Prelaunch(again)
 

Yes.

I guess i am kicking a dead horse yet again.

PA today is more or less about trying to do your outmost NOT getting incs while yourself are free to two fleet attack each night while your sleeping. Alliance politics now is more or less trying to have as much of the round possibole without having to wake up every other day to DC yourself(thats what we have the "non-euros" for i guess?).
Most alliances have a "pain barrier" on how many fleets they can get incomming each night without going into "red" negative growth.
On average, each planet sends out 40ish fleets a'round. 50ish fleets from alliance "A" out attacking each night/day.

This is a issue for almost every alliance out there, every other day, between 02:00-05:00 on average it pops up 100 fleets while you are sleeping, a big part of em launched 3-6 hours in advance, the only way you can protect yourself against this is if either you stay awake waiting for em to appear, or that maybe you have someone who is kind enough to dedicate their time doing this for you. Most allies/most people arnt able to do this every day, so they tend to make agreements with each other to make sure they dont have to spend time anywhere else than in bed.

This is a vicious cycle, it happends every round, you can work your ass off for 3 weeks straight waking up, handling the incs, and making sure they dont go past the "pain barrier", but with that in mind that sometime, sometime soon 2-3 other alliances(that perhaps are putting less time than you into the game) decide that its your turn to have waves and waves of incs(many preset to attack hours in advance) wich goes past your "pain barrier", and makes sure you stay in red for enough days for them to catch up with you.

People argue about that PL enables them to play, with any change to PL they would have to quit the game(and point to last time it was fiddled with). And i agree, i dont want to remove the option to prelaunch your fleets, as often i myself rather go sleep earlier, or that im unavalible at the time when i need to send the fleet. But the way PL works now, its mostly only one sided, and that side favours attacking.

Discussing this with the admins the other day, and trying to argument for why i think it should be a change to it, covered a lot of my points about the subject.

PA 2001 vs PA 2015:
1: You(atleast I) would launch earlier, and be able to DC your incs earlier. I could stay up untill 03:00 some days and still be able to cover most of what the game asked me to do.
* Ofc the technology has evolved a lot since back then, alliance tools, ingame options, and internet accesability is a lot better than back then.
But what does that matter if you have all these "tools/options" avialible if yourself are asleep?

PL attack vs PL defence:
2: Why would you only have one of the two componets of fleet movement avalible to be preset? If you could prelaunch defence as effectively and for more or less the same effort, why not have it like this?
* Yes you can PL defence, but that requires you to know when the attack fleet is gonna arrive, and without "spies/intel" from the attacker its simply just a guessing game. And staying up each tick to check for incs is putting in way more effort than the attacker is doing.

The "bandwagon" effect:
3: The bandwagon effect would change dramasticly, you would be able to DC incs when they are launched, and you will not have 50 incs showing up each tick suddently in the middle of the night wich requires to be handled within 40-50 minutes(more or less). Getting scans, putting up bcalc, looking for avaible fleet, trying to reach those avaible fleets. Its demanding.

The "pace" of the game will be slowed down:
4: If its less demanding protecting your roids, and having a "normal" life beside the game, less people/alliances are likely to get burnt out. There is very few alliances that are able to "compete" or "challenge" for #1, 4-5 rounds in a row. Wich to me says that knowledge/teamwork has very little to do with the game, its being able to dedicate majority of your(or someone elses) life to it.
* Some might say the game is "too easy", or "way too relaxed" allready, but i dont see many of them running around year after year performign at the same level. Im pretty sure that there mustve been a few thousand "accounts" being signed up the last 3 years.
And if you want a "higher" paced game, it could be done with offensive stats perhaps? or lower travel time? smaller tags?

______________________________________________

Now here is what i propose to change PL:

Prelaunching ships:
When you prelaunch ships, they leave your base the next tick, and can return to base according to when the fleet was prelaunched. Prelaunched 4 hours ago, 4 hours return time.

Detetecting incommings:
This stays as before, they are being able to be detected when they are ETA 9(hull3), ETA 8(hull2) and ETA 7(hull1) when the planet has TT4(hypergate). The incs will be showing on JGPs as before.

Detecting landtick:
Option 1 - Add a new scan to the tech tree(say military scans for nostalgia). This scan will show what landtick the fleet is gonna land at, and enables you to start DCing/sending def fleets straight away.

or

Option 2 - Incomming scan now show landtick instead of (PRELAUNCHED) or (ATTACKING). This requires the planet under attack to have sufficient amps/scan technology.


