My last week with ZING........

Hi Everyone,

It's been an absolute pleasure to be with ZING, it's amazing through hard work, dedication and teamwork we've become a 1.17 Million (at time of writing) rated Alliance, at the beginning of May we were 380k!

There's been some tough times, like when the original creators of ZING left but the good and fun periods far outweigh these and I believe all experiences have made the Alliance stronger.  It's great to leave on a high having been part of the last 7-day Rank Up so that everyone got Yellow Jacket and Crystal Crash as we managed to rank in the top 50!

But now I must focus on other things in life which take priority.

I won't be totally leaving the game, I still want to see Act 4 and get to level 50 but I need to stop playing and so it would be unfair for me to stay when I cannot make the commitment needed to keep ZING growing.

This blog will remain but I won't be updating it, so let me know if anyone wishes to take over.

I shall miss the whole Alliance experience, players old and new, everyone has been awesome but I will try and keep in touch with officers and those who are friends in the game now and again.

My last day, well I haven't quite decided yet, would be nice to win one last Alpha but this week will definitely be my last.

So all the best and just remember play smart, keep working as team, plan and prepare as much as possible, think of your fellow players in the Alliance and don't hate the game, enjoy the game!

Jamey (AKA Waylander)

Latest Kabam News 19/08

Latest News from Kabam Forum, a lot's happenings!

Arenas

1. 7-day Ant-man and Yellowjacket arenas giving players the chance to get 2, 3, and 4-star Ant-Man and Yellowjacket basic heroes. As a reminder, these arenas are being run so that players can use up their existing Pym canisters.

      For those with remaining Pym canisters after these events, they will be converted into battlechips at a rate of 15 battlechips per 1 Pym canister.

2. The 3-day Elite Arena kicks off tomorrow. A reminder of the details:
- You’ll face off against a harder AI
- You’ll see faster difficulty ramping
- You’ll experience a slower increase of streak multipliers (in order to make it more rewarding to maintain your streak)
- Players will only be able to use 4-Star champs

Prizing for the Elite arena is a White Suit Iron Fist ranked reward for first place, and the other players in the Elite arena will be able to earn 4-star Black Panther as a milestone reward. Because we are giving players the opportunity the chance to win Black Panther as a milestone reward, they are not going to have the ability to participate in the 3-day 4-Star Black Panther Arena. This is to ensure other players have a chance at the 4-Star Black Panther Arena.

This one's gonna be tough, to the victor go the spoils!

3.  Two 3 day Black Panther Arenas.
- 3-star and 4-star arenas
- Black Panther and Crystal Shards as rank rewards
- For players that have been with us for a full 60 calendar days prior to the arena starting, the 4-star arena will also see 4-star Captain Marvel Basic Hero as a ranked prize for ranks 401 to 1000

Players will also see a few different 1-day Alliance Events starting tomorrow.

Alliance Quests

We’re coming up to that time again, so I hope you’re all ready to get your game faces on! This week, we have some pretty big announcements pertaining to Alliance Quests. I hope I have your attention! 

We’ve received comments from players saying that they feel like the prizes for Alliance Quests aren’t compelling, that how we award them isn’t fair, and that a lot of players feel like there isn’t any point to participating in these events. This is disappointing to us, because it’s certainly not how we want our players to feel about events. 

We’ve been working away at a number of things in order to address these concerns, and hot damn is it ever an exciting day because we can now start to share some of what we’ve been working on! 

On the subject of Prizing, this week will see the following improvements:

    Better milestone rewards, and an increased amount of prizes for milestone rewards!

- The new Crystal Shards rewards have been added to milestone prizes. These allow you to work towards 3-star and 4-star hero crystals. These are a big deal! You can read more about them right here: http://community.kabam.com/forums/sh...Crystal-Shards

- Alliance Quest Crystals have been added. These can include high level Catalysts.

   Top Rank rewards for lower brackets have been increased!

- More players now have a chance at more awesome prizes

- We’ve added more Alliance Quest Crystals and Crystal Shards to prizing for lower brackets as well!

   

Players will receive an Alliance Quest Crystal with every battlegroup your Alliance manages to explore.

- Alliance Quest Crystals can contain a Tier-4 Generic Catalyst, A Tier-4 Class Catalyst, or other great rewards. These Crystals are awesome to get!

