Design Fireside Chat Edition

This explanation makes sense; my concern isn’t about the concept, but that y’all are going to use values that are too high and end up killing counters and the modding system (with all due respect, CG’s testing has historically missed a lot of problems and causes unintended waves). 

I understand not wanting a G12 team to hard counter an R7 squad, and I even appreciate the unmentioned aspect of people now being able to invest in teams that they love but aren’t exactly “meta” because relic delta can compensate for the team’s otherwise unimpressive stats/synergy (eg. wookies). Just please, PLEASE keep the relic delta curve shallow enough that skill can realistically overcome raw account GP.

On that note, I feel like the community would be way more open to this if y’all did something about GAC matchups - off the top of my head, limiting GAC groups to accounts within 30% of each other’s GP would be fairly easy to implement, still allow big accounts to climb, and make the game mode a lot more fun for newer/mid-game accounts who would get to actually use and test out their roster instead of just having to cross their fingers that the 12m account they got paired with doesn’t attack. This would even still prevent extreme climbing, because if a lower GP players gets to higher leagues, they’ll be paired with other players who are equally skilled at the game. What about the best of the best who beat anyone within 30%, you ask? Well, two things: first, eventually they’ll get past all accounts within 30% of them and be forced to match up against higher GP accounts which acts as a natural gradual barrier to league climbing, and second, you can adjust this 30% value for higher leagues (say, letting Chromium matchups be anything within 40%), which would act as a “soft cap”. This wouldn’t cause sandbagging either if you use this 30% as a slider specific to each group instead of hard cutoffs at 3 mil gp, 3.9 mil gp, et cetera, because players would always go up against people up to 30% higher gp or ~30% lower gp - they wouldn’t feel any difference after bumping up their roster except “I have more full squads that help me with more counter varieties now”. The last issue I can think of with this is players getting punished for investing in non-GAC-meta teams who raise their GP without proportionally raising their GAC capabilities - and for these people, they by definition aren’t prioritizing GAC anyways, and if they start to care about it they can start investing in GAC and their “GAC prowess” will improve more rapidly than their 30% range peers who also haven’t prioritized GAC yet.

Back to relic delta - I think the best way to implement this is to start low, and see how it affects gameplay before turning it up a little more instead of starting high and turning it down. This will prevent/give early low-stakes detection for the inevitable unforeseen consequences that come with change across all systems in the universe (not just this game). Again, the problem isn’t the concept itself, but that the concept will be introduced too strongly and throw the game out of whack and encourage people to quit. Starting small and dialing up will prevent this.