ITs truly dying...

[road-kill]

Now ID community has literally dropped its value......

goood hand full is left....


Any good ideas to either bring back people or recruit users???

Any suggestion is good,

I have 3 nephews and I plan to get them hooked on island defense for future...

[Panopticon]

It's not dead, we just play on battle.net rather than wc3connect, not to mention most of our games are over the weekends now.

[Yarragon]

Now ID community has literally dropped its value......

goood hand full is left....


Any good ideas to either bring back people or recruit users???

Any suggestion is good,

I have 3 nephews and I plan to get them hooked on island defense for future...

If you play on the live servers there are games hosted over the weekend. Most of us don't have time to play during the week because the regulars all work or go to college.

Just hop over to the Azeroth discord and we're all still around!

Edit: Hoogies you're literally in the League, wtf you talking about the game being dead for.

[Lynx]

Interesting how the general wc3 community is growing and the island defense community diminishing maybe if the map was good ID would be growing as well...

[Burn]

Wait what? Does ENT only use WC3Connect now? What kinda b.net bullshit is this? I'm sure that's not helping popularity.

Blizzard has blocked several of our host bots from Battle.net. Because the upcoming 1.30.2 patch will anyway break support for joining our games from Battle.net, we will not be investigating this block further.

To continue playing on ENT and MMH, please use WC3Connect, a desktop application that allows you to easily join custom WC3 games.

Get WC3Connect here.

-Burn

[Yarragon]

Wait what? Does ENT only use WC3Connect now? What kinda b.net bullshit is this? I'm sure that's not helping popularity.

Blizzard has blocked several of our host bots from Battle.net. Because the upcoming 1.30.2 patch will anyway break support for joining our games from Battle.net, we will not be investigating this block further.

To continue playing on ENT and MMH, please use WC3Connect, a desktop application that allows you to easily join custom WC3 games.

Get WC3Connect here.

-Burn

Bots no longer work on the live patch, and Blizzard "banned" (I call BS on that one) ENT's CD keys. Meaning they were forced to develop a private server or shut down. They chose not to shut down and advertise the private server heavily, which is why the bots got banned.

Also @Lynx ID is still alive and well on the live servers, I see 10-20 games a day hosted by different people, all of which tend to fill within a few minutes. Plus as mentioned above, we still have the "League / In-house" games on the weekends.

[Lynx]

Nice to hear, just think ID would grow if 309d or a prior version of ID was popular no offense to dragon or remixer I think they are improving on necos pos version where neco made builders and titans homogeneous.

[Yarragon]

Nice to hear, just think ID would grow if 309d or a prior version of ID was popular no offense to dragon or remixer I think they are improving on necos pos version where neco made builders and titans homogeneous.

"The editors are improving on the current map."

"The game would be popular if a prior version was popular."

u wut m8?

Pick one.

[Burn]

Lynx is trying to say our current editors are better than Neco who did a great job on 309d, but the big changes in 4.x.x killed the game for many veterans, including the two main 309d clans, StiD and BTI. That's just a theory though. It could just be that b.net is getting outdated in general or other reasons, but IMO that's just an excuse, because when comparing ID to other games such as LTD, WC3Ladder and WC3DoTA, these other games didn't suffer the same popularity drop. Imo WC3 still serves a niche, still being the best game to support content creators to make custom games. For example, SC2ID is trash compared to wc3id, and Dota2id didn't even make it to release because the dota2 custom game support was just utter trash.

Note: I am a little outdated with the current META, but I'll try to explain things from my point of view from August 2015 to around May 2018. Starting from BTI Grunt inhouses or ENT weekly inhouse league which I regard as the best inhouses in ID history..to now, where pubs are pretty much dead, and inhouses are scarce and filled with less experienced players who most won't even get vouched for the ENT inhouses.

Having said all that, I'd like to name a few reasons for ID dying so that we as an ID community won't make the same mistake again and try to push changes together in the right direction.

Spoiler!

