Addressing War Zones Play

Jul.09.2019 BY KIXEYE_Chris

Commanders, discussion in community channels over the last several months has revolved around one primary gameplay issue – the War Zones have grown stagnant. The design team has just wrapped up an internal transition that took a bit of their time, but the War Zones Refresh project now accounts for 100% of their focus outside of continuing to maintain our baseline content cadence. Here’s what we’re thinking about:

What Are The Problems?

While Design continues to develop a plan of action – let’s look through a list of what the community has identified as problems – which will steer a large portion of this project’s direction:

Outpost/Stronghold payouts – at the top tier of gameplay, the required amount of Criticals, Commons, Resources, etc have all grown considerably. Unfortunately the PvE bases within the War Zones have not kept up with their payouts and we are planning on a refresh of these payouts soon.

CP War (Sudden Death rules) – Since Defenders can rejoin with tokens any amount of times during Sudden Death, winning a CP is particularly difficult and attackers find they must defeat defenders multiple times in the Sudden Death phase in order to achieve victory. We want to preserve some of this, but we’ll likely be adjusting the rules here.

Zone buffs not worth protecting – This issue typically comes down to the ease at which resources can be stolen (a different version of this same complaint is that players often sit under damage protection or simply leave alliances in order to avoid getting their resources stolen) – but in general players find that the benefits being provided by staying home in their owned Zone Area are not worth protecting at this point in time. We’ll be seeing if this is resolved by making resources easier to protect, or if it requires an adjustment to the buffs themselves.

War Zones play not fast enough – The idea of flash raids is attractive, and we do want to encourage high-intensity battles, so long as we can continue to ensure to some degree that wars for territory aren’t entirely over before a player in a different time zone has even had a chance to sign on and defend themselves.

Low level alliances are unprotected – It’s still extremely easy for one high level player in an alliance to single-handedly defeat an entire alliance of low to mid level players. Mismatched power levels in battle are not a bad thing, it’s a natural part of PvP games, and sometimes you are up against an opponent you simply cannot hope to defeat. However, we do want to ensure we’ve also carved out space for low level alliances to be successful in their own War Zones gameplay.

What’s The Plan?

While we’ll be seeking to address the player concerns listed above – the general approach we’re taking to this is to ensure the content available in War Zones is interesting, and then ensure the activities of War Zones are engaging as a means to acquire and deploy this content.

Content: Defensive Generals

An idea has been floating around the team for some time called Generals. This feature allows you to earn Heroes that cannot be used in battle but can be set to lead your armies temporarily, providing unique buffs and/or combat functionality to yourself and potentially to your entire alliance. Victories mean you can even steal an opponent’s General for a short time as a Prisoner of War.

On the Defensive side of things, Generals may provide better security for resources, or may provide greater combat power against specific metas. Defensive Generals would likely deploy from a building like the Global Ops, Alliance Embassy, or Command Center, in order to keep your regular defensive buildings free for your already loyal troops.

Activity: Territory Control

While we don’t have details yet on what’s changing about the current War Zones set up, we do know that we’re sticking with territory control as its fundamental cornerstone. Despite the issues with the War Zones, territory control is still what the community has told us you want from War Zones play – and we’re seeking to give you a more engaging version of that same premise. We will retain what is good about Control Points, update rewards on the World Map for new level ranges, and introduce some Alliance-focused cooperative and competitive territory control.

We know that game development can be a slow process – but we absolutely hear you regarding your concerns about the War Zones and are committing all of our focus to resolving this point of feedback to ensure Rogue Assault continues to be a thrilling experience for all.

Good luck out there!