Closed Discussion Inventory Balance

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Mintyfresh

Skilled Soldier 18 & Master Commander 21 & 22
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Currently the mid-top level meta is heavily skewed by the size and depth of your inventory. Flag boosting and using a lot of warehouse items to shuffle resources around has become the de-facto strategy for account building to a large degree, while this isnt an issue in itself per-say when combined with large amounts of PP usage it causes extreme imbalance between those who have a lot of flag boosters/wh items and those who only have a few.

While it can be argued that on paper everyone has access to the same opportunities through PP farming on other worlds the reality is that its not often the case. Particularly as you need to understand how exactly best to utilise flagboosters in order to get the most out of them. This is another example of 'pro-player privilege' as they have access to resources/information etc that new players do not. Top players access to large amounts of nobles at much earlier points in the game than has ever been historically possible is highly detrimental to the new player experience. There is also the issue of how incredibly un-fun it is to pop your boosters and then sit there micro minting every 5 minutes for a 48hr+ period of time, nobody enjoys doing that but its mandatory if you want to be competitive.

Therefore i propose that something is done to by the development team

a) Curb the potentially infinite usage of some inventory items that is lopsided to the powerful few
b) Discourage unfun and time-consuming but powerful mechanics

I believe the key-offender is primarily the flagbooster and how strong it is stacked onto a coin flag and secondarily how easy it is to obtain large numbers of warehouse % items, if you utilise a bit of PP in events its very achievable to get 3/4/500% of items with minimal work. I would advocate for the nerfing of flagbooster items and putting a cap on the number of warehouse items a player can store in their inventory. Clever usage of a flagbooster should still be viable but not mandatory. Some potential solutions could be:

1) Flagbooster increases power by 50% not 100%
2) Maximum warehouse items allowed in an inventory is 200%
3) Flagbooster reduced to say 30% but duration increased to 96hrs

The other smaller issue i would like the development team to address is the stacking of defensive boosters (and to a lesser extent offensive boosters) up to unreasonable levels for unreasonable amounts of time. You can obtain (for swords):

30% from paladin
15% from gold Defense booster
15% from sword booster
2% from tribe level that can increase to i think 8%?

I personally feel like that having your units be increased in strength by 62%+ is a little bit extreme, particularly combined with other defensive bonuses like fortification and other paladin perks etc. Given how mobile defensive paladins can be can be a nightmare for attackers to break down defensive walls. Nobody enjoys seeing 20 nukes slam into walls without a wall level drop which doable or the defender with far less commitment than it should be in the current stage of the game. The gradual rise of TW "pp whales" has made defensive buff usage become problematic for the late-game. I would like to see either a softcap on defensive boosts where at a certain stage they get reduced effectiveness or a hardcap of say 50% on all boosts for attackers and defenders. This will once again help the smaller/new players who are much less likely to have access to large banks of inventory items and often get rolled by the powerful inventories that large players obtain and exploit.

Let me know what you think should be done for inventory balance.

P.s. reduce MA cost to 4 pop
 

Seven Devils

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I think these issue's could be solved rather easily. Simply do not allow flagboosters to be used on coin flags.

Set a cooldown period on buffed used, this way you will not want to blow 'all' buffs in one go, cause you might want to have some running while the gold buffs are on cooldown.

Could possibly make it impossible to use 'double' bonus buffs, if 15% sword is active, you can not activate a gold buff for 15 15% sw and spear with a cooldown.
 

IAmAbel

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There is no single top player that would sit around with more than 200% inventory resources anyway since that is not beneficial at all. You use a smaller percentage than that, go for some villages, make sure they have high warehouses and then go again. Letting players sit with 500%+ warehouse resources is just good because that means they don´t grow as much as they could.
 

tudadar

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Most of the overpowered advantages comes from pure cash offers instead of pp so I dont see inno too willing to change much. Every few months they sell massive amounts of war packages which I believe is 20% fillups and attack/def booster for $10. Some people spend $10. Some people spend $100. Some people spend $3000. I believe profits from tw are at an all time high because of all the "special offers" over the last few years even though population is way down. Nerfing flag booster would just give the accounts willing to spend thousands less "waste" and more of an advantage using decree + mass 14-18% coin flags.

