MiriamRowan's Troop Brawl Thoughts

My intention with this blog has always been to post helpful articles about Battle Camp, that perhaps overlook the problems in the game but aim solely to help those who are keen to learn more about the game.  When Team Brawl was announced as an event, I was excited to be able to analyze a new event and to share that information ideally before the first match had even ended ended.  I had time set aside and looked forward to seeing the match... and then unfortunately quickly reached the conclusion that this wasn't an event that I wanted to help players with in its present format.


Why are players saying this is an event for spenders only?

At first glance (and second and third glance), it looked as though BC had constructed a new version of Battle Royale with the intentions of making it cost the most possible gold.  (If anyone from BC is reading this, please persist.  My constructive comments will appear later on, but I think it will be helpful to know how we saw the event as players. I understand fully from the live stream that Team Brawl hadn't been intended to look this way to us).  However, at first glance this is how it appeared to me...

• Free refresh has gone, so gold is now required if you cannot beat your opponents or if you have run out of opponents.
• Every refresh costs more gold up to a maximum of 50 gold per refresh.
• Opponents only grant 1 trophy per energy after they have been defeated once. This forces players to spend gold for a refresh or to choose to earn lower trophies against other opponents.  After playing 5 battles and the match is over for you unless you pay gold to refresh.
• Trophies have been reduced for all opponents compared to Battle Royale, however the trophy benchmarks don't seem to have been adjusted accordingly making them harder for anyone to reach now.  (See worked example at the end of this post)
• The disparity between the trophies of the highest opponent (1000 per energy) and the lowest opponent (50 per energy) is far more extreme than during Battle Royale.
• The match is extended to run for two hours. This forces players to keep playing for low trophies or to pay gold to refresh.
• Event monsters are old raid monsters. They have the same overpowered boost as BR mobs, so having only one ultra event monster in the team will give you double the trophies of regular players.  Add in additional event monsters and other players simply cannot compete. This is no longer about event team building (such as BR) but the event will substantially reward anyone who is willing to spend gold on event spins each time Team Brawl comes up in the event rotation.
• Event monsters came randomly with actives like snipe, barrier, venom, without seeming to be designated to be defensive monsters if they had a defensive ability.  It's only possible to have one venom monster on a team, so already some of those players who spun multiple times have monsters they cannot effectively use.
• Farming initially dropped approximately 100 trophies per energy for every second or third battle, which made it more appealing than playing the lowest trophy opponent, and any opponent twice. However, this didn't count for VIP benchmarks, forcing a player to stick with the match.

Essentially it looked as though Battle Royale had been modified to completely be a spender's event by forcing players into paying gold in order to earn trophies.


Masta Don's explanation of these changes during the Livestream

During the livestream, Masta Don explained his reasoning for all of the changes he introduced. My understanding is that he had originally designed Battle Royale and then became frustrated that we didn't play it as he had intended.  He had hoped that we'd play all 5 opponents before refreshing, instead of moving on to new opponents with refreshed trophy amounts.  He removed the free refresh in hopes of forcing us to play the opponents we were presented with first.  He also wanted players to be willing to try battling the highest PR opponents, so he made the highest opponent have greater trophies.

To me, these two changes are contradictory.  By increasing the relative trophies earned by the highest PR opponent and reducing the lowest, BC has increased the incentive to refresh your opponents to get a new highest PR opponent.  With 10 energy, the top opponent gives 11000 trophies... so where is the incentive to play against the lower opponents for 5500/2750/1100 or especially the lowest at 550 trophies with 10 energy?  With a 20x difference in trophies earned from the highest and lowest opponents, the event forces us to pay gold to refresh to achieve reasonable trophies, or to accept that we simply won't do well this event.

If the intention is to have players battle against all 5 opponents, then consider bringing the trophies more closely aligned with each other to reduce the incentive to refresh.  (The opposite of what Masta Don chose to do).  If I had already battled the top opponent for 1000 trophies per energy, it's likely that I'd avoid wanting to refresh if the second opponent could give me 950 trophies, for example. I wouldn't be losing much in trophies and I'd be saving myself gold, so I'd keep playing that round, especially as gold is so hard to obtain for free in the game currently.  Where a large difference in trophies exists, the incentive to refresh to hit another top opponent is incredibly high.

