Re: Club wars - Feedback

Hello Mayors,

With the latest update of the game, we have introduced some enhancements to Club Wars to improve your experience. You have shown how much you care about this new game mode by sharing your feedback with us, so I also wanted to take some time to say thank you and share some information with you.

We know some of you felt Club Wars related tasks were interfering with your Contest of Mayors experience. For this reason, we have lowered the chances of getting war related tasks for now. We will be paying close attention to how this change affects your playing experience, and make even more changes if needed. Please, feel free to give us your feedback about how things are feeling for you now. If you don’t want to participate in Club Wars, it should be easier for you now to ignore war related tasks and, at the same time, if you do want to play this new game mode, you will still have tasks available to choose.

Another topic you brought to our attention is matchmaking. There seem to be some questions about how it works so let me try to explain it a bit. 😊

As some of you have already noticed, every Club has a Club Wars Score. This score increases at the end of a war if your Club achieves the victory, and decreases otherwise - a rating system some of you might know as 'Elo'. Club Wars Score is one of the elements the game considers when finding an opponent for your Club - during matchmaking, your Club will get paired to battle another Club with a similar Club Wars Score.

What does this mean for you? The more wars you win, the higher your Club Wars Score will be and the stronger your opponents! If you feel your opponents are weak now, keep winning and use the opportunity to accumulate war cards, things will get more difficult soon!

Thanks again for sharing your thoughts with us,

-Mai

With war involved in the contest of mayors, I have been losing quality members.  Make war separate from everything. 

War Items should also have their own storage like the Omega Items do.

Listen to your community! 

Club wars is unfair for members in the club who decided to enjoy just build their town and earn points and rewards. In my club A hot headed member initiated war but do nothing and other members in the club were suffering been attacked and have to wasted time repaired the damage while working to achived the season competiton.

In my point of view EA should add function for members who don't want to joined the wars so the members who happy with it can spend their time do what they like and didn't annoyed other who don' t like

@EA_Mai  two times in a row - we were matched to against the exact same opponent club. Both wars we were soundly beaten by the other club, loosing 100,000 to 120,000 the 1st time, and 99,000 to 111,000 the 2nd time.  I took a screen shot of the 2nd match.  My club score was only 1572 vs. the other club was 1637.  Didn't seem like a good match either time... mostly because the other club had vastly more active war players.  If you are looking at the match making, perhaps you could include some type of "personal war score" much like is already done with plumbob points.  Perhaps we now need vuwarpoints or something similar should be introduced. vu war rank sort of thing.

Also our 2nd war ended Tuesday morning, and Tuesday nights CoM Megalopolis had - launch 3 attacks for 3000 - as it's highest point assignment. I chose a the 2nd highest assignment forget what it was... and immediately got a 2000 point 4 war deliveries assignment.  So my CoM Megalopolis score is ridiculously low and I have no chance of winning - again - because war assignments.  I would really suggest you remove war assignments from CoM - this will allow players who do not wish to be involved in war to ignore it completely.

Originally I thought only President and VP were able to start war, but we found out the hard way that "senior" is also allowed to start war.  As I have a war of my own in my club of those who want war vs. those who don't want war.  I had to demote everyone to member, so now people can only blame me (VP), or the other VP or President for a war being started.  This change was required but it makes accepting new members harder.  In the past we would allow Senior Members the discretion to add new members, but not we have to revoke that due to the ability to start war.  As war is such an all encompassing club activity - I would suggest you remove the ability for the "senior member" role to start war.

Next, most of all us (me included) who play war, have decided the "club prize" for winning vs. loosing - is almost a joke.  So we are mostly playing out of it being something new to try. But in the above example, of 2 times in a row my club racked up 100,000 points or so... and LOST.  The amount of resources used... to possibly win 30 simbucks, 3 plat keys, and 3 gold tokens is ridiculously low.  I'd suggest your folks think about making a graduated scale where the higher the points during the war, the higher the prize should be.  You already did this in Club Challenge rewards as part of CoM.  I don't understand why you didn't do something similar in War.

