone other than the weakest links.

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We had the same kind of experience with already the same tactic to focus on the weakest. For me, if a unique tactic spreads already that means there is an issue here.

Alliance war should be a real team mode where everyone in the alliance is important both in attack AND in defense.
I think that focusing on the weakest is not good for the team spirit. Some will soon say ā€˜again we will get hit on xxx, pfffffā€™

This is why i think your first suggestion (revive a team only when all the others are dead) should be really examined.

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Trainer heros are always maxxed, but even ao, they are still weak

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It wasnā€™t just waiting for the revive timer to run out. The timer is buggy. We had one member that was attacked and killed 8 times during the war. We would watch her timer and it would just randomly go away with numerous hours left on it. Some kind of balancing needs to happen so everyoneā€™s defense is involved. I love the idea of no revives til everyone has been defeated. Over all a very fun experience but some adjustments are definitely needed.

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Well if weā€™re rehashing this now out in general publicā€¦

Reuse: this breaks hard wherever you draw the line, explicitly at 3*'s thatā€™s dubious for us at the high end but it utterly sucks for newbie alliances. Pretty sure people will get used to this just like we did on beta, the complaints died down on beta, they will on live too. As Dante so excellently said: this design was ā– ā– ā– ā– ā– ā– ā–  brilliant for getting people to level dupes and other underutilized heroes. I am somewhat jealous of an alliance mateā€™s 5 Kirils now, no lie.

If you want to do it at 1* 2* that everyone can train up and easily skill including newbies thatā€™s more fair, but that doesnā€™t address your core concern at the high end.

Level 1 heroes though are absolutely functional in AW on cleanup crews, so everyone stop feeding your unwanted pulls away.

Full team kill before revive: most alliances arenā€™t the top 100 where everyone was basically on for the wars that I saw - if you have random arrival rate of players, most of whom only login a few times a day, they need to have targets available regardless of time. If in the typical newbie alliance where you have 27-28 newbies and 2-3 people with well developed teams acting as leaders / coaches ye olde 2* using newbie enforced to go up against 4* 70 teams, is going to lead to the same form of frustration you are trying to address with your other points.

I think a revive timer adjustment (originally it scaled up pretty harshly on beta but looks like that got tweaked somehow for Live) or even better as Rekka suggested: use the scoring system to devalue repeatedly killed targets. Not sure what exactly this looks like but I agree with your point that having only a subset of players farmed repeatedly isnā€™t as engaging as it could be.

Multiple Defense Teams: not sure this matters frankly, the scoring system matters and all the alliances I talk to made it work with multiple attacks; have to get out of the individual mindset for AW, and while that is a break from the rest of the game, itā€™s an extremely good design choice from my perspectiveā€¦ intra-alliance socialization was amazing during this war, unqualified success from SGā€™s standpoint.

Revenge bar reductions: same as above, one standard for everyone, work with your buddies.

Loot: this could probably use some tweaks. I was hoping for 50% 3* rare ascension item chance and 10% 4* ascension item chance: this would work out to roughly 4 3* and 1 4* per month if you win all your wars, and that seems fairly reasonable given the other progression metrics. We had a couple people with 3* items but wasnā€™t anywhere close to my napkin math suggestionā€¦ I do think this should be fixed, and I think it should be the same for everyone to foster team cohesion and effort: itā€™s pretty easy to track sandbaggers in AW, we have the tools already in game to handle that if it becomes an issue.

Also as a follow on point to loot being somewhat weird: we had people in my alliance that received 5 loot slots, I received 3 (admittedly I did get an Orb which was the best loot I saw today), and someone got stuck with 2 mana potions only. Thatā€™s just silly, at least do it like titan tiers where everyone gets the same number and types of rolls at least.

I donā€™t know how to balance the loot if itā€™s one standard game wide: I understand the game design requirement for progression; however, if that is an issue, just create tiers for AW based on whatever matching criteria you eventually come up with (Alliance Score, really?) where the higher tier alliances get correspondingly more useful loot based on their progression level.

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Multiple defense: no donā€™t need it and probably causes more frustration at lower levels.

in terms of reduced scoring for repeat kills, if implemented they should have a little icon, maybe skull or skull and crossbones, to indicate on screen how many times people died. Not everyone is crazy organized on discord/line.

