Time for an overhaul?

#1

ÑI’ve been thinking a lot about the frustrations people have expressed (and my own), and wonder if it isn’t time for a major overhaul.

League changes
I would change the the league shuffle from weekly to monthly, go through one full cycle of major and minor events. At the end of the four week period, everyone that stays in the league receives a team prize based on league rank - which would be the result of the cumulative impact of the four-week cycle. Note, there would still be the prizes for the major and minor events, this would be in addition to, not in lieu of.

League promotions - when you move up in leagues, you should get a team prize. It doesn’t have to be extravagant. But some reward would be nice.

Events - there needs to be a better separation between prizes at the bottom of one league and the top of the league beneath it. And, perhaps more importantly, the prizes themselves should be more tailored to what players in the different leagues actually need. For example, in gold and maybe platinum, a greater emphasis on tokens. In diamond and sapphire, a greater emphasis on timers. You guys (pg) undoubtedly have this data, use it to improve the experience for a change.

There needs to be a separation between atlas leagues and non atlas leagues. I would say everyone in sapphire gets moved into the atlas leagues. But new tiers for sapphire are created for atlas teams that fall below the sapphire rank. If at the end of the 4-week cycle you have not climbed out of that subtier and you own no castles, you lose access to atlas and are returned to the nonatlas league until you climb bAck up.

War Changes
There needs to be a revamping of the payout for winning wars. The egg tokens are meaningless. It should be a goodie-bag type payout, hammers, spells, tokens, potions, etc. - maybe the equivalent of 3-5 gold chests scaled per league?

Also, in addition to the default war time of 8 pm eastern, why can’t we declare on 12 hours notice at any time?

I would also like to see a war status screen that would show all the wars that were active in my league, current scores too.

Atlas Changes
Troop stockpiling - impose either a hard or a soft cap on the number of troops a player can hold, say 1,000,000 for arguments sake. A hard cap would be they cannot create more once they reach that cap. A soft cap would be impose a maintenance cost for troops above that number, say 1 food and 1 gold to be assessed at the end of each day.

Castle bubbling and conquering - bubbling a castle should get a glory bonus to all non allied teams, say 1250 glory for t2, 2500 for t3, etc. conquering the castle should get that glory bonus plus a shard payout based on the land the castle is in and the castle infrastructure.

Glory
I would make T3 castles the base at 100% glory (subject to team attack power), T4 would be 125% and T5 would be 150%. T2 I’d make somewhere between 75-90%.

Defensive primarch glory should be doubled. Period. Full stop.

Costs/resources
The costs of playing this game increase exponentientially. Cut the cost of everything by 25-50%, and it may seem counterintuitive, but you will see your revenue increase because more people will be buying.

Chests need to scale. We need more and better ways to earn (not be given for free) embers, pearls, timers. By earn, I do not mean a not-so-secret way to squeeze more blood out of the turnips. Give us a legitimate way to grind these in meaningful quantities. Seriously, 10 embers on a quest?:man_facepalming:

Legacy elite - it’s perfect

Atlas elite - cut the cost in half. Give us an annual price - the only reason I can see why there isn’t one is that you don’t have enough confidence in the game to go beyond 30 days.

Double the troop creation rate for bot elite and non-elite. For people with elite, you could increase the troop cap by 150-200%

Edit: Two points I forgot

Transparency - there is no reason you can’t tell us the approximate release schedule for new tiers and new prizes - or at least the season. If the intent is every 6 months for new tiers with mythics 3 months in between, just say it, if towers are every 9, why keep it a secret?

New teams - there is nothing that is going to screw up bringing new players into the fold than getting placed on a crappy and ignorant team. There should be a cost to forming a new team, it should be at least what it costs to remove a rune from your base.

7 Likes
#2

Every team operates under the same rules. This just seems like you personally dislike the start time? can’t make everyone happy no matter the time.

Why do you feel it matters? People would just stockpile horns/diamonds/gold packs as troops vs troops themselves.

