Thoughts about Balance

[Morax]

He says here they have been working on T3 patch a lot. (not proving he did, just that he claims this, but nobody said he was lying, so...)
viewtopic.php?f=67&t=12926&p=132827&hilit=T3+delayed#p132827

Fair point, but say in a 5v5 team game scenario, how are they testing this? Everyone claims "yes he has a vision, or yes he is testing..."

But where are the tests to back it up? How is he and a balance team doing this? Does anyone have replays of him and others showing these test set ups?

I attempted on a few occasions to get team games hosted to test the balance patch and no one joined. Why? I don't know... Some people simply didn't care, some didn't like the changes and refused to do so, and there are probably other reasons.

Without this kind of testing how can we truly appreciate the work being done? That's a serious question to everyone; it is not an attack. Please share with me your thoughts.

[Ithilis_Quo]

I join also on party.

Problem with zock is that, everything took so Long time. As i remember when was create concil positions in was for half year. Now its nearly 2 year and what balance concil did? Nearly nothing and that what he do is exactly oposite as people ask for. And ingore it with excuse that it will be iná patch no.46882 that will be realse in time when... Will never be relsed

Another problwm is that zock is lazy to learn at last beginer level of coding. What I think should be necesary for eveyone who want be in position create new gameplay meta. Need ask every time for single change make think incredible slow and unacurate. For example when i (with retard) was creting better bomber manevrabily it took us about 30 diferent test with 25 diferen number on that unit. When was zock doing same was describe it as how Hard it is to do, retard was offer him help and do something what is (incredible Hard to do) in 10minute. I cant imagine how long time it will took when will need ask 25time someone for recrete unit and then test it.

I personálu dont believe that zock have concrete vision, at last he dont have vision when was diskusie with him. He have lot of good ideas, lot of gameplay experience but is mising what put them together. He dont have system. If im wrong im sory.
.....

About heartler ideology.

Idea of team that work together is nice on paper, but in reality will most likely end on big meshup or on static quo where bigger change will be change +2 m cost. That team will be most likely mising vision that must be same for all teammember. That will probably not happend. Zock and zepilot have experience with it where was balance team as this and end horrible.

What theoreticky should work is balance concilor with balance testers team (5ppl) with veto to some change. But most of work must be done on balance concilor itself.

And tbh heartler have even less vision what to do with balance (and time) as zock. Zock was 2 years in this position think gabout that, so have at last something, even when do lot of mistakes. But after first year I Simple lose patience and believe that it will change with zock in future.
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[Zock]

The interview is a good idea! There are many assumptions here. I'll try to clear a few things up:

1) The very long development of the patch. This has nothing to do with RL issues, lazyness or anything related to the balance team or myself at all. It was simply impossible for a long time to release a patch for technical reasons and because of organization problems after the server switch. As explained in the patchnotes, the patch was actually supposed to be released in February (with much less change).

This issues are (mostly) solved now, which is why we have a patch and will have more regular patches in the future, as i originally planned too.

2) The structure of the balance team. Citing Petricpwnz about how things happen in there isn't the greatest source, because he isn't and was never part of it. The team started with 7 people that should discuss until consensus or, if needed, decide things with majority vote (sounds faimiliar?). While i'd have a veto or, since this isn't working on a super official or legally binding basis, also the power to overrule them. But just for the record, i have never pushed any change that a majority of the balance team disliked.

Now instead of 7 people, from the 3 people that i added this year to the team to replace the ones that became inactive, only jagged is left active. That's not a huge surprise because having influence looks nice from the outside, but once people realize that it's actually hundreds of hours of work that gets rewarded only with a lot of blame and little thanks (even though i take all blame for balance right now on me, and will keep doing so for this reason), it loses a lot of its appeal.

