thing being rated doesnt make them official. ofc this is debatable but we already have arbitrary rules like ffas are unranked - does that make then unofficial? anyway thats not a major concern, but in my eyes eq is just as official as it was before, but i dont mind being more official

as icedreamer explained, rating is a system and whats rated or not is decided on what is good data or not, and not if we want it to be the super approved balance. indeed there was a time when zep was against unranked games for exactly the same reason - its actually possible to abuse rating like this, if you spend a good deal of time on it. Having eq unranked may fit some peoples principles but in that state it may actually cause harm, or rather relative harm.

ok about secondary balance team outside the council -
im on the official balance team too. does that make things better? we do have communication between the balances and ideas are being swapped and so on. you can see bugfixes from eq like aeon tmd, ythotha aa, shield bounce, transports, bomber maneveraiblity in the official beta patches already, and more things are coming soon i guess like variable oc, a variant of some vet nerf, some t3/4 rebalance, and so on.

about patches - i wouldnt worry about that tbh, eq is kept up to date with beta patches and we get all the info before the public does so adjusting is quite easy. indeed we have just released an adjustment patch a couple of days ago. having an eq patch a week late is a strange concept when eq has been patched multiple times per day in the past, patch frequency isnt a problem.

yes the official balance team has been speeding up patches. theyre not as frequent as eq is on average though so they need to pick up some more pace anyway. not a concern.

keeping eq unranked has no benefits for its development. we dont aim to go off on other directions, thats not what eq is about. we always, always take what the current balance team is doing into account.

so you say you cant play eq exactly like you would current balance-
that depends on the extent - for me i play exactly like i do usually, i just do random shit pretty much. if you have a super precise bo that might be less efficient than usual sure, but you can pull off the same strategies as before. special care has been taken to make sure thats true. you can do the same usual things and you will be more or less fine. there are a couple of caveats that its nice to know, but for a mod that changes every unit in the game its not bad ; )

your examples of the mantis and tanks vs acu are commendable, but wrong. if you take a look at the changelog you will see that the mantis cost the same as the other t1 tanks, so 40v40 is a draw, depending on unit placement and micro as usual.

likewise the acu example is interesting because the t1 units were balanced with that in mind - it takes exactly the same number to kill an acu - 19 strikers for uef com (with 18 its alive on 250 hp). comparing to vanilla - 19 striker to kill uef com and 18 leave it on 500 hp.

so yeah. balance? xD

i take your point on the sudden announcement. i was kinda surprised it went through so quickly too, but it needed a server update so we had to slot it in at the time. perhaps waiting would have been more appropriate, but it happened

completely agree that the amount of work is irrelevant to the end result. however it does show that we take it seriously and that we have the time to keep it maintained, and that it has been tested and developed with care.

about the message behind eq being ranked, i think icedreamer answered that pretty well. rating doesn't care if you play faf or dominoes, but if playing dominoes has a perfect correlation with faf then that data actually makes an improvement, and if you can get good at dominoes then come to faf and wreck everyone the system indirectly suffers.