Bubble parties are already a thing because its easy glory.
1250 - 2500 glory is a pittance compared to the glory of actually just hitting another castle.

No. If people want to go hit whoever for max glory. There are T4/5 for that.

Would need to see numbers but I still don’t think it would be very good glory for a defender.

Agreed, the resource gains are not commensurate to the cost increases.

Would even more greatly skew the balance between F/E2P and Whales.

Agreed

Would have no meaningful impact. They would just increase the glory cost of lines by some amount which in reality just means that you’d have to spend more time grinding to earn prizes since the prime troop killing capacity would not increase.

2 Likes
#3

why? that just sounds like a problem for teams that disband or have more sandbagging teams than usual.

yes please

why? in most events that doesn’t really seem like an issue.

yes :+1:

“the easy war target screen”

1 Like
#4

Nope, start time works great for me. But for European teams it is very difficult and gives a distinct advantage to us based teams.

For two reasons. PG makes screwy changes to see more action in atlas. This would help encourage that action without actually hurting small teams. Second, conquering castles needs to be easier (not less difficult, but less time consuming) reducing troops available would help.

#5

Your proposals wouldn’t have the desired effect

1 Like
#6

I think it would make the competition more interesting and meaningful. Not to mention that it would help when a team gets promoted to not have to worry about getting dropped right away because they suck at kingdom wars for example. A full cycle of events is a better reflection of a team’s ability to stay in the league. As for sandbagging, personally I don’t care about sandbaggers. They are making their choice on how to play the game like everyone else. But, ideallly better and more prizes at higher leagues would give them the incentive.

You must be new to the forums.:joy:. Seriously though, access to atlas gives a distinct advantage over not atlas teams. Relative to non-atlas teams they are able to grow stronger faster. Obviously not all take advantage of this opportunity. But those that do don’t really have the opportunity to move up leagues because those in higher leagues almost all have access to atlas, allowing them to also grow stronger as fast.

Maybe for some. I just think it would be interesting to watch.[quote=“MOBmariah, post:3, topic:100987”]
why? in most events that doesn’t really seem like an issue.
[/quote]

#7

I appreciate the statement, would love to understand the rationale.

#8

I stated additional reasoning in my original post.

But to add to that
You want a 1m cap of troops
Then you want 2x troop production

Without considering the increased grind which would come to compete an atlas season

1 Like
#9

Instead of stockpiling or letting them go to waste, you don’t think people would burn troops?

Or are you saying the cap is too high? Because I just picked a random number as an example

#10

This would be a nice change since the weekly shuffle has made it harder to create inter-team friendships.

#11

I would settle for PG following through on some of the stuff on their own damn list from 6 months ago:

  • Improve / Smooth building upgrade times
  • Font Size customization
  • Fix Expedite Economy
  • Fix Elemental Ember Economy
  • Improve Runic and Silver Chests
  • More Fun Branches like Headless Horseman

How about the UI team actually get on board and make improvements instead of glitz and rotating our buttons 180 degrees just for fun?

I’d settle for PG fixing all of the “server throttling” issues but they don’t even count them as bugs:

  • Failed to load Atlas.
    Failed to load troops.
    Failed to load tribute.
    Atlas bank errors.
    Sync errors. Sync Errors. SYNC ERRORS!!!

I’d settle for PG not introducing new bugs every release and every event. Not being able to attack islands in PvP? Remember chat breaking completely? Negative currency bugs, farms/mills costing more than RSS can hold? Broken War Cry that was disabled for weeks?

What if they stopped with the bait and switch dragons, or realized the stealth 6 month Invoker plan wasn’t the savior this game needed?

What if they admitted that the non stop castle glory sniping wasn’t intended and is wearing damn near everyone down to the point of saying “Forget Atlas and pointless defends! I’d rather go shave with lemon juice today and enjoy a nice after shave salt scrub.”

