February 14th 2017 PVP Arena Update Discussion

[Sparton_LOTB]

Great job Sparton... I was attacked 170 times in less then 40 hours, with only 40 revenges possible, and every single win giving me 12 points while broken def losing me at least 18. This is such a great system and such a refreshment from PvE grinding. I am also happy that I can only see 10 most recent attacks only and carefully pick my revenges from 29, which is sow many I had last two mornings. It really is possible to make some progress in Arena, with two refills a day you can be +1 point compared to yesterday.

As if this writing, you're... rank 45.

Better than thousands of players.

Looks like you're doing just fine.

one real small but important improvment would be to add the rank and the current points to the names on the revenge screen.

so we can quickly see, who is a good pick to revenge. now i have 154 attacks and i have to search every time for the name
of the guy and think about if it's worth to revenge him. that's really annoying...

Yeah, we can look into surfacing that information a bit more easily.

please check the refresh lists too, they are still broken, even there are so many new names, 40%-70% of the lists remains the same every time.
this has to be some sort of conflict.

This is something we're still looking into improving. The bigger playerbase has helped (at least for most people), but it looks like people at the top see this more often than not.

And yes, please listen to Billion a little more he is a bright mind and has really good suggestions. :-)

Oh yeah, I've been happy to digest his advice (and many others' constructive criticism, too). I just can't promise too much right now while we're still analyzing and making sure that PVP is performing as intended (that people can continue to climb during the week, people want the rank-based division rewards, and that there is competition to get into the rank-based divisions).

Sparton, I get that. But how do you recover from 80-100 attacks per day? Even if you have a decent offense (holds at 25% plus is good I think) then you still find yourself in decline or stuck at best. Did you guys anticipate this #of attacks on a player?

The short answer is people are continuing to climb despite that.

The long answer is we expected there to be more attacks and for the loss reduction based on divisions to mostly handle that so people can still be making progress getting higher VP from day to day. Despite attacks on some players outstripping what we expected, that seems to be working as intended, but if we see people end up stuttering around the division where the loss reduction drops off (Duelist II w/1700), then we know we'll have more work to do (either with tuning those values and/or doing other things to spread attacks around).

Could you elaborate a bit on how the current AI works?

I wish I could with confidence, but there's definitely a lot of weird legacy code from the Roadhouse days which governs that.

Mizrael has it about right, in that moves are categorized and the AI tries to use them at seemingly smart times, but... they sometimes lack awareness with what the enemy's current state is (thus Mizrael's example about the dumb Warrior Troll), or awareness in how their "heal" skill or whatever works relative to other heal skills (thus low health Sentinel Allied Bomber Boy sometimes doing a poorly-timed heal).

It would be great if we could have a say on their actions, either by their placement on the map or by just saying: "attack only mode" for this guy!

We do want to be able to do something like that eventually, but the above issue of crazy legacy code makes that problematic to build off of. That said, there is someone in the office who's taking extra time out of his day to try and look at improving the general AI (to have better situational awareness), but I dunno when the fruits of his labour will make it into the game, or if we'll be able to make it so it can be "player-tuned".

And as a suggestion, we could use more feedback about how people are attacking us, teams their using to attack and % win rate against players/champions. So we´d know what is giving us trouble. (I believe we are biased to set our defense based on how we attack because of the lack of info)

We are looking into expanding on that information, but I don't have a timeline for it. We've spent a long time working on PVP, and while we know there's still improvements we want to do, we want to make sure we don't have such a large gap between releasing new features!

[RCarter]

As if this writing, you're... rank 45.

Better than thousands of players.

Looks like you're doing just fine.

Sparton, thanks for the LOL, intended or not. Been one of those days and that just made me laugh...

I gotta admit that I wasn't particularly thrilled with the idea of PVP. But after playing around with it for a couple of days, its been fun. It has really made me think about things in a different way.

I was wondering if we change a toons talisman load out in PVE, does that change the load out of that toon if it is locked into the PVP defense?

