Another plus to going Dev-control/Automated is it would provide a more overall scope of possible traitstones. Since opponent’s kingdoms would be more random.
Bringing up that classic player request of people changing their home kingdoms from Whitehelm. lol
The very best defense teams, WITH player agency, produce a loss rate of 50-60%.
Let’s not pretend player agency, when it comes to defense, is really that big of a deal.
Of course, there is another option… don’t touch PvP at all and add another PvE option.
A combination Explore + Arena, call it Plunder, where you fight 8 matches against randomized kingdom based matches but each match gets a progressing stat bonus and the 8th match being a special built kingdom-centric match (1, 1, 1.25, 1.50, 1.75, 2.0, 3.0, 3.0). The final fight should be devastatingly difficult. Each win would yield normal gold/souls/stones, but each match would have a higher chance at an arcane stone payout. Additionally give wins 5, 6, and 7 a trophy and glory and winning 8th would get 2 of each.
So, if you want gold or fast trophies, go PvP. If you want easy traitstones, go explore. If you have a strong team and want a faster return, go Plunder.
I could see people putting together teams specificly designed to fight a kingdom’s Plunder line up. Like an anti-undead team for facing Ghulvania
I’m not saying that it is necessarily a big deal, and with the “win” rates on defense as they are I think we can agree it’s not. But it’s more about how it would be perceived by the player base, people will feel that a choice is being taken away from them and there will be claims that some person or other is getting the raw end of the RNG stick in terms of defense teams and losing all their PVP points as a result. It could be a case of removing pvp point reduction from losses, but that would bring it’s own slew of problems most likely.
So I guess what I’m trying to say is that taking away player agency in defense teams will possibly cause more trouble that it will solve (at least in the short term, but that’s also when the most damage will be done).
Yeah I was literally about to say, like @htismaqe said, they could just add trophies to explore and let us ramp up our own difficulty.
This would be the simplest form of the desired with a lot less work.
But i’m guessing the traitstone drop would have to change, therefore explore doesn’t work. They would have to create some explore/arena hybrid system.
Contradicting myself again. Nobody argue with me, please. This is between me and me.
[quote=“HKdirewolf, post:19, topic:16551, full:true”]The players have somewhat shown when given the chance, they are going to abuse the troops. Especially when “broken.”
[/quote]
This is, of course, human nature. It’s always going to happen.
The ideal solution would be for the Devs to balance all of the troops and fix all the bugs. However, we all know how difficult that is and will continue to be.
The only practical solution I can see is to change player behavior. That can be accomplished via positive incentives or punitive methods. I’m much, much more inclined to ask for the former. But I also acknowledge that the latter may be the only means available.
They just need to make a decision and implement. We seem to be stuck in a revolving door of stagnation, changing one broken or overpowered mechanic for another every few weeks.
Well considering how things normally get handled, as in don’t fix it just try to come up with incentives(Maw, Manticore,Mab) I’d rather they just fix this problem instead of implementing 1,000 other things personally. Plus i’m of the mindset incentives in this case are rarely going to work out. Because incentives have to be a CHOICE not forced. So why would anyone change how they play the game unless forced to.
Not a knock against the devs. There’s no 1 way to handle these types of things. I’m no expert. Clearly i’m addicted to their game.
Well we’re just having a discussion on our own, and trying to find a way to make it work. What problems do you see coming up? These are important things to think about.
Not that we’re in control of any of this lmao. We can type til we’re blue in the fingers, but zilch could come from this.
Nice discussion nonetheless.
Sorry deleted that right before your responded.
I just don’t care about defense teams at all, and care about them a bit at the same time. I don’t think people should be assigned teams and actually lose points because of them. It’s fine if my team loses, but a dev chosen one would be annoying.
Maybe adding trophies to explore would be okay, but those are a lot easier to farm. I’m in the middle for all of it. 
Also I’m not sure about incentives for using other teams would work, as they would mainly just lose all the time.
Yeah they would obviously have to revamp that system.
I think since the system chosen teams would/could be harder there would be a greater chance of losing. That’s where the loss to points would have to come in.
This whole discussion tiptoes on the problem with pvp as a whole. Why defense team losses don’t even matter to start with, because there’s nothing viable to work towards in pvp. Most people aren’t even going for #1, so what’s left to work for? That’s part of the problem, but player choice would still have to go in some type of way. It doesn’t fix the broken meta problem. No one could question a meta if it was dev controlled. lol (someone probably still would)
That’s why I set one troop defenses, because I avoid more of the teams I want to. Also I’m not going for #1 so losing points doesn’t matter to me.
