If the server cannot track your defence teams then one option, if it is in the task system or something similar, is to reward you for changing your team but then not allowing you to change it again until the following day.
It is a small restriction that will affect a tiny percentage of people but will benefit everybody with increased variety.
How about 5, 7 or 10 teams? Some troops may need to be used more than once if it increases like that.
I actually change my defense team several times at the beginning of the week when I’m tweaking it and occasionally I’ll just change it so I can play against a specific AI composition and see how it plays or to demonstrate a glitch (since you can play ‘friendlies’ versus your own team at any time). I don’t really think we need to be taking things off the table here to accommodate giving out better rewards for using semi-unique defenses. Locking the choice would be an unnecessary hassle that would do nothing to actually facilitate using a unique team, because most people would still be more likely to choose one they know works (about 10% of the time, anyway).
Like I said, it is completely irrelevant to reward someone for changing their defense if they aren’t currently in the PvP matchmaking pool, since that defense would never be fought anyway. Linking any potential rewards to battles the defense has actually fought makes the most sense on both fronts.
Its not about removing features for rewards. Its about facilitating an increased variety. If the server cannot track every change then the couple people who change their team more than once could be expected to suck it up.
Playing friendlies is distinct from PvP defence and should have a seperate option.
The PvP pool should be extended to include all people who are active whether they have played PvP today or not.
Except it wouldn’t do anything to foster variety, except circuitously by maybe allowing teams to be easier to track so a task to be added to reward just changing your defense team. And again, as I said in my original post in this thread, they actually need to be in the matchmaking pool, which also cant happen without both removing the point penalty (partially for lower players, partially for the bad psychological component it brings) and extending the time everyone remains in in the matchmaking pool. Having only one change per day would be more likely to have the opposite effect, in fact, because you would have to “lock it in”, so to speak. If I wanted to, I could easily cycle through “meta” options for several days before resorting to actually thinking about crafting a team with actually underused characters.
I would gladly “suck it up” if I thought it would make a difference, but there is no reason to go around adding restrictions that wouldn’t even achieve the target goal in the first place. Simply having a task for changing is just too prone to exploitation to work without throwing up even more walls and requiring so much extra infrastructure that it simply wouldn’t be worth it.
Note that I’m not disagreeing with the idea, just the implementation. In my first post in this thread, I outlined how additional variety could be implemented without the need to add such restrictions.
I think youre over complicating it. Its a simple process that will result in a lot more variety than exists at the moment. To say changing your defence team daily, through 5 unique teams, does not improve variety and would be too convoluted is actually quite ridiculous.
It doesnt even need to be a task. It is just an example. Even if it was then the task could last a week with one reward and changes saved locally. Anyhow, the thread was only made to highlight options not to tell the developers what or how to do it.
Bit late to the thread and just skimmed thru it but has an idea been suggested along the lines of the more unique troops you use in a Defense each week the more of a particular reward you can get? I would have it on a 24 hour timer so you can swap out a Defense for 4 fresh unique troops each day. Combine that over 7 days (28 unique troops) and you get something additional in the weekly rewards, how about an Arcane Stone of the week?
Thats another good idea. Unfortunately it does mean blocking your defence team for 24 hours which is surprisingly a bit of an issue for some.
I’m not sure how you’d accomplish this in the current UI.
Would you reserve a team slot specifically for “defense?” Or would you both lock the current defense slot (so people can’t designate another team as defense) as well as locking all troops currently set to that team? When the team unlocks, how would you go about changing out more than one troop if the team automatically locks after?
I think you’d need to have the defense team handled entirely separately, rather than as a normal team slot. That’d really mess up @TaliaParks, who likes to “hot swap” defense teams as I understand it. And all this just to get draconian around defenses…
I don’t like the idea of introducing lockouts for anything (I really don’t like the one on classes, which is at least shorter now than it used to be), so I’d rather see a solution that rewards the use of underutilized troops (or troops that allow you to fish for targeted resources) rather than emphasizing personal variety (which I think will just turn into a meta of “defend with this cycle of 5 teams ad infinitum” anyway).
[quote=“Lyya, post:70, topic:11527, full:true”]That’d really mess up @TaliaParks, who likes to “hot swap” defense teams as I understand it.
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Hot swap? Sounds kinky.
Also, I don’t think we’ll ever see much variety in defenses, period, as people want to win, and very few defenses can win. This post is a bit dated now as it’s before the emergence of Khorvash and Manticore, but the salient points still apply:
Except in instances where the concept of “winning” is less relevant to what you actually end up earning. The “revenge bait” meta wasn’t exactly healthy either, but many people would rather lose than win during that time because better rewards were given due to having guaranteed revenge battles (doubly so when PvP battles cost a ton of gold). If the rewards given were less about winning or losing, and more about variety as a whole, I think it would be at least a step in the right direction.
That’s fair, though that’s an extremely delicate balance. One-Percenters win over 95% of their games as it is. If winning is deprioritized on defense, that will go to 100% very quickly.
Personally that’s why I think the devs should control defense teams so they could raise/lower defense difficulty as they see fit. It would be cool to have some kind of link between when new troops get dropped weekly, to getting introduced to the defense team cycle. So when X troops drop, they get put in rotation for defense. IDK just my view personally. I like games where it feels like I’m truly beating the AI or “computer” versus some trolly team someone created. (even though in this situation it is controlled by AI)
Console devs hinted at some form of matchmaking tweak recently. Maybe it will be one of the amazing suggestions you lot have provided, can only hope
On days where I’m particularly active, I change my defense teams several times, either because I’m experimenting, or when it feels like the current team is on a losing streak. Since I don’t have the resources to field a brute-force powerful team of fully traited mythics, I try to win on defense by throwing my opponents off guard with unusual compositions.
Restricting people from changing their defense team isn’t going to encourage variety, and it shouldn’t require any explanation to see why, but I’ll explain anyway: If someone can’t change it when it occurs to them to do so, they’re more likely to just leave it. Increasing the hassle of setting a defense team, like all the suggestions for requiring multiple defense teams, or one for each kingdom, isn’t going to encourage people to change their defense team more. Unless the reward for doing so is significant, in which case it’s going to generate more complaints than it is going to encourage people to regularly change their teams up.
I don’t think there’s much point in maintaining the pretense that it’s Player versus Player if the player doesn’t even get to choose their own defense team. The devs already choose the teams we fight in quests, challenges, and explore mode. In PvP we can theoretically fight any possible combination of troops, and if the balance were better, we would see a wider variety. A healthy meta in which a wide variety of team compositions are viable and competitive, in which facing an unfamiliar team composition is more challenging than certain troops simply being overpowered, would encourage more variety on offense and defense than any system intended to reward people for picking bad options.
Youre in a very small minority of people who change their defence team multiple times in a day. Sounds like youd rather protect your own interest.
You dont need any explanation as to why your following paragraph was illogical. Actually, you do, but I cant be arsed today.