- The more battlegroups that are 100% completed, the more crystals everyone receives!

We’ve also increased the gold payout ratio for maps 1 and 2!

Regarding difficulty, and ensuring players outside of the ‘Top Alliances’ want to participate:

    We have decreased entry fees for certain maps within the event:

- Entry fees decreased by 80% for Map 1

- Entry fees decreased by 20% for Map 2

   

We have made adjustments to the difficulty of certain maps

- Maps 2 and 3 have been decreased in relative difficulty

- We’ve improved the ramp-up of quest difficulty. Up until now, it was essentially ‘sweet, this is fun and kinda easy OH HOLY CRAP BOSS FIGHT OH MY GAWD HOW DO WE DO THIS’ but with the changes 

we’ve made, it’s now more along the lines of ‘Hey sweet this is fun, oh it’s getting a bit more difficult OH SNAP BOSS FIGHT hey, that was hard but we handled it and we beat it like a bawsss’.

- These changes help to ensure that event difficulties scale better with players

   Map 5 has seen some adjustments as well:

- Bosses for Map 5 have been further tuned to address concerns of difficulty. You can read about those changes here: <link to be included once posted> It is important for our players to note that this Map is still difficult, and meant to be, however we did feel that the difficulty needed to be revisited in this specific instance. A change has been made, but don't wander into Map 5 expecting a hug and a cakewalk! 

Shard Crystals

You’ve seen the tab in the game, you’ve speculated as to where we’re going with this new feature and what it is. We’re excited to start further discussing Crystal Shards with the community, what they are, what we’re doing with them, and how this impacts you! 

What?

Crystal Shards are a new type of item reward that give players the ability to work towards more hero crystals. 

Why?

Our team has had several ongoing discussions regarding prizes, improving rewards, and adding new elements to the game. We know that the community has a ton of concerns in this area, and we are working to address these concerns.

Our intent:

To make events feel more compelling, rewarding and exciting. To give players more ways to obtain the crystals they really want. To add a new layer of meta-game to Contest of Champions. To help work towards addressing some commonly voiced community concerns. 

How they work: 

There are three types of crystal shards that players can collect, to reconstruct the three different types of hero crystals: Premium Hero Crystals, 3-Star Hero Crystals, and 4-Star Hero Crystals. 

Can I mix and match Crystal Shards?

No. You’ll collect the three different types, and each type can only be used to reconstruct their designated crystals. 

How many Shards do I need to reconstruct a full crystal? 

2000 Shards

How do I get Crystal Shards? 

Shards can be earned through in-game events and promotions!

Latest Alliance Strategy 18/08

Open up all crystals we're going for rank rewards!

Rank-Up what you can, we're going for Yellow Jacket in the 7-day event!  Ideally save ranking up for Thursday for possible overlap of the 3-day event but let's go for it, ZING style!

Alliance News & Strategy 17/08

Events

Current 7 day event is Rank Up Push.

As it will end on Thursday, save any more Rank Ups, hopefully we will have a 3-day Rank Up event that overlaps.

Going for the milestones in the 7-day event is not worth it, getting the Alpha in the 3-day is easier.

Also it's been a very long wait, Crystal Crash cannot come soon enough but the 8 are still holding out, just about......ahhhh I really want to open my 4* crystal!!!

EDIT: 

Crystal Crash is finally here!!! So open minimal crystals to register your score so that everyone has a chance to get rewards.  Not good timing for Kylarion and Judd as they are both on hols, but hopefully they can get access to the game to open their crystals as they are part of the 8!

Rank Up Push - 7 day vs 3 day

I know a few players are very keen to rank their 4*s or high level 3 stars during the 7-day event but if we try to do our best during this event, will we lose out on the Alpha from the 3-day event which could follow Crystal Crash?  And even if there isn't a 3-day event straight after, should we not still save those rank ups until there is?

I'm aware that cats are expiring but a screenshot of why this is an issue might be helpful to better understand the issue.

Anyway I think if everyone can post the score they can get from ranking up in the comments below, we can decide which reward is worth going for in 7-day event over the Alpha in the 3-day event.

(For iPhone or iPad you will need to install Chrome to leave comments)

Kenpark Ranked Number 1!

