Alliance Wars: The Good, The Bad &?

Here Here!
These are my ONLY gripes about AW.
LOOT
and
SCORING

Perhaps I just havent looked at the scoring…

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There apparently is something broken: after the initial round, they were using those 1* troops as feeders, leaving blank teams that couldn’t be scored against. This is a serious enough issue that @sara or @petri should flag it for a hot fix before the weekend.

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I do not like the wars, the concept, and have some doubts about the mechanics. Some like both, veryone s entitled to their views… Also, thre should be an opt out alternative. Many do not fancy having 6 teams, or buying the spots to accomodate them and the food. The loot is awful, but no one should have expected more, considering SG’s stinginess with it.
The one real big glitch in it, that most everyone agrees is that the matching system is not working. It has to be solved asap, so that even those that like the wars get upset with it.
That some are well matched, as has been with my alliance is more a fortunate coincidnce than any merit of the system.

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I agree the loot is terrible. It is like they wanted to create something to have even less loot than other places.

We had our first war and we won 2500+ against 800+.

I was in top 3 damage and I received no resources, no gems but some crap ingredients and war items.
It for sure does not make sense to grow up to 30 heroes to get nothing in exchange.

I am really considering not registering for next war.

Silexu

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Hi everyone - I think someone already commented this (and in some other threads, with someone scoring over 700 points in a single hit because of this) - the situation where the opposing team has put up really low level defenders or incomplete teams.

Just to repeat, the scoring in these cases goes as follows:
“A fixed amount of points is distributed between members of the alliance depending on their strength, If someone puts up only one defender, he will give a low amount of points, but other members will have higher value. If everyone in the alliance does it, they’ll still give the same amount of points and they will be easier to defeat.”

We are also currently looking into the Revenge Arrow attacks in these situations.

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@Sara The issue isn’t someone putting up low power teams (as yes other teams will get those points, but they are eating the heroes in their defense team, which means there are no heroes to respawn, clearly an exploit. If an entire alliance did this all at once, the opposing alliance would be left with NO targets to hit once they kill the current wave. There will be nothing to respawn, limiting the opposing alliance to 2000 points total for the whole war and once they kill all the heroes (with proper timing) there will be no one to hit.

EDIT: heroes in your AW defense team shouldn’t be allowed to be eaten while the war is active.

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In the next war, if a player completely removes the heroes from their defense team (‘by eating them’), they will become a spectator and will not receive any rewards. If all the players remove the heroes from their defense teams, that will trigger immediate defeat for their alliance.

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I am wondering why in the world I would give the Wars any serious attention when this is my loot from a win:

After the first couple of Wars, I thought it would be a good idea to start leveling up my 2nd, 3rd, and maybe 4th best hero in each color to help the Alliance. After this last incredibly sad haul, I’m abandoning that and I’m going to feed all my duplicates to each other. So many things in this game that are becoming tedious, like level farming, and now the Wars have fallen way short of my expectations. I’ll still participate, but I’m not going to change my game habits to help this.

Here’s an idea - how about something guaranteed for each Alliance member for winning, like an Alliance Flask! This would help the team as much as the players, and encourage people to actually try. As it is, if I can make one run at a level 5 board and get a better haul, what’s the point?

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I agree. With the demand alliance wars puts on your roster, winners should have an easier time advancing their roster. With ascension items. What harm will 1 rare ascension mat do when everyone has a dozen heroes or more left to ascend?

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Hell - give me 10 practice swords and 5 backpacks (adventure kits) and I’d be happy.

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I mean its 6 rais once a week? Why do you act like playing the game is a burden without rewards? And why would the rewards even be important to you if leveling heroes is not enjoyable for you? I don’t understand what players who complain about having to level up extra heros for wars actually do in game… If i didn’t passively level the rest of my stable I wouldnt have a way to spend half my resources and be hero capped with training fodder.

So far I’ve done 3 wars. Two rewards gave me a fine herb and a gem or two… and one gave me an ascension item. Twice it sucked, once it didn’t. I’m happy to get the extra reward role once a week or however often wars pop.

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The time to play the raids is irrelevant. It changed how I was leveling up heroes. Instead of working on ones that will help me win raids and hit titans, I started working on ones that would help my alliance and give me more bench strength than I need. I’m not mad that the loot is so pathetic, I just said that I’m not going to focus on the wars or worry about having 30 vialble heroes.

I’m not sure if to have a totally maxed out A team at your disposal already, but I (and many others) don’t.

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It hasn’t changed my optimization pattern at all:

  1. Titans
  2. Raid attacking
  3. Everything else… except now that everything else is AW in addition to defense / autofarm team.

