FtXCommando wrote:the general player on FAF is an 800 rated astro crater/dual gap player. In order to appeal to said player, are people going to be arguing about the need to allow cheaper t2 stage to make 5x5s easier or is the general debate instead going to hover around whether we need to introduce a t4 mex to make the late game more fun?
Balance decisions should be 100% about 1v1 games. Team games should not come into it at all.
The goal should be to keep high-level 1v1 games fun and to encourage high-level 1v1 players to use diverse strategies. You don't need to worry about how balance affects people who are not as good, because we are just trying to catch up with the good players, and if we increase our skills to be more like the good players, we are better able to use any strategy that is available to them.
Balance for teamgames can be adjusted by the mapmakers. They can give more mexes, change the terrain, etc. in order to shape gameplay in team games. The community is definitely able to tweak multiplayer maps for balance reasons. But I do not expect that mapmakers would re-do all of the 1v1 maps to accommodate bad balance decisions that are made without regard for 1v1 games. It just won't happen.
Also, it is easy enough to make a mod to change balance. If players on team games want a slightly different balance, who is to say that the balance changes they want for Dual Gap are the same as the changes they want for Astro Craters or Seton's? If the team game players really want a different balance for their specific team games, they can make map-specific balance mods. But we can't use balance mods to fix 1v1 ladder.
Also, if we were going to elect a balance counselor, only active ladder players with decent rating should be allowed to vote. I think 1700 1v1 ladder rating would be a good cutoff point. Basically, if you're not very good at FAF (myself included) (a) you probably don't have good insights into how balance changes would make the game better or worse (b) if your reason for wanting balance changes is so you can have more success at the game, then really you should be focused on improving yourself and adapting to the game, not adapting the game to fit your shortcomings.
Also, the idea of having just a single balance counselor is frightening, if that person has the power to single-handedly implement balance changes. All balance patches should have to be approved by some sort of committee following a time-consuming formal process that gives the community a chance to give feedback. If we were going to have an elected balance counselor, would that mean they could single-handedly make changes? And if they are not going to have that power (if it is too easy for the FAF administration to prevent them from making changes) then is the election kind of a sham? We would be allowing the community to elect a balance counselor who did not actually have real power to decide balance. Based on all that, I am fine with balance counselor not being an elected position.
If you want technical help with making a balance mod, feel free to PM me. I made a stupid balance mod that no one uses (not even me) and I would be glad to explain which .lua files you need to put in your mod and how to edit the .lua files to make changes to things like mass cost, e cost, and build time.
I am interested in the concept of a "Seton's Mod" that would change the balance in a way to promote more varied gameplay. For example, in higher-rated games, people don't make much T2 arty because T2 navy is so much better. Perhaps if T2 arty cost 40% less, people would make more of it. Perhaps that would make the games more interesting because we would see a greater variety of strategies used. Whatever T4 units don't usually get used on Seton's, let's buff them. Whatever T4 is used a lot, let's make it slightly weaker. I am thinking that it is better to change the balance by way of changing COST, rather than ABILITIES, because players are not going to want to use a mod that makes it harder to understand what is happening on their screen. As long as you are only changing the cost of units, players can still maintain their visceral-level understanding of which units can beat up which other units (whether or not they are going to lose a fight). My interest in this is not very strong, but I would be happy to help any high-level Seton's player to make a balance mod if they wanted to try something like this.
If you believe that FAF needs balance changes just because change itself can keep things interesting, I don't completely disagree with you. I disagree with changing the global balance for that reason, but I think people could have a lot of fun by using balance mods to inject more variety into their team games.
