Second Campaign General Feedback

Gnomus, on 16 December 2013 - 04:37 PM, said: Hi dear WG and other players.   Here’s some thoughts about Campaign II. As feedback to WG and as points of discussion for other player. Please share your opinions and point of views so we can get Campaign III  better than this one.   Warning: Wall of text coming. :)   General: 1.       This Campaign was much better than earlier in my opinion.   2.       Rules should have been published even earlier (still much better than last time) and opened up. For example stage 1: “Increased change of revolt” is just words. “100% change of revolts and half of your provinces revolting” would have been hard facts. More about this in VP section. Or even better, publish rules and listen for feedback and then modify them. Now it took most experienced players about 5 minutes to see how FP's can be exploited, but this seemed to surprise WG.   3.       Big alliances couldn’t dominate, but all clans needed to work for their points. This was great.   4.       This changed CW metagame, as instead of safety and area control clans were forced to look for maximum number of (winnable) battles and try to attack and provoke encounters and attacks as much as possible. I liked this.   5.       As main point of Campaign was FP’s (or VP’s for top clans) gold farming was nicely reduced (wise farmers would have been at basic CW map). Most areas were looted most of the time, as stacks went through and holding areas was not necessary. Also clans came and went from riots leaving much room to map. This resulted in nice flow of game, including few chip actions, like 1-1, 2-1 or 4-5. At least for us. Interesting to use less than full stacks on map.   6.       For good clans it was still unwise to fight each others as long as there were other targets available, but once there were no easy battles left, it was battle time no matter who was next to you.   7.       Separating VP’s from FP’s was brilliant. Both had problems in themselves, but having different measures for players and clans was good in theory.   8.           One of biggest problems with FP’s was that clan leadership had to make hard choices about who gets battles and who doesn’t. This was especially true for clans with lot of active players and no “chip accounts”. This was something I didn’t like, as I had to say to some clan members: “Sorry, you are not getting playtime, as getting you to 10k is risky and we need to secure tank to those who can get it.” I hated this. Hated. Did I say I hated it? Yes! I hated it really much!   9.       Campaign was still too long. I know several CW-leader that got burnt out at third stage (point 8 didn’t help this). 3x12 was not necessary. 3x7 or 4x7 if T4 would be included would have been better.   10.       Tier coefficiencys for FP’s were pretty good. There was hardly difference between stage 1 and 2 battles and stage 3 had only slightly bigger amount of FP’s per battle. Good job there. Interestingly it wasn’t the tiers, but maps that made FP difference. From a nice victory in Campinovka with medium lineups clashing one could get only near to 4k mark, with heavy lineup in Ensk even 5k was possible per battle.   11.       Fame points from missions should have been visible as soon as mission is finished. There will be lot of butthurt when someone who reached 10k with hard work will be dropped out after campaign as mission rewards are added.  Points and situation should be visible all the time to increase competition, but also to show actual situation of player.        12.    Otherwise Missions were good. They didn’t give too much fame, but that fame came to all players in clan. Nice addition to give reasons to do something else.   13.       Please add medal descriptions to “Winners of…” news. Not much work, but then players could see what clans did to get that medal instead of trying to search old news for finding one telling what was needed to get that medal.   14.       Also gather up all important information to clear place. Now there’s official pages, news, news discussion and forum clan section discussions.     Exploiting rules:   15.       This was totally crap. There were no clear rules what is exploit, what is intelligent use of game mechanism and what is just tactically stupid.   16.       Now only rule was “don’t exploit”. Asking for replays was basically ok, but that is something that shouldn’t be clans responsibility (serverside replays anyone?).   17.       