Loot Assessment - War Shuffle vs. Established Alliance, Which is Better?

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War Shuffle vs. Established Alliance - Which is Best for Loot???

Premise

The premise is simple. There is an approach to Alliance wars where the participants create a new alliance, win 5 straight wars, open their war chest & repeat.

The trade-off on this is that each time they create a new alliance, not only does it reset their war score but it also resets their titan score. This means that the new alliance must rebuild their titan level from 1* again.

The argument is that by sacrificing the Titan Loot Tier, you get more 4* materials by simply opening a war chest more frequently. War chests have the best known likelihood of dropping 4* materials (for those who have 100% war participation).

Objective

The aim of this experiment was to determine which method was better in terms of giving not just total ascension materials but more specifically the 4* materials (ones needed for 5* hero ascension).

To do this I took my collected Titan Loot, Titan Kills & War Loot data from three times for comparison:

  • When I fought 11 & 12* titans in We Are Groot Vol. - 2, an established alliance
  • When I fought 9 & 10* Titans in We Are Groot Vol. - 3, an established alliance
  • When I fought 1-6* Titans while doing the War Shuffle strategy.

I completed the war shuffle with 2 other players & incorporated their Titan & War Chest data into this analysis as well as my own personal previous War Chest data.

I have ONLY accounted for ascension materials which drop from War Chest vs. Titans. I have not included War Victory or Titan Chest loot as (from my own tracking for over 1 year of data) these drop very infrequently.

Drop rate for Ascension Mats from various sources

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Other Data - Titan Loot & Ascension Materials

Titans are pretty well universally acknowledged as the most regular method of achieving non-farmable ascension materials.
I have a Data-Farming project running to collect & try to pin down the liklihood of getting ascension materials from each Titan Loot Tier.

The preliminary results from this project are:

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As you can see, it is not until Loot Tier V that there seems to be a CHANCE of getting a 3* material and not until Tier VIII that 4* mats have been observed to drop…

From this, it’s worth noting from the outset that by reducing your titan level, you reduce the maximum Titan Loot Tier you can achieve. In essence, if you drop to a 5* titan, you can get AT BEST a loot tier of VIII (8). This is compared to getting a C grade on an 11* titan which gives loot tier XI (11).

Link to Titan Loot Project:

Results - Ascension Materials

The results are pretty stark… I will let this Graphic/ Summary Table speak for itself.
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Other Considerations - Emblems

One major other consideration is Emblems.

In the Reset Alliance (War Shuffle) strategy you WILL get more emblems as compared to an established alliance. The reason is simple:

Emblems drop from Titan Chests & War Chests.

Both of which you open far more often with the War Shuffle as compared to an established alliance. More chests opened = more emblems. Simple.
NOTE, this is not necessarily the case for an alliance which is chaining 14* Titans.

Raw Data

I have a copy of all the raw data used in this report if anyone wants a copy of it. Just either @ me here or send me a PM via Line (Guvnor81). The data is in an Excel Sheet.

What Next?

The only thing I am not 100% confident on is the War chest drop rate. I have relatively limited data as these take time to collect.

HOWEVER, even at 100% drop rate of 4* Items the total is still quite stark…
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Summary

From the data, I highly highly recommend that if players are wanting Ascension Material Loot, they join an alliance & kill bigger titans regularly.

If a player is focused on War & enjoys wars the most, then the War Shuffle will serve it’s purpose then.

However, based on my analysis I reject the premise that there is value in sacrificing Titan Levels for easy War Chest Completion.

References

Titan Loot Farming Project

War Shuffle Discussion

Explaining How Reset Guarantees Easy War Victories

Discussion of War Strategies (Around Post 118 is where I first saw the War Shuffle strategy.)

22 Likes
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Is war shuffling occuring more often with stronger players? If so, I’m wondering if the rewards are playing a smaller role and they are simply doing it out of boredom.

Winning wars may be their reward! High fives and bragging rights, carry on to their next alliance?

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Why do you need to create new alliance every time? Just switch between two. Inactive alliance will lose in wars so many times that its war score will be super low. Am I missing something here?

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Very informative post, thank you for putting time and effort in it

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Nothing stops you :slight_smile:

Amounts to more or less the same thing.

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You could well be IMO, If you have signed up for a war and don’t participate, the game unchecks your participation thingy and informs you that you have been kicked out for non participation (i.e. no points for you) If you don’t participate you get crappy loot due to a low war participation rate which makes the whole thing sort of counter productive. You actually have to be present to be able to fight. I have encountered one man bands that try this, but they can only ever manage one, or at best, two attacks and lose. So their war score never increases, but it will take months to fill a war chest given the 1 point available for a defeat.
They usually just use one savage attack/defense team and hope that you cannot defeat it. As my own war score has gotten higher I am seeing this far less frequently. Most people make a fairly reasonable effort. (11 of my last 15 war matches have been vs Russians and they are pretty fair to be honest).

