Lets Talk Shield Training

So, by now people should know enough about Shield Training to make some valid strategies and how to do well. If you don't, check back at some of my previous posts regarding it.

Instead, I'd rather address things people do that are just bad decisions. So, here is my list of things I see people doing because somewhere they think it gives them an advantage.

1) Not Building Walls

I understand that people think of these as 'free points' but the amount of points per attack power players get from destroying a wall is much lower than the points per attack power a player can get from attacking a player.

2) Single Card Defense

I don't get this one. Apparently people haven't realized yet that they are penalized for using single cards on defense? If you don't believe me...attack somebody with a single card assigned. You can attack them over and over again while receiving full or near full points. Don't do it.

3) Lockout Strategy

It doesn't work. People who use this strategy are simply saying..."I plan on losing, but I plan to take all the fun out of the game while doing it." An active team can still accumulate far more points. Now, can you do it? Yes, but you're a dick ruining the game for others and your odds of winning aren't actually increased.

4) Minimum Attack/Defense Requirements

This is something that's been around since Rage. Realistically, it's not a good determiner of how people will do. Instead you want to ask them how much PP they are willing to spend. People will aim for players they can beat naturally. But some players with high stats will merely do the minimum and do nothing after that. It's important to find members who are willing to throw down, not just members stats.

Those are my big four. But for those who don't know, the keys to winning are:

1) Active Players
2) Coordinated Battles
3) Solid PP stockpiles
4) Strong enough decks to break defenses
5) Good Attack/Defense Leaders

Captain America vs Red Skull

So, I anticipated a Hydra event for some time so it's good to see one showing up. Red Skull is one of my favorite villains, even though Captain America is a little 'too good' for my taste in heroes.

First things first. I'd like to address the Raider Card Changes. I get that people are getting continually frustrated at the diminished value of Raid Reward Raider Cards. The fact that an SR Raid Reward has not only less boost than its purchased equivalent, but less boost than its Rare equivalent is pretty annoying.

And I have to say, I am very disappointed in the change. For high level players this change makes very little difference, but for low level players this change makes rising in rank even more difficulty.

Couple this with the changes to Personal Power Packs being given out, I struggle to think of how low level players can improve their decks without spending money. I feel these change will cause the game to lose players faster as they hit a wall in improving their deck.

Now, on the upside. The value of PP had been diminishing, actually down to about seventy five cents per PP. This was partially due to how easy it was to get Personal PP during the Raid Event. So, the one thing we can look forward to is PP increasing in value back up to its dollar hopefully (but generally when things drop they don't go back up). This of course...will make it even harder for new players to get ahead.

Overall, these changes are bad. And a game that had a possible shelf life of 2 years probably has a shelf life of one as a result of them. This is due to the fact that these changes increase the chances of losing new players, and veteran players will leave naturally. I find it hard to believe that given these changes that Marvel won't be losing players at a higher rate than which they gain them.

That's enough of a rant there about the changes.

Captain America vs Red Skull

So, for this event obviously there are certain tricks. Trick number one is ideally you don't want to use any of your RDS bars until enraged bosses come along. This way the damage done is significantly more. On top of this, try to stack as many raid cards as you can for the bonus damage.

Trick number two involves retrieving prizes from raid bosses. Ideally, you want to let the inbox for your prizes get to the full 30 max before accepting them. The idea behind this is you will summon weaker bosses making them easier to finish and get RDS bars. If you gradually prizes as you beat the bosses, you will gradually get tougher bosses. This will mean that you may have 15 battles that take 2 RDS each instead of 30 that take 1 RDS each.

Trick number three involves teamwork. Ideally you'll want to target shared bosses regularly. If your Alliance set aside a two hour period during enraged bosses where you all farm enraged bosses, hit them once, then share them, you can look forward to a bonus as well. This boost to damage is welcome because it promotes active participation.

Trick number five involves renting/borrowing cards. Players all have a limited amount of time they can play and need to sleep. A strong alliance with good bonds will often be able to pass around cards for people to use even if they didn't purchase them.

Finally trick number six is to know your damage. I try to always hit the highest level boss available with a 1 RDS, a 3 RDS and a 6 RDS attack. I normally write these down so I know how much to use on certain bosses. Then when enraged come along you just triple it.

