A Radical Suggestion

Warbringa

With all the talk about rebalancing and which teams and characters are unfair and their impact on PvP being the big issue, what about if the devs were able to revamp the way PvP defense teams are assigned.  I know it may not be possible given the limitations of the code and game itself.  My suggestion is as follows: 

You can select 12 characters from certain tiers in PvP based on your MMR. Your defense team, will randomly be created from those characters and the required character (if non-Sim) and will change every time someone queues you up. Thus we get away from seeing all the same dominant characters and teams that are results of broken characters since those dominant teams and characters will not be appearing as often.  This would enhance diversity in PvP teams and encourage more attacks, boosting points.  It may also encourage more shielding purchases since people with the dominant defense teams cannot just float for a lot longer in the current PvP environment.  On attack of course, you can still pick any team you wish.  You can change your 12 characters on your defense roster at any time as well. 

In order to discourage cupcaking, 5* MMR rosters can only select 4* and 5* characters to their defense rosters.  4* MMR rosters can only select 3*, 4* and 5* characters to their defense roster etc.  This may provide an issue for a small amount of 5* players who routinely use 3* characters in PvP beyond the required character if that exists? You could still cupcake but just not using 1, 2 or 3* characters if you were a 5* player.

Thoughts on this general idea?  I know it may not be feasible in real life but would this help alleviate many of the character/team balance issues that seem to plague PvP and spice up the game with team/character diversity?  What other thoughts do people have to help PvP that are not directly nerfing or rebalancing characters?  Is this a much easier fix than going through and upsetting the current meta and angering players like prior nerfs and rebalances have done? I think the end result may be more points, more activity and more participation in PvP.  The downside is it may require more shielding/hopping or strategy to consider the best way to climb.  This downside would probably only impact the people who are floating with the dominant defensive PvP teams though right now.

Daredevil217

Me on offense:

Thorkoye hitting the people with only a handful of 5* **** defensive 4* teams.

Me on defense...

Gritty

HawkCap

Bishop/Strange

Bishop/BRB

Bishop/Jessica

Bishop/Daredevil

Bishop/Doom

Bishop/Professor

Bishop/Thor

Bishop/Iceman

Bishop/Okoye

Bishop...

PiMacleod

Daredevil217 said:

Me on offense:

Thorkoye hitting the people with only a handful of 5* tinykitty defensive 4* teams.

Me on defense...

Gritty

HawkCap

Bishop/Strange

Bishop/BRB

Bishop/Jessica

Bishop/Daredevil

Bishop/Doom

Bishop/Professor

Bishop/Thor

Bishop/Iceman

Bishop/Okoye

Bishop...

So.. . Um..   is that your way of saying you support his idea of selecting 12 characters that the cpu selects THREE RANDOM from in order to build your defensive team for each fight?   

Daredevil217

PiMacleod said:

Daredevil217 said:

Me on offense:

Thorkoye hitting the people with only a handful of 5* tinykitty defensive 4* teams.

Me on defense...

Gritty

HawkCap

Bishop/Strange

Bishop/BRB

Bishop/Jessica

Bishop/Daredevil

Bishop/Doom

Bishop/Professor

Bishop/Thor

Bishop/Iceman

Bishop/Okoye

Bishop...

So.. . Um..   is that your way of saying you support his idea of selecting 12 characters that the cpu selects THREE RANDOM from in order to build your defensive team for each fight?   

Ohhhhh.  I thought I had to pick 12 TEAMS.  Not characters.  My bad.  So right now I have almost 30 5* champs, but all are pretty much "baby champs" (450-460 range).  Someone with only a handful of baby champs would currently be in the same MMR as me.  So say they have 4 5* and 8 4*.  Odds are I would be facing a lot teams composed entirely of 4*.  Or is that not how this works?

froggerjohn

I think Daredevil hits on the biggest problem with the idea, which is that players who recently entered a new tier, and/or players with lighter rosters in general would be hurt quite a bit by this, due to significant differences in their top players, versus everyone else.

The motivation for the idea however, is sound IMO.
If PvP players aren't faced with a predominance of the offending characters, then the problem largely goes away.
And there should be ways to engineer that, besides bringing out the nerf bat.

