Hello. Today I bring some of my thoughts on Creep Surge, although it also applies to City Watch a bit.
It’s a base for your guild. It’s bread and butter. Most of the players are in a guild, and most guilds require daily Surge participation. It means that, maybe apart from the very top players for whom there doesn’t seem to be a suitable difficulty yet and those that are guildless, everyone has to complete multiple fights a day in Creep Surge.
Now, definitely the devs saw this as a problem because they added in an option to Raid these a couple of times. That’s because of repetition. You had to do it so many times, players saw this as a hindrance more than anything.
But there’s one more thing about Creep Surge and it’s repetitiveness. Namely, all of the actual teams you see there are pulled from actual players’ defences! All of the heroes on those may have unequally leveled skills, different levels, different ranks, even friendships. Sometimes, which is probably the bane of newer players, you get a single very strong hero instead of a team because someone decided to lower their rank in Arena and dampened the defense.
And then we have meta. Quorra, Mr Incredible, Sulley, Moana, freeze teams nowadays. It comes and goes, just like a meta should. But, it’s called meta because it’s currently considered the strongest strategy (often is) and is widely used. Arena is a good example. You can clearly see that some units are present incredibly often, and some - not at all.
I’ll take Quorra as an example on how it’s bad. Some people defended her, saying that she has her counterplays. Well, that’s true. You just had to construct a good team, that’s the strategy part coming into play. But, what if you have limited resources? Because that’s Creep Surge in a nutshell. Place, where you have to fight multiple times a day, and you keep pushing against the current meta over and over and over again. You run out of counters, mercenaries, and there are still more and more Quorra based teams to deal with.
People were pulling it off of course, they had to. But the point still stands - people are unhappy about the “meta heroes” because they are just so obnoxious to deal with on a daily basis. Arenas, Coliseums, Guild Wars, Surges, City Watches. So they start complaining about the heroes being overpowered.
Now, I’m actually asking - what’s the benefit of having real time teams in City Watch and Creep Surge? I see only drawbacks. But now I wonder, what if they were randomized? What if there was a pool of compositions and nothing else? You could see something without much synergy, sure, or you could run into something and think “wow, that’s genius”. Because you never see that hero in action as he’s not in the meta, but that doesn’t mean he won’t shine in a certain scenario.
What I’m trying to say, this game mode takes such a part in a daily gameplay, but it’s hurt very badly because it’s based on Arena teams. We, as players, get fed up with certain heroes because we have to deal with them literally all the time. If the teams were at least slightly randomized when it comes to their members, it would be like a breath of fresh air. It would bring other, unused heroes to the play and show their potential when they have some investment put into them, inspire some imagination in team creation. It wouldn’t be so grueling, I believe it would actually be more fun, because currently everything in this game is preset, either by players or devs themselves.