Regarding the removal of the free refresh... consider a couple of scenarios.  

A player is randomly allocated 5 opponents whose PRs are all above what they can defeat. The match is essentially over for them before it begins. A free refresh would give them a chance to overcome that random allocation and perhaps allow them to find an opponent that they can battle against.  As per the livestream comment about beginners disliking constantly losing in PvP, this can be happening in TB too.

Another line of thinking: A player on regen energy who isn't spending has no aspect of excitement or control in deciding to refresh their opponents and possibly face a better or worse troop.  Instead, the 5 opponents they're allocated for the 2 hour match is all they'll see. There is nothing dynamic about their event screen as nothing will possibly change for them during the match.

Masta Don's suggested solution of awarding a free refresh for those players who defeat all 5 opponents then runs into a problem if someone is randomly allocated a strong opponent team who they simply cannot beat.  See below for an example:

Example: Player on regeneration energy who isn't spending gold

At the very bottom of this post there is a mathematical worked example of how many trophies a player on regen energy who isn't willing to spend gold can achieve during a ten day Troop Brawl event.  In summary of that example, if that player hit one match every day with their VIP energy and maximum regen energy, and then hit a second match with their Facebook friend energy plus the maximum possible regen energy... and was able to defeat the top opponent (and all others) every single time, they could achieve enough trophies (277k) by the end of the event to reach the super monster benchmark prize.  If they missed a match or lost some battles, they would not be able to achieve even this.  Likewise, if they do not have active VIP, then with only 10e from Lost Temple each day they'll receive substantially less TB trophies.

Event Monsters

In contrast to the above example, consider a player who was lucky enough to spin an offensive event ultra. Their trophies will be double the player above simply by having this monster in their team. A player who can fill their team with event monsters, will receive many multiples of the player without.  It seems sensible then that a player should do event spins during Team Brawl?  However, these event monsters aren't likely to be reused for some time, so is it worth the spins for a single event?

Consider a contrast... if BR monsters had their bonus active during TB, then essentially this is simply another BR event and we might as well simply be playing BR.  However, what if TB had no event monsters at all?  No player was able to achieve an advantage over another by spending gold on event spins.  TB would then become what players seem to love most about Troop Wars... it would give a purpose to a player's main team... increasing the incentive of players to continue working on these teams that essentially are mostly only used in Lost Temple crystal raids or Troop Wars.  Yes, the higher PR players will do best in this event, but perhaps that's worth rewarding them for putting their time into their teams instead of someone who simply gets lucky on a TB event spin and instantly becomes overpowered.

Troop Pairing

In concept alone, this was an intriguing concept.  It could possibly remove the rumors of top troops colluding together to drop their defenses so they could gain easy wins.  However, in TB, with most of us not having event teams, there is little advantage to them doing this as trophies are so low without event monsters.

It could have increased communication between troops and allowed for collaborations, however the game does not offer any effective way for troops to contact each other.  The chat in the live event screen could be read by all players in that current room regardless of their troop, and can't be seen by players who were allocated other event rooms.  

If the match would instantly create a group chat for the paired opponents, then I can imagine communication might start happening, assuming we all spoke the same language.  Perhaps even increase collaborations by allowing the position bonus of one troop to affect the players of both paired troops?  So far this event is missing any involvement with the other troops, it just seems to be adding in a random distribution of opponent defense teams and gives us slightly less control of our own troop trophies since they now also depend on a random troop that we likely don't know of.

At the end of the match, the live stream had described to us that each of the four troops who played would receive different match multipliers based on their performance in the match. The trophies shown during the match only show us which pair of troops is ahead. We're unable to see if our troop is beating the troop we're paired with in order to win the higher match multiplier.  In fact, none of us are aware of what the different multipliers are because the troop trophies aren't shown anywhere, and neither are the multipliers.

