The main issue with the new alliance game mode is that people will just join the group with the most people. It doesn’t matter how many citadel points (cp) you get because the alliance with the larger number of people will always win.
This is incredibly dumb and horribly unbalanced. People will also buy more battles with money offers from the pvp shop because the devs created a separate leaderboard for the alliance. This was done intentionally to make people more likely to spend even more money so that they can get more gold marks, even though this has horrible value. It’s like they wanted to confuse people and convince them that the new alliance leaderboard could be as rewarding as the global pvp leaderboard.
Here is what needs to happen–
REMOVE the money offer to buy more citadel battles because you can just buy more battles and get more cp than someone else. This probably will never happen, but it is one of the main reasons why this game mode is clearly pay to win and absolute garbage. It doesn’t mean that you are a better player, it just means you paid to have a higher score.
Take the average (cp) scores from each alliance in a region to determine who wins. That is, if an alliance has a massive difference in the number of players, the other alliances with a smaller amount of players could possibly still beat them if they have higher scores.
This is a mess, and the devs are making more money from this, but this is horrible. It gives me the impression that they will add money offers to the new guild wars as well. Did you lose a battle? Oh, that’s alright, just buy some more battles in the pvp shop so that you can get a higher score. Absolute trash with a false sense of accomplishment.
You can only purchase extra sigs 3x per day giving you 24 total per day. A simple solution is to penalize each won territory. We start with 20% increase stats and when we win 2 territories, we lose the bonus. So, what if we lose an additional 5% stats for each territory we win beyond 2. Exclude Central spire and there are a total of 9 territories between 5 alliances.
I joined The Enchanted Grove simply because I love Nature Green, I fought all 6 battles and purchased 3/3 daily and I did get rewarded gold marks and resulted top 5 on the leader board.
My question to the developer is that the scoring system vs players in each alliance. Do they averaging points per total amount of players in each alliance like Guild Wars? If not, this game mode is failed fundamentally.
To be fair, total points per alliance average the total amount of players who actually played to get a fair and more accurate victory.
Last, but not least, I got gold marks per each guardian battle yesterday.
Loyalty is gold, players’ dedication and passion will win the race at the end.
Let’s have fun in GoW.
I stay and fight, let’s go Green against the odds!
Thank you.
My proposal is as follows.
either the players will have to enter automatically from the system and be divided evenly among the 5 alliances, or if the player who will go is selected then the system will have to calculate how many players are candidates and open 20% proportionally to each alliance. let’s assume that there are 1000 players, this gives us 200 players per alliance, as soon as an alliance reaches those 200, it will automatically be locked, each subsequent player will be able to go to one of the other 4 alliances, every time you catch the limit then the next alliance will be locked so that in the end everyone has 20% of the players.
I am curious … why just five Alliances? If they instead debuted six, they could spread them equally across all Mana Colors.
Can I tangent for a minute?
About built-in, day-one flaws
The “Sinnoh generation” were the first Pokemon games to support online battles and trading. The GTS (Global Trade Station) was a system where you could deposit a Pokemon of your choosing, fill out the details of what you’re looking for, then another person can deposit a matching Pokemon to complete the trade and you’ll receive it when you check back later. Conversely, you could search the GTS for a specific Pokemon and, if you had what the other person requested, you could make that trade immediately.
But can you already spot the built-in flaw?
The person depositing their Pokemon dictates ALL the terms of their trade, with zero checks/balances to ensure that the trade was even plausible (let alone “fair”). Anyone using the GTS’s Search feature had zero ability to negotiate the terms of a trade; they could only accept the depositor’s terms (see following point) or keep looking.
You could, for example, deposit a Lv.1 Magikarp and request a “Lv.100 Mewtwo” despite that almost nobody else would even remotely consider making the trade. Similarly, you could request a “Lv.9 or under Articuno” despite that the species in question simply can not be encountered any lower than Lv.40.
And this problem was NEVER FIXED, even across the four generations of games where the GTS was a feature. It only ever saw incremental improvements (such as filtering trades by Pokemon actually in your storage, and showing you search results in “newest first”) but it was otherwise functionally identical, and was each and every time plagued by the same intrinsic problem.
Could it have been fixed with a better design? Yes, actually – but it wasn’t.
example of better design
The person depositing a Pokemon can request a specific Pokemon in exchange, but this is not enforced as a condition of trade.
Other players can “offer” a Pokemon of their choosing to potentially make the trade with, basically with no restrictions.
When the original player checks back, they get notified of whatever offers they have received, and if they want to trade they can select a given offer to execute the trade with that player specifically.