Anyway, Good luck on the event.

Sorry about Delays

Sorry about delays on posts. I wanted to have the Raid Info and my take on it before launch but I've been working on a project that requires a huge amount of my time. I plan on making some time this weekend to do an update on the event and the changes as well as.

I have yet to get time to update my best decks either. They haven't shifted a lot in SSR and only slightly in SR. Rares have probably been effected the most.

Finally, yes, I am just as annoyed as you all are at the shifts in the way events are operating. Just remember, everybody is in the same boat so if you can't get personal PP, neither can others.

Anyway, I'll have an event update post by Sunday.

SHIELD Enforcement Training Four

Sorry about the delay on the SHIELD Enforcement Training. With some of the game changes recently I wasn't sure if they were going to perform significant changes to SHIELD Enforcement Training.

Structure:

For those who aren't aware, I hope that's very few anymore, SHIELD Enforcement Training is an event where players and their alliances compete to reach the top rankings. Players declare a training, afterwards the system matches them against another alliance, and then they destroy the defense leader and wall before going to town on the alliance.

Obviously the outcomes of these wars are heavily influenced by the amount of PP a team is willing to spend, but having powerful members always helps.

Changes:

For this SHIELD Enforcement Training a ranking system was added called the Instructor System. As you raise your valor in battle you improve in rank and eventually get upgraded to another instructor. As you do this you gain rewards for each increase which consists of shards, rally points, silver, training power packs, etc. While do high level players this change may seem like 'who cares?' to low level players it gives them some additional incentive to battle, especially for the poor souls trapped in temporary alliances.

Player Bans:

Haha. So, it's no real secret that top level alliances in the previous SHIELD Training had been using an exploit that caused them to earn about 300-500 extra Valor per PP. I'm not going to name the specific alliance but I know from a friend that one specific top level abused it profusely. This went mostly unnoticed but I guess during the downtime between trainings Mobage learned about it (Not from me).

Anyway, the bug was that when a player hit the attack key rapidly they would perform about five full attacks on the same target even if they only had the attack power for one. I learned about this bug in the last HW from a friend and didn't even tell my alliance about it for fear that some of them might use it, figuring that it would eventually end in bans.

It's nice to see Mobage finally grew a pair of testicles and did something about the cheaters though.

Two Cheap Strategies Everybody Needs to Know About:

1) Alt Attacks - Using alternate accounts to spam attack a specific defense leader and lower their defense points. This tactic is common amongst low level alliances but falls off the higher you get, mainly because a 30% morale boost with a decent attack deck is all you really need to break a defense leader.

It can be very frustrating for low level players who have a baller defense leader to lose to this strategy. The key is...your defense leader needs to be using PP to replenish.

2) Lockout Strategy - I find this to be the most boring and awful strategy in the game. This strategy is accomplished by one player being the only one who's attacking. This way as your Alliance attacks all of this team members are worth low amounts of Valor while he farms your team for proper amounts of valor.

This strategy is effective at high levels because players don't want to spend PP to only get 120-160 Valor Points. Even if you end up winning the war, you feel like you lost.

This strategy is something that Mobage really needs to look at correcting because it is the epitome of Anti-Fun. Most notably, for the Alliance using it - only one player is really playing while the others sit back and do nothing. For the Alliance that it is getting used on - They just stop participating in that battle because even though they CAN win, they want to get a premium on their PP.

The only person having fun out of 60 players is the single person participating. Although some people will say 'I don't mind not having to participate as long as I get my rewards' that isn't playing. That's having somebody play the game for you and it's sad.


Anyway, those are my thoughts for this SHIELD Enforcement Training. Good luck and have fun!

Spider-Man vs Venom Reward Values

I just wanted to make a quick post on the reward values for the Spider-man vs. Venom Event. Then I thought to myself...why? The prices fluctuate so much anyway and currently the economy is shifting quite a bit as players reach high power levels. But then, hell, why not.

