PvP broken mechanics

[Sparton_LOTB]

When I won the DM I put that defense together, and now face many similar defenses. I routinely beat them going second - but I have a Prisoner. If you don't have a Prisoner and go second? Good luck! There have been a few who have appeared here and told tales of victory going second, but it's almost impossible. Perhaps that's what you were referring to

But to Slauki's point - every character should have a counter - and there is one for this combo. He's called the Prisoner.

But the Prisoner being the only counter to the Prisoner is the problem. When a character's only reasonable counter is the opposite side having the same character, then it becomes a game of "have that character or lose substantially more", and it makes every team force themselves to dedicate 1 or 2 slots to specific characters you'll then see everywhere (which is what we see a lot of in the top 25... but also in a lot of the lower rankings, too).

With all that being said - I hear what Mr Freeze is saying. I'm sitting here typing while owning the combo in question; I'd perhaps feel like him on the other side of the fence. At the same time I've put a ridiculous amount of time into this game - and some money too - and so I would think my defense SHOULD be really strong. But not unbeatable.

Yeah, in the end, that's the goal; we don't want everyone to win 50/50, and we want people with better stables of characters and the skill to know how to best pair them up to have better win rates than others. We just feel that some characters create massive spikes in capability to achieve high win rate, and commonly it doesn't have to due with specific synergies the characters have, but in their raw presence and power that start invalidating many more opposing options than intended.

I initially griped about the Corrupt General nerf and it ended up being a good thing. We all want this game to be fun, so I appreciate this dialog and look forward to seeing what you bring to the table. While this isn't a democracy - you guys ultimately calls the shots - it would be great if there was at least some dialog about your proposed way to handle this before implementation as it is an issue that is pretty significant.

That is precisely what we'll be doing next week (and I guess to a degree what we've started in there). We'll start with a few characters that on our end we specifically want to look at, but I'll also be opening the a dedicated thread for others to make their case if they think there's something we on the design team are missing, so we as a community can look at and discuss what'll make Legacy of the Beast's PVP as dynamic, competitive, and fun as we can for as much of our players as possible.

The bottom line is, no matter who you nerf, some characters will always be better than others, and this is what makes them desirable, and what will make people keep playing to earn and and paying to buy souls in order to be lucky enough to pull these characters. The Prisoner is currently the strongest (arguably--at least, the one you fight latest in the game campaign) boss character that can be drawn... does it not make sense that he would be one of the most desirable characters?

It's not a problem that the Prisoner is popular/valuable in PVP. We knew that well before PVP would launch that he would be popular. Our oversight is that there's no practical answer to him without using him.

If we introduce other characters with the same passive, we haven't solved the problem. We've just made it so there's a shortlist of characters with X passive you need to bring to have a top-end defense. Team building on defense still stagnates in basically the same way.

Our goal is that there should be viable combinations of characters/talismans that can meet or exceed the value of having a prisoner on defense, even if that means it's much harder to get such a combination. Right now, it doesn't look like that exists, and due to the nature of why he is so dominant, there may not be anything without changing the nature of how his passive works (such as no passives for everyone, or only some characters getting locked down, etc).

And it's then a chicken - or - the - egg argument

Are a lot of these players at the top because they have Prisoners? Or do they have Prisoners because they play a lot and managed to score them - just as they're playing PvP a lot?

Yeah, that's a good question, and something I'll be continuing to review next week.

If I remember correctly... [my quote about not turning this into a Prisoner discussion thread]

RIP my intentions.