Since our last post about the depiction of the former state of team wars version 5.0 of South Park Phone Destroyer has been released. It didn’t come too soon though as the whole SPPD community were told, “Don’t worry. The updates are on their way!” for the better part of 18 months. In the update they’ve attempted to combat the problems with the team wars ladder by changing the way the crowns are awarded.
This wasn’t the only significant change since the 5.0 version of South Park Phone Destroyer has been released. They’ve also attempted to combat deranking but there still seems to be very mild and unpreventable symptoms of that as there are in other games similar to SPPD. You can’t force everyone to play their best game every time. Some people just suck at the game too.
Ultimately, the biggest change in version 5.0 and up in this game from that of its predecessors is the change regarding team wars. Now, team leaders can cap the levels that the cards in the team wars deck can be upgraded to.
Before this incredible new feature it came down to a game of survival of the fittest for many teams. For us at team Apologize! we realized very early on in the involvement with team wars that we needed to have an account of where everyone was spending their bottle caps.
From our previous wall post about how team wars works that we would show to new members as they walked in the door you can see the way we had everyone report their bottle cap spending. That was under the old version. We don’t report our spending anymore now that leaders can put a limit on how many bottle caps can be spent on a card.
The way the old system would work and basically the way we survived the pre-5.0 version era of this game was everyone would report their spending in the team chat. Then one of the team leaders (myself) would take a series of screen shots at 2 hour intervals or so starting with the deck upgrade screen, moving down the list of bottle caps and ending with the team chat of reported spending.
As you can see from the video here it took 28 seconds out of my daily life to stop every two hours and take the series of screen shots.
Aside from the screen shot taking and people reporting their spending there wasn’t any more work involved until we had an issue of misspending. When you think of how easy it really was just to type into the team chat where you just spent your caps and how it easy it was to take 30 seconds to screen shot things the only work that was ever involved was figuring out who misspent the caps.
What you would do was take the set of screen shots before the misspend occurred and the set of screen shots after the misspend occurred and then generate a variance report (find the difference). Between the upgrade screen, the list of bottle caps and the reported spending in the team chat, you could always deduce exactly who, how much and where bottle caps were spent.
Thankfully everyone on the team did a really good job and were all really good about reporting their spending in the team chat. We had several “pirates” try to board our ship and spend bottle caps on Transmogrify (a big violation within teams in this game). They were all kicked out for doing so and the screen shots proving they did were posted to our social media accounts.
Other teams in the game would constantly complain about people misspending their caps and the leaders would have NO idea who did it or when. Those kinds of dynamics can degrade the quality of your team and make members want to play elsewhere (on a team like ours where it doesn’t happen!).
The pre-5.0 era of SPPD required that you have more survival skills than just being able to snipe intentional bottle cap misspending. The deranking then was a lot worse as well. It wasn’t exactly a blue moon when you saw level 4 legendary cards playing at a rank of 4800. While deranking is still somewhat of an on-going issue in the game, and always will be, it doesn’t appear to be as rampant as in the pre-5.0 version days.
To the defense of Redlynx and Ubisoft though they have been giving us players more “we’re sorry” packs of cards every time they mess something up in the game. We’ve noticed a difference there.
