Let Us Fight Shielded Characters Again

Unknown · February 2014

I feel this is the worst change that was made lately.

Unknown · February 2014

buckfanana wrote:

I feel this is the worst change that was made lately.

To be honest, I think you can. I put up a shield for DD last night and ended up getting hit about 8 times total over the closing 3 hours.

Unknown · February 2014

I also got attacked quite a bunch while I was shielded last night

Unknown · February 2014

Shielded people can be attacked if you are still in the fight queue for someone. But you are eventually removed from the pool and you can't be found by someone skipping through a ton of people.

In the past, shielded people would show up frequently.

MarvelMan · February 2014

I understand that people were gaming the system and using shielded people as punching bags to move up rank faster, but that seems more an issue of broken MMR rather than shields. Watching the DD tourney over the last few hours everyone in my top ten was shielded, with the occasional person bouncing in (and usually out). If all those people arent showing up, and all brackets are similar, it seems a massive break to the top end.

Maybe they could put shielded people back into the pool but give them a +10% def bonus (its, you know, a shield...) or reduce the points won from someone shielded by 5.

Unknown · February 2014

Progression rewards are not meant to be obtainable without spending $$.

Unknown · February 2014

Here's a better thought. Take out retaliations

Unknown · February 2014

In a tourney with no progression rewards like No Holds Barred Elite, hitting shielded opponents should be allowed. Otherwise you hit the ceiling I hit where EVERYONE ranked above you is shielded and you can't really move up. Shielding up at the top tier means you're sitting pretty and almost guarantees a victory of some sort then, which I thought was one of the problems they were trying to solve.

Unknown · February 2014

One of the big problems with shielding was the fact that everyone threw in a tank team to help each other achieve the unreasonably high progression rewards. Now they've effectively removed tanking (by using your last winning team instead) and doubled shield prices, so I doubt people will still abuse shields the same way. So why not let us hit shielded opponents for a hard fought chance to win?

Unknown · February 2014

They wanted to stop point inflation, where people could leap-frog each other to keep gaining lots of points to get all the progression awards. An approach that would stop this is for shields to only block ~90% of the point loss/gain instead of 100%. People couldn't then use shields to get up to 2000 points then because hitting a shielded target would cause the shielded player to drop in value. It would mean that if someone put up a shield while you were attacking them you would get less points than you expected though, but I think combined with shielded targets being visible again, it would be better overall.

Another problem with the current system is that being invisible while shielded means you can stay shielded/invisible, pop out for a fight or two before anyone targets you, then shield again before attacks start hitting you. If you were always visible but worth low points, this wouldn't be an issue, as unshielding at any time might mean that any incoming attack will hit you for full points rather than -90% reduced.

Most importantly, the current PvP shield system isn't much fun to play.

Unknown · February 2014

Knock3r wrote:

One of the big problems with shielding was the fact that everyone threw in a tank team to help each other achieve the unreasonably high progression rewards. Now they've effectively removed tanking (by using your last winning team instead) and doubled shield prices, so I doubt people will still abuse shields the same way. So why not let us hit shielded opponents for a hard fought chance to win?

I've said it before, tank teams were not the issue at all. ANY shielded team aided in progression, regardless of if they were a tank team or not (high level players just get annoyed having to deal with a regular team, but it wouldn't remotely be a deterrent).

Shields created points out of thin air at a rate much too high for D3's tastes. In the current iteration of PVP, the vast majority of points come from seed teams, and thereafter, other players. The occasional points off a shield team still in the fight queue flows into the point pool. But with shielded opponents being in the fight queue on a regular basis, it causes point inflation which is what the Devs didn't want. Especially because it made progression rewards trivial, no matter what the point value for them was.

turul · February 2014

Shielded players should be visible with a low chance, that would fix it.

aussiemac · February 2014

I'm not convinced it's the retaliations that are the problem. The retaliations are a good deterrent to 'cherry picking' as you may gain small points for an easy match but then get blasted if they successfully retaliate. I personally think it's shields that are causing the issues that are frustrating everyone. I like the shield concept, but I think there is some tweaking that can be done. When 100% of the top 10 is shielded, I'm going to assume that 90% of the 500+ are shielded. That leaves a very small amount of people frenzied at the last minute. This frenzy creates an impossible environment for two main reasons:

1) Less valuable attack opportunities: The people at the top are shielded meaning no valuable battles. So if you're at 500, and looking for a 600+ opponent to make worthy progress, you're SOL
2) More likely to have adverse attacks: At 500+, you are now the prized match to attack. With 90% of 500+ players being shielded, you will have WAY more attacks on you since others aren't showing up or are getting skipped due to low value. These attacks are more frequent and usually more costly

I find this unfortunate, because shields are no longer a luxury, but a necessity to place. I shielded during DD with about 6hrs left at #1, and saw many people try to crack top 5 of the leaderboard. The minute someone did they got destroyed. Also, anytime someone was already in the top 10, but unshielded to progress to top 5 got annihilated. I was fortunate that when I got to #1, which was 800 in my bracket, I had two successful defenses. So I shot from about 780 to 840. One person managed to surpass me in the remaining span (kudos to him! He came out of nowhere and immediately shielded when he passed me). Everyone else who decided to take of their shield or try to grind couldn't maintain their rank.

I do think having shielded opponents show up in the queue would help. I'm guessing the devs are concerned that everyone would get to 1000+ due to shielded people only going up on successful defenses and bringing up everyone else who successfully beats them. But hey, when the progression rewards are 2,000+ I don't see the issue with that! I think it's a poor design when you can't play the last 3 hours of an event and no one can crack 50% of the progression rewards. It's not a major flaw that will cause me to quit, but I do think it's something that needs to be addressed sooner than later. I'm wondering if the skip tax will provide enough boundaries to allow shielded players to show up on queues again...

Unknown · February 2014

Blind Justice was the first time I used shields as a strategy. IT was costy (500HP total, 1 24H, 1 8H), however, got a "1250HP" cover out of it that I wanted/needed. (Now my Dr Doom is really feeling blue....)

Observations: with 40 minutes to go, I was in 5th in my bracket, top 10, and I believe at least 12 out of top 15, were all shielded. And in that 40 minutes, I dropped from 5th to 10th

There may a Reverse Strategy: "everyone at the top is shielded, attack with impunity"

Worthwhile to note that I was attacked six times while shielded - and came out at +15 points! My D pulled through! Comment being more that your points can increase while shielded, but not decrease. I am liking the one and done feature.

Let Us Fight Shielded Characters Again

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