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We all know about the jade problem. First, let's just define what exactly a jade is because there are common misconceptions about it.

Early on jades got their name because people used jade gear to maximize their resist and act simultaneously as tank and healer for team pvp; but eventually this carried onto 1v1 pvp when people realized they could inevitably win by forcing their opponent to give up to avoid wasting hours on a single match or exhaust their cards. The label has since stuck and people colloquially refer to this brand of opponent with it even though stats may vary.

It's important to understand that the characteristic to jading is play style not necessarily gear, especially these days with the use of buffs and debuffers (e.g., brace). The play style for jading is very passive, defensive, and exhaustive; the goal is to primarily win by default or exhaust the opponent of their energy or time to invest in the match. Someone may have high damage and low resist, but we will call them jades if they spam shields and rely on massive heals to essentially be unbeatable without some miracle one-shot attack (which isn't optional for some schools and especially at low levels). The average 130 ice wizard has 70% resist with over 9k health, yet we don't call every ice wizard a jade because we on some level understand that jading is defined by play style rather than stats. In fact, the fact that ice wizards would make the most optimal jades and yet, they seem to jade the least of all other schools shows jading is largely encouraged by conditions particular schools face.

Anyway, now I want to get into why jades exist and how to put an end to them.
Jades exist partly due to lack of viable strategy alternatives. Every school is supposed to have its own unique personality (fire with ability to pressure with overtimes, storm with high damage, etc). The games development over the years has removed any sense of personality at particularly the meta level. Everyone has the same stats; everyone has to have high damage, powerful shadow spells, high resist, etc. Then there's massive oversight in spell accessibility. For example, at lower levels people do not rely on natural strategies for their level cap because they'll buy or trade higher level treasure cards (this, by the way, makes these spells less special to their reserved school. IMO if an ice can buy or receive an earthquake treasure card then it should at least be a nerfed version. This makes myths' ownership of that spell more unique and special to their school).

So the first step to this problem is by removing incentives that encourage jading. This means giving balance a good healing spell at high level pvp. This means giving life better attacking spells that aren't so costly in pips. Etc. We need to do away with current gear that makes everyones stats the same and start creating good gear that preserves every schools personality.

Finally: we need an algorithm that detects jade play styles. I think if Kingsisle can construct an algorithm for Diego to determine who wins matches (with pretty decent accuracy), they should be able to create an algorithm that detects jade-like qualities, such as 80% universal resist, having 100%+ incoming or outgoing alone, not using an attack spell greater than 4 pips in x rounds, spamming shields with high health, etc. Now I'm open to ideas on what happens when the game detects jades, but personally I think every calculated detection warrants the match being cancelled. Nobody wins or loses, nobody loses or gains ranking, the game just puts both players back into the queue with someone else.

diyakom on Aug 17, 2020 wrote:

And just to be clear, my idea of creating an anti-jade PVP algorithm should only apply to 1v1 PVP, for both ranked and practice. Jades aren't much a problem in team pvp (unless the entire team are jades. In this case they manage to render the 2011/2012 stunblock updates completely useless because they spam at least two variations of smoke screen and remove all stunblocks within 2 rounds only to stun again). Usually jades in team pvp exist to support their attacking allies rather than to exhaust the opponents of their cards or time.

Jades are a fundamental issue everywhere in pvp except pve. The ability to have immunity and heal power, while powerful in synergy, is not healthy for pvp. So I fully support any changes to render jades to a more stable and spell reliant passive/defensive option, not just straight up immune.

However, going back to what you said in the first post, while most of what you said was accurate I just want you to understand what exactly your pushing for and thats more offensive pvp. Not all pvp should be ended by 0 hp altho thats just how most of us wants it to be. The issue with that is the lack of diversity to win a game. Hence why penalizing jades without taking into account spells like shrike in regular pvp that turns it into quick match needs to be dealt with, including scions.