______________________________________________

Now this is just a suggestion to the discussion about the "PL" issue of PA.
People will still be able to prelaunch fleets as before, but the efficiency of prelaunching will be lowered as defence will be made easier to handle.
Many of you will prolly say that this only "favours the non-EU players", but aint PA allready "favouring" this group?

Re: Prelaunch(again)
 

Go away, you bring this up every year and its not PA 2001 vs PA 2015, PL was changed in 2012, the result... it was changed back! not going to dignify you with debate on the matter yet again, voted no, go crawl back under your rock!

Re: Prelaunch(again)
 

Changing PL isn't the answer. It needs to be abolished for attacking fleets (defenders should be able to time their ships to arrive at the right tick). That way we all have to be online to launch our attacks and, as a result, we may (but only may) see attacks spread out a little through the day.

I know that it's unlikely to happen but I can hope - can't I?

Re: Prelaunch(again)
 

One problem that hasn't been raised is the launch culture ... alliances dont war like they once did. for example CT v APP war in r40 it was 24/7 and was continuous... whilst most alliance wars are mainly conducted in the of 1am-6am GMT launch "window"

I do think that bigger carrots are needed to get a different launch culture before prelaunch can be addressed

Edit- I voted No btw

Re: Prelaunch(again)
 

Norse has shown the past rounds that its perfectly viable to launch attack waves without prelaunch.

There is NO need to launch your attacks at night.

Re: Prelaunch(again)
 

Norse or any 20-30 tag is hardly representative.
Yes, its viable to attack mornings/before noon and still get roids.
I dont see it becomming a go-to strat for a real allie though

Re: Prelaunch(again)
 

I am sure that mil scans or changing inc scans has been suggested before and has not happened so I can't see this thread making a difference. Personally I think that it would add more balance between pl attack and defence.

Mind explaining why you would have pl ships leave base and spend time coming back and how that would work? Would it mean that if you pl+4 and then cancel Just before launch it would take 4 hours to get back before you can actually launch it? Or do you mean that if you set pl +4 the fleet will fly away 2 ticks and then back 2 ticks to be ready to launch on time?

Re: Prelaunch(again)
 

P3n got its first 4 waves through aga and deejay in the evening: peak activity time.
Both p3n and, longer ago, Ascendancy launched 8 am raids on occasion. However these work mostly on the basis that everyone else is already out. Having lots of people doing it would be a totally different dynamic.

Re: Prelaunch(again)
 

I wasnt here in 2012 so I looked it up

That seems to be a totally different proposition to changes in scans to see how long PL is.
Being able to scan and know the length of PL does not disable PL. Particularly as you could dist whore your way round it. It simply raises the risks of doing it and the benefits of not doing so.
But it also still requires defenders up at night - over an even longer period since you have to keep scanning to find more PL and organise more defence. And then deal with the live launchers. Im not really sure whether that actually on reflection sounds much better. Useful for alliance DC to spread things out. But for individual defenders its more time awake at night not less.

Re: Prelaunch(again)
 

I think we should raise the taglimits.

Re: Prelaunch(again)
 

With that feeble attempt at humour out of the way, I am pretty much in favour of any mechanism that weakens prelaunch that does not have nasty side effects. I don't see any here, so full speed ahead, as far as I'm concerned.

I would also be OK with removing it altogether. Fortunately, I am not as big an optimiset as ArcChas, so I will not be disappointed when it doesn't happen.

Limiting prelaunch to a few ticks is and was fairly pointless, in my opinion. With 2 ticks prelaunch, you can prelaunch at 23:01 and have your fleet show up at 02:00. A fleet that shows up at 2am is just as bad as one that shows up at 4am.

This is not an argument against reducing the strength of prelaunch. Why was it changed back? Where there well-found reasons for reverting the change, or was it just mass whining?

Re: Prelaunch(again)
 

Changing PL would only make strong alliances stronger and weak alliances weaker..

In the fleets data I got from PA team the order tick was added - precisely to check how much PL there is/was - but this has not yet been analysed fully (i.e. grouped by alliance/PL time).

