Unintended side effects of company war cooldown

General Discussion General Discussion
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While I think there are great intentions behind the war cooldown, ultimately I believe it will put the game into a worse state because it will have two unintended consequences: less wars overall and more throw wars or wars with no one defending them. In my opinion the best and most sought after PVP feature of the game is wars, it is what most PVP players look forward to and why they play the game.

There will be less wars overall for a few very simple reasons. The incentive for taking additional territories when you already own one is being all but destroyed. After the cooldown is implemented, territory owning companies will not be able to defend a newly acquired territory without an additional 40 players in their company. This will result in winning the territory and having no means to defend it in 2-4 days when the next declare comes. Any company that currently owns a territory will rarely be going for a declare on other territories unless the income is a significant upgrade over their current territory. The income gap between territories is being shrank per the last dev video, so the incentive to attempt to upgrade territories will be even smaller than it is currently. Another incentive killer here is companies attempting to upgrade their territory can be easily denied through a long used strategy of matching war windows. For example, say a company which owns Ebonscale and has a war window of 8:00 PM wants to upgrade to own Everfall by attacking it. All the Everfall owners need to do is simply change their war window to 8:00 while Ebonscale window is locked to completely negate their efforts and have all their time wasted. For there not to be a drop off in total wars you would need 20+ active PVP companies with 40 members to be pushing territories and attacking each other, this is just not a reality on the server I play on. From these factors alone I believe we will see a large drop off in total wars.

The second, and possibly worse side effect, is that these changes will result in more throw and uncompetitive wars. Artificial barriers are being added into the game which are going to prevent war rosters from being filled with players. To explain this concept further imagine a territory owning company with 40 members sniping a declare with a minimum 10% influence effort. If this company wins the war, the next company to push this territory will not be rewarded with a meaningful war. Their efforts spent pushing will be rewarded by warring against an empty war roster and a free win. One may argue they get the territory for free, but I as I said above war is the main and most sought after PVP content in the game and winning some war against 0 people is not the epic and meaningful war experience AGS and the players desire. Creating these artificial barriers to filling a war roster is a terrible idea in my opinion. This is going to happen every single time a territory is won by a territory holding company without 80+ fully active members of its own.

I think we will see an overall drastic reduction in wars, players are already consolidating into larger companies to have the 40 necessary players. With the current player count and server cap I do not believe there will be enough companies on most servers to be generating the war content at a rate the player base desires.

Other problems with this implementation:

The most competitive companies are skirting the system by purchasing and obtaining characters that are owned by the company. The company is then account sharing the characters with good players to fight in that companies wars. I have already seen this happening first hand, the top companies will have a fleet of accounts or characters in company that they let other high skill players play on during their wars.

Solution Options:

War Cooldown:

  1. There is no easy solution to this problem, any solution has to be a multifaceted approach. First and foremost there should never be a mechanic that blocks you from filling a war roster. Players want meaningful and fun wars, this feature cuts directly against that. I recommend removing the 40 company requirement and giving each player two 4 day cooldowns, one for attacking and one for defending. This means each character can be in one attack and one defense war every four days. This would give players meaningful choices of what territories they want to defend and attack, they can help an ally out or blow their cooldown on a meaningless war, but at the cost of not being able to defend their own territory. It also gives the players the ability to group together to attack stronger companies and gives more ability for non territory holding or less skilled companies to create alliances and attack larger companies as a coalition. This also prevents the top 10 players from being in every war as you can still use 10 mercenaries in the currently planned implementation. The second change that needs to happen is account sharing needs to be cracked down on. This problem is very rampant in the game and it is heavily abused to get around the good intentions that AGS has with these changes. This solution solves both of the above problems because you will be able to fill a war roster from any war eligible person that is not on a cooldown while at the same time preventing the top players from partaking in every war on the server.

  2. The second option is to remove the ability for companies to choose their war window and make all war windows the same on each server. War window times can rotate once a month or can always stay the same. If every war happened at 8:00PM in the local time it would resolve this problem immediately. This is more of a heavy handed and has the problem that you would basically need to throw your current territory or have someone else defend it for you to try to take another one.