I think a lot will depend on how ‘scaled’ the gold mark reward is for the big guild.
Chasing the orange lantern around pvp trying to hit your bonus region for ?? gold marks on a Tuesday may be less attractive to a lot of players than the 20% stat bonus in a lesser alliance.
If they want to even the size of alliances, the best way to start would be to remove the penalties for swapping
Balance based on grind results. Every Sunday (or we can take a free day on Monday) there is a draw. We have a global pvp leaderboard. Each five players have a separate bracket (1-5, 6-10, 11-15 and so on). Players from each bracket are randomly distributed into five alliances. Repeat every week. More randomness and chaos
If I might respond to your tangent. There is no day 1 flaw here, that’s why it was never fixed. It’s a system you dislike, but that doesn’t make it flawed. And your solution is arguably worse, from a design POV. Let me give you an analogy, to make it clearer.
My Analogy
Pokemon town has a trade center, where trainers can come and open a shop, selling their goods. Anyone can open a shop, offering their goods at whatever price they choose. And anyone can browse the open shops and buy goods at the price listed. Obviously, if they don’t want to pay the price listed they can simply ignore that shop and browse others, and if they want to buy a specific good but it isn’t being offered for a price they like they are free to set up a shop themselves and offer their goods for sale instead.
A wandering tradesman arrives in Pokemon town, and they look around and see a bunch of shops offering goods at stupidly high prices that nobody is likely to buy. They see that the mayor of the town has made a bunch of improvements, but not changed the shop system. They instead propose a barter system, where everyone gathers in the town and discusses each exchange while haggling over the price, but the mayor points out that it’s a lot more time and effort for the traders, rather than a take it or leave it price, and the mayor doesn’t want to force them to waste time haggling when set prices are much simpler. The mayor points out that if haggling were allowed, every shop would be bombarded with customers trying to offer lower prices, forcing shopkeepers to sort through a bunch of offers each time they try to sell anything, many of which could be unreasonable, so the shopkeepers experience would be way better just setting prices and checking whether they sell or not. And if a customer wishes to haggle, they can just set up their own shop and offer the sale they actually want, to see if anyone accepts it.
In short, in the current system, you might enter the marketplace and see a bunch of players asking for trades of makicarps for mewtwos. In your system, every player offering a mewtwo would see those same people making that offer, every time. Along with a barrage of others offering pidgey, rattata and pikachu, etc. which they also wouldn’t accept. Imagine if every time you wanted to trade a pokemon, you had to sort through hundreds of offers for it, instead of just finding a player offering something you want and accepting or refusing their price.
Basically, the system they used was easier from a design POV and gives a better experience from players. Sure, haggling seems great, until every trade has to involve haggling. Then, it just becomes a nightmare. There’s a good reason most shops won’t haggle, even if some marketplaces prefer it.
As far as this game, the built-in flaw seems to have been overlooked so that they could get the mode out fast, in order to start earning money from players buying sigils for citadel war battles. I suspect they’ll try to balance the alliances at some point, in order to keep players spending, because if they don’t and all players migrate to one alliance, then spending will dry up as that alliance wins without having to buy anything.
The key thing is how to balance alliances without angering most of the playerbase, as they will if they try to push players into specific alliances.
Yeah. At the moment they seem to be more worried that players will “chase” victories. So, after an alliance wins a citadel, players would move to that alliance to get the gold mark rewards. And, yes, some would, if the only penalty was losing VP or loyalty. So, giving a time limit before earning rewards, after changing alliance is important. But that’s already included, so I don’t see why there’s such a big cost for changing alliance. You obviously lose all loyalty and any rank, so why also steal a quarter of a player’s VP? That’s just overkill.
Without commenting on anything else brought up, I just want to point out there’s a lot of other paid items that haven’t been updated and is largely dried up that could easily be adjusted before they adjust these “microtransaction” citadel sigils that are largely bad value and are only really good after buying the other 2 gold mark bundles which I’d imagine a good majority of the player base isn’t doing on a regular basis.
Things like War Coins and the Ring of Wonder etc.
It’s more of a “not a big deal” kind of thing that yet another microtransaction gets forgotten by the wayside again by them.
The alliance leader board was never supposed to be fair. It was created to make money off of whales who want to see their names on a leader board and are willing to pay for that.
Speaking as someone who hung out around a few relevant Pokemon forums back in the day, EVERYONE was talking about this GTS problem with much the same vigor as people who debated snaking in Mario Kart DS, and people here discussing the obvious One Alliance to Rule Them All.
