War Commander - State of the Game (07.2016)
Commanders,
The excitement of the War Commander team is at an all-time high! For quite some time now we’ve been working hard on some major features and improvements to the world of War Commander... and we’re finally ready to lift the curtain. Without further ado, let’s dive right into the new features and improvements coming your way!
OPERATION: ROACH EXTERMINATION
Late last year we began a massive initiative to reduce cheating in War Commander. We’ve gradually been chipping away at these cheats one at a time, and, by the end of this month, you’ll see yet another major loophole closed: Repair Cheating!
Here’s a list of some of the roach behavior we’ve eradicated in since we’ve started this initiative:
Bullseye and Missile Spammers
Oversized Platoons
Free Unit Unlocks
Free Unit Upgrades
Free Building and Turret Unlocks
Free Building and Turret Upgrades
Repair Cheating (within the next few weeks)
ALLIANCE RAIDS
When we first shipped Alliances last year, we regret that we didn’t really give you too much to do as an Alliance. With Alliance Raids, we seek to correct this problem.
Sick and tired of having your home sector invaded by the Hellhounds, Corpus, or the Eastern Horde? Now you and your Alliance can return the favor! Collect faction Intel on the world map by striking Intel bases. Then spend that Intel to activate a Raid. In a Raid, you can send a predefined number of your platoons to strike at your enemies in their own home Sectors. While having a powerful army matters, having allies matters just as much! Work together to defeat your enemies for great rewards!
ALLIANCE WAR EFFORTS
Raiding enemy sectors earns precious Supplies. Supplies can then be spent to activate War Efforts. There are three War Efforts that you can activate (and all three can be active simultaneously). One boosts your units, one boosts your turrets, and the last boosts your resource collection. Though War Efforts only remain active for a limited time, every member of your Alliance fully benefits from them when they are active. A coordinated Alliance can use War Efforts gain huge benefits during Events, a major advantage while at war with other Alliances, or additional Thorium looted from your enemies while preparing for future battles!
RETURN OF WAVE EVENTS
We know you guys have been asking for this one and we aim to deliver big time! With our very next event we’ll be returning to an improved version of the Wave System! Now, you’ll have three tracks to conquer: Attack, Defense, and Master. Right from the start of the Event, you’ll be able to participate in both the Attack and Defense Tracks, each of which offers its own loot. Progress far enough in both the Attack and Defense Tracks, and you’ll unlock missions in the Master Track. Though Master Track Missions are far fewer in number, they are especially challenging and offer great rewards.
You can Reset your Event progress at any time, if you want to replay for more goodies, but you’ll only have a limited number of Resets, so make sure you use them wisely!
PvP OVERHAUL
Hold onto your hats, folks, after the conclusion of PvP Preseason 2, there will be a glorious overhaul of our PvP systems. With Repairs fully secured, the test of skill will be real. You’ll see vastly improved Leaderboards, broken up into multiple divisions, and tons of rewards. People reset within their divisions monthly and get payouts depending on how high they climbed on the Leaderboard. Of course, as many of you have said, without lower Repair Times, PvP would have a tough time getting off the ground, even with all these also improvements. Well, prepare to be shocked: we’ve heard you!
Not only did we recently reduce Repair Times across the board by 35%, but we’re going to introduce a new type of Platoon in the Platoon Manager dedicated to PvP. If you choose to put your units in a PvP Platoon instead of a standard Platoon, you can only use them to hit other players, but they will have significantly reduced Repair Times (on top of the previous reduction)!
SECTOR OPTIMIZATION
While there are a ton of you out there, it’s undeniable that some players start the game and it just doesn’t connect with them. These players would start up the game, get through the tutorial, and it just wasn’t what they were expecting. Unfortunately, this meant sectors would fill up with these bases, causing us to need more Sectors, and ultimately a massive inflation of the number of Sectors we needed.
Over the past few months, we began an active process of culling bases that belonged to these players who didn’t stick with the game and, as a result, this exposed the fact that we have many, many more sectors than we need. So, we’ll be reducing the total number of available Sectors, so that we can better optimize sector performance and balance the ratio of player to non-player bases. You can expect advance notice on this as we get close to the date so that everyone has time to adjust.
STABILITY AND PERFORMANCE
It goes without saying that we can do better on this front. Fortunately, we’re going to be dedicating additional resources to both solving critical bugs and improving performance in the coming months. Much of this is be made possible by the conclusion of some of these other major initiatives. We want to make sure that War Commander can be enjoyed by everyone and we are planning to make some real progress on this front soon!
WRONGTHINKER THINKS
I clearly remember when we decided to actually tackle some of the long term issues with War Commander late last fall and started the journey to make War Commander better than it had ever been (as I boldly declared way back in the first WrongThinker Thinks). I’m not going to say the road has always been perfectly smooth (it hasn’t been), but we’re nearly to that point. Everything listed above will be arriving in just the next few months, and some of them in the next few weeks! These aren’t pipe-dreams, these are about to be the reality:
Securing Unit Repairs
Alliance Raids and War Efforts
PvP Overhauls
Event Rework
Sector, Stability, and Performance Optimizations
We’ll be delving into most of these topics in greater detail in the coming weeks. We greatly look forward to your feedback and hope you share in our excitement.
Until next time, Commanders, this is WrongThinker signing off!
-WT
P.S. Alliance Raids and War Efforts will be coming to the Preview Servers very soon. That’s right: Preview Servers! We are going to be using Preview Servers again, so be on the look-out on the forums for your opportunity to check out Raids, War Efforts, and more before everyone else!
P.P.S. Deena’s Shredder tactic will be fixed this week.
Well this might go either ways, very well, or very bad.
Let's just hope for the best.
SECTOR OPTIMIZATION
One major point to this update:I am not familiar how exactly your system is working, but what I know and what I see is, that the number of players in some sectors are a bit high. Mainly in the event when the lvl95 bases pops out, the game is lagging and slow like hell. If this has something to do with the number of players and the number of active players attacking bases, than I would suggest the following:
- you can reduce the number of sectors, if there are sectors just with few players
- at the same time, please reduce the maximum number of players in one sector (if this could help on performance)
Thank you
So if KIXEYE decides to cut the number of Sectors down to 300, does that mean that everyone in Sectors 301-420 automatically will get shoved into Sectors 1-300?
While it is no secret I have not been a fan of your predictable coin hungry actions, (no doubt cheats were allowed to some degree to boost sales).
I can say good job here. Hopefully half of what you just laid out works half the time.
The only thing people really care about now is the cheats. How can we keep up with people who do not have to repair their toons? There is a gold hack as well that seems to elude you people too despite the fifty billion player reports sent.
Good luck noobs, hope this works.
we dont have enough time as it is to build half the new units we got let alone upgrade or rank them, then theres the gear store tech which also takes time to get and impliment and then we have to try them out and get to use them, all this takes alot of time which kixeye dont give us, again units will become obsolete betwen events because THEY not listening again, we need the events spaced out more...
How about reduced building upgrades?
How about make limited tech easier to get since it's just a pain in the **** to even get/grind that **** now...it's getting annoying and boring as crap getting none stop limited tech. Can we finally get limited tech in packs and bring back epic tech.
And much more!
Kixeye Forum/Chat Moderator
My issue I see with going back to the wave system is if the cost of units and tech in the event store. So does this mean we will see unlimited tech coming back or will it be still 500k for one tech? Will the prices for items in the event store be priced like they are now or cheape or more like how onslaught is set up now?
Regarding Onslaught: will there be changes to that to?
I highly recommend you counter this with about an 80% reduction in repairs.