Club Champions - 2 Week Retrospective

[omnijew]

Just wanted to touch on a few problems we are seeing come up with the Club Champion feature now that it has been running for a couple weeks.. I'm speaking as a representative of the Club, having talked to most of the members (we are actually pretty active in chat).  Every player is active (last online time < 24h for entire club), and ranging in level from 350-450, give or take.

When the feature first came out, we had good participation, a few players were spamming kobans to make sure we were completing the event in time.  Several of them, myself included, were able to get enough shards to get the girl.

Now that a few players have the girl, we are seeing participation change.  It's not decreasing.. players are still using tickets and fighting the girl, but the members who already have the girl are not spending kobans for extra attacks, just hitting the Champion on their regular cooldown, 10-15 times a day on average.  It's hard to ask players to do more than that when the rewards do not scale with effort once you have the girl.  Without people spending lots of kobans on extra attacks, we are no longer beating the Champion.. only getting to 40-60% impression.  The lack of expectation of success now is driving the players who don't have the girl yet to not spend kobans either, so we are in this spiral of worsening preformance.  I've told people that if they really want the girl, they have to be willing to drop a few thousand kobans and go hard for a few days.. but it really does leave casual players in the dust.  We're seeing this gradual slide in the number of total attacks being done, even though we're still getting 30-35 active participants on the Club Champion every day.  I'm curious if people from other clubs have been having the same experience?

We've been discussing a few potential solutions to address this..  Not sure if that exceeds the scope of this forum, but might be worth some discussion.

1)  Faster Champion Decay - 10 failed attempts to impress means 10 days for the Champion to lose a level.  Considering that the Champion only sticks around for 30 days before rotating out, this is simply too slow.  If we're capping out at 60% impression, with a Champion at level 216, available one month out of three, that means it'll decay 12 levels per year, and be nearly a decade before it decays to 50% of it's current power level.  I'm not sure if that's the intent or not.. it seems unnecessarily punishing.  If the Champion gets weaker on failed days at a faster rate, that means a shorter delay before it gets into a beatable position.. as it is right now the casual players who can't afford to spend tons of kobans, or dont have a huge stockpile of challenge tickets, don't have a realistic shot at ever getting the girl.

2)  Scaling rewards with participation after getting the girl - We could use a way to motivate people who have the girl already to do more than just the bare minimum.  If I do one attack and the rest of the club beats the Champion, I get one affection item.  If I spend 1200 kobans on attacks and the club beats the Champion.. I get one affection item.  That's a really, really expensive affection item.  Yeah, I'm helping out the other members of the club, but that's a pretty steep price and I'm not willing to mandate that all my members spend kobans every day on this.  If someone is contributing more and more attacks, then I would like to see some kind of linearity in the rewards coming their way.  If the intent of the system is to encourage teamwork, then it has to be rewarding for everyone involved.

3)  Changing reward structure - Everyone knows that the girl is the real reward and everything else is secondary.  We had a member suggest, and it was a popular suggestion in the discussion, that a preferable system would see the Club Champion work more like the Season system.  Have an impression threshold that you must reach as a group before the end of the month.  If you reach it, the whole club gets the girl at the end of the month.  Bonus rewards (Affection items, in this case) would be awarded based on overall participation.  That's a much larger change and again, probably beyond the scope of what the devs want to even consider, but I figured it was worth a mention.

Anyways, I think that's a big enough wall of text.  Thanks for sticking with it so long.

TL;DR - Can't convince people in the club to spend kobans on extra attacks after they get the girl, so we're having trouble beating the Club Champion now.  Widespread problem or just us?

[PowerCast]

I'd really agree with 1 and 2, especially 2.  If you still contribute to where you would have gotten 1-50 shards or something, should you at minimum get that number of affection items?  This might be a good way to introduce a 5th tier of affection items too.

The third idea is interesting but would probably be a lot more work to implement than the first couple.

[Largy]

I think the ONLY issue is that it full resets if u dont beat him.
100% reset is brutal.
 

Edited February 28, 2021 by Largy

[omnijew]

1 hour ago, Largy said:

I think the ONLY issue is that it full resets if u dont beat him.
100% reset is brutal.
 

So obvious when I see it.  Not sure how we never thought of this, but you're absolutely right.  If it only dropped 10% impression like a regular champion it would not be a problem at all.