1 and 2 also somewhat build towards AW: there’s nothing bad about raid heroes or even most titan heroes when we’re talking AW benches, and optimizing for AW unless you’re in a power alliance, well, I’d still focus on the more meaningful things.

I do think loot should be somewhat better for victory, more like 40% “junk” ascension roll, 50% 3* rare, and 10% 4* ascension item just based on some typical loot statistics: 1 3* rare per week, and 1 4* per month… which seems fairly reasonable and not at all game breaking given the other sources of items in game.

There is some problem with that given that the Victory Tier is the same for winning a war 1 vs 2, as two newbie alliances facing off… there’s a progression path which SG has defined, I don’t know what it is, but presumably the rate I tossed out may be too high for a new player in their minds (since 3* rare ascension items are far less common than that off a 1-3* titans and it’s hard to clear the rare quest 4th stage at this point) but they may need to stratify the rewards based on whatever matchmaking metric they come up with.

Not certain it’s right to limit things the other way either, design for the newbie player, and give all the long time players the same which appears to be what they may have done. There should be some middle ground.

In general though I just want them to do something smarter with the matchmaking; wars don’t have to suck, it’s a compelling feature when it works, but broken matchups != working. The ideal should be competitive matches top to bottom, but because Trophy Score is a flawed metric for really measuring anything, Alliance Score for matchmaking for AW is just as flawed.

Or just fix cup dropping once and for all and that helps sort the matchmaking issue and makes Trophy Score more meaningful… it still doesn’t work fantastically as it doesn’t measure roster depth which is really the predictor for wars, but it’s not lost on my at all that my alt may already be ahead of my main when it comes to war performance, and the salient difference is I drop cups on the alt, and I don’t (much) on the main.

Alt had leftover 60’s and 70’s of all things, the main, nope, and the main has a one month head start too and I skipped playing the alt for like a month at one point… cup dropping is absolutely rational when it comes to hero development speed and so Trophy Score will get sandbagged when we’re talking alliances that don’t care about your cups in today’s game.

That is sort of ugly from a AW perspective when matching on it.

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What about matching based on Experience Level for both the Wars and Raids? I’ve never seen that even discussed. It seems that a player’s level will be consistent with how long they have been playing and thus how deep their bench is likely to be.

A non-farmable one?

How long a player has been playing is not always consistent with their experience level and certainly says nothing about how deep their bench is. If a player has the necessary financial means, s/he can have a very deep bench - albeit probably not all leveled - within a relatively short time. A F2P player, who perhaps Lady Luck has not been smiling on, can have a very high experience level and a very short bench.

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It’s got to be better than using cups, though. Players can manipulate their cup level pretty easily, but XP is just consistently increasing.

Sara, this does not remedy the problem. Playing is as important as winning. You will have alliances expecting a nice fight with a one second game. We need a button for those who want to skip the war

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but the experience level does not say anything about the player’s strength

Well, it doesn’t quite track that way unfortunately either but it’s an interesting idea that occasionally comes up, @Vivenna once wrote a nice rebuttal IIRC of using player level to measure anything but I’ll try to explain.

Where you spend your time farming matters: I live in 3 flag zones, hardly ever leaving them, and that is seriously suboptimal for exp. I’m also not competing for events so not retrying levels for non-trivial exp, and I’m not purchasing WE for farming.

I’m level 38 having started July 2nd, and when I’m actually trying while I’m not the top in my alliance (hi Zero!) I’m top 10 in virtually every metric we can track and in some cases better than that.

I’m tied for the bottom in Departed for player rank, and other than @Dante2377 I expect that to change… Dante lives in the same farming zones I do so it’s not unreasonable to expect we’ll stay the same, not sure when he started though.

I don’t know many people who are active (and by such I mean spending the overwhelming majority of your world energy flags) who are lower rank than I am who started anywhere close to my own start date, most are non-trivially higher.

Also there’s another individual in the top 100 regularly who’s several player levels beneath me but given his troops he’s spent quite a bit more than I have in game, so that definitely affects raid performance… but it also affects hero development if buying WE which isn’t a terrible use of gems compared to some things (ascension packs come to mind).

For wars I think it might be a better metric, but it’s still not a great one: while I’m not close to some of our members in hero rosters, I’m ahead of most when I last looked at the data (top 10, barely) so it doesn’t really track that well there either.

Ultimately I would like matchmaking to take the best predictor of war performance into account, and that’s hero development. My opinion only but if going to do it, they should try to do it right.

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