Fire Emblem Heroes: World-Class Summoners

Chapter 1

"So, the next big update adds a lot, doesn't it?" asked the large summoner.

I nodded, sipping down a stamina potion, too impatient to wait for my stamina to recharge on its own. "That's only what they teased on Feh Channel yesterday. They said they were adding a lot more than just that. The whole damn game is changing."

Sitting with me in the square of Fire Emblem Heroes were two of my friends, Maia and Joker. Joker was a big guy IRL, and his avatar was as well. He was a portly man with chubby cheeks and ruddy stubble covered his cheeks and neck. He wore a beige tunic which was stretched a bit thin over his pot belly, with a leather breastplate that was two sizes too small covering his chest, all around giving his character a very cartoony look. Maia had a more pretty and motherly looking avatar, tall and lithe with long, brown hair. She changed outfit s every so often, but presently she was wearing a creamy, semi-transparent blouse over a peach tunic with a chiffon pleated skirt. Beside the both of them were their lead heroes, Corrin (the male one) beside Maia and Kagero with Joker. Zephiel was also present, having been silently leering over the others as I reviewed the last episode of Feh Channel to the others.

"That live arena definitely sounds like it's going to be huge. Shame, though, it'll go to the whales the moment that goes live," Joker sighed, inspecting his nails. "Good for you, Ren, but I guess we'll be stuck with the old one one for the time being."

"I don't think so," I said, shaking my head. "They're talking about making the live arena more balanced by removing the bonuses from merge levels during arena battles. This way, F2Pers and P2Pers can fight equally in battles based purely on skill, not player investment."

"Really? But would the players really like that?" Maia spoke up. "I'm sure that F2Pers would be more than happy with it, but the P2Pers would probably get upset by a system like that. They would find it unfair that even though they paid money on the game to build such strong heroes, it wouldn't give them any advantage in the live arena. Why don't they just break it up into different rankings based on the power of the Heroes so that way everyone can be happy and the battles remain fair?"

"I can answer that one," Joker replied. "Look at the current arena. It's also tier based and pits you against teams which are based on your team's BST and your tier in the arena. Yet, all the time weaker players end up against OP teams simply because they got lucky and managed to summon sort of powerful 5-star hero."

I nodded my head. "That's exactly why. The current system for 'balancing' PvP teams isn't very efficient, so the best way is to remove things like hero merges from the equation. Also, since the battles are live, you can choose to challenge a specific opponent yourself so that way random pairings aren't as likely to screw you over. It's also possible to challenge players one tier above or below you, so as a Tier 1 summoner who just got started you don't end up against a Tier 5 simply because their team's BST totals out a little low."

The other two seemed to seemed to pause for a moment, thinking. Of course, the system wasn't flawless. It would be easy to bait weak players into challenging you by assigning a pathetic hero like Odin or Wrys as your lead hero but then actually use a super powerful team. I suspected that would be the first complaint to the system, but the only way to balance it would be if you could see your opponent's entire team, but then the issue would be that no one would accept a challenge unless they had a distinct advantage. There really was no perfect solution other than to have an executive hand select each pair in a duel. Of course, that would never work. No one wanted to rate teams by hand all day, and it would bog the whole system down.

"Well, guess it can be summed up to 'Intelligent' Systems," Joker sighed, shaking his head. "I think I'm going to go do a few runs in the Training Tower. I've still got a few orb quests to milk before the next monthly quests begin."