With more than 51 million views, the video featuring the revenge feature and the famous actor Liam Neeson would seem to make anyone eager to try out the Clash of Clans revenge attack. However, players already familiar with the system know better to not even consider revenging a base for two reasons. First, in my experiences, most of the bases in my defense log cannot be revenged. Clicking the revenge button would most likely present either one of the two possible the disturbing messages: 1) Can't attack! Village has active shield; 2) Can't attack! Village owner is online. The defense log stores 47 defense battles. At the time I'm writing this, only seven could be revenged; the other forty showed one of the two can't-attack messages. That is less than 15% available to be revenged. Second, if revenge is available, there is a good chance that the opponent base is low on resources, which makes it not worth attacking. I'm sure most, if not all of you, have been disappointed to find a poor base to revenge.
These difficulties greatly discourage the use of revenge feature. Personally, I do not even bother trying to revenge. I have done it in the past, however. There is a particular instance that I want to share. After someone completely destroyed my village with an expensive army of dragons that made it unprofitable for the attacker in terms of gaining the three resources, I was unable to resist my urge to take vengeance--with the exact same army that he or she used against me. I prepared an army full of dragons and clicked the revenge button. To my dismay, one of the can't-attack messages appeared. What made this extremely annoying is that, in addition to being unable to revenge and the uncertainty of when the shield would terminate or when the owner would go offline, I now could not attack anyone else because my army of dragons were meant to be used against the person that attacked me. Thus, I waited without certainty throughout the day, periodically checking if the revenge is available.
So what are some possible solutions? Some have suggested to make the revenge button grayed out if revenge is not available so that one can easily eyeball which revenge is available. The counterargument for this is that it would require tremendous updates, as revenge for each base may become available in any minute, in which case the button should no longer be grayed out. I would love to see, however, if this is not implemented, that another method will be. One particular solution that I have in mind is to make the revenge button return a more specific message. Thus, instead of simply returning "The owner has active shield," it would inform us as well the remaining duration of the shield. This way, if the person about to be revenged does not discard the shield early, the person attempting revenge has an equal chance of attacking that base as any other regular attacker.
With the implementation of my suggestion, I feel that the revenge feature will become more popular. Despite the possibility that the shield is terminated early and the person attempting revenge is not available to play at the moment the shield is scheduled to end, this would encourage many to revenge. Thus, an attacker of a strong base would then have to worry about the possibility of being revenged. It would be even better if the defense log could display the amount of resources available to be stolen from the revenge targets. This would have the potential to facilitate the process of finding bases rich in resources to attack, which is a whole other issue in this game. I feel that the work of implementing this will be worth it.
