Wins Streaks. Good Or Bad?

[Rebels]

I really like the concept of win streaks along with the new challenge and strategies it brings to the game.

There is however a few thing that need tweaking IMO.
At the moment we have very powerful teams hanging out in lower tiers just there for the win streaks and destroying teams within the same bracket.

Do we need a better system matching teams? There is no way one team should face another team that no one can even beat at all..... but it is happening and making battles no fun at all for some teams when they dont even stand a chance.

Are the prizes for win streaks too good compared to the ranking rewards?
It seems at the moment everything is arse about face with the prizes and the win streaks are the main goal for a lot of the teams.

Like I said I like the win streaks and want it to stay, it just needs adjustments to make it more playable for the majority of teams.

[Vito6593]

I think it is a great idea in principle BUT the match up system is a joke.

Yesterday we were matched up against Solomon Carnage who were 9m IP ahead of us.

We are nowhere near their strength, nowhere near their standing in that war & we have never been in the top 25 in any previous war unlike them which totally debunks GREE"s explanation of how match-ups are drawn.

[dgwalker]

I like the "# of wins" part a lot more than the "win streaks".

Any non TOP 3 team that gets matched up with FIGHT Club or Indians has 0 chance of winning and will get their streak broken. There is a lot of randomness to the rewards. If you get a TOP 3 team match up when you are on streak 7 of 8 then you are out of luck. If you get a TOP 3 team match up when you are on streak 0 of 8 then it is not a big deal.

The 50 wins aspect is much more fun. It allows you to get 2 or 3 bad match ups and still fight hard for the big prize.

-Dgwalker

PS: I did pretty well on streaks using a strong mini account in a syndicate of 1 member. He was able to beat most battles for free just by hitting the HO or command center 4 times and pressing the battle button every 1 hour.

[Im Jahova]

tl;dr
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[Im Jahova]

I like the "# of wins" part a lot more than the "win streaks".

Any non TOP 3 team that gets matched up with FIGHT Club or Indians has 0 chance of winning and will get their streak broken. There is a lot of randomness to the rewards. If you get a TOP 3 team match up when you are on streak 7 of 8 then you are out of luck. If you get a TOP 3 team match up when you are on streak 0 of 8 then it is not a big deal.

The 50 wins aspect is much more fun. It allows you to get 2 or 3 bad match ups and still fight hard for the big prize.

-Dgwalker

The Indians? Haven't heard of them for a long time now, are they even a threat anymore compared to other syndicates?

[dgwalker]

Fair enough. I probably should have Said Fight club or SAS. I got matched up with SAS1 3 times in 8 hours. I felt used and dirty afterwards.

-Dgwalker

The Indians? Haven't heard of them for a long time now, are they even a threat anymore compared to other syndicates?

[pervbear]

I think the streaks break the current system, over all wins only would be a better syatem.

[Gazzman_razzman]

The Indians were cruising around top 500

[ploop]

I like the "# of wins" part a lot more than the "win streaks".

Any non TOP 3 team that gets matched up with FIGHT Club or Indians has 0 chance of winning and will get their streak broken. There is a lot of randomness to the rewards. If you get a TOP 3 team match up when you are on streak 7 of 8 then you are out of luck. If you get a TOP 3 team match up when you are on streak 0 of 8 then it is not a big deal.

The 50 wins aspect is much more fun. It allows you to get 2 or 3 bad match ups and still fight hard for the big prize.

-Dgwalker

PS: I did pretty well on streaks using a strong mini account in a syndicate of 1 member. He was able to beat most battles for free just by hitting the HO or command center 4 times and pressing the battle button every 1 hour.

Indians need to get rid of the fake indians in their syn who are douches. no offense to people i knew from IN that are cool

[Rebels]

tl;dr
Extra

He's almost as smart as people say he thinks he is

[Laelia]

any team from average to pretty darn good will not get much of a win streak going. If your combined strength or/and past placement is good then you will be matched against one of the 'Serious' teams every so often. only the amazingly strong who duck the other amazingly strong, OR the middling who are a bit lucky will get a really long win streak.

the addition of prizes for streaks has added an element to tactical planning though and has for the time being reduced scoring levels.

in future it will affect the composition of teams (note my previous post on SAS's adaptation in this regard - I can't beat em and I can't be like em)

[Im Jahova]

He's almost as smart as people say he thinks he is

And that's how I like to think. Great job on noticing. Do you want a medal, maybe a cookie so you'll be pleasured?

[BigMoney]

I like the "# of wins" part a lot more than the "win streaks".

Any non TOP 3 team that gets matched up with FIGHT Club or Indians has 0 chance of winning and will get their streak broken.

LOL, Fight Club OR Indians? What year is this, 2009?

[BigMoney]

Anyway, to add my serious thoughts to the topic, I would prefer a wins-only model, because it doesn't matter how good you are (unless you are the best, FC), the streaks are completely luck-based. And the lower ranked you are, the more luck you need. Even as an intentionally crafted streak-killer team, you STILL need a ton of luck, in that you need to match legitimate Top 400-500 (or whatever) teams-- if you match a fellow streak-killer during an important match (e.g. on the final streak of 12, with less than 12 hours remaining), you are totally screwed. Either you lose, and end your shot at the top streak, or you spend a ton of gold and win (hopefully), but now your team's IP score is really high, and you will face significantly better teams (none of whom will lay down as easily as your lower ranked matches).

However, I don't think it is fair to institute across the board prizes for wins either, because there is a big difference between getting 50 wins while you are a Top 10, and getting 50 wins while you are Top 750. It is significantly more impressive beating 50 other Top 10 teams.

