For those unfamiliar, Smogon is a website that maintains an unofficial metagame system for the game Pokemon. It is widely used outside of official events. There are many different metagame lists they maintain, but the main ones (as far as I know, I’ve only dabbled in Pokemon metagames) are Ubers, Over Used (OU), Under Used (UU), Rarely Used (RU), Never Used (NU), and I’ll throw in Little Cup (LC) for the sake of my proposal.
In Ubers, nothing will change from the current metagame. All troops and weapons are available. At this point, we must start declaring what troops and weapons must only be allowed to be played in Ubers and nowhere else. These will be the most powerful of all, such as Life and Death, or Zuul’Goth. Then we declare what can only be played in OU. These troops and weapons cannot be used in any lower tiers, but can be used in higher ones. We do this for all metagames until we get to the weakest.
By making metagames beyond just the one that we have at the moment, we allow for more interesting team building with troops that we may have never used before. Some people may find that they prefer to play at a lower power level and a more methodical approach to the game. There may be some that like to play at a high level, but find that they dislike playing with and against the most used troops all of the time. Then, there will be some that will play every metagame and get a fresh experience every time they play.
Here is an example of where the current troops could align right now. Keep in mind, there will be a lot of disagreements on where I have placed some troops and weapons. This list was done a little quickly and could use some fine tuning. I’d like to keep discussion of this post about the metagame idea itself. If this gains traction with the devs, it would then be suitable to make a new post and discuss exactly where everything fits. Any troop or weapon not listed can be assumed to be in LC. GoW Proposed Metagames
Pitfalls and Solutions
How do we fit 6 metagames into our current PVP menu?
- There may be more elegant solutions, but there could be a drop down menu under the current ranked submenu which includes all of the metagames. It would be necessary to make this VERY obvious. For defenses, you could do the same, however it would be ideal to redesign the current ranked menu so that you could see your current offered opponents with your defense team on the same screen. There is a lot of wasted space on the defense submenu as it is.
All of the best mana generators are at higher metagames, making for slower games.
- Yes, empowered converters are in most high end teams, so we introduce a multiplier for each metagame that will reduce the stats. Stats have inflated greatly as of late and spells that only deal 30 damage is not enough to cut through 140 total health in a reasonable amount of time. Ubers would keep current health pools, OU could be x .9, UU x .8, and as we get to LC we could go as low as around x .3.
Umberwolf is too good for RU and Krystenax is under performing in OU. What do we do?
- This is the best part of the system. We simply just shift them to the next higher/lower metagame. This must not be done lightly, though. These changes could be made during updates, or even in hotfixes if something is too problematic.
It’s a lot of work to maintain 6 different metagames.
- Community. There are many people who love to pick apart these things and would love to help make sure all 6 are in a healthy state. You could assemble a small group of community members to voice their opinions, maybe even just your beta testers.
There are only troops and weapons listed in your metagames. What about classes?
- There are many troops and weapons that require synergies with racial attributes. Ideally, classes would be a little closer in power level, but if some prove too powerful, we could assign metagames in the future.
New troops come out every week. Which metagame do they belong to?
- Realistically, this shouldn’t be too difficult and the devs should be able to pinpoint where they should go. There could be a hotfix if they’re wrong. If there is some indecision, Salty could always post a poll in the Spoilers post or with the beta testers the week before release.
Splitting the player base is not a good idea. People will be facing the same opponents over and over again.
- You mean like we are right now with one metagame? Make players who play PVP matches, in their respective metagames, stay in the opponent pool for longer, even if it’s a week. Remove rewards for individual defense attempts and make a defense leaderboard. A large leaderboard. Make the leaderboard rewards small, but at least you make up for the fact that players may have more defense battles since they are in the pool longer. The leaderboard would ideally be percentage based with a minimum amount of battles.
About me
I’ve been playing Gems of War since March 2018. I started on PS4 and made it to around level 1315. I was in the guid Assonance at the end of my time on PS4 and participated in a few bracket 1 and 2 Guild Wars. I switched to PC in early 2019 and am currently level 1217 with the guild Throne of Odin. PVP is my favored game mode and my favorite thing to do in game is to theory craft new teams for PVP. Also, I’m a “short and to the point” kind of person and it pains me to make a post this long. It could have been much longer.