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That is pretty much undeniable.
Chaining and killing high level titans is almost always more rewarding in terms of loot.
Even emblems are not so higher in the war shuffle, as you miss rare titans too.

But this analysis doesn’t consider the most important factor for picking a war shuffle strategy: items employement.

To fight and kill high level titans, you have to use (depending on your style and your deck) much more items compared on a shuffle alliance, which use almost zero items.

This meaning 2 things: you can use more items on monthly event. Much more, and that’s very important if you dont spend strong on refills during atlantis/event.

Second, you have costantly more iron that you can use for everything else.

4 Likes
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This post shows the dangers of diminishing returns in leveling-based games.

Moving forward through the progress of the game, especially in an Alliance social context, can be part of player engagement.

However, by making top-tier performance a diminishing returns investment, where the progress made for time put in starts to approach zero, you are guaranteed that your players will either get tired and bored or will try to subvert the intended play experience of the game.

A way around this is to have new content allow for an achievable race to top-tier performance through engagement of the new content. By the time your players catch up to that you have another content release.

However, with the diminishing returns aspect people fight for Ascension items in order to try to maximize the current available playing experience and you start shedding people.

An alliance full of players who have played consistently for 6 or more months, which is already semi-miraculous in mobile gaming player retention, probably cannot defeat Titans regularly. As described above it requires items and fairly intensive coordination that isn’t rewarded by the minimal social aspect of the game.

I’m curious to see if the next release of costumes continues on this diminishing returns road, where you spend hours and hours and hours and the only real benefit is a slight Edge in three star tournaments. While functional, I feel like a strategy of diminishing returns is also a bit nihilistic in terms of how you treat your player population. Being a completionist is literally impossible, being a 100% collector literally impossible, and being an elite player within six months to one year of playing the game is extremely difficult.

While it is important that a game Studio net whales, meaning players who spend a lot, I came up against a player in a Raid Battle who had a team entirely made of the hero of the month. I did a couple quick napkin calculations about how much cash they probably blew to do that, and the only thing I could think of is “this player may be a pathological person with some serious problems.”

Because reaching that “Elite level” is a form of conspicuous consumption and it was disconcerting to see that much intense spending. I will take the SCUBA diving charter trip to Cozumel over the heros, thank you.

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But does it? Lets you have a core team of hard core players.
Assume you have a main alliance is all high level hard hitters and two alliances with mid level to low level teams.

Allow the low level alliance to lose wars and keep titian at 4 stars. Allow the mid level to go 50-50 and kill 8 star titans.

Then rotate mid-level into the low level alliance, so I’m at war -10 but winning 50-50 so i will stay at some negative number and start building the titans up to 8. My low level takes over the 12 star killing war winning alliance so lower the war score, and the titans will fall back to 4 star. My heavy hitters rotate into the medium alliance with a low war score and 8 star titans.

Just keep the rotation going. I wouldn’t think it worth the effort but a bunch of hard core, “my life is E&P” types might. And I think they will end up slightly ahead doing this.

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Not sure really, but if you’d be willing to track some loot across both locations we can compare it?

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I fixed it to make it less confusing…I don’t do this. As my last paragraph said - not worth the effort imo. But based on the way a phrased part of it I can see why you thought that.

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Not that I have a way to start this project anymore (nor do I intend to even try), but while it may not benefit a player to do the war shuffle if they can be part of an alliance that can hit 9* Titans or better, what is the Titan * level where the war shuffle is better?

Let’s say I’m an alliance of level 20 commanders and fight wars. Is it a benefit then to start over the alliance for the war chest because your loot for beating a 3*/4* Titan (likely where your group would be) is a level 6/7 tier at best?

My guess is that the war shuffle may be viable at some very early point in the game when Titan loot is just poor by it’s nature (but like I said, I have no interest in running that experiment to see).

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Potentially, yes.

My advice tho would be to migrate to an alliance where there is the consistancy of a higher titan kills.

Higher titans = better loot generally speaking.

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Your numbers look fantastic, but I can tell you categorically I’m not receiving anywhere close to those results of 4* materials. I have 3 teams all killing 11-12s and am averaging 2 4*unfarmables each month, some months I only get 1. this is true across all 3 of my teams. You must have a some sort of magic when it comes to these unfarmables, because myself and my alliance mates just don’t see that volume of loot from titans.

2 Likes
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I agree, my numbers are way lower than that too…magic touch I guess.

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Even if you halve it from the titans you’re still coming out ahead…

Even a quarter and you’re winning :stuck_out_tongue:

You can go a 6th of the number I received and you’re still winning!!

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A post was merged into an existing topic: War matchmaking strikes again