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Thus, my solution that I would put forward is somewhat of a hybrid system, that takes into consideration both your rank and your opponent's rank, and rewards you for both. Everyone knows that if you are a Top 10 team, you are going to see a lot of the Top 3, a lot of the Top 10, a chunk of Top 25s, and a couple of Top 50s when there are very few teams able to declare. The goal would be to award you more "points" (separate from IP) for beating high ranked syndicates (think of an inverted pyramid-- beating a Top 4000 syn awards 1 point, beating a Top 1000 syn awards 5 points, a Top 750 syn 10 points, etc., and knocking off the #1 team awards a huge number of points, to discourage the #2 team for avoiding the #1 team, since a well-timed match, e.g. when half of #1 is sleeping while all of #2 is ready for a big match could award these "syn points" that would give them a huge advantage in the race for the Top Syn Goal Prize (whatever it may be). Since you're probably thinking to yourself, "well what happens if some garbage team with a 4-letter all-CAPS acronym decides to push for #3 very early, and someone beats them, it's not fair to award them huge points for knocking off a phony #3 team." And I agree. My solution to this, as well as teams intentionally trying to game the system by avoiding their typical rank so that people don't gun for them as hard, is to also award syn points for simply participating in a match, win or lose, in accordance with your syndicate's rank. So, you get, I don't know, 25 syn points for fighting in a match while you are a Top 100 team, and say you match a Top 250 team, who gets 15 points for fighting in a match while they are a Top 250 team. If the Top 100 team wins, they get, I don't know, 75 points for winning the match, and if the Top 250 beats the Top 100 team, they get 100 points for winning. Something like that. Don't take the "syn point" numbers too seriously, they are just an example, and I'd need to be able to see an entire war's (or wars') worth of data to set "fair" numbers. The goal in setting the syn point numbers would be to discourage a good team from intentionally tanking for easier matches, so you'd need to award e.g. a Top 10 team more points for competing at Top 10 (win or lose) than they could hope to earn by intentionally tanking their rank and beating up on Top 75 teams or something. After determining fair numbers for the "syn points," you would then look at how the expected number of syn points a Top 1, 2, 3, 10, 25, 50, 75, etc team could earn, and you could award prizes commensurate with these expected values. You could even earn them mid-war, which would similarly encourage teams to put up points early, instead of sandbag (though in the perfect system, there would be no advantage to sandbagging, since you cost yourself points by fighting at a lower rank, and you cost yourself points by matching worse teams than you could normally beat).

The way I see it, such a system should shut down complaints about how "unfair" it is for a certain team to match such and such number of good teams in a row, and such a team could then carefully decide which team to take a stab at, while laying down for the other difficult matches. It sucks matching FC or SAS when you're on a streak, it sucks matching a Top 10 team when you're a Top 50 on a streak, etc., but [b][i]it's largely luck-based the kind of team you will match, and it is silly to award streaks of luck. Rewarding teams for beating better teams makes far more sense to me.

Since you must assume that anyone who can abuse the system will, the only possible manipulation I could see of it would be collusion amongst top teams-- e.g. "we let you win this one cheap, and you let us win the next one cheap." I just spent a good amount of time trying to think of a solution to this, but I can't come up with a perfect one. I originally thought of something where the underdog (e.g. if a Top 10 beats a Top 3) needs to score more points than the Top 3's average battle for the win to count, with the hopes of at least forcing the Top 10 to score a decent number of points even in collusion, but it still doesn't stop teams from losing on purpose. You could also offer less with points during a rematch with a syndicate, so that it would not be advantageous to trade wins, but it doesn't stop a Top 3 team from losing on purpose once, the first time, to a Top 10 team. I can't really think of a good way to stop collusion without punishing teams giving up in hopeless/overmatched fights.

This obviously would be an incredibly convoluted system to implement, and would require a lot of data analysis, looking at a long history of matchups and outcomes, trying to determine the probability of a team beating a higher ranked team and awarding points accordingly, and so on and so on. Suffice to say that I wouldn't have the utmost faith in GREE to implement it in a fair manner.

In all honesty I have no idea why GREE implemented wins and win streaks, as it dropped the spending for war significantly. Top 10 the war before they implemented the streaks, the mark was 23.1 million IP. I don't know what Top 10 was last war (too busy sleeping, for once ), but is was 12.7 million in the first war with streaks.
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tl;dr I think wins and win streak prizes are overpowered and based primarily on luck for any syndicate that is not FC. I would prefer a system that rewarded you based on the quality of the teams you beat. The mods on the latest wins/win streak prizes + "individual LTQ" prizes are ridiculous: +7% mafia attack, +5% mafia defense, +20% melee defense, and an absolutely inexplicable +50% explosive attack modifier. Mafia attack and defense modifiers are the most valuable in the game, +20% melee defense seems almost reasonable for what it costs (4 vaults), but +50% explosive attack is absurd. Just when I was beginning to think GREE was getting a handle on the modifier inflation. I don't know if I can suggest a better alternative, because I don't understand what their goal is in offering such prizes to a particular subset of players-- make FC/SAS even more untouchable? Or was it a misguided attempt to offer lower ranked syndicates the chance at a very nice (but unobtainable) prize? No idea, so I can't suggest a better alternative. But GREE has done well to correct the stats and modifier inflation in most of the other events, so I commend them for that.

But the wins and win streak prizes are still overpowered.

[MattThomas08]

This time, even your TL;DR was TL;DR.