That's right, Kenpark ranked first in the recent 3* Air Support Arena, he may be in the beginner bracket but he certainly knows a lot about the game, very well done!

Other News

Some might be wondering about the Shard Crystal, here's a screenshot that a player posted on the Kabam forum.  Looks like you will have to get 1000 shard pieces to make up one single crystal.  Maybe an attempt by Kabam to make getting a 4* more attainable but no-one knows yet how you have to get a Shard piece.  I thinking it will be from a drop in quests but more might be be available from milestones in the Arena.

Latest Kabam News 13/08!

Originally posted by Kabam:

Hey hey, everyone! It’s that time again - time for the new arena events to be posted.

Thank you to everyone that participated in last week’s feedback thread, there was a lot of great discussion.

This week, we’re running a few different arenas:

1. War Machine Arenas. They do not require Pym canisters, and there is no basic hero prizing. We will be running 3-star and 4-star War Machine arenas from Thursday to Sunday and Monday to Thursday.

The top 50 finishers in the weekend War Machine arena will be eligible to compete in the first ever Elite Arena on August 20th! See #3 below for more details.

2. Two 7 day arenas starting on August 20th that will give players the chance to get 2, 3, and 4-star Ant-Man and Yellowjacket basic heroes. These two arenas are being run to allow players to use up their existing Pym canisters. If you still have a remaining supply of Pym canisters after these events, fear not - they will not simply disappear into the ether. We will advise on what will be done with these very soon.

3. New Elite Arenas. The top 50 finishers in the weekend War Machine arena will be eligible to compete in the first ever elite arena on August 20th! The elite arenas will have the following differences from standard arenas:

- You’ll face off against a harder AI
- You’ll see faster difficulty ramping
- You’ll experience a slower increase of streak multipliers (in order to make it more rewarding to maintain your streak)
- Players will only be able to use 4-Star champs.

This elite arena format absolutely emphasizes difficulty and intense competition. The prize for this arena will be a new re-skin Champion exclusive to the winners of the Elite Arenas.

More on cheating on rewards can be found on the original post here.

Latest Kabam News 06/08!

Arena & Alliance Quest:

Thursday will see three event types going live, giving you a few different flavours to choose from. On the menu:

1. A 7 day Alliance Quest Series will start. We previously ran a 4 day placement round, and we’re now moving to the ‘main event’ system for this new feature. Players – you will be receiving a message today (Wednesday) to let you know what bracket you’re in. As a reminder, each subsequent round of Alliance Quests will determine the bracketing for the next event. Place high in your bracket and you’ll move up, but place lower and you could drop down a bracket instead. The tiers are as follows:

Incalculable Tier – Ranks 1 to 25
Superhuman Tier – Ranks 26 to 100
Gifted Tier – Ranks 101 to 200
Peak Human Tier – Ranks 201 to 300
Normal Tier – Ranks 301 to 400
Training Tier – Ranks 401 and lower

The higher the tier the better the rewards, naturally!

2. A 3 day, 3-Star Yellowjacket Arena. This Arena will not require Pym Canisters.

3. A 7 day, 4-Star Yellowjacket 3v3 Alliance Arena. This Arena WILL require Pym Canisters. We'll be adding a Basic Hero as a Milestone reward for this Arena.


Monday will have two events going live.

1) A 3 day 3-Star Yellowjacket Arena. This Arena will not require Pym Canisters.

2) A 3 day 4-Star Iron Patriot Arena. This Arena will also not require Pym Canisters.


It’s worth noting that there are no new types of alliance events this week, these are all formats that you’ve seen before.

Patch notes for 4.0.1, released Aug 5th

Summary:
1. Alliance Quest improvements and optimizations.
2. Shard Crystals are coming - more information shall be revealed in time. For now, mystery and anticipation!
3. Misc. Bug Fixes

Alliance Quests Improvements:
1. You can now donate to the Treasury directly from the Alliance Quest info page.
2. The highest unlocked Alliance Quest is now selected by default (instead of the first quest).
3. There is a banner in the Treasury that links back to the current quest when tapped.
4. In the Edit Team screen, tapping on a Champion currently in an Alliance Quest displays the time remaining until they are available.

Bug Fixes & Optimizations:
1. Fixed an issue where Battlegroup Chat panel appeared while in single player quests.
2. Fixed an issue where Battlegroup 3 could not change chat channels.

