The problems with "pvp"...according to W1lson

Many of these have been listed here before, and I'm leaving out a lot of things people have issues with, but in the hopes that something actually gets improved, here's why I'm pretty close to abandoning this game all together, and certainly not spending any more money on it. If BB chose to fix a few of these things it might make pvp viable for longer than it takes for people to get to level 15 and realize they don't care enough to push on to 30:

1) Making pvp weapons is very expensive, even with the reductions in cost we saw a few months ago. This is a barrier to entry for anyone without a flourishing economy, for example anyone that isn't high level.

2) Making pvp weapons takes an insane amount of time, even at level 5 armory. This means that those of us who have nothing left in this game to accomplish outside of pvp will now only want to play once every 2 or 3 days instead of every day. This is not great for settlers, in that people who don't play often don't spend money...and eventually just stop logging on.

3) If you do somehow put up with numbers 1 & 2, the resources you gain are not just low, but pretty insulting. Honestly you might as well just have no resources if that's how you want to play it. This applies especially to tier 3 large maps, where the vast majority of available colonies are coal, iron, hardwood lumber and marble.

4) To make things worse, there is an artificial cap on how many resources per 6 hour period we can make. If you somehow manage to take 6 tier 3 huge colonies, you will not be collecting on them all. This is like a knife in the back of the people who make it through all the previous obstacles. Why strive for greatness and go after the hardest expeditions if it is more profitable to go after the second-hardest ones? (better chance at granite and titanium and fewer troop losses).

5) The fact that there is some sort of ranking system now is nice. The fact that I can't search it and see any of my friends or guild mates (unless they are top 10 or within one position of my own) makes this rating system fairly pointless. I also can't see what pvp level my friends are, other than visiting their island, looking at their water castle, and knowing within 2 levels what they are.

6) Which brings us to number 6...if somebody actually sticks it out despite all of these issues, they are rewarded with a slightly nicer decorative item than everyone else. Seriously?

1. PvP was meant to give bored lvl 50s something to do, so thats probably intentional.
2. There is 2nd armory building you get after reaching PvP level 10.
3. Any colonies beside granite and titanium are not profitable, at any tier. But its not too hard to get one of those, on lower tiers at least - and if you optimize your losses, they might become quite profitable.
4. Agreed, but you can always play lower tiers or claim less colonies, if you are after mostly after colony yields.
5. There are people who dont want to be listed or searchable in any kind of rankings - gotta think of those too.
6. See point 1 - bored lvl50s should not be too picky :)

3) Most of the maps won't profit you. You basically do them to gain experience.

7) I don't like the fact that I got to Tier 3 with minimal work due to the simple fact that I've been attacked multiple times with no actual fighting. I don't want to be Tier 3 right now. It's not worth being Tier 3 at all for people that don't have a massive troop buildup. I mean right now, I have maybe 2000 total expedition troops and only the resources to build maybe 1000 more. Doing even a small Tier 3 map would potentially wipe out half of those troops. I only built the armory/academy after I heard they were bringing in the leveling system, so I did not have too much of a chance to store weapons. I dislike having to waste 50 gold/sausages and 90 mins of an explorer's time to attack a random map and then immediately retreat to drop back down to Tier 2.

Points 1 & 2): It's a completely different mind set than adventuring where you can crank thru adventure after adventure all day long losing cheap troops exclusively. Basically, run an expedition every other day and you're OK. Trying to force more than that out of the game isn't sustainable. It's an alternative and a supplement to adventures, designed to be played slowly by high level players who can afford it, not a replacement.

3): I've put in 2 tickets, one on January 2nd, and one on June 24th. In both tickets I pointed out the fact that repeatedly out of ten searches there was only coal, marble and hardwood showing up. Got the standard reply:

"What you are experiencing is a known issue and is currently being investigated by the development team. I ask for your patience while the development team works to resolve this situation. In the meantime I apologize for the inconvenience and thank you for your patience in this matter on behalf of myself and the developers. If you have any future questions or issues feel free to submit another ticket."

