I haven't been replying to specific comments in this thread for a bit, but I'd like to chime in on the reactions to the character tuning in broad strokes:
- Reception to changes to the Prisoner is fairly divisive (unsurprisingly), but it does appear that the general sentiment is that the proposed change is going too far. We are reviewing alternatives posted here and may change the adjustment when the tuning update goes live. That said, no character in PVP should feel like they're almost always someone you should use for every team (PVP attack or PVP defense), and no character should only have itself as a consistent counter, and that is clearly where he is right now.
- We do not want to go about situationally banning characters from certain game modes. This obviously comes with the drawback that characters occasionally necessitate changes to not be overpowered in particular game modes, but that is the direction we are taking. That said, we aren't going to round the edges off every popular character until usage rates are flat... we merely don't want certain characters to have substantially more usage than others, or for certain high-rarity characters to basically have no usage.
- We are not currently considering allowing the removal of skill shards from characters. Our stance continues to be that these are permanent, long term investments to specific characters, especially due to the nature of how they are earned, their increased availability as the game matures, and how they are assigned into skills. As the game evolves, some characters will become more or less valuable for a variety of factors, and direct character tuning is only one of them.
- We are reviewing the work it would take to change logic for PVP point calculations relative to other initiatives we have. That said, points gained when you win and lose are the values they are after accounting for sand recharge time, expected attack win percentage, expected defense win percentage, etc, so reducing losses in certain situations means we'd need to also make changes to how many points you win, or what the requirements are for divisions (otherwise, everyone would blow well past 2100 and then the VP requirements for divisions below Warlord will become largely meaningless). We do not expect that everyone will get rewards for the top divisions, and that many less-competitive players will be fighting just for daily challenges/iron coins, which continues to hold true.
- We are still looking at making adjustments to PVP matchmaking. That said, activity from the player base shows that a greater percentage of players are playing PVP, and more are competing for the higher divisions. Recent changes to matchmaking appear to have removed the most extreme cases where players were attacked very few times and able to rank highly, and we believe we can make further adjustments to further reduce discrepancies that are still reported.