1) Hotkey changes (self-explanatory, many euros quit inhouses and pubs due to hotkey changes, because easts were used to 4.x.x hotkeys, while euros were used to 309d hotkeys, which meant cross-realm inhouses were mainly east based, which meant less tryhards, which also meant more feeders, and more titans winning. So I pretty much disregard any inhouse titan wins in 4.x.x. To be clear, since inhouse quality was bad, many titans won 4.x.x games where they shouldn't have. Although, since builders are constantly learning how to stomp pub games ASAP, many bad titans were merch rushed to death, which happened faster and more frequently in 4.x.x inhouses)

2) Broken EXP changes (only a few patches and to Neco's credit, received a quick fix, but it really messed with both inhouses and pubs)

3a) Builder and titan balance changes in 4.x.x, particularly eurobase nerfs. This nerfed builder win rate in competitive pubs because euros couldn't rush to 309d eurobase any more and expect a free win by having 3+ builders hiding in eurobase with OP draenei/morph towers with a re-walling 300HP+125HP undead summoning walls against decent titans with summons that gave zero EXP with insane turtle lumber pooling. This changed the play-style winning condition in pubs DRASTICALLY, because in 309d you used to be able to easily defend against lvl 8 FED titans in eurobase, but now in 4.x.x, even weak lvl 7 titans will be able to break even the best bases, especially if you're coco and abuse permanent ethereal form on Molt. This meant that builder win rates dropped drastically, which meant TEN out of the eleven players were losing and had a worse time in 4.x.x, whereas one out of the eleven players in 309d were winning and having a better time.

3b). Thing about 309d was the game was actually pretty balanced competitively, other base spots were worse in 309d with the exception of eurobase, so the only decent spot to base in the whole map was eurobase and a few other bases like river base. With the 2 per base rule, you're pretty much guaranteed to find a few shit bases to siege or have a lot of roaming/golding/stalling builders to hunt down. Titans could afford to buy floating eyes just to make sure builders didn't base in eurobase. This meant that titans won more in 309d compared to 4.x.x. It also meant that games were shorter, which made the game a lot more fun. In 4.x.x, you would see many early bases in bay or river base pop up the instant the 15min mark hit, which meant games were long, boring and drawn out with slow sieges, or titan just farmed all day against shit builders who fed them, then proceeded rolled over bases. We didn't play that many inhouses in 4.x.x, which meant we didn't really get to exploit the coco strat of abusing etheral mirror with molt immolation in inhouses which would pretty much guaranteed a titan win every single game. I think in the newer 4.x.x versions molt immolation are disabled while in ethereal form, which is a good fix.

To further prove my point; in 4.x.x - bay base, river base and eurobase are all more popular bases than vagina/top left. In 309d, the most popular bases are vagina, eurobase and the decent bases at top left. What I'm trying to say is that for inhouses, I feel like 309d was easier for titans to win when compared to 4.x.x. In 4.x.x, the crappy builders like troll/mak/murloc also received decent buffs, which made pretty much nearly every tower base in 4.x.x a decent base, whereas in 309d a gnoll, Arachnid, Panda or murloc HAD to wait for GP or become a re-waller because their towers sucked donkey dicks.

4) Builders and titans getting better in general (meant that good titans spent more time doing nothing and being bored, while good builders spent more time dead as an observer, or waiting in lobby) - To be honest, I always found it fun shitting on bad builders as titan, and shitting on bad titans as builder. It meant it was less of a challenge because the opposition was low-skilled, but you can make it more challenging by playing greedier and riskier. Which is why it's not unusual for me to die to bad titans, or to bad builders as titan because I now choose to end early instead of farming up on bad players.

5) Other games stealing ID's player base. The rise of WC3DotA, LTD and TaE may have stolen some of the player base from ID, because they had better updates compared to ID. I know that a lot of my ID clan mates went to play LTD and wc3DoTA and DotA2, which was much rarer in 309d times.

6) To offer a counterpoint, it is possible that Neco's updates didn't harm ID's popularity at all, it was just that other games had better updates which made it seem like ID was the only one falling behind. For example, I'm not sure of this, but I think castle wars used to be much more popular back in 309d times as well, and just slowly died off over time because like ID, the changes were not good enough to save them from losing popularity.

7) Over-banning players, I know this is a heavily debated argument so I won't get into this now, but I believe stalling builder and banning builder leavers shouldn't be a rule.