7th place for KVH_PSV!

Congratulations to KVH who ranked an amazing 7th place in the recent 3* Bio-Sting Arena, recording a 250 streak and 1,274,161 score.  That streak will take some beating but I believe Iansyakirin is up for the challenge!  So again well done to KVH!

Zol was able to attain 10th place before with 910K score, so it's great to have another one of our players hitting the top ranks.

Latest Arena News for 30/7!

Here's the latest news from Kabam Forum on arenas and events announced today:

1. We will be running Yellowjacket Arenas this time around! There will be two separate three day Arenas, for 3-Star and 4-Star Yellowjacket. These Arenas will require Pym Canisters. We’ve continued to review your feedback on this while conducting our own analyses, and we've decided to continue using the Canisters for the next two weeks.

2. Yellowjacket ambushes will be included in this Arena. The issue that caused us to pull them from the Arenas last week has been resolved.

3. There is also a 3 day ‘Defeat Yellowjacket’ Alliance Event: players can defeat him in Quests and in the Arenas to earn points.

4. Separate from the Yellowjacket arenas, we will be re-introducing the 7 day Alliance Events that we last ran back in June. We'd mentioned that we wanted to study the impact of the multi-day Alliance Events after concerns related to grinding. We feel comfortable starting the 7 day events again, but we'll continue to monitor the situation. These 7 day Alliance Events will run every other week.

5. The 7 day Alliance Events will feature the return of 4-Star Unstoppable Colossus as a reward, this time as a Rank reward. As this is a special Champion that will be more available than others, we've lowered the amount of ISO-8 and Signature Ability levels he gives for duplication. He'll award 5 signature ability levels and 6 chunks of Tier 5 ISO-8.

6. The final Ant-Man Quest will be released Friday. These Quests will continue to be available until August 14th.

Rank Up Push 3-Day Event!

Write in the comment what score you can achieve, 6.7k each is the target.

You need to hold off your big rank ups until everyone has participated and we know what we can achieve in total to see if we can get the Alpha.

EDIT: FORGET THE COUNTING WERE GOING FOR IT ZING STYLE!!!!!

The Zing Guide!

A few issues have come up over the last day so we want this post to be read by every single member of the Alliance.

"Team communication skills are critical for ensuring the success of the team effort"

It has proved difficult to provide clear communication to all the players in the Alliance, messages will get lost in Alliance chat and the General page only has a certain amount of space to provide information, so this blog must be regularly checked by all members to make sure everyone knows what our plans and strategies are for the Alliance.

This post is a starting place for a set of guidelines that we want to produce for the benefit of everyone.

So write your comment on what you feel should be included in this guide.

And remember not everyone in the Alliance can be active in the game all the time, we all have other commitments so for example "players need to make sure they do all there duels" is just not realistic.  In this case, Kabam should have a lower milestone and it's simply not fair to expect everyone to do all their duels all the time.

I'm sure we all want great things for this Alliance but we need a committed effort to make sure everyone is one the same page by following some simple guidelines.

Also if you need some advice or have any problems with being active, PM an officer, use alliance chat or this blog to post your queries.

NOTE: If you're using an iPhone or iPad, you will need to install Chrome to post comments.

Dupe and Rank Up Event - Team Rotation

You might be wondering in the recent dupe event what this new approach to teams going first in the event is all about.  We have players in the following countries (yes ZING! is global baby)

United Kingdom
United States
Canada
Malaysia
Ireland
Poland
Netherlands
Russia
Australia

Data provided by blogspot stats of members who have viewed the blog

So it's only fair that everyone has an equal chance to participate in these events as we always tell players to stop ranking or opening crystals once we've hit the top milestone.

First attempt went OK but think we can still do better, so if you can keep in mind Team 3 has all the players based in Australia, rotation would work as follows:

1. Team 3 to go first.  
2. Once all players have participated, or indicated they have finished, Team 1 will go next if the top milestone hasn't been reached.
3. Team 2 would then have to wait until Team 1 players have all participated or indicated they have finished.

Going forwards, the order of teams will be:

• 2, 3, 1
• 1, 2, 3
• 3, 1, 2

The teams were put together to be balanced and to allow for time differences but please provide feedback if you feel you should be in another team or a different approach is required.