As for the trainer packs, if someone is going to drop gems to improve their team for AW, bring 10x trainer heroes is probably not an effective long term use of the gems, when an epic or elemental pull would be more helpful to getting to 30 good usable heros. yes you need to level them but trainer heroes attacking probably isnā€™t something they need to spend dev time tweaking.

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Very valid points about lower level/casual alliances having to kill everyone before any one revives. I still personally like the idea but see how it would most likely not make sense for the game as a whole. Already excited to see the changes made for the next war.

Psā€¦ would love a march madness style bracket of the top 64 alliancesā€¦

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Petri announced in the parallel AW loot thread that they had made some adjustments to the resurrect timer and loot. I hope that will fix the problem of weaker defenses getting picked on.

Alliances without ā€œfarm teamsā€ carry some rising talent who may not yet have fully developed teams. In our war, one-seventh of the points scored against us came from attacks on one such player. Thatā€™s excessive.

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Oh hell yes :slight_smile:

The rehash was to bring the rest of the people up on the beta discussion, not to beat dead horses. There are some who are suggesting the same things that we had already discussed. Iā€™ll focus on the new stuff.

I think the revised revive and loot changes should be of immediate benefit.

I like the idea of devaluing hits on the same target, but it is inherently unfair to people with jobs or family who cannot hit until later and will score less than their mates because the weak teams have all been killed once or twice. That is why a revenge bar adjustment after three hits works, because everyone is treated the same way.

It would be spectacular, but letā€™s face it, almost anyone below the top 16 wouldnā€™t stand a chance against the top few alliances. I think I saw 7DD main scored over 5000 points against the #2 alliance. We won with 3700 points against the #25 alliance. Our defenses are nowhere near the #2 team; it would be a Texas chainsaw massacre unless we had a massive revenge bar handicap.

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Sidebar: but for those of us in beta who got to play with and against some of the best, it would be cool to see how the cream of the crop is doing head to head.

our alliance participated in wars. as I understand, now will wins the one who has more 5 * heroes. perhaps it makes sense to limit each of the six attempts by a particular team? for example, two times you can use a team with 5 * heroes, 2 times with 4 * heroes and 2 times with 3 * heroes.

it seems to me that such a system can slightly level the chances of winning

I guess I donā€™t understand the rationale for revenge bar adjustment.

People donā€™t play this game because they want it to be easy-mode: the entire game design is an experiment frankly in non-casual phone gaming which to my knowledge hasnā€™t been done previouslyā€¦ thereā€™s plenty of match 3 games like Angry Birds Match or Candy Crush for the casual ā€œI want an easy gameā€ crowd.

Revenge is a percentage of HP whether youā€™re using a level 1 Aife or a 4/80 Athena; the defenses and the point values are the same regardless and the only variation is the boards like so much of the rest of the game.

What actual problem are we trying to solve with the adjustment? Making it easier for people who donā€™t have 30 heroes? Shoot Iā€™m in a top alliance and I donā€™t have 30 leveled heroes and used level 1ā€™s yesterday and still scored points with them.

We had reduced point values in later rounds but we had a different war where we were often using 2 and sometimes 3 attacks anyway to kill HHR and this is what everyone else is going to need to do too if they arenā€™t already:

Average per round

Departed
1: 40
2: 29
3: 33
4: 27
5: 31
6: 28

HHR
1: 43
2: 21
3: 28
4: 21
5: 21
6: 19

This was two of the top alliances in the game and a reasonable match and you can see reduced point values even after the first flag.

Part of design of this was such to get players to level additional heroes, and itā€™s brilliant and I suspect absolutely intentional as a lot of people at the end game weā€™re ignoring large portions of their hero roster because they provided no marginal improvement to existing teams: those days are over, and wonā€™t be back for a while unless I miss my guess badly. SG picked a reasonable number in that many of the top players donā€™t have 30 leveled heroes: itā€™s going to to take me another 2 months just to get 30 level 60 or better at this rate and Iā€™ve been in game since July and level more efficiently than most anecdotally.

I just donā€™t see where peopleā€™s frustration is going to become that evident after the first few wars: the design forces people to work together and thatā€™s a HUGE win for the gameā€¦ and the progression path is just level more heroes, together as an alliance I might add.

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