I almost wish what I am typing wasn’t something that I consider to be true. But alliances in their current state are bad for the longevity of this wonderful game.
If you start as a new player ( and every game should be set up to cater for and to attract and retain new players) you will have a blast up to venom in the prologue. Then you hit your first real wall. Challenge is good, and you steel yourself to gain more covers as you try to take on the goons in dark avengers. So you decide to click the SHINEY orange ‘events’ tab. You load up one of the PvE tournaments (although to you at this point it just looks like another prologue) and you see how far you can get. The ‘rewards’ button looks nice so you click it, and then you see an ‘alliance rewards’ button. This is probably the first time you realise there are alliances unless you’ve actually been reading the annoying pop ups (assuming a lot of the player base has ADHD as most gamers do, this is less likely than you’d expect).
“How do I get me an alliance?” You ask. And then (on the iOS version at least) you hunt for the elusive button that you don’t know exists. IF you find it, you wonder how on earth you’re supposed to join an alliance when you don’t know any names. You try some obvious marvel ones. They’re full or they don’t exist. Because the system currently assumes you’re on the forums already and already have a social network.
So you don’t join an alliance, or you do, but it’s pants. And now you start to feel frustrated that so many lovely rewards are beyond your grasp. And so you log in less. And less.
That’s point 1. It can be fixed with interface changes, let’s hope they come soon.
Here’s point 2.
Due to HP costs to expand alliances the top will stay at the top, and the bottom will never catch them. It’s rich get richer…
And d3 must have made a killing on people buying HP for alliance expansion slots. So they’re not going to want to stop the gravy train. The trouble is that it creates every chance that the player base stops expanding and becomes a closed group, because it’s hard to break into the top or even the middle. Alliance rewards are replacing personal rewards (certainly in terms of covers) and for a large % of the player base they are unobtainable.
And because people have invested so much (time / real money), if you reverse it there’ll be a mutiny. Except that unless a way to level the playing field is found you’re going to stretch the top ever further from the new starter. And the more you do that the more the new starter pokes his head into the game room of MPQ sees that he can’t get anywhere and quits. Now not everyone will follow that pattern, but a significant amount will.
No / less new starters means the game will eventually die. Entropy is always inevitable, but in their current state alliances are speeding this process up.