Finally... In the last war, I literally decided to do a research project on how to get the best score.  I literally never slept for more than 3 hours during the 36 hour war phase. I never allowed my war energy to hit 12, ever... instead I set alarms, etc... and always made sure my attacks started when I was at 11 war energy or less.  My score... as expected was 16,000.  As it's 4 energy per hour for 34 hours. And then 12 energy per hour for the final 2 hours of the war.  i.e. 160 energy total per war.  Out of this I have 2 comments.

1. The fact that the entire way to make points is to literally never wait more than 2.999999 hours before you launch a new attack is rather silly.  You have designed a system that rewards nothing more than never getting a good night sleep.

2. When you do what I did, and don't sleep... you can use your entire 36 hours (160 energy) - which translates to 3 bronze, 3 silver, and 2 gold chests.  Later with upgraded attacks, I'd be able to reach the 22,000 score needed for 3 gold chests... but here's the problem... all the chests seem to have the same random chance to get anything.  This last time I got as many war attack item cards out of bronze as I did out of gold.  So... really why bother with bronze or silver or gold... might as well have just said... here's your 8th chest.  And to get your 9th chest hit 22,000 points.  Because there was no difference in any of the chests, I randomly literally got from 1 bronze a plant monster card, and from 1 gold chest I also got a plant monster card and with both of them - they were not enough points to upgrade the plant monster lvl1 attack I already had.  So either just collapse the chests into "X" number of war chests... or make something actually uncommon or rare come out of the silver or gold chests.

-Michael

Excellent research and presentation. I have one suggestion that may help - only demote the Sr. that started the war and reinstate the others that didn’t and emphasize this is a team decision don’t press the button the VP’s will (taking the onus off the President since there’s a debate in the club) and next week reinstate the former Sr to help save some dignity (they were promoted for a reason) and I would suspect that will not be an issue again (with that mayor). This is only a short term solution the real answer is to decide collectively what’s best for the club. Good luck.

I really like wars. I do not mind all the preparation, timing and waiting. I managed to handle it to fit to com assignments. I do not mind cost, I can afford high price of producing items. I do not feel offended by the concept of war itself it does not really matter to me. I can wait couple months to get all the cards which I need, drop rate is fine for me as well. I can handle starting war by seniors not just vp and p. I can squeeze all war items to my storage, it is challenging through megalopolis but I like challenges. There is one thing whis is not fine.You have made us to do war assigments and we are adjusting wars to com. Today we won war but opponent did not rebuild after being destroyed couple times. They were weaker than we and they decided to finish war 12h before end. I could not do war assigment (3k and 2k) and it was beyond my control. Our club is strong so far we won all the wars and this time it was 30k points more. Basically we were penalised because we were too good for them. I only have 1 assigment left plus 5 tickets. It seems to me that I could have win or be placed in top3

Thanks for listening and the improvements,

while matchmaking became a lot better, the reward system really must improve. Here a few suggestions, I’m excited to hear what you think:

For the war tasks in CoM I see 3 different solutions

a) only give us war assigments during an active war (not preperation phase)

b) do not include war assignments in CoM at all

c) the radical way - make the war more important and give mayors CoM points if they do deliveries, launch disasters or rebuild their cities. While this would completely change the dynamic of CoM, I think I would enjoy this more. There would finally be a reason to participate and it is a wealthy alternative to the regular coM assigments.

c.1) It could probably go the other way around as well. Those who complete assigments in CoM contribute towards winning a war as well. I just thought about this, because members in our club decided to either do club wars or CoM and this would probably be a way to bring both sides back together. 