Now that I've shared the reasons on where I think ID went wrong (because I don't want future editors to make the same mistake), I'll try to end on a more positive note and suggest some general ideas on which direction ID should be going. I have made such points before which is why I didn't lead with them, but I think it's important to reiterate and reinforce my views especially for newer readers. Remixer and iamadragon are well aware of my stance, and have co-operated a lot with me when I was still active, which I am very grateful for. Imo I don't think it's too late for ID, I think ID still serves a niche of a well-made survival PvP tower defense game.

Spoiler!

1) Release new (but balanced) shit to make things more interesting and exciting (like the pirate windwalk changes were good, made him much easier to gold at mid. I also couldn't understand Neco deleting Panda, Huntress and puppeteer, they was a really fun hero to play. Instead of deleting them because puppeteer/panda was buggy, or huntress being unbalanced, why not just fix/balance them instead?

2) Focus on small balance changes per patch (big changes means builders or titans must adapt to the changes and change their playstyles drastically. The reason why 309d was so successful for inhouses was because everyone knew what they had to do to win the game, and honed their playstyles accordingly to make more competitive close games. In 4.x.x, it was always a stomp, either the builders were bad and the titans stomped, or the titan was bad and got stomped instead or was given both froff and exp to be able to win. In 309d, Plus.@useast would stomp stacked ENT inhouse games without froff or EXP.)

3) Make the boring shit less boring, and exciting shit more exciting. Introduce quality of life changes like cutting the duration of the early game like speeding up builders before titan spawns and letting titan spawn quicker, or introducing the end-game scenario so titans won't stall and make games boring. Making pirate's abilities more fun was a good start.

4) Bigger picture: After b.net banned ENT bots, I think we need to find a way to make ID work on b.net without using wc3connect. We need to find a way to be able to auto-host ID without getting banned by b.net, because ID won't survive the change to wc3connect. I haven't been playing ID because my computer won't update to the newest wc3, so I can't share my ideas here.

5) A quick fix to make the game more fun in pubs is to nerf titans and buff builders, and stop forcing new players to play titan. Give the option like TaE to volunteer to be titan, random the titan amongst the volunteers, then if no-one volunteers, then random titan amongst all 11 players. Then, we can also have the option to repeat games if there are still 10+ players in the game and titan got merchant rushed or something in 10mins. Have extra !hcl inhouse options to combat these new changes.

6) Something controversial to add is that creators really wanted things to be original. The problem with this is that editors completely throw out balancing when implementing new things. They happily use low quality pubs that have never won an inhouse game in their life to test their alpha and beta versions. For example, the reason why Luci/Breeze/Syph/Molt/Demonicus/Glac was so good in 309d inhouses was because they could easily prevent re-walling. This meant that all other titans were pretty dogshit because they were harder to prevent rewalling. In 4.x.x, It's still the same, Granit and Voltron still have dogshit rewall prevention, making them still sub-par titans in inhouses.

7) In the end, ID will never be balanced because titans and builders are too different, but if it was somehow changed to a 5v5 or 4v4 game then we may eventually see a truly competitive ID. I believe I have expanded on this point in the past, but in a nutshell, we pretty much just split the island defense map in half, and have two 3v2 games side by side. 3 red builders versus one blue titan and one blue minion on one side, and 3 blue builders versus one red and one red minion on the other then balance accordingly. Rename the map Island Defense MEGA (lmao), then call it a day.

EDIT:
8) To top it all off, I would like to refer to this graph here: https://i.imgur.com/67oYfMl.jpg

Spoiler!

8a) A decent titan playing as a titan against a normal decent lobby is actually pretty good, if it's too challenging, they can make a smurf and stomp pubs to enter the "flower channel", as shown in the above graph. If it is a shit lobby, stomping the pubs isn't too bad now that builders get banned for leaving early.
8b) For a new titan player, they get stomped or has nothing to do for 30 minutes and ends up stalling, which ends up being boring for new players (This isn't part of the graph).
8c) For a high-skill builder focusing on having fun it's still pretty good, according to the graph, you can choose your own challenge level to make sure you're in the flow channel.
8d) For a high-skill builder focusing on winning (tryhard style):
- Collect 45g then double or triple base when you have enough wood (g2l any extra gold). (VERY BAD, BORING)
- Stall the titan, denying feed and wasting the titan's time by making the titan chase you, saving team-mates and giving back minimal feed. Then farm up a fuckload of wood and gold then base when you're 99% sure your base will hold. (my preferred playstyle, you choose your challenge level to be inside the flow channel. If you die too much then just tone down the risk level.)
- Bonus: Thing about these two playstyles is that it's complete dogshit if it's a decent titan who stomps lobbies on alts or abuses ethereal mirror to stomp 99.99% of his games (coco)
8e) For a noob builder focusing on having fun - I'll be honest, I think it's pretty shitty. You go in and you feed the titan or die and have no fun. It needs to be easier to play/learn for noobs.

