Ascendant arena changes

[frigid lily]

Arena in its current state is a copy & paste flowchart. Just copy the deck and play 5-6 rounds with the same placement. Maybe, you have to learn 2-3 different setups depending on the deck of your opponent. With that you are already at the peak of the game. That won't change through balancing the game because you will just add more paths on your flowchart but won't remove the flowchart feeling. So, there are no real decisions to be made in game because everything is already planned (hyper doesn't change that).
BUT! That doesn't mean that the base isn't adjustable to get really good. I believe the team knows about this and shifted focus for know until the reiteration of the design team for arena is finished.

1. Arena has two big problems:
   Hard to learn everything about Illuvials, affinities, classes, hyper and so on. -> This will be solved with gauntlet because people can just start playing and don't have to build a team first

2. flowchart style / copy paste is too easy / no variation
   This a design problem, but as I said it is one that can be solved. Obv. I don't have the exact answer to that but I can't stress enough that arena is a good base and it is good that they indent to improve on that.
   Still some thoughts on underlying problems and possible ways to improve arena:

• An auto-battler without randomness or pick ban will always be a rather simple flowchart. That is even true for games with objectives like mechabelum. Every real advantage is based on developing a better deck which gets again copied by everybody within a day.

  -> The real game happens outside of the actual game in the area of deck creation (Very few like that).

• The game has only 9 real positioning options ((left, mid, right) x (front, mid, back))

  -> With that every round as hole is basically comparable to one chess move which means we only make around 8 moves (including augment picks) per game. That isn't enough to decide who is the better player.

• Combine the randomness of survival with arena. If both players get the same random deck it will be really difficult to find the perfect way of playing that deck within the short time given. Mode is only accessible if you caught every Illuvial (at this point I agree with nitrodragon in another channel that Illuvials shouldn't be too rare)

• Add several ban phases to force the opponent to think on the spot
  -** Add board effects like presence of the mind leviathan which reduces energy gain by 50% (maybe even 2 Leviathans for more variation - or let them switch after 3 round or give a player the option to sacrifice points to switch the board effect)**. I am not sure if this is enough to generate variations

• Add more drawing phases for augments

• ** Illuvials don't have access to their omega/can't get evolved until the player gives them 1-2 affinity-stones based on their affinity. The stones are handed out during the rounds on a random bases and by killing an opponent Illuvial with a dominated affinity. **
  -> maybe it is necessary to include a negative interest with this to avoid players not playing anything the first three rounds

• Stage 3 evolutions' can only be drawn during the game based on a random mechanism (A line can only be played if you have all stages of that line)

[opaque zenith]

I agree that arena has a great foundation. Although i agree to some extent that it feels like just following a flowchart sometimes i disagree that this makes it skill less. The proof is that its always been the same people finishing in the top10 and scoring in the tournaments. Even if many play the same deck and copy the curve between each other theres many subtilties in the game that will make the play player come out on top

Arena was in a good state for about a month at some point and it was amazing. We had 5 viable top decks and we had to play in very different ways against different kind of teams. What killed it mainly in my opinion is the ability to have 2+ full team in your team. When the game was in a good state we could play 1 team only with a half variation if we wanted but we had to pay the price of brining less augments which made our late game weaker

When augments got nerfed to the ground they were now useless and the total slots werent adjusted so now we were able to easily have 2-2.5 teams in our team and that was a major problem. If we are able to have 2 team its easy to have a team that can counter anything, especially when balance is off

Then they removed augments entirely and introduced the ascendant feature. With this rework we now have 50 team slots and it made it worst. Now we can bring 3+ teams easily

This makes it incredibly hard to balance the game and have a diverse meta

The blind team feature may help with this but only a handful of people have tested and played arena since then because of the airdrop

Balance on its own has been far off but its because it wasnt a priority for the team and they needed to test stuff out

Im very confident that if we solve the multi-team problem and give some attention to the balance the Ascendant Arena will an amazing competitive game

Also, @tough quarry is currently working on improving ascendant

[tough quarry]

Guys, just bear with us.

We have been focusing on OW, Zero, Gauntlet and Launch in general. Everyone is doing the best of their efforts for this, and by best of the efforts I mean the team works during weekends for 8-12h Saturday & Sundays.

We have not forgoten about Ascendant mode. We will at some point address it.

