War #3 Suggestions

[~Napalm]

Looking at the results of this war, Discord is devastating. It seems to me that it is horribly unbalanced. If you look at all the matchups where Discord appeared, it won in 70+% of them.

While other rare weapons can be devastating, most require dedicated decks whereas Discord can be thrown in to any deck Entropy uses and be highly effective.

Now, this is coming from a member of the current war, so you might call it biased, but bear with me. This card needs a nerf for the war.

I think the best way to do this is to limit the number of them team Entropy can start with. But, you cannot do this to only one team. So I propose we limit the number of starting rare weapons to 12 in each teams vault. This will still leave them with 3-4 working decks that can run Discord, rather than the 6-8 they had this time around, but it will not be the card that absolutely destroys the opponent more often than not.

Props to Team Entropy for being a great team, you've done nothing wrong. You played nearly flawlessly and have been a very worthy opponent. I am in no way trying to weaken you because I do not like you as a team or an element. I just think that Discord is unbalanced in the War event.

Discuss.

[918273645]

Napalm, this is all true. Discord is OP. I checked your stats (I only looked at Entropy), and 70% feels about right.

A perfect example of this is Discord/Black Hole. I know this is a favorite deck for this. And, because 50% of your deck must be from your element, this ends up in duo and This completely kills everything.

This card DOES need a nerf for war. Maybe a different version is distributed to everyone in the war (it would be worth a full 0 E!!!) beforehand? I don't know...

The starting of only 12 rare weapons for everybody would help, too, I guess...

And , yes, I am a huge fan of entropy. I was rooting for them in War #1 (after Gravity was killed, of course ).

[Skydaemon]

Discord is more a strategy (quanta denial) than just a rare.  I group discord/bh/devourers/eq's together in that way.

If you look at how frequently the above happens, yeah they're very pervasive strategies, partly because they're effective.  It's not just that they work, it's that they work against a large number of opposing decks, since all decks need their quanta for something or other and delaying an opponent a few rounds can cause a loss.  They're also faster to get out than many of the counter shields (phase shields and so on).

I don't know how you could start banning single cards without a reason though (voodoo for an example of the kind of reason I mean).

Discords would be less effective if more battles used novas/immos, but everybody hates rainbows and teams are supposed to have an elemental flavor to them anyway.

It's funny, but team entropy is one of the teams I least worry about running into discord from, probably because it's predictable enough to plan for.  A fair number of teams probably wouldn't be impacted by 12 rare limits anyway, but some teams would really take it hard, like death (arsenic is pretty central to most poison decks).  Even if I didn't like discord, I wouldn't support that specific solution.

Now, if you wanted to say that rare weapons in particular represent elemental specialties, and limit them across the board to own element use, that might be worth talking about.  (ie, only team death could use arsenic, only team gravity could use titan)  While it would be very limiting in some ways, I could appreciate the elemental differentiation/flavor aspect.  It would also make it easier for newbs to get drafted, since they only need enough rares of one type to support a team, rather than a whole set.

//edit
Maybe only the own-element team could initially bring the rare weapons in the initial vault, but still allow other teams to salvage later.  It gives a better bonus to beating specific teams too.  Beating a discord deck from entropy adds a whole potential strategy to your team in the salvage, and gives added incentives/bonuses for beating some teams early (if you want their rares).  It would also weaken small-quanta-bow, since they like to take arsenic or vamp stilettos.  At the very least you'd have to earn them by beating their elemental team first.

[Scaredgirl]

We were forced. We took Darkness cards and discarded out of element cards and did not have enough on that round we suicided to make enough legal decks. 118 darkness cards cannot make 8 decks.

I'm not talking about a situation during a specific later round. I'm talking about the previous decisions that led to that situation. You know all those earlier rounds and the cards discarded during them. Like I said earlier, this is a discussion we should have after War when secret sections are made public.

Looking at the results of this war, Discord is devastating. It seems to me that it is horribly unbalanced. If you look at all the matchups where Discord appeared, it won in 70+% of them.

