I’ve now played hundreds of invades with my defense team set to a single Sacrifice. It absolutely DOES make a difference. The average power level of my Hard match has gone down over 1200 points.
The problem now is that everybody has figured this out and in order to avoid the Mantibore / Bone Dragon spam, they’ve done the same.
8 out of 10 of my invades are now against single-card teams.
This kind of stuff needs to be fixed. The game is starting to get really stale when PVP is just the flavor of the day over and over and over again. There needs to be more structure around defense team composition. There’s no reason not to do it. For one, everybody knows that defense wins and losses are meaningless in the grand scheme of the leaderboards.
Defense composition has become about either improving one’s invade chances or frustrating the fun out of whoever is facing your defense team. Neither of those are healthy for the defense meta.
I really think we need some kind of house rules for defense. And before anybody cries about not having compositional freedom, we have that in our invade teams and those teams are completely interactive. We don’t actively participate in defense, and quite frankly very few people care about winning defenses anyway, so it shouldn’t really matter.
I honestly don’t know what the answer is but I do know this - if I were able to get Trophies from Explore mode, that is all I would do. The battles are much more engaging and fun, varied and interesting. PVP went from non-stop Bone Dragons to non-stop Giant Toadstools.
Wasn’t there talk of an Event System coming into place which should go a long way to improve this situation? I’m pretty sure it’s in the works if not soon to see the light of day.
If rewards for completing the events aren’t lucrative enough, people will just ignore them. Kind of like how nobody uses card synergy bonuses because they’re simply too small to be worth it.
I’m a little jealous. Most of my PVP opponents are some flavor of Mab / Valk / Khorvash (like 2 out of the 3 choices more often than not), with Death or Justice or Bone Dragon filling out the team. A nice cheap opponent would be at least a little break from the constant not-fun slog of frustration.
I strongly agree with you. And I will go further by saying that it should be better to remove the defense system. Instead of, when you invade someone you will have a fight like in Explore mode according to the Home Kingdom of the defenser.
Else, the other solution is to modify how the match is done by taking into account the troops that one player already invaded in the day/week. For example, if you invades X times Bone Dragon, the algorithm will try to find a team without Bone Dragon. And so on, players that uses the same meta build will be less invaded → less chance to Revenge which is a sort of punishement .
What I find about this Event System:
I’m not really sure that Event System concerns Defense Team…
The only problem with Kingdom-based defenses is that it won’t help the problem of repetitive matches. Kingdoms have their own rewards which is why a large portion of the player base has Whitehelm as their home kingdom. Unless they change that system too, we’re just exchanging Bone Dragon boredom for Gard’s Avatar boredom.
The defense teams could be randomly drawn or selected from the troops you have in your home kingdom. Any levels, traits, or ascensions you have would show up in your defense team. This would add urgency toward traiting and leveling more “useless” troops. It would also give new players even more motivation to collect cards.
Wouldn’t all the options be easy? With randomness there would be no synergy and just faceroll defense teams. I guess unless you mean they boost the stats, which might suck also.
Yeah most likely they would have to put in the system which teams are good and rate them based on that. Also they could probably up the AI difficulty based around that.
So not complete randomness. The devs would have to choose what teams are acceptable at what difficulty and rotate them. Along with buffing stats and all that. Because those troops are no longer backed up by Kingdoms. So essentially the devs are in control.
Which allows them to also test out troops before releasing or if there’s an issue with a troop they could just remove that troop from everyone’s rotation, so you don’t have to see it again til fixed.
The problem with this from a design perspective is that it takes agency away from the player. We would have almost no control on how well our teams do (barring leveling and traiting troops) and punishing people with PVP point losses when they have no real control over what kind of defense they field is a tad rough.
I get that, I really do. But as others have said we still get plenty of creativity with our invade teams.
Also some of these purposed systems are already in place. Have you noticed in pvp you’ll get several “easy” sets of 3 opponents, then all of a sudden all 3 opponents are considerably tougher? For me it goes from like 4500 being my lowest opponent, to 7000. This is obviously to try and make you lose a fight. It’s the system trying to push back and break your streak. So it’s already somewhat automated, wouldn’t be much of a difference.
It’s true we have control over our defense teams NOW, but the system picks who you fight, and how hard that fight is.
With the obvious choice to opt out of that by spending gems to reset opponents.
I guess it all boils down to the intent and what you consider variable.
Currently you have player made teams with player achieved stats.
The pros being you can get synergistic defenses with moderate stats without requiring any dev involvement in the process.
The cons being you are subject to trolling, both easy (single bombot) and hard (teams meant to annoy not win) and flavor of the month meta (MMDbBd)
If you want to avoid the cons, you could go with randomized teams of troops with player stats/traits.
The pros being you never know what you are going to face so it won’t get dull.
The cons being the chances of getting a competitive build is minuscule.
Another option would be take a random arrangement, and then scale up the stats to a pre-determined rating. So if your randomly selected troops had a battle strength of 6000 and the 3-trophy is slated to be 9000, you’d give it a 50% boost to stats (exact numbers TBD)
The pros being you get the randomness and better tuned difficulty.
The cons being you still have a small chance of facing a force that works together well
You could have the devs build 20+ teams and have each fight be against one of those randomly
The pros being you get well built opponents with realistic stats.
The cons being a substantial ongoing time commitment by the developers to constantly add/remove teams as more troops are added, along with predictability of knowing what you’ll face. After over 100 pvp matches you’re going to see each build multiple times.
I suppose. I am a few months out of touch on exactly how PVP is working these days.
It just feels weird on principle to take control away from the player to fix this.
Though if they did go the way of random troops then the Team Power could be used as a factor (as @Rasper mentions) I’m pretty sure we worked out most of the numbers behind how it was calculated when the system first came out… So it might in theory be possible to modify troops to scale them up in terms of power to make a number that is comparable to the attacking teams.
The players have somewhat shown when given the chance, they are going to abuse the troops. Especially when “broken.”
So the best course of action is to take that choice away.
Or at least it’s on the table.
The devs could just take any troop that is considered broken out of rotation. Problem solved.
I mean don’t get me wrong, i’m all for freedom and personal control. But in this situation it’s just a bit like school yard bullies trying to aggravate players just because they can. I don’t put 100% of the blame on those people though. Those troops were there for the grabbing so to speak.
So in re-reading the OP’s post it seems like the core issue is the fact that one’s defense team is affecting what team the player faces while on Attack. While this makes sense since it’s the only static the game has to work with (it doesn’t know what your attack team is before you pick and opponent), it also can be abused as the OP discussed.
One solution to this would be to remove this link, but the question remains as to what it should be replaced with.
Option 1:
Average power score of ALL troops you have, so you will slowly creep up the difficulty bar as you accumulate more cards and power them up.
One downside to this is that it might disincentivise players from ascending and traiting troops causing a few issues in other areas (economy etc)
Option 2: Have the player set their attack team BEFORE they choose opponents, meaning the opponents can be selected based on the attacking team’s power.
Downside: Prevents the attacker being able to counter the teams they come up against, which would be people would try to create teams that can handle anything, which could lead to everyone using the same attack team (which doesn’t affect other players, it would make the game a bit more stale to play).
.
It’s not even close to pvp as is.