Some AW feedback

This was from Rekka in Mixed Nuts Extra Spicy regarding some things in AW:

  • let us see how many points a target is worth, including the full kill bonus.

  • Either give a first full kill bonus, or slightly decrease points for repeated kills, so that ignoring targets completely is not optimal. It should not be a big difference, but we had people who were not even attacked once and the other alliance still had plenty of targets. I think the timer is good, but you can still farm key points sources.

6 Likes

AW is a group effort. Why do we all get different loot??? Unlike titanfights, this takes some serious coöperation. We did that so why don’t we share the loot evenly too???

5 Likes

Echoing the points of Rekka and Chrisis, giving out different loot would promote people going selfish rather than cooperate.

Also:

  • the game is pretty glitchy atm, though it mostly affects other areas than war (didn’t have problems there).
  • the matchmaking should seriously be altered, seems like it is just based on alliance score
  • would be nice if we could quickly see how many attacks have been used by each alliance
  • i remain by my earlier feedback points that they should either cut the revenge bar, or keep it but add several defense teams so that they gradually become worse as well.
2 Likes

Two things I want to echo and elaborate on - and these were definitely mentioned in the beta forum -

First, we (Mixed Nuts - Extra Spicy) were against an alliance with less hero progression than our team. What started out in the first half as a close battle became very clear that there was a huge imbalance in the second half when our hero lists were not as depleted than the opponent. We essentially doubled up their score. There needs to be some work on improving the matching or incentives to push up our cup counts and make our alliance sit higher in the list (we are still talking top 20 for this imbalanced fight). With the abundance of food/iron being at lower cup counts the only way to progress heroes quickly is to lower cup counts which has the secondary and compound affect of making Alliance Wars far less competitive.

Second, there has to be a mechanism to handle the imbalance within an alliance. We had 4-5 members repeatedly attacked because the scores were much better than could be achieved attacking some of the better defense teams, the difference often equated to about 10x the number of points. In a more balanced fight this would make the strategy very “wait and see” which puts additional time constraints and time zone differences into play. There has to be a bigger incentive to go after different teams over time and potentially a diminishing incentive to killing the same team over and over. Ultimately this will just de-motivate those people who are still growing there defense and cause churn out of good players in the ecosystem. I know I would not want to feel like I am dragging now my team and would likely consider moving on with my gameplay to somewhere more balanced.

Oh and lastly – we need better rewards - the war was fun, but I can farm 100 monster kills and get better rewards. I should just sit at 1600 cups and crush any alliances that we are put up against in the way that the game is currently incentivizing my play.

6 Likes

Is it even possible to assess ‘bench strength’ in an alliance to address your first point? I mean that would be the true balancing point, no?

It may be a necessary evil for a while - just like the events were (specifically the beginner level with the 3* team cap) - as people adapt to what AW requires and they build out their top 30 heroes roster.

1 Like

I posted this in beta as a rough idea:

Sum up hero power for each member in the alliance, sum up those members and get an a reasonable facsimile for bench strength and use that for alliance matching.

That’s not a difficult query to run from a database perspective; could do some useful things like exclude 1/2* heroes or those at level 1, or similar too… but ultimately alliance score is a terrible metric to use unless we encourage everyone to play for top tier cups and for top tier titans.

Right now we don’t have that, and there were a number of mismatches with Spicy being one of the most evident (really, Spicy vs. Departed is going to be one of the equivalent high end matchups that should happen someday) but there were others too like Seven Days Hunting which obliterated their opponent (cup dropping, lower titan score as they’re only 2 months in game).

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Perhaps sum of power of the top 30 heroes? I keep 66 heroes on the payroll, but clearly can’t use 36 of them in any given war.

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Even using titan score only may be a better metric than total alliance score. Not without it’s warts, but still.

That would be fairer, Kerridoc, for sure.

Titan score would be ever so slightly better, but it would indeed be better than this.

Rev’s idea would work beautifully imo. And as a player of Spicy who wants to maintain our different style of play but also the fairest fights I can’t really see any bad sides to this.

On another note: All of this has been mentioned ever since the very start of AW in beta. I am thoroughly disappointed in the devs that this is what they ended up implementing. Literally everyone and their mum came up with better ideas than match-making based on alliance score, with Rev’s idea generally being agreed upon as best option. Their lack of info about matchmaking and general 0 info towards beta testers already concerned me, but I gave them the benefit of the doubt. Why do we do beta testing when SG doesn’t listen or wants to go into discussion with players who dedicate their free time towards coming up with constructive criticism? I wish them good luck with listening and dealing with the complaints of those alliances who get obliterated due to their mismatching.