I never said I disliked the GTS system (as a whole). The objectively best way to utilize the GTS was for YOU to be the “good Samaritan” who deposits a Pokemon asking for a fair trade that is easy for any other player to fulfill. The tradeoff being that you needed to wait for the other player to find your deposited Pokemon in their search results – search results which were invariably dominated by a majority of impossible/implausible trade requests. Furthermore, back in Gen IV specifically you were limited to a handful of about 7 search results total (due to them being depicted as NPCs to chat with) meaning the only way to find a better offer was to spend even more time re-running the search and hoping the new batch has a better offer.
Gen V introduced an alternative system called “GTS Negotiations” which functioned almost identically to a local trade (and would more or less become the standard trading method in later generations): Both players selected a Pokemon of their discretion (which was shown to the other player in real time) and once both players confirmed, there would be a separate prompt where they can review the other Pokemon in detail and decide whether to actually execute the trade. This was admittedly limited by a lack of an in-game communication feature (you couldn’t even send predefined messages, despite implementing exactly this system for other in-game purposes) and there were still incidents of players merely “showing off” their favorite Pokemon with no intent to actually trade it, but the real-time nature of it was a marked improvement.
Oh, and my hypothetical example was literally just a non-real-time version of the Negotiations system.
Yes that is a good point, BUT if modern digital storefronts are any precedent, every search engine needs to provide, as standard, options to quickly summarize/filter through potentially hundreds-to-thousands of results to narrow down what you may be looking for. And, again, there were incremental improvements to the GTS over time:
Gen VI (I think) allowed you to filter results by whether or not you actually had the requested Pokemon in your storage.
…which ironically DID NOT actually eliminate all those pesky “my Magikarp for your Mewtwo” offers, unless you spent the extra time separately transferring your Mewtwo to an alternate save file (or cloud storage) so your current save file could legitimately claim “well go fish because I don’t have any Mewtwos”. This filter only checked whether you were technically capable of trading a specific Pokemon, with no way to acknowledge/specify whether you were actually willing to trade a specific Pokemon.
I think Gen VII added a specific filter to exclude “requests for special Pokemon”.
…but “special Pokemon” was an arbitrary list provided by the developer. Sure, it might automatically exclude a “my Lv.1 Ratatta for your Lv.100 Arceus”, but it won’t filter out a “my Lv.1 Weedle for your Lv.100 Charizard” offer.
Gen VII allowed you to browse ALL results (loaded in pages of 100 at a time) sorted by “newest deposited Pokemon first” – where prior generations were limited to just one “page” of results (whatever the page size was).
…so the longer a trade offer lingered on the GTS with no takers, the farther down the list it would appear, and the more likely it was that the offer itself was deemed implausible. It was therefore not worth the time to check more than the first 10-20 offers. Unfortunately, the fact remained that the Pokemon was still deposited on the GTS at all, contributing to the overall feel of clutter.
Also, I don’t know that the servers ever checked for players resetting their save files, meaning a given Pokemon could potentially become permanently orphaned on the GTS with neither any player willing to complete the trade, nor the original player able to take it back. Like those two Skiddo waiting at the Lumiose train station for their owner to return someday…
For comparison, various (newer/other) 'mon games provide a “Favorites” mark that you can arbitrarily apply/remove to individual creatures, enabling additional functionality such as having a predefined “Favorites” list to find them by, or disabling the ability to delete/release/trade off the creature while that mark is present on them. Pokemon could have easily provided a system where any player can mark specific Pokemon as a “keeper” / “I’m not willing to trade this one”, because they already HAD a system to “mark” individual Pokemon – but the system was functionally cosmetic, since it was never incorporated or combined with any other system in the game.
Every system that relies solely on unchecked player discretion is going to suffer a certain level of “noise” (spam/equivalent), and a certain degree of intentional player exploitation – in this case, an apparent bandwagon/groupthink effect. If players receive awards based on relative Alliance ranking scored by cumulative participation, BY DESIGN whichever Alliance becomes the popular favorite is going to have the most participation and receive the best rewards, and provide the best incentive for other players to join that Alliance exclusively.
You could just normalize the number of alliance members to some constant, like 5000. Then an alliance with 25,000 members has their score divided by 5, and an alliance with 1000 members has their score multiplied by 5. That way the size of the alliance doesn’t make any difference, but the quality of the members – or perhaps their spending habits – does.
I’m not 100% confident on this, but its mainly a problem with the entire system in general.
In this particular situation, it’d be easier for the lower player count alliance with like minded individuals to “pay to win” to get the upper hand, since it’ll be much harder for the higher player count alliance to demand basically random people to pay money to play.
There’s also the situation where casual players just join the easiest/most common/largest alliance and just only sometimes participate and drop the point average in result.