Now only few clans got punished for exploiting, and either they must have been stupid (say it loud themselves), very obvious (low tier tanks etc.) or just unlucky (WG decided to concentrate on them). I’m pretty sure that many clans did exploiting more or less and punished clans weren’t only ones or perhaps even worst. Couple of clans contacted us trying to fix match results, but we declined them all. The punished clans were just picked as public warning to others. Arbitrary punishment. Needed, but I would have preferred clear line of what’s ok and what’s not and then some way of make sure that line is same for everyone.   18.       As there’s no official alliances or any way WG can control clans communication it’s pretty much impossible to prevent milder exploiting as even clans part of same community are officially separate. How can one sanction for allies fighting against each other when there are only informal alliances based on communication between players?   19.       Example of mild exploiting: Winner is decided diplomatically and other side brings weaker players, non-optimal but still useful tanks or, easiest, just informs enemy what tactic they are using so they die because of “bad tactical choices”. Pretty much impossible to “prove” as exploit, but means that clans can gather FP’s easier.  Not as fast as clans getting high WR for proper battles, but can more easily distribute FP’s to players needing them regardless  of player skill or tank garage. Problem for clans is losing stacks while doing this.   20.       Side note: My clan decided at start of Campaign to fight properly and every battle was fought to the bitter end. In the end it was good decision, as we managed to get clearly positive winrate and generate more FP’s than could have been done in arranged battles (with 50/50WR). Also everyone getting tank knows they have earned it (few players who should have gotten tank didn’t get it L). We were offered few times fixed battles or NAPs, but it was refreshing to decline them and go for YOLO attacks around. Only problem was lack of delays, as we rarely had actively friendly neighbors.   Victorypoints:   21.       Having very restricted VP’s was good. Getting them needed some work (or luck), especially in stage 2 and 3   22.       Having VP’s as meaningful only to few top clans (FP multipliers, big gold reward) was not good. If you weren’t part of top game it was enough to aim for top30 positions. If you wasn’t part of top30 competition VP’s were totally useless and uninteresting.   23.       There should have been more gradual change. Some bigger reward for positions 4-10 to keep clans fighting for those positions (1-3 got good enough rewards). Also some reward for others too, like 20 000 gold for positions 31-50 and 10 000 gold for 51-100. That would have made non-top clans interested in VP game instead of just folding out of big clans way because for them VP’s meant nothing.   24.       VP numbers were badly out of balance. Stage 1 gave too much in comparison to stage 2 and 3.   25.       VP generating in stage 1 was badly off. To get points as landholder one mistake meant you got nothing while for rioters one lucky success meant you got your reward. As this wasn’t clear from rules (point 2) this made whole 1 stage badly balanced. When situation got clear some clans had clear lead while others had big potential hold that they would have needed to dump to try rioting way. I see three possible solutions: a)      Some coefficiency, like 0,5 to 0,75 for looting VP b)      Longer cooldown for leaving map, so it’s not so easy to raid every evening. c)       Some more difficult system, like banking 10% of potential VP’s per day for landowner. For example 1 day you get 250VP so you get 25VP to bank and 225 as potential. Next day you get another 250, so you have 475 potential so 48 goes to bank etc. Longer you hold area more you get to bank, but there’s still plenty for rioters.   26.   Fix changes from stage to stage and random bonuses from WG. a)      End of stage 1: Landowners needed to stay on map to gather their VP’s. Rioters could leave map as soon as battles were resolved, so they were in better position when stage 2 started. This in combination to rioting being more profitable in stage 1 punished landowners some more. b)       Route of trains in stage 2. Some clans hopped to train and followed it through stage as well as their skill and power permitted. Some other clans met invisible barrier as train went through landing zones meaning that they couldn’t anymore catch that train as they would have needed to take longer route. Trains moved too fast. Staying in one place for a day would have given time to setup some kind of assaults on them. Now they were already gone when you got near them. c)       Stage 2 and 3: Clans getting a train or gold mines in their areas got free VP’s for more than half a day with no need to do anything. Just random bonus from WG.  