[Largy]

Well, 10% would be too easy (ideal for every1), 40m on a 400m champ is nothing.
It would be more .... 'normal' if it was something like 50% of current impession. (so if u had done 200m dmg to him, he would drop to 100m)

[Methos2]

3 hours ago, Largy said:

Well, 10% would be too easy (ideal for every1), 40m on a 400m champ is nothing.
It would be more .... 'normal' if it was something like 50% of current impession. (so if u had done 200m dmg to him, he would drop to 100m)

You are right about the full reset. I don't think 10% would be too easy. The problem is that once the heavy hitters get the girl, their participation would diminish. So over time, lower level members would have to fend for themselves. A 50% drop in a day would be too difficult for them. The higher level members can help but that wouldn't do any good because most of the impression would then go to the higher level players who only get a token reward. The lower level members would still get crappy shard drop.

Edited February 28, 2021 by Methos2

[jelom]

I see these possible adjusts to the club champion ordered by impact in the feature, some of them have been said above:

- reducing impression lost. My proposal: 25%-50%

- faster champion level/tier decay. Every 2-3 losses

- reducing the initial champion strength. 10%-20%

- increase minimum shard range with the percentage of impression done. Up to 10-12 should be enough

- scaling rewards with participation after getting the girl. Up to 5-8 affection items. It can even be a reward range as with shards (example: 1-3 or 1-8 items). Or adding other randomized rewards, as books.

[Xemnas]

1 minute ago, jelom said:

I see these possible adjusts to the club champion ordered by impact in the feature, some of them have been said above:

- reducing impression lost. My proposal: 25%-50%

- faster champion level/tier decay. Every 2-3 losses

- reducing the initial champion strength. 10%-20%

- increase minimum shard range with the percentage of impression done. Up to 10-12 should be enough

- scaling rewards with participation after getting the girl. Up to 5-8 affection items. It can even be a reward range as with shards (example: 1-3 or 1-8 items). Or adding other randomized rewards, as books.

Fully agree, mostly on the points 1 and 5. I got the girl and i still want to help my members to get her, but it really sucks if i get only 1 affection item after all the effort (and i'm at the point that i really need affection, i have 37 girls "waiting" their turn :) )

[Karyia]

4 minutes ago, jelom said:

I see these possible adjusts to the club champion ordered by impact in the feature, some of them have been said above:

- reducing impression lost. My proposal: 25%-50%

- faster champion level/tier decay. Every 2-3 losses

- reducing the initial champion strength. 10%-20%

- increase minimum shard range with the percentage of impression done. Up to 10-12 should be enough

- scaling rewards with participation after getting the girl. Up to 5-8 affection items. It can even be a reward range as with shards (example: 1-3 or 1-8 items). Or adding other randomized rewards, as books.

Yes, please! 👌 

Namely the "reducing impression" and the "minimum shard range", those are absolute feature killers (for example, possibly doing 50% impression and getting a 1 for such a feat should NEVER be possible).

Random boosters as potential rewards would be neat, since they would probably be useful towards the feature itself.

I would also suggest that, since the champ improves tiers (or whatever you want to call it), so should the rewards improve accordingly.

 

[Hastur]

4 minutes ago, Methos2 said:

The higher level members can help but that wouldn't do any good because most of the impression would then go to the higher level players who only get a token reward. The lower level members would still get crappy shard drop.

That's the position my club is currently finding itself in.  We're still able to ensure that nobody's efforts are wasted (100% completion thus far, mostly through our 14th challenge) but it's only a matter of time before our heavy-hitters' resources get drained which perpetuates that downward spiral.  I think only one of us has the girl, 2-4 are "very close" (70+ shards I'd imagine), and we have ~50% participation.

We're walking a tightrope due to the inactive members being lower level and therefore bringing down the Club Champion level for everyone, while simultaneously needing more active participation to give everyone better shard ranges.  Those inactive members also contributed heavily to improving our club rankings back in the day & some of them still like to come back casually; it would be selfish/wrong to "clean house" but no doubt many clubs are struggling with this, too.

Right now we're trying to have everyone participate in at least one battle (good for all; best risk-reward for low levels) and do a Club Champion every 36 hours or so (get shards as frequently as possible).

Suggestions/hopes

1. Eliminating the all-or-nothing aspect of Club Champions would be a great start.
2. Deduct Impression dealt by participants who already have the girl from the Club Champion's total Impression BEFORE calculating shard ranges for others... or otherwise add/spread Impression dealt by participants with girls evenly among participants still fighting for shards (similar to the way Legendary Contests work- if you've won the girl, future efforts don't hurt the chances of people that haven't yet).

