That’s only how it seems at this moment. For the most part players haven’t adapted their defenses to try to take advantage of the new scoring as far as I know. Have you ran into a team that is built to make more mana than you? Or do more damage, but you’ve managed to eek out the win?
EDIT: The problem here is that the only information we have on our defenses is whether or not they win. We need to see how many points they are allowing before we can see how to really take advantage of the new metrics.
as far as i can tell, that post wasn’t making a case against either guild war style. it simply put forth a reasonable system, which may have more closely resembled one over the other.
If that’s the case, that’s fine. I wasn’t intending to criticise the system layed out by Fourdottwoone, just wanting to understand it better.
My two cents on the issue of the old scoring system (and I’m going to regret posting this on a night I should be doing other stuff…):
It felt very binary. Either you got a perfect score (5 wins with 0 deaths) or you didn’t. So it was more about which guild could fail at their battles less, rather that which guild could win more. Rather than starting everyone at 0 and people earning points, it felt like we all started at max points and we lost points based on our actions, which didn’t feel that great.
Now I’m not saying the current (new) system is better, I honestly haven’t had a huge amount of time to look at it properly this week. I’m just providing my point of view on the old system.
That’s likely an isolated issue that would have to addressed on the defender side, not the attacker side. I’m afraid I haven’t given it enough thought to name a good approach, if one exists at all. The next patch is supposed to provide a guild score bonus for locking in 24 unique defense troops, I’m not convinced this will work exceptionally well though. Competitive guilds will probably react by synchronizing their defenses, each member setting up the same 4 unique troops for a given day. Meaning we might see different troops each day, the same team for each fight throughout the day.
Your are not wrong, but the current system is not so much different. Only a defeat makes you lose a significant amount of points.
If you don’t lose your score will be in the 1300-1400 range whatever you do.
the main difference is that you don’t understand your score anymore and what you need to do to improve it.
You could, but you’d be seen as playing “sub-optimally” or letting your guild down by not getting a perfect score. Sure most guilds didn’t worry that much about it (mine didn’t for sure), but it didn’t “feel” good, to me at least. Since we knew what a perfect score was, that was where the bar was always set, and as such the only variation possible was you losing points, due to a mistake or bad luck. You could never really gain points for good plays, or smart decisions.
Yup, like I said, I can’t really comment on whether the new system is any better as I haven’t had a good look at it. It could very well be much of the same as you’re saying.
To be honest, these are my feelings about how the system worked. I’m not suggesting that it was how players felt about the system. It’s… kinda hard to put into words properly though. So apologies if it sounds a bit weird :S
I agree with this. They can keep their formula as secret as they want, but we need a score breakdown at the end of the battle. Something that lists how many points we got for each of the factors, and the total. And it need to stay onscreen for more than a second before it adds it into the previous total and zips to zero. And we need to have the same breakdown on our defense losses, so we can adapt them as well.
let me just go ahead and apologize. i only intended to create this account to make my first post, not nitpick everything everybody says. thanks for your time everyone, this forum is amazing!
That’s the extended variety bonus I was proposing. It’s not well suited for a tie breaker, you have control over it. Think of the tie breaker as a coin flip, whenever both parties involved perform equally “well”. The fairest approach is to do it completely at random, not based on some secret component (e.g. who got out of bed first), that’s just prone to get exploited.
The magnitude matters a lot less than you might think, it’s almost like a flat bonus. There’s 150 fights each week, so this would average out pretty reliably to 125 points, give or take a little. 250 flat + 250 random works about as well as 450 flat + 50 random, If you like one of them better, no objections from my side.
Again, I’m not suggesting the new system is better. It likely has similar issues based on what people have been saying in this thread.
My assumption is that the devs wanted to allow multiple methods to reach high scores (speed/mana/damage etc) rather than for players to try and combine all of them into one team. As well as the ability to cause smaller differences in score to help break ties (eg a few points here or there based on differences in mana collected between to teams could break a tie where in the old system they would be equal).
I’m sure there is a better way for me to describe this, but my brain is all fuzzy from dealing with a networking assignment for most of today, so all my game dev terminology is out the window at the moment.
Having said all that, I do agree that the current system has some issues with transparency and it feels a bit like trying to find something in muddy water. But beyond that I can’t really comment due to the reasons I mentioned above
Discussion is fine, and I don’t feel you were nitpicking. To quote one of @efh313’s songs this is a place “where we always argue, but we use decorum”
That is certainly the case, but the result is not very convincing.
I will make abstraction of the fact that probably many players will want to combine everything to get high scores and not only good scores.
What was nice with GW was that the constraint of using monocolours teams made us (at least in my guild) discover and use troops that we had never used before. True we were always facing the same defense teams, but building attack teams was interesting. It made us try different things and use different approaches and brought some variety in our gameplay.
The new system does the exact contrary. It discourages us from using some troops (devour, death marks) and rewards only a few styles of gameplay, while it punishes the others.
So much less variety.
Plus we don’t know what to do to have a good score. So winning is the only thing that matters.
As a result, what was stressful but interesting has become dull, boring and frustrating.
It removes the play limitation of requiring your troops to survive. Or, putting it differently, it makes a win a win, no questions asked. There are so many troops out there, use them as you see fit, no need to discourage gimmik teams that are based on hurting yourself (e.g. Black Beast). If that’s the way you want to play, your win is still a win, not an almost-but-not-quite win.
@Fourdottwoone
do you honestly think it is fun or fair (with the guild wars rewards)
if a guild with statistically weaker play (less color bonuses etc followed) won in the ranking against a guild with statistically better play (more color bonuses etc) just cause of the rng factor?
why do you think allowing such situation in the first place is better then reducing the random factor to a marginal tie breaker?
statistically its guaranteed these situations will happen if you allow such point system
(true story)
