Bad champions are good for the game
Jack_OHara
Member Posts: 92 ★
In 2018, we were given an INSANE amount of high tier champs. Void, Gladiator Hulk, Killmonger, Corvus, Cap IW, Domino, Ghost, Omega Red, Symbiote Supreme, and Aegon are some of the best offensive champs in the game, and that's leaving out defense.
Now I've been seeing a lot of complaints about how 2019 champions are significantly more mid-tier than 2018. This is completely true. The champions released this year, while not all terrible, just aren't as good as the ones last year. I think this is a good thing.
Adding better and better characters is going to leave the current best champs in the dust. I think that more middle ground ones help keep balance. If great champions keep getting added, and older ones keep getting buffed, there will be no bad characters in the game at some point. I think the risk of pulling a bad champ is part of what makes the game fun.
However, I think the mystic class might deserve a break. Since the beginning of 2018, we've only had 3 mystics. 2/3 aren't great, but I see the point of Ebony Maw. However, he is terrible offensively, and Diablo is pretty bad overall. I think a decent mystic would be well-earned at this point.
Feel free to disagree. I'd like to see what you guys think.
Now I've been seeing a lot of complaints about how 2019 champions are significantly more mid-tier than 2018. This is completely true. The champions released this year, while not all terrible, just aren't as good as the ones last year. I think this is a good thing.
Adding better and better characters is going to leave the current best champs in the dust. I think that more middle ground ones help keep balance. If great champions keep getting added, and older ones keep getting buffed, there will be no bad characters in the game at some point. I think the risk of pulling a bad champ is part of what makes the game fun.
However, I think the mystic class might deserve a break. Since the beginning of 2018, we've only had 3 mystics. 2/3 aren't great, but I see the point of Ebony Maw. However, he is terrible offensively, and Diablo is pretty bad overall. I think a decent mystic would be well-earned at this point.
Feel free to disagree. I'd like to see what you guys think.
3
Comments
Game balance is a separate question. But even in a perfectly designed and implemented game I would want the champions to be different enough that I would value some more than others. In a perfect game, different players would disagree about which ones were more or less valuable to the highest degree. That's not true now.
Rock Paper Scissors is often mentioned as a way to balance the performance of games like this, but I think that's actually not the best model. I think the better mental model is a pen and paper roleplaying game called (coincidentally enough) Champions. Champions was a superhero pen and paper role playing game where you built characters using a system of advantage and disadvantage points (at least in most incarnations). The basic idea was to "buy" beneficial abilities by simultaneously taking disadvantages that offered points.
The system always had balance issues, and in my opinion it was impossible to balance for many fundamental reasons. But the core idea is interesting: if you want to be strong here, you have to be weaker there. The stronger you want to be in some areas the weaker you have to be in others, or the more weaknesses you have to possess, relative to some average.
In this kind of system Rock buys supremacy over Scissors by being absolutely horrible against Paper. But you could also make Stones that are actually slightly better than both Scissors and Paper, but get shattered by other Rocks. This kind of system is less binary, and there's more flexibility to make things that aren't the best at anything, but pretty good at a lot of things - even though they individually do less well compared to everything, they also don't lose to anything. That sort of thing.