Raids: fair or unfair?

[Little_Infinity]

I’m afraid you’ll be disappointed. Check out @Dante2377’s excellent guide to Alliance Wars.

Dante's Alliance Wars Primer (with Video from Beta)

Alliance Wars Introduction Alliance Wars is a group effort where two Alliances are pitted against each other. Each alliance member sets a defense and then goes about attacking the other alliance’s defense. You get points for killing enemy heroes when attacking and whichever alliance has the most points at the end of the War is the winner. Each War will have a 24-hour preparation period to set defenses and then a 24-hour period of the actual War (i.e. when you attack). Each member will get 6…

The defence not only have the usual Raid style advantages, but are also heaped with an arrow attack that gets more regular the weaker they are.

From a Raids perspective, really it doesn’t matter… it’s all about people finding their natural level based on a combination of their team power versus the average opponent they face, and their experience in using it. If you stripped the 20% boost off defence, all you’ll be doing is allowing people to progress a bit further to meet opponents with more powerful teams that they can’t defeat, and they will have reached equilibrium again. So for the average player, the 20% is neither here nor there. You still establish an equilibrium. (People complain when they reach that equilibrium and start pointing to things like the 20% boost, but really, this is more to do with general frustration because at equlibrium, you start losing as many as you win… (or you win your attacks, but lose your defences… etc.)

Now where the 20% boost DOES make sense is to start sorting out the people who are at the top - most of whom would have access to the best heroes, fully ascended, matching against others with similar heroes. If the defense did not have a boost at this level to offset the AI’s lack of tactics during the encounter, then the attacker will always win, and it then becomes far more difficult to start differentiate the truly best from the also rans. If all at that level are winning all their attacks each time, then the one staying in the lead is really just the one who plays the most, instead of employing the best tactics.

So all in all, I’m in favour of the 20% defence boost.
Why? Because it makes no real difference to my life and those of my level. We’ll find equilibrium whether it is there or not. But it DOES yield a far more fair assessment of the best players at the top, because they need to attack with good tactics and team mix to overcome the defensive advantage instead of just winning each time, and thus the ones who stay at the top deserve it.