When lower and higher divs collide

Day 3,113, 09:49 • Published in Netherlands Netherlands • by Redi Jodikku

Good evening, night, morning or whatever depending on when and where are you reading it. Today I wanted to talk about something different. Those who know me know that I tend to over rationalize most part of the things I say and do, but hey, that’s the way I am and I think it works in this case.

You all know that during this competition the big guys could go to lower divs and try to fight there, it also worked the other way around, lower divs could come and visit us. So we’ve seen some problems and people complaining about BH fighting. I would like to share what I’ve learnt and have in my mind with all of you and maybe help one or two of you to have things more clear, who knows.


Imagine a guy with 100,000 str. in D1. It can be applied to any lower div if you are interested enough to change some numbers. In D1 a BH costs about 4M (yeah, i’ve asked around to some D1 guys). Then, someone with 100,000k max-hit and no packs at all (I’m trying to benefit the lower guy to make it even more clear, actually it’s very likely that he has at least the IK if he is hunting BHs). Having 700 max energy stored twice and using a 50% booster he has about 21M available, which is about 5 BHs or what’s the same, 10 golds minus the cost of the damage in weapons and food. Weapons will cost him 210cc (14 at 15cc each one) and the food about 60cc. That gives us a positive profit of more than 9 golds as it only costs him 0.675 golds to fill the bar.

The exact numbers are not that important, so you could use the concept and apply to your personal specifications.

Now let’s see the world from a D4 point of view. A weak and poor (yeah that’s how i’ve been called lately, I would rather call me pragmatic. To maintain the hype, you know.). That average D4 can’t afford a BH medal with his 25, 30 or even 40M most part of the times. So maybe he might be interested to try it in a lower div.

To make it even easier to understand, imagine I got two offers, one is to get nothing and the other one is to take part in a raffle where i have a 1% chance of getting a prize of 1 dollar. If those are the only conditions, I would take the ticket without even thinking, it’s a low chance and a low prize, but it’s still more than 0, or in a worse scenario (like a 0.000001% chance and 0.0000001 dollars of prize) I’m completely indifferent.

Now let’s draw a game in its tree-form to see what would we expect to happen and what should people do (if they were profit maximizers, if they are driven by other feelings you should use a different tree with different payoffs and different reasoning).

Notice that it’s not a simultaneous game because the lower div can see what the D4 is doing (if someone tries to fight the medal in the last second it’s a complete different story where we would need to know the chances of this happening and I’m not going to compute them).





Let’s explain it a bit for those who are not used to these kind of drawings. The D4 player moves first, and therefore the first number represents his payoff (gold in this case). Then the D1 can react and therefore the second number is his payoff. We see that the D4 player can decide either to drop his damage in D4 and get nothing or move to a lower div and see if he has luck there. Then the D1 can choose if he wants to retaliate and use all his damage in that battle (here I assumed that he won, but maybe he didn’t) or diversify his damage into other battles where there are not D4 players. I hope the payoffs are clear, if I see many people complaining about them I will add the explanation.

Some things to add. There are not EBs involved as I’m assuming we are talking about profit maximizers, as said before this is not applied to people driven by other emotions. If there were EBs involved we would use a “chicken game” which is a bad game to play to be honest, you can google it and see that not many good things can come out of them.

Second thing I’ve seen lately is people claiming “I will teach those D4 not to mess with lower divs and stay in their divs”. Well, I’m afraid that this can not be applied here. Why does the retaliation strategy does not work here? Remember that the retaliation strategy is a non rational path in the short run or in a single “transaction” but that could work in the long run or in a society in form of reputation and really change some people’s behaviour patterns. Well, I state that it does not work for two reasons, because it’s not a credible threat (meaning that I would expect a profit maximizer to diversify because it’s the best option for him, so I’m not trusting what he is saying) and secondly because I’m completely indifferent, I was going to drop my ffs and get 0 as return in D4, and we have already seen that the expected payoff is slightly higher in the other scenario (remember the raffle example? ), so in the worst case I’m indifferent.

Also notice that this is a simplified model with simplified calculation, but in my opinion it’s not oversimplified and works enough for a browser game, we are not in a Maths convention.

Feel free to argue and show your disagreement or opinions in the comments section, I would really love it.

Before you say it, yes, I was bored this afternoon because I’m stuck at home for personal issues and I had anything better to do here.