Flag boosters/wh fillups are also the main selling point for when they sell premium with massive event currency added in for free several times a year.
 

Mintyfresh

Skilled Soldier 18 & Master Commander 21 & 22
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Most of the overpowered advantages comes from pure cash offers instead of pp so I dont see inno too willing to change much. Every few months they sell massive amounts of war packages which I believe is 20% fillups and attack/def booster for $10. Some people spend $10. Some people spend $100. Some people spend $3000. I believe profits from tw are at an all time high because of all the "special offers" over the last few years even though population is way down. Nerfing flag booster would just give the accounts willing to spend thousands less "waste" and more of an advantage using decree + mass 14-18% coin flags.

Flag boosters/wh fillups are also the main selling point for when they sell premium with massive event currency added in for free several times a year.

Yes i do understand that. However as i've stated a few times previously:

I dont have the power or capacity to overhaul the game economy/pp system/innos business model even though i would really really like to

So here is what i can do:

Make suggestions to the dev recommending quality of life changes which i think have a decent chance of being accepted

What i cant do:

Tell the devs to put caps on PP spending or stop pushing out special offers, because that will just be ignored and waste my time and their time.

So yes you are right, my proposed changes will not fix 'some' of the problems with the current warehouse/pp meta. However given that i cannot fix that i would like us to consider what can be done to help even if it is not the sweeping overhauls we would all like to see. Seven has some excellent suggestions which i think might actually be in the realms of possibility.
 

Seven Devils

Still Going Strong
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How do you fight the p2w meta? You spend more time, you use double flags and you sit 247 minting. Thats how you do, cause these warehouse packs will not be comming your way if you don't pay for it.

Pretty difficult to fight someone who play the meta and is willing to pay. I think this is the smaller issue of the both you brought up, the big issue is the god damn buffs. Palas are simply too op if you ask me.
 

Deleted User - 11501214

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There is no single top player that would sit around with more than 200% inventory resources anyway since that is not beneficial at all. You use a smaller percentage than that, go for some villages, make sure they have high warehouses and then go again.
I disagree. Some events yield 300-500+% with moderate to heavy spending for a top account. Depending on the previous events and what your daily login bonuses were in the weeks around it you can easily reach 600%+ in a time frame where you won´t be able to exhaust your noble limit. You either use those 600% very ineffectively or stop spending on events. Otherwise you will sit at 200+%. Maybe if your enemies don´t defend themselves at all.
Most of the overpowered advantages comes from pure cash offers instead of pp so I dont see inno too willing to change much. Every few months they sell massive amounts of war packages which I believe is 20% fillups and attack/def booster for $10. Some people spend $10. Some people spend $100. Some people spend $3000. I believe profits from tw are at an all time high because of all the "special offers" over the last few years even though population is way down. Nerfing flag booster would just give the accounts willing to spend thousands less "waste" and more of an advantage using decree + mass 14-18% coin flags.

Flag boosters/wh fillups are also the main selling point for when they sell premium with massive event currency added in for free several times a year.
I agree with pretty much everything you said. But Inno surely has people knowing about those things instead of making educated guesses/estimates. What they seem to lack is people with an in-depth understanding of the metagame and its community. Also: It´s not "some spend 10, some spend 100 and some spend 3000". It´s more likely that most spend nothing, some spend 10, very few spend 100 and maybe a dozen per server spend 3000.

This is another example of 'pro-player privilege' as they have access to resources/information etc that new players do not.
It should be quite easy to supply those informations to new players. The concept itself is not really complicated.

b) Discourage unfun and time-consuming but powerful mechanics
For this particular issue I agree. But farming and faking could also be described as "unfun and time-consuming but powerful mechanics" and those are at the very core of the game.

