Single Troop Defenses

Official News
61

So I’m looking at choices post change and its basically meta meta meta…each time for between 830 and 971 gold…hmm yeah not enthused. And those are 1-3 trophy battles.

I anticipate lots of late game players continuing to muck their defense for easier quicker options just with four troops.

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62

The reason I did a 1 troop defense is so I didn’t have to see this crap all the time.

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63

Mate, every time I see your profile picture it makes me think you’re joking even when you’re making a serious point!

It’s really distracting and hard to picture it otherwise.

:grin:

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64

I still find weaker teams with a full def team. And I’m over lv 1,100.

Also, if you want to play against weaker teams for relaxing, it doesn’t have to be PvP… unless your guild requires you to collect a lot of trophies…

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65

I didn’t catch two things:

  • how 1-troop defense was a problem?
  • before patch X (I don’t remember which one), 1-troop defense was filled automatically so why not taking back this feature better than this fix?
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66

Just change it to how I feel about these changes.

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67

Hahaha, that does help …

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68

A lot of people were using 1 troop Princess Elspeth. She 1 shots herself and causes enemy to win instantly.

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69

Now that you’ve changed it no one will know what I’m talking about so I’m back to looking like the village idiot!

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70

If one-troop Elspeth was the problem, then I think this is another prioritization foulup. The reason Elspeth is so trivial is because the code checks for victory before resolving her spell. I can’t believe that the developers would add code to adjust PVP teams instead of switching the victory condition code around, if Elspeth were the only problem.

On the other hand,

  • Famine (where the problem is everything except its first edit:second trait), and
  • Death Knight (where the problem was the full-team death mark, not the status effect itself)
    suggest that what the dev team sees as a problem isn’t always what the player base sees as a problem.
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71

When players deliberately take themselves(and their potential non asshat teams) out of the maximum point pvp pool by posting one troop defenses they escalate the problem we have with meta team dominance.

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72

Hey look a different team

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73

It seems you assume that these high level players were putting 1-troop defense [HLP1T] and so reducing the pool of possible players. Am I right?

The HLP1T are just going to put the META defense teams now so the pool will still be full of META defense teams…

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74

The player base doesn’t even agree on these problems. Famine has several vocal defenders in our playerbase (ironically some among them that are now heartbroken about having to face Famine more often since the one troop def workaround is history…) who are convinced that Famine is absolutely fine.

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75

If they do that i don’t feel a bit sorry for them losing their 1 troop exploit.

76

I hate seeing single troop defenses, but I really think this was rushed into for a number of reasons:

  • There was a reason single troop defenses were steadily gaining popularity, and it has little to do with personal gain. The addition of the Deathknight class and Guild Wars saw a veritable explosion of single troop defense choices when I set a low score defense team. People are setting low score things to avoid annoyance/RNG metas as much (or more) than they are for quick personal gain.
  • If the devs are going to be policing defense teams, then the system itself is really flawed to begin with. Variety should have been incentivized the entire time, but if you are going to force things, you might as well force variety.
    This change has the potential to force more toward conformity.
  • You have provided no alternative system to alleviate the other two issues.

I’ve never indulged in the single troop thing, but I have set lower score teams on certain weeks to get away from the grind and I was seeing a lot of single Elspeth, which is bad. But at the same time, single Elspeth can be used as a free repick and then you get on with your game. The prevalence of this as a defense choice has greatly increased recently, so I’ve been slogging through meta teams with a high score defense rather than setting low score teams myself, so yeah, it was a problem. But this change addresses the wrong thing. This has been going on for months with increasing frequency and the ability to “neatly cycle through single troop defenses” would have had to been a deliberate choice by people doing it, because even with the lowest possible four troop team I can muster (much lower score than a single fully traited Elspeth would be for me) and I would still get full teams on at least one of the options most of the time.

By the way, for anyone who still wants lower score variety, just use untraited troops as low level as you can get them with your current VIP level. This should be enough to get you into the 5ks-6ks score range. Hey, you might not have any untraited troops except for the last released event troop and then there’d be an increasing number of crappy four troop thoughtless teams, but you’ll still have more variety of options. Until you start seeing “four event troops from the current week” over and over and over and over…

My recommendations:

  • If you are already going to be forcing teams, why not that random thing you mentioned if they have one troop? Make one-troop mean “I don’t care” and so four random troops will be pulled from their collection. The user gets to avoid the meta without putting out toxic single troops defenses, everyone else gets full teams to fight.
  • Unmarry defense teams scores from PvP matchmaking completely and clamp down score ranges offered in each trophy bracket. I know the official stance on this is that defense teams don’t affect your PvP picks, but I think the evidence speaks for itself at this point. The three trophy should be at or above your current score bonus. The two trophy should be slightly weaker than your current score bonus. The one trophy should be significantly weaker than you current score bonus, not a slightly different version of the meta of the moment. Also, fix five star kingdoms not contributing to score bonus so that there are bigger score gaps between those just starting to star their kingdoms and those that aren’t. This issue is not getting as much attention as it should, but I believe it to be a huge contributory factor in the worst parts of PvP matchmaking.
  • Make casual PvP actually usable by increasing the base gold and glory rewards to equal that of normal PvP and interact with Revenge and Rival Pools. The only reason people even use Casual PvP as it stands is to cheaply refresh, usually to hunt down snotstones. Also, extend seals rewards to this mode as well and change tiered rewards to be awarded after a number of battles instead of PvP points. This should be where everyone not caring about getting on the leaderboard should be hanging out, not in the normal PvP pool. Instead, the rewards are so heavily gutted that most people would need to play the battle on Warlord 1 just for a comparable gold payout, plus the complete lack of revenges for bonus rewards, lower glory payouts, no bonus seals etc.
  • Incentive variety by having troops with low overall usage stats give higher payouts for being used on defense and winning. I think this bears repeating.

I have the utmost respect for the dev team and their workload and having to prioritize things isn’t easy, but this claim right here is my biggest problem. Judging from history, it could be months before this is properly sussed out, and it is a problem with the game long term - not just the one-troop exploit, but the actual function of exploit (lower score defense team score nets bigger range of score choices when invading), and the reason people are exploiting it (occasionally variety, occasionally personal gain). Meanwhile, one troop gimp defense become four troop gimp defenses, probably stacked with 50% boost event troops which wastes the maximum amount of time while still having a low score, non-engaging experience for the attacker, which is really the worst of both worlds.

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77

Yeah but how is that a problem?

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78

Thank you. I am happy with this as long as things get straightened out somewhat regarding the points being right. And fixing higher levels getting a less amount of gold for the same fight.

79

Easy trophy very quick not fair for legit players

80

Well I call BS to those who fear the change will make PvP more monotonous. I’ve never set a 1-troop defense but rather it’s a 9.5k point defense. My invade teams are all 9k-9.6k and I rarely see the same meta team in more than 1 of the 3 slots. I see plenty of variation. If I don’t want to deal with the same old meta team in 3T slot I just drop to one of the other slots to break it up.

The real complaint is it’s going to likely reduce the vast amounts of gold/trophies the machine-like players (this is by no means an accusation of being bots, simply that they game constantly) and guilds are producing. Obviously anyone gaming the system or is so competitively motivated to reach top 500 isn’t going to appreciate being held back from their potential. For the other 80+% of us we’ll see little to no affect from the change other than glitches that may arise.

1 Like