So, as a lot of late-to-end-game players agree, the meta is getting stale. It can be annoying and frustrating to see the same troops over and over and over again.
When event system was first proposed I had mistakenly thought that it would help fix this problem. Only one week in I realize that it’s a bit different than I had thought it would be.
My idea to help fix the meta is to make one event (hopefully add one rather than take one of the four we have currently) specifically for defense.
Now, it could have any goal to it, but what I was thinking is that it would have something to do with using the weekly kingdom event troops. Every person that defends against you when using those troops would grant you an event currency thing. If you win then you get a bonus.
The goal of this would be to reward players for using new defense teams every week. And it would get people to play around with the newly released troops which I think a lot of people ignore unless it is meta breaking (but I can really only speak for myself there - I know I do that)
I think it would definitely switch up pvp for most players since you’d turn it into an event and you could gain event points and then turn that into rewards which would need to be better than defense rewards.
There is also this idea that I thought was really great -
If anyone else wants to contribute to event suggestions, please feel free. I would like to make events as great as they can be! They are a great feature I just think they need a little bit of work
Well if people can’t take one minute to read a “text wall” then I’m not sure I want their opinion anyways to be honest.
To me a text wall is when someone types out a illegitimate wall of text without proper spacing, formatting, or punctuation.
I introduce the problem
Say what I think is the solution
And why I think it is the solution
And how it could be implemented.
I will bold the text with the exact one sentence idea for those people that don’t care enough to spend a minute or less to read a slightly more detailed than average discussion.
Personally, I think if a request does not hit on all of those points then the request should be better thought out.
I timed how long it took for me to read the first post.
54 seconds.
I honestly don’t see how less than a minute is really that much time loss.
If I were a dev I would appreciate descriptive features requests so that’s why I try to make them detailed
Also I did bold it just a few moments after you mentioned it. Nice idea!
I mainly was affronted by the “wall of text” comment which triggered my reaction. I really am not trying to be rude so I hope you don’t take it that way @Annaerith I was just trying to explain my point of view, so I hope you understand
What’s the point of saying this? Add your perspective or don’t.
It doesn’t matter whether or not I want your opinion, although - I actually do want to hear anyone’s thoughts who have read the idea, whether that person agrees or not. Constructive criticism is welcome
Heres some things I think could improve on the event system:
Make the team-building event either more versatile (for example, only requiring three of a troop type to get the bonus, or having smaller bonus rewards for each x troop type). As an introduction to the event system, twenty souls that arent event modified by your global or necromancy modifiers is not very much, especially when the entire race is missing a specific color (outside of base mythics) or any reliable mana generation.
The types of troops that are stat boosted should coincide with the types of troops being incentivized to hunt down. As it stands, for explore, you basically have an entire kingdom basically boosted to Warlord II difficulty and several others boosted to Warlord I difficulty. The rewards for the hunt event are handed out by exploring other kingdoms. If the stat buffed troops were the ones that were giving out the extra rewards, it would be your choice to either hunt them for the extra bonuses or steer clear until the event blows over - greater effort (or time expenditure, as it were) provide greater reward.
An incentive to use specific troop types on defense other than stat bonuses. As in original post. Rewards should be increased for using underused troop configurations on defense, not just slapping some extra stats on a few troops, hoping some of them are good enough to still get a defense win, and then still giving out the same rewards per defense win.
Carefully selected stat bonuses. I’ve already said something similar in a couple different threads, but this whole stat bonus thing only serves to make troops that were already decent better, and does not make terrible troops suddenly usable. If we get a week where Monsters are boosted, we aren’t going to suddenly see more Owlbears and Creepers on defense teams (from those that are trying to win, anyway), because a few troops are just much better than the others, so much so that a 25% on them still hands down beats a 50% boost on the average/medicore troops. Knight Coronet this week was especially painful on my low level account, but on my main account, the very few times I saw Anointed One just served to prolong the battle as I chewed through their massively increased defensive stats.
Team scores take into account the event bonus stats. As stated above, stat boosted teams require extra effort or at least extra time to kill, but you are not rewarded in any way. If the team score were appropriately increased, their gold value in PvP would at least go up.