[RemiImer]

 

I think too 10% is good. My club members below 400 lvl hit like 300-400k impression for each atack. And make about 8-12 atack in 3-4h play time without kobans. Normal player cant or dont want sacrefice more time. And this is about only max 3-4 mln impression for player. Average Havy hitter whith dont target girl shard maybe make 50-80 mln impression with kobans(1-3 players who want help after they have girl). If there be 400mln/520mln and lose 200 mln they never finish. Havy hitter probably will not help next day, they too dont want lose more kobans than need. And for normal players 40 mln alot. Dont counts old players who have hundreds or thousands ticket for normal casual players use 20 ticekst is also alot.

 

Edited February 28, 2021 by RemiImer
dmg= impression

[Fiel]

Yes, I agree with you guys.

At Tier 2, we are forced to sacrifice many, many tickets and Kobans and the reward is very low for the amount of tickets spent.. There is definitely a scaling problem involved., The Champion is both too difficult, and this will waste the tickets of the weaker clubs who can't break though.

But it will also "waste" the tickets of the stronger clubs. Like the one I'm in, there are many friendly players who will sacrifice their tickets to help the few who still lacks shards here at the end of the month, but the reward they get for the time and effort they spend on helping the last few people who missed the girl is disappointing.

Keep in mind each ticket costs 114 - 120 Koban. The club combined spends many hundreds of tickets, and the prize is very weak in comparison.

Personally I can take the loss, but I fear for the the weaker players in our club who don't perform well in the League, they are really sacrificing beyond their means of recovering. And this part is really worrying.

[DvDivXXX]

12 hours ago, omnijew said:

2)  Scaling rewards with participation after getting the girl - We could use a way to motivate people who have the girl already to do more than just the bare minimum.  If I do one attack and the rest of the club beats the Champion, I get one affection item.  If I spend 1200 kobans on attacks and the club beats the Champion.. I get one affection item.  That's a really, really expensive affection item. 

Absolutely. And even for 1 ticket, it's a pretty lame reward to begin with. I suspect it's largely due to the fact that affection items are on a short list of resources that Kinkoid doesn't value correctly at all compared to the actual game economy. This is also evident when you see real-money bundles offered for like 10 to 20 bucks with a bunch of epic affection items as their centerpiece... For the price, you can get an actually good bundle (the only one left in regular rotation is the €7 one for 1.8k kobans and a few extra goodies), and maybe also a silver card and/or the season's pass. From the mid-game onward, for 42 kobans, you get 8 affection items that are at least epic, and each have about a 33% chance of turning legendary. There's no way 50 epic items are worth real money as is.

[Makinen]

In all honesty, i'd have to agree with Johnny Suzy Test on Club Champions.

Looking at the one our Club has, it's completely impossible.

The Club i'm in has 22 members, inactives included, with an average level of 122. Most players are around that level, +/- 100, with two exceptions that are also still below 300.

Chad is level 61. Chad has 146,400,000 HP. Chad expects us to get through that in a day. F--k Chad.

I'm actually close to the average level in the Club (111) and, with maxed stats and a decent team, i can expect to deal around 215-220k or so to him. This means, he requires around 700 hits from all members combined to go down, or -- taking my damage as the average -- 32 hits from every member, or 8 hours of continuous hitting every 15 minutes from every single person in the Club. All within 24 hours of course, as otherwise no one gets anything.

And as a "reward", everyone would need to do that another 29 times to actually get the Girl, assuming an average drop rate of 3.5 shards (mean of 1-6 spread).

I mean, seriously, i get that you want to encourage people to work as a Club a bit more, but the rewards versus amount of effort required is so poorly balanced i can't even take it as anything other than a joke myself.

Edited February 28, 2021 by Makinen

[Pelinor]

If one affection item is lame try getting zero when you are the one who finishes off the CC! This happened to me twice this month. The reward system has to be fixed (support ticket sent).

 

Followup: This morning KK responded with a confirmation that I did receive a affection item in both cases. So that's good. Now if they can fix the bug where the winners screen doesn't show up the mechanics portion for the CC will be even better. 😀

Edited March 1, 2021 by Pelinor
added followup

[SoggyShorts]

Being a teamy sort, I really WANT to like this feature.  However, it's patently unsustainable for average Clubs, which have average or above-average participation rates, a level spread and (to read upthread and by direct experience in my own), even above-average power and generosity in their player base.  

