Thanks! That is exactly what I needed. 
Change from an environment that only rewards AI wins (and “punishes” losses) to ones that rewards wins only and more with underused troops and compositions. Sadly, the extra effort of actual team building would take coupled with the already relatively low rewards gained from winning defense battles would still leave a lot of people up with the cookie cutter teams unless there were some kind of significant reward.
If we ever nerfed to the point where there stopped being any significant outliers, our gameplay experience would be as flat as the usage graphs they produce. And sadly, I’m convinced that not even this would encourage people putting up unique defense teams, as even 1% better is still “better”. If the average player thinks they will have even a slight advantage with their copy paste defense teams, they will do it.
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Seems to me ALL of the troops being targeted by complaints are being used by players over lvl 500. How many are there in terms of the percentage of the player base?
It seems to me the problem isn’t with the cards, it’s with the PLAYERS. Something about the economy at high levels is accentuating the problem.
It simply isn’t fair to alter troops for everyone when the real issues only affect 10-15% of the player base.
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Well said sir. Amen.
At higher levels, you have the resources to take on all comers. I’m a little under level 300, and I routinely take down level 1000 players. In other words, it’s much harder to get defense wins the higher you go up levels. The only way a level 1000 person is going to lose a battle is through pure horrible bad luck with RNG… miraculous cascades, never-ending AI loops and some crazy devours. There is a small list of, well, overused defense teams that can make that bad RNG occur around ~33% of the time for end gamers.
I’d say the sweet spot is under level 200. I remember that PVP choices were far more varied then. It wasn’t perfect. There were tons of goblin teams. But, it was more varied than higher levels. More defense options have the capability of defeating a player at level 100 than at level 500.
That said, I think it makes no sense for the devs to nerf balanced troops just because they are popular solutions to the simplistic AI problem. I think the devs will ultimately need to find a new way to incentivize changing up defenses weekly. If they gave players a good enough incentive to change up defense teams, there would be an end to copypasta defenses.
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I’m level 442 and I actually see a lot of variety. Sure there’s a few troops that appear more frequently, namely BD, Maw, Mab, Mercy, and Valk, but overall even these troops I’m seeing combined in all kinds of different configurations. If I decide I don’t want to face Maw or BD, I just select the easy or medium battle instead of the hard one.
The issue to me is that once you get to a certain power level, all of your invades are going to be against that same power level because it’s capped. So level 1000 players don’t have easy or hard battles, they have Maw, Maw, and Maw to choose from.
I agree variety has improved over the last month. It’s not great in my opinion. But, I’m certainly not as bored with PVP as I was. However, my level 800+ friend has even less variety. I can only assume it’s worse for level 1000 people.
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I think the process is more organic/natural. There are a few ways to pick a defense team. Maybe we pick a team that’s hard to play against; maybe we come up with it from scratch, thinking only about how the AI uses troops.
But another way to pick a defense team is to move an offense team into the defense slot. If you play a team and it seems effective, if you’re confident that the AI could handle it, you’re likely to at least give it a try on defense.
And if most of your offense teams contain Valkyrie, it stands to reason that some of those teams will make the move to defense.
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Can we also get team usage data? Pretty please? I really think that’s the more telling data.
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I totally agree. It’s all about the combos.
I made a similar comment in another thread. At higher levels there should not be a meta, there should heavy experimentation and variety do to the high level of resources that should have been gotten at lower levels.
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Whoa. Valkyrie is actually ahead of Mercy even for 501+. Obviously the Mab teams need her, but … clearly something has to be done about souls in this game.
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How would you propose he do this? It might be possible to do some limited searches on specific combinations (like teams containing both Maw and Mercy, for example), but how would you handle the wide variety of Goblin or Knight teams that might be out there? I play on console and our combinations are a lot more limited at the moment (fewer cards, no double-types), so I can’t even begin to imagine the complexity of what you’re asking for.
YOU BET !
It’s been an issue since Stormheim release, I never played anything without Valk ever since unless I just wanted to have fun instead of grinding, wich is why I don’t really play the game anymore, 'cause it’s tiresome playing Valkyrie and I’m fed up with it !
Is there any importance to each division on your charts? e.g. each one is 5%?
The troops being mostly used in the game, even with the rework of some kingdoms, is pratically the same. I still think that having another way to play pvp could help:
In summary: For the period of one week/tournament some troops couldn’t be used on Ofense/Defense, it could be an extra mode for PVP, so people could just ignore this mode and play the regular “Maw versus Mab” battles.
There is also @Rasper 's great suggestion of enviromental elements to increase troop usage if there is a bonus for using certains troops.
Can we get a graph for the weeks containing the kingdom reworks? I want to know if the kingdom reworks had a small impact on game play at low to mid levels and how long those trends lasted.
I’m pleased to see that more people are running Chimera. Long been underplayed, IMHO. Along with the Sabertooth Lion! Some of the very best damage / cost troops out there.
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The real hidden dev emerges!
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It seems pretty straightforward to me: Query every combination of four troops over the past few days excluding anything with less than a hundred plays or something so the CSV isn’t overwhelming.
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