1) Flagbooster increases power by 50% not 100%
Simple and effective. The power increase should only become 50% for coin flags though. It´s already rather useless on 5/8 flags. Did would make it nearly useless for defense and offense flags aswell.

2) Maximum warehouse items allowed in an inventory is 200%
Rather than limiting the amount of items that instantly take effect you could implement a cooldown. Or a daily limit. Or a "cast time" like the items that add troops to a village. A daily limit would probably be most "on-point" on nerfing minting with coin flag booster. Make it 50 or 100% per day and you heavily limited the advantage of heavy spenders. If you then make the informations more readily available to newcomers you achieved the goal.

3) Flagbooster reduced to say 30% but duration increased to 96hrs
So top accounts will have to micro mint for 96 hours instead of 48 hours to compete with the other top accounts that do? Please not!

I would like to see either a softcap on defensive boosts where at a certain stage they get reduced effectiveness or a hardcap of say 50% on all boosts for attackers and defenders.
Hard cap please. Next to different troop strenghts there is Wall level, luck, troop strength, flags, possible night bonus, (sometimes religiousness) and several dozen of potential paladin/inventory bonuses to consider. Several of these things are a concept of their own one has to understand. This is already incredibly complicated and correctly estimating the damage an attack will do is hard enough for some veteran players that simply never liked math. Adding a scaling softcap to bonuses is just yet another concept that many new players will have to learn about the fighting system where information will most likely not be easily available. A simple "You cannot exceed x%" when you try to activate an item or in the simulator that would make you exceed it is fine though.
 

Aretas

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Just my two cents, but I don't really believe that putting an inventory limit on res packs alone will get the stated desired effect of closing a gap between new players and pp whales. Most mint sessions would not require more than 200% res pack use per "flag doubled" mint session, as using more then 200% res packs would be quite wasteful in all but extreme outlier cases. It simply makes more sense to as Abel pointed out, use your nobles, and then remint with more lv30 warehouses from having more villages, and thus getting more res from your packs. Thus a 200% cap limit on the inventory would not have a great effect on pp whale accounts, as they could likely just restock every event that comes around (and as you stated, we aren't likely to get that changed anytime soon), and still be able to fit in 1-2 solid mint sessions between the next event that they will mass spend on. The real factor here causing large amounts of rapid growth is the flag doubler in general. As this allows accounts to gain coins at "half" price for 48hrs and thus gain a lot more coins then they otherwise would be able to. On top of this, experienced/older players get an additional bonus from flag doublers over new players, as an older/experienced player is going to have a much better coin flag to double then a new player, and thus reap even more benefit from the flag doubler then your average new player (non pp whale). Thus I would say, that if anything with minting needs to be changed to work to level the playing field for newer players, it needs to be flag doublers that are focused on either alone or with res packs. A limit on the amount of flag doublers in ones inventory would be a better idea imo then on res packs. This with making flag doublers more rare in events would limit the amount people can stock pile up and use for minting. The average player can easily get a couple from events, but then have to compete with others, typically experienced players who better know there value who get 10+ flag doublers when they come around from events. This can be the same for D buffs that was brought up. I would agree that right now D buffs massively favor the defender, from more buffs being available to stack, to wall buffs, etc. But another big gap between new players and older/experienced ones is D flags available, and in particular flag doubling a D flag. An experienced player is much more likely to have a 8-10% D flag more multiple ones really. This when doubled gives that player an additional 16-20% bonus when defending that newer players simply do not have available to them. Thus here again we see that the flag doubler gives experienced players a large advantage over new players, who are very unlikely to know or value flag doublers the same as veteran players, as to them its just a random event reward, not explained elsewhere.
 

dzippe

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Just disable the offers where you get 50% wh pack if you buy the largest PP pack.
 
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