Question: Why is there a balance testing mod?

[Ze_PilOt]

So replay will break every 2 days. Same as game balance, crashes,.. Not a good idea.

There is a reason for that mod : having a patch working at least properly.

[Eukanuba]

I do think that there's a lot of truth in saying that less experienced players may not feel confident enough to correctly assess balance, it definitely applies to me. I just don't think that my skill is anywhere near good enough to be able to correctly identify imbalances.

[Softly]

Thats what the forum is for Euk, we can politely discuss the strengths and weaknesses of your proposals. (As well as dish out lots of abuse for no reason )

The more people who test the better. I regret not doing so much testing myself.

[Eukanuba]

It would be great if somebody could think of a third way, so to speak. Balance changes being trialled in a mod mean most people won't play it (for the same reason as me or perhaps for any number of other reasons), and I can see why Pilot finds it frustrating to then have people complain about balance changes. But the fact remains that people aren't playing the mod.

Second option, just implement all changes directly into FAF to force testing. This carries all sorts of other problems though as discussed above (also people may start to leave if they perceive the game to be being regularly “broken”).

The only suggestion I can make would be to have some sort of unignorable banner showing what changes are proposed and strongly advising people to use the mod if they think any of the changes might not be to their liking. This could theoretically have avoided the Seton's players unhappiness with T3 navy.

But then of course people have a tendency to just click through warnings, EULAs and anything else that's in the way of where they want to be. Catch-22.