A very quick query on the data - which has not yet been verified:
So the majority of attack fleet launches are already live launches..
This can be explained by several reasons:

• retals during the day are always live launched
• several alliances - from what I've read - do already live launch (Faceless?, Ultores?)

I know most people in HR can not bother with live launching (including me).
So changing PL would force us to launch during the day - which does make our attack way weaker.

The top alliances however have less problem waking people up to send def so what makes you think they have less problem waking people up to launch attack fleets?

So from my point of view: our attacks become weaker while attacks of others don't become weaker at all: some/most? alliances will just switch back to live-launching - if they don't do that already.
If anything it would further increase the gap between top alliance and the rest. Is that desired?

When I had time to properly group this - and the tricky part here would be excluding retals - then I'll post.


Also: your proposal would also hinder defence fleets.. Maybe that is intended maybe it is not.

Today sending FI/CO based def against FR/DE at eta 8: if the attacker recalls at eta 7 the def ships are home immediately and can be reused. Your propsal would force a eta 1 return on them.. which may or may not be intended.. It's not a change I would welcome..
Would force def to live launch too which is not really convient.. (not for DCing and not for the people launching def)

Re: Prelaunch(again)
 

I think we have to factor in to the above data when "raids" are released.

Alliances release a raid between 19:00 to 21:00. Launch ticks range from 02:00 to 05:00.

Based on that I would expect typically to see those who wish to utilise PL on a typical 20:00 to be +6 at most for a 02:00 launch. The data seems to show this also in my opinion, the majority launching +5 and below.

If you then say typically most people who want to be away to bed at say 22:00 / 23:00 would then be setting a +4 or +3 PL it seems to follow the figures too.

Re: Prelaunch(again)
 

Stats based on:

• Attack fleets provided by PA (note: this does not include fleets launched by deleted planets)
• Second half of the round only: Day 26 - 49: PT 603 - PT 1175
• Launch tick range from 01:00 to 06:00 game time
• Alliances based on launch tick

Also pasted on pastebin: http://pastebin.com/raw.php?i=fPh5Gmbf

Total launches:
Live launch:
No live launch:
PL+1:
PL+2:
PL+3:
PL+4:
PL+5:
PL+6:
PL+7:
PL+8:
PL+9:
PL+10:
PL+11:

Re: Prelaunch(again)
 

Those stats seems to be more close to the reality. 2/3 of incommings is PLed, and the biggest sinners for PLing are those that are "the worst deffenders" my the first glance at the stats.

So based on those stats.
The ones that live launches the most are BowS/CT/Ult.
The midtier is P3ng/FL/BF
The ones that uses prelaunch the most are HR/ND

Re: Prelaunch(again)
 

Percentages:

Re: Prelaunch(again)
 

so the alliance that would be impacted most is HR!

Re: Prelaunch(again)
 

Yes, it surely would favour alliances like CT/BowS, as they are far better at live launching than the likes of p3ng/FL/BF

Re: Prelaunch(again)
 

it clearly doesn't favour anyone, it harms half of all our alliances, half the player base, now you may want to ignore half the player base but i think we need to keep as many people as we can playing. everyone has a choice to live launch if they wish right now, they shouldn't need the mighty butcher to dictate to them that they cant.

Re: Prelaunch(again)
 

@ B-Butcher if you really want to scrap prelaunch successfully you really need to push alternative ways/cultures that will stop the 1am-6am launch window (remember players follow the path of least resistance) and make attacks/defence more 24/7 and the only times I have seen this happen is when 2+ alliances go toe to toe and really compete for rank... As NAPtarion stands there is little incentive for players to break the current mold.

(rounds like r40 CT v APP was a prime example of warring 24/7) this also required more creative BCing during the day (launching fleetcatches and hitting defenders with fleet out etc) again envolves breaking the Mold.

Examples of Carrots to induce more war could be Alliance Golden Roids, daytime bonus XP, Rank mining bonuses, have more agressive ship stats, <community insert ideas here> etc
But alliances need better incentives to war, once this is done it creats a 24/7 enviroment and then Prelaunch can be Phased out.

Re: Prelaunch(again)
 

Possibly, if you ignore the fact that the only alliance live launching more than half the time is Asgard. In practice the difference between Ult live launching 43% of the time and P3n live launching 33% of the time is not so great as to say one will benefit and the other will lose significantly. Both (by extension everyone) would be faced with serious strategic questions from changes to PL.

