Balance Thread Guidelines Feedback

Honestly MML thread was balls off the wall absurd with the balance suggestions straight off the bat in the OP and the sandbox used to attempt to argue that MMLs are underpowered was also incredibly flawed as a test (it was also not part of the OP).

Main reason it was locked was because the OP was just a cherrypick of random stats and then a bunch of changes with no analysis of how it would impact the game. Just "do this and game will be better"

No showcase of a problem, no explanation of the solution, no justification for why the solution is the best path forward.

The purpose of the balance forum is ppl giving feedback to the balanceteam on changes, or convincing the balance team that thing x is broken and needs fixing/implementing y would be good for the game/etc.

If you wanna just discuss/complain about balance, do that in aeolus.

@FurudeRika said in Balance Thread Guidelines Feedback:

The purpose of the balance forum is ppl giving feedback to the balanceteam on changes, or convincing the balance team that thing x is broken and needs fixing/implementing y would be good for the game/etc.

If you wanna just discuss/complain about balance, do that in aeolus.

This is exactly the issue. The balance forum is useless if the balance team doesn't read it. Why doesn't the balance forum read it? They consider most posts to be random changes that people "feel" would improve things, followed by 20 back and forth replies calling each other idiots.

I can't say I disagree with them. This isn't to point fingers at anyone, I've been part of that cycle dozens of times in my years on thr balace forum, and this change is long overdue.

And enforcement is a learning process since it's almost always subjective. Please forgive anything I might overlook, and feel free to use the report functionality if you believe any post, by staff or not (even by me), breaks these rules.

@FtXCommando I think the MML thread was alright. The better point to be made is not that MML are weak at what they do, but that just ignoring them skipping to T3 and building MMA is just simply the better option in all cases, because MML are very niche, and are completely outperformed by T3 arty, which have a significantly better stat for mass to dmg/aoe/range ratio than MML. And the discussion progressing towards this realisation.

The strongest units are often the most versatile units.

Whether you disagree with an opinion or not, is irrelevant as to whether that post is part of a valid discussion. Unless, you want discussion that only conforms to your own narrative, and that is not something I think would be healthy for this forum not this community.

Sometimes, its the craziest the ideas, that are the genius. Obviously, before you hit that nugget of gold you'll pull up lots of duds.

The purpose of discussion is not always to garner consensus on a preproposed solution.

There are multiple stages in a discussion:

Consensus of a problem
Consensus of a need to resolve said problem
Consensus of a solution.

Discusion will take place at each stage, with varied answers/argumnets/assertions/opinions/etc. The person who provides the solution, does not need to be the person who highlights the problem and this is why discussions are so efficient in effecting organised and productive change, when in the correct environment that fosters proper discussion, as it is the coming together of minds all with varied experience ideas and opinions.

Bunch of rationalizations that ultimately come down to “if you let the thread go on long enough you will PROBABLY eventually converge to a good post” as some form of justification for allowing a daily low effort OP.

As said above, no one with an impact on balance decisions reads the forums because it was full of precisely that garbage. No one cares if the 113th post in the 300 post thread discussing whether megas should be able to be picked up by soul rippers has a decent point.

If you can’t meet the current guidelines, you didn’t put enough thought into your idea. Put the thought into it so that there is a point to reading it. That’s all there is to it.

Judging by the response to the guidelines which are now the most liked post on the forums, I did determine the top desires and problems of the forum community and responded promptly. Thanks for quoting my duties at me, though.

If your ideas are worth me bringing up to the balance team, you'd be able to EASILY fulfill my guideline requirements. So luckily none of those ideas have been destroyed by "The Great Filter".

" In QA and Customer Interfacing"

This isnt QA and customer interfacing, its improving the game for competetive gameplay, a job being done by ppl in their free time.
for easy acess you got aeolus.

@Psions please stop - having a proper objective argument about anything is only more than fair. You can use replays to show case some situations, you can use your own mods to show others. Luckily the forum is more than just the balance section and Dragun and Biass made a guide on it for this situation:

• https://forum.faforever.com/topic/739/guide-creating-a-basic-balance-mod-with-a-merge-blueprint

Any community, whether that is as small as FAF or as big as a country, will largely operate on facts. I hope you too can appreciate that. Without it everything would just hop from one extreme to another.

@Psions said in Balance Thread Guidelines Feedback:

Or hell I simply say Beetles are underpowered, but provide 0 replays, because no one builds the bloody thing after the unit was nuked, because certain high rated players got very salty, after they realised you can die if you're not keeping tabs on your com, have 0 scouts, and no flack, or simply moronically overextend.

Bad take on beetles aside, that's a good point. I recently posted in the beetle thread showing that beetles are built in very few games (and backed it with data) and received a couple replies to the tune of "they are good, people just don't know better and that's why they don't build them". I'm worried that showing that a unit is very rarely built would never be enough to satisfy guidelines (i.e. a moderator would lock the thread using an argument like this).

It seems the purpose of this thread was not clear. The guidelines are staying. This is for suggesting additional rules or minor adjustments to existing ones.

