(Rant) Alliance War Pain Points and Solution - Marvel Contest of Champions

Channel:

Jae Sylvr

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1,600

Published on June 26, 2020 2:17:24 AM ● Video Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0uMMM-ftwUI

Game:

Marvel Contest of Champions (2014)

Duration: 28:44

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23

AW Issues (My notes)

defense: to a degree is P2W, but I'm actually okay with this. consider
sports, other collectors games

Fight Timers: if someone wants to go in and do a 20-minute fight using only blade and parry, power to them. that's a skill. to a degree I understand that fight timers force people to play the mechanic, and deal with the node/champion. but this also creates a restriction of roster selection.
makes protection nodes such as ebb and flow more frustrating
I think enrage timers, rather than hard timers would be a good solution. increasing the timer to 5 minutes was a good start, but instead consider after 5min, giving the defender: power gain, unstoppable, unblockable etc. not all but just examples

Roster selectivity: 3-man teams is nice, it gives war its own flavor. but some champions rely on synergies for utilty, it'd be nice to have access to a pure synergy slot, or two, where we can bring a synergy for utility, and not lose an attack slot as a result.This'll also make synergies in general more impactful.

Fair contest:
the fact that there are/were alliances pulling shady stunts for multiple seasons is ridiculous. I understand that the ideal situation is to have a system in place that prevents these issues for ALL alliance. but when multiple seasons pass, at one point it is just more effective to launch an independent invesigation and issue repercussions for unfair actions, and issue warnings, followed by actions
then continue to find a "fix-all" solution in the meantime

100% meta
tough one, because I understand not wanting to have players be boosted
on the other side, having a 100% meta is incredibly frustration, when some paths are just strictly harder than others

one idea is to make defender kills worth more, making alliances think twice about pushing through a hard path, if it means having a negative impact on the point total
one solution is setting less paths, but having a minimum number of fight attempts, for a war to be considered as "participated in" for season rewards
I'll admit I'm light on solutions here, but I do think a 100% meta is bad, and sets the wrong tone.

Tactics:
make the benefits more reasonably accessible
make the attacker tactics apply to all champions, rather than restrict to match.

items/boosts:
I don't mind these in war, I hate the accessibility of them. its ridiculously costly to revive/heal in war, and boosts are similarly expensive. this creates a "P2W" feeling, which might not permeate the entire contest, but definitely is a presence. The fact is an alliance of 30 people popping 30% boosts, power start 1's, invulnerability boosts etc, is going to do a lot better than an equal skill alliance going boostless.
to an extent this is fair, boosts and items costs resources, and alliances should be rewarded for investing resources, but right now the costs are stacked for P2P, making it a significant advantage over F2P, and that bridge should be significantly small to cross.

rewards:
its about time we ran a percentile rewards, the same way we do with most of the other content in the game.
top 3, maybe even top100 I totally understand, but after that the rewards need to be distributed percentile. It feels better to say "i'm in the top 10% of alliances, than it does to say "I'm in the top 1000 alliances"

reward distribution, right now only the top tier alliances have rewards worth pushing for, this makes alliance war feel like a loss for mid tiers. to raise the competition I think selectivity could be added to the top tiers, this way while the quantity of resources might be the same, selectivity would give higher alliances a reason to compete, while allowing the rewards to stretch further down.

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