Restriction list

Does anyone else think it’s way too big now?

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Yeah, i wanted to know how much it affected new players who only have a few legendaries

Probably not much, because they only own a few legendaries :wink:

Way back when the restriction list started I did a big survey about how much it was affecting people. There were lots of complaints from the online community about it and how it messed with their team building. Back then the list was much smaller and the survey basically proved that nobody was affected negatively, they were just moaning because they didn’t like the change.

After the first few months I’ve barely seen a single complaint on the forum about it so I guess most people accepted it. The complaints have instead been about specific monsters being on there / not on there or how they theorise the meta will be because of the new list (X will dominate and that’s a problem, etc.). So not a problem with the system itself, just that they think the lists themselves could be done better or general quibbles like we get for a few days when there’s a bad special rule at the start of a season.

From what the Devs have said, it’s massively improved engagement of players in PvP so I think without a doubt it’s a great addition to the game.

At the beginning when the list was small the Devs said it simply didn’t do anything impactful, so I guess they’ve been making it bigger and bigger until it properly sculpts new metas. I’d love to know whether they feel they’ve reached that point or if they’ve gone beyond the necessary number. I think it’s really hard for us to judge. I also think probably as time goes on it will naturally need to get bigger because there are more people with large collections that need a big list to force their team building to change.

The tL;Dr is I don’t know, but it must be having a pretty big impact on the PvP meta now (so it’s actually working as it should) and it doesn’t seem like too many people are complaining about it, yet.

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Oh

Yeah probably hardly at all. It’s the middle ground players who suffer the most I think. Players with big collections will rotate fine, but ones with a medium sized collection may find it harder, especially when so much stun protection can be limited in one season so it feels like there are auto includes.

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Yeah, it’s creating two different metas that we cycle back and forth from every two seasons. This restriction list will have lots of poison endgames because vent is restricted and none of the good poison mons are. Next restriction list we’ll see a bunch of poison mons get restricted and I’d bet money that would include a majority of my endgame. With poison gone, we’ll see even more sleep, centaureon, and harleking. Frontlines and midgames don’t cycle back and forth as badly, but we’ll definitely see a bunch of the OP stuff the devs haven’t bothered to nerf since they’re too busy restricting four dozen monsters.

I think it’s more that most dissenters accepted that the restriction list was here to stay and was only going to get worse in a similar way as how players like @Unown eventually stopped complaining about their 6* pots being stolen because it wasn’t going to change.

The main reason I hate the restriction list is how it actually ends up limiting creativity because of the devs constantly restricting most of the good stun protection along with 30-40 other mons. Players who want to test out new ideas and not instantly lose to stun teams have to pick a few stun prot mons from the list and then they’re blocked from using everything else. It also sucks when you go for certain legendaries or mythics and then you can’t use them for months at a time.

Another issue with the list is that it targets all the popular legendaries that players with smaller collections have to rely on due to power creep, leaving them at a massive disadvantage to players like me who have large enough collections to switch between two powerful shells of a team every time we get a new list. This part probably can’t be fixed without some drastic changes the devs might not want to take tho

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This

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In the end, a lot of the problems players have about the restriction list aren’t realistically going to be addressed for various reasons I don’t fault the devs for.

@Dev_VKC with that in mind, there are two things I recommend to improve the list. The first is that the broken stuff that’s been getting pumpted out in the past 1-2 years needs to be properly balanced. This isn’t a nerf thread so I won’t get into the specifics of it although it should be pretty obvious what mons need to be changed. The restriction list really needs to stop being used a crutch to half-heartedly blunt the impact of an unhealthy meta. Most of the recent updates have had very few significant balance changes despite there being quite a number of mons that could use some balancing.

The second thing is the restriction list needs to be reset as a first step to preventing it from cycling between two different metas every two months. Anyone who’s been monitoring the pvp scene much at all would know how the list essentially switches from meta A to meta B and then back with some slight differences/additional restrictions each time.

Once the current restriction list ends (and I hopefully claim more top 1s), release a “no restriction list” special rule that lasts the entire season. A new restriction list can be made that hasn’t been warped by the previous list’s meta once the season ends. After that, you need to be diligent about making sure each list differs enough from the past ones so that we don’t have a repeat of this cycle.

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Just put all shockers, stun bombers and any mass stun monster in 1st restriction permanently :joy:

Another thing i notice is that there’s a feeling that there’s a list A and list B. For example last time the major poison endgames were restricted and poison endgames were more scarce (list A), this pvp its back and the other set of popular endgame monsters are restricted instead (list B). I don’t play pvp a lot but this is the feeling i get from the current rotation.

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I’d quite like to have the odd season with no restriction list at all.

