Title: A Time For Change: FAF Community Balance Team
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@evildrew said in Title: A Time For Change: FAF Community Balance Team:
@Wheelie Why I wrote this... Well I could have just watched you and your group continue to fail the community and just looked away and ignored all the comments that I read from people having meltdowns wishing the bleeding would stop, but the truth is; I had to do it because somebody had to do something and looking to my left and to my right there was no one who was going to say what needed to be said.
You say it maybe would be more useful to start a proper discussion. Well I was open to give it a shot and bring many of my improvements to the game on Github but I got these types of replies like the one SpikeyNoob referenced. What would anyone conclude who gives a flawless mathematical demonstration and receives an answer decrying the methodology which is logical and sound as "criminal" and blasting out conceptually and factually false statements about T3 Pgens and T3 Mass Fabs vs RAS SACUs. Who would compare a RAS SACU to Mass Fabs and Pgens and not just the RAS upgrade without the SACU cost when specifically adding that the SACU has all these other benefits. It is called double counting. I can't help people who get the equation wrong and then refuse to listen to someone whose analytical skills are superior. He may decry that he is the balance in a Faucian fit because he carries the title - fine - but that does not make any claims relating to the balance of the game true and this is where a major problem lies.
"First of all, calculating the income of T3 mexes without mass storages is just criminal. A similar is true for mass fabs without their adjacency to T3 pgen. If you calculate the efficiency of a 2 T3 mass fab + 2 T3 Pgen grid you will see that they are more efficient than RAS SACUs. On the other hand, RAS SACUs have BP, are less volatile, can move, don't take space, can fight etc. " https://github.com/FAForever/fa/issues/4365
This is not the only incidence of double counting/double buffing/double nerfing we have seen over the years where only 1 targeted change should have been done, even the last patch has some of the same problems. So is that really me being unwilling to have a proper discussion?
You see Wheelie you are in the wrong about this, portray yourself as the victim and accuse me of being the person you are seeing in the mirror. We all do this from time to time so I wont hold it against you.
The question I ask myself is: Should I waste my time trying to collaborate with people like that? No, I will not avail my time or material to a group of people who from my point of view lack the wisdom to recognize its value. Tools can do a lot of good if used correctly but can be very harmful in the wrong hands, especially in the hands of people who do not grasp the underlying concepts.I'm somehow accusing you of.. something? Meanwhile in your OP you are comparing me with a self centered dictator that uses conspiracy theories, blocks progress on purpose and puts his friends on important positions.
You have not shown us any evidence of what is wrong with balance and it's general direction. The only thing you've done is nitpick a few issues that people dares to disagree with your opinion. You call your own analysis a flawless mathematical demonstration and if someone thinks you're wrong they're the devil incarnate. If the balance team would behave like you are doing right now any possible balance discussion could be removed from the forum.
At the end of the day there are 2 main questions in this topic: 1, Should we make the balance team a democratically elected position, and 2 should the balance team be more open about its vision/decisions.
The first one is definitely a no for me as there is no good reason for it. Yes, lower rated players can be good at game design/balancing too, but if that's the case, what's stopping them right now? Spikey joined the balance team last year, not as a top player but as someone who wanted to help and had a positive attitude. Exotic retard used to be in the balance team while he was 1400 since he was a great coder(although i wasn't there at the time). Sure you have a higher chance to make it into the balance team if you are better at the game, but that's nothing to be surprised about since it means that statistically you have a way higher chance to actually know what you're talking about.
Both Rowey and Deribus, around 1k-1.5k rating, have roles that give them access to the balance team chat. Both sometimes make a suggestion or join in on a convo. Ask them how much we laugh in their faces for being just a mere 1k.
It isn't that hard to try and involve yourself. You just need a positive attitude and are willing to actually listen to others, while also staying critical of yourself. Being high rated is a pre but not a necessity.
As a small sidenote: Keep in mind you don't need to be in the balance team to have an impact on changes. Multiple changes in this patch were suggested by people not part of it.
If on the other hand we would democratically elect the balance team you would get tons of issues, a lot Ftx already mentioned. There's absolutely no way to stop it being a popularity contest. It reminds me of a story bh told me when he was facing zock in an election and he pmmed every random guy online on faf and he got 100+ votes from them because they new him from cool casts. So what happens now? T_R_U_putin gets elected by the russian gap community because he want to make the gameplay be more adjusted for gap. Tex gets elected by the 1v1 community because he wants to make all units fit 1v1 more and tryth gets elected by the teamgame community as a meme. Now what happens? 3 People with completely opposing views will never come to any coherent decision.
If on the other hand we would be electing 1 winner who would get to decide his own team then it's all the more dangerous. T_R_U_putin wins the race because the russian dual gap community is huge and he simply gets more votes. Or even better, yuri tells his audience to make him win for fun without even promising anything.
