While i appreciate everyones input and i dont mind the discussion going wherever it goes naturally, i want to point out that thus far everyone has missed the point of my OP.
I am trying to point out the cause not fimd a solution.
That said, there will always be a meta because of human nature. Between copycats and the tendency to want to come here and wail about a troop/team that you struggle with nothing will ever change.
I find it quite amusing, albeit incredibly frustrating, that many people’s first and only response is nerf it into the toilet.
@Delinquent you say nerf 10 cards i am gonna guess which 10
Wisp
Kraken
Mab
Forest troll
Shiny
Famine
Psion
EK
Doomclaw
Probably wisp again
Now what i find amusing is lets say the devs decide to listen to you and they nerf all 10 in one day. That wont get rid of the list it will only change the inhabitants of it.
Then what happens? Those 10 cards get nerfed… Next thing you know all the cards are garbage
And if we buff everything to the point where one troop cast equals a swift victory, the game would be a coin toss, as I said earlier.
So it’s about not always nerfing but not always boosting either.
The thing is some people will prefer shorter battles than others enjoy a more lengthy, strategic one.
I guess @Vangor prefers it settled under 10 turns.
Perhaps there just needs to be an incentive to change out your defense team. Maybe with each day reset, you get a few gems if you change your defense team.
It won’t completely fix it, because I’m sure people will just alternate between two teams, just out of laziness.
No i prefer a challenge. I prefer to have troops that arent frustrating as hell to use. I prefer to be able to enjoy my victories without having to endure the masses yelling that the troops/teams that i just got done wookie-stomping are too hard to beat.
But as usual TSC is out in force and i am woefully outnumbered
Not every card should be nerfed, in fact most shouldn’t be. But that doesn’t mean that some cards shouldn’t. I was all aboard the famine nerf train…it had to be done. It’s still a very powerful card and worthy of its rank. I would argue still one of the top two or three mythics in the game.
Wisp needs a nerf. There is nothing else to say about that as he is way op for his rarity. I’m not saying to neuter him, just make him targetable. He would still be annoying as hell making you happy, but not infuriating making me happy. I don’t mind a challenge, or rng, or losing, but when the starting board determines if I win or lose then that’s a problem.
But most of the time people are on here calling for nerfs it’s mainly because they lack the creativity or sometimes just the cards to counter it. Even vjm was counterable. Sure, every once in a while rng would screw you and it sucked, but a little creativity went a long way with it.
This was precisely my point. The recent, brief 4-surge meta made this clear. When matches go faster and easier it disproportionately benefits the AI. It makes the game “harder” in the sense that the AI can loop you to death, or one-shot you, but that’s not real difficulty. That’s RNG masquerading as Difficulty. And it isn’t fun at all.
The answer to “nerf OP troops” is not “there will always be a meta so what’s the point”. Yes, there will always be a meta. But there are better and worse metas, fun and not-fun metas, healthy and unhealthy metas, etc. The existence of a meta is not an argument for or against anything.
I think there’s darn near universal consensus that the current meta is undesirable. Thus, change the meta to make the game more enjoyable for virtually everyone.
And here you have hinted at my point without knowing it. This is always the case! Change the meta by nerfing everything and a new meta will rise from the ashes of the old and it wont be 52 seconds before ppl will be yelling exactly what you just said.
This meta is undesirable and it must be nerfed!
I have seen it before and i am sure i will see it again
Yes.
And sometimes the community is worth hearing, sometimes it isn’t.
“TSC” is not always made of the same members.
I’m not necessarily a good example, but you’ll note I used to be very active on these forums (because I loved the game and the community) but had stopped participating for a long while now (getting bored). Now I’m back again. Why? Because I feel unconfortable with the state of the game, but I’ll probably just go back to the shadows when everything is back in order.
Bottom line is : you feel like you are one against the world because all the time you see people come and complain. That’s normal, people complain when something is wrong according to them. When everything’s okay, most of them will simply not come to the forums at all.
So, yeah, there’ll always be someone to complain because of a meta or another, it’s up to the devs to figure wich one should be worth hearing and wich ones aren’t. They usually use facts : statistics they get from the game, on top of the heartfelt opinion of players. The choice is made at their own discretion.
In evolutionary game theory, the sets of teams discussed represent the ESS - evolutionary stable state or strategy.
Played out on a large scale, players are just trying combinations that are successful. Because defense teams aren’t hidden from players the way attacking teams are, it’s easy to copy defend teams you had a hard time playing against yourself.
Attacking players might value several different features:
-win speed
-win efficiency
-‘fun’ (hard to quantify)
While defending players only see win/loss, making it easier to gravitate towards the so-called ‘grief’ teams that make up the long-run most effective strategy.
Asymmetry in the way battles are played also mean that teams that don’t rely on choice, but rather luck or RNG, can be played closer to optimal by the AI (all things being equal, let’s not get sidetracked about AI or RNG) since the AI more or less lacks strategy.
The only way out of this would be for players to deliberately choose not to use the ESS teams - something advocated by people like @trickycdr - but going against an individual’s best interest is what leads to the current ‘tragedy of the commons’ we’re experiencing and it’s hard to convince people to do this.
That’s exactly how it should work! There should be a periodic change in the meta in order to keep the game fresh and interesting. A stale meta is always a bad thing. It can be the death of games. Change is good!
And, as I said, there are “better” and “worse” metas. A meta where everyone complains about RNG and being looped to death without ever getting a turn – that’s clearly not a good meta. And even if the changes result in a similar situation, psychologically it’s much more palatable if the troops doing the work aren’t always the same handful of troops.
Like I said, claiming there will always be a meta is not an argument for anything.