Here we are in Month 2 of Club Champions.  Shard ranges still begin with ONE.  Greater participation increases exposure to the RNG, ergo, increases frustration, as it did in Month 1.  We presume (too early to tell) that finishers still get a single Aff item for the trouble (and time and resource drain) of helping out the club members who are still working on finishing.  To boot, the girl's derivative from last month's.  10 minutes on Photoshop, Presto! She has a different top! Back to drinking beer.... The feature is either slipshod or intentionally soft-competitive: Get the girl while there's the momentum of self-interest in the club, or you're out, but the girl will be back in a few months.

I suppose that the third option is that, like in many games, this is a feature that isn't designed to be played by all and isn't designed to be cooperative.  If you still require ymen, then CC constitutes an opportunity cost.  If you still have things to do in the regular Champions, then you are faced with crushing resource competition AND the ymen opportunity cost.  However, if you have a big, moldy pile of unused tickets because you finished the Champions a year or more ago, now you have something to do with them and can absorb the reduced ymen payout (assuming that yours is reduced), vs regular Champs.

I REALLY like the idea of impression decay, as expressed above.  Regular champs have it; it seems consistent with the game for THIS one to have it.  Kudos for thinking of it!  Between that, re-scaling difficulty, providing appropriate rewards as incentive for finishers to help clubmates, making shard drops fair and realistic, dropping the short rest requirement for platinum card holders (another perk that would be congruent with the regular champs), actually putting time into the art, and a half dozen other little tweaks, we might eventually arrive at a feature that is fair, enjoyable, and playable by the majority of players and clubs. 

[Honza]

As someone who don't even KNOW that the champion is supposed to get weaker after you don't beat it ten times (hey, perhaps having this information available somewhere would help) I'm not able to suggest specific fixes, although both the impression decay and the champion getting weaker faster sounds like good idea.

Our club has barely active leader, so we can't optimize the members even if we would want to (and I don't think forcing clubs to optimize this way is right). We had some success against first champion, but the second one is too hard ... and participation goes lower as people start thinking it's not worth it as there is no chance to get the girl anyway.

[GeorgeMTO]

4 hours ago, Honza said:

As someone who don't even KNOW that the champion is supposed to get weaker after you don't beat it ten times (hey, perhaps having this information available somewhere would help)

I recommend reading the patch notes each week, as this information was stated in there.

[Honza]

48 minutes ago, GeorgeMTO said:

I recommend reading the patch notes each week, as this information was stated in there.

... ok, sorry. I though I did but apparently I missed that sentence. Still, the three related sentences

• Depending on the progression of the Club, the Champion will have a respective level and tier
• When the tier Changes, the Champions levels up
• After 10 failed attempts to impress the Champion, the Champion tier will revert back to the previous one.

is not exactly specific enough to understand how the champion level and tier work, but it's true that the bit about him reverting in 10 attempts is there.

...

... also, considering our champion is tier 0, I probably shouldn't expect him to get weaker. Level 184. I still think the previous champion was weaker. Any info WHY is he level 184?

[Kenrae]

4 hours ago, Honza said:

... also, considering our champion is tier 0, I probably shouldn't expect him to get weaker. Level 184. I still think the previous champion was weaker. Any info WHY is he level 184?

It depends on all your club members level. If you all level up or some high level players enter your club the champion level will grow accordingly.

[Alkazord]

Our champion's level rose giving him 80 more mln HP when we actually kicked 4 people out, so there's something more to the formula ( I think it was shared somewhere on the forums at some point).

[Chthugha]

What you failed to read between the lines in Kenrae's post is that it depends on average level. If you kicked four players on the bottom part of your club with respect to level, then the average level goes up, which in turn will make the champion stronger.

[Kenrae]

Yes. I have a couple of very low level inactive players in my club that I'm so not kicking out until needed  .

[Sex&Zen]

I think that one of the real problem about the Club Champion is the way shards are given...

Just yesterday a member of my club finish the Battle with a 1-108 (!) shard ratio... and receive 3 shard... this is simply ridicolous! I mean, not all stuffs can be played only "by luck"... this can put the passion for the game in a very low level... It's fun when you can make the difference also with a little of "skills" and dedication and/or tactics don't you think?

Maybe an "at least" or minimum shard related to the numbers of battle you make will help...

My 2 cents

[Honza]

19 hours ago, Sex&Zen said:

Just yesterday a member of my club finish the Battle with a 1-108 (!) shard ratio

Which reminds me ... on one hand, the message says "All participants get one of those" ... on the other, the ratio is different for every player. So, which of those is incorrect?