Hey all, lots of things have gone on over the last week that I wanted to touch on the highs and the lows and what we’ve learned. Rather lengthy details in here about some AQ and AW thoughts. Apologies but I started to get tired and I’m not going back to proofread tonight.
1. Alliance Wars
We lost 3 in a row. I understand that can be frustrating but there a few things to consider before we get too upset and start making drastic plans.
First, we are trying to learn how to best organize ourselves which will allow us to beat stronger opponents once we figure it out. We had some planning and communication struggles on the assignments but I really think this will up our game once we get it right. We are learning better the capabilities of each of our fighters and this is allowing us to refine our assignments. We are also taking a lot of guidance from some of our members that have a stronger account in a more powerful alliance; we can learn from what they know and apply it.
Second, we are in a really awkward spot power-wise. If you don’t know how war rewards work I will give you a little detail. There are a total of 20 different war tiers. As you win and lose wars your “war rating” goes up or down. Your total war rating when you start a war search determines your rewards tier. The rewards tier also determines the map strength and the relative strength of your opponent. We seem to toggle between tier 7 and tier 8. At tier 7 the class of your opponents are hidden and some of the nodes boosts are more powerful so the fights here are harder three different ways: 1) Harder opponent, 2) hidden class and 3) stronger boosts.
We tend to do really good when at tier 8 and get promoted to tier 7. Once in tier 7 we win occasionally but struggle. So we are a strong tier 8 alliance but weak at tier 7. The last 3 consecutive losses were at tier 7 and now we are at tier 8. Eventually if we keep working on getting stronger and organizing better the tier 7 wars will become more manageable.
2. Item use
Item use started today so burn through anything that doesn’t impact Summoner Advancement today, but starting tomorrow drop all your signature stones, awakening gems etc. Lets hit those milestones!
3. Alliance Quest
This is another interesting one that I need to study. The tiering here is different than AW but we used to toggle between the bottom 2 (Training and Normal). More on that below.
Your rank up/down depends on how many points you score in the event. The score is defined by multiple factors:
- What is your alliance “Prestige” on day 1. This is why top tier alliances worry a lot about prestige (What is prestige)
- The map you complete. Each fight earns points, the points get multiplied by the map difficulty.
- The number of BGs that you can run increases the number of fights and the total points.
For AQ, we get three kinds of rewards:
crystals for completing maps (which can contain nice rewards, ask Tilt he gets tons of T4cc though I’ve never sniffed one from a map crystal). The harder the map, the better the potential rewards are for the completion crystal. Everyone in the alliance that participates in that map gets a reward crystal as long as at least 1 BG gets 100%.
- Milestone rewards as you earn points. Milestone values and the rewards are different depending on your AQ tier.
- Rank rewards based on total score compared to other alliances in your AQ tier
If you recall I said we used to toggle between normal and training every other event. The tiering is such that unless you are stuck in training you always either move up or down; you do not spend more than one week in a tier. If you score enough points you get promoted up, if not you get demoted down. We would score enough one week to get a promotion to normal, then score enough for rank rewards but not enough to move up Peak so we would get demoted again to training. Over the last few weeks Kabam made maps 4 and 5 free to run. So everyone’s scores were inflated more than normal so we got stuck in training. Last week’s run was the first one where all maps had their normal cost and we again got promoted out of training and into normal.
There are wonderful people out there that collect data from fellow players and put together charts (like Arena cutoffs I’m sure you’ve seen). They also track Alliance Quest Results. If you look through it, the data for the last few weeks (in normal and training) is much higher because of the free maps. (if you look at the data, there is also a spike back in december when they made maps free for 2 weeks). If the older data trends return, we would need to hit 13M to 18M on our week in Normal to get a promotion up. Based on my tracking we have been hitting 8-9M.
We have been doing map 3 on non-war days and map 2 on war-days… We typically clear 2 BGs on the first 2-3 days and only 1 BG the last 2 days. If we want to move up in the tiers we need more consistency across the week. But we may need to try and tackle the stronger maps. Either squeeze in a map 4/5 once or twice a week (which requires donations and a lot of coordination as we saw today) or at least hit map 3 all days and actually clear it. Step 1 though, is to get more consistency in clearing the maps and not fizzling out in the last day or two.
4. Duels
Overall we did pretty good, only a few people did not duel, and we will keep pushing on them. We hit all but the last milestone.
MCOC SpiderPigs 