@nick and I came up with a series of changes that we’re thinking of implementing on the arena ladders to improve quality of gameplay for both subscribers and non-subscribers. We’d love your thoughts and feedback on the following changes:
Reduce control-disabling effects on heroes (no effect on minions)
Greatly reduced duration of fear, tornado, paralyze, and confuse against heroes
Blue fox and decoy don’t work on heroes
Invisibility and hide don’t work on heroes with twilight glasses
Stomp and hurl don’t throw heroes as high
This should reset the balance away from control-disabling strategies that are frustrating to play against.
New skill-based arenas
Introduce more new arenas that are generally available that don’t depend on hero gear/equipment, so that everyone’s on a level playing field
These arenas will be like Zero Sum and Ace of Coders, but available from the beginning of the game, and much easier to get started with
These changes should make arenas more “fair” for both subscribers and non-subscribers, and will make the arena levels focus on strategy rather than equipment.
I like them but this one I don’t think should be implemented, because people might have a really good strategy with them but then their opponent just has twilight glasses could just easilly break the strategy
The problem with invisibility/hide/phaseshift is that they all disable enemy attack, and Ritic literally can kill any wizard in the first ten seconds because he can just use invis + backstab with 100% success. We made backstab powerful because they were meant to be extremely hard to use, but the ability to just become invisible and always land a backstab makes gameplay very uninteresting and rangers too OP.
Anyways one more question regarding this. So Ritics phase shift ability said that it makes him, A faster, B invisible and C the ability to pass through objects and projectiles, so say a wizard is shooting at Ritic when he is in phase shift mode and as reasan C states he can pass through projectiles so would that do damage to him?
I’ll get to further details with Nick, but as far as plans go Ritic will take damage even when in phase shift, as giving him immunity will be no different than before the changes.
I like this idea. Now it will be fair, your score will be not because of heroes on 29000 gems), but code and startegy. And I absolutely agree with hurl, because one person (I don’t remeber who) hurled me over the “fence” that is near the houses in Dueling Grounds. But I’m not sure about invisibility and Twilight Glasses… Because sometimes you need just hide from enemy hero. And almost all players who are in the top and who beat you are with Twilight Glasses. So you won’t hide from them.
Also, I think that’s fine when warrior is attacking decoys and Blue Fox, but rangers and wizards can’t attack decoys and Blue fox. Maybe because they’re attacking from a distance, I think.
It’s annoying because they both force a certain action that overrides the player code which makes the gameplay very uninteresting and annoying in general.
As I said, backstab is far too powerful with invisibility abilities which really wasn’t the intent of the ability. It shouldn’t just be something that can be done 100% of the time with invisibility. The nerf should definitely make it so top-players must actually use more strategy and different techniques than just spamming + cheesing the abilities.
Not really, because some players have extremely dodgy code for Blue Fox + decoys and it makes it practically impossible for slower warriors + more simple code to actually defeat them, which means players and units alike are kited forever during the game without being able to use their actual code.
Yeah, I know backstab + invisibility is quite strong, especially if it’s Shiver. But maybe the invisibility effect will not be as long as it is, or backstab + invisibility will be locked.
It’s not just the backstab that’s annoying. It basically pauses + makes the player invincible for that duration which is just super boring in arenas. I’d like players to actually compete face-to-face with different strategies.
That’s really not possible because there’s no real way to “tell” whether that’s in player code using the referee.
Still doesn’t fix the issue of “stopping” gameplay. I think locking the ability to detect invisible players with twilight glasses will do.
Okay.
Also, I think the “bug” with invisibility/hide/phase-shift (when someone wants to do an action to your hero and you cast invisibility) should be fixed. (if it wasn’t, I wasn’t on arenas quite long time)
Nice, I definitely think changes No. 1,2 and 4 are needed, however, I think maybe No. 3 should be invisibility only and it doesn’t work with all glasses. I think otherwise that just increases the gap in between low and high-level players. The reason for allowing hide would be that Naria is a pretty weak hero, especially without invisibility to complement hide. I think the highest I’ve ever reached with a Naria tactic is around 15-20 so it’s not too powerful.
However, if that’s not possible, I think all of these changes would still greatly benefit all the multiplayer arenas. Good plan .
Hmm, it’s true that Naria is hard to play in arenas, so perhaps we could keep Naria’s hide working? One of the reasons I want to nerf invisibility in general is because it’s proven really difficult to stop invisibility/hide from breaking the implementation of a zillion abilities, and the defensive coding required from players is very non-intuitive. I don’t think I’d ever be able to reliably fix the bug @PeterPalov mentioned for all abilities.
Depending on implementation, I would hope to keep invisibility still effective against minions.
yeah. right. ritic smashes me with tons of arrows from gift of the trees. or, maybe, theyhavelongrangeattacksIdont. or… they attack. I attack them. they are fast gets the heck out of there and regens. and summons… well, you get the idea.
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