Most players, not all players. I don’t think crippling the gamemode to accommodate for players who don’t know what they’re doing is the right call. If unskilled players have trouble killing the dragon, how is that the games fault? From what I’ve seen, the dragon loses most of the time, even after getting a movement buff and the knights getting a speed nerf. Adjusting how they play or limiting what they have to play against isn’t a proper solution to the problem of people just not knowing how to play. Little Crusaders has a very low skill ceiling, so even having a rough idea how to play (like knowing that stomping and tail whipping exist) makes you better than 75% of the people who play LC.
So basically what I’m trying to say with that block of text is that the game should try teaching new players how to play instead of just kneecapping it every few updates. Even a popup that said how-to-play (with controls and explanations of abilities) could help with this, at least to alleviate some of the problems I see a lot, like people not knowing whether you have to left click or press E on the button. On top of that, a training mode/map could be useful for new players getting a grasp of how to play and how the hitboxes handle instead of joining and getting wiped by a 300k exp player who looked at a Steam guide for LC.
It looks like we're getting a new tutorial section on the menu, nice. What a perfect place to put a LC tutortial.
Also- if people have a problem with a 12 playercount, they still have the option to lower it back to 9 or less. Option’s always been there. You could even have 9 be the default, but just let 12 be an option. Sometimes you just want to play with a group of people, such as I mentioned with the community game night example, and not worry about an already unbalanced gamemode being made more unbalanced.
Realistically, how much lower could it go? Not much.