I also have some experience with community balancing projects. Once I played Earth 2160 online. This game had the worst official balancing of all games I ever played. BUT there was the rebalancing project, and as only a few players stayed at the game online, nearly everybody (about 95%) of all players played with it. It was good, and the game was fun to play.
But then suddenly the team started to change things too fast. There was a fourth faction, that was totally imbalanced, and therefore never played. when the team decided to start balancing this 4th faction, they changed too many existing things at once, making the community split in those who played the newest rebalancing version, and those who wanted to stay with an older version. Finally the game died (as supreme commander beta was born
, thats how history goes).FAF doesnt have 95% of all players. (Talking of online players, not of singleplayer). So the first priority must be to get nearly all gamers to FAF, especially those who play often.
What will happen if FAF now changes too many things (as we talk in those forums discussions)? We might know that most of those changes are good to the game, as most of them who write here in forums know the mechanisms behind the game, and understand how to play correctly. But even then, some changes are controversal.
The danger of too many changes in a fast pace is, that some will decide, they rather want to stay with the old version at GPGnet, because they may not understand why some things are changed, or because they understand, and it does not comply with their understanding of how the game should be.
In my opinion it is really necessary to do this balancing steps slowly and to get more people than 10 in the balancing discussions, so we can really see what the majority thinks. The decisions finally need to be made by the top players, but the opinions of many players need to be heard.
Dont OVERbalance the game! This is very dangerous.
Just keep this in mind.