In the screenshot below, I can see that our troop, CG Raiders, is currently in the winning pair of troops. However, I am unable to see if we've contributed more of those trophies than our paired troop to see which of us will get the best trophy multiplier.

The screenshot below is from my alt and I hope to replace this with a better screenshot (with earned trophies) soon. The end of match results only lists your individual trophies. Aside from the victory indicating that this account was on a winning pair of troops, there is no way to know what the troop placing was nor what multiplier was used on the troop trophies. (It can't be reversed engineered since the in game troop tiers is lagging so badly).

With the in game tiers lagging so far behind, even once a match starts, the in game tiers don't correspond to the troops being matched. No one is quite sure whether the matching is being done correctly as some troops paired are next to each other in the tiers, others are substantially far apart.  Most of us are hoping that the game servers are doing this correctly for us and that we're really all bunched together on the real troop tier chart, but this take a lot of trust from us and we're really not sure it's working as described.  Example is shown in the screenshots below of the 4 troops who played in the same match, and also their troop tiers as per the in game tiers.  Troops 75 and 76 seemed to be playing against troops 88 and 78. This wasn't the even balance described in the live stream (if teams 10-13 played, then 10 and 13 would be paired and 11 and 12 would be paired). Either the tiers are lagging or the matching isn't happening fairly.

Troops 75 and 76 were paired against troops 88 and 78

The troop pairing does seem to give a more consistent blend of opponents - some high and some low.  In a way though this removes our excitement when we used to occasionally be paired with a troop who only had common teams, or the challenge and/or grumblings when we faced a well prepared troop with all high PR teams. Many of us used to look up the defense teams of the troop we were likely to be paired with in BR and we'd be able to plan ahead for a troop strategy depending on the difficulty levels.

Event Screen

Unfortunately with all the opponent monsters placed so close together in the event screen, it's often difficult to see them due as the larger monsters (higher rarities and evolutions) overlap each other due to their in game size.   Once you add other players to the event screen, looking at the opponent monsters becomes impossible.  This is demonstrated in the screenshots below.  The left screenshot only 5 players between the stumps. The right screenshot has an unknown number of players.  When larger (high rarity sevo) monsters are involved, it can be challenging to click exactly on the "Enemy" pointer instead of their monsters.

  

5 players (left) and  unknown players (right) crowded into the event screen

Match Duration

I've heard both sides of the argument regarding the match being 2 hours long and 8 hours apart.  Well, more specifically, I haven't heard much about the 2 hour long match, but I have heard a lot about the 8 hours in between matches.

For some players, this has worked very well. Their troop has longer to play LT or farm between matches.  Players going hard in the event have a chance to get a longer period of sleep overnight before hitting all three possible matches.

For other players, the 8 hour gap has been a disadvantage to them.  Many of us have a real life that takes precedent over playing the game.  When the matches were spaced out for an hour every 4 hours, then if we were stuck in a meeting/class/sport for that one hour, we knew that we could simply play the next match.  Now that there are only 3 long matches each day, a long meeting/class/sport can entirely cause you to miss 2 hours of event play.  Regarding lost temple, for those who still need a lot of time to play against the crystals, we now have to take into account a gap of 3+ hours when no one will be able to hit a running crystal raid. (1 hour regen, 2 hours of the match, then time for energy to regenerate).  I'm also seeing a reduction in the frequency in which players are active in the game.

In Battle Royale, a player has the ability to hit twice per hour with regeneration energy, and can face different opponents each time without paying gold for a refresh.  In Team Brawl, we can only hit three times over 2 hours and are faced with the same opponents throughout, unless we pay gold.

The 8 hour rotation has potential - perhaps consider running TvT in raid events every 8 hours so that each timezone has a fair chance of playing 2 out of 3 matches each day.  (My Tvt times are 1pm and 1am, meaning that I can only play once unless I'm willing to miss out on sleep).

Event Duration

For a new and untested event, a 5 day duration would have been sufficient to receive feedback on what worked and what could be improved.  10 days is getting tedious for those of us who aren't enjoying the event. ;)


Glitched Match - 8am PST, December 7th

The troop tiers did not update from the 0.00am PST match and troops were matched with the same opponents.  (Time stamps in the screenshot below are EST).