Best example from start of stage 3 BIA (nothing against BIA, you are just best example of this) got more than 8k from lucky positioning. It took more than two days for VP hunting clans to go past them. [As of writing this BIA is 6th on S3 with 13k VP’s instead of 24th with 5k VP].  Also clans that got hold of train or goldfield just before removing them got only small benefit as they didn’t get full 24h reward. d)      Worst example: MUROP was doing Mission, so had their HQ moved to Kiev, and then wild Goldfield appeared over Kiev and MUROP HQ annihilated. MUROP got screwed badly and EFE got hold of one whole goldfield at end of stage and rocketed past RSOP to victory. And of course all the added drama on forums thanks to this. This almost changed winner of Campaign, so one random placement of Campaign things can have really big cumulative effect. e)      These kind of random changes place clans on uneven footing and their effect can be quite high if competition is though. Most of all, there’s no reason for such. If information is available beforehand clans can plan for it. Then it’s up to their skill, not some arbitrary random decision. Any actual reason not to tell trains route or goldfields positions in advance? Use as little RNG or random jumps as possible or at least give all possible information in advance. If gold field positions would have been given in advance this kind of fiascos would not happen. It would give more options and planning to clans instead of these “hey, have a 10k VP bonus” or “whoops, we just screwed your HQ, have fun” happenings that had major influence to results of whole campaing.   Technical issues:   27.   When you learn to have some quality control?   28.   Wrong logos on maps. Though only when turn was changing.   29.   Homepage languages as random (not CW problem, but makes reading news and announcements quite difficult).   30.   CW map closed for “scheduled maintenance” every primetime. If servers need this to be stable and count all moves properly, then it’s ok. What’s not ok is not tell about it (Russian server had announcement, but EU not). Now you couldn’t know if whole CW is down or is it just calculating turn results, so lot of people had to just wait instead of doing something useful like playing randoms or doing household chores. Also don’t use that same picture as every time server is down. Some day we don’t believe anymore that it’s “scheduled” blow up of servers. Perhaps “CW calculating results, be back in few minutes” instead? (Or “We are having server problems, we are sorry” if it’s actually down.)   31.   FP’s missing from lot of battles.   32.   FP’s doubled or tripled for some battles.   33.   First stage bonuses and FP multipliers applied several times.   34.   Battles not showing up.   35.   Battle results not having effect on map.   36.   Randomly placing goldfield on an area with attack declared. Remove attack and place stack to cooldown and basically spoil on clans plans. Why not place that stack to riot in minimum? (Or better yet, don’t place things on map randomly without advance notice.)   37.   You can move your own chips to rioting area if you own that area. Clear and good rule. When having a “redivision of world map” (normally this is not problem, but we had these twice when some clans stayed on map) you can’t move your own chips from your own province to another own province? Why? Of course you are free to move your HQ and place down chips.  Logic? Simple solution if Igor is too tired to code this properly: remove cooldown for moving HQ during redivision of the world. At least that way one could get their chips on map from HQ to defend against lading clans.   38.   Chips getting removed from map. That one bug of battles not showing up spoilt us one whole day, we were half strength next day as stacks were wrongly positioned and couldn’t get battles or defend areas  and even third day we were still having effects from wrong positionings. Thanks WG. Having chips returned as green was nice, as otherwise we would have been even worse off. Also giving 1000FP for all affected landing clans and 2500FP for affected clans on land was nice, but in one day we could have gotten 5-15k FP’s to players who actually needed those points.     39.   As you can see from earlier point (and 26d) even small changes can have very big effects on map. It’s really nice and appreciated that we get some reaction (freezes removed, FP compensations etc.) instead of old “CW is beta, so suck it up”, but we would like more to have even playing field where results are not decided by unclear rules, random changes or bugs, but clans own action. Now we had probles quite often and having major bug only few days before end of Campaign made it hard for some players to compete for positions at 10k. Having some battles not showing up at last night can pretty much mean that not all who would have deserved tank got it.