I would like to conclude by saying that I saw very little in the way of a “shake up” of the end game meta due to this current event. The biggest impact it has had on me so far was to impact my Explore farming choices, which is more of an annoyance than a benefit. In PvP, Darkstone and human teams were few and far between (possibly even less than the few kind souls putting undead on defense so others can get event points), with teams using “meta” troops like Bone Dragon and Khorvash or even single troop teams still much more abundant by comparison. I’m pretty sure I even saw stuff like Maw and full goblins more than I saw stuff related to the actual event. In fairness, the event did start mid week, so I only ended up fighting about 60 battles since it went up, so hopefully given some tweaks and more time it will have more beneficial impact.
Something not being considered when people keep asking to make the same troops that are getting the buffs to be the ones we need to hunt down: Let’s say that the combo of next week is buffing Knights and you also need to hunt down knights, while living in “End-gamer country” we can just feast in the entrails of all knights placed in front of us, but Knight Coronet in the low levels of PVP could be a nightmare to face, Khorvash would be insane and at this point some people would have a worse time at collecting the Event Points. So i don’t think both things should be mixed at all.
The way the events are working we as end-gamers can get the best rewards for our time spent, the gems, and leave at that without bothering with the other rewards. A beginner can also get the same gems and maybe a few will try to get a higher reward like 500 of glory. For a whole week killing 500 troops seems pretty doable.
More variety on pvp is welcome, but i don’t think it will be achieved by combining the “Buff event” with the “Slaughter event”… Better compositions will keep being better than raw bonus. And in a normal game people are supposed to avoid being attacked, so making a team that is prized for extra rewards defies the conventional logic, but since our PVP is much more casual than basically any other game in the world we have to live with these oddities.
Having a reward for leaving a “non-meta” team will just reward players for doing nothing, so i hardly believe it would be picked as an option. Even the “Buff event” demands a certain investment from the player to achieve better bonuses, bonuses that are the reward in itself for having a stronger team.
The lack of impact on these “Buff events” are mostly due the fact that many troops can’t simply make the cut and become fairly good or decent with just some extra points. To change the meta with these events we need more reworks on the troops, so it will take time, but at least we have something new every now and then, and these event features are very promising.
But one thing that needs to be said is they have not balanced a good amount of troops since way back when on march/April. That was right when I first started playing and I remember looking at those patch notes and saying “wow they change the troops to improve the bad ones!” And it was one reason why I started playing the game.
Ever since then they changed the OP ones to be not OP and they buff a small bit (like 1-5). Most of the buffs aren’t nearly enough to help. They just
Make new ones. I like that new troops are made of course but I don’t like when old troops are ignored
So with the slow progression for buffing/fixing troops in mind, I propose a bandaid fix that would keep the troops that people use (for those that are about events) constantly rotating.
But yes the ultimate fix would be to balance all the troops. I’m not sure how interested in that the devs are since they haven’t made it a priority in the slightest.
You figured it out perfectly.
You can do this by reading the bolded text. Which is literally a few short sentences.
This was exactly one of my points, though. This week Knight Coronet was buffed and made it my more difficult for my low level account to progress in PvP. I also hinted at later how bad it would be if these events overlapped some of the stronger troops in the game, with certain troop or kingdom combos never being able to be buffed into the range of usability. I didn’t still didn’t give peasant or thrall or the like a second look (though I caught a few people still using Dark Master, which was easily dispatched).
In the grand scheme of things, if PvP score were also adjusted to take the weekly bonuses into account, lower levels would not have to suffer through getting as much matched up with the uber-buffed troops in PvP because they would be more likely to be out of their mid range, and when they did get match with them, they would get a massive gold bonus due to the score difference. However, if the event is working in its current intended manner, they would be unlikely to frequently see the troops type that you would have to hunt down in PvP anyway, because they are not in any way incentivized for the defender to put up. So, to your hypothetical knight buff, since Knight Coronet and Khorvash (actually still fairly frequent at low level) are going to be everywhere anyways in PvP, taking them down should at least have increased rewards. Otherwise, you’d probably want to avoid him as much as you could, especially at low level where the spell would pretty much always a double one-shot unless you can cast something that life buffs the entire team before he can cast.
However, I do agree that this would make it much more difficult than now for low levels to get event gems in Explore, but as of now, you get nothing for seeking out the stronger Explore kingdoms. Given a reward to fight the buffed troops, you’d have the decision to either seek them out or avoid them. The few that leak in as randoms in your explore process, instead of being purely an annoyance, you’d be getting at least some small reaward. As of now, its basically just avoid because they are either harder (at low level) or waste more of your time (at high level) - akin to putting the difficulty on Warlord I or II for zero extra reward. If the bonuses did coincide, I also think a 50-100% buff in most the reward tiers would be also be appropriate to represent the extra effort. But some of the rewards would still rather low for anyone to go all the way on this if the buffed troops and the ones you want to hunt down are the same.
