Community Thoughts on Medical Revamp 2021

Please read the outside hitting section. As a bounty collected by a non faction member is considered an outside hit.

To be honest I think these changes will make it much harder for a newer player to complete, and Im not sure I see how it actually increases wars. Just the opposite I suspect. By changing revives like this, you have made it difficult for underdogs to get around their stat disadvantage which in turn will make it much less likely they can fight or hold their own.

But ohh well. Not the end of the world or anything so im hardly freaking out over it. But this does seem like an across the board step back. It hurts revivers, it makes it harder to win wars as an underdog alliance or a new player... which in turn i suspect will actually lead to fewer wars (why join a war when the results are pre-determined much more clearly).

I'd like to be wrong though. And freely admit i'm coming at it from a relatively inexperienced pov and so COULD be wrong.. So we shall see.

There is a lot to unpack with this update. It is 100% reasonable for players to have reservations about this change. It is a big change! I would encourage people to not rush to judgement.

Lets back up a bit and discuss how we got here. A few years ago, territory warring was introduced. Under territory warring, you had to be out of the hospital standing up on the wall like a sitting duck in order to be gaining wall points. At the same time, your opponent had to keep knocking you off that wall. Revives were the only reasonable way to keep getting out of the hospital and getting on that wall. Not surprisingly, territory warring made the demand for revives skyrocket and thus the cost of wars ramped up as well. It then followed that less and less factions were willing to fight because it was just too expensive. If you thought you would lose, you wouldn’t want to incur the expense. If you weren’t sure whether you would win or lose, factions would give it a try for a day or two, then the losing side would always stop so as to not incur more expense.

So, the simple fact is that something had to happen. The war system had grinded to a near halt and Ched had Ranked Warring on the drawing board. Ranked Warring promises to frequently match up factions (who want to participate) in reasonable wars. The game has been starving for Ranked Warring and it wouldn't have worked if it was too expensive to participate.

Ched could have just removed med cooldown or massively boosted meds, but that would have destroyed reviving. Once the decision was made to not destroy reviving, the only choice left is to limit the number of lives. Once you decide to limit lives, then you decide on how many lives and the mix of attaining those lives through meds or revives.

This change is especially tricky because it requires a change in mindset from unlimited lives to limited lives. That won't come easy to a lot of people. Those of you that have been around a while will remember that under the old warring system, the hospital was your friend. You would stay in the hospital so as to not give your opponent a target, then pop out when you needed to do stuff. It is a totally different way of thinking. We all survived under the old system. We still enjoyed the game. People are going to want to bein the hospital in Ranked Warring when they are not making hits. When you are in the hospital, you are not running up your finite med cooldown and/or revives.

Comments on some of the specific changes:

1. The changes to meds will make sense after you think about them. The 6-hour cooldown is scary at first, but a blood bag only uses 30 minutes. When everyone is on war upgrades, it will always be two blood bags to get out of the hospital. Faction specials make the cooldown 9 hours.

2. Fortitude is going to become a more important tree branch.

3. Hospitalization merits will be more important.

4. The outside hit mitigation was necessary. Med cooldown/revives are now a finite resource and can be run up by people who are not a party to the war.

5. You had best have your revives turned off, especially right before a war.

6. Defending a surprise attack has always been difficult. It will become a bit more difficult if you are defending and don’t have wartime faction specials. It will be OK. You might lose a territory then have to fight to regain it.

7. Revivers now have a lot more depth to their game path with the reviver skill rating. Skilled revivers will be able to command better pricing.

8. A few years ago, reviving was a starter job special that was mostly just used to resolve Xanax overdoses, getting mug targets out of the hospital, and a little bit of warfare. Territory warring changed all of that, until costs got out of control. Reviving was never meant to be so important. I know it seems at this moment like the revivers have gotten screwed by this update, but I think this visually explains the potential:

[image: i.imgur.com]


There are two things I think Ched got wrong on this update:

1. The med cooldown should be 12 hours, not 6. Last I checked, people do sleep and have lives, so having some extra cooldown room would allow everyone to use their full amount. Expecting semi-casual players to log in every 6 hours is not realistic. However, the extra cooldown would really only help you in the beginning of a war or when you are less active.

2. The mechanics behind the way the reviver skill is applied are not great in my opinion. I think this will result nobody wanting revives from low level revivers during wars because you recover much less life from a low skilled reviver (as low as 1%). Premium revivers will flourish and unskilled revivers will wither away. Additionally, very few people will want to expend the enormous amount of energy needed to become a skilled reviver so a “barrier to entry” into the skilled revive market is created that very few will be willing to overcome. It would be better if the recipient recovered 50% of life regardless of reviver skill, then reviver skill can add an additional 50%.Additionally, the way the revive success chance scales down in a straight line with each successive revive is suboptimal. It would be much better if the success rate were really high for the early revives then dropped off quickly for later revives. Doing it the way it is set up now is going to create a lot of extra cost for factions and enormous frustration for revivers with failed revives, as well as furthering that barrier to entry for young/aspiring revivers. Reducing the pipeline of future revivers will only result in higher revive prices which is totally contrary to the goal of this update. So, I think these mechanics need to be tweaked so they aren’t so impactful on young/aspiring revivers.

Overall, this is a good and necessary update. Ched just needs to tweak the mechanics a bit, preferably now, rather than in a year. There is no question the revive costs now are really bad and have negatively affected warring. To give you an idea of how bad the revive costs could get, last year NS and CR had a war that cost their factions $6 billion and $7.2 billion respectively in revives in 25 hours. CR probably would have continued to fight, but after losing the first wall, it was just too expensive to continue. However, the top factions have that kind of money. Nobody is crying for them. It is the other competitive factions outside of the top 10 that just don’t have the resources to pay big revive bills. For them, they have to get money from individual members or just surrender. It is hard to think through all of the implications of this update and how it will affect each faction. Hopefully Ched will be open to making changes quickly if something isn’t going well, although that has been a problem in the past. Like every change before this one, players will adapt.

[image: cdn.discordapp.com]

Woulda been better with a cat