Re: Prelaunch(again)
 

No PL is fine as it is, it was changed before and it sucked and due to it being shit it was changed back, the people that are voting "Yes" are simply from a better timezone than the likes of myself and alot of other players, that im 100% sure do not want to set alarms to get up and send ships in a virtual space war game with 400 active accounts if even..so i agree with gm ;p

Re: Prelaunch(again)
 

Yeah, and with the changes i suggested wich enables people to defend "daytime", they can continue to live launch or prelaunch without anyone dictateing them do to either.
Its a change wich I BELIVE will even out the difference in wich allies who can succsefully defend their roids, and even if it would favour HR/ND less, guess what, they are allready on the bottom of the ranking list, and i doubt they will be put further behind by what i suggested.

Re: Prelaunch(again)
 

Im not sure if you are still playing, and IIRC the last time i played with you, you said you would never come back to the game :salute:
Im not looking for options to "scrap prelaunch", im looking for options to make it less effective.
Alliances will always go for the "most effectivce" way to attack, and perhaps a change to PL will move this game from a 1-6am game to a 24/7 game(wich i seriously doubt with the current size of the active playerbase).

Re: Prelaunch(again)
 

so you want to take their fun away by not letting them PL so you can see who the superior alliance is?
Basically what you're saying.

Re: Prelaunch(again)
 

They will still be able to prelaunch.
Did you even read the thread?

Re: Prelaunch(again)
 

because I was bored with PA/NAPtarion... I crave war, I might come back if the conditions are right.


Short sighted imo .... Ive stated why scrapping or limiting PL would hamper the game in its currently launch culture and ways to change it.

Re: Prelaunch(again)
 

Its REDOING it, to enable people to use prelaunch more effectively for DEFENCE.
How is that bad at all? wouldnt that encourage more war, being able to defend yourself?

Re: Prelaunch(again)
 

Its 1984 newspeak (ignorance is strength etc) .... you don't want more defensive set up when PA is nicknamed NAPtarion

No wonder folk slate you on the forums
Look at r16 as a historical round on how attacking was better than defending

Re: Prelaunch(again)
 

Which is NOT the case in your current proposal.

From your starting point:
This also affects DEFENCE fleets!
If you get a FR incoming and defend against it with FI and if you PL that defence fleet 1 tick - which is usually the case! - then you will not be able to use that fleet immediately when the attacker recals at eta 7.
The defence will be stuck with a 1 tick return time.


And more important: this round there are already 4 alliances which live launch 40+% of their attack fleet between 01:00 and 06:00 !
So even without PL you would still have had at least 40% of the fleets. And possibly more.. since those that are now on PL+1 would likely just live launch.. or land tick set one tick earlier..

These attack fleets will require you to wake up defenders - defenders which in turn can then also live launch their attack fleets.


The problem you want to solve: incomings during the night.
Your propsed solution: rework prelaunch. In the very best case that would have reduced nightly incomings this round to 40% of what they were.
And even that is stretching it.. For the fleets that PL+1 the extra 1 tick return time hardly matters after TT4 finished..
(And before TT4 it would just be a live launch because of the slower travel)


If you really want to lower nighty incs then the suggestions from Paisley make a bit more sense..
For example: higher XP gain for fleets launched during the day could make sense from a game point of view.. Landing an attack during the day requires more experience after all since it is easier to get covered - since people are awake.. :)

Re: Prelaunch(again)
 

In practice all BB was asserting his changes would do was spread out the pressure on DCing. He did not seem to be expecting a huge revolution in launch times. Rightly so since I would think the vast majority of people who pre launch are really not all that bothered if their land tick is revealed and will go on using it.

However, I agree that the pre-launch sending your fleet a distance from your planet is absolutely bizarre. It is pre-launch because they have not launched yet, not because they have stealthily shuffled half way there!
The effects of such a change are also, as you point out entirely bad for defence, meanwhile attackers suffer no penalty at all because they pre-launched for the simple reason that they are not going to be on and so they wont be cancelling PL and thus wont be traveling back due to having used it.

Re: Prelaunch(again)
 

Initialy i left out wether the "prelaunch" penalty would affect both defending and attacking fleets, intentionaly.
Do i think it should be a penalty for prelaunching def? no.
Why do i want a "return" penalty for prelaunching attacking? so people cant "fake prelaunch" to soak up defence.

