Cups should be given out by team power

Went to bed over 2700 cups and woke up to this…

This is what my opponents look like too.:imp:

my main account is my powerful spend money account. my alt is to see what i could do with $30 and my know-how.

also i once had -406 cups after a one hour lunch break. fairly standard at higher cup levels.

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Top team is weak, to much heals and little dps. Any team with Perseus and mix of other decent 4&5* dps heroes would eat you up.

Perseus is garbage

I have more trouble with debuffers than him

Perseus is far from sucking far as pvp goes, he dismantles healers like no other and raised my max cup count by 800+ when i actually push myself to care about cups and the dismal pvp aspect of this game. Till they make raiding rewarding besides stroking your epeen i will continue to keep my cup count between 0-1000 for ez daily hero slaying.

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I use the exact same approach as crawdaddy. There is absolutely ZERO benefit or detriment to you or your alliance today whether you have 30,000 cups or 0 cups. You get no extra ascension items or anything else (this may change with the forthcoming alliance wars). The greatest benefits you can get in raids is filling that chest and food (most of us have more iron than we know what to do with). I sandbag my defense team and keep myself in the 1100-1300 cups range where opponents seem to have most food. I pull in 300-400k extra food a day from raids which helps keep my 3xTC20s running full steam and giving me plenty extra food for other things. I easily defeat teams in this range in order to get that chest ASAP, thus increasing my chances of ascension items. You want to chase your name in lights, go for it, but that approach is only hurting you from progressing as quickly as possible.

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yeah i started deranking yesterday

As a true PvP, raids are broken. The game relies too much on getting a good board. I can lose to someone 1000 points lower to me with a bad board and I’ve beat people who were substantially better on paper then my team was at the time. I use raids for resourses and every so often when I don’t need resources I will see how high I can get. While I can get above 2800, by the morning it is inevitable that I will have lost several hundred cups. And this is with a team power of 4120.

Your approach is perfectly rational. But of course, just as there is ‘ZERO benefit or detriment to you or your alliance today whether you have 30,000 cups or 0 cups’, so there is also ZERO benefit or detriment to you or your alliance today whether you have all 5* heroes or all 1* heroes, whether you login daily or annually, or even whether you are alive or dead.

If you choose to view trophies as irrelevant then more power to you: I hope you enjoy the game. It is equally valid, however, to view trophies as a measure of success in the game - the entire point of building a strong team being to advance in the rankings.

On behalf of those who see things this latter way, I thank you for providing us with easy kills and wish you well in achieving whatever goals you are seeking to achieve.

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Board randomness is a feature, not a bug. That it allows you to beat better teams, and lose to worse, is part of the joy of gameplay. And of course, if you fight your way up the rankings past your equilibrium level, you will be beaten back down to size when you are offline - that’s the nature of an ELO ranking system. One cannot be surprised or disappointed by this unless one does not understand the process.

Raids are not in the least bit broken. You may not like them - many don’t - but the system works precisely as is intended. That’s sort of the opposite of being broken.

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If you find a system that is random and not based on skill to work as expected, more power to you my friend. The difference is in chess, it is about skill. If you have never played chess and want to learn, you play novice players. If I can beat Bobbie Fischer, et al because of a lucky roll, or I can beat Lebron James by just chucking the ball at the hoop, it’s not strategy or skill. It is an unfixable flaw with match 3 games. This game will never truly be about strategy when there is that much luck. I don’t have a problem with it. It is the way it is. I just dont really relate this game to chess in the slightest.

My son won a recent Challenge Event at Beginner Level (which, as you note above, is highly competitive and usually dominated by the top players across the boards). My son may have $10 or $20 invested in this game, but at the Beginner level, you can get a great team without paying much, or anything, if you’re patient.

I’ve watched my son during these events and while raiding, and if you believe winning or losing is principally luck, think again. Sure, he gets bad boards like we all do, but he’s planning several moves ahead (very rapidly) and strategically using items (in events). He easily completes the Advanced levels in these challenge events despite having exactly one 5* hero (at the time; he’s since drawn Perseus), while I with a much more powerful squad struggled through.

Sure, raiding has a random component, but it absolutely has a strong skill component. When your team is defeated in a raid, it may be that the AI didn’t play your team very well. It’s really not that smart. For example, it will fire Ares’s special even when the opposing team has a de-buff special charged up. Two humans would be playing chicken about whose going to cast first.

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That’s a poor analogy. Chess is a game of perfect information: as a passable amateur I could play Magnus Carlsen 100 times and never earn a draw. But as a poor-to-middling poker player, even I could win a few pots from Daniel Negreanu or Phil Hellmuth thanks to sheer dumb luck. I’d actually expect to: that’s part of the appeal of poker; skill doesn’t always win. It’s a feature, not a bug.

Same for this game. So don’t relate it to chess: it’s not remotely similar. Relate it to poker.

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I’m NOT disputing the ELO statement as far as rankings or that there is strategy to the game. I am stating that while the randomness may make it more fare overall, it doesn’t really lend itself to true skill. Sure, you can skillfully turn around a bad board maybe just as easily as you can do it with luck. It’s just like pulling heroes. I can get lucky and get HOTM on first pull while you make have to spend $300. Is there skill there… or is it just luck?

I love the poker analogy and it fits so perfectly here. Sure, a bad player will win a lot here or there, but over time the truly skilled players are the ones making a little bing playing poker.
Same thing here…sure we will enter dry spells and lose cups from time to time to worse teams and on occasion beat better teams through luck, but over time the system gets you in the right spot for your level.
We tend to dwell on the times we feel screwed over (myself included) but after reading the discussion here I have finally come around to accepting that the system works.

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Equating this to poker vastly over estimates the reality of this game. There are so many nuances to poker which this game lacks. Sure, in the sense that I can be dealt an unbeatable hand and win even if I’ve never held a card in my life, I guess. I’m sure you’ll go back to some circular logic like with you’re elo/chess anology, and then how it’s nothing like chess and how it was ridiculous for me to compare it to chess, so I will just move on.

It has elements that are similar to chess and poker but not really that similar. It’s a card game. It’s random. You could say it is most like any game of chance that involve percentages. There are always skills you can learn along the way to increase odds but it will always have an element of luck. I don’t have a problem with the raid system. I use it to my benefit for food and iron and for the quest. Trying to be a top PvP player is too frustrating with no real benefit unless your in the top 100 for bragging rights. It is typically much more beneficial in loot to have lower cups.

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Not really my ‘elo/chess analogy’, but considerably more your ELO-chess analogy, I think. I would never liken one to the other. That would be silly.

You’re right to say that poker has many nuances that this game lacks, but this game has many nuances that poker lacks, so in my humble view the two sort of wash out. The point is that both incorporate a large amount of randomness and luck, and that you were indeed ridiculous to compare E&P to chess. I’m happy indeed to see you move on.

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Again… circular logic. It’s just like poker yet nothing like poker. The matching system is just like chess, but nothing like chess. Please don’t insult me and go about you life.