Dear ATA:

Congratulations you have indeed lived up to your name and you are no better than thinking apes. I hope the quarter end window dressing promos you've ran in June will wildly pad your Q2 earnings so that some PE, LBO, VC firm on Wall Street will take notice and buy you out before your game starts to tank. Hopefully they hand you a wad of cash, shut down your momma's garage from which you run this game and put you out to pasture. Hopefully a professional gaming company will take over and start running it with more than half baked, poorly planned promos & contests, wayward schizophrenic war changes and stop listening to a handful of whining crybabies who want to eliminate all ingenuity (aka "exploits") and turn the game into a flat egalitarian mindless game... Which by the way exists it's called Angry Birds. Seriously, these people are no more than the same bunch running around the U.S. begging for entitlements, redistribution of wealth and are the enemies of a free entrepreneurial society.

Although you don't deserve it, I will identify the fundamental reason why wars suck (aside from the whiners).

Participation - simple! There are not enough clans that war. Let me spell it out; you need 30-60 clans or more signing up to war on a regular basis. Once you solve the problem of participation the inequities and shortcomings of war match ups will largely disappear.

Now, I'm certain there may be multiple ways to force the action or create an environment where more clans war regularly.

I will offer one here since it's only right because I've pinpointed the problem. The solution will be difficult to swallow and will initially make some angry and cause threats of game abandonment. In the end the gamers will adjust and kaw will be better for it. After all you remember the introduction of EBs and the destruction of the PWAR system and dynamcs. It also created quite an uproar and overall game distress, but the games is now better for it.

FORCING THE ACTION: Forcing clans to war regularly. How do you make that happen? Create a "seal", an item, let's call it the "epic key" that will be required to initiate every epic battle. (I will offer a small caveat below- but for the simplicity follow the general proposal). This Epic Key can only be earned by participation in war. Win or lose - every war participant gets 1(or 2) keys and perhaps the winning side gets 2(or 3) keys. Every time a clan wars, their waring members acquire 15 - 40 keys; good for a couple days of Epic battles for their clan. The beauty of this is that it forces all clans to war sometimes. It doesn't require every member to always war. It turns the game into an active war game. Clans will have to war regularly to continue to have the right to earn easy gold doing epic battles - epic battles themselves gain more purpose beyond just brainless tapping to grow. Now here's the caveat, a variation - leave the first EB series(Claydor the Depraved) open for the new players to get a start, or for those in a pickle without keys to have some EB consolation.

BONUS PROPOSAL: To truly make this game great you need to go in the opposite direction from flattening the game; making it fair, leveling the field such that you diminish the differences between builds and sizes etc. Dev's you need to create more variance and differentiation to take the game to a new level. My proposal is to assign unique advantages to the placement of buildings on the land grids. Leave these special unlocks hidden. Let the kaw community discover them by trial and error. Let me give you an example: By placing spy defense towers on all 4 corner lands of each land grid players receive an additional xfactor of spy defense. You can imagine the possibilities. There can be dozens of specific land/building placement configurations that each provide some advantage. The advantages can be set to lengthy regen timers from 24- 180 hours so that the ability to use them is rare but potent. Imagine a power to zero an opponents troop with one stroke- a power that is only available one every 7days (but to gain such a power a player would have to make a sharp build sacrifice). Players will have to experiment and discover special configurations to unlock and find certain advantages. Each of these will have tradeoffs. If you put a little effort into the strategic aspect of building/land grid patterns that might reflect how one would consider protecting their kingdom - there could be a wealth of possibilities as well as significant stratification of builds. This would effectively create huge layers of complexity into the war system by with substantial variance between players strengths and weakness. The match-ups would have new layers of complexity and elements of surprise. Certainly this would give players a reason to put more thought into what type of building should go on every square of land and what overall configuration they purpose to build. anyhow the possibilities are endless.

Your current trajectory is an unsustainable operational model. It requires too much hands on developer tinkering I imagine on a daily basis. You either have a huge backlog of issues or your bleeding supporting the game - it's your own . doing. Wake Up. You need to quickly put this game back on a universal stable footing where new and old players can interact in a meaning predictable uniform engaging manner.

You're welcome. I am happy to accept a consulting fee in the form of Nobs, Crystals and Mithrials.

In the meanwhile, there is a mass exodus of spendy players; LBers and otherwise leaving the game. Your game is on the decline. Time to stick a fork in it.

FOOTNOTE REGARDING SH/GH being exploits or otherwise bad for the game.
This view is unequivocally shortsighted, selfish and destructive for the future of the game. One fundamental metric for KAW’s survival as a game is its ability to attract, integrate and retain new players into the game. In order for the game attract and hold new players they have to be able to ramp up quickly, there has to be a real opportunity to interact with the game at all levels. Whether you've played the game for 4 years or 4 months, there has to be some opportunity to meaningful engagement of players at all levels. Otherwise it’s a hopeless, hollow experience for new players. One commendable initiative ATA has carried out to help alleviate this chasm is the heavy discounting of lower tier – to help newer players quickly ramp up to a stat level that allows them to enjoy more of what the games offers. The existence of SH/GH is another critical piece to integrating new and veteran players, players of all sizes into the game. For a kid that started the game 2 months ago to have an opportunity to war with 3 and 4 year veterans is a hopeful and positive development.
Let’s fix the war system by adding meaningful layers of complexity into builds, such that the number of variables, the combinations of unique build strengths and weakness in any given roster confound a formulaic silver bullet, where every war is a process of discover and strategy unfolding in real time. Nerfing or scapegoating SH/GH is not a solution; it’s another nail in the coffin of kaw. Just because the handful of whiners have cried long enough to bend the ear of kaw com doesn't make it an exploit