Amount of wars:

Influence pushing needs to be made WAY easier or completely reworked. In the recent dev video AGS talked about the concept of “Stop the Grind”, they should practice this concept with influence pushing and not gate the main PVP feature of the game behind 50+ hours of soul crushing faction mission grind. If there are not enough resources to rework influence pushing make influence pushing at least 10 times faster. If there is some time for a small rework just increase the amount of activities that increase influence in a territory. For example: killing mobs, skilling or farming resources, running dungeons, crafting, trading, etc so that influence can be gained passively and territories would constantly be at war. If AGS has more time for an influence push rework it should be changed to something fun and challenging. One can easily imagine a scenario where there is an influence window for each territory, and during that window companies and players can fight at the fort to decide who gets the declare. There would obviously need to be loser protection built into this style of influence pushing so the same dominant company doesn’t get every declare, but the general idea is to make influence pushing something fast, fun, and meaningful that players want to partake in.

If the following goals are met I believe any war cooldown and influence push change will be good.

1. The solution should create more meaningful wars, players want more wars

2. The same few players should not be able to partake in all wars

3. Influence grinding sucks and is not fun, you should have to actively defend your territory to keep it, a mind numbing grind shouldn’t be the reason a dead company still has territory

All solutions to the problem have flaws as there is no perfect solution, but the current AGS PTR solution only partially solves for goal #2 above.

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You forget that currently only 5% of the current pvp players are involved in wars. The other 95% are currently available to claim/defend. Yes, i am completely making these numbers up, but they are probably close to accurate. And most of us really don’t care about the mega companies and how this effects them.

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You are missing the point entirely if you think this has anything to do with mega companies.

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OP here is the solution for your thread, sorry but less wars overall will only affect a tiny piece of the overall playerbase, so the previous post should sum it up why we also dont are about city ravenue ditribuition also.

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@zTL33T Tell me you didn’t read the post without saying you didn’t read the post.

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I think there are tons of people that would like to fight in wars, but don’t even sign up because they know they will not get in. I agree with most of what you posted. Don’t let my jab at mega companies distract you.

My guess, is in 2 or 3 months you will have new posts about how the same 10 companies are always owning the territory. However, that is better than the 3 or 4 we have now. I was just mostly replying to this:

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I’ve only skimmed this but one of your point is assuming that one company will take multiple territories. This new company war cooldown was specifically made to prevent this, 1 territory for 1 company.

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If i’m not mistaken, 10% dec sniping has been altered already.

Contributions count for much less if you are not involved in the last “push”.

IE company 1 pushes 10% and stops. This contribution will be weighted far less than company Z who pushed the last 10%. I believe it was altered to make it more important to push to completion, and not just stop at 10%.

As far as less wars overall, i think this actually just opens up opportunities for lesser known companies that have bodies to get competetive. If they know they aren’t going to have to face the tippy top of the server every time, they will probably be a lot more willing to even go for it.

In this way, i think there will be a lot more involvement, The big dogs can keep punching the big dogs. And the smaller dogs can fight for their slice of pizza.

Instead of right now, the same 50-100 just eat everything with no real limit.

But that’s just my take on the changes overall.

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I do agree it is a step in the right direction, it is also a good acknowledgement of the super company problem by AGS.

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I actually thought exactly the same as you when I first saw these change. The more I thought about it the more I realized this will make the problem worse. How many smaller homeless, less skilled companies do you know that actually have 50+ active players that are going to continually attack territories even though they don’t own one? There just isn’t the raw company and player numbers to sustain this.

My solution achieves everything they are trying to achieve in a much better way.

Also why are the big dogs going to attack each other if they can only have one territory? What is the benefit of taking Everfall if you have to give up Windsward? This change will result in the same 11 companies owning all the territories with no one ever attacking anything because the incentive to try to upgrade or swap territories just doesn’t make sense.

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I guess maybe orofena is different.

We have a lot of war companies, but Ego’d ate everything. There would be a lot more ownership from other factions if that was not the case. We have the bodies, but no one can stand up to Ego’d shelling and mercing every war for green.

This will help our situation extremely well, but for other servers that may not be the case i guess.

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Man, I’m sorry I’m going to go off on a little tangent.

But…

There is an element of this that sometimes you’re just not good enough or you haven’t put enough effort in. I’m by no means an all-star war fighter–at my peak I could hold my own and was regularly top 3 in OPR–but far from impressive in wars. I knew in the most competitive wars, I was not good enough to get slotted. I knew that in the best speed running mutator groups I was not good enough to get slotted.

I accepted it. Because it’s the nature of the game in the most competitively/challenging content there is. Whether it should be accepted is a different question–but that is the current nature of the community and no whinging about it on these forums will change it.

What drove me bonkers, as someone who has managed rosters/pushes, are the people that would outright whine/moan about not getting slotted while putting in little to no effort.

I mean we are talking about people that would regularly sit at the bottom of OPR scoreboards and when they did get slotted would be bottom of the scoreboard (and gapped from everyone else) and actively gloat about how I’m probably the worst player here hehe.