There is also the issue that i want the game and balance to move forward and not stagnate. That's why it is important to have people in the team that agree on the same goals, and vision of the game, but disagree in the way to reach it, to find the best approach and avoid mistakes. To find suitable candidates i was using the testing team to see who is actually willing to put in work, and is able to have an open discussion. Unfortunately there are not too many suitable candidates, balancing has the same issue as development in this regard, and as many volunteer projects in general. There are hundreds of people claiming they can do better balance, but to get in the balance team right now, one needs to do more than that.

It's easy to claim that a team of different people will do better. It's very hard to get a team together that'll do the work, stay active for more than the first few months, is able to agree on a joint direction/vision where to go with balance and where no one gets discouraged because his favourite changes get shut down by others. I know it, because i tried, and i've seen (and been a part of most) all the different approaches to balance teams that we tried in the past before i was in charge, and saw what worked (somewhat) and what didn't. (for anyone curious: community votes on every change let, unsurprisingly, to a disaster)

3) Too much change. This is really the core of things, while i believe that a different structure of the balance team is either overly optimistic or will lead to stagnation, this is a very valid concern. There are many people who dislike too many changes, who are happy with how the game is now and want this stagnation, with only little fixes for the biggest and most uncontroversial problems.

I don't agree with this. I think it is important to move the game forward, to improve it where it is possible, increase faction diversity, make the game more accessible for new players but without reducing complexity, increase options for different strategies, to solve underlying and bigger issues...and so on. Even when it leads to bigger changes, like the current HP changes. Mind you, there shouldn't be too much change, and especially not at once, but the opinions on what is too much, and what is necessary are different here. (e.g. Equilibrium is too much change for me, my changes are too much change for some individuals)

FAF was created with this philosophy in mind, and without it, we would not have the balance that the people who don't want too much change are "defending" against this changes to begin with. The current balance is made by this kind of change, without it, we wouldn't have most of the FAF patches, they went through a similar process as the current one, and any patch, with many people disliking it. Engymod is the most prominent example, while being considered a bad and way too extreme change in the beginning, it is now liked by a large majority of players.

If the community wants to leave this path and wants to conserve and finetune the current balance instead, that is fine with me, but it will have to be done without me, because i believe this is the wrong approach and will, in the long term, contribute to the degeneration of FAF.

If it wants to continue it, i'll keep investing all the time and effort (easily over 1000 hours by now, just to give you an idea) put up with all the trouble of it and take all the blame that inevitably comes with doing balance, but i won't mind if i get to do something more pleasant with my time either.

[Apofenas]

3) Too much change. This is really the core of things, while i believe that a different structure of the balance team is either overly optimistic or will lead to stagnation, this is a very valid concern. There are many people who dislike too many changes, who are happy with how the game is now and want this stagnation, with only little fixes for the biggest and most uncontroversial problems.

I don't agree with this. I think it is important to move the game forward, to improve it where it is possible, increase faction diversity, make the game more accessible for new players but without reducing complexity, increase options for different strategies, to solve underlying and bigger issues...and so on. Even when it leads to bigger changes, like the current HP changes. Mind you, there shouldn't be too much change, and especially not at once, but the opinions on what is too much, and what is necessary are different here. (e.g. Equilibrium is too much change for me, my changes are too much change for some individuals)

Does this mean you may integrate Nomads in future?

BH clearly told he would never even try that mod and that's the reason i will never vote for him on balance councilor role.

[Zock]

Does this mean you may integrate Nomads in future?

BH clearly told he would never even try that mod and that's the reason i will never vote for him on balance councilor role.

Firstly i don't think that integrating nomads is something that any balance councilor/team should decide alone, but a decision that needs to be supported by FAF as whole, whether that's done in the form of the council deciding for it, or a community vote. Then, i am not against integrating nomads by principle, but i would put very high standards on the mod before integrating it:

1) They would need to be absolutely equal in terms of graphical appearance, textures, models, animations to the existing factions (or surpass them )

2) They would need to have a very solid balance foundation, that has no apparent or known imbalanced they'd cause with the other factions. Even with this, balance problems would definitely occur after integration. It took a couple of years to get the existing factions somewhat balanced, fitting a new one in would require a lot of time and work before we could get back to that stage. This isn't a dealbreaker though, the evolution of the game could even have many positive effects on FAF. Any newly released game, or add-on is going through that stage and often this is even the period of a game that people enjoy the most.

