Events should be a real competition

Done my research after I made this thread (shame on me), and you are right. There are people enjoying this setup. My reaction when I figured what I need to do to remain in the tier I landed was: does almost everything in this game has to be so repetitive? Even more if competition is involved. Can’t remember any real life contest in which a contestant has unlimited number of attempts to set his best score. It just doesn’t make any sense.

While people afraid that setting limits would lead to RNG determine the outcome, to me it looks quite the opposite. More times you try, more chance for you to be extremely lucky so things work out the best way. If that’s not RNG dictating the rankings, I don’t know what it is. :man_shrugging:t2:

2 Likes

Make 2 prize tiers: rush & “perfection”. Fist set goes to the first time through leaders, the other to those that keep retrying? Would satisfy both.

It’ll never happen though, the more people spend on resources the better they do for money. So they want people redoing over and over and over again.

Nice idea! Like to see it happen! Good bye, P2W@ :smile:

Well, old rewards system are kinda broken. Getting in 1000s with 10k active players is a different thing than getting in 1000s with 500k active players.
The thing is, SG earn a good fortune selling energy during events. This is the main thing why events are made the way they are. Any “improvements” should consider this. I can name an easy addition, which can ruin the life for contenders, i. e. disable the flee option. This will increase time required significantly. Next thing - increased energy cost to redo of a stage (maybe some cooldown system with gem skipping). Final thing - once you get 1st place - you can’t get anything than completion rewards.

rewards system was updated

used to only be top 10 for 4* mats

fwiw everyone has a shot at the better rewards

if you want em, get em

if not, don’t

especially in rare & epic

2 Likes

This topic has been brought up over and over again. Yes, the winning strategies aren’t the most fun way to do things, and you need lots of flasks, but for this competition limiting the number of flasks will make it a lottery.

There is more than just using a mono team to the strategy. If you look at a lot of the very top players they are using multiple 4* heroes for legendary. Some even use costume Gunnar for that, and others use 4 reds plus Miki. Several of them get away with using very limited troops. Those who are older and slower need better teams and troops (I know from experience :blush:)

There is another way to shake things up which is to make a different event. The upcoming Ninja Tower promises to do away with infinite repeats. Features are changing but in the first beta, floors could not be replayed after they were completed. Fleeing early is risky because if you keep doing stages over and over you can get an Oni gem and if you flee after that your heroes will get disqualified. However, if you think that any event made for this game won’t favor spenders and use flasks you don’t know the developers!! The first version had 100 stages which required purchase of multiple refills just to finish…

3 Likes

I have this ongoing problem. Every time there is a update my heroes get worse. They could hold there own until this last 5 to 10 updates. With every update they loose power. I had these heroes for almost 2 years. They used to be competitive. Not going to buy all these new characters that do 5 different spells that are just ridiculous and have nothing to do with leveling.

Though your post is out of topic, but allow me to shed light.

First. Two years is a long time without you improving your lot.

Second. You failed to account that the enemy defense may have their heroes highly emblemed while yours may have remained stagnant.

Third. Attacking using rainbow teams may be successful in the lower raid arenas early on but not much on higher raid arenas although rainbow teams may still win in diamond arena provided you have the ideal heroes and troops for it, with luck and skill on tile manipulation also a factor.

Fourth. Stacking strong element against the enemy tank is still the best strategy there is.

Fifth. Try reading some threads in this forum with regards to guides in attacking, stacking, etc. You may also want to be enlightened with several E&P guides posted by various players on YouTube or other similar platform.

@Sirdread63

3 Likes

Agree with you on everything but this, and I’m speaking from my own experience. :blush:
I did repeat some stages this time and it looked like this: open the stage, make couple of moves, if I don’t get enough tiles to finish 1st wave in 20 seconds I flee. After 4-5 times it happened: excellent board and I’ve improved my score on each of those stages by almost 10k. More importantly, I have secured the rank that I wanted.
IMO, this repeat thing actually looks more like a lottery - those who buy more lottery tickets have a greater chance of winning the prize. Sort of exploiting the RNG distribution until it works in your favour.
If there’s limited number of attempts, yes, it will happen to everybody to get repeated bad board in some stages… But on average, the RNG factor should not favour anybody to large extent. Or, it will at rare OR epic OR legendary quest - hardly on all of them. Even less likely in every event. There would be more fluctuations and competition would be more open.

I could think about about another system which would significantly lowers the RNG impact. The idea is averaging results for a stage. For example, you completed a stage with 40k score. Next attempt - 50k score. Your final score would be 45k. Next attempt 55k - result is (40+50+55)/3=48333. Next thing you flee - result is (40+50+55+0)/4=36250.
This would truly show the skill among players, not only willing to spend gems for energy.

3 Likes

I can see why you think that way but mathematically that is not how it works, and even if your idea was sound, SG would not implement something that would lose them money.

The score can be written as a function of skill, heroes (with troops), number of repetitions, and RNG.
As you have more and more repetitions, it converges toward a maximum score that is based on just skill and heroes. The top scorers are still limited to some degree by RNG but it is much less than if they were given limited rerolls. This system does leave out some players who are skilled and are FTP or CTP. We had one such player who would only able to compete every few months but then could get top 10 in epic.