Note: If Team 3 goes first, the next team may have to wait until the next day to participate.

Chance to win a 4* for Everyone!

Quote extracts:

"The Arenas starting tomorrow will be a little different. We'll be re-running the Ant-Man 3-Star Arena alongside a 7 day Alliance Arena for a 4-Star Ant-Man.

We have seen some promising results so we're going to continue using them for the time being with the Alliance Arena requiring 3 Canisters, but we're removing the cost from the 3-Star Arena. An additional change will be that the Alliance Arena will be 3v3 instead of 5v5.

During the Alliance Arena you will find a 4-Star Basic Hero as an added Milestone."

So is anyone else excited about this one!  A chance to win a 4-Star!  Hopefully the Milestone hero is a good one though.

Please comment if you can participate in this one as will need a lot canisters and need to work out if it is a realistic goal.

EDIT: Disappointed that Kabam messed up this Arena with unrealistic milestones and low rewards, plus having to use Pym cannisters.  One Alliance worked out that it would take 129 of them per day per player to get Captain America!

So let's move on, play if you want for fun, I will do one run with all my champs to see if I can still keep a streak.

Latest Arena News!

From the Kabam forum:

1. The Arenas starting tomorrow will be a little different. We'll be re-running the Ant-Man 3-Star Arena alongside a 7 day Alliance Arena for a 4-Star Ant-Man. We Learned from the Avengers Arenas that players wanted to have more opportunity to win Champions featured in the movie, so we're making Ant-Man available one more time.

2. Thank you for all of your feedback on the Pym Canister system. Initial player feedback regarding this system was one of concern, but as time went on we saw more comments regarding the positive benefits of the Pym Canister system. We have seen some promising results so we're going to continue using them for the time being with the Alliance Arena requiring 3 Canisters, but we're removing the cost from the 3-Star Arena. An additional change will be that the Alliance Arena will be 3v3 instead of 5v5. This allows everyone to participate rather than only those who have reached level 25.

3. During the Alliance Arena you will find a 4-Star Basic Hero as an added Milestone.

4. We'll be re-running the Captain America WWII Arena on Monday since there has not yet been a chance to get a duplicate from Arenas.

5. We've done an analysis of our data on Alliance Events and we're going to increase the frequency. The 3 day Alliance Events will start running back to back and we're looking at possibly bringing the 7 day Alliance Events back as well. Because of the increase in the frequency of events the rewards individual events may decrease a bit.

6. A new Alliance Event type will run this week. Players will get points for winning fights using Champions of a specific class.

7. Alliance Quests are finally here. The first Alliance Quest will start for everyone on July 28th and will be active for 4 days. This first iteration will act as a placement round. Alliances will be placed into brackets based upon their ranking in the placement round. The top 25 finishers will start the next Alliance Quest in the top bracket competing for Tier 4 Catalysts. Each subsequent round of Alliance Quests will determine the bracketing for the following Alliance Quest. Place high in your bracket and you'll move up, but finish low and you could drop to a lower bracket instead. Stay tuned for more information on this feature.

*Due to complications, we've had to remove the Yellowjacket ambushes from the Arenas.

What? Kenpark got Ant-Man with 250K score!

If you have read the title, for some players you may think this is not possible.  Well it is and first off I would like to say it's great having a player like Ken in Zing who looks to have grown rapidly in the game in a short space of time (has got same amount as champs as I have!).

Many of you probably know by now, to get a 3* champ you have to "grind" the arena to earn enough points to make the necessary cut-off .  At the moment this is around 500K, could be more on a week-end, could be less during the week.

What some of you might not know as it's taken time to get enough 2*s to become competitive in the arena, is that there are brackets in place which makes it easier for  players like Ken to earn a 3* champ.  This is based on when you started playing and works out as follow:

Beginner      -  0-30 days
Intermediate - 31-60 days
Veteran         - 61 days plus

So as you can see, the longer you have been playing the game, the harder it becomes to make the cut-off as you've become a veteran and with such a huge amount of players participating, all in the same bracket, the cut-off scores keep on increasing.

How can I achieve high scores?

Well the main technique to help achieve high scores (apart from devoting a time to playing) is to maintain a winning steak to keep the score multiplier at 3x.  I haven't played the current 3* arena but from what I know, you will need to make sure your 2*s are at least rank 3 and close to max (comment if I'm wrong).