It might be fun to have a second 1v1 ladder, parallel to the first. This ladder would have "seasons" lasting 1-2 months each. Each season, there would be a new balance mod that is applied only to the seasonal ladder games (although you could host custom games with the balance mod, if you wanted, because it's just a mod like any other). For example, Season 1 might have all air units cost 25% less. Then for the next month, anyone could play 1v1 ladder matches on this special seasonal ladder, and the gameplay would be very different. I think a month would be long enough for the development of new meta around the changes (the goal would be to make the changes significant enough that there would be new meta, but not enough to completely take away the use of the disfavored strategies, because you want the game to continue to be diverse and fresh). So there would be a contest (inherent in the framework of the ladder itself) each month to see who can get the highest score under the crazy new rules. By having these wild balance changes every month, it would feel like a fresh new game, for people who want that, without taking away the opportunity to play vanilla 1v1 ladder (so if you are diligently working to improve your FAF gameplay, you don't feel like your efforts are stolen from you because the balance keeps changing in crazy ways).
Every season, your seasonal score reverts to whatever your vanilla 1v1 ladder score is except there would be some cutoff, e.g. if your 1v1 score is over 1200, your seasonal score reverts to 1200. That way we avoid the problem of matchmaking great players against completely terrible players, but we still create a level playing field for decent players to compete to see who can get to the top of this new ladder.
If FAF was being developed by a for-profit studio, this might look like: while maintaining the vanilla 1v1 ladder and without screwing up team games, every month we would have the option to play with wild new balance changes that are not going to last, 1-2 new units per faction that are season-specific, plus some graphical changes intended to only last for the season (but if they're nice, incorporate them into the base game), and some rewards (even if it's mostly things like: "Season 1 badge, I won 20 ladder games this season").
We could make a lot of interesting changes even without having access to the source code. Imagine if the change for season 2 is that units keep teleporting in to your starting location, for free (reinforcements). So in addition to the units you make, you know you are going to have lots of units to work with during the course of the game (and if you lose your starting location, your opponent has to deal with these new units, so he might build a point defense deathtrap there). And then, give built-in teleporters to most T3 land units. The theme would be "teleportation" rather than "cheap air" and you can see how this would suddenly turn the meta inside out on most maps. And maybe some hostile civs also teleport in to the map over time. This might require making not only a balance patch, but also to revise existing ladder maps with scripting to make special versions for the seasonal ladder. (And of course, you should try to make it possible to play team games with the same seasonal theme, as a way to keep team games fresh and to give people an alternative way of learning/practicing the new season's mechanic so people don't feel left out if they can't handle their business on the ladder.)
That is the kind of thing I would look at if someone wanted a plan for how to drive community interest without spending a stupidly large amount of money. Then every time there was a new "season," there would be an accompanying opportunity to drive social media engagement (basically you get people to discuss the wild new season on streams, in reddit, etc. and then people come to play the game for a reason other than "I saw some Gyle casts" -- Gyle is great but we could be doing more to drive growth). You get people to come back to FAF for the chance to play this wild new season because every game, by nature, is going to have people stop playing, for whatever reason. Instead of trying to trap people 100% of the time, if they come back every two months for a wild new ladder experience, that would be better than just losing them for eight months or three years.
Basically I am suggesting that, if we want to grow FAF, following this model would be a very effective way:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tmuy9fyNUjYThere should be no limit to the number of wacky ideas we can come up with for themes. All you need to do is start with a gameplay mechanic (air units, teleportation, etc.), then make it CRAZY.
But first we might need to establish a way to get revenue from people playing the game (so that more FAF players = more revenue). Otherwise, we're not going to have any money to spend on that kind of thing. Perhaps there would be enough additional community engagement to solicit enough donations to cover the cost of each new season, but I doubt it. Perhaps: "You can have your own custom non-offensive avatar in Aeolus if you give us $10/year." Or: "If you are a premium FAFer, games you host always appear at the top of the custom games lobby, non-premium hosts go to the bottom." If you are a premium FAFer, there is a star next to your name on the scoreboard when you are playing the game. So your opponent in ladder will know that you are premium and they are not. That way we can use peer pressure to encourage people to pay their share. If you are a premium FAFer, you can start playing the seasonal 1v1 ladder 1 day earlier than everyone else. Things that won't break the game, and won't stop people from playing if they don't donate, but drive enough revenue to maintain operations and pay for the kind of new content that might encourage players to join or return.