I knew this sort of thing would happen, which is why I very deliberately did not participate in this one-troop-defense crap…
Interesting topic. I’m still of the opinion that the most important thing right now is to bring older troops, especially legendaries, to NEAR enough(not Khorvash good)where the newer legendaries are currently at in terms of power and then do all the fine tuning. I’d rather hear about people using older troops, finding them fun and useful instead of no useage at all. They’ve already done Maugrim Woods and I think they should push on with this and let us fully know their plans for troop rebalancing. I think this paragraph falls in line with the defence discussion, too.
PVP should be called Kingdom Invasion instead and the leaderboard system should be completely reworked. I’d start by rewarding win streaks more, a bigger point deduction from a loss and that’s all I can think about right now.
Perhaps the new event fights will solve some problems? And then there’s guild wars, too. Who knows, but I think immediate acknowledgement of troop adjusting from the developers would go a LONG way around here and would ease some people.
While I agree with the pushing forward with the reworks (which I’m assuming they plan to continue as Maugrim Woods wasn’t the first, Mist of Scales had rework back in June / Julyish) I’m not sure about the changes to PVP. The PVP leaderboard system was completely reworked just recently in 2.0, so reworking it again so soon might not be viable. And the issue with rewarding win streaks more and punishing losses is the inherent randomness in battles. There are already voices complaining about the AI cheating (and there probably always will be) but these would only get worse when that one unlucky loss could not only lose them more points, but also break their win streak bonuses at the same time.
If I recall correctly, pvp defense loss results were already nerfed a bit when the ladder was first introduced, specifically because people were losing too much ground from losses that they couldn’t control. So they complai- I mean, discussed it here, and the Devs modified it. How much, i don’t remember anymore. So who knows, I’m sure this kind of discussion is valuable to them regardless.
To chime in, first let me say I’m not sure what the right solution is. But I do think some modification is needed. Maybe we remove the defense penalty altogether and turn it into a show off feature, to display your team building brilliance, and perhaps coordinated with the weekly events? Maybe all it takes is requiring you to change your defense team each week to a team you did not use last week, or the last few weeks? Perhaps we can set a different defense team to each kingdom, which will force many players to come up with a variety since most don’t have 20+ Bone Dragons, and invaders randomize which kingdom they attack?
A variety of options even beyond these are available. The question is, do people really want something different, or do they just want an easy invade every single time?
I personally think there’s enough powerful options for the players in this game already to laugh at randomness and overcome it quite comfortably, but that’s just my opinion.
I’d like something different at this point in the game and I currently think there’s enough power in the hands of the player for the person to get an easy and quick invade win.
I participated in it solely because I got tired of seeing the same 3 troops over and over again.
It seems we have a choice between boring effortless wins and boring monotony.
If they would take care of Bone Dragon we wouldn’t have to resort to this kind of stuff.
When PvP was first launched, the point loss for a defense loss was more than you gained from an invade. This was not a healthy system because tiers and ranks were based on the same system, because it made getting just tier rewards a treadmill (and one many people couldn’t even progress on). And herein lies the biggest mistake of the system - the pseudo-competitive nature of it all.
So, I’ve said in the past about 100 times that the problem with the meta isn’t that there is a meta of the day, but rather that the system promotes having a meta at all, and therefore will always gravitate toward things that people know work for whatever their intended purpose is. Someone catches wind that something has a high win rate? Repeat ad-nauseum. Thread goes up that single troop defenses make your invades easier? Single troops abound.
So how do we solve this? My main solution in the past was to incentive winning on defense with rewards heavily weighted to the relative usage stats of the troops on the team. Overused combos would not gain significantly more than they would from a loss (I mean, even less so than already) while underused combos could randomly see a glory key or gem or something. The problem with an idea like this is that it still requires participation, and, given light of the “weak defense team” strat, would not offer enough of an reward to deincitivize that.
So what is the solution? Well, if the problem is shoehorning in “competitive” features where they don’t belong in the first place, the main way would be the ability to avoid them completely (and not get screwed, rewards-wise).
My suggestion: buff Casual PvP.
Basically, as of now, there is little reason to even play “Casual” PvP because it is just ranked with less rewards. If Casual just meant “I’m opting out of the ladder because I want more team options to fight and better filtering for ones I don’t”, I have a feeling it would get a lot more usage. The ability to ban teams and the lack of any gains unless a team is fought would naturally deincentivize using irritating “meta” teams. Completely unlinking your team usage (both the anecdotal defense team effect and the stated invade team effect) from the picks you get would deincentivize using one troop teams. Increasing your defense team’s time to stay in the matchmaking pool to the whole week radically increases the numbers of players to draw from.
When Casual PvP is a viable way to gain PvP related resources, then ranked PvP can be “fixed” in whatever way necessary to make it more “competitive” (win streaks, bigger loss penalties, etc.) and the rest of us can just avoid it like the plague.
I know I certainly don’t want easy invades. That’s actually why I’m complaining. The one-troop defense teams are boringly easy to beat.
Freaking excellent post, as usual.