Game Balance Spiral of Doom
RECOMMENDATION:
The minimum points required to collect brawl rewards should be significantly increased and that minimum should increase depending on what stage your league achieves.
I appreciate the knee jerk reaction to this will be unpopular from many self interested leagues and players but read on to why it's absolutely required to safe guard Stormfall as a meaningful strategy game.
THE PROBLEM:
The brawl has become more important than every other element of the game added together.
Brawl rewards now far outweigh actual game participation. Final stage brawl rewards are between 3 to 5 times higher than a highly active player would grow by from interacting with ALL the other elements of the game.
It is now become far more important to be an almost inactive player in a high performing brawl league than an incredibly active player, skillful and knowledgeable player in a low achieving brawl league.
A highly active player keeping troop production running 24/7 and participating in a significant proportion of events could expect to grow by approx 6m-10m troop power a month.
That same player would grow by 30m from just top tier brawl rewards per month. To get those brawl rewards they would need to score just 2k brawl points, which could be achieved with just 2 mins of game time per week.
Big Brawl performance is nothing to do with activity, skill, knowledge or experience, it is just down to money spent.
It is possible to score near infinite points speed boosting troops or reviving troops. The only limit is how much you want to spend. Mass spam of BGs the next highest point scorer is only sustainable if you are willing to buy back losses. Equipment selling, lost arts etc are only achievable in a significant way by paying for speed boosts. One of the few points mechanism actually driven by real activity is raiding and that has been given a tiny points reward.
Many of the leagues achieving 10m+ in the brawl are almost entirely being driven by a tiny minority of high spending players. There are some reasonably dead leagues, that have never achieved anything in the game scoring 10m+ on my server.
The benefit of coining has now become many many times higher than the troops / boosts and items bought on the original coined account.The advantage bought from spending is therefore now completely out of control.
Stormfall was always incredibly aggressively pay to win. Now mega coning on just several accounts can literally buy billions of troop power per month. Each brawl can be worth 1bn troop power per week.
As an example, It would be possible for a single mega coiner to easily drive 10m points on just their main account (e.g. queue up and speed boost SH troop production). The other 159 members of their league could be inactive alts scoring just 2k. Just that one account's coining would be buying 3.5bn of troop power per month in the league (and there is nothing stopping them coining to complete the brawl for much more rewards than just 3.5bn).
THE IMPACT:
As a result the game is fast becoming meaningless as a competitive strategy war game. In a few months it will become apparent to everyone it has simply become who is funding the most brawl rewards.
There has always been a huge advantage of from coining. Stormfall has never been balanced. But the brawl structure has increased the impact exponentially to beyond any sense or reasonableness, to a point that threatens the continued existence of the game. It is just completely broken now.
Leagues that throughout the game have been poorly organised, ineffectual and basically inconsequential are now becoming incredibly powerful off the back of just a couple of people's spending.
The usual list of major mega coined leagues are of course also exponentially leaving the rest of the game in the dust. And some of the people in those leagues are incredibly weak players now having "hero" accounts built for them with no investment of time and effort and no required skill or experience.
Other "have not" leagues are facing extinction as their key major player are effectively forced to move to the handful of coining supporting leagues. As those leagues die off we will lose server activity and the remaining actives will be become concentrated in just a tiny handful of leagues. This will accelerate the death of the servers significantly.
From a Plarium perspective, a significant number of players in major leagues will now have little to no incentive to ever spend any money again.
The benefit of what they spend will be inconsequential compared to the free troops several mega coiners are effectively buying them each week. Coupled with free bonds from floor 100 of the Tower and orbs from Weor there is no need to ever spend money again in certain leagues.
THE SOLUTION:
There should be a significant increase in the minimum points required to collect brawl rewards.
That miminim should be proportional to the Stage / points your league achieves in the brawl.
Below is a table with my suggested minimum points structure.
The average column shows the points scored if everyone evenly scored points. I have suggested the minimums at 65% of this value and you can see how this impacts the ability of a tiny of minority of people to subsidise their leagues in the final two columns.
With minimums of this level, it is still possible for a small number of players to drive a significant part of the leagues points. This means Plarium can still make lots of money from the mega coiners funding their leagues. And we aren't completely penalising leagues that have a few people heavily scoring points.
But we do hit reasonable compromise and balance where players need to contribute to the rewards they are being given. If they don't contribute they don't get the rewards.
This completely stops billions of troops being earned by accounts which are hardly contributing or participating. It stops a couple of people subsidising an entire league.
I love that this could cause leagues that are driving their entire brawl reward from a couple of mega coining accounts, to have to stop and think. Yes pushing to higher tiers in theory would earn more rewards. But if the underlying general activity is low, less and less of that reward would be collectible.
MY REQUEST TO YOU:
When you respond to this thread, don't do it just based on your myopic self-interest. Most of the people who post are in major leagues. This broken structure benefits those leagues. If everyone posts just out of pure self-interest this thread won't get much support.
So what I ask you is to take a step back. Think about what this is going to do to the wider game here. Consider whether I am right in assessing the level of imbalance has reached such epic proportions we might be on the cusp of driving a significant proportion of people away. Think about whether this situation is in any way fair or reasonable and whether it drives a meaningful strategy game.
After you have taken that step back, then post and try and post in the most balanced and unbiased way you can.
Btw it's a long post but it's a complex issue, so well done for reaching the end. Looking forward to hearing what you have to say :)
