Trade Wars

Trade Wars just went live.

Similar to the city raid, it's a teamwork event where the whole city works together to unlock rewards.
Players can contribute gold, gems, items, chests, bags and do PvP fights to score points for the city.
And last but not least, all cities will be competing for extra prizes: The ranking of the city in the event competitions will determine the extra prizes we'll all recieve.
Only the top 100 cities will recieve a new blueprint from it for example.


Teamwork for this event is even more important than it has been for raids, as it rapidly becomes more expensive to score extra points for individual players.
Which is also why I'll greatly appreciate feedback of what we'd want to accomplish and expect from this event as a city.
Because we'll have to find a way to do this event that's fair for everyone, that we're all going to be happy with.

Everything is still new right now, so for the time being I'm just going to go with a "let's see how far we can get".
But what I will say is that it is quite cheap to buy extra pvp fights and contribution points for gems (at least the first few). I know gems are very precious to everyone, but if everyone would be willing to reinvest some of the gems they can claim from the rewards back into scoring more points, we'll all end up getting a lot more gems by the looks of it.



Personally:
-I'd definately want to get my hands on at least the new blueprint the event offers.
I'll do my best to contribute what I can to help unlock as much rewards as possible for the city, and if anyone needs gold, as usual: spam spam spam city requests for horns =)
Or maybe we'll come up with some better ideas to help eachother out along the way, I'm always open for suggestions =)

I think it would be great if we could establish a minimum "fair share" similar to what we have done for raids. The trick will be determining what that should be. Do we know how many points it takes to get to tier 40 in the TW. I expect that we should have no problem getting in the top 100 cities in order to get the blueprint.

Also since, as you pointed out, the pvp fights seem to be the easiest way to score points provided you have a good winning team, I think a good tutorial/guide to what a good team is would be very helpful. I for one do NOT know what that is given my usually winning only 1/3 of my fights and the TW requiring you to win 2/3 of them.

Also do you have to be a minimum level in order to get each tier of rewards from the TW similar to the requirements for raids and if so do we know what they are?

I know, lots of questions, so for now I agree we just "see how far we can get" and keep track of as much information as we can so we can maximize our return on our investment, especially when it comes to gems. I agree that we should all be willing to reinvest all of our TW gem winnings as the rest of the rewards are more than worth it. The real question is how to invest any other gems and coins the best way.

Personally I would be willing to invest whatever I can to help us unlock as many rewards as possible and definitely make sure we stay in the top 100 as the rewards for TW are much nicer than those for raids.

I saw posts with estimates of it taking around 2.4M points to finish the event to unlock all rewards (Even the #1 city is barely above 1M so far, so no one knows for sure yet).
But it implies it would take nearly 100K per player = 25K a day.  
From what I calculated, that's only possible if every player would be willing to donate way more gems than what they'd receive back in rewards... I think very few players (at least in our city) are going to be willing to do that for an ultimate charm.

about the gem investments:
-The steps for PvP & direct investments keep increasing: 1-10-50-100-150-180-220-???
-*edit:* The direct investment costs reset daily now (PvP does not)
-The costs of extra contribution sets is fixed and always stays 100 gems per extra set.
Time will tell what the best option is, I've seen a lot of players mention primal chests which are worth 200 points each for contribution. But those are very rare (1 weekly from the raid), so I'm expecting those will be unaffordable to most players soon and we won't be able to rely on them in the future.
I think the standard contribution item will shift towards dwarvish chests (100 points) as alternative for "hard" item days.


PvP wise:
There are several players with succesfull teams in our city that will gladly share their builds. Hoping they will all post them =)
For those with access to Yue, I would recommend copying Squark's.

I know Zarus has a good de-buff team build for the arena, and I use a break/buff team myself. I'd suggest trying several builds after players share them and see which one works best with the heroes you have. (for more idea's & builds, there's also a PvP guide on the official forums)

What I currently use myself for PvP (from left to right):
- Edward(Inspiring), Charles (Absorb), Fiora(Holy), Oneira (Purify), Louca (Field repair) & one 100% breakchance item on each (rest simply the highest power items you have, as item skills have no effect in the arena)
- Without packs, before I got charles I used : Edward(Inspiring), Fiora(Holy), Oneira (Purify), Darthos (Improvisation), Louca (Field repair) & one 100% breakchance item on each
(Quite often see variations to my current set-up without Edward, but with a Fransesca/Lorelei using a debuff in the middle spot)

