Could we perhaps make this game slightly more...compact?

That could be an option. Personally I would go for something a bit more radical although it would take a lot of time to do.

- To begin with, strip every rune down to its bare essentials. I'm talking pretty much just attributes, race, class, nora cost and basic attacks here as well as perhaps one or two abilities that are truly, intimately connected to that champion. Abilities that you would recognize the champion by as it were. I'll use Festering Corpse as an easy example.
First strip it down to its stats and calculate its nora cost based on those stats. Then give it two immediately recognizeable abilities: Rabid and Lumbering. Adjust the nora cost accordingly (say +3 for Rabid and -15 for Lumbering).

- Then, in order to add complexity and variety, you have an indeterminate amount of cp to spend on each champion. Forget about upgrade abilities. You can now use your cp on literally anything to customize the champ.
If you want to increase the Corpse's defence by 1 point, you can. It'll cost you, say, 10 cp and 5 nora (with both amounts scaling up if you want to add more defence).
If you want to add Disease Aura to it, you can. +2 nora per rank and +2,5,8 cp for each rank. If you want to add a set ability, say, Black Death, that'll cost you 20 cp and 7 nora (I'm making up the amounts obviously).
But of course, as an added bonus, you don't HAVE to spend cp at all. If you wanted to, you could just leave your champ at its cheapest, base version which has the advantage of saving you nora.

Each champion this way would be able to choose from a pool of abilities appropriate to the champ AND FACTION. I completely agree that we do not want to see things like Cleanse on a Festering Corpse (as an extreme example).
The advantage of also being able to change attributes is that you can give a single rune completely different roles depending on what you want. I distinctly remember when Aquatic bgs were popular for a while (I mean full on Aquatic here, not semis) and you would see some people playing their Mirevixen at level 1 at a cheap nora cost (40ish) with just the bare minumum of stats as a support unit.
However, you ALSO saw people play the same Mirevixen at around 60-65 nora with full abilities and damage upgraded all the way to 12. Because of the range inherent to the rune, this made her an excellent ranged attacker while still performing well as a support. In other words, the same champion was played in two completely different ways.

That for me personally embodies strategy and creativity, not having to memorize and read 10+ abilities in under 2 minutes.
Of course the amount of runes has drastically increased since then and it would require a considerable amount of time and effort to implement something like the above system again (it's basically the old system I've described for those who weren't around back then). But if enough people want it, then I think it IS possible and it might just be the best, cleanest solution. After all, the people who designed the original system are in DOG

 

so yea while i do understand how the complexity of the game can be intimidating.....and i do agree that a review of things is in order.....BUT......i do not like the idea of "DUMBING" down the game so that champs simply move around and attack.....with no abilities......the truth of the matter is maybe it intimidates new players.......but if the game were to become too simplistic.....i really doubt it could hold my attention......i mean seriously im not here to play checkers.

 

Of course not, I'm fairly sure no one wants that. This game's main strength has always been its complexity and diversity, giving players hundreds of strategic options to choose from.
The problem right now is actually that all the abilities on champions are no longer adding to their variety or to the strategic complexity of the game. Instead they're detracting from those key aspects.
As was pointed out before, you can find nearly all abilities on champions in all factions. This is bad for the game's diversity.
In addition, champions have so many abilities, that reading / memorizing them all becomes more important when trying to win a game than thinking about positioning and attack/defense. This is bad for the game's strategic complexity.
The system that used to be in place (as outlined above) combined these concepts beautifully and best of all made the game completely unique (which is why, despite not playing seriously for years, I always kept an eye out to see if the situation might improve). Frankly, I miss it a lot.

 

Out of how many know what the early pox system was? before anything can be done they have to take steps backward to move forward, just trimming champs down isnt enough the revert back to stable has to be achieved before balance can happen.

 

but in defence to current system, where you cant use cp to change a champ alot, this gives the possibility to associate one champ you meet on the field with a set of abilities and characteristics. If you can change almost anything, it again requires to read and check every detail on every champ every game. This could be even more frustrating. Id like to see just less abilities and especially less super power full abilities. Or alternatively a second type of ranked play where you can play more like in the old days.

 

I would enjoy making the game more complex with like 30 UNIQUE abilitys minimum on every champ. New players are just lazy

 

My gripe with these abilities is not because theres too many, my gripe is that theres too many that are similar if not carbon copies, I do agree that new players dont bother to learn, I dont really agree with this nux system....if new players cannot be bothered to learn the game then thats their problem, that is like blizzard or lcsoft (wow and lineage2) giving them a fully levelled account, when i start a new game whether it be moba or mmo I have to learn thats what being new is all about.

 

I think we must understand its not realistic to expect them to change all the runes to have less abilities. its like making a new game. Think about it. Even if they just spend 1 h on each rune to change and balance it, it means 2000 h. If they are 3 peuple working with the game, it means 4 months of work...

Thats why i suggest instead to introduce the second old school ranked play or the combination with last expansin to give variation over time. Also it gives increased incentive to buy new expansions, even without having to let every expansion be more and more powerfull.

 

This is how the game USED TO BE, Prior to SOE. It was rather quite fun and allowed a LOT of customization. Then SOE made it "User friendsly." Bleh.