The alternative, of course, if Events don’t overlap in this manner, would be just to directly reward killing the mega boosted troops in some other way (+1 soul, 50 gold per boost tier perhaps?), and incentivize winning defenses with the troops meant to be hunted.
I’d also like to add that putting the bonuses in the arena system was probably a mistake, but I don’t play Arena enough to really speak out on that.
The main point I was trying to make is that the system, primarily meant to shake up the PvP meta at the point where it gets really stale, is not going to accomplish that in its current state. Instead, at this point, it is mostly steering Explore choices by making one set of kingdoms very very slightly more profitable and making another (and much bigger, in the case of this week) set much less profitable over time. On the weeks where it does have a large impact on PvP, it is going to be extremely obnoxious, because buffing any troop type only serves to highlight the strongest troops of that type and we are going to get a “meta” troop with 25% or even 50% eventually. Buffing by overall usage would have put a much more organic system in place.
I don’t think it was meant to shake the meta, but i believe the devs kind of expected us to change the defenses for undeads (this week) in order to provide Event points for attackers and get more revenges, pretty much what we have been doing with the “1 troop defensive teams” lately. These “Buff events” i see more like an offensive incetive. The “Hunting event” more like an extra goal during the week. All of that to breath a little more fun into the non-pvp/non-competitive sides of the game. Just that.
The state of the end game is a very important thing. Anything that could possibly help it at this point is welcome in my book.
The ultimate goal would be to balance all the troops. But that will take years at this rate. So I think it’s best to give a bandaid fix while working on the problem.
A bit hard to remember a post from september, on a thread where i never posted … So i’ll beg your pardon on this as much as it seems fit. (The title still looks repellent like “whiny noise”… So that’s probably the reason i ignored it back at the time.)
A bit “sad” that the devs chased this option in an attempt to shift PVP, and Sirrian even knew that it wouldn’t work perfectly. And i mean “Sad” because even with this effort from their part maybe they got mixed signals from the commom comentaries like:
1: “MantiBoreBone teams suck, i hate the meta! It’s not that i can’t win, but it takes so much from my part that i can’t stand to face it over and over.” If it takes some effort and time it kind of mean a challenging battle. But the repetition seems to be the problem
2: “Teams with only one troop suck! It’s no fun at all, i want a challenge!” Now, this is more own players fault’s for “cheating” the pairing system, but having a challenge wouldn’t be “that good” too since it would basically take us back to point 1 simply because the pool of relevant troops and combinations is very small. So, having too much of easy wins becomes repetitive and again a problem. If we stretch the thought a little even having the “hunted troops” with a bonus in status wouldn’t make it much better because they would still be weak enough to not provide a challenge, it would be repetitive and therefore, a problem.
The repetitive battles, be it challenging/unbalanced ones or easy ones, have being the main problem, so unless we get more reworks soon, and i really hope for it, people will still keep doing the same over and over (fielding the most effective combination or fielding boring/easy weak combinations).
So, you are not out of place asking for these changes, but i can imagine that it wouldn’t be as much effective as you are expecting. And it would create some colateral damage that could be avoided. The effectiveness of the events so far seems to be very poor, but for the first half-a-week we can’t expect much… And as the devs collect data we must bear it a little longer since we know the procedures.
Personally i see the events working well even if they don’t change PVP a lot, but let’s not be too eager to see miraculous changes inside a single patch and discuss a little more to see another approach that may or may not need to change the events before the devs have some data during this “beta test”.
only thing i was/am expecting from the improvement is to actually shift meta for different trends each week, not to nullify meta
the hardest, most chellenging, or most boring meta is not so horrible if only lasts a week,
even if after a while it becomes clear that there is like only 3-5 same metas shifting thats still more variety to me then now, so im looking forward to that
i dont expect this game be rid of meta ever with its ever adding new troops behaviour, but if each meta can become more seasonal then i could deal with that
Man, you missed out on some fun with Thrall, then. Fully traited (for cheap) with a double purple banner, he charged with any match-3, surge or not, and could pull 28 gems (almost half the board). I understand this wasn’t your larger point, but it’s fun to give even the severe underdogs a hard look when they get buffs like this.