And a method that works well to ensure more easy wins is to try and keep your arena ranking low so you get easier opponents. Downside of that is it takes a lot more effort & you won't get the special champion's bags the 4K+ regular arena has to offer and CJ's gained are slightly lower… so I'm still messing around to find a decent balance with it myself.  
I'm not sure what others found works best. For now I'm focussing on scoring as much trade wars points as possible so I crashed my regular arena rank down (tip: you can do this quickly by losing all regular arena fights on purpose).
Once you've lowered your arena rank, you can keep it stable and still score some crown jewels: With regular arena's I'm just scoring 3 wins (4CJ's) with my normal team now and after that I switch to 2K naked power heroes again to lose all the remaining fights from that round to lower my ranking back again. And repeating that with every round, seems to work allright.
+Switching to 3 lower heroes with skills that compliment my 2 normal high power ones while afk to ensure losing but not handing out grand victories to opponents.


Grand Victories seem to be the key to scoring many points from the PvP in trade wars. A normal victory gives 125 points, but all 5 heroes winning their fights gives 250 points.

I agree with all of your observations. 25K per day would require a gem investment that frankly I do not think is worth it.
Thanks for listing the investment increase for PvP and direct. If anyone has invested more could they please post it. It would be nice to see if the curve flattens out. 100-150 (+50) 150-180 (only +30).

Primal chests are the highest value item I have seen at 200, with dwarven at 100. But even they will not last as you can donate at least 60 items over the 4 days of the TW. I don't think even with the high chest drop rate any of us are getting 60 per week.  So it will be good to find out a high value easy to make item for each item type as that is what most of us will need to donate when we run out of chests.

Thanks for the help with the PvP groups. I put together a group that sounded good "on paper" but it never wins enough to get 7 crowns . I look forward to seeing the group from the players who I see regularly winning 7.

As for a good target, it looks like level 25 (the next one we are about to unlock) takes 600K points which would be 24K per player. The next level with a "nice" reward is level 34 which I think would require way to many points to be worth it to us. So perhaps a "fair share" would be whatever points are needed to get to level 20.

For certain days we can definately help eachother out with items. We'll just have to compile a list in the future of what's good.
Some items have very high values.
-Boots for example: Starfrost boots are 250points at flawless quality, 203 at great and 172 at good.
Many of us have access to that pack, so requests at good (max request 10) & great quality (max request 5) depending on how many sets players can still fill would be a good city request on those days.
Big downside: it's a lvl 54 item, so players that do not own the pack would have to be lvl 49 to city request them =(

-For guns, lvl 49 stakeshooters (city raid bp) are really nice. Flawless version was somewhere around 349 points each, didn't have time to check all versions unfortunately as I logged in 5mins before the event end and rushed through my contribution sets & arena's very quickly to make it before the deadline.

On most of the other days I really stuggled to find any decent items though, most lvl 50ish flawless I had, have only been slightly over 100 points so I went primal chests on those days for now.

(Dwarvish chests I know many players still have huge amounts stockpiled, heard viniciro mention he had 700ish, I still have ~1000 as well, as I usually get those in large amounts during raids. Downside is we can't transfer them easily as the city requests for them only allow players to ask for 1 =( But because of the high drop rate I'll expect them to stay reasonably affordable on the trade house, at least cheaper as the craftable items on "hard item" days that give the same amount of points).

Just adding the screenshots from the discord conversation about it here for those not on discord.
(City discord channel is https://discord.gg/jAAJF6d )












and I forgot to screenshot it, but Zarus also mentionned in city chat that we should implement something for a fair share, with me keeping track of averages for busy weeks.

2nd trade wars just ended. Just copying the earlier city chat in case anyone missed it.
(Bottom to Top reading:)







Also just adding: Zarus, I saw you mention rising tempest fusing with common + flawless junk to try and get an epic a while ago.
Path I'm planning to use for those will be (all in an upgraded fusion slot):
1 Good > 1 Great
1 Great + Basic Charm (+25%) > 1 Flawless
2 Flawless + Powerfull charm (+50%) > 1 Epic

2 good qualities should turn into an epic version for sure with this method. Without risking an undesirable outcome as you'd have with using flawless junk items. (And without using ultimate charms… could do the last step with just 1 flawless with that, but I'm saving mine)
Not sure if there's any more efficient way.. I'd love to know if so (or if I overlooked anything).

Overview of the two trade wars events so far & players average contribution in comparison to the Top 10, Top 50 and Top 100 city averages:




First event we hit top 50 =  765gems + 400ish gems worth of materials  = 1.1K+ gems per player.
and 18 powerful charms & a blueprint on top of that.

The only reason we’re all able to claim that much is thanks to the high average investments in the city. The amazing value of those rewards, should also give everyone the capability of hitting the contribution points needed to help unlock them again in the future.
Also means that for the future, I’ll be basing fair share on the rewards that are claimable in the city.

