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.