Character Bans?

Sandmaker

I think a banning system can really benefit the pvp in this game. Essentially, every player would get to choose 2-3 characters to ban for pvp where neither you or the people attacking you can use those characters. I believe this will do a number of things that will improve the game:

Player-based buffer to balancing problems
With the ability to ban out characters, the players now have a way to deal with unbalanced characters. If something extremely broken gets released, players would have the utility to stop it in its tracks, instead of waiting for months for a balance patch. This has the side effect of forcing the developers to released semi-balanced characters, otherwise it'll just get banned out 100% and nobody will buy the covers.

Rotating meta
The meta is pretty stagnant in this game. There's usually one dominate strategy and almost everyone runs it (e.g. sentry+hood/draken). With a banning system, players can now ban out the dominate strategy. However, the consequence is that you've banned yourself from using it as well. This forces new strategies to emerge and eventually become dominate. And that's where it'll start becoming interesting, because now player will have to decide how to adjust. If they all switch to banning the new strategy, then it opens up the original strategy. This creates a dynamic evolving meta that promotes roster diversity, which is my next point.

Roster Diversity
A banning system will promote people to develop a more rounded out roster with multiple strategies. It becomes very risky to run just one roster, because you can't hit teams that ban you out. In addition, you open yourself up to getting hit by that same strategy. Instead people will look to find uses for characters that most likely won't get banned, maybe providing a use for the slew of characters that currently don't see the light of day. This makes the game more interesting for the players, and drives up sales for the developers. Quite the win-win.

Defense now plays a role
Defense right now plays almost no role in this game. Being able to ban out strategies that are strong against your team will go a long way to finally letting us have a say on what goes during the defense. It also has the consequence of letting you have a choice on what shows up in your retribution nodes.

Unknown

I like the idea, but I say test it for a season to see the feedback. Of course, everyone who relies on sentry will b!tch that they didn't come in the top 5 for the one pvp he was banned, so those results might be tainted. Also, once a character is banned, he shouldn't be banned again until every other character was banned.

Adventfire

Wouldn't that be bad for people with smaller rosters? They could potentially find a nice chunk of their roster banned. Also for people transitioning from 2* to 3* could find themselves not able to compete very well in PvP because the only powerhouses they had happened to be the 3 characters banned.

OnesOwnGrief

Typhon13 wrote:

I like the idea, but I say test it for a season to see the feedback. Of course, everyone who relies on sentry will b!tch that they didn't come in the top 5 for the one pvp he was banned, so those results might be tainted. Also, once a character is banned, he shouldn't be banned again until every other character was banned.

Most who have Sentry also have Patchneto and or Daken leveled. A lot of the players who consistently place in the actually have deeper rosters to pay with.

Unknown

There really isn't any interesting dynamics between how certain characters interact against another character so a ban feature would just mean someone who don't have Sentry would have Sentry banned all the time, and the guy with Sentry will never have him banned and if it's like that, you might as well just ban Sentry globally and be done with it.

The closest thing I can think of is that if you're running Nick Fury you might want to ban Falcon, but you can also just skip the guys who have Falcon and he's just not used often enough on offense in general for you to be worried about him.

Sandmaker

Phantron wrote:

There really isn't any interesting dynamics between how certain characters interact against another character so a ban feature would just mean someone who don't have Sentry would have Sentry banned all the time, and the guy with Sentry will never have him banned and if it's like that, you might as well just ban Sentry globally and be done with it.

The closest thing I can think of is that if you're running Nick Fury you might want to ban Falcon, but you can also just skip the guys who have Falcon and he's just not used often enough on offense in general for you to be worried about him.

It's not necessary just about interesting interactions between the characters (although they do they exist). The interesting part is about allowing the players to evolve the meta. Take your Sentry for example. If 100% of people who don't own Sentry is banning Sentry, then it becomes very sub-optimal to play Sentry in your team. Your target pool will be very limited, and you become high value targets for people who want to keep running Sentry. In the mean time you'll be paying heavily in iso on skips to find teams that didn't ban Sentry, or you'll be forced to risk more shield hops, because you can only find lower point targets.

The strategic minded player will see this trend and abandon sentry and move on to the next "OP" character in line (let's say Magneto). Many others will eventually follow this example, and the meta will have shifted to most people using Magneto. But that's when it becomes really interesting. If 90% of the players are now running Magento, then there is incentive to start banning Magneto instead of Sentry. You open yourself up to sentry, but that's fine, because nobody is running Sentry anymore, and in order to attack you with Sentry, they have to open themselves up as well, which many won't want to do. However, if this leads to everybody banning Magneto instead, then the meta will have shifted again, and people will have incentive to start running Sentry again.

Now, if there is only one ban per person, it'll probably just shift back and forth between banning Magneto and Sentry. However, if you have 3 bans, this dynamic becomes very difficult to predict. Between you and the person you're attacking, there will be up to 6 characters banned total. Which character is the 6th most OP in this game? 7th? 8th? What percent of people would agree with you? People will have incentive to invest and use less popular characters to avoid getting their main team banned out. It'll dramatically open up the number of viable team.

This is very different than a global ban. A global ban is static, it doesn't open up any choices for the player. There will always be a top OP character in the game. If you globally ban Sentry, then people will just all start using Magneto. If you ban Magneto, then it'll be the next, and the next, and so on.

Player controlled bans lets you make smart decisions about the state of the game and what you see in battle. It let's people run strategies that counters what everyone else is doing.

Flare808

Take your Sentry for example. If 100% of people who don't own Sentry is banning Sentry, then it becomes very sub-optimal to play Sentry in your team. Your target pool will be very limited, and you become high value targets for people who want to keep running Sentry. In the mean time you'll be paying heavily in iso on skips to find teams that didn't ban Sentry, or you'll be forced to risk more shield hops, because you can only find lower point targets.

Actually, having one veto would make me use Sentry even more (if thats possible). Top level shield hopping is done 90% of the time with Sentry. The only character that gives me a pause is Hood (other than supersized spidey/hulk), since he is annoying to play against and forces me to run my own Hood. If I could veto Hood, Sentry would be even easier to use paired with Daken. I know a lot of people would want their own Hood out for Intimidate, but I'd rather sacrifice that for the peace of mind that whatever AP I match will stay with me.

Sandmaker

Flare808 wrote:

Actually, having one veto would make me use Sentry even more (if thats possible). Top level shield hopping is done 90% of the time with Sentry. The only character that gives me a pause is Hood (other than supersized spidey/hulk), since he is annoying to play against and forces me to run my own Hood. If I could veto Hood, Sentry would be even easier to use paired with Daken. I know a lot of people would want their own Hood out for Intimidate, but I'd rather sacrifice that for the peace of mind that whatever AP I match will stay with me.

I'm not sure I understand how this would make you want to use Sentry more. If everyone banned Sentry, and you insist on having Sentry on your team, then you'll be spending all your time (and iso) skipping nodes you can't attack. And banning the Hood won't help you find nodes without the Hood in it, it'll only make it so you can't use the Hood, and people attacking you can't use the Hood on their team.

Allowing bans is mostly a defense mechanic (something this game sorely needs). On offensive you can already technically ban whoever you want through heavy use of the skip button.

Unknown

Adventfire wrote:

Wouldn't that be bad for people with smaller rosters? They could potentially find a nice chunk of their roster banned. Also for people transitioning from 2* to 3* could find themselves not able to compete very well in PvP because the only powerhouses they had happened to be the 3 characters banned.

All the more reason to spend HP on a bigger roster roster