One of us doesn't understand loot mechanics

[Wendle]

SC, maybe its me, but I don't understand how higher collector levels are going to help loot. The issue as I see it (as I literally see it when I play) is that the available bases are all picked over. So more collector loot may have those that did the picking over, but I don't see how it helps me.

I think about this phenomenon I heard about called the "golden hour". This is supposedly an hour or so of good loot that immediately follows a 3 hour maintenance break. I have a job, so I've never seen it myself, but I could see how it could be true. A 3 hour break for all bases with an average shield remaining of 6 hours would mean that about 50% of all active bases are available. The telling part of this is that if the good loot really only lasts an hour, it means that good bases are being consumed on a regular basis at a rate 3 times faster than they become available. If this is the case, then there is no loot change to bases that will help.

In other words, the only reason any bases are available is because they have such lousy loot. If all bases offered 1M/1M, there would never be any base available to attack.

So the answer has to be a combination of things:
1. Eliminate or substantially reduce shielding (say down to 1 hour max)
2. Eliminate or substantially reduce the amount of loot lost/gained in a raid
3. Go to a reward system based on cups relative to TH level, attack difficulty and performance (number of stars). This would be similar to what you do in war, only scale it according to stars.

With the short shield, de-emphasis on losing loot, and the emphasis on cups, there would be no reason for folks to put their th outside the walls.

[imdrunk]

Understand that SC monitors how much loot is available at any given level for looting, number of 'inactive' bases, avg. loot per base, standard deviation or available loot, etc. They tune these values as best they can to try to create a balance. If every base you searched was a loaded collector base, the game would be too easy and we would all eventually quit. If there was no good loot, you wouldn't play at all. This is a huge cash cow for SC, they are doing there best to keep a prolonged interest in the game by tweaking the balance of farming difficulty.

That said, loot has been on the low end for the past month or two it seems. The level 12 collectors is just another tweak to make it a little bit easier to accumulate resources.

[F34RTEHR34PER]

There are a lot of variables to getting decent loot in raids.

Which league you're farming in?
Which troops you use (cost vs loot gained)?
How often you play?
Do you boost troops to farm faster?
TH loot penalties...
Do you hold resources until builders are free?

I can play for several hours each day and get enough gold to upgrade another TH9 defense building. Today, I'll be pushing for 4.5mil for an archer tower to get to lvl 11.

I have 2hrs until my builder is free, so that one will be sleeping for a few more hours. I need to earn 3.1mil in gold to put his booty to work. I can do that in about 5 hours with the troop comp I use at Crystal II.

[sj74]

SC, maybe its me, but I don't understand how higher collector levels are going to help loot. The issue as I see it (as I literally see it when I play) is that the available bases are all picked over. So more collector loot may have those that did the picking over, but I don't see how it helps me.

I think about this phenomenon I heard about called the "golden hour". This is supposedly an hour or so of good loot that immediately follows a 3 hour maintenance break. I have a job, so I've never seen it myself, but I could see how it could be true. A 3 hour break for all bases with an average shield remaining of 6 hours would mean that about 50% of all active bases are available. The telling part of this is that if the good loot really only lasts an hour, it means that good bases are being consumed on a regular basis at a rate 3 times faster than they become available. If this is the case, then there is no loot change to bases that will help.

In other words, the only reason any bases are available is because they have such lousy loot. If all bases offered 1M/1M, there would never be any base available to attack.

So the answer has to be a combination of things:
1. Eliminate or substantially reduce shielding (say down to 1 hour max)
2. Eliminate or substantially reduce the amount of loot lost/gained in a raid
3. Go to a reward system based on cups relative to TH level, attack difficulty and performance (number of stars). This would be similar to what you do in war, only scale it according to stars.

With the short shield, de-emphasis on losing loot, and the emphasis on cups, there would be no reason for folks to put their th outside the walls.

The golden hour is not caused by people coming out of shield when the maintenance is on (well this may be a small part). In the golden hour the main feature is that you find a lot of long-term inactive bases to attack.

The cause of this is unknown but may be because of the algorithm that CoC uses to push the inactives to the back of the search queue. When the maintenance happens it may be that the 'activity counter' of all bases is reset so the inactives have as much priority in the search queue as the actives. As active people gradually log back on to their bases the activity stats become gradually more accurate again and the inactives disappear again.

Player shielding has not changed and is not the cause of any loot issues.