Arena of Valor / YMMV

Americans Hate Tingle: Those who play in the North/Latin American Servers are usually known for putting more emphasis that Helen is the ultimate Replacement Scrappy for Peura. Aside of their distaste towards anime-ish characters (which Helen is), Helen is replacing a non-humanoid character like Peura, who is considered more unique and giving diversity. On the Asian side, however, Helen is a lot more accepted and her story of losing Peura and having to shoulder the burden of her position being more accepted.
Annoying Video Game Helper: If Kaine and Aya are on the same team, it's generally encouraged that Aya does not attach herself to Kaine. Kaine is a hero relying on Invisibility all the time, but if Aya's on top of him, she's blatantly telling her enemies where Kaine actually is located, thus rendering Kaine's gimmick useless. This is not quite a problem for both Batman and Quillen, or Prince of Lanling and Ah Ke, because their stealth skills are not permanent, but on a button click. However, Aya (or her counterpart Yao/Yaria) can still hop on them anyway, which is still pretty annoying.
Broken Base: AOV's latter heroes tends to be anime-inspired rather than the more hardcore, medieval designs of the earlier heroes, and some of the older westernized designs like Arthur or Zephys gets a revamp to make them look thinner and anime-ish. This causes strife between the camp who believe that this anime-inspired designs are bland and merely pandering to the anime crowd at the cost of the greater older designs (to which this camp believed that they were attracted to AOV in the first place due to the Westernized designs, but since Tencent is moving away from that, these fans felt betrayed and considered leaving), with the camp that think it's a harmless gesture and should be OK, believing that Tencent got inspired with fellow Chinese-based game, Genshin Impact, that gained great popularity with their anime-design and they could garner more popularity with it (or, Honor of Kings already had cutesy/pretty designs anyway, so it's more proper to follow its forebearer).
Complete Monster: Arena of Valor has two Mage Heroes and one Archer:
- Mganga, the Unspeakable, is a Monster Clown who delights in torturing other living beings for the sake of learning more power to claim for himself, while laughing at the miseries of his victims. Mganga violated restrictions of magic research solely to learn about the forbidden Voodoo/Poison and Blood magic and was expelled from the Magister Council as a result. Hired by the demonic forces of Lokheim, Mganga continues his forbidden research and gleefully tortures any living beings assigned to him, some to the point of insanity. When he's not researching, Mganga executes tasks that result in the deaths of many either to further empower his research or just because he feels like it. Mganga stands out amongst the demonic forces of Lokheim as he's the only one who joined without any tragic circumstances or opposition with the forces of Light, but purely for the hunger of power for himself and the pleasure of inflicting pain on others.
- Lorion, the Nightmare Incarnate, is a magician who forms the Dark Den, a group only for evil magicians, and gleefully tortures and corrupts people that he notices "potential" within them, under the guise of "training". Fascinated by the corruptive powers of Black Magic, Lorion attempts to capitalize on them for evil purposes, including ruling Athanor for himself. When he is killed by his ex-student D'Arcy, who rejected black magic after seeing its evil, Lorion is immediately reincarnated in a younger body by the Dark Andura Stone, which amplifies his evil thoughts. Lorion then manipulates certain people and events, including turning whole village inhabitants into demonic zombies, to create a miracle that will cause untold death and destruction within Athanor, all the while happily gloating about it in front of his victim and potential witnesses.
- Stuart, the Collector, is a notorious Serial Killer working with many shady organizations. He kills many in brutal and sadistic ways, then immortalizes the patterns of their dying life forces in a crystal for him to collect, as he finds said pattern to be the most beautiful. Stuart murders the families of both Kaine and Sinestrea for no apparent reason, leaving the two traumatized. Stuart then decides to torment Kaine further by goading him to give in to his demonic lineage, as Stuart suspects that his demonic transformation will produce a more beautiful pattern. Even as a human amongst magically inclined creatures, Stuart stands out as one of the most depraved humans to walk in Athanor, matching the Hero he replaces.
Ensemble Dark Horse: For a Guest Fighter, Wiro is well-beloved, because this is his first exposure outside Indonesia. Many people, who doesn't even know him in the first place, are taken by surprise in a good way with his chill, yet Crazy Is Cool attitude, in addition of being an all-around solid Tank/Support hero. Even if he holds the record of the only hero with absolutely no extra skins (even the DC heroes have a few), he's attained an unexpected popularity even beyond Indonesians, who are also normally happy with his addition.