What you are saying is that if you do a small number of runs, that you can get lucky and have a great board and that RNG causes high scores. In reality this means that with few attempts, the impact of skill and heroes is modest and a lot of the score is due to luck. However, the impact of skill and heroes is enough that I’ll bet with 5-10 repetitions per level that most of the top 10 and top 100 would stay the same. There could be some shuffling but it would be some folks in the range 101-200 that made it to the top 100 by getting great boards.

In any case it isn’t worth arguing about because many such suggestions have already been made over and over again with little impact. SG did consider some of these factors in the Ninja Tower, but the non-spenders will still have a disadvantage.

2 Likes

No, this is definitely not true. A simple example. Let’s say, we encounter a solid 5* team in raids, about 4500 power. Can we win against it with a stacked team of 4* with something like 3500? Sure thing, there’s some videos of such wins. Does that mean that we always win in that scenario? Not at all, more likely we are going to lose. So, does that have anything with skill? No, it all depends on board. How can we measure skill? Only with statistical methods - making many raids and averaging the results.

It is impossible to argue math over the forum given all the posts I see but these are two different issues completely. The win percentage on the raid will converge toward a relatively low value with multiple tries, just as the maximal score will converge toward a value that you will get from a perfect board.

But it is actually a good example, since there is a cap in raids up to 3 attacks on the same team. If we imagine there’s infinite number of attacks, it is quite possible that every 4* team will eventually win against the same top defence team - when the best board come.
I’m a statistician so am familiar with probability calculus. And I must say I don’t follow your logic that increasing number of repetitions puts forward the quality of team. I agree that it brings out the maximum potential of the team, given the right circumstances (read, the best possible board). But that score strongly depends exactly on those circumstances. If you take the same team out, and give to one 5 attempts and to other 100 attempts - the probability that the first one will score better is very slim.
In raid example, there’s price for that infinite number of failures - cup dropping. In events, there’s none. IMO, it gives wrong incentives to players. But it does maximize profit for the company. :face_with_hand_over_mouth:
Your example of a guy who was able to compete on the highest level once in couple of months confirms this thesis. Being able to repeat stages determines the outcome strongly, if not even decisively.
Regarding Small Giant making some changes, agreed. I don’t put much hope in it. But we can discuss, at least. :man_shrugging:t2::blush:

P.S. Droped out of desired bracket in epic tier - didn’t check the score in last 2 hours. :joy:
Oh well, lesson learned: do not chase score under these rules. At least I didn’t used flasks for it, just regular WE. :muscle:

1 Like

The score for a stage consist of 4 (5) parts. One is from enemies - here we do not have any influence. Second is time bonus, third is match bonus, and last one is health bonus. Final is chest bonus, but that’s not always present. So, we want a good combo and little time. Health bonus is mostly automatic.
Popular tactics for a high score on a lower stages involve going with a stacked team, and 2 moves. First move is make a crystal from horizontal bar (so central enemy get 3 tiles and sides get one each) and a good combo afterwards, your heroes become charged. Second wave is wiped with axes and bosses are hit with your team and finished with blown crystal from first stage. It can be done in 40 seconds. Sure, this need some investment in heroes and troops, but main part - finding a good board with crystal and combo, has nothing to do with skill. It’s just flipping the coin until you get a result.
Some advanced tactics say that you need a good combo and two chests. Is this skill? I doubt that.

2 Likes

I consider myself a good and experienced player. Level 63, defense team is nearly 4600, I win 85% of my raids in high diamond, have made it to global #1 4 times (twice post-Telly), usually go 5/6 or 6/6 in wars, know how to put together a good team and leverage synergies between heroes… and am always in the 2nd or 3rd to the last tier in challenge events. And in most cases, my teams are identical to those in the top 10-20. I just don’t throw obscene levels of money and resources into them, which I believe is the only way to get so high.

I think limiting the number of replays is a good idea, and would make it more competitive and not only (mostly) a function of who has the bigger wallet.

3 Likes

I think replaying is not the problem in these events. 5000 points for those chests are. It’s fine to have them in for the coin, but 5000 points on top are completely unnecessary.

This game is now a relic of a time that was. There has been way to much more work in the playstore to actually benefit ftp for actually playing than this game ever has. The fact that three years later people still defend this travesty of a reward system says enough. The veterans are now like old racist grandparents afraid of change. Good luck beating the proverbial dead horse with this one.

3 Likes

This. This is where I concede defeat. Veteran, experienced and moneyed players can afford to buy gems for WE refills and flasks, crafting materials and the cost of gems expediting the crafting of battle items, not to mention the insane cost of getting ideal heroes to max and emblem, including the troops. With these factors, no wonder they are the same people hogging the leaderboards.

IMHO, the OP has a conscientious idea on mind. That is, to make the challenge events a real competition where one player tries to best the others in the monthly challenge events. Have you guys seen in sports where the team or individual that lost retried doing the game against the winner in order to change the outcome? Have you seen that in professional basketball, football, baseball, chess, billiards, darts, volleyball, hockey, boxing, marathon or whatever game or sports man has conceived? Definitely, YES. But that would be on a different tournament or season or league where the former loser bested the former winner. This should have been the case here in E&P. While those professional sports or games allow each opposing team a single chance to determine the victor, OP is offering that the redoing of certain stages be done in a limited number of attempts, not unlimited with what the current gameplay promotes. With all the best emblemed heroes you have and troops maxed, if you still lost to a seemingly weaker player, then try your luck next time after several months when the same challenge event comes around.

3 Likes