[frigid lily]

Sure, no problem. I knew that the thread might is a little to early because focus is on other parts of the ILV-universe. Still wanted to give some ideas/feedback regarding ascendant because I think it is a good time to get different views on arena for now. I believe with the base you guys have it could be relatively easy to implement further features but it is important to figure out which are good candidates since you are trying to create a completely new sub-gendre.

Again, this was never meant as a "do it now" thread and more like a compendium of ideas for future options. I have a lot of respect for the work of you guys. You are doing an awesome job.

[tough quarry]

And any idea from anyone is great and welcome sir. Keep them coming ❤️

[brisk basalt]

The feedback I had given around Feb-March has been similar to the pointed out problems.

I think the issues are fundamenal and no amount of balance would change much.

After removing the augments especially the skill ceiling of the game felt incredibly low, there were only very few "flowchart" lines of play needed to learn to be at 95%+ skillcap of the game. Also many obvious decisions like left or right, team 1 or team 2 option outdid almost all the small min max options of skill expression.

My fundamental wish would be to have more options for plays every turn, so people have the ability to make more mistakes, as currently that isn´t the case, very few relevant mistakes are possible if you have learned a low amount of knowledge about the current team/meta.

To Patates point of same people being top X during leaderboard rewards I think it isn´t super true that this speaks for skill expression and high skill ceiling. A lot had to do with simply being able to play far more games and or knowing the new "op" thing for your 15 games or a portion of it.
While I played and tryharded as much as I could while streaming I had the best results out of everyone in the weeks I played, half of that was having the better Team, other half was knowing some minor things of the mirror matches others hadn´t figured out. I could have coached someone the same "skill" in like an hour after figuring things out for myself, which was mainly a time/prep with people in friendly games thing.

Some of the ideas I had over time that I communicated over the recent months (not in public yet only in dms to teammembers) were:

1. A kind of burning mechanic, were e.g. to obtain ascendant coins you have to sac an Illuvial from your Team, so you start with many options but you reduce them during the game and you and your opponent can keep track of what options players are left with to break the low amount of standard lines to learn.

1.1) Similar logic could work on something like burn weapon/suit for more mastery points, this would be harder to "balance" but could lead to more aggro-midrange-lategame team options if the downside of burning these is enough compared to the mastery points gained.

2. I think leg augment bidding simply isn´t good in a 1v1 game, it will always be an event that favors one player with 0 skill-input, outside of having learned the tierlists for the augments in each matchup.

3. Changing turns to not be these long one time fully blind vs each other, the full blind and many moves comited at the same time thing forces this all in playstyle and these all in decisions to have been the correct plays most of the time, those plays force 50/50s a lot and no amount of balance would change that.

-maybe could experiment with less MP/Turn
-splitting turns into multiple smaller MP ones and after X blind turns combat starts
-do 1 (or more) moves per player and have it turn-based, combat again after certain amount of these or amount of mp spend (turn timers might be very high in this option?)

4. Have weekly? changing extra rules which would be similar to a new patch forcing people to learn new lines of play more frequently, while truely good players with fundamental understanding will know these quickly.
   Big downside is obv more "p2w" as likely you want a different Team every week, and it doesn´t solve that someone can share a long doc with if-then options and majority can simply copy and go by that.

I had more ideas but 1-3 are the ones I personally liked the most.

[tough quarry]

Lovely insights. Thank you.

[frigid lily]

Nice ideas.
Got a question regarding 1)
Wouldn't that lead to another point on a flowchart like against rogue/inferno burn X and evolve Y? I was just wondering if it would be sensible to combine this with a sort of ban mechanism. If the opponent decides which Illuvial on your side gets burned and the opponent gets 1-4 ascension coins based on what he or how much he bans. Lets say an Ascension token is worth 35 mastery points during that phase you could decide if you want to ban 140 mastery points and get 0 coins or ban nothing and get 4 coins (or everything in between).
If we have like 1-2 phases like this that would destroy every flowchart play because a player has to guess what his opponent wants and evaluate that against his own strength

[brisk basalt]

I don´t think interacting with your opponetns Team as standard mechanic is good, one of the often very good for the game, but hated by many mechanics in card games is interacting with the enemy hand, that as baseline would tick many people off.

Also avg person wants to play what they like, if it just gets banned every game they won´t have fun.

Coins vs MP is a good idea imo, but it might just force almost every team to play for mp early on to max out a board quickly and then play for tokens later, which I think wouldn´t acomplish the intended idea.