At the very worst it will give us A B and C lol

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It also doesn’t help that 90% of the time they restrict the counters to the now unrestricted metas that they KNOW everyone spams. Why is goch restricted when no poison is restricted, why is nearly every good absorber and counter restricted when nearly every stunner is unrestricted? We’ve seen similar with wilhelmina and dusy (maybe wraithhost) restricted when the token spammers are unrestricted. It makes the game miserable, and it feels like an attempt to “force” a meta to be played and less of a push towards something different than last two seasons.

When 25% of your team has to use the same few stun protection units left untouched, it feels more boring than just having freedom to pick whatever I want and mix it up

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I currently see this as the biggest problem, because I think the annoyance of the restriction list would tempered by proper balance updates.

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Really good points

I would like to add a few points.

1.) After KDs Survey i did a second survey that already found out that people thought the list wasn’t doing its job properly:

2.) This is a classic case of unintended consequences and the unwillingness to deal with them. Unintended consequences is a concept well known in economics. It basically states that every regulation causes consequences that weren’t intended. They force you to either adjust the regulation or drop it completely. For example if you want to help your domestic steel industry you can limit the amount of foreign steel that can be imported by car manufacturers or other industry that needs steel to produce their goods. This way your steel industry profits because it doesn’t have to compete with cheap steel from other countries. However, your car industry is now forced to buy the expensive steel from the domestic steel companies which puts them at a disadvantage compared to their international competitors. So they either have to raise the prices for their cars (which is another disadvantage) or save the cost elsewhere (for example: fire people). That’s a classic case for unintended consequences.

With the list it’s the same and the sad thing is, it was totally obvious and its a massive failure from the dev side to not have addressed it properly. This game is based on a rock paper scissor mechanic. If you more or less ban paper it’s pretty obvious everybody is going to play rock. Now the list becomes a self fulfilling prophecy. It produces the result it’s going to regulate later on. Because of course now rock has become super popular, it’s the new most used and becomes banned in the next round. What happens now? Scissor is the new champ and gets played the most. And so on and so on.

That’s by the way the reason the list often seem to restrict monsters that we definitely wouldn’t have put up there. The list produces and limits an artificial meta. It’s basically what the French philosopher Baudrillard described as a simulacrum. His weird idea was that we are living in a simulation that has lost its connection with reality. One of his examples was the McDonald’s cheeseburger that is presented to you on billboards and in tv Adds. Baudrillard argued that the cheeseburger presented to you has no equal representation in reality. Which is obviously true because if you ever bought a cheeseburger at McDonald’s you will realise it looks nothing like in the commercial. Still, when we think of a cheeseburger, we do that based on the commercial version, even though it doesn’t exist. So capitalism produced a simulacrum of a product and makes more or less ignore reality when we decide to buy a cheeseburger at McDonalds.

Likewise the restriction list produced an artificial meta that has lost touch with the real meta. It makes one archetype popular by banning its counters, then proceeds to ban the archetype it just made popular and creates another popular counter. It’s a deadly boring cycle that can repeat itself endlessly.

What helps?

1.) we definitely need at least 2 unrestricted seasons to see the real meta in order to correct the artificial meta we are currently seeing

2.) Avoid Yoyo restrictions. The most obvious Yo-Yo restriction is stun because it’s the strongest archetype and the easiest to use. If you limit stun protection (effective stun protection is also a very limited resource) you will see stun rise to the top. I suggest that the community creates a list of „essential monsters“ (like the WHO has a list of essential medicine with the most important medication that always should be available to adress to the most common diseases in the world). This list should mostly contain counters to the most common strategies like sleep, stun, etc. Monsters on this list cannot be banned by the restriction list. This will help to never let one archetype (like stun or poison endgames) become super oppressive due to the absence of counters.

3.) The Devs are very busy and it’s only natural they base their decision on what to restrict purely on numbers. As explained above, these numbers are based on an artificial meta created by the list itself. That’s why I suggest a group of 4-5 experienced PvP players that get to see the list a few days before it gets released and who are allowed to give the devs feedback on the list. Experienced players only need to one quick look at list to anticipate which meta it’s going to create and can raise awareness for unintended consequences before they come into effect.

4.) A Restriction List feedback thread in which the community discusses its tier list experience with the group of experts. This way the experts can factor in community feedback for their own feedback To the devs. With 3 and 4 we have a good representation of the human factor to correct flaws in the numbers produced by the list itself.The numbers and statistics on the other hand limit the influence of human factor. With the list of essential monsters as explained in 2.) we make sure to break the rock/paper/scissor circle and with 1.) we reset the whole system from time to time.

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Yeah alternate seasons of list and then no list would be :fire:

The thing that baffles me is when we have a heavy SP rule AND a heavy restriction list.

That’s what she said. :eyes:

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This is amazingly spot on

PvP seasons 61 and 62 will not have a limited list.
Let’s get the party started!

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what have u done☠️
#buffLuna

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