My suspicion/guess is that setting up of defenses was removed, in favour of attack teams becoming defense teams, because it would be time-consuming for people to set up 10 (okay, 9+1 central spire) defenses with new restrictions every week, so they wouldn’t do it, or do only one or two regions, and then stop, do maybe one more on Wednesday, depending on the restrictions and blood frenzy regions. Especially if the game, as it does now, clears the teams if restrictions change. In GWs, we have the entire Monday to set up defenses. There’s no time allowed for that in PvP, to make the playing field equal to everyone.
Some losses. Yes. Emphasis on some. But this is so painful to start a battle, take one move, and just watch AI play; over, and over, and over. If I wanted to watch AI play, I’d go to explore and turn on autoplay. The only difference is that PvP AI playing display is at 4x speed, while explore is cut down to 1.5x.
Of course this defense team thingie could be automated, the game choosing 4 random troops from the restricted pool at default, then players being able to change them if they want to. With this simple move devs would hand out the keys to the playerbase if they want to keep the game easy or if they want to make it hell to their opponents.
I definitely miss setting ridiculous [but easy] PvP defense teams. I always put up 3x Pet Gnomes and 1x Dragonite Gnome [help players get that achievement for DG encounters] during Vault events.
I also liked just flexing with my defense team sometimes, TBH… Had 4x Diamantina as my defense once I crafted my 4th copy, for example. [Tons of people beat that defense team, so wasn’t that hard, either.]
Someone (I don’t remember who) wrote that defense teams were a way to express player’s personality - spot on! I’d have easy (but not the usual 4x bombs) teams; and when that was still a thing - the troop to kill in the campaign… to help other players, not to make the game unbearable to them.
It would need to be made so that defenses are only needed to be set up once for each restriction and then be remembered by the game and automatically be set up again every week that is a repeat.
If none are manually set, a random team would need to be picked.
Maybe that was seen as unnecessarily complicated to program while not foreseeing that 90% of defense teams taken from attack teams would be (almost) the same.
I think that your level of activity (you and Nim both) is part of what makes the discussions more fruitful and civil.
Less frustration is building up when players don’t feel like they’re being ignore/not heard/disregarded/misunderstood.
I may not always love what I’m reading, like GWs not coming back anytime soon and maybe being something altogether different from what it was (change is scary, we’ve seen a lot of changes we as players hated) but I love the engagement, information, and interaction.
Except it is not PvP, it is really just PvE that the game chooses to call PvP. That’s fine. It’s what we have. It’s just important to keep remembering the opposition is NOT a player. It does not matter how much tinkering is done to the AI (whether made ‘dumber’ or ‘smarter’) it will never be a player and the mode will essentially still be just another PvE mode. It should be balanced as such.
Once it was Goblin looping that was OP
Once it was Orbweaver + Life and Death - both were nerfed.
Once it was Empowered troops with Zuul’Goth.
Once it was Journey troops - now nerfed to oblivion.
But Stellarix is insane - more powerful than Zuul’Goth that instantly kill 1 troop. Stellarix is killing a team in max 3 turn - looped to death. Which was the official reason for nerfing Journey troops… It did however take more than 3 turns.
Elementalist is the best class - HOWEVER we can all get it. So please do not nerf it. Then you will need to nerf so many other things.
Wand of Stars is the best counter to Elementalist class - so they even eachother out. Don’t nerf either.
IF anything needs to be nerfed it is Stellarix - way too powerful. Yes that has been said with many troops but this one does high damage to ALL troop AND loops.
Suggestion: Is it possible to implement that you can only have 1 all mana colors troop or weapon on a PvP defense team? So either you have Wand of Stars OR Stellarix OR Diamantina.
You are worried about that Kingdom restrictions should apply to weapons/class as well. Why have restrictions at all if you can bend the restrictions? You have weapon restrictions in Guild Events too so I really can’t see the problem when there are 10 regions - you have a choice.
I would really like and ask if it is possible to reset defense team stats, now that have made it working (more) as intended. The old stats are useless because it was random troops - winning a defense fight was pure luck. Maybe have a reset weekly and keep an overall
Naturally the A.I. is acting on the opponent’s behalf but, for clarity, are you advocating the balance be in favour of PvE (dumber) or PvP (a challenge)?
Or, perhaps you mean like the old PvP system where the A.I. would throttle itself based on relative team power?
Just a friendly reminder that you can still set up a friendly defense. Go play until you meet your goal for the day, and then switch to 4 bombots/sacred treasure/firebomb/sacred cow/or whatever the lowest mana cost common troop is in a restricted area. Take your one loss and depart.
Enlighten me please, what that change is good for? There was no issue, PVP was FINALLY playable for mid game people, not only fun but also let you play some less strict teams and give a life to troops that cant easy loop, try not to loop, get rekt by 20 enemy stellarixes or beetrixes. Can’t even get the weekly stages cause I get looped to oblivion and wanna yell. Bring back earlier PVP please and let people have some fun. You cant just fix pvp and make it fun and then get all the fun away and call it an issue lol.
I’m not advocating for either. I’m saying that making it more of a challenge does not magically turn it into an actual PvP mode. You could code it so that merely opening the mode lights the player’s hair on fire, forecloses on their home, fires them from their job and smacks them 12 times in the face with a 2x4. It would still be just another PvE mode.
I’m fine with some modes being more challenging than others. I’m not ok with justifying the challenge by pretending that is what pvp means. I’m also not ok with messing up various other parts of the game in order to achieve “challenge” in pseudo-pvp.
That man is a bottomless pit of wisdom.