The Way AW Blacklisting Works Does Not Make Sense

Suros_moon · April 29

Here we can see the worst case of how black listing interacts with hard tactics. The whitelist options are functionally useless because they are the artifacts of a season which shares no similarities with the current meta. On the other hand, the black list uniformly chosen to ban strictly tactic attackers.

War tactics typically increase difficulty in one of two ways:

i) Challenging in fight mechanics to handle in game (Getting rooted)
ii) De Facto shutting out massive swaths of viable options due to node interactions (Sugar pill, Magic Thief)

The second option is particularly problematic with how banning works because, depending on the ratio of strong tactic defenders to viable attackers, you could shrink the viable options to ridiculously small categories. Magic Thief, perhaps more than any tactic before it, has this problem. The defensive pool has some of the… silliest champs the game has to offer with an almost comical assortment of attackers in comparison. We are about to enter a season with 2 of very few good tactic champs unavailable from the offset only to be flanked by 3 MORE bans per war. This needs a counterbalance.

Insofar as you agree with the preceding comments there are options which could be considered:

Option 1) The defensive champion who garnered the most kills last season is black listed for the second iteration of the tactic

Option 2) Reduce the number of blacklisted champions specifically for the second round of a tactic. That way we only run the risk of losing 1

Option 3) No black list for “sufficiently lopsided tactics”. Im being intentionally vague here as that heuristic would have to be quantified internally. I think comparing historical frequency statistics of placement rates of defenders vs attacker pick rates of the tactic offense before the tactic was introduced could be a decent metric of knowing how lopsided the decks may be but there’s a million ways to determine this

Each of these solutions has issues (some technical, some practical), but I believe each of them is far better than the situation we have pictured above. In the meantime, given the extra delay, I would strongly suggest Kabam rethink having the blacklist for the current season.