Upcoming War Zones Changes (Phase 1)

Jul.16.2019 BY KIXEYE_Chris

Commanders, a recent article titled ‘Addressing War Zones Play’ mentioned several issues that the player community had identified as negatively impacting the experience of War Zones and Alliance gameplay. Addressing these concerns is the top priority of the game team, and has been taking up all of our design and product planning bandwidth in the last couple months, outside of ensuring the baseline content and event cadence continues unimpeded.

This project will not be a single massive feature change the way past launches of the War Zones have been – instead we will be making minor iterations and improvements to the War Zones over time to make it a more robust and competitive space to play. This also allows us to act as better stewards of your game, getting your feedback to small changes to make sure we are heading in the right direction. There may be one or two medium-sized features added as bandwidth allows, as well as new content streams that are unique to amplifying fun in alliance gameplay. For the most part, however, this will be a series of minor changes that we hope will breathe new life into this realm of gameplay for our most experienced and loyal Commanders.

The first batch of changes we are looking to make are below:

• Reduce Zone Area Control Point Cooldown from 14 days to 7 days.
• Update Outpost & Strongholds (across multiple updates)

• • This includes making all meta types of SH/OPs available to attack each day, rather than just one type per day.

• • It also includes updating payouts at higher levels to reflect increased costs of upgrading units beyond CC10.

• • Lastly, we will be exploring if adding Supercharge functionality is possible for SH/OP payouts.

• Removing movement cooldowns – except for cooldowns caused by relocating to a different Zone or being shifted out of a Zone Area.

Several of these changes will be available as of the 3.13 and 3.14 Updates. Following those releases, we will be monitoring the impact of these changes as we work on the next round of adjustments. 

Additional adjustments that we are considering for followup changes later on:

• Adding Zone Combat Restrictions based on player level to ensure players are competing with their own player level groups and not griefing low level players.
• Removing the Movement Cooldown buff from the alliance store to limit the amount of times Defenders can jump back into Sudden Death after being shifted out.

We are eager to hear your feedback, so join us in Discord and make your voices heard through your Alliance Leaders. Thanks, and good luck out there!