SirArtturi wrote:Hobo Joe wrote:
No. First rule of game balance is to NEVER balance around people who don't know what they're doing, and ESPECIALLY not around uncoordinated teams.
They're just that - noobs and uncoordinated. They don't care if the game is finely balanced and tailored to the the way they play the game, and if you balanced it around them it would inevitably ruin any other kind of play. See: All games that are balanced around low-level play.
So you are arguing that balance should be done only based on empirical data, that consists of replays and player experiences of those games, which are played only by players who are considered as "pro-gamers?"
Interesting approach, very reasonable. However, It's very hard to create and test this kind of setting, because it would need various maps and various team sizes and various rounds to create results provable and plausible enough. Plus, I't would be hard to find enough equally matched pro-players. But I agree with you in common.
You should start collecting this data :)
Oh, I'm not saying it's easy or fast. It's one of the things that makes game balance so tricky - it's easy to get skewed results by varying skill levels and unequal matchups. But in the end, a game will always be better for all groups if it's balanced for the group that is equally matched, highly coordinated, and very skilled. This makes it especially hard for a games in a community like spring, where the general playerbase is not only very small, but very fragmented, there are very very few arranged team games between closely matched and highly skilled teams. This is why the slow balance approach that XTA/AA/BA have taken have been a very slow progression, trying to make very good balance and not being disrupted by little fads and other various scenarios that can make it seem unbalanced.
This is true of all games - ones that are balanced for low-level play are always shit for high-level play, and in order to have very good high-level play it's a long process that usually takes years, even for a popular game. I've had experience trying to play competitively on games where the developers insisted on keeping the game "accessable"(read, easy and badly balanced), rather than balancing it around the players who knew what they were talking about, and this even extended to the community plugin developers, and the end result is always stagnation. The community dies out as the noob/pub group moves on to another game, and the competitive players leave because balance is not improved.
And the opposite is also equally apparent - Quake, CS, Starcraft, DoTA - some of the biggest competitive games out there, all balanced around top-level play, and it's immediately obvious. The purpose of balance is to remove random elements and cheese tactics so that you're left with simple skill(speed, reflex), and strategic thinking.
SirArtturi wrote:Thats why all the suggestions here are just based on experiences. I've played and spectated over 1000 hours of this game. Since there is no better evidence than experiences and unit statistics, I'd consider my observations based on my experiences plausible enough to make some conlusions - or at least some observations.
It's hard to say which units are OP, but what can be said is units that are barely used on any sized serious games:
-t1 arty
-t2 merl/diplomats
-t2 fido, crawling bombs, spiders
-t2 blades (flakresistant gunships)
-juno
-heavy plasma cannons
-HLLT
-fusion decoys
-commander decoys (lolunit, becuase who wants to decoy something worthless?)
-long range missile towers (screamer/mercury)
-emp launcher
-juggernauth (lolunit)
-asssault transports (lolunit)
I agree with most of these, except maybe fusion and com decoys and emp launcher - they're rarely used, but not because they're not useful. EMP launcher especially, when it's used it's devastatingly effective - it has no direct counter and freezes a moderate radius for an entire minute. Perfect for freezing an anti-nuke or a plasma shield, or simply freezing the front line-defense(although spy is better for this in most cases). Juno however is fine I think, perhaps a slightly faster firing time(missle move speed), but it's a niche counter for things that aren't built very often, but what it does, it does very well, I think.
T1 arty needs to be slightly faster and have slightly more range, merl and diplomat just need faster move speed, maybe slightly lower cost. Fido is pretty close to balanced but it's outshined by more specialized units(sniper for range, mav for harrass), I think slightly faster fire rate might help with this. Blades are basically only useful for defense because their cost doesn't justify building them over brawlers, even when the enemy has a decent amount of flak AA. HLLT is pretty pointless since it's more or less equal to two LLT's, imo it should be replaced by something like the immolator, similar to the beamer in some ways but different in others. Long range missile towers just need a slightly faster firing speed, I think they're mostly fine. Assault transports usually aren't useful but they have a few tricks that can be very effective when used right, such as cliff placement. As for the jugg, I think it was just supposed to be a joke unit anyway.
SirArtturi wrote:
Comnappin isnt absolutely fine. Not enough AA argument may feel rational but at least questionable in those circumstances, where building aa is impossible and economically expensive. You just cant have aa everywhere. Paying attention to movement argument is also reasonable but same restrictions applies to this as mentioned before: You cant watch your commander all the time and making lua to do this for you is cheating.
You don't have to have AA everywhere to avoid comnapping, just around your com. 1 or 2 defenders or decent awareness of your com is enough to easily avoid comnapping. I got comnapped yesterday, but I didn't bitch about it because it was my fault - I was playing a forward com without AA and wasn't paying attention, and it got me killed, exactly how you would expect it to turn out.
SirArtturi wrote:Comnapping regardless these arguments is still a lousy tactic. Most of the people agree with this, except ofc regret and some noobs who just discovered it. I just dont understand why you need to defend it with arguments like "play better." Why cant this just be fixed and then "play better" in the actual game.
I don't see how it's any more 'lousy' than perfectly legit tactics like bladewing or stumpy spam - it's easy to do and easy to counter.
SirArtturi wrote:Theres conflict with 1v1 and 8v8 commander because most 1v1 matches are com ends game, which makes commander most important unit in your game even though it might had no actual use in the battle. On the contrary, in 8v8 commander = metal, or a bomb after losing its viability in the battlefield.
By reducing comwreck metal, com explosions and reverting commander wreck flying physics you'd have fix for 8v8 but leave the 1v1 gameplay untouched. So simple...
Though this still not fix the issue commander being pretty useless after 10 minutes of the game...
You know, there are game sizes between 1v1 and 8v8. Lets not ignore the 2v2-5v5 games, coms aren't abused in those games(very rarely, at least), and the changes you're suggesting would change things drastically for those.
SirArtturi wrote:We have Senna's mapmods for that audience who enjoys teching and dsd/greenfields porcfest. No need to change the BA in that direction Imo.
Mega agree
