You look wonderful today. I thought you should know. People don’t say things like that enough.
I have finished my weekly climb to Tier 1. I was able to make the climb facing 75% Fire Bomb teams and Revenge matches. Sounds great, right? Super fast and maximum rewards!
No, it’s actually awful. The current state of PvP is good for resources and bad for fun, and fun is the thing that keeps the game alive. Fun is what keeps the casual playerbase playing, and those people make up the majority of all players. Without them the game will become a ghost town of hardcore players with all the troops and no reason to spend money, which is an unsustainable business model.
The problem as I see it: more and more players are figuring out that putting up a joke defense, like the current Fire Bomb x4, gets them a lot more Revenge Matches. It also gets them a ton of Casual Defense ‘victories’.
The secondary problem: just as many players use the current standard meta defense, which is not unbeatable, it’s just boring to play against over and over.
What I think we need: players need a reason to field interesting and different competitive defenses.
The Solution? Bear with me.
Ban self-sacrificing troops on the PvP ladder for defense. There are not that many of them, so it would not be game breaking. The AI is bad at using them properly, so they aren’t viable regardless. They are the core of every ridiculous team.
Allow players to mark 5 teams on their roster as potential defense teams, and limit those 5 teams to using the same troop 3 times. This will not stifle anyone’s creativity and will provide a variety on the ladder.
When a player appears on your list of 3 available PvP matches, one of their 5 teams will be fielded randomly.
Allow every player to ban 2 troops that they will never see in PvP. This can be changed daily, and will greatly help avoid the complaints of “This troop should be taken out of the game” and “I cannot beat this troop”
No TL;DR offered. The problem deserves a longer look.
Thank you for your consideration on this topic, and I look forward to hearing alternative ideas.
Seems weird to talk about “fun” when soul farming is a legit thing where people bang their head against the wall for hours on end against the weakest enemies they can dispatch of quickly. Or Traitstone farming. Or any farming really. I don’t personally think any of those are particularly better than fighting Fire Bombs sometimes. But of course some people find that stuff fun (I don’t), much like some people find Fire Bombs fun (you don’t).
Like, if you’re talking about ‘casual’ play, PvP isn’t that important to worry about. It takes me like 30-45 minutes on Mondays, and then I don’t spend much time on PvP after unless the weekly event dictates as much. I might fight 100 battles over the course of the week. Firebombs in that case are a blessing! The match length is as short as possible and thus allows me to move on to other things.
You can keep in mind too that there are three options before each match. Casuals can easily choose whichever to get as much variety as they want (not to mention the additonal 3 non-ranked options).
I can see competitive players having an issue with Fire Bombs ad nauseum, locking themselves into 3 trophy matches, worrying about competitive balance or monotony over 1000s of matches, etc. Even then I’d think they’d happily take 1000 Firebombs over 1000 Divine Protected Infernastet. Either way, casuals aren’t going to care.
You look wonderful today. I thought you should know.
Thank you. You look great too, as always.
During “purple PvP event” i realized, that fighting 4 Mushrooms isn´t much funnier than fighting 4 Bombs. At least 4 Bombs are short and dull while 4 Drake Rider are annoying and dull.
I´m afraid Nr.1 might be applicable. Even if troops are not selfdestructing and 4 different cards are used, nothing can stop players from using bad teams. There will be only diverging grades of badness.
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I have to admit, I made my account basically only to rant about Ubastet but no, I don´t think this would be a proper solution. Competition is still part of the game and I wouldn´t like the difficulty level to be self-imposed. Better balancing will do.
The simplest solution would be to punish defense losses harder. This would require a better KI because the current one behaves like a Drake Rider after eating some Toadstools and being hit by a Firebomb.
So the simplest solution is the most complicated one.
I agree with all points made in the original post (including that one). I posted a topic detailing a slightly simpler solution much in the same vein of your own a little while back, to little fanfare. I very much agree that something should be done, and your framing of the issue is spot-on.
I get seeing the same troops over and over can be boring, but the Firebomb one works so well. Once upon a time I used a well thought out (not meta) defense team using unique troops. It would see about 5 battles a day and win about 3 a week. I switched to a 3x Firebomb and a gnome. Now I get about 30 battles a day and win about 10 of them. There are days that I win more than I lose.
The reality is most people would rather fight an “easy” troop they know than learn how to fight something different. Most of those that don’t look for the Firebombs have attack troops that are just going to roll through anything anyway.
I completely agree with this. It’s up to the developers to save us from ourselves. If something is more efficient, we will flock to it because doing otherwise activates our ‘people are getting more than me’ reflex.
I play on 4x. I liked the game better at 1x. I wish they never invented the speed increase, but when I play at 1x I suddenly realize how much I’m missing out on rewards wise, and my desire to have fun is overwritten.