Combat Mechanics & Game Longevity (Graveyards?)

Hello! I enjoy PvP as much as the next bloke, for someone who’s been in OSWs (wars) on KaW since 2010, I believe the PvP mechanics on Heckfire need to be addressed before it kills the game.

Why? The problem lies in how quickly you can lose months’ worth of troops. You can drop a lot of money on troops, gems and build an army for months and end up losing it in under 10 minutes.
From a game design point of view, this seems counterintuitive.

It’s the single biggest flaw I find with this game and I do not understand how ATA can justify this mechanic.

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I’m hoping we can see a discussion on this and hear from ATA about if they plan to rework combat mechs.

I personally know at least 30 players that have quit the game after catching a zero. Some of them even spenders. It’s disheartening to lose months of progress so quickly. I’m sure we all know someone who has quit after a zero.
ATA is haemorrhaging players, spenders too, due to this. Frankly it does not instil a lot of confidence in ATA, a design like this only encourages players not to invest in troops.

Say there is no PvP/FFA event going and someone decides to zero you for no reason, you’re AFK, boom, months of troops gone.
Shielding 24/7 isn’t exactly a fix either.. perhaps a stop gap on a horribly broken PvP system. Bail troops? Welp, there goes ally gold on hits.
Every FFA I see troves of players quit after a zero. This cannot be refuted. Heckfire does not have sufficiently enough of a player base to keep losing players every FFA event.

User Acquisition is not the easiest thing for a game of this saturated genre with retention rates of 5-10%, I see Heckfire being advertised on 5-6 networks by ATA. It would make sense if they worked on keeping the player base they have intact.

What happened to “Graveyards”? ATA spoke about releasing it in 2018 Q4, has it been scrapped?
I really hope this does not turn into another “Smash Monsters” or Kingdoms at War, that has had it’s game economy ruined due to ATA’s lack of foresight.

Thoughts?

 

I get what you're saying Multiplat about the map, realms like 21 are so overcrowded that finding L9/L12 nodes aren't the easiest. A majority of players in 21 sit around the shrine rings or close to it.

I don't get why ATA doesn't dynamically change maps according to relam density, they may double spawn rates, but that's not a fix that ensures healthy node distribution due to the fact that a majority of players in huge realms sit close to the shrine rings or next to it.
If 90% of a realm sit in or around shrines like 21, increasing node spawn rates doesn't fix anything, because there's a huge area of the map outside the shrines where there aren't many players and are empty.

Coming to the ally system, such a problem with allies can be fixed, like any game that depends on a certain number of players for a system to work, the developers on said games create bots that do the same.
Ie, of all the allies you see, ATA just needs to make accounts/bots with different stat ranges and that'd be enough to sustain the market even if they weren't enough "real player as allies".
Say 100 or xyz bots with 1%/1%/1%, you get the idea.

That's what we do in my company, we use bots to simulate real users when there aren't enough. Most multiplayer games use some form of bots/simulated accounts.
I've seen companies like Supercell do it too. Supercell has over a million players on each of their games, their new game heavily depends on having 6-10 players initiate a game at the same time when you initiate a round, which isn't always easy, so Supercell uses bots to ensure the wait time for a round to start is low.

I won't deny that we've been seeing a steady rate of inflation regarding allies and gold since beta, that's what happened on KaW too over the years. It started in the thousands, then millions, billions.. Right now? Having a couple of quadrillion in allies on KaW is okay. Many years ago when it started on KaW, players asked for devs to create ally bot accounts with stats, which would infuse the game with more allies and stem the inflation, but nothing was done to check the inflation on KaW since '09.


ATA does seem to listen a lot more when it comes to Heckfire than they did for KaW, so maybe there's hope and they may do something to curb inflation over time and balance the game economy.