While other rare weapons can be devastating, most require dedicated decks whereas Discord can be thrown in to any deck Entropy uses and be highly effective.

Now, this is coming from a member of the current war, so you might call it biased, but bear with me. This card needs a nerf for the war.

I think the best way to do this is to limit the number of them team Entropy can start with. But, you cannot do this to only one team. So I propose we limit the number of starting rare weapons to 12 in each teams vault. This will still leave them with 3-4 working decks that can run Discord, rather than the 6-8 they had this time around, but it will not be the card that absolutely destroys the opponent more often than not.

Props to Team Entropy for being a great team, you've done nothing wrong. You played nearly flawlessly and have been a very worthy opponent. I am in no way trying to weaken you because I do not like you as a team or an element. I just think that Discord is unbalanced in the War event.

Discuss.

One big reason why Discord is so powerful, is that outside Team Underworld, there are no real rainbow decks. You are facing mostly duo-decks and trio-decks, which get owned by an early Discord.

We might have to think about some specific card limits, for example picking one card from each element that you can only have 12 or something in your opening Vault.

[Sir Valimont]

I believe that in the current War structure, member roles are pretty limited. The Salvager, the Deckbuilder, the Strategist, etc are really just titles that imply starting a thread, but at the end of the day most people have 2 or 3 active players that lead most decision making, supported by other members.

I suggest a complete revamp of roles and of rounds to include one new idea that I think has fantastic potential to add a great new element to War, while simultaneously solving some known issues.

New Roles Structure:

1. General
The general leads the team, naturally. He is given moderator privileges in the forum subsection. He gets 6 upped cards in his own battle.

2. Fighter
The fighter is the only player besides the general who can substitute for a missing member and still salvage 3 cards. He gets 3 upped cards in his own battle.

3. Scribe
The scribe is given moderator privileges in the forum subsection and is in charge of all thread updates. He must keep the vault updated, the decks ready on time, and the salvage thread up on time. This is an extremely important job, but it makes the most sense for one person to do it instead of spreading the responsibilities to several people. Having two Scribes per team might make sense also (I prefer one but some others might like to spread the responsibility a bit).

4. Merchant
The merchant is the team representative in the Trading Thread each round. I will explain this in the Trading section below. This is also an important role that requires a totally new set of skills. Someone has to be clever at making deals, handling other teams, and being extremely active. This will add a lot of interaction, strategy and enjoyment to War.

5-7. Soldiers
Soldiers have no specific role. It is very important to have a few positions like this on the team because some players would really rather just fight in battles and not be responsible for all kinds of posting or constant online presence. On an active team, of course soldiers can also be very active if they choose. And that only helps the team!

8. Rookie
The rookie is a rookie. That will be determined by eligibility rules. Personally I like the concept suggested on the first page of this thread that rookies should be people who have not yet competed in PvP tourneys.

New Rounds Structure:

(prewar) Member Auction, Propaganda, Vault Initialization as normal.

Every round of War lasts exactly 1 week.

1. Round-1 Deckbuilding: 3 Days

2. Round-1 Battles: 3 Days

3. Round-1 Trading: 1 Day

4. Round-2 Deckbuilding: 3 Days

5. etc.


Trading Phase

For exactly 1 day -- preferably a weekend day -- there will be a Trading Phase. During this phase, a public thread will be started called Round-X Trading. The only people able to post to this thread will be the team Merchant, or another designated player if the Merchant is unavailable.

Threads started in this phase by the Merchant will be "offer" threads. They will work like this: The title of the thread will be an "offer" of cards. Any number of cards, up to 6, can be offered per thread, and teams can only have 3 offers up at a time. The thread title might be:

Entropy Offer: 2 Discords, 4 Stone Pillars

Then every other team can make a counter offer to trade for those cards. A response post might be:

: 4 Devourers, 4 Black Dragons, 2 Darkness Pendulums, 2 Wings

The counter offers can contain any amount of cards -- however: if a team bids more than once in a thread, every bid that team makes beyond the first must offer more total cards than previous bids. So if a team makes an offer of 8 cards, it can only bid in that thread again with an offer of at least 9 cards. The cards do not have to be the same. The reason for this rule is to prevent offer spamming in the thread, and to make teams think hard about what they offer. As soon as the offering team ACCEPTS, there is no going back, and the trade is made.

