I wanted to share some of my thoughts on the state of the game.
The Cycle of Strife 7 week blessed reign is a design flaw that’s driving all the wrong behaviours. It’s well intentioned to provide a new objective to compete for, but nonetheless it is diminishing competition and the health of the gaming landscape.
What’s happening is two dominant whale clan factions (typically top 6 clans) are creating alliances with each other to trade Immortal reigns in pursuit of blessed reigns and capes. This involves instructing clan members to throw Vigil of Blades and Rite of Exile matches to give allies a better chance at succeeding. The favour is then returned next Immortal reign.
What this does is take away all elements of competitiveness from the gaming experience. It makes the game boring and pointless, and it erodes the value of investment in effort (and money) spent to build up characters to compete in end game content.
It comes down to power balance on any given server/cluster. Without enough competition/opposition, the two factions pretty much do as they please. Intuitively, most players would agree distributed whale power would make the game more exciting, however human nature goes against this. Whales like to swim with other whales even to the detriment of the gaming experience. What ends up happening is most of the whales on a server end up in 3 or 4 clans and form the backbone of these alliances.
This is like equivalent of the NBA throwing together a roster full of All Stars to compete with the everyone else, hence why there are salary caps to keep the game competitive, exciting and to keep the championship meaningful.
There’s a couple of thoughts on what could address this in DI:
- Merge Servers: Some servers are already merged with different regions/clusters for Battlegrounds to create a larger pool of players. Merging servers to include Cycle of Strife activity will effectively make it harder to collude in such a fashion and foster competition.
- Clan Resonance Caps: Put some form of resonance cap on clan participation in Cycle of Strife activities like Shadow Wars, Vigil of Blades and Rite of Exile to help redistribute power across multiple clans, again to help drive competition (ie A clan loading up too many whales will not be able to deploy them all).
This will help to take it back to the original intent of the game at launch, when the first couple of Immortal reigns were hotly contestested and many clans had a chance. It would bring relevance back to clans that fall outside of the top 10 Shadow clans each cycle as well.
After all many of us build characters far beyond what is required for the PVE content. Why? With out the competition it becomes less meaningful.