With the current season we got a balance patch, a big one in fact and the Aqua Axies got the short straw of it. Imma give you my personal opinion about this in an attempt to analyze some consecuences we faced in this season.
Axie infinity entered the greatest bull run in play-2-earn gaming in history this year (to clarify: a temporal state where a ton of people entered the ecosystem of Axie) and with that the game suffered what every game that is played by a ton of people suffer:
It's gameplay mechanics are pushed to their absolute limits
With that we found a lot of extremly functional Axie builds that became "unfair" to more generic ones like the so unfamous Terminator or the Inmortal Plant or the Indes's Bird.
But we also found that there are races that need truly specific combination of skills to work and in viceversa, races that could run a really wide combination of their own skills and work pretty well.
In the later case we find three particular races: Plants, Reptiles and Aquas.
I think that's the reason so many of their popular cards got slightly nerfed, because it was easy to got a random set of Aqua skills and have a decent Axie and since the skill stat "got buffed", Aquas would rise just too much and that wasn't acceptable since they where the most popular type of Axie and the second with the best Win rate (being Dusks the strongest Axies in the game).
But, and we all knew it was a but, the situation turned the other way around. Now Aquas it's probably the hardest Axie to build and turn out good. (To clarify, i mean pure Aqua Axies, actually Aquas with two beast/insect cards are really strong) And now we see in the Marketplace pure Aquas in the range of floor prices.
Up until now, this post talked pretty much concrete and pretty straighforward concepts and data, now it's my time to say some more controversial opinions.
Remember that i mentioned that Axie infinity has been pushed to their limits by the sheer amount of gamers we play it everyday? Well because of that situation, i think we found that are cards that cannot be balanced by balance patches because their problems are not their stats but their effects, and in fact are part of the dominant strategies in ultra high mmr.
Of course i'm talking about Cute Bunny and Gravel Ant.
But why i'm ranting about these cards? Well, because they show the limits of the actual Battle System and make me want even more the legendary Battle V2 that show really interesting evolutions to the game by the little sneak peaks we got.
What do i mean by the limits of our battle system? Well, that this cards are the greatest example of: "This is a regular card until i find the point where i can exploit them and win whitout counterplay possible".
And in any other game, these cards come and go and simply are deleted, reworked, shifted to only being playable in non-competitive game modes, etc. But in Axie infinity you can't do that, because you can't delete an Skill (you can completly rework it) but it's expensive in almost every way possible. How could you delete a problematic skill? You can't leave an axie whitout it's cute tail or even worse, mouth!
But well, the good part about all this is that we are in the hands of one of the best teams in the world and we found out the limits of a battle system pretty much at the end of it, and it's a good teaching about how to design skills in a game where after it's deployed and in the hand of the players cannot be so easily modified by the nature of the players being owners of their little cute monsters ♥
If you want to talk with me hit my dm's in twitter: https://twitter.com/ChuntaroDS