Having only the Merchants able to participate does two very nice things: First of all it creates a new role in War that's actually really important, and which uses different skills from other roles. Second, it makes the team's communication between members even more important. This is a community event and emphasizing communication is a really good thing. It will bring the team closer together!

At any point, the offering team can accept any bid by typing "ACCEPTED: " and the accepted bid.

At the end of the Trading Round, those two teams have the cards from the trade exchanged in their vaults.

Trading Rounds happen BEFORE Deckbuilding. This means that salvage is actually flexible, so teams can offer a trade based on what they can salvage without having those cards in their Vault. However, teams should be careful because if a trade gets approved and they don't have the cards in their Vault, they receive a penalty.

Notes on Trading Round:

This will bring a whole new dynamic to War. The ability to make smart deals, to be a clever bidder, and to be active on the forums all become advantages, and they will be unique to War. For once there will also be trading in Elements, something which many people would like to see. New players with new skill sets will become valuable to the team, and teams will be able to strategize by making smart counter-offers to help their vaults.

This could be an amazingly fun new addition to War.

New Conversion Rules:

I believe that conversion per round should still only be 12 cards per team into pillars. This is extremely important to retain vault strategy. Making it easy to convert takes away the importance of good vault planning, and makes it less of an advantage for teams to have good strategists.

However, especially with the new trading system there should be a new rule:

Unlimited pillar/pendulum Conversion.

This new rule would allow a team to convert an unlimited number of pillars and pendulums of other elements into their own type. They couldn't convert into the other 11 types of pillars (they would have to salvage pillars from another Element to get those, or trade for them) but they could now use salvage of another team's pillars for conversion.

Team Underworld should have a nice little advantage here: Unlimited pillar/pendulum conversion from any type to any type. It's one of the few advantages they really would have over other teams, and it's one they logically should have. It also gives them a unique offering position in the Trading Rounds, because they can offer any type of pillars to other teams they want (or trade for any type and convert as they see fit).

This will change the way salvaging works; suddenly it will be useful for teams in later rounds to salvage more pillars and pendulums for conversion, and there will even be added interest in trading for pillars in the Trading phase. "Giving up" some salvage for pillar salvage is something that would make a nice new strategic dynamic in the game, and alleviate some of the frustration and hopefully prevent too many late-game sacrifices as teams start running out of quanta sources.

Return of Event Cards:

This needs to happen but I will hold off and make suggestions in a different post in order not to flood people with ideas.

[DrunkDestroyer]

Completely different idea (Team Entropy will kill me, and possibly some others too)

Limit of Rare cards in initial vault
Why? You could say it is to make the war more acsessible to new players (and in a way, it does). But the main reason for me is to prevent the 2-4 Discords that seem to be splashed in around 1/4 of all decks.
And I doubt a limit on most of the other weapons would drastically change much.

(However, this should exclude non-weapon rares, since you can field more than one at a time)

[Malduk]

Limits on Discords or limits on rares in general wont stop over(ab)usage of Discord. Fact is, every team will have those in the Vault, because yes, they are THAT good to force an entropy duo simply due to this card. (Looking back, I'm actually interested is there any team that didnt pack those in this war?)
Speaking of limits, I doubt any team (entropy excluded), packed 12 of those anyway. Limiting Entropy weapon only makes no sense really. And limiting ALL elements due to Discord... well, whats Death without Arsenic, Air without flying OEs, life without adrena-staffs... Weapons are important part of some elements.

[Daxx]

I would be extremely interested in seeing the number of elements that were used as the second part of a Duo, and the win/loss records associated.

I may even compile it myself if I have the time.

EDIT: Here are the Win:Loss stats for the secondary partners in the duos up to the end of Round 5. Omitted are mono-decks.