PinkoMcFlyToo

I do think there is merit to this idea.
My biggest concern is how this would affect the overall points pool.
Like it or not, there are a lot of points built up early by front runners that rely on their strong defensive team to build up points before they throw out an easier team for others to beat.
I think this idea would level the playing field, but if it were to make 1200 ridiculously hard to hit, d3 would need 4-5 years of data before they adjusted the progression awards.

HoundofShadow

I saw these (similar) options in a survey in 2018/2019 before: players fight preset teams. I expect rewards to receive radical change too. It could be good or bad, depending on how the difficulty changes.

AXP_isme

There’s something in the idea but it does overhaul the current structure in a big way. It would require a shift in mindset for both attack and defence and would likely create some perverse incentives. You could skip the same person over and over hoping for an easier defensive team, one with lower tier characters or more colour overlap. You would have to trade off the time required to cycle teams against the time difference from beating an ‘easier’ team to work out when to skip. On the other hand it would encourage resource consumption, iso for skips and hp for shields so it wouldn’t be bad from the bean-counters’s perspective. 

peterdark

I had an idea for pvp a while ago:

https://forums.d3go.com/discussion/79207/yet-another-pvp-suggestion

bluewolf

This system would be amusing chaos but depress spending among whales who target specific people, often because they are effective on defense.  If your defensive team was random they would have less reason to chase characters.

Also, people who shield hop etc plan out their teams carefully and also spend a lot of money on shields.

I mean if you want to see spending drop and the game's revenue drop, and possibly push it over the edge, then maybe they should try it.

That said they had a survey a while ago where they asked us what kind of teams we wanted to see presented to us in PVP.  I can't remember all the options but the point is it showed they are thinking about this to some extent.

But then, they have been thinking about a lot of things.  Always hard to know what they will do.

Borstock

I like knowing what defensive team I have out there so I know approximately how long I have on a shield hop before I'm goo.

Warbringa

Yeah I do believe there would have to be tweaks to MMR as it currently stands to make sure transitioners are paired against each other and not large, advanced rosters like the current system does.  I think it would end up with a better MMR though than what we have now if it was adjusted such.

Warbringa

bluewolf said:

This system would be amusing chaos but depress spending among whales who target specific people, often because they are effective on defense.  If your defensive team was random they would have less reason to chase characters.

Also, people who shield hop etc plan out their teams carefully and also spend a lot of money on shields.

I mean if you want to see spending drop and the game's revenue drop, and possibly push it over the edge, then maybe they should try it.

That said they had a survey a while ago where they asked us what kind of teams we wanted to see presented to us in PVP.  I can't remember all the options but the point is it showed they are thinking about this to some extent.

But then, they have been thinking about a lot of things.  Always hard to know what they will do.

There may be some of that but I think many of the whales would still spend to get the good defensive characters to make sure they have the 12 best options in their opinion on defense.  In addition, many people with the "good" defensive teams can just float most of the way towards max progression, so wouldn't we possibly see an increase shielding with the random defense?  

PvP seems to be dying already, I think it needs a huge shakeup. Not sure if this is the way to do it or not.  I know myself, I prioritize PvE for several reasons, but one of the major reasons I don't play PvP as much is that it simply is boring.  All I see are the same 3 teams or so beyond 600/700 points, which is really really bad for PvP.  

Warbringa

AXP_isme said:

There’s something in the idea but it does overhaul the current structure in a big way. It would require a shift in mindset for both attack and defence and would likely create some perverse incentives. You could skip the same person over and over hoping for an easier defensive team, one with lower tier characters or more colour overlap. You would have to trade off the time required to cycle teams against the time difference from beating an ‘easier’ team to work out when to skip. On the other hand it would encourage resource consumption, iso for skips and hp for shields so it wouldn’t be bad from the bean-counters’s perspective. 

Yeah, I could see the skip tax actually increase since you should be able to get a whole more reasonable teams to play against in this idea.  

Another option with this idea would be to lessen the points loss for the defender when losing a battle, perhaps making points lost significantly smaller than it is now? Wonder if you only lost 5-10 points per defensive loss?  This may help assuage the people who complain about random defense and draw more players to PvP.  One complaint I have heard from the various alliances that I have been in for the many years I have played is that getting hammered  (even between shield hops) and losing so many points is a huge turn-off to many players.