War #4 Brainstorming and Planning

[The_Mormegil]

Regarding "little things that are easily implemented" to improve War #4. I think best-of-five matches are one thing that would greatly improve War as a whole, and they don't really have any drawback. Less RNG-dependency, a bit more time required for every match, but I don't think it's too big an issue. Most PvP Events use best-of-five matches as a rule already, why not War?

Yea, why not. Originally it was made best-of-3 to keep the amount of matches that don't happen at a absolute minimum but now with subs and all I don't see any major reason why it couldn't be best-of-5. There is a lot of planning involved so might be nice to have longer battles.

We could maybe have a poll and ask what everyone think. I'll add one on this topic right now.

The problem is that in war you cannot (except event card) change your deck between the battles (of a round). It means that if the other has a counter deck to yours, best-of-five or best-of-twenty-one won't change anything. It might just be a bit more boring. If we do a best-of-five it might be nice to have the opportunity to do as in the event card of war#3 round#7 : Shapeshifting - Before each duel: Remove up to 6 cards from your deck (http://elementscommunity.org/forum/index.php/topic,26537.0.html). This way the result of a best-of-five can never be as planed in advance. Also it would increase a bit the weight of fighting skills compared to the deck building skills.

The main point of having best-of-five battles is to reduce the impact of RNG and make counterdecks matter MORE. If you're bored you can always concede. I mean, we had some instances of perfect counterdecks that failed due to bad luck. Having best of five matches reduced the possibility of a counterdeck failing, while increasing the probability of an RNG-dependant deck failing.

[10 men]

Here's a little table with the win probabilities depending on the respective best-of mode. The best of one probability is of course also the win probability of a single game. This does not take "surprise decks", decks whose winprobability changes over the course of a match, into account.

Best of 1	Best of 3	Best of 5	Best of 7
0	0	0	0
0,1	0,028	0,00856	0,002728
0,2	0,104	0,05792	0,033344
0,3	0,216	0,16308	0,126036
0,4	0,352	0,31744	0,289792
0,5	0,5	0,5	0,5
0,6	0,648	0,68256	0,710208
0,7	0,784	0,83692	0,873964
0,8	0,896	0,94208	0,966656
0,9	0,972	0,99144	0,997272
1	1	1	1

Or, for those who like graphics:



Or, as subtractive version (from the game win probability):



Personally, I don't really think that prolonging games that much is worth the small loss in variance (voted for best of 3).

[Scaredgirl]

I think the strongest argument for making the battles best-of-5 is that it takes a lot of preparing and planning to make one round happen, and if all that leads to a quick 0-2 loss, it might be very disappointing to that player, especially if that player is the first one to be kicked out when the team can only build 7 decks.

I would also like to add that most players would probably accept 3 losses as getting beaten fair and square while 2 losses could be seen as a fluke, regardless of what the actual math tells us.

Problem is of course that this would mean a potential 67% increase in total games, going from 3 to 5. I personally don't think that's a big deal, but maybe someone else disagrees

Everyone vote.

[The_Mormegil]

I think the results are pretty one-sided... are they not?

[willng3]

I think the results are pretty one-sided... are they not?

Yep.  Glad that there's such an overwhelming consensus on this issue.

[pikachufan2164]

Problem is of course that this would mean a potential 67% increase in total games, going from 3 to 5. I personally don't think that's a big deal, but maybe someone else disagrees

Not a problem at all; the deckbuilding phase is arguably more important and time-consuming than the duel phase anyways

[Scaredgirl]

I think the results are pretty one-sided... are they not?

Yep.  Glad that there's such an overwhelming consensus on this issue.

Well, there is probably a quite a big margin of error seeing the sample size is only 49 and most people responding here are probably hard-core gamers who want longer matches. But still 73.5% tells us that despite statistical errors, best-of-5 looks to be what the majority wants. So yeah, lets go with that and see what happens.

[Avenger]

The overall count of matches doesn't really matter, those who can afford a best of 3 can also afford a best of 5. At least, even the first poor loser can play some duels before sorted out.
The war isn't prolonged by the individual match length, you definitely got 10-15 minutes (2 matches) more in a week to complete the best of 5.

Is there a rule that all 3-5 duels have to be played in the same session?

[DrunkDestroyer]

Luck is part of everything.

My favourite event card was the one that made it best of 1.
Let the word RNG show up in every single losing battle summary, and go with best of 3. People get it.

[MrBlonde]

more games...
more FUN!

Also if this gets people to complain less about the RNG i'm all for it.

[mrpaper]

thoughts on the length of war and vault...
to reduce the length, why not simply lose more cards in round 1 (rd 1 would become the old round 2) it would fasten things up much. 

for the Vault every team should be able to switch  up to any 10 cards to any 10 other cards once during the war.... giving you a chance to adapt to a particular deck that kills you every time or become a bit less predictable.  It's an easy tweaking that teams will use late in the war and would keep the interest much higher! (I choose 10 because it is enough to build a new deck around 10 new cards... but I didn't wanted a big number so that a team changes 2-3 decks!)

[daccoo]

When do you plan to start with WAR event ?