That being said i really would like to see a bigger/more open balance council
Therefore, instead of removing Zock, other people wanting to contribute should prove themselves and then join the balance team.
That would be great indeed.
As pointed out, i am not doing everything
alone and not listening to anyone with Jagged (and occasionally Zlo and now SirPrize when they have time, and before that with keyser, and before that with pip and Vee, and others) because i want to decide everything by myself. When i became balance councillor i could've decided to do so, but i don't believe that a person deciding everything by himself is good in any way. People make mistakes, and it is important to have other who can point them out. A single person can easily get ahead of himself with concepts and start to lose touch with the reality of the game. Or getting so fed up with all the "hate" that he would start to ignore reasonable critic too in an attempt to filter all the bad feedback.
To prevent this things from happening to me, i decided to make a balanceteam rather than just working alone on the balance. The team is supposed to help doing the balance, but also to control (me and each other) and prevent things getting out of hand.
Now being in the balance team is not something everyone can do, and that's why i have less people in it than i'd like.
I made the testing team not only to test but also to find suitable candidates by seeing who is willing to put in work, is able to have open and unbiased discussions, has the needed knowledge about the game (not to be confused with being good at the game, but often goes together), and so on..
Thats where i added first keyser, then JaggedAppliance, and not too long ago SirPrize to the team, and also why i haven't added anyone else from there. E.g. after months of people complaining about loyalists, i was asking for someone to actually post replays that show that loyas are OP. I thought that shouldn't be too hard, after everyone agreed to it so easily. However, jaggedAppliance was the only one who posted some. And was also open to discuss them openly rather than insisting i don't listen to anyone after i didn't 100% agree to his points and implemented his feedback (which is why e.g. ithilis but also many others are not in the balance team, more on that later). So i added him to the team.
Should i lower the requirements now? And add e.g. Blackheart (if we imagine he'd want to for a second), who doesn't even play anymore except for money and who's contribution to balance is limited to this post? Even Lichking showed far more effort by taking time to argue for his opinion and creating a mod to test it. I don't think lowering the requirements to get into the balance team will solve any problems, rather create new ones. Just as in development, where some more coders would be badly needed, they need to work with the few people who are suitable, and so do I.
One more thing: Maybe it would be a good idea to have a discussion of the general direction of balance separate from the drama about persons.
With the general direction of balance I mean the decision, if we mainly want to preserve the status quo or if we want bigger changes to increase faction diversity and keep the game interesting.
Indeed, a few things are getting thrown in together here that are all connected, but not really the same:
-The direction of the balance in general
-The structure of the balance team
-The content of the last and next patch in specific
-And the person Zock being balance councillor
I can maybe expand on what i already wrote in my last post about the direction of balance in general in a new topic in the next few days, if no one else starts it.
Not true, I was active (very active), exotic_retard was active, Ice_dremer was active, and none is parth of balance team. I personaly test 80% of balance patch in hundrets of tests write long elaboraty about that what is good what is wrong why its wrong and what should be better and zero f*** was given.
Equalling your testing for equilibrium but not playing a single (correct me if i'm wrong) balance test game with "hundreds of hours of testing the balance patch", and equalling me spending hours to consider, answer and discuss your feedback (and we actually implemented a lot of it) with "zero f*** given" is exactly the reason why you are not in the balance team. Putting in work, being open to discuss and having knowledge about the game are important conditions, and if its just for them, i'd have added you a long time ago, because i appreciate all your work, testing and feedback very much, even if you don't believe me. But having a decent discussion culture is required too. Repeatedly going on about how the balance team is shit, lazy and ineffective because there are not enough patches after i repeatedly explained to you that it wasn't possible to release any probably doesn't help either.
Retard on the other hand, was one of the first persons i noted down when i thought about who would be a good candidate for the first balance team, but thats a different story.
And IceDreamer is organizing a lot of the development stuff, he might even become Game Councillor, and has enough to do there. But many of his suggestions got implemented (e.g.
viewtopic.php?f=67&t=12804), and we were doing some of the other changes together (like new janus, selen toggle, and more), and if he wouldn't be occupied with the development side, i'd have added him already.
by PhilipJFry » 19 Sep 2016, 08:59 
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