Glitched match

(We were ranked 113 and facing different opponents each match normally)

VIP Benchmarks

The glitch in the VIP benchmarks could easily have been avoided by BC either through more thorough Quality Assurance testing of the event (likewise for the incorrect gold taken while refreshing for the first 3 days), or quite simply through communication with us players.  QA could have tested the prizes, but also would have noticed that Cool Luke wasn't indicating what the next prize was over 500e, so every player was completely in the dark.  (Cool Luke also wasn't talking in terms of energy this event either).

If we had been shown at the start of the event what the VIP benchmarks we could aim for were, if we received 100 spins instead of the expected 1 spin, players would be aware that there was a glitch in the game.  Any spending from there would be done with the known risk that the spins weren't intentional and would likely be taken away.  However, by keeping the benchmarks disclosed, players had no way of telling if this was a glitch or intentional. The live stream had told use that the VIP benchmarks had been extended and had been "buffed". That's a little open to interpretation.  While veteran players are likely to know that BC isn't usually that generous with spins, it has to be accepted that newer player may have legitimately believed that those spins were earned by them.  The removal of their spins and monsters after spending real money in the game is causing a lot of anger among those players.

Perhaps mistakes in the game by BC should penalize BC (and not the players) for not running sufficient Quality Assurance on the event, encouraging them to make sure this never happens again.

Disclaimer:  I wasn't personally affected as I have yet to claim my free VIP prize. I'm waiting until later in the event so that it won't run out before the next event begins.  Anyone who claimed it on day one of the event will unfortunately have a gap in their VIP before the next event begins.


Celebrating the aspects of BR/TB that frustrate players

It's common knowledge among players that towards the end of Battle Royale, and also now Team Brawl, many high spenders leave their troops to join low tier troops or to start their own troops. This changes them from playing against difficult defense teams to very low PR defense teams (possibly all common teams for their first match).  This is an element of BR that has long frustrated many players who stay loyal to their troops.  While this strategy is legal in the game, I'm hoping it's not the kind of game play that BC wants to publicly celebrate?

The top two troops there have only been created during this Team Brawl event, and each only contain one player. It's highly likely that this is exactly the strategy those two players have used.  (I haven't taken the time to check the other 3 troops).

Celebrate players who are making wonderful achievements that we would all like to get behind, instead of the players who are intentionally making the event easier for themselves please.

Worked Example: Player on regen energy who isn't spending

Consider a player on regen who isn't spending.  At the start of most matches, they'll come in with 5 energy. They'll hit the top player they think they can beat, hopefully the best player for 5000 trophies.  50 minutes later, they return to the match and they then hit the second best player for 2500 trophies.  50 minutes later, their energy has again recharged and they can hit the third best player for 1250 trophies.  At this point, many are wondering if those low trophies will make a difference or whether to simply skip them.  That player may gain an extra energy or two before the match ends, but is it worth them hitting the fourth best opponents for 100 trophies per energy?  Ideally they may use their 5 fb friend energy to gain an extra 500 trophies at the end from the fourth best opponent. Total trophies: 9250 

At best, a regen player who isn't spending will come into the match with 5e recharged. They'll plan ahead and use that against the third highest opponent for 1250 trophies. They'll then go and claim their 20 VIP energy from Lost Temple and return to face the top and second top opponents with 10e for a total of 16500 trophies.  An hour later they play the fourth highest for 500 trophies (5e), and most likely they may not bother to come back at the end of the match as their last opponent will only give them 250 trophies.  Total trophies: 18500 trophies.

For the third match, that player is hopefully sleeping. Total trophies:  27750 per day (maximum).  By the end of the 10 day event, that player will have just reached the super monster in the benchmark prizes, if they can maintain this precision in timing all of their regenerated energy in the event.  If that player doesn't have active VIP and only receives 10e from Lost Temple each day, they will not be able to reach even this benchmark. Likewise if they missed one of these matches or couldn't defeat the top opponent, this benchmark goal is unreachable.