@Jip
It's not about implication, you said there should not be a balance team, there should only be a game team. I was just explaining some history.
I don't know what to say but it's completely obvious that when you work on things then you want to see them in the game. Why you would disagree here is beyond me. Linking a list of things which you made that didn't get into the game is irrelevant. I had plenty of things which did not make it too.
The pulsar thing is obviously the main point of contention for you personally here and I actually totally agree with you. It is the balance team's fault and that should not have happened. If I had been in charge I would never give it the go ahead.
Ok so the game is obviously designed already, It was released in 2007. Doing things "related to game design" is not the same thing as designing the game. Maybe this is an ESL thing, I don't know. Literally anything you do to the game could be said to be related to game design. Guess what, you're still not a game designer. Also please stop linking Extra Credits videos to me, I watched them all 10+ years ago until I realised they are a lot less knowledgeable than they let on. Just look at what the writer of the show has been involved in.
I'm not sure what the point was about the cybran nano. Just that that was game design happening? This is getting silly now but yes it's related to game design, but again it doesn't make anyone a game designer if they were involved. Also I think it was a bad change and damaged the identity of cybran.
Statutes are whatever. Let's be honest, it was probably written in thirty seconds. It reads like that anyway.
I'll tell you what I wanted to do when I was in charge. The first thing was to get other people involved so it wasn't just me deciding things. Before that it was Zock making all the balance decisions and to be fair he had a much deeper grasp on the game than I did. Then a lot of it was just improving shit units that nobody used like janus, mongoose, LABs, titans, blaze, obsidian, czar, satellite, restos, UEF destro(lmao), aeon frig, t3 maa, tempest, mmls and others. Very simple stuff, just make it not shit so it's an option. Some of these were very weak by the way, like you could be banned for throwing in this day and age if you actually built them.
One of my main missions was to keep an eye on what the game team was doing. I'm going to trigger people here but I wanted to protect the game from modders. Modders are often kinda crazy but very hard working and passionate. I wanted to try to find the line where we are still "developing" the game but we are also more or less preserving it. To me that means almost certainly no new units. It means watching for the next OP hotkey that's about to be added which will bust the game.
Sidebar on hotkeys or new commands, they're always presented as quality of life features for the slow playing masses but they are inevitably either useless or op and abused by the top players. Average players are not gonna add a new hotkey, they might not even use hotkeys.
So a big part of it was watching for stuff that was gonna skate through in the game patch and I did not catch everything that I probably should have.
When I talked about engy mod and t3 maa in the first post, what I really meant was this is what you can get when a modder is running the show. Zep put the changes in the game although he didn't make all of them. There would be no FAF without him so I have huge respect for him but he was also kinda crazy and he dealt with balance complaints by introducing new units, a new factory system and reworking every buildpower value in the entire game. And by banning by all accounts. It's absolutely a mod project from that point and it definitely meant losing a lot more players in the transition from GPG to FAF. It's impossible to know what the total effects are but I would've loved to see the game play out more without engy mod and t3 maa, Certainly the latter of those was not needed in any sense.
That's enough forum waffle.