Epileptic Trees: Some speculate that Lauriel's default skin isn't actually her true form for some reason. Her true self is actually her six-winged Divine Grace skin, where she's no longer being restrained with any sorts of power limiter. It also helps that aside of extra quotes, the Divine Grace skin has a separate lore that tells about Lauriel's past where she exemplified the trope Magikarp Power (being a weak angel during her growing up phase only to become super powerful when she grew up and realized her true potential) and had her own 'angel orb' pet/buddy, which is nowhere to be seen in her default skin. Tencent hasn't given any statement about whether it's canon or it's just Alternate Universe thing.
Fan Nickname: Valhein and Yorn tends to get combined into "Valyorn". The term refers to the frustration of players seeing newbies that do not want to go support and instead picked both Valhein and Yorn for the Dragon Lane, with high chance of throwing the game because of it.
Friendly Fandoms: Both Arena of Valor international fandom and Honor of Kings fandom get along relatively well. Additionally, this game's fandom and its main rival's, Mobile Legends: Bang Bang engage their rivalry and competition relatively good as well.
Germans Love David Hasselhoff: While the game's mostly spread well in Southeast Asia, ultimately the ones who made their love for Arena of Valor as part of their culture are Thailand and Vietnam. It has become the go-to mobile MOBA game of the nations, which seeped through various advertisements and meme, as Garena truly concentrated their efforts there. They almost did it for Indonesia, but eventually realized that Mobile Legends: Bang Bang has rooted itself and dominated the advertising chances there first, so they still struggled there despite managing to nab a local hero character (Wiro Sableng) over there.
High-Tier Scrappy:
- Florentino is a constant resident of the ban list because he's too good at his job. For one thing, he's supposed to be an example of a Crippling Overspecialization: he's extremely good at dueling, to the point of being nigh-untouchable, and in the same time he really sucks at team fights or fighting multiple enemies at once. Despite his high skill ceiling, many people dread the times they find any particularly skilled Florentinos that easily shut down the Slayer Lane opposition because he's too good at dueling, and then scaring the hell out of the junglers while somehow slipping away without fail. And if you meet him in 1 vs 1 mode? Good luck.
- Paine is a hero that is super dreaded as a jungler. He can freely jump on you unimpended by using one of his skills that sends out a projection that can't be damaged and then instantly jump right onto the projection rather than walking there and risking getting interrupted, all he needs is just a bush to hide (and if he's found out, he's got damage reduction and anti crowd control). Once he's on the spot, he attacks you in an area very quickly with silence and deals extra damage if you turn his back on him, and he can do this at a mere Level 2, causing him to easily snowball. His ultimate is a much more sudden Dynamic Entry that deals massive damage and allows him to deal surprising burst damages with all those taken in factor. Paine is one of the junglers that often get banned for a reason: You can't spell Paine without pain.
- Nakroth is the hero with the most mobility in the game, with three dashes as long as his skills aren't in cooldown. This makes him not only able to zip through the jungle fast on a daily basis (so he can clear jungles faster), he's considered an extremely dangerous hit-and-run Glass Cannon hero who kills squishies as fast as possible (his passive causes him to knock up after the fourth attack) and able to escape without being caught due to his many dashes, causing him to snowball so fast and carry the game with ease. It's even worse when he's supported with Aya, who takes care of his main drawback (his own squishiness).
Low-Tier Letdown:
- Zanis, despite being generally a good Skill Gate Character, is the type of 'Once you mastered the basic of jungling, ditch him' kind of hero. This is because he's a combination of snowball hero with Magikarp Power that he's overdependent on how many kills/assists he could get... and being a hero with minimum gap closer, all he had was just a speed boost and an ult that launches himself to one target, meaning that if things go south, he cannot escape reliably. All these combined means that he's the ultimate bully target in the early farming phase, shut him down during the early game and he'll mostly end up useless in the remainder of the game. Therefore, most people tend to consider Zanis rather unworthy of the efforts put for his snowball potential.