UR Symbiote Venom:

Ultra Rare Venom meets a need that players have been waiting to be filled, an acceptably powerful UR Bruiser card. Although players might look at him and say 'hey, he's pretty much an Iron Man with less frequent proc rates!' he does allow bruisers to get rid of those UR+ Thors in the core of their deck. That and the fact he's Venom and extremely limited puts his price somewhere around 300+. Personally though, I wouldn't pay over 200 for him because lets face it, he's an Iron Man.

SSR Wall-Crawler Spider-Man:

Seriously...another Spider-Man? Don't have enough of those. And it does what? Oh, decreases Bruiser attack and defense...yeah...that's not useless at all. Lets face it...this card is just bad. It helps you defend against the weakest alignment offensively and defensively. I bet it will sell pretty solid for 10PP but lets be honest, it's worth 7PP at most.

SR Secret Veteran Arachne:

Actually she's really good for an SR card and possibly the best SR speed attack card now. Her pure boost to speed attack and her future wall breaker event ability makes her a pretty nice card. Unfortunately her abundance will bring down the price. Realistically 3-4 PP each would be a reasonable amount of PP.

R All Seeing Doctor Strange:

Lets be honest. He really has no value. Rares just are nice stepping stones for low level players but otherwise are used to skill up cards.


On a side note. Pretty much every SR quality card is worth 1-2PP each at this point and in a month will probably all just be worth 1PP each.

Finishing an Event

People are built differently. Some people will fight a losing battle to the end, others will cut their the losses and move on, but some people will always win.

Now, I have been that blind bull that pushes a losing battle until the very end...I don't like it. Generally, I only do that when I'm particularly angry or don't care. This is probably the worst case scenario for anybody who wants to profit off of an event. The reason is, when you push hundreds of PP into a losing battle, you're gimping yourself for the next one. It's a Pyrrhic Victory. People can literally 'win' themselves into the poor house.

Now, I've been the second type of person as well, that guy who cuts his losses. This will normally be the result of frustration and I compare it to flipping the monopoly board. Realistically, this is me throwing a hissy fit that I'm not going to get where I want and I've already invested X amount and I'm just done. I used to be more like this in games, and even now I will get this way for a short time. The key is to step back and look at everything, and this leads into the third type of people.

Always winning. Some people will finish every event with more than they put in. This is almost always accomplished by people who step back and look at all facets of the game and where they are at. It's accomplished when people look at the time tables of games and graph highs and lows. This is the type of gamer I am now. Although I'm always susceptible to one and two, I tend to end up at this point.

In MMOs I've graphed and tracked auction house data down to how certain times of day effected prices. I did this to the point I almost got banned in vanilla WoW for messing with the entire market on my server. In free to play MMOs I've identified needs of players and used that to get people to gift me cash shop items which I then sold for huge profit.

Now, I know, that appears like a huge waste of time for some, but I often find engaging in those activities more fun than talking politics in chat.

What's this have to do with Marvel?

Simple, we are at that point in the event where players are deciding whether they are going to be the bull, cut their losses, and some are looking at profiting.

During these last couple of days if you want to bull it, do it. It's awesome when you hit your target, but if you miss, it's infuriating. If you're going to quit frustrated at all the issues that occurred this event...that's your right. But I'm saying there's an alternative.

Some players are quitting and selling their event cards cheap, other players are intending to bull their way through and are picking up event cards. If you're smart you can clear about 10 PP as a middleman for trades. Look for people selling a card for a certain amount...let them know you might have a buyer, go into one of your other trade chats and ask if anybody wants to buy x card for (Their Price+5-10PP.) If you have somebody who says yes, tell the person you'll buy it and you clear the profit.

Not only that, there are people who are selling their solid non-raid cards at a discount to get that last bit of PP to push. One guy in my Alliance during the Dr. Doom Event Liquidated his entire deck during the last couple days to earn 2 Dooms. If you buy low at the end of the event, you can normally sell for a profit down the road.

Finally, have fun. Do what you think will result in the most fun for you. I find this type of thing fun, but if you'll have more fun blindly pushing, that's what you should do. If you're not having fun, it's fine to take a break.

The message I'm trying to push here is to look at the greater picture for this event and try to profit where you can. Whether you win or lose is entirely up to how active you are willing to be and how broad a view you can achieve. Yes, its a lot for an android TCG, but that's because this is how I have fun.