As i said in the start of the thread, beign able to DC during "early" night hours makes defence a lot easier, having 60-100 calls down to one person each night to set up calcs for/calling defence for/etc etc is too demanding. And you could simply just use all your def fleets at once IF you wake up during the midnight for "live launcehd" and "prelaunched fleets.

Re: Prelaunch(again)
 

I assume that this is anticipating a problem that will arise, since fake prelaunching is pretty rare atm.
Tbh i dont see a problem with the idea that fake prelaunchs is the risk you take if you 'pre-DC' your incs. I do see that that would run counter to what you are trying to achieve, but i do like there being another strategy added to the game.

One of the problems with this idea of being able to reveal a land tick or similar with a scan is that atm PL def is a rare event, if it becomes the norm then that has a profound affect on the way meta clases interact with each other. CR/BS def against FR/DE and FR/DE def against FI/CO will be much more common.
Obviously this is an issue for the stats maker, but it is something I have not seen mentioned, and seems worth flagging up.

Re: Prelaunch(again)
 

Its allready a issue, hence why Ult were so hard to take down allready.
They are active enough to stay up and "predef" their incomming fleets from the "non-fulltime-pa-players".
Its also why alliance choose to "fort"

Re: Prelaunch(again)
 

You missed the point there: I do PL def a fair bit. I had it against me just the once this round, used it twice with clippers and three or four times with rogues. Nevertheless game mechanics make it unusual. Of all def fleets I would bet that under 10% are the meta class above the one they are defending.
But one of the reasons it is strong is because it is common for downward shooters to be somewhat stronger than upward firing. This is done because a, those below have two ticks to gather def, and b, it is considerably harder to def CO with DE etc. (Outside gal anyway)
If it is no longer harder then there needs to be consideration of that when making the stats.

Re: Prelaunch(again)
 

As far as I can see, there are 2 factors that currently make night attacks better than evening or morning attacks:
1) Everyone launches at night, and there's safety in numbers. This means alliances are forced to set launch ticks at ungodly-hour o'clock, because everyone else does so. This makes launching at an unusual time much less effective than launching at prime-time.
2) Most people sleep at night, so there's fewer defense fleets available to stop attacks launched at that time. With fewer defense fleets to counter you, your landing rate increases.

Evidently, both mechanisms contribute to making night attacks more efficient, but the question is, which one (if any) is the main factor? Since we currently lack data to answer that question objectively, neither hypothesis can be disproved. Given that, this tendency by (primarily, though not exclusively) the pro-prelaunch faction to ridicule and dismiss the anti-prelaunch faction as 'obviously' wrong is intellectually dishonest. Nothing in this thread is 'obvious'. You have a viable hypothesis, but you're overextending by pretending it's the only hypothesis. Phrases like "you're probably all live launchers", "removing it clearly doesn't favour anyone" and "the mighty butcher" are veiled insults aimed at dismissing a proposal and its proponents, without bothering to formulate any arguments to counter it.

There's 2 possibilities, neither of which has any supporting data, Bram's efforts notwithstanding. For example, something I'd be interested in seeing is how the fraction of prelaunch use changed when prelaunchedness (that's a word now) showed up on Incoming Scans, and whether using prelaunch meaningfully reduces your landing rate compared to live launching. Unless anyone can come up with that or some other useful data for us to look at, all that remains is for the powers that be to make a decision. Or a guess, really.

Fortunately for you, inaction is effectively a decision in your favour.


I think people mentioning they'd like prelaunch to be removed altogether might have slightly sidelined the thread. For my part in that, my apologies.

Re: Prelaunch(again)
 

I like butchers option 2: showing prelaunch on inc scans.
Sure there's a bigger chance of prelaunch def, but is that really a bad thing?

Re: Prelaunch(again)
 

I don't think so, because on the attacker's side, it would be an awesome flaw to exploit in the defense. I would have fun changing my PL a few times before launch.

Re: Prelaunch(again)
 

So far as I can see if you ignore BBs odd idea about fleets flying away on pl which the reasoning for has yet to be fully explained I think the pl time showing on inc scans is more of a good thing than bad.

