My opinion, there should be an automatic shield after you’re attacked that isn’t taken down when you enter a fight. Not long, maybe 5 or 10 minutes, just to keep BS like this from happening. Normally you get attacked less than once every five minutes, so it would only keep this and those 19 attacks you get the moment you put your regular shield down. Oh, and only one guy should be allowed to fight you at once
What I don’t understand is how attacks don’t happen until after I drop my shield.
In the last event it was very quiet while shielded at about 830, only a couple of attacks overnight, so I dropped the shield to try to hit 900. I complete my first match to find I’ve been attacked by two people and dropped points. WTF? And then once I’m shielded again it quietens down except for retaliations.
You can still be attacked while shielded. A shield just prevents you losing points when defeated. The attacker gains points as normal. It’s almost as if the system makes you more available if you’re not shielded. Of course that’s impossible…
When you are shielded, you are taken out of the player pool, and the only people that can find you are retaliations. But once you lower your shields… the game seems to place you in EVERYBODY’S rotation, so you get attacked at once.
But how are you supposed to build any points when you get attacked all at once? This is bullshit.
The whole game is skewed so that people with strong teams get all the chances and people with weaker teams struggle to get anything apart from a 2 star crappy card that they’ve already got
It’s generally a bad idea to drop your shield in the final 30 minutes unless you’re sure what you’re doing.
The last hour of PVP is a bloodbath since most high point targets are shielded, so the few that aren’t show up in everyone’s queue right away.
Get to the points you want earlier and stay shielded next time, don’t go for broke in the last 30 minutes. As you found out, it doesn’t end well.
The most I do is two quick fights in the last 5 minutes, I’d get torn apart if I’m unshielded even with my full 141 team.
I did not know that. Have a +1 informative recommendation.
It must leave you in queues that you are already placed in. And that explains the posts in the event forums that say something like “feel free to hit me now I’m shielded”.
And that kind of cosy arrangement at the elite levels makes me both fume and jealous.
Yep, that’s a problem, and it’s gotten worse lately. Remember the jolly times when you could play the last thirty minutes of the game? That was fun. Of course you got hit occasionally, but you could climb. I loved playing the last minutes.
Not anymore, obviously.
The problem with your suggestion is that it can be exploited. I can either have an alliance member or friend or spin up another account to fight me, but do nothing. No matching, no powers, no nothing, for the ENTIRE event. That means the whole time, no one except retaliations will see me. Free shielding for the entire event.
Even temporary timers will get exploited. People will just figure out the optimal amount to “fight” someone else, then retreat and “fight” them again, bot-style.
This has become a tricky issue and I honestly don’t have a solution to offer.
On one hand, the game shouldn’t be about who shield hops most efficiently…so getting hit during that period is your ‘punishment’ so to speak. On the other hand, as someone who DOES shield hop…it upsets you to ‘waste’ all that hp just to lose out on rankings due to quick counter attacks. 6 attacks during a hop is completely excessive and NOT realistic but counters can and do happen very quickly.
If I were to quickly brainstorm a idea for possible solutions I’d say this…
Under no circumstance can an alliance mbr ever hit another alliance mbr and reward the defending player with pts. This goes without saying I’m sure but it really has to be implemented ASAP.
2a) Your shield is NOT removed until AFTER the battle in question. This allows people who shield hop to confidently do 1 battle without fearing like they’ve wasted their effort. It doesn’t fix the shield hop problem but it satisfies the buyers and leaves the risk/reward option of doing a 2nd battle up to them.
2b) Limit the amount of shields that can be used in a PvP event. Imagine how much an event would change if you could only use 1 shield? This is possibly my solution of choice but it’s not without it’s own problems. It would also probably hurt the monetization side of the game.
Anyone else have potential solutions to offer (assuming they even see this as a problem to begin with) ?
There’s nothing special about leaving a shield state. I can guaranteed you if you shielded at 25 points since the beginning an event and unshielded in the last hour, nobody is still going to touch you. People are good at finding guys who are worth a lot of points. If you got hit by 6 guys at the same time it’s because your team is perceived as weak, and yes even a 141X3 can easily be seen as a weak team to 6 guys who are more than 200 points lower in rating. Weakness is a relative thing, and part of doing well in this game is knowing when your team is likely to be perceived as weak. And if you can’t figure out, then don’t unshield unless you’re willing to take chances. One way to think about this is to realize that all the guys you can queue up likely can queue you up as well, and you should ask yourself if the situation is reversed, would someone attack you? If you have to skip 8 guys before you find someone worth hitting, that usually means all those 8 guys you skipped will certainly attack you.
Isn’t this where queuing is supposed to come in? You are shielded and set up your 3 or 5 nodes with viable targets, and attack the first. Your shield is dropped. Only at that time do you become available as a target for everyone that the system matches you with and who needs a new set of targets, but not necessarily at the front of their queues. They’ll usually have to skip or attack at least one team to get to you. If you hit your 3 (or 5) targets and win quickly enough, you should be able to get your points without being hit yourself until after your shield is back up. I’m not sure it’s economical though in terms of HP.
Feel free to correct me if the game mechanics don’t work this way.
(Edited as you get added to queues as they are generated from the pool of available targets, not just because you’ve unshielded)