The New 200K City Raid & The Future

New City Raid
The new city raid started this weekend. Everyone seems to be pretty excited about the extra levels and new rewards the improved event has to offer =)
Up to 40 blueprint fragments, 1 key of every type (including a primal key), 1 charm of every type (including an ultimate charm) & more.

The big and obvious downside is that the new raid requires 5x as many points to complete: instead of 40K points, a total of 200K points are now needed to complete the raid.
So the average points per player needed to finish a raid, suddenly increased  from 1600 to 8000 points.
(*edit: they just announced the amount will be lowered to 160K, which means 6400 points per player)

I really wish they would have increased the raid in steps instead of 5-folding the amount overnight.. Because the way they implemented it now has high raiders leaving mid level cities, as they want to be in a city where they can get all the rewards to match their effort.
And that’s definitely something I want to prevent from happening in ours.
I’m not going to expect everyone to be able to raid 8K+ overnight, but the new rewards should help everyone to improve their teams and allow for extra castle speed boosts to improve their score.


For the future:
We are a high activity raiding city. Home to 5% of the “crazy” 10K+ raiders in this game & usually in the Top 10 cities when it comes to raid activity.
Which makes us one of the very few cities that is capable of completing the new raid.

So my priority for the future will be the same as it always has been: to ensure that the city can complete the raid every week, without pressuring or requiring people to raid far beyond what it should take to unlock those rewards.

To ensure that, I am likely to use the same system as I’ve used with the previous raid changes where they increased the amounts per player needed.
That means for any player that can’t cover their fair share (8K points), I will personally guarantee I’ll cover the difference in points on each and every raid, if I let them stay in the city.


That will mainly depend on if people are willing to put in all the time & effort it takes to increase their own score towards it, to get the higher rewards. Because it will take sending out all teams a lot more often than before & using the castle to reduce the quest time to 50%/25%/15% of the base time.
The extra raid rewards easily cover all the castle costs (1 gem = 30M), but checking the game more frequently to get to those top rewards may not be worth the effort for everyone.

Which is completely understandable & I definitely don’t want to pressure anyone into spending more time on this game than what they’re comfortable with.
But if you’re happy with the lower raid rewards & prefer just raiding a few K points every week..
one of the top raiding cities with a lot of players that want to complete the raid, is just the wrong city to be in. Because for every player here below 8K, someone else will have to cover that difference on top of their own 8K just to get their rewards.

I’ll try to keep as many players below 8K in as I can personally cover for (even on a busy weekend), to ensure no one else will be required to go 8K+ just to claim their rewards.

I will be raiding like a completely crazy person on most weekends in the near future, to ensure we finish that raid. Because I don't like the alternative of going with city removals and replacements of the lower raiders right away, as some cities are currently doing.  
But I will not be able to keep it up for long & I might be short on over-coverage on busy weekends... so you can expect me to re-evaluate the situation in a few weeks.

A bit over a month has passed since the new raid has been introduced, so time for an update & future plans.
The new city raid now takes 160K points to complete, which means the new 1/25th "fair share" is 6400points per player.

As stated before, if I allow any players that can't cover that to stay in the city, I will personally cover the difference: So no one else is required to raid beyond 6400 points.

And I want to make sure, that everyone that's willing to work towards covering the 6400 points, gets enough time to build/improve their skill based teams:
Up to the howling mountain raid, that ends 15 September, I'll cover any differences. (that's new raid #8, so a period of 2 months)

After that raid, I will slowly start reducing the total points I'm willing to cover for, untill it's back to an amount I could reliably cover for every week (even on a busy weekend):
-So after 15 September, I'll start warning the players that I wouldn't be able to cover for by raiding 40K+. (40K-6.4K= 33.6K total "cover" points)
-After 15 October, I'll start warning the players that I wouldn't be able to cover for by raiding 30K+. (30K-6.4K= 23.6K total "cover" points)
(If anyone would fall into the warning category, you always have a few more weeks to improve before I start looking for a replacement).

As for what should be considered safe: With an expected 10+ players above 6400 weekly atm, leaving 15 players to cover for:
-with 40K+: 33.6/15= 2.24K difference covered per player, so anyone above 4200points would be completely safe
-with 30K+: 23.6/15= 1.57K difference covered per player, so anyone above 4830points would be safe. Upping it to 5K+ for safety as other players may also have busy weekends.

From the very first new raid to the last one of the current cycle, that's 15 raids and almost 4 months of time to get skill based teams up and running.
That should be plenty of time for everyone, so on the raid cycle after that I'd expect everyone to be able to cover their fair share of the points it takes to finish the raid again.

I'll make a few exceptions to the fair share requirement after that period, for example for:
-Players that are playing together with friends/spouses/relatives, where I'd look at the group average instead of individual scores.
(the same applies for any player, that someone else has personally offered to compensate the difference for).
-Trosdan: special exception, I'll gladly compensate any raid shortages for him. He might be less active on weekends, buts he's always gone above and beyond all of us with Trade Wars, to help unlock more rewards for the city.
-Other exceptions: Will depend on the reason.


Last but not least:
For anyone that is still working towards efficient teams: many players in our city will gladly help out with the lower legendary items.
I've posted my starter build for making efficient teams in the tips and guides section of the forum, and will gladly fill city requests at legendary quality for all the items used in it, with exception of relic hammers (due to long fusion time).
So just city request them & keep refreshing requests when you can, if you can still use the items =)

Also quite a few players that have mentionned they have extra's sitting in their inventory, including some mythical versions of the lower energetics & a few of the higher legendaries. As those things tend to get lost in city chat quite quickly with the 10 message history only, I'd reccomend joining the city discord channel as it allows for much easier communication without chat dissapearing (  https://discord.gg/jAAJF6d it's a small chat program that's usable on all devices, PC, Phone, etc).