[Ubajoa]

It is absolutely impossible to rank up when you are in the middle. Right now I am at rank 59 1672, the refresh list give me 10 options with 200 less points than me (6 refresh in a row). 10 guys between 1350 and 1450. If I decide to attack them I'll be winning 120 points, 12 per head. And then the 10 guys will revenge me they will take me 170 cause the 200 difference. If I'm lucky I'll hold 2 of them (cause you know I dont have a prisoner nor troll nor CG so my defense sucks) that gives me -17*8+12*2 equals to -136 in addition to that will be the 20 attacks from the attack list. So my question is why we cant have high ranks in the refresh list? or at least people with similar rating.

[Mizrael]

And why does the AI "auto draw" after like 100 rounds? i swear i was 1 round away from a win!!!(Thanks for that draw AI)

[Rodrigo-3281]

Hi Rodrigo,

It will take a little bit of time to adjust to PVP. Sag made a great post with tips/thoughts for newcomers. Also, many considerations newer players are having we had during BETA. You might wanna check that thread too.

Having said that, maybe we did get too far ahead with skill shards and new toons during the BETA testing. I believe sacrifice is just around the corner to make up for that. The game has to make champions and skill shards more available for newer player to catch up.

Best

Thanks Gmac. I'll take a look at Sag's thread as well as the PvP forum to see more tips.

It may be that you need to rethink your character teams, and/or how you have assigned talismans. You need to build a team that can work when going first or second to maximize your chance of victory, which often necessitates more defensive play, and/or building more health talismans to improve general sustainability.

If you want some tips from the developers, check out the new Talisman Packs in the store. You don't need to buy them if that's not your thing, but it shows you some possible sets of talismans that we've found work well if you want to have competitive characters in PVP. You'll notice that usually means having at least one health talisman, balancing secondary bonuses to Def/MR, using some more advanced sets to help build up combos, etc.

I immediately noticed that my Golden Sons (Assassin and Warrior both maxed out) really don't stand a chance due to their low health (I really like their talisman setup for PvE). So I have a higher health team now and it does seem like I can make it out of the first wave attack.

I have some Toon options that I'm working on to give me that Def/MR bonus like the Sentinel Bomber Boy or Pyro Soldier. I keep seeing Mummy and GR Eddie on plenty of teams so maybe I'll look at them too.

[Nicko]

As I was testing my defense, I removed the Prisoner and replaced him with an AoF. Because I was tired, last night when I attacked Schadenfreud I forgot to put my Prisoner back on the team. Oops . In any event, my Troll and Hellhound's passives didn't work because his team had the Siege passive, he went first, and I was stunned/taunted/frozen to death. I lost.

So yes, the Prisoner is important. That battle reminded me how much I depend on him. But - it also validated what I suspected before - lose the Prisoner and another toon will just take his place as "overpowered". In this case it was the Blue bat (or maybe Death Dog, can't remember which). Yes - the Prisoner is more powerful as he affects all passives, but Immunity and the Trolls shield are probably two of the most critical passives in the game and they are eliminated with Siege. Nerfing the Prisoner too much simply passes the buck.

[slauki]

wouldn't it be a solution to remove the points needed for claiming specific rewards? if solely the ranking would matter, there would be much more competition in total all over the list. i imagine a big firework on saturday with many refills all over the place.

i understand that you want to assure that people play a lot to "deserve" the rewards, but i assume that you would create much more action/competition when you simply make a rank based reward system. then the point system could stay as it is. the competition will make the people play, that should be more effective and it will bring the competition into every region of the list not only into the top 25 region.

now many people won't refill on saturday because they don't have the points needed for ther reward anyway. so why should they spend something?if yoz change it it would immidiatly push the number of refills and your income at the same time

[Kaz_LOTB]

Sparton, thanks for the LOL, intended or not. Been one of those days and that just made me laugh...

I gotta admit that I wasn't particularly thrilled with the idea of PVP. But after playing around with it for a couple of days, its been fun. It has really made me think about things in a different way.

