Understanding that this topic is “Constructive feedback…” I will apologize in advance and keep my comments as brief as possible.
Until some improvements are made I refuse to click the “war” tab again; it’s a complete waste of my time. As the sole participating member of my alliance in war, there are a possible 779 pts and 1k victory bonus pts for each opponent who fights me. I am currently facing an alliance of 10 participating members whose top player offers me the opportunity to score 137 pts. and 137 victory bonus pts. if I defeat them. It is impossible for me to beat the alliance I’m currently facing, so, why should I bother trying. The additional (ridiculous) aspect of the “revenge attack” makes this already skewed “battleground” even more frustrating and infuriating.
Alliance wars could be a fun new niche in the game; I hope the bugs get worked out soon. Until they do, I’d prefer to see an “opt out” button.
You’re an extreme case and one should not expect to win an alliance war while solo, hence the term alliance
In your case, your opt out is to not set a defence. Or just don’t play in the war. 
As @Talisax says, yours is a very special case… you won’t have a chance of winning playing solo in any event, so whether you take part or not is neither here nor there. You could choose to play simply for the interest, to learn strategies for taking out opponents or to challenge yourself / whatnot. I certainly wouldn’t get hung up on the result.
Here is what I suggest: Why not assign an “AW Power score” that is hidden to each eligible member of the alliance. They can make it visible to the player, but not to everyone, so members of each alliance who do not wish to participate in AW do not feel pressured to do so.
The way the “AW Power score” would be determined is to take the power of the top 30 heroes available in Each Player’s hero house and total it. They could then add up all of the AW power scores of all of the Alliance members eligible to fight in the war and sort/compare to determine match ups.
This way, for match ups, it takes into account what is available to the player and to the alliance as a whole. It would match alliances that are “deep” against similar alliances and alliances that have a very shallow hero pool against each other.
I believe that it would provide for more even competition.
Yes, I do realize that the hero power score is not exactly an accurate measure of a Player’s strength, but I do believe that the system would work better than what is currently determining the match ups.
This has been litigated at length in other threads. It has two fatal flaws.
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The best strategy will be to have 5-15 excellent heroes and all the rest 1* unlevelled. Thus you have immediately done away with the best thing about alliance wars - the incentive everyone now has to level heroes 15-30. (This is the thing that bothers me.)
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Mismatches will be just as common as they are now, because power is not evenly distributed through players’ top 30 heroes. Some players are top heavy (they will win easily) and others have more even distributions of power (they will lose easily).
I have to disagree with your assessment.
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I feel that most People will always want to be the best and that would require competing against the best. To do that you need to have a full team of at least semi-trained 4 and 5 stars. That’s the incentive to train heroes 16-30 or even more for flexibility.
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Mismatches may still be common, but the disparity between the two groups should be closer. Maybe even close enough to overcome the disparity with good planning/coordination between the members. It is at least comparing apples to apples in a way that cannot reasonably or easily be manipulated and then recovered from.
It’s reasonable to disagree and I like the idea that people ‘want to be the best’, but I think we have an enormous volume of evidence to the contrary. If players really ‘wanted to be the best’, then:
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Cup dropping would not be a thing. But we do see players sacrificing their place on the trophy leaderboard all the time - it’s endemic - because there is a small reward for doing so.
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Mercing would not be a thing. But we do see players sacrificing their Titan grades all the time - it’s almost an in-game vocation - because mercing has substantial rewards in terms of extra ascension rolls.
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Titan sacrificing would not be a thing. But now we see some alliances taking strategic ‘Titan breaks’ because it gets them easier war matchups.
And would the disparity between matched alliances be lessened with this new system? I don’t think so. Actually I think mismatches would be worse, because the current system effectively overweights a player’s top team, while a ‘top 30’ system would effectively underweight it. But I think close matches are an entirely secondary concern.
The first two: Cup dropping and Mercing are both done to acquire materials to become better. I don’t do it. I used to drop cups in a moderate manner to farm for food/Iron. I stopped the practice quite a while ago and won’t resume doing it again. Merc’ing is done for much the same reason and also in order to get more chances to acquire acension materials Both of these practices are done in order to make their entire team stronger and work toward being better or work toward being the best. That being said, those were probably not good examples.
Titan sacrificing is not a widespread practice. I’ve heard of it being done and for different reasons. Some do it to keep the titan level low, which makes no sense to me. Others do it in order to give their players a break or a day off where they do not feel pressured to hit every single titan. This is something with which I can agree, but I wouldn’t want to be in an alliance that practices this.
I think that by implying that because some people act some way or believe some way, that all people believe or act that way is a fallacious argument. There are some that don’t care about much other than farming and socializing in the game. They don’t care for titans, AW, raiding, but that does not in any way mean that it is the rule of the land.