The hard part though is maintaining the steak as the AI steps up to another level at around 20, then they become like energizer bunnies, apparently.  So you have to use a whole other technique for maintaining your streak after this point.  Many players in Zing can do this like Zol and Ianskyrin,
so I hope other can share their tips with players who are in the beginner bracket/intermediate so they can continue to grow and become better players like the veterans.

So what about 4* Arena?

This is whole different ball game and it's become ridiculous how hard it's become to earn a new champ in this arena unless you have time, money and already have teams of 4*s to get a score of probably over 3.5M to make the cutoff.  The milestone of 2M in the recent Black Bolt arena made getting a 4* slightly more achievable but not for the casual gamer like myself.

I still play 4* arena as don't have time to devote to 3* (getting Ultron hurt a lot :p) and finally today I have finally kept my winning streak going.  From match 16 on-wards, fights become easy, though the AI does steps up a gear.

EDIT: This morning, I experienced the energizer bunny, speed freak, crack addict opponents and yes they are harder to beat but I like a challenge!  SP1 and SP2 are no use but at this level, your heroes should still have a higher rating over the opponent (though it might be different in 3* arena).  These opponents are basically "Duel" AI level, so my advice would be to Duel more for practice.

So finally share your tips and strategies for the Arena in the comments.

Waylander

What's your favourite team for questing?

Post your teams here and what makes them so good.

Why We Need To Get Alpha Catalysts

If you haven't got a 4* you might be wondering what the fuss is about Alpha catalysts but once you have a 4*, it's a big deal, a very big deal.

Without one you can't rank your 4* to level 3 and that means your maxed 3* champs are just about as powerful as a 2/20 4* champ.

So how do you get one?  Well if your extremely lucky you can get one out of the free for all event on Sunday or enter the alpha catalyst arena but both events are not guaranteed an alpha.

So the best way is through the 3-day Alliance events but it means everyone working together to achieve this highest reward.

ZING managed to acquire a number of these alphas during the Ultron Attack events but until something similar comes along, we have to select an event that is suitable for EVERYONE to achieve the minimum score EACH.

In my opinion, there's only one event that has come up that is within our means to score an average
score of 6700 points (rounded up 200K divided by 30) and that is Rank Up Push.

That means a lot of preparation has to be done to acquire the necessary basic cats and class cats to rank your champs up, see the scoring system below:

And of course you need a lot of gold (get this from Arena crystals) and ISO (farmed from questing).  The best ISO to use is the class variety which means you use less gold to leveling up our champs, see this guide.

So that's it, all you need to know about Alphas and how important they are and how we as an Alliance, through teamwork can get them.  So start CAT farming NOW, it takes time to get the numbers you need.  Here's a guide:

If you think there are other events we should look to fully participate in them leave your comments below.

Ian was able to provide an interesting post, similar to this one for a previous 7-day rank up event.  Here a player talks about making the ultimate sacrifice to get enough ISO for ranking, selling a maxed 3*!  Check the post here.

Alliance Quests

What have we learnt:

• Promotes teamwork
• You need to communicate.
• Planning/Strategy is key.
• Discuss who will take which path BEFORE starting.
• Make sure boost nodes are taken out before tackling opponents.
• Choose a balanced team from your top champs.

How to Beat Superior Iron Man:

• Take out the boost nodes (obvious).
• Use a mystic to fight him, first choice would be Juggernaut or UC as they have most health, followed by Iron Fist, Dr Strange and possibly awakened Scarlett Witch.
• Other choices would be a high impact hero like Ms Marvel, Colossus, Hulk and awakened Gamora (bleed + assassination my favourite combo).
• Dodge his attacks as much as possible, blocking will still take a chunk of your health since he's super strong.
• Watch out for power drain special moves but need to try to get him to use them so he doesn't do SP3.
• Save up YOUR SP3 move till the very end of the fight, so just as he's about to Arc Overload, boom, he's dead or a Gamora SP2 attack with assassination.

After a week of Alliance quests, posts your views, tips and strategies in the comments section below.

IMPORTANT: Alliance quests starts Tuesday the 28th.  Let us know if you have any thoughts on how teams are organised.