Just a few thoughts… :man_shrugging::man_shrugging::man_shrugging:
Sour%20Puss%20Cat

9 Likes
#12

I would love to see more prizes that reward a team rather than the individual. I’m not saying personal prizes should be reduced, but rather team prizes should be buffed. Reward teamwork since this is a team based game. Granted I am on a team that 99% of its members put the team ahead of the individual. Those who don’t typically don’t stay long :hugs:

3 Likes
#13

Maybe I should have prefaced with, In addition to delivering a working product . . .

6 Likes
#14

There also needs to be a system in place to reward the grinders. Example: complete “x number” of egg token missions in that week and get a bonus “x number” of tokens

6 Likes
#15

Some of these I like and understand the rationale behind, such as prizes for league promotions, better prizes for winning wars, and fixing chests (whether scaling is the way to go or not, I’m not certain; I’ve seen convincing arguments on both sides). Others I’d like some more explanation on, if you don’t mind.

Can you expand on why you think this would be a good thing? It sounds like stagnancy and un-fun to me to be stuck in the same league for 1 month, depending on whether a team I’m on wants to move up or down.

I have always been bummed they didn’t complete the prizing side of the league restructure proposal, and agree with that part, but I’d like to hear more about what you’re thinking with this and how it benefits people. What people need tends to be dictated by, well, what individual people need, rather than by the league they’re in, no?

While I agree that having a set start time means that wars are always starting at inconvenient times for some and really convenient times for others, I’m not sure that this is the right answer. It’s been debated a lot, and I’m not sold on any proposed solutions thus far.

I’ve often wondered why, if there are too many troops in the game, they don’t implement a hard cap on troops owned. I don’t disagree necessarily, but just want to clarify that this is the problem you see?

I don’t understand this at all. Can you expand on your rationale and exactly who gets the glory, and whether you mean team glory or individual players getting glory?

I may not be entirely opposed to this, depending on what problem you’re trying to solve with it?

I agree with MBN that the request for a hard cap on troops is at odds with a request to double troop creation rate. I would like to hear how you’re thinking these go together (I do happen to think that the rate for non-elite is too low though).

#16

Did you mean get x number of timers as a bonus? :slight_smile: :slight_smile: :slight_smile:

#17

Well I’m hoping a way to grind timers is already in the works :joy:

2 Likes
#18

With an incredible 6 month long planning period, I’m sure their timer solution will be jaw dropping simple, elegant, efficient and effective. Seems like it takes less planning to go back to the moon than fixing a pretend economy.

3 Likes
#19

The lack of competition between spenders and everyone else will undoubtedly be the games demise anyway. I know that the whales will always have the nicest things, but what would be wrong with giving people a way to compete without having to drop 20k an event. Competition is what makes the game enjoyable. PG just gets in their own way

7 Likes
#20

It provides another level of competition that brings wars into the mix. I think your ability to stay in higher leagues can often depend on whether you get promoted during a major or a minor event. It makes the risk of losing an individual war less.

For the most part, I am sure you are right, every player has specific individual needs. However, I assume that there are certain needs that are more prevalent in some leagues than others simply by virtue of the fact that you have different level concentrations, different knowledge concentrations, different spending concentrations. For example, the average diamond player might not need more swords and shields, but would die for more hammers. While the average gold player could use all three.

I must not be articulating this very well. A cap on the number of troops and a faster regeneration rate are not exclusive. The idea is to not have troops just sitting there, but get them out being used. The creation of troops is the lifeblood, and that blood moves slowly, even with elite. But some people have stockpiled ungodly amounts of troops that skew or chill behavior theirs, their allies, and their enemies. I want to get rid of the unused troops and focus on putting the troops that remain to work.

PG has expressed disappointment that there aren’t more “wars” and castle turnover in atlas as opposed to sniping and minor skirmishes. One of the reasons for that is the cost of taking a castle is too high, we invest too much in our castles and are too reluctant to give them up. So I want to give an immediate reward beyond what currently exists to encourage bubbling and conquering. It is a reward that would go to every conquering enemy that participated (e.g., lost troops, taunted, trapped) in the attack.