For rewards in general and if option c) above is not an option

The rewards do not reflect our efforts. The investments are much higher than what you get and it doesn’t really matter if we win or loose. Suggestions:

- way more platninum keys and vu items (because there barely is a realiable source to get either of those)

- different tires of rewards depending on the amount of points and not only on winning or loosing the war

- buildings as rewards (no war buildings of course ;D)

And last but not least

- please consider a seperate storage for war items, just like with the omega update

I'm not so sure the team scores are based on the Elo system. Under Elo, the only way someone can gain 200 points in 7 contests is if they beat a few players rated hundreds of points higher than themselves. This obviously could not have been the case since everybody started off at 1500 rating 7 wars ago. Yet we see many clubs rated around 1700 now, 200 points above their starting point. My team was 7-0 before the current war (we trounced all but one of the opponents by a wide margin, averaging 10:1), and there are 25,000 clubs rated higher than us. How is that even possible? This round, we were matched against a higher rated team than ourselves and they never showed up to play. You can't rack up a huge score if the opponents are constantly shielded. Besides, there's no incentive to rack up a huge score since the supplies are expensive and the payouts for a 1-point win are the same as for a 100,000-point win. Our team was already seriously soured on Club Wars (we basically only play because of the contest challenges), but this rating system and the matchmaking have made the whole thing pointless. We had players who were insisting that we win wars for the honor of the club since we were undefeated, but now that we're in 25,000th place, we realize the ratings are a sham and the "honor" is not worth our time. Take the Club War away and go back to the drawing board; it's just not ready. And no, matchmaking has not improved.

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@egan857 wrote:

...My team was 7-0 before the current war...

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If you are still engaged in war #8, then you are behind a round.  Did you delay starting one or more wars?

We delayed one war by about 4 hours, and we finished war #8 over 24 hours ago.  So our score reflects an 8-0 record.  Must be a lot of teams at 8-0 or 7-1 if you are 25,000th with 7-0...

At any rate, it sounds like you might be a cycle behind.

@EA_Mai"a rating system some of you might know as 'Elo'"

Certainly that is not the case. We (1528) against another club (1582) get 26 rank (1554:1556) if we win, and they get 30 rank (1498:1612) if we lose. That is just the opposit what Elo says.

Elo says: the stronger gets less than the weaker if they win. Something like we the weaker (1528<1582) would get the more points, like 30, and the other club would get less points, like e.g. 26 if they win.

Hi ef-eff19,

I’m not implying anything stated is incorrect, I’m just not sure how it was calculated. In the thread “How is the war game ranking is calculated” I shared what I had learned related to the Elo scoring system and how it works. As a teenager I had a special interest in how world rankings in baseball were calculated and I learned the Elo scoring system was utilized - we had a family friend who was the Head of the Department of Mathematics at a local University and he was kind enough to walk me through it. It’s been a week or two 🙂 - so if you get a chance please see if it is consistent with your understanding. Your insight would be most appreciated. I think we are all trying to figure out if it’s the Elo scoring system or a modified version. Thanks.

@PinnacleValley

It could be the opposite of Elo's sytem. Or it could be just a random score around 30. But it is NOT Elo's sytem. Period. (See my live example.)

Btw. Elo means "live" (n.) in Hungarian.

I am new to this game but I am enjoying the club war feature a lot. I can see these are not universally enjoyed and have a couple of suggestions that could help:

Introduce a feature that would allow Club Presidents to opt into wars (or out). This should be visible in Club information so members know if it is a club that wars or not. This would mean that the other admins cannot initiate a war unless the Club President changes the setting. 

Allow Club Presidents to set frequency of war for example every war, every second war, once a week etc. 

Individual members could be given the ability to opt out of next war if they will be unable to participate. When opted out, members should not appear on the war map or should be automatically shielded for the full war.. To avoid abuse of this feature, I think that the ability to trade with other club members who are warring should be turned off for the duration of the war.

@EA_MaiWe beg you to make shields time limited. 3 hours, 6 hours, 12 hours, whatever. Ask anybody, they beg you too.