[tough quarry]

1. Interesting.
2. Agreed, there are some ideas on the pipeline that would make the augment system very competitive and fairer.
3. Interesting, problem is that the game would require quick reflexes and elevated mouse skill, thus changing the target audience. But definitely interesting specially if it can be implemented in a way that preserves target audience integrity.
4. Something similar has been considered for a long time and it's on the backlog.

[brisk basalt]

I don´t think you have that much of a timer problem on 3), surely people can spend lower amount of mp in lower amount of time.

[frigid lily]

Understandable but I think it could be perceived slightly different here because the card game is quite different compared to others. Lets say it is true for now.
Do you want the tokens you get out of a sacrifice to be affinity based to narrow the path you have to choose and risk to being countered by your opponent by "teching" too deep too fast

[brisk basalt]

I don´t think you´d want to narrow it down too much, it shouldn´t be too difficult, just a "noob" trap so to say for people to make mistakes, so there is more to do that could matter.

[tough quarry]

Time would definitely be a problem, but if we divide the steps and only reveal the illuvial line selected instead of the illuvial and location, we can create a non-mouse-skill sensitive approach that forces players to reveal at the same time their next illuvial line played. Thus revealing info to the opponent in certain rounds.

[frigid lily]

If something like your answer to 3 is an option. Do you think we could use real time abilties during combat? Like buy a buff/heal and use it in the right moment

[brisk basalt]

We play over 1 min turns atm, if you give people 20-30sec per set of mp, I fail to see how this is a apm heavy thing.

In the end it is likely higher turn timer and more time per action.

[frigid lily]

we could buy/not buy a scan for something like that to get more accurate information

[tough quarry]

They wait last second to place the illuvial, and it's an apm/best pc&internet/reflex matter.

[tough quarry]

We get the same issue here sir, while it would be super cool, it kills the purpose of an autochess, it becomes something else.

[brisk basalt]

I think you didn´t understand, you don´t play TFT, you play same setup of blind w.e. with lower timer and lower mp, fight after X amount of these reveal inbetween

[tough quarry]

So the fight starts upon spending a threshold of MP?

[brisk basalt]

I mean yeah there are diffirent options to that.

Baseline -keep the current setup but don´t fight after each turn, introduce set amount of mp or move or w.e. else and fight after X amount of these turns happen.
Would need to be tested what numbers would work best.

[tough quarry]

So what we are saying actually is to increase the amount of turns with lower MP cap so that there is less room for rng and increase the amount of effective decision making based on opponent's intel.

Something that I am also considering strongly.

[brisk basalt]

Yes, that is what I said, had been saying for a while.

[tough quarry]

First time I see, good to know we are aligned. 😉

[frigid lily]

hmm, tbh, I am not convinced that more turns with some intel are enough to break the flowchart feeling because I can still plan out every sensible opponent turn for 3-4 decks and map my reaction to that out.

[brisk basalt]

It isn´t enough, but it is better.

[frigid lily]

Sure, at some point there are so many options that people get overloaded like in chess

[brisk basalt]

tldr. is you want more things were people can make mistakes, this would be one small thing more

[frigid lily]

agree, the last sentence I added was a little to slow. If you get enough options you can overload the memory of a person but that is a VERY long way

[brisk basalt]

compare to TFT, it has such a high ceiling, because people can misplay every shop, every augment, every item, every carosell

[frigid lily]

agree, but the problem is that we have like 10 minute matches. You would need like 50 turns to reach a better splitting and that would take too much time
(until now I thought the team doesn't want to have too long matches)

[tough quarry]

I have a proposal that completely destroys the flowchart thingy, and maximizes game knowledge reward, good decision making, and makes the game highly variable (essentially it makes the game more competitive and less copy meta like). I have already pitched it to Aaron and Kieran and they both like it.

I can't say more as maybe this never happens, but I agree with what you are saying.

Anyway, good chat guys. Please ping me in DM if you have more brilliant ideas or feel free to ping me in threads.

[brisk basalt]

you don´t increase the timer that much if you split it into smaller turns

[tough quarry]

Don't get me wrong tho, I am in favour of increasing turn granularity.

[frigid lily]

Sounds interesting. I hope we hear from that soon 🙂

[tough quarry]

I hope so too <3, but remember, first priority is 25th July launch 😄

[frigid lily]

count me in for that 🙂 And also don't overwork yourself. Hope everybody stays healty 🙂