I was pretty disappointed that the problem was still there in the new June release. Rather than take a junk colony, I skip them all and try again later. Yes, it's expensive, yes it's frustrating. Hopefully it's something that will be fixed eventually by the one programmer still working on CEO. I try not to forget how many SotV & SE's I used to get from adventure searches before I stopped them altogether, altho the bad expedition search results are extreme and in a totally different context than adventure searches.

4) What bothers me most about the cap is the fact that it isn't raised if additional slots are purchased. A 2,000 limit on 4 slots = 500 per slot, so for each purchased slot the limit should be raised by 500. Even at that, the limit is too low to start with and needs to be raised. If I can't logon for 12 hours, I shouldn't lose the resources I've earned.

5) Being able to opt into (or out of) the ranking system would address the issues raised. Something similar to comparing friends achievements maybe?

7) Agree. If there's no body count in the attack, it shouldn't count in your strength points.

adding # 8). We need a better way to see and analyze our colony maps. The report we get if a colony is taken is useful but is lacking in some information and is difficult to "read" due to it's size. More or less a much larger version of the existing report along with the resource and time stamp as in the colonies screen or else some other form of identifier. It would be nice to have access to these maps at any time to ponder defense strategies. Actually...... being able to simply visit the island without access to make changes might work well.

adding # 9): The combat armory needs to have totals for each weapon type/things being produced like the barracks and provision houses do. Seems like it would be a quick and easy fix.
Patiently waiting for PvP 3.0

I heard cats are finally coming to "pvp" in 3.0... Wonder how will that be implemented. :)

Probably be Elite Cats to use against the War Dogs!

http://i1274.photobucket.com/albums/...pscqzgj6cu.png
Makes it impossible to select next attacker and when it finally clears, it's too late... dead bodies everywhere.

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Originally Posted by Vanessa

[...] Makes it impossible to select next attacker and when it finally clears, it's too late... dead bodies everywhere.

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Lol - I'll stick to running FT's and SE's... Let Expeditions fade away, and hope to embrace the new expansion set. (If nothing else, we get to use our existing generals!) :D

...but...but...but! I'm almost level 10 :'(

I've yet to see that bug. Lvl 10 is great.

I'm rolling out the Expedition troops (I built a few in the case I needed the requirements for the Easter Event...) so that I can kill them off then put them worthless Marshals back (permanently) into Star Menu. I expect I should be able to take 2 colonies with the built troops, wherever that leaves me in the Expedition Quest/Achievement status... so be it. Ramping up FT's in anticipation of this Ali-Baba stuff working out. :D

Did enough PVP for the acheesements and quit. It is horridly bad. Now that they have added granite, titanium and salt mines to the game, I will never have to consider "pvp" again. Now if they would let me delete my pvp gens and get rid of the stupid rankings button that opens another tab I would be happy to forget the whole thing.

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Originally Posted by kzar

Expedition mode is awesome. The problem with "PvP" was that BB tried to sell it as... PvP. I think that if they drop that term, that would solve everything. If the expedition mode was a game of its own, it would have failed.

Seriously, I am just curious to know how long other players are able to keep a granite or titanium colony because I am usually not able to keep one for more than 48hrs. One night I had 6 colonies and the next day 4 of them were gone. And this is frustrating because there is nothing more that I can do to improve the defense of my colonies. So I'm trying to figure out how many players are active in expedition mode and how many of those Tier III colonies are available (and I believe this number is very low). BB decides how many colonies are available and this has a direct impact whether the expedition mode is worth playing or not. That number should be the result of players' activity only: this means that the players can build and upgrade new colonies, win them and lose them.

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From my experience, granite and t.ore colonies never last more than a few days. If I am lucky the attacker suffers from one of the many glitches (unable to attack the boss camp, sneak intercepts, ...) and aborts the attack and I can keep my colonies a little longer.

I sometimes keep Tier 1 granite colonies for the whole 7 days. Tier 2 granite colonies are lucky to last 24 hrs, although the last one I held for about 5 days before losing it. I don't do titanium ore colonies normally. When I'm not finding granite colonies in searches, I'll sometimes opt for gold ore colonies. Those last a few days typically.