-Burn

[CalculuS]

Your graph doesn't seem to show/work.

[Lynx]

I agree with the majority of your points burn.

You seem to regard coco as a cheese strategy player with how much you refer to his mirror siege. I'll give you that it was his go-to method of sieging when playing molt against stacked lobbies but I don't think it takes away from his genius. The version he played was the version of the mid-masswall meta which was incredibly difficult to transition from the early game to the late game. No offense to your burn, I hold you in high regard of skill level but I will never forget when you wallwalked coco and he wotw'd you and shifted instantly 4 items on the ground preventing further wallwalking and killed you.

The best player in cocos era was miles below him so his self-intuitive ability to realize how to react to situations amazes me, most if not all of his ideas must have come from himself and that I can't do anything else than to appreciate his genius for the game we both love. I've said this before but in my opinion the shared tier 1 players of Island Defense of all time are Pongu, PLus., and coco.

P.S. can anyone make a guide on where to play Island Defense? bot name, peaklobby time etc. pin it to this subforum also thanks!

More on-topic I wish Dragon and Remixer scrapped Necos version and instead continued on the version Yokola tried to continue ID development on back in 2014 back when Neco handed over the reigns. Too late now I guess..

[Neco]

Hilarious.

[Burn]

Spoiler!

I agree with the majority of your points burn.

You seem to regard coco as a cheese strategy player with how much you refer to his mirror siege. I'll give you that it was his go-to method of sieging when playing molt against stacked lobbies but I don't think it takes away from his genius. The version he played was the version of the mid-masswall meta which was incredibly difficult to transition from the early game to the late game. No offense to your burn, I hold you in high regard of skill level but I will never forget when you wallwalked coco and he wotw'd you and shifted instantly 4 items on the ground preventing further wallwalking and killed you.

The best player in cocos era was miles below him so his self-intuitive ability to realize how to react to situations amazes me, most if not all of his ideas must have come from himself and that I can't do anything else than to appreciate his genius for the game we both love. I've said this before but in my opinion the shared tier 1 players of Island Defense of all time are Pongu, PLus., and coco.

P.S. can anyone make a guide on where to play Island Defense? bot name, peaklobby time etc. pin it to this subforum also thanks!

More on-topic I wish Dragon and Remixer scrapped Necos version and instead continued on the version Yokola tried to continue ID development on back in 2014 back when Neco handed over the reigns. Too late now I guess..

I never meant to flame Coco's skill level, I agree he was a very good titan, especially considering he played on high delay. I'm sure if he had lower delay, he'd be better than Pongu/Plus/Kyleep/KenXtreme, who I regard as the all time greats when it comes to playing titan.

It was a flame towards balancing, and maybe even a minor flame at him being cheesy and using cheesy strats. At least he never resorted to item jumping or ankh jumping, which I reckon is the greatest cheese.

And to Neco, I do truly feel bad for you because I know you tried hard to try to improve ID 3.0.6e and 309d were truly one of the best maps out there even though veterans would say 2.8.5c was the best, I remember going back to 2.8.5c trying to inhouse with oldies and just from shield of fates having an hour cooldown per shield was enough for me to switch back to 309d. I blame mainly the balancing team that you chose. I respect you as a person since you're doing everything for free and on your own time, but just question your changelogs.

-Burn

[Ben_T]

This is quite funny. I appreciate all of the work you put into the game @Neco and whether any of it was a positive change or not, it kept the community alive by having active development, thank you for that. Many games of ID are currently being played on the latest patch and within the new Island Defense League. However, due to the recent responses, I believe the title of this thread should be renamed to something such as, "These Balance Changes Make the Game Actually Difficult" or maybe "The Circle Jerk of Coco ft. Lynx-"

[KamiKadse]

You guys dont even play pubs. Nor do you join the IHs that happen on the weekends. Then you talk about ID dying. dafuq?
Good thread 10/10.

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