5 Likes

Yesterday and this morning, my alliance played the first AW. Our experience:

  • the opponent concentrated on our weakest teams. When they were down, the opponent waited until revived and attacked them again and again. How about making attacking every team obligated?
  • teams of us were not attacked at all. That could (partially) be caused by focusing on attacking weaker teams.
  • the rewards after preparation, 24 hours playing are meager.
  • it would be nice to see how the points are built up.

This is literally what Elo math is designed for, fixed number of wars per month, enough 5v5 battles to smooth out RNG from boards, heavy penalties for deliberate tanking.

Hopefully the problem is their initial Match Making Rating number is based on the current alliance score which is wonky with everyone tanking to Silver, Gold or Platinum Arenas for more food and iron ( I honestly cannot believe I typed that phrase “for more food and iron” ).

1 Like

Thanks - if it’s so easy, it should be done :slight_smile:

If they go that route and the current matchups were just for seeding purposes, I will absolutely praise their implementation; no idea why they would’ve have just said that during the beta process if it was that well thought out.

I guess we see, tomorrow US time would be my guess, what the game fairies bring us in terms of a new war matchup.

Regarding matchmaking in Alliance Wars, here’s what they should do:

  1. Add a dedicated ‘Alliance War’ score (AW score), based on AW performance.
  2. For leaderboard ranking, add the ‘Alliance War’ score to the current titan score and sum of member cups.
  3. Use only the ‘Alliance War’ score for matchmaking in Alliance Wars. Randomly match alliances that are within some percentage of each other, e.g. 5%

That’s the only sane way, really.

2 Likes

How do you separate Spicy from Gumby’s Goshdarned Ghostriders if they’re both 10-0 in AW where the second is a typical newbie alliance?

Think there has to be a more complicated system than that as we just won’t get enough matchups to filter the tens of thousands of alliances, or maybe I’m missing something which at thi time of night wouldn’t surprise me heh.

1 Like

If the AW score uses some kind of ELO ranking system, then alliances should get the correct score within a reasonable time.
We do expect to have AW twice per week, right ?

It might make sense to use the leaderboard position for the first few wars, but over time, it should shift towards a dedicated AW score.

3 Likes

I tend to agree that the mechanics should be altered to encourage all players getting attacked. We are proud that our alliance is diverse with some quite strong players (level 40+) and some who come in below level 10. We believe in nurturing new players and don’t want those new players to be picked on during the wars by teams with a more balanced demographic.

My biggest issue was that the mechanics of the war (particularly the revenge feature) encourages a specific type of defense team. Namely, a team with strong healers, mana suckers, riposte, and troops is very difficult to beat. I would be happy to build a defense team to wait everyone out with Vivica, Hel, Boril, etc. and let the arrows kill them, but I don’t feel that is very creative. I’m not saying kill the revenge arrows, but I do feel it skews toward abusing the system with a particular type of team and if everyone converges on the same defense team type, it won’t be as fun.

However, having that deep of a bench allows you to pick the best 30 to fight, not the overall Strongest 30. Having 6 of each color at a decent level to fight is difficult at 30 heroes, not so much at 65. I would say that your selection of heroes make your presence stronger than a player with the same exact top 30 heroes, but only 30, because of your ability to doubling up on strong VS weak colors.

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I’ve been reading everyone’s input and feedback and there are a lot of good ideas being thrown out there. I don’t think using the overall alliance score is the best way to balance opponent’s and eventually using AW scoring would be a better way to go, but even still not a great fix. It seems to me that there are way too many factors involved to make it 100% fair when you consider cup count, hero team score, individual hero level, bench strength, etc. Etc. There’s always going to be stronger teams and weaker teams within any alliance. Your just going to have to figure the best way to make them even considering all facets of the game and let her rip.
I would also add that I am in complete agreement with even loot across the board for the wars as it is very much a cooperative team approach. And better loot. The winning team should all get at least one ascension item.

As near as I can tell there is one ascension item roll in the victory tier; just may not be the rare non-farmable ascension item we’re all looking for.

Which is pretty par for the course admittedly. Top flight alliance wars to newbie ones, all identical from what I’ve observed at least.

  • Victory
  • Defeat
  • Win By Default

3 tiers that I’ve seen, haven’t seen many defeat pics TBH, and Win By Default wasn’t much, some consumables IIRC.

Actually not sure I’ve seen any defeat pics since the loot patch, hrm.