- Valhein is basically a one-trick pony where all he had for his skills were just how to attack a single target while his passive runs on RNG thus not very dependable (and worse than Zanis, he doesn't even have extreme snowball mechanic). And he's also a newbie bait as he's one of the earlier Archers you get along with Tel'Annas (who's actually encouraged to stay pretty far due to her range, while Valhein needed to get a little closer to the danger zone to actually deal damage, plenty of time for his enemies to strike his weak spot), there are a lot of cases that when two sides picked Valhein, your Valhein is basically a dumb feeder while the enemy Valhein plays pretty good and contributes to your team. All these combined makes him a recurring resident of bottom tier in the meta. Even after Tencent revamped him (but not making him look more like the usually-regarded-as-solid Di Renjie) to make his passive more reliable (and eliminates his magic power build), he still has similar issues.
Memetic Mutation:
- Qi's boobs^Explanation
- Justice for the horse/deer lady!^{Explanation (spoilers alert)}
- Mistaking Violet as Toro.^Explanation
Moe: Even amongst the more internationalized feel of the game that is a lowkey American Kirby Is Hardcore, you can find some really adorable, bubbly (or kind of shy) character that are extremely huggable. Chief examples of this include Alice, Annette, Ishar, Rouie and Aya. If you managed to also get the Japanese voice, their Moe status get cranked up further.
Narm:
- Anything that comes out from Yena's mouth might not be able to envoy her personality as a calm and collected lady when her EN VA delivered her lines in an extremely monotonous, borderline Emotionless Girl tone (She actually does have emotions, though her personality is actually more of an Ice Queen). In comparison, her Japanese VA manages to envoy her emotions more clearly (and her Honor of Kings counterpart is voice-designed/directed with a lot more emotions in both languages).
- Some heroes' voices are... outdated and still overly dependent on memes and pop culture. This can be seen with Ormarr and Kahlii, but Kahlii simply got it worse: Lore-wise, she has been revamped into the Token Good Teammate and non-malevolent member of Lokheim, but you will have a hard time recognizing when she constantly breaks the fourth wall and spouts pop culture references.
Player Punch: The death of Peura. Imagine that you've got a hero you liked and stood with together from the beginning. This is a Multiplayer Online Battle Arena, surely even the devs wouldn't even try to kill off any character storywise, it's all just Excuse Plot, right? (Not even Riot Games dared doing so after temporarily removing Gangplank for his rework) Tencent doesn't think so. So your favorite hero is killed off, replaced by someone whom you can have mixed feelings about. And now you're screaming for bloody vengeance on that hero who killed her in-story, Veera, if you haven't been using her.
Replacement Scrappy: Helen got it rough from Peura fans. Unlike every other cases of rework, in order to make way for Helen, Peura was Killed Off for Real instead of her becoming a new model. Even then, Helen is an anime-styled young girl, whereas Peura is a female centaur which is considered more unique. Most of the Western fanbase that liked the centaur and has a disdain on the cutesy anime design are not pleased at Helen. Thankfully, this has at least gotten into at worst a case of Base-Breaking Character; because when it was revealed that Helen was actually Peura's student, fans took it better instead of how Peura herself was turned from centaur to human anime girl, but some are still salty on Peura's removal in the first place.
Rooting for the Empire: There's a sizable part of the fandom that roots for the victory of the Lokheim faction despite the fact that it is basically full of dark demons. This is due how their opposition, Veda, has done a lot of petty actions in spite of being the faction that represents light; some of them even screwed over several heroes so much that the heroes decided to go over to Lokheim, where they were openly welcomed, to enact revenge. Additionally, the leader of Lokheim, Volkath, is a charismatic hero who appreciates freedom of choice, rebelling against the restrictive rules set by Veda. Those that root for Lokheim can often be seen chanting a popular quote from Volkath that espouses the glory of darkness while ridiculing light: "Light is fleeting, darkness is forever."
Ships That Pass in the Night: Long before Allain was introduced, there was several pair skins between Tulen and Butterfly. Fans take it that Butterfly has been dating Tulen behind Allain's back, even if Tulen stands on a higher level than her and will probably look down on her.
Unexpected Character: Yes, Allain crosses over to Honor of Kings. Perhaps as the 'main' Tencent game, it's a privilege for the 'big brother' game to get the crossover stuffs. Well... certainly no one expects that the 'little brother' game also gets a transferred hero there in form of Ming Shiyin.
Viewer Gender Confusion: There's a lot that easily mistake Iggy as a little girl, when in truth... he's a Dude Looks Like a Lady.

YMMV / Arena of Valor

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