The 2nd event just ended, city ranked #57 with a city average of 31.009 points, with 1 player missing that means we had an average contribution of 32.301 per player. That’s only 871 points below the average per player we would have needed to hit Top 50 again.

I already pointed out we’d all be able to claim at least 665gems+300gems worth of materials+ 13 powerful charms from this event & asked players to please reinvest some of them and not just 11 daily. (As I noticed 5 out of 7 players invested only 11gems after the reset).
But the same thing still happened on the last day… end result being that, even with 25% of our city exceeding the top 10 cities in contributions, we couldn’t even hold on to the top 50 =(

It’s going to be a matter of time & sharing information to figure out what gives the most effective/cheapest contribution points. But reaching 1/25th of the points needed to claim the top 100 rewards shouldn’t be a problem for anyone.

Not even optimal but just a quick calculation:

Close to 25K points already, purely by reinvesting the gems we can claim for sure.
Last 100 gem investment step, as I already pointed out in city chat, might be better to spend elsewhere like for example on an extra contribution set on easy item days, or for PvP to get more points out of it, or on item purchases to get more out of the contribution sets.


So another example would be this:



With both examples, the 665 gems directly claimable from the rewards should be enough to cover the costs of reaching almost 28K contribution points per person to reach the top 100.
Which leaves a minimum gain of 300gems worth of materials, 13 powerful charms & more.

Considering the value of those +50% fusion success charms alone, that is a pretty huge reward to get for a few minutes effort a day.
The amount of gems that can be saved and/or made by using them, or as some players have pointed out, the fact that they’re $3  each to buy from the shop, makes them highly desirable.
As a result many players are also willing to invest far beyond 1K+ gems in order to get them from the event.

I’m not going to expect or require players to contribute more than the rewards they can claim from this event. But with a minimum set at 1/25th of what it takes to get in the top 100 , I’m pretty sure that with those willing to go beyond, we can reliably get into the top 50.
That would imply a minimum of around 27.5K-28K. (I don't plan on enforcing that with a city kick on the next one yet!)

For future city recruitment, I plan to be a lot more strict and set the entry requirement higher to at least match our city average to ensure the rewards won’t decrease.


P.S.
Gold + Chests: shouldn’t be an issue for a single person in our city… a single horn city request gives 90M. But craft them into dragonfire potions and you have 250M+. We’ve always been offering to fill requests of those for players in need of gold. Regularly reminding players that we don’t mind at all if they spam city requests for them when they can. And that they can also buy several dwarvish chests from that gold as it’s not effective to ask for those in requests as those can only be transferred 1 at a time.

Feedback & questions always welcome

I missed last day pvp, so shame on me - missed 5k pts.

I vote for fair share like that:
1.2G - 4.8G / 2 weeks  - is pretty affordable price - exactly 30 submits giving 1800 pts
161gem - 644 / 2 weeks - affordable, raids give 300 gems each and we get from TW but the main reason we get charms saving materials for thousands of gems
15 dwarven chests - they come in abudance on pre gaias quests, so cant imagine how can anyone hass less than few hundreds already

1800 + 3000 + 1500 = 6300 / day = 25400 / TW
the lack of min points can be subsided with PvP (+extra tickets, which are 1/10/50)

No reactions or questions yet from the group that will be most affected by this change, just from the the players that already contribute well beyond their share for the rewards we can claim.

So I’m hoping the silence means that everyone expects to be able to cover it on the next events.
Next trade wars starts 12hours after the next raid ends: April 15th at 12UTC

I've already posted this in discord, city chat & the forum's raid section, but just in case anyone missed it, there will be no Trade Wars in May:

Re: Upcoming Trade Wars Schedule
postby CC_Alfred » Wed Apr 24, 2019 12:21 am
Hey everyone! I wanted to thank you all for providing feedback for Trade Wars. There will be no Trade Wars during the month of May as we want to take the time to digest the feedback and work with the team on making potential changes. Thank you all for your patience and understanding!

We'll just have to see how this affects us next month.

Also.. Maharilya has let us know she's quitting the game & left the city. So I am looking for a replacement atm, that's willing to match our cities average contribution, to ensure the claimable rewards will remain stable.
I've placed the city entry requirement for Trade Wars at covering at least 1/25th of the rewards that are claimable in the city. (With an indication of the 40K avg contribution per player we had on the last one).

(on a sidenote, I also removed some of the other old city entry requirements in the recruitment post, as 1G+ city investments recommended & <1600 raid exceptions for lower levels looked completely out of place with the high Trade Wars requirement).