Pros
1, Attackers can still pl as long as they like with little further disadvantage to what they have now, does NOT take away pl as some people in this thread seem to think
2, Provides extra fun for active attackers as mentioned by mxy above
3, Provides an opportunity to pl defence thus balancing with attack - good for less active players/alliances
4, Means that people have a better idea when they are going to be attacked (helps some of us with our sleep!)
5, Encourages live launching, hopefully encouraging attacking away from night time.

Cons
1, Defence is slightly stronger by enabling the class above being a more useful and used defence - as Londo mentioned this might need slight tinkering of stats
2, Damages less active players on attack as more likely to get pl defence against them
3, Makes dists stronger/more useful (if you like dists then this is potentially a positive not a negative, I dont so I'll have it as a negative!)

Re: Prelaunch(again)
 

The rationale for that is to avoid exactly what mxy suggests happening. I dont think fake PL drawing out PL def is a bad thing, but presumably BB does.


That depends whether this is an augmented inc scan or a military scan, BB was undecided on this in his proposal. The later a scanner could do circumventing the boost to dist whoring. Having it as a mil scan also means alliance DCs can use it without having to get the defender online, which otherwise would rather undermine the rationale for having the scan in the first place, you can already organise PL def if the relevant people are on! (presumably this would not actually be a real military scan but would simply tell the destination of fleets and their eta, without providing details of their composition)

Re: Prelaunch(again)
 

My list was for inc scan, military scan would need to be a bit different.

The fleets launching on pl would seem to have more negatives than positives.

pros:
1, preventing ppl mucking around with their pl fleets

cons:
1, makes defending base against multiple waves more difficult
2, more unintended fleetcatches as ppl return their previously safe fleets
3, means if a fleet recalls that you are defending against having been pl on def you take longer to get back
4, prevents prelaunching fleets away to avoid being called!

Re: Prelaunch(again)
 

This is not really the case..

Today you have two options:

• Put base to fight and put ships you don't want to fight in a fleet and PL it
• Put base to run and put ships you do want to fight in a fleet

Option 1 would be affected by 'fleets "launching" on PL', option 2 would not.

Re: Prelaunch(again)
 

Well the whole reason why i want attack fleets to leave base at PL is to prevent what mxy said, wich would favour the "fulltime non-eu players" more than the average joe.

Re: Prelaunch(again)
 

5, Prevents prelaunching to evade cov-ops

Though I think BB already said this pre-launch half launch thing need not affect def PL; if that is so most of your objections fall away. Other than foiling Mxy.

Re: Prelaunch(again)
 

somehow I have never even considered option 2!

I also have a 5th con (or 4th if taking out #1): Damages gal defence. It is useful to be able to pl a def fleet +2/3/4, sometimes it even forces a recall, and to then be able to move it to defend elsewhere.

Clearly this is another one that would not be affected if this launching when in pl only affects attack... it does however make it an even odder idea to have one launching out and the other not.

Re: Prelaunch(again)
 

What do you mean by this? Prelaunching +8, then coming back 4 ticks later to live launch? If so, why do you list this as a pro?

Re: Prelaunch(again)
 

I don't see the problem. It gives active people like yourself a way to **** with your targets / enemies but also gives less active people a chance of prelaunching def.

Re: Prelaunch(again)
 

Yes I mean what it is apparently supposed to prevent, people changing their pl later thus mucking up the defenders nice planned defence. It was a pro because preventing this is apparently the aim of the proposal. This clearly has both negative and positive aspects, the positive is that it is good for less active players, the negative that it takes out strategies for the more active.

My intention with the list was not to reframe the proposal but to look at the proposal on its own terms. As such if it is not a pro when taking it on the terms of the proposal then what is?

Re: Prelaunch(again)
 

I think that would make it a conposal.



I'm sorry. I'll show myself out.

Re: Prelaunch(again)
 

Tbh making the inc scan show only to the attacked planet how many ticks the fleets are pled in advance just equalize as much as possible the advantages of pling atks without affecting any relevant aspect of the game. Any downsides of it are so minor that I dont know why this was not done before. For defense it will be the same as in attack, sometimes pling attack work, sometimes it doesn't.

Maybe something that will become more common are manually inserted incomes in the red page. Therefore, in addition to that, I imagine that if the manually created incs in the red page were somehow highlighted it would be very useful for the other members in ally to follow their status.

Anyway, this doesn't change the game. A game changing modification would be the removal of atk pling. Defense pling is necessary.