 

^^ this +1, thats exactly how it used to be and was 10x better than it is now.

 

IMHO I agree that there is a lot of work that needs to be done in both streamlining abilities, consolidating abilities, and rebalancing champs/abilities so that each rune is flavorful and recognizable as fitting specific role.

As for upgrades the simplest and most impactful solution would be relevant stat upgrades for all champs (+3 dmg / +2 def / +1 spd / +8 hp)
This dichotomy allows great flexibility in changing how a champion acts without adding abilities.

I do believe, however, that rarity should equal complexity so exotics and LE/LEG could potentially be the exception to the above and have ability upgrades.

Commons/Uncommons/Rares should all have solid states and either one or a few defining/relevant abilities.
Their roles should be for filling out warm bodies in a bg and interacting with the more complex portions of the bg.

For Streamlining they can do a lot by just instituting keywords for like abilities.
For instance- Resistance: frost vs Colossal vs Foe: Wizard vs Evasive vs Reflexes.
They literally could all just have the keyword RESISTANCE: X (frost / small units / wizards /ranged attacks / melee attacks)
BAM a ton of abilities all now instantly recognizable as 1 ability. (THIS DOES X)

Hearthstone and MTG capitalizes on this greatly and it makes abilities that are very similar instantaneously easy to know what they do.
Pox right now takes similar abilities and gives them a name that you have to read each time to see what it does. ("What does colossal/Foe/Reflexes do? I have to read it." vs "Oh RESISTANCE:X i've read that once and just have to look at the name".)

Ranks of abilities could also take an axe to.

The real difficulty will being doing all the above AND retaining the play depth we all know and love.
It's going to take a LOT of community effort.

 

The problem, as I see it, is that in a game which has a bazillion runes existing, how do you make them all different and all viable without making them so complex that the game becomes unwieldy?

I think perhaps that you can't, and that if we have truly simple champs (1-5 abilities each say) then we may have to abandon the idea that all a factions champs will be different.

But maybe it's ok if they aren't different. If the only meaningful difference between many champs within a faction is the art then you just make an aesthetic choice or a thematic one.

 

I think a lot of people underestimate how much variety you can get purely from stats. If you want a tough healer who can't fight well... you can do that with stats and Heal Champion 3. You want a skirmishy mid-range healer who is a good damage dealer? Stats, Heal Champion 3. Maybe throw in a movement ability like Hit and Run if you want to get fancy. Something mindbogglingly complicated like Aspect of Life is unnecessary (its got like 17? 18? abilities? all it is is a tanky healer thats better against melee- easy).

Stuff like Arctic Camo, Tough, Scale Armor, etc. -it mainly just reduces damage. I mean they have little quirks but really, the Armor stat can cover 90% of this stuff. Same goes for a lot of 'moar damage' abilities. Just... give em more damage base.

All I'm saying is you could boil most champs down to three or four abilities. The idea probably will horrify yall but I think it'd make a more fun game.

 

Totally agree and I think this really is what is needed.

 

sounds boring to me

 

I don't personally have a problem with complexity, but complexity plus a short turn timer is bad. Increasing turn length would go a long way towards solving this problem. Consolidating some of the nearly identical or completely identical abilities with different names would help just as much.

 

No, not everything can be reduced to base stats. Scale armour, tough, and arctic camo, the three you mentioned for example, are much more useful in that defence-shredding or defence bypassing abilities do not bypass those abilities also, and a lot of tank-y champions rely on that sort of thing, and this goes for other types of abilities.

As for a lot of the other points people mentioned, I find some of them to be downright silly. Having to read "Reflexes 3" and having to read "Resistance: Ranged" is the exact same thing, with a different name. I don't see how this solves any problems whatsoever (and in the case of Colossal, having "Resistance: Small Champions" or something similar would sound plain stupid).

Mass editing all the champions in the game, besides being a huge undertaking, would also result in us oldies having to acquaint ourselves with all the runes we already have - a BG that we once liked might turn into a useless piece of garbage. While I agree that some abilities could be consolidated, such as the many that involve granting Fearless and Iron Will, a lot of the ones you guys are mentioning would change the way a lot of runes play drastically.

Also, why should a champion have only one fixed "role" in a battlegroup? Upgrades are there to tailor a champion to the style you want to play it in. If I'm playing Kiergana in a Stitched deck, I'm not going to be taking Pack Leader and Boost Kanen am I? And the whole "buff stats with cp" thing is an atrocious idea if you're complaining about people needing to be familiarised with runes. When someone deploys a rune now, I know what to expect since there are only 4 upgrades he/she can choose from, I don't want to look at a rune every time someone deploys one to see what stats he buffed and how I need to react. I've been around since old pox, and I found that quite annoying.

 

Looking at Colossal, reflexes, Foe, Evasive, and resistance you would be unable to tell just from the name that they are essentially the same ability just with different triggers. The only reason this is currently the case is purely due to flavor and I feel this is an acceptable sacrifice to make the game more friendly and intuitive to new players without sacrificing the depth of said abilities.

 

Sooooo good to hear this news, an that there is serious thought involved in the upcoming decision...