Just say, "No!" Never have and never will waste any time or resources on this 'colony' thing. Best thing about it is that utterly useless water-castle thing at level 15, it is pretty!

can be profitable but for the most part a huge waste of time.. problems that still are not fixed that ive found...

found 2 adventures maps which are incomplete, you can't target boss castle (tier 2 titanium / tier 3 granite )
LAG bugs, so many, if you choose to block at the loss of XP, you find often generals will attack with something you didn't choose, sometimes it reverts back to its correct units, but sometimes it doesn't resulting in more losses or a total defeat. As posted above sometimes its blank attacks.
attack hounds/dogs will refresh itself at no losses if it outright kills the stack (must attack with full 20 stack or 10 blocks / 10 elite blocks)

its nearly impossible to claim tier 3 rich colonies once claimed, due to such high losses versus cost and time to make weapons... making the ones who currently own, able to hold forever, abandoning them once used up and reclaiming under bandit control again, not fun with extra towers and 2k+ losses being legit.

hwl, exotic, marble, coal, iron, gold colonies are less value than it costs to claim, titanium and granite only.

the costs of searching for expidition colonies doesn't seem like much, until your searching 4-24 times for one titanium / granite thats still bandits owned.
because the search defualts player owned colonies up first, you generally will find those only worthwhile colonies of titanium / granite... nice sure, but this is why you lose colonies in a day or two... on top of it every small's extra bonus player towers can be totally avoided by blocks or pathing. to furter exacerbate it, theres only around 3-4 titanium / 2 granite or less on each tier... if even 10 people activly do small-med tier 2/3, your just trading colonies back and forth every other day lol..

weapons are pretty bad, but at level 10 a second armory helps a ton.

i find it a little better than spamming some advs during non events, but it is clearly lacking a LOT.

Yeah there needs to be some more granite colonies even at tier 1. Also there's one Tier 1 small granite colony that's quite a bit harder than all of the others. You can withstand multiple attempts on it and hold it for the whole 7 days pretty easily. Meanwhile, there's another Tier 1 small granite colony so easy you can take it with like 208 troops without any blocks, and none of the places to put troops will ever need to be targeted. There needs to be more consistency in difficulty per section.

Also I still say your Strength points should only increase if the person targeting you actually attacks troops.

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LAG bugs, so many, if you choose to block at the loss of XP, you find often generals will attack with something you didn't choose, sometimes it reverts back to its correct units, but sometimes it doesn't resulting in more losses or a total defeat. As posted above sometimes its blank attacks.

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I've made only on observation in that regard when I was bored enough to aim for the T3 achievements of losing less than X units.
So first I had to grind my way up from usually docking myself down to remain in Tier 1. And T1 has been 0/10 problems, always. No lag, no unit switching, no rubberbanding, no hidden intercepts, no lag to attack to stack switch to invisible buttons, no non targetable camps/leader/map bosses....nothing whatsoever.

Then I got to T2, caught a couple quite nice ones back to back which were barely any more losses than a T1, however....starting T2 colonies, "any" type (I only ever went for something worthwhile iirc, but I highly doubt there is any correlation between resource type to bugs) started to have problems. Lag has soon a block has initiated and the server (unlike with adventures) behaving differently. So, in short, the block starts, lag happens, everything sorta reverses and then rushes forward again and stuff, but the block itself ran shorter than usually, intercepting the rest blabla...and because intercepts make your marshall jump 3 flags ahead, during lag and missing menus and stuff, that's one hell of a frustration inbound....just to arrive at the untargetable map boss if you are lucky and forgot to check upon arrival.
With T3 the same story, block initiates, lag, boom, buncha dead marshalls. Which is really helpful going for the T3 achievements. In most games, a ton of achievements are really simple for even the average player to accomplish, but those ones I tip my head to, I was starting said colony, eyeballed my path and sat down for math and barely made the requirement for it....also really helps if "pro players" get their wings artificially cut by forced limitations, which would be time limit (as you don't get a 4h downtime recovery for your marshalls), medipack limit, which is like 1 more than all other ones and 1 marshall, when you already need 2 to take down a map boss at that stage is also counterproductive....meaning, T1 has the highest capabilities for "pro players" to shine, as the higher you go, it's just turns into being forced to take down camps one by one once you have done your blocks and are dead (roundblocking so the marshall doesn't die is of course another way, which I actually didn't do the math for, but knowing how long fights etc take...seemed really moot).

