We limited the travel gate use to exactly form these clear fronts of war on the map. The idea was that clans start to position themselves before the conflict phase starts. Like an early attack defend strategy and then start to claim travel camps to open up the attack fronts etc. On servers where war is played buildings are starting to get reclaimed and this opens up new possibilites over the time of the conflict phase to travel & rescue. The proposed change of the yield HP helps on that front that claiming high yield buildings will get faster and could result in usable travel gates after 2-5 min time. In addition the idea that buildings will also fall into DV maintenance based on the risk/fail chance will directly open up more buildings usable to travel directly at the start of the conflict phase. On Lower populated servers they already have multiple travel gates managed by DV on every map.
If we open up buildings to be used again in vulnerable state, then this whole gameplay dyanmic would be lost.
But what could be an option is that the owning clan of a travel gate can use them to travel and rescue when they are in Vulnerable state but not in attacked state. In addition reclaimed gates then also only usable by the clan that claimed them? This would create territorial advantage which could be interessting while players still have clear fronts?
i get the need to have clear fronts but ultimately it's something that only helps the defenders. with the maps being as linear as they are as well, you are extremely limited on what you can do to get into the map. you can definitely teleport in and hide before the attack phase starts, but once you get killed, your options are basically 1) die at teleport sites until you find one that's unoccupied (unlikely) or 2) wait for people to walk away to defend or kill drainers and then respawn at that site or 3) get killed walking between sites and use a kit after your attacker walks away. the issue again though, is that the defenders outnumber the attackers by quite a lot, and so no matter what option you go with you're bound to just get killed right away again anyway. limiting what teleports you can use during the attack phase eliminates the only element of surprise attackers have now that we can only drain sites at a certain point every day.
i think the main issue with this idea is that, while i understand what you're trying to do in theory and i think it's not a bad idea, it heavily favors the defending side simply because of sheer numbers. the attacking side can position themselves before attacking, but the defending side can too, and so if they clash before the sites even open up, the attackers are immediately at a very very heavy disadvantage because now they're dead, the open travel sites are limited and camped, and if they try to come in through another map there are mostly likely defenders there too. i think ideally, it should be harder for the reigning clan to defend than it is for the kos clan to attack, because the reigning clan is reaping the rewards of holding maps. i think that would give more incentive for people to stop just forfeiting and joining the defending alliances. how? i'm not really sure, but the way the attack phase is now just feels fundamentally unbalanced. at least before, attackers had the advantage of surprise (often in the form of attacking at night or early morning when most people are sleeping or getting for work/school).
i think the idea of allowing clans to use their own claimed gates would be a step in the right direction, but again, this heavily favors the attackers just with the logistics of sheer numbers. i don't really know what to do to fix this, but right now, the gameplay being the way it is just isn't a "win by strategy" type deal. it's just numbers.
We never liked that player acted that way in a sort of toxic fashion in the community. But thats something we as developers can hardly avoid in a open PVP enviroment. We can just make changes here and there to lower the impact. The PVP protection helps but also removes a player from participating in PVP. But with the added synchronized protection phase for all buildings the PVP protection can be disabled before the conflict start and a player can savely play in the protection phase. We really try to think all ideas through and I understand its often not clear why a change is made as the subtle things are not directly noticed.
what i mean is, at this point it's kind of too late to be implementing updates that are supposed to be addressing the issue of kos lists/running people off servers as alewx seems to be saying. the culture that's ingrained in the game now has been here for, at this point, over a decade. i think to address the issue of kos lists, and by extension alliances, there need to be more severe changes. the ones implementing now, if they
are to try to combat kos lists and give those clans a chance, are not exceeding expectations at what they're supposed to do. again, i don't have many ideas in that regard, but what you all are trying to do is going directly against the culture of the game that has been growing up until this point. things were a bit better back in 2013/2014 when enemy clans could own maps at the same time and attack each other while still holding and trying for elections but i think we are too far gone beyond that point. it would probably be better to try to make kos alliances more viable against defending alliances. again, not entirely sure how, but i'm sure someone with more brain cells than me could come up with something decent.
We think that having syncronized time schedules for conflict and protection phases is important to counter many issues and make the gameplay more interessting and less boring as there are always player around. We can see that CCU spikes during the conflict phase with is great. But I can totally understand that its more difficult to perform sneaky attacks on times where most players are offline or other strategies etc. But it had a also a big downside as players used multis, shared accounts etc to be available 24/7 to counter these attacks. Having a clear time when conflict ot peak times loweres this unfair and CoC breaking behaivor. Especially as you need to really play to able to defend the building and not just idle in the building area.
Right now we are on a single conflict per day but that might change later. Currently it helps to easier iterate changes on the dynamics like with the proposed idea. So we want to focus on the internals first before introducing more conflict phases.
the issue with this, aside from robbing attacking clans of that element of surprise, is the game is genuinely dead outside of those 2 hours. defenders have no reason to log in because they know their maps are safe. attackers have no reason to log in because they know they can't do anything aside from maybe kill enemies who are trying to hunt. but those enemies can just get protection because they don't have to defend their maps from draining. it just feels very... lifeless, the way it is now. it's probably a bit more lively at the moment because of the event, but once that's over, most servers are going to be next to empty outside of the attack hours, which is just... not fun. granted, it was already heading that direction anyway, but now it's 5x worse than before. it
is good that it's more difficult to multi account, but it's come at the cost of everything else, so i wonder if it was really truly worth it anyway.
sorry if i repeated myself or if i worded anything poorly, i am currently ill.