3) This can only be shown if the mod is extensively tested and played by many people before it gets integrated. This is something FAF can help with by promoting it a bit, but it's still a difficult task. It would also show that there are enough people that actually want to play with the nomads.

4) Not absolutely necessary, but it would be great to have a nomads campaign too.

Given the current development state of nomads, i don't see this happening any time soon, and probably never. But generally, i am open to integrate them and i think it would be great for FAF and bring much needed "fresh air". It would also be good advertisement to new players, and a good opportunity to get some press releases done to promote FAF.

[CookieNoob]

Does this mean you may integrate Nomads in future?

1) They would need to be absolutely equal in terms of graphical appearance, textures, models, animations to the existing factions (or surpass them )

2) They would need to have a very solid balance foundation, that has no apparent or known imbalanced they'd cause with the other factions. Even with this, balance problems would definitely occur after integration. It took a couple of years to get the existing factions somewhat balanced, fitting a new one in would require a lot of time and work before we could get back to that stage. This isn't a dealbreaker though, the evolution of the game could even have many positive effects on FAF. Any newly released game, or add-on is going through that stage and often this is even the period of a game that people enjoy the most.

3) This can only be shown if the mod is extensively tested and played by many people before it gets integrated. This is something FAF can help with by promoting it a bit, but it's still a difficult task. It would also show that there are enough people that actually want to play with the nomads.

I think they already look kinda good, concerning the balance... well I dont know cause nomads is broken since quite a while. This also makes playing it and testing it much harder.

4) Not absolutely necessary, but it would be great to have a nomads campaign too.

This is quite nice but it should happen after it gets integrated or it will never happen.

Given the current development state of nomads, i don't see this happening any time soon, and probably never. But generally, i am open to integrate them and i think it would be great for FAF and bring much needed "fresh air". It would also be good advertisement to new players, and a good opportunity to get some press releases done to promote FAF.

I agree and hope we are wrong. FAF should promote playing it (after it gets fixed ofc) maybe together with the beta patch and optimally on an adaptive customizable map from the "ultimate series" (yea I know, some shameless self advertisement... viewtopic.php?f=53&t=13014). This could be done similar to the way already suggested somewhere on the forum (cant find it), which is basically showing an icon with the map preview and the mods above the hosted games and clicking it would create such a game.

[Apofenas]

IMO Nomad unit design look much better than Seraphim. Ofc there are some bad looking units.

I doubt Nomad dev team will ever come back to this mod unless they are officially planned to be integrated (no guarantees here too). For last couple of years FAF patches broke the mod, Brute fixed it and than FAF broke it again within a couple of weeks.

The balance is a bit outdated and had some small problems(mostly when Nomads were inferior), but it was good enough so some players could play them well from first attempt and only get confused by icons and unique abilities.

But the way dev team worked with whatever player base they had was awesome. I remember when devs made a new unit within one day to balance t3 land and compensate the loss of unique unit(which was t3maa).

[dstojkov]

I doubt Nomad dev team will ever come back to this mod unless they are officially planned to be integrated

no worries, after my next update i ll put more content in my lobby

maps
mods
featured mods( Nomads, Brewlan,... ) with the permission of their owner of course


With this next release the lack of diversity will be fulfilled. I work hard to make the ui as intuitive as it can be since this was the pitfall of my first versions. The client was over simplified so that the end user will need really few step for being ready to play (download) start client, log in that is it


Regards

[Lieutenant Lich]

I'm gonna be doing some testing of part 2 over the weekend, will write constructive feedback sometime then.

[SpoCk0nd0pe]

@Blackheart: What do you think are the core problems of the current game balance? What would you try to change about them (just an outline)?