T2+ is made for noobs to steamroll without competition per se, which is why I had to crazy laugh when "rankings only reflect T3 stats for fairness" or something.

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Meanwhile, there's another Tier 1 small granite colony so easy you can take it with like 208 troops without any blocks

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There is also the one where you can just target the Map Boss directly without any camp in the way, losses 65 or so haha

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Also I still say your Strength points should only increase if the person targeting you actually attacks troops.

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Yes that would be nice. Not having to waste a buncha Explorers(!) to keep your desired tier to stay in.


But I'm back to my biggest gripe (well,there are a couple that share the biggest...). All my searches return next to none expert colonies at all, and the maps I'm getting are also distinctively troop intenser than before. I'm referring to that "phenomenon" to On Phase/Off Phase...and I'm so Off for some 3 weeks already, dunno how long it'll last.

Other than unattackable camps my only real problem with PVP is that when I want to run an expedition, and yes sometimes I do, I never have a free explorer. I think I have only done one since the XXL package for just that reason.

In my opinion it would be much nicer if you could send a marshal out to find a colony instead. If you decline the list that comes up the marshal goes into his recovery state for the 2 hours.

agreed. this either needs a bump in number of available colonies, boost in resources produced on non titanium/granite with increased loot box holding, or a better method on searching.. i feel like someone forgot to move a decimal point in the math when my explorers are finding maybe 1/15, sometimes 1/30 searches on medium tier 2 and tier 3 for a bandit controlled, usually player owned shows up but not always.
It also would be nice to search for any size, kind of getting bored deleveling myself back down to tier 2 to find something at times if the tier 3 colonies are already owned... /shudder at 1400+ losses when i can do a bandit for <800... can only use so much valor points :p

Yes, we need something more to spend valor points on. As it is, I'll likely just use up my few remaining heavy weapons left and then just block with all Guardsman to save a little resources.

Started my first expedition in forever today only to not be able to attack the map boss. Guess it will be another five or six months before I try again.

Expeditions are all I really do anymore. That didn't stop me from getting the explorer and MMA though.

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I'm confused. I'm not sure if PvP rankings make sense. Is it possible that a player have a better average time by playing only against bandits (PvE) instead of other players (so-called PvP). Irony.

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Don't worry about rankings, they are as fake and illogical as the 80% of the entire expedition concept. All the reasons and explanations that we've extracted from Endesmor piece by piece for clarifications just pointed the "everybody is a winner, here is your medal for participating".

Currently pissed the hell off about algorithym that decides what kind of colonies your explorers find,eventually got sick and tired of that about a month ago and killed my 600 troops off and expeditions can rot in hell again until I go mad and play illogcial too. So. Many. Issues.

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Originally Posted by Perwyn

[...] 9): The combat armory needs to have totals for each weapon type/things being produced like the barracks and provision houses do. [...]

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Having waited to do any of these silly Expeditions until I reached a comfortable level, I was appalled to see that the Combat Armory STILL does NOT have totals in it. So, having to produce thousands of units at a time, and we are unable to get a quick view of where our production stands?! Truly amazing. How long have Expeditions been in production? Wow. Please, seriously see what can be done about this.

Screen shots of existing and desired outcome

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Originally Posted by Raubhautz

...the Combat Armory STILL does NOT have totals in it. So, having to produce thousands of units at a time, and we are unable to get a quick view of where our production stands?!

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Hello!

Thank you for this report. I've notified the developers about this, and we'll inform the community once we receive more information about eventual updates.

~ BB_Aeyline