Nighthawk_FPBO_1 said:
Towers give no plunder thats fine.
Increase ALL tower stats in lieu of that.
Release new big spy defense pots only.
Make plunder in war more relevant. Not to the point it kills spy builds from entering. EE can increase beyond 5 by 5% increments according to plunder to a max of 100%.
Ban PS in EE. Why?
To encouage ADT no different than attack builds get SDT to fend off spies.
Not intended to to alienate PS just an obvious fix.
1) For the suggestion to buff towers since they award no plunder: They are as high as they currently are because they award no plunder. I'm not sure what ratio you're going for in a game-design sense.
2) New Spy Defense potions is an interesting one, as long as they introduced New Defense potions also. For ages, the soft deterrent to attacking has been for attack/spy attack potions to be much more expensive than their equivalent counterparts, but otherwise they cancel out (and if they use defensive potions, then you get bonus gold to help offset that).
However, if you assume nobody Wars until they have that stockpile set up, that soft deterrent is wasted - only for lightly discouraging PVP. If you brought Attack/Spy Attack potion prices down to the defensive costs, but gave the spy defense/defense side one extra potion, then the attackers would always be at a disadvantage as long as the defender had potions - it'd be like giving everyone a small amount of towers for "free" - passively killing success rates for everyone. As long as escalation (from new releases) doesn't keep the 1-potion difference too insane, it's interesting. I'm not sure how that would impact PVP with everyone fighting at a disadvantage.
My gut tells me the status quo would not change. However, from old mechanics testing, towers have diminishing returns on reducing the success rate of incoming actions. This would allow more unit-producing buildings / less defensive towers to hit a critical mass of defense - slightly boosting plunder from before when you do find soft targets. However, the bonus potions at the same time could be backbreaking to small units builds. Pure spies and Very Troop Heavy builds might be the only victors here (ignoring broken leveled equipment or BFA of course). Alternatively, dedicated PVP warriors will just take the 20+% success rate on attacks and steals, and go all-in on both towers and skim from the top. That may be more effective than currently, since their current levels would already be so low that the bonus the potion gives would be negligible. //
Of course, if everyone has worse stats, then the status quo mostly stays the same, which is why the person I'm quoting suggested only Spy defense potions being boosted +1. Incidentally, this makes strips even worse, so that could be well received (by everyone who doesn't actually want to PVP). Funnily though, the devs could just background nerf spy success rates, and mechanically the effect would be the same. The only difference is that the community wouldn't notice and would keep complaining unless it was noticeable enough to kill spies entirely. I know I haven't been keeping watchdog-levels of testing going in the recent past, and I bet few if any are. This impact makes me think that maybe there are holes in this solution to introduce an extra potion - I'd just have to work on it more than just in an on-the-spot forums-response.
3) Towards banning pure spies from war, you'd have to introduce a new mechanic in the background for this ban. Additionally, the complaint here are that hansels and spy-heavy builds are too strong in PVP - not just pure spies. This would be a slapstick solution that would just make some of the community angry without fixing much of anything. Additionally, such a patch would probably also disallow switching buildings during war - removing gameplay interaction / response ("choice") during a war and making the battle even more binary - an unpopular solution for most.
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Still, at least one of your solutions showed a little bit of promise, with some slightly tweaking. At the same time though, another dominant build will emerge, and complaints will shift to that instead. The developers are incentivized to make all builds have pros-and-cons: for the ideal clan to have a mixed composition where everyone has their role, but not where all builds are viable (because then build choice is moot). It's possible that there's a way to do this admirable goal, but the issue of not being able to control aggression might be too much - maybe I'll dedicate some thought to this instead.
Until Next Time,
Corinthian