I think cup dropping and mercing are examples that are precisely on point. I too indulge in neither, but both (as you say) are practices undertaken to win extra materials and ascension rolls - which is precisely what players gain by winning wars. This is to say: the incentives are identical. You think players will respond differently, when faced with the same incentives? I can’t see why.
You’re right that Titan sacrificing is not widespread. But effective tactics are as contagious as a virus.
You recall how some alliances swapped players out at the beginning of alliance wars and then it became a plague almost immediately, until the rules changed? You recall how cup-dropping went from being widespread to being almost universally practiced when alliances realised it would net them better war matches, and this continued until the rules changed? I suspect that the only reason ‘Titan breaks’ are not dominating the game already is that there is a cost to them in lost ascension rolls.
And yet we still see the tactic taking off, to a limited extent, as some alliances calculate that their gain in war victory rolls will outweigh the loss of a Titan they might not have defeated anyway. That’s because players are clever and recognise the value of every advantage. And that’s why one has to be especially careful of unintended consequences when changing the matching mechanism.
Moreover, you don’t need to assume homogeneous behaviour to conclude that some things are bad ideas. In a game theory context, 5% population behaviour is often enough to determine whether a particular approach will survive or perish. And this, being a (relatively) simple game, is a classic game theory environment.
So does it matter than some players will not understand incentives? No. The point is that some players will (or will behave consistently with them, even if they don’t understand them) and will thus determine the new equilibrium.
Just wanted to put something out here I observed in our last match up. Titan score was fairly even at the match up time… however our opponent was much stronger than our alliance. We gave it our best, but ended up losing, as I had expected. Not complaining. I don‘t expect to win every time and, as I said, they were stronger. But I found the titan score to be interesting, asI checked it several times during the war.
This was at match up.
During the war…
When the war was just about over…
Any thoughts?
Could be they aren’t all that motivated to maintain higher titans. Maybe they don’t spend lots of battle items on titans, or have low participation where the majority of titan damage is done by relatively few players, which will limit their titan stength… etc.
Hello guys. Alliance War is great opportunity and fun in the game, but the balance is not good. i think what necessary to do for more correct and justice balance: 1. Define the strength of each player inside the Alliance based on his/her more experienced Heroes on the deck. So, as a result the strength of the Alliance will be the sum of all strengths their members. It’s eliminate the manipulations with cups and titan’s points; 2. Counting the level of player! More experienced player has more possibility to collect different types of Heroes and attakers for them.
In the past, I had recommended summing up the power of the top 30 Heroes available to each player and using that as a hidden AW power score so it would be visible to the Player, but no one else. Then taking those AW Power scores and summing them up to determine the power of each alliance. It should provide a better idea of how powerful a particular player might be while passively determining how “deep” they are in heroes.
I thought this would be a much better “Apples to Apples” comarison of Alliance strength, but it was not a popular Idea or at least those opposed to the idea were very vocal about it.
A power sum of the highest 30 would work better than titan score in theory, but the actual hero scores ingame don’t necessarily reflect the real effectiveness of heroes before they reach their final ascension tier, especially where 5* at 2/60 or 3/70 are concerned.
Otto, i think this is the good idea, developing my menteioned above and hope developers will count it in the nearest future. As you told about comparison “Apple to apple” this is realy good. If it is not popular idea to realising such mechanic I may understand that the most part of players would like to manipulate different scores as much as they want to receive poor gamers and alliances to get victory. I think it is not interesting and I can’t receive fun and pleasure from the game. If developers won 't do anything with the balance it will be one way…
We have the same problem during the war. My thoughts are below )
I’d think of two step selection:
- Set of candidates by a Titan and trophies score
- Median of alliance defence teams. Median should work better than averag.
However, I suspect that complicated calculations will not be used for the sake of server load.
Give the leader the possibility to opt out off alli wars
Agreed.
Personally, I think I’d like to see 3 or 4 leveled leagues set up much like we sort of have in raids. I’m pretty sure everyone here would agree that Alliance A that only regularly defeats 2 and 3 star titans should not be fighting Alliance B, that regularly defeats 8 and 9 stars.
What I’m suggesting is a very basic league system, bronze silver and gold.
Bronze 1-3 star titan clans
Silver 4-6 star titan clans
Gold 7-10 star
The game already has this leveling system built in to the alliances it just needs to be utilized so weak or new Alliances aren’t beaten into submission while high level players aren’t wasting their time when they could be fighting competitive matches.
I know this won’t make things fun for bubble teams, but a pro team fighting an Alliance with 10 people that was created 2 weeks ago isn’t fun for anyone
Not bad Idea but more accurate idea was mentioned above by me and Otto0000. Example of full disbalancing alliance war matchmaking below. Our last war where the opponent had 3000+strength whole alliance against our where we had 2000+. As a result full MASSACRE! We have done all what we could do. The question is why we are not so lucky 