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.
āEvery team in the alliance must be killed before any are revived - most really liked this suggestion
āMultiple defense teams (1st, 2nd, 3rd, etc. so you would not always fight the first team) ā people were split on this suggestion
āReduce or eliminate the revenge bar for the last three attacks
āReuse 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.