These are the people that god bless their participation in territory pushes–are the bulk of the people that you are talking about not getting slotted. They don’t put in the effort, they don’t put in the research, they don’t put themselves out there to learn. They just walk up to the war-board click sign up and expect something to happen. That’s not how the world works, and these companies that pour thousands of hours into pushes/build synergy aren’t going to give up slots to people that just wanna play the game. Nor should we expect them to.

I was a huge fan of any less important territory/war getting new people involved, to cut the nerves and let them learn what it’s all about; to be apart of the team–especially if they were regularly territory pushing. But those are people that are putting in 100x more effort than the “I pushed once, but I never get slotted” types.

There are four types of people in this game.

Solo people/small group people that if they are lucky will meet the right set of people and get an opportunity to play in wars.

Active participants, people that seek out companies and actively participate in push/war calls. Get involved in OPR/arena nights.

Volunteers, these are the meat of any company, these are the people volunteering their time to organize/lead pushes/wars, get people involved help people with their builds. This is a TINY percentage of the player base and the most important people.

And then you have the founder group who are the people that have the balls to put themselves out there and just keep building and recruiting until they have the right mix of people/personality.

The last two sets of people are the people that have earned the right to have slots regardless of their skill level–because they put in the work. Even then, often times these players are smart enough to stand aside for a better shot to win a war. Everyone else–it’s skill and commitment and if you don’t want to have that level of commitment–well unfortunately you don’t get slotted. There’s just nothing else to say.

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While i think what you are saying is true, it doesn’t consider that right now you are looking at fighting the big 50 on your server in almost every war. Whether they merced, or company swapped to get there.

So that list of people who will get selected, knowing they are going to face 25 or more of the big 2 on the server gets extremely thin.

If you aren’t part of the big 50, you are in the 50 to 100 others that are considered good enough to face the big 50.

For all other cases, if your company wants to fight for a territory you are going to face those 100 people, one way or the other right now. These changes limit the capacity to spread those people that thin. So it is much more likely that lesser established (not top 100) companies are going to take territories and fight for them. While the top still keep everfall and WW most likely.

This will, in my opinion allow for more people to get their feet into territory ownership. That otherwise don’t stand a chance. I think it’s more than fair, as right now the system unilaterally allows 100 people to own the entire cookie jar. (IE pay us 60% of your income or we take it and sell it to the highest bidder)

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Yes, but right now you have folks that are good enough, but don’t even bother signing up anymore because they are not “elite”.

I don’t think the intentions of AGS were to have territory control turn into esports with the map being the scoreboard.

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Well you see just becose you can winn all teritorys its not mean you supose to do it, so yhen you say it will be less wars you are wrong it will be same wars but diferent companys will have chance

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At this stage you’ll face the best 50ish of two combined factions. But it doesn’t mean as an attacker you don’t have an opportunity to be apart of an attack by getting involved.

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This in only true if you can’t be apart of an attacking company. The attacking company has say and while multidecing is still possible—it’s not full proof.

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I agree with you 100% on the problem at hand, it is a big problem that the same 50 players can dominate 5,000 other players on a server. I also agree with you on the skill level part. The idea that John the casual who plays a few hours a week on weekends and doesn’t have close to BIS PVP gear or skill is going to have fun or be able to meaningfully participate in wars is just not a reality.

My point is that this change is going to make less wars for everybody as a whole. What I predict is going to happen is the top 600 or so players will form 10-11 companies and take all the territories. From there the map will completely stagnant and there will be barely any wars because the incentive to do the massive influence grind when you already own territory is just not there. There is also the chance that a company trying to upgrade pushes the influence only to have their window matched last second in which case they can’t even attack without losing their own territory, this is the can’t fill your roster scenario I mentioned where you just grinded influence for no reason.

Maybe there are some servers where there will be 10+ other homeless companies that will be willing to do the grind, but that is not a reality on my server or many other servers.

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Yep, i get it now. That will indeed be an issue. Sorry, on my 1st cup of coffee.

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Maybe you have more experiences that point to this being true. But all of the genuinely top end players I’ve ever played alongside are looking for good PVP not dominance. They want good fights.

There’s always toxic elements and memers, but I think not all servers will run into the issue your prescribing. Any of the competitive companies I’ve been around actively move servers and active seek out more competition. Hence months ago you had a lot of people server swapping and trying to create “top PvP” servers.

What remains in those remaining servers is where you get the toxicity and the memers. One group remains, takes over, and there isn’t enough organization throughout the server to true counter the remainder.