Epic Duel's Decline


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Epic Duel's Decline

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5/12/2013 12:05:04

Exploding Penguin
Moderator

I spent some time thinking about it, and I've finally developed a thesis on why Epic Duel is in decline, and I'm going to share it in this thread. Please note that majority of this is speculation and opinion, and that I do not mean to discriminate or state non-constructive criticism about the staff.

Before Omega, Epic Duel had an extremely wide gap between varium and free-to-play users. The varium players (most of the varium players are the ones who are leaving) in previous phases had things such as enhancements, class changes, name changes, and other such things that made the game more enjoyable for them. While we were all eagerly waiting for Omega, some of us expected great things from it, and others feared the new features brought. Unfortunately, the newer features have made more of a negative influence rather than a positive one. I believe that the sole reason for why Epicduel is in decline is that HP was moved from 2 points per stat investment to 1, making the stat much, much harder to invest in. This is because since everyone had less HP (no stat enhancements also helped lower defenses of players), people were dying much faster. The shorter fights are, the much harder it is to balance them since there are an infinite number of possibilities on how these short wins/losses end in. Therefore, to make fights longer, the staff team nerfed many skills.

Why are shorter fights bad?

Shorter fights are much harder to balance and just not as enjoyable as they result in less tactical skills being used. It's very hard to predict your opponent since the fight ends quickly with the opponent still having lots of different options during their turn, particularly with the new core system where you don't even know what cores your opponent has. This resulted in builds that could output high amounts of damage over the first few turns becoming far too strong, and thus they had to be nerfed.

Skill Cores...just why?

So... the staff team stated that they chose to implement skill cores rather than new classes (or a singular new class). This doesn't make any sense in my opinion. The staff team said that it was because it was already too hard to keep balance among the 6 current classes, but active skill cores are pretty much the exactly same thing as a new skill in a new class, except that ANY class can use it without the opponent knowing what core(s) you have, making skill cores much harder to balance since you have to make them work for all 6 skill trees rather than for an individual one. I believe that new classes would actually have been much more appealing to the users and much easier to balance. Passive skill cores are also not too great of an idea because it leaves many wins in fights up to luck rather than the skill that was required in previous phases.

The effect of all the nerfs

Since Omega, many skills have been nerfed, and only a few buffed. Those that were buffed were probably buffed with the intention of making fights longer (such as assimilation removing EP). Percentage-based skills were nerfed, particularly massacre. Bunker was nerfed. Malfunction was nerfed. Damage output was nerfed for aux, gun, primary, and robots. Poison attacks were buffed but were also nerfed more because you can field medic out of them. Enhancements were taken away as well, which is somewhat like a nerf in itself. So, what do these nerfs do? They make the game less exciting. We can no longer hit those joyously high 90s when we use our aux on support-abuse builds, we can no longer make 140 energy caster builds, we can no longer have fun with those 200 HP builds, we can't make strength-abuse builds with fun guns like dage's boomsticks, and many more builds. The lack of enhancements reduces the capacity for build creativity, and this leads to many players at a loss in this new and complicated system, resulting in lots of unfavored build copying. But, the main idea is that because of the nerfs, there is less excitement and just in general fun in the game. Therefore, because some of this was lost, many players (particularly var players who previously had enhancements) left and stopped playing ED.

To sum it up
This is actually shorter than most of my similar posts, but I feel I've explained the main points. The general idea is that since everything was nerfed/removed, there were less options for creativity and things such as "epic damage," removing fun and excitement from the game, making it lose much of its previous appeal. I believe Omega was approached the entirely wrong way, by choosing to remove enhancements, changing the HP and EP stat point investment system, and by choosing to implement skill cores instead of new classes. The way it's going now, ED is just going to keep getting nerfs in every skill until it's pretty much dead. The only way for it to be saved is to bring back excitement into the game by doing things such as creating a mass amount of new skill cores at once that are all pretty balanced, and/or by buffing most skills while keeping the classes balanced among each other. Another option would be to take some current skill cores that exist or that the staff have ideas for, then remove all skill cores and create new classes with active and passive skills with the same ideas.