- 33:36
- 15:19
- 25:17
- 21:15
- 15:16
- 20:22
- 19:18
- 5:11
- 5:11
- 8:18
- 14:13
- 11:14

What jumps out is that Aether is far and away the most popular duo partner; Darkness is the most successful; Life and Gravity are dead last in terms of popularity, and Light just pushes them out for the worst win ratio.

For reference:
- 53:35

[Kael Hate]

Um, easier to show you a result then explain.

Ok, here is a basic version of the tool, don't bother going into the backend, its just a whole lot of mumbo jumbo to do the things you'd do manually.

Use Master to enter the details, and see results. Complain if you don't like it.

ATM it lets teams preference their order of battle but I can randomise that if you want.

I've updated it using inverse player weight to fix the ratio between generals and other players.

[Sir Valimont]

k, i'm making an excel tool that will allow fair assignment of 13 teams of up to 13 players based on strength of opposition and fair linear assignment. I'll share it here for the community when finished. I'll put a results screen that will generate a report to be posted into the forums or copied to googledocs.

I find the statistical biases you're proposing quite interesting from a mathematical perspective. But to be perfectly honest I don't think the concept that using such a system makes things more "fair" is at all desirable.

The way I see it, the whole point of competition is to compete. When someone gains an upper hand, that is part of the nature of the competition. Forcing those who hold an advantage into a harder position invalidates the advantage in the first place, making the competition self-defeating. I don't really see the appeal in that.

If anyone should feel that War is a crapshoot because there is a breaking point at which one single battle determines victory or defeat, then perhaps the system should be recalibrated. But if anything it seems to me that War is a very long slog -- and teams do trend of course, but they also rise and fall. To take the example at hand, I don't think it's fair to say that has succeeded because other teams were suddenly and irreversably crippled against them. We haven't won yet -- not by a long shot -- and it's been a long, tough haul already. Most rounds, teams run their best decks against . Our team's success, and that of teams Fire and Death, have been resultant from several rounds in a row of good showing, in good battles against good decks. I think it's perfectly reasonable to discuss whether some elements like Entropy are inherently stronger than others; but that's another topic.

In my philosophy of strategy game design, there is one singular most important mantra: Simplicity in design leads to elegance in design. Chess is a good example of this; the rules for the movement of each piece are extremely simple. With simple building blocks, the resulting strategy is complex and interesting. In War, one can view that the simple randomness of opponents delivers the most fair outcome over time. One elegance of the system is in the fact that the more players a team plays per round, the harder that round is for the team, by definition. Fielding more decks against teams with fewer decks increases the odds of fighting Generals and increases the total number of probable losses, which means the total number of probably lost cards is also greatly increased.

Anyway, my 2¢. I certainly don't want to poo-poo your interesting statistical manipulations in and of themselves ... but I don't think they are necessary at all to make War any more "fair."

[Kael Hate]

Um, easier to show you a result then explain.

Ok, here is a basic version of the tool, don't bother going into the backend, its just a whole lot of mumbo jumbo to do the things you'd do manually.

Use Master to enter the details, and see results. Complain if you don't like it.

ATM it lets teams preference their order of battle but I can randomise that if you want.

K this variant has a seeded variance to offset the balance between Generals and regs, to appear as random but is technically balanced across the effect of time. Its the best of the bunch in my opinion but if I can get some suggested rules on fair then I'm sure I could build a better variant.

I'm mostly for the the fact that teams should not face another team more than once unless they have no choice and they should be able to commit where they like.

I like the idea that all teams fight all teams once each round and you choose who you will put up for the round. If a deck plays twice and loses either round then the deck is lost.

Damnit I guess I was born to be a Rules Designer rather than player...

[Kael Hate]

The way I see it, the whole point of competition is to compete.

I agree it should be a competition of player management and skill, not luck of matchup.

To measure something on a competitive nature you should remove as many of the variances as possible so that you are left with only the things you are competing for or comparing. Card pool already makes a big swing such that some factions have a better choice of cards or can min/max more effectively when given the ability tohave more of a more influential card.