there is clearly 3 camps here.
personally i fall in the 2nd one.
its about time that the cx team had a support member based in Europe and USA, the fact they are on Australian time means most English speaking time zones miss them
2 and 3 don’t really feel mutually exclusive.
I had those too, it;'s not that I didn’t have them at all. But I also happened to have journey loopers in at least 1 slot, sometimes in all 3, quite often. I can work around Kurandara with Leonis Tower, I can work around goblins or Yao, and L&D teams, and various Zuul teams as well.
But in all honesty, the combination of Wyrm/Arges & journey loopers were my PvP breaking point. They were 100 times harder to stop than all the other popular teams, and they started to dominate the field at some point. I never understood why people put up such annoying teams on defence, when it was more beneficial long-term in old PvP to get revenge battles from losing on defense than from winning on defense, but… that’s a different discussion.
You forgot 4: People who are fine with journey loopers, have no issues beating them in pvp, remember how much they helped when they were new and are possibly in guilds that struggle to reach higher tiers in events where the newer players will now have even less options to progress. It’s possible to have no issues with people using journey teams at the same time as being able to build a team without them.
i am probably going to later regret this sarcasm. but if the looping is such a problem then goblins, books, all gem spammers and extra turn all need nerfed. they can be all countered in a similar/same way…
i have said it before, this is a distraction. no one is complaining about pvp at the moment are they.
Blame development for including an overall winning percentage into the game. I can’t be the only one, who kept at least half an eye on that number.
Anyhow, once they get going, there is not that much difference between running against pathfinders, goblins or Yao Guai + red weapon (except maybe, that Yao at least leads to a quick end). Unless you have frozen exactle the right troop (and they have no cure), you are watching a film from the first cast on.
It is bad design, but, unlike what development thinks, it is far from exclusive to pathfinders.
As a newer player I don’t even play pvp all that much because I need to spend my time farming traitstones. When I was brand new I was way too busy using suboptimal troops to VERY slowly attempt events and daily tasks.
Maybe they don’t think new players come to the forums so they could get away with saying it’s to make the game more fun for us but the reasoning is garbage since it actually harms lower level accounts when you take away an easier to get troop that helps them when they don’t have access to basically anything better
i dubbed it gems the movie, kafka even found the jest in that - shocking i know 
I highly doubt development actually think that. If anything, they think people will believe it.
As for defences in PvP. When I started, I used joke defences, but I ended up trying to create harder defences for two reasons. One being trying to figure out what would be effective in GW, and two because I used PvP to test teams, and money bag defences are not useful for that
There are lots of spells, that work much better in the hands of a human player than for the AI, as they require planning. Maybe the solution would have been to move Ailuin, Chalcy, Todd and the whole gang further into that territory.
It’s interesting to note the number of newer players coming here to express their opinion about how Journey troops are more beneficial than the occasional groan they may have elicited in PvP.
It would be interesting to know how the ‘overwhelming evidence’ presented itself as I am pretty sure it was not via this forum.
“We have found overwhelming evidence, that new players are suffering from the random effect of tributes. For this reason, we have removed the gem bonus from hourly collections and instead replaced it with a daily 20 gem gift.”
What a shame, that the “overwhelming evidence” does not seem to have existed until a few weeks ago.
This is definitely not a case of “better late than never” here.
“Overwhelming evidence”
Source: Just trust us bro
I would guess the source of their data is the % or number of ‘rage quits’ when the AI loops followed by the time it was taking people to log back in after the rage quit (seconds —> minutes —> never).
So I think this is why the looping pathfinder troops are worse than doomed book or arges teams where the pain is over rather quickly. So it is not losing but the time that a human has to watch AI and not be able to participate.
I also get that they try to make this event harder as it gives plenty of deeds and books. But at the end of the day they should know their player base contains plenty of completionist type players and that not being able to complete events will frustrate them to exit and play something else. They use this to make money, but if they push it too far, everyone can just use this energy on something else.
…oh, and off topic…. is this new forum troll who began their existence on 25th Dec, just kabal2.0 who thankfully left on 11th Dec…?
I’m wondering if they viewed pvp player data and saw that lower level accounts don’t play as much pvp and very incorrectly assumed that’s because it’s not “fun” because of looping teams when the actual reality is newer players need to spend their time in explore farming targeted traitstones. Not to mention the fact that lower level accounts just take longer to complete things so even just doing the adventure board, delves, dungeon and weekly events can take up all of your game time
I honestly doubt that, since it’s obvious journey troops are more beneficial to newer players than annoying in pvp, especially considering their recent influx, that they are currently only to be found in central spire in a dangerous capacity, and that you can pick from 3 battles. I just quit battles with loopers if I think there’s no chance it’s going to stop, or offtab until I can’t hear them anymore.
And that’s going to be even more of the case now that they won’t be able to use journey troops, meaning slower progression overall and less rewards from guild.
For a low level player, this is the only accessable region, and if a lot of players on low levels use them in offense, you will have equally many defenses…
So yes, bronze and silver league could possibly look quite ugly.
As a lower level player I really don’t think most of us even care about pvp beyond the absolute bare minimum and I honestly don’t see very many looping teams. If I come across one that I can’t counter I either just take a break until I die or simply retreat and start a new game. It makes no difference if I happen to lose a battle and believe me I lose a lot more to 3x eye of arges than looping teams. You need well over 100k traitstones to trait all troops and those new players are using explore to target them instead of playing pvp all day for random stones. When you are new even just going to explore takes forever to earn enough stones to trait 1 troop and you may need to trait several a week depending on events so pvp is at the bottom of the list