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!