@MazorNoob said in Balance Thread Guidelines Feedback:

Bad take on beetles aside, that's a good point. I recently posted in the beetle thread showing that beetles are built in very few games (and backed it with data) and received a couple replies to the tune of "they are good, people just don't know better and that's why they don't build them". I'm worried that showing that a unit is very rarely built would never be enough to satisfy guidelines (i.e. a moderator would lock the thread using an argument like this).

That's the problem that comes with relying entirely on statistical data, especially since FAF itself is hardly a large enough pool of players to continuously be testing things and assume that the meta as it is would be the whole range of optimal tactics. There are several examples throughout FAF balance change history where people didn't realize something was broken until several months into a patch just because people didn't abuse it as much as they could. People are metaslaves and generally lazy.

Reminds me of Yudi learning about ground assisting hives near two quantum gateways as the most efficient way of making RAS boys from some random dual gap dude and then that method spreading to the rest of high level FAF from there.

There's also the problem that you have a burden to explain why "a unit is very rarely built" means a unit is bad and what exactly the correct proportion of it being built is. Does the sparky need to be built as often as a t2 engie to be good? Half as often? Quarter? Why? Why does this being under or over mean anything about sparky?

You also need to qualify the data pool you're using. If you get some random assortment of 10k games over a set interval, even if you control these games to remove all single team games, that will still be what? 100 games with an average rating of over 1800? Why does it matter if the guys playing all welcome wonder 8v8 are not making firebeetles? Why does it matter if we rarely see RAS sacus in ladder?

There's a lot of qualification work that needs to go into making the information you posted in the beetles thread to be worth considering if you want to make it the crux of your analysis.

By the way, I do think the information you posted is interesting and a nice starting point for a discussion or adding onto a discussion, but I do not think it's any sort of solid basis to demand adjustments from.

From a different thread:

@IceDreamer said in Proposal: T3 Arty & Movement:

I'm in the rare position of agreeing with absolutely everything your just said Apart from, perhaps, the proposed solution...

Recognizing the existence of a problem, and proposing a good solution to that problem, are two very different things. It's common when it comes to game development that the fan community identifies a problem but proposes terrible solutions. The game devs usually have a much better idea about solutions (the range of what is feasible to code, and the impact it would have on the game) than about problems (the fans almost by definition are better at recognizing whether something is fun or not, than the people building it).

Guidelines that encourage people to propose solutions sends the discussion in the wrong direction, it would be more useful if we first figure out the scope of the problem and then invite brainstorming about possible solutions before picking apart solutions as good/bad ideas.

Really we should have two subforums, a "balance gripes" forum where people identify problems and argue about them, and brainstorm solutions, and then a "balance team discussion" forum where people make more formal presentations about what the problem is, what their solution is, replays showing the problem, and replays with a sim mod implementing a proposed solution. The balance team shouldn't have to feel any need to get involved, even just to read what's going on, until it reaches that level.

The balance gripes forum shouldn't show up on the "new posts" tab. People should have to seek it out in order to get it. That way we don't have to worry about innocent players being corrupted by reading dumb stuff. People get into long arguments because they think it matters, but if this forum was hidden away only for people with an active interest in the subject, people who understand that the "balance gripes" subforum will be full of misinfo, then there will be less incentive to try to "win the argument." The point of the gripes forum would be to collaborate to imagine and design sim mods for testing balance ideas, not winning arguments about who understands the game better.

Only when a proposal is sufficiently far along would it end up in the official balance team discussion forum where it could receive more careful attention from the community.

The way I see it is if you are competent and motivated enough to find a problem, figure out a solution, code it and test it then there is very little reason for you to post it on forums, you would rather make a pull request on Github and message balance team directly about your proposed changes.
I think that on forums it should be enough to find a potential problem, provide good arguments for why it's a problem and preferably provide a replay (if it's necessary or even possible). Finding a solution is a nice bonus but it shouldn't be a tick box in order for you to be able to make the balance thread. I agree with Arma here that players generally don't have the best solutions in mind, mostly since not a lot of people understand the game very well and the balance between different units. They usually get blindsided by one interaction between a pair of groups of/individual units and completely forget about other unit interaction or game scenarios.

@Tagada Perhaps the kind of discussions that I'm envisioning should happen primarily in the discord then? There's really no reason to preserve the discussions in forum posts that will be up 5 years from now. Better to just use a different venue than to make a special subforum. There should be some avenue for having discussions about balance that doesn't waste the time of the balance team or players who can't let an incorrect statement be on the forums without correcting it.

@Tagada Please see comment by Deribus. This is not a discussion on feedback about whether the rules should exist or not, this is apparently a discussion on whether there needs to be any minor alterations or additions to the rules.

What this actually entails, beyond being a yes man, I do not know.

P.S I agree completely with your statement, which is why a made very a strong reference to the responsibilities of the Player Councillor as the interface and representative of the playerbase. Which got deleted, unfortunately.

@arma473 yes apparently the appropriate place for such discussions now is #aeolus or discord.