I was wondering if we change a toons talisman load out in PVE, does that change the load out of that toon if it is locked into the PVP defense?

Currently your Talisman load outs do not get saved until you leave the inventory screen, so unequipping and equipping talismans while in your inventory will not affect your defense team.

-Kaz

[Sparton_LOTB]

I was wondering if we change a toons talisman load out in PVE, does that change the load out of that toon if it is locked into the PVP defense?

Kaz's comment is correct. That said, as far as features are concerned, it would change talisman assignment on that character for use in other features. Right now, talismans are tied to the character, not tied to a character in a team.

It is absolutely impossible to rank up when you are in the middle. Right now I am at rank 59 1672, the refresh list give me 10 options with 200 less points than me (6 refresh in a row). 10 guys between 1350 and 1450. If I decide to attack them I'll be winning 120 points, 12 per head. And then the 10 guys will revenge me they will take me 170 cause the 200 difference. If I'm lucky I'll hold 2 of them (cause you know I dont have a prisoner nor troll nor CG so my defense sucks) that gives me -17*8+12*2 equals to -136 in addition to that will be the 20 attacks from the attack list.

In general, you usually won't be revenged as much as you attack (because revenging is limited per day, and not everyone will revenge even if they have the option).

That said, if you end up being stalled at this amount while spending all the energy you naturally regain even through to Saturday, then certainly we will have a problem, and we'll look at tuning to make it so players are not stalled at such a point so far before the rank-based divisions.

So my question is why we cant have high ranks in the refresh list? or at least people with similar rating.

Right now manually refreshing gives you slightly easier opponents (and easier opponents will usually have lower scores). Perhaps it's too much lower in score, though, so that's something we can look at.

wouldn't it be a solution to remove the points needed for claiming specific rewards? if solely the ranking would matter, there would be much more competition in total all over the list. i imagine a big firework on saturday with many refills all over the place.

i understand that you want to assure that people play a lot to "deserve" the rewards, but i assume that you would create much more action/competition when you simply make a rank based reward system. then the point system could stay as it is. the competition will make the people play, that should be more effective and it will bring the competition into every region of the list not only into the top 25 region.

now many people won't refill on saturday because they don't have the points needed for ther reward anyway. so why should they spend something?if yoz change it it would immidiatly push the number of refills and your income at the same time

Not having the top 25 able to get rewards for the top few divisions only happened early in the beta when the point system made it much harder for higher ranked people to climb, and when there were far fewer competitors. People are still climbing hard and fast (Jofer16 just came outta nowhere and bumped Nicko outta 1st). I would be surprised if at least the top 4 divisions weren't filled out by people with enough points by this Saturday, but it's definitely possible.

[Kamuz24z]

As I was testing my defense, I removed the Prisoner and replaced him with an AoF. Because I was tired, last night when I attacked Schadenfreud I forgot to put my Prisoner back on the team. Oops . In any event, my Troll and Hellhound's passives didn't work because his team had the Siege passive, he went first, and I was stunned/taunted/frozen to death. I lost.

So yes, the Prisoner is important. That battle reminded me how much I depend on him. But - it also validated what I suspected before - lose the Prisoner and another toon will just take his place as "overpowered". In this case it was the Blue bat (or maybe Death Dog, can't remember which). Yes - the Prisoner is more powerful as he affects all passives, but Immunity and the Trolls shield are probably two of the most critical passives in the game and they are eliminated with Siege. Nerfing the Prisoner too much simply passes the buck.

Really good point Nicko I think just by reducing the amount of toons affected by the prisoner or blue bat (siege) let's say that instead of taking the immunity from all toons provide by hellhound take it away from 2 random toons instead of all them and then we'll have two toons protected by immunity or shields if you are using the troll, for Angel of fear get affected for a 50% chance of getting a extra turn i think that will be a good balance and to get to the top you don't necessarily need a prisoner all the guys taking the top spots have a prisoner