The silly part of that auction system was the fact that if you wanted a specific General to buy you for 24 cards, you had to PM him in advance, and then wait with your finger on the button, hoping that no other General has time to raise. Minimum amount of things happening should always be 24 hours. This way timezones have no affect.
Ah, true, timezones can be a pain there. Another solution (though very similar to making 24 the max bid), would be to allow player to accept 24 card bid, even after some other general made a higher bid after that. That way, first general that makes the bid has the advantage of bidding first, and if the player decides to not take his bid, it forces other masters to pay higher than that.
Having individual auction clocks for each player has been suggested many times before. I don't like it because it's a huge task for the organizers. You have to pretty much watch the situation like a hawk for the whole duration of the auction.
Time marks of posts solve that problem really. I assure you, generals (and especially players) keep a close eye on their bids. If given timeframe passes, generals (and/or player in question) will most definitely claim the buyout, making the job of warmaster much easier. All WM has to do is to confirm time stamps of posts after general/player claims the buyout.
I wouldnt even be surprised if some community generated thread comes up listing players with soon to expire deadlines (not that thread like that would be crucial anyway).
Saying that, current system works of course. Its just that its not very... exciting.
About forcing to field suicide/illegal decks.. this is something that I don't fully understand. Is there an example of a situation where a team did all the right decisions, but were forced to build suicide decks nevertheless? I seriously doubt that. My guess is that these teams made bad decisions which led to their Vault becoming a mess, which lead to them having to use suicide decks. And if I'm correct, it's not really an issue with the rules. It's an issue with teams making poor vault building/discarding/salvaging decisions. And I don't think we need to change the rules because of poor those decisions. There should be a consequences for making mistakes, not some easy mode rules that gave you a way out no matter how bad you fail.
Good decisions can turn to be bad ones. For example, keeping or discarding stuff like Reflective shields, depends entirely on your future, completely luck based, draws of opponents. Due to salvage/discard mechanics, your Vault WILL become a mess at one point, unless you're winning huge majority of your matches, and never get to experience a situation where you field full Vault. And everyone WILL come to that point sooner or later.
In example,
is a 3rd team at the moment, I think we're doing a great job. However, even if we keep winning with 6-3 results, our Vault will become a mess at one point, just like in first war.
In a more concrete example, since you can look at any vault, pick a team and look at their card count of an element they can duo with. Through salvages, they can get more cards from that element, giving them more options in building that duo (always a good thing). However, when they lose the deck, that in its optimal build had say 80% of those cards, other 20% have a good chance to become useless cards, mostly due to the fact that in shrinking vault, they cannot afford to take 24 of main element cards, and 6 splash cards. And that happens to couple of element simultaneously.
It seems complicated when talking like this, but its a very common scenario in the war.
Then you get couple of useless cards here, couple of useless cards there, and you dont get to convert them all to mono as every round brings more useless cards from salvages.
I'm not trying to make things easier for those that make poor decisions; I spend crapload of time thinking about salvages/discards and the state of our Vault, and I want that to count. But regardless, suicide decks are detrimental to the event. I dont want to see some elements giving free wins to my opponents, just like I dont want to give free wins to anyone myself. I'd rather give teams some more tactical working space than have this scenario.
About the roles.. like I've said before, teams can be use their own methods if they want, but I think it's important to have some kind of default system for those teams that have no system at all and don't really have the skills and/or interest to make one. I can already see that secret forum sections are much better organized this time because we had those roles. It's very different from War #1 where many players were not given any specific roles, so they did nothing.
Well, in defense of the first war, it was the first one
And I understand what you're saying, and completely agree that suggesting default roles is a good thing, as long its not "you MUST do it this way".