I know these aren't very realistic examples and pretty over exaggerated, but it certainly can happen on a smaller degree as the example with bh shows. In the end the cons far outweigh the pro's for me when it comes to electing the balance team.
Now for question 2: We probably should yes. I don't think anyone on the balance team is particularly against sharing information. It's just that nobody goes out of their way to actively share the information in the right place. I myself am guilty of that since i generally find discussing/explaining balance related issues on the forums boring and tedious even though when i'm streaming i can rant about a single balance question for 15 min.
This is why i suggested that i won't mind doing a Q&A every now and then at all since i would actually find it quite fun to talk about it / explain things. I didn't really think of anything else yet though, although the talks about things like making the balance team chat public is something i'm against. I don't think it will be efficient at all since it's nowhere near the only place were discussions are being held (other discord servers, in voice, on stream, in the client). I wouldn't mind something like releasing the meeting vods though since they tend to be more cohesive. Issue with that though is that they're kinda sporadic in nature.
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It's funny to see all these arguments against democracy.
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Shall we democratically elect the next mod team then?
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Evildrew u keep talking about how the only difference between u and epic balance team chads is fast clicking and memorizing bos or whatever. It's giga cringe. Just live up to ur skill level it's ok to be bad. There's no soul in faf that is so disturbed as to have BOs in teamgames, not even tagada. And half the high level scene has apm from retirement home cafeteria, myself included.
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@melanol said in Title: A Time For Change: FAF Community Balance Team:
It's funny to see all these arguments against democracy.
As it turns out, democracy is not intrinsically good and reducing arguments into simple labeling of viewpoints into classes that create some emotional response in people is a brutal insult on human intelligence.
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For the record I don't disagree that there needs to be some change. The balance patch looks (tentatively) decent. The main issue is that it's been over a year since the previous one.
Also yea there's some evergreen topics that everyone is too afraid to touch, fearing that they fall down on ur house evidently. T3 air is one example of this. A new thread has been spawned every few months (a record, for such an inactive forum) ever since I joined literally a decade ago and yet the most dramatic change since t3maa was some strat cost adjustment (iirc). U really can't deny that there's a problem after the hundredth thread even if all the threads were wrong in some way.
So yea it's probably a matter of lack of imagination, lack of willingness to experiment or maybe a lack of design competency. T3 arty is a similar example (though doesn't date back quite so far). Whenever people complain about this stuff the image I get about balance team consensus is that they think that there's no problem and that nothing should be done. Clearly after 10 years of balance threads there's some perceived issue at least.
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The key part of any team is the ability to work with others (i.e. getting along with them without creating tension), and it's the main reason people end up getting jobs in real life (irrespective of technical merit). In a volunteer project this is even more crucial. So reading this thread you can draw your own conclusions about who would or wouldn't make a good team leader.
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Also on the subject of democracy, its fine for countries so you can periodically kick out a bunch of useless or actually dangerous politicians but I don't want anything that requires actual technical expertise decided on the basis of a democratic vote, otherwise you end up with uninformed (read stupid) choices being made.
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@melanol said in Title: A Time For Change: FAF Community Balance Team:
It's funny to see all these arguments against democracy.
Want more? Ping me in politics channel
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@thewheelie
I know it is not easy to read all that has been posted but I did mention that I am not against having a group of people (be it active contributors in a council member position or whatever else we can agree on as long as they are not campaigning and on the jury at the same time) setting guidelines, looking at the proposal of candidates and excluding the clearly unserious ones that do not meet the guidelines.
A pre-requisite of any candidate should be the goal to shape the game in the way that maximizes the game's balance across all spectrums. I know many think I only play one map and therefore do not have the ability to understand the depth of the game to a large extent but I can assure you that this is a false assumption.
This doesn't have to be a political office where people who do not deliver on their campaign promises and get to stay in for X years while running the game into the ground with no way to stop them until they leave.
I doubt T_R_U_putin would want to candidate, but if he put something together that appeared feasible and coherent then why not. If he or any one said they would occupy the position for 1 year and only change the cost of nukes and nothing else, then that would be clearly insufficient. A serious proposal should cover all aspects of the game, from T1 to T4, economy, military, offence, defence, unit relevancy, increasing strategic optionality. I know that sounds like a lot of fluff with no details but i don't want to write a 25,000 word essay.I guess you have a point that me saying my model is flawless was a bit of an absolute statement, but I have been building financial models and complex tools in excel to analyse and solve problems for a long time both at the place I worked at for the longest part of my professional career and as part of what I do these days. So I am very confident, some might say overly confident in my ability to not only scrutinize other people's analysis but also an expert at doing it myself.
Well first of all, the balance team has no vision, at least no one that is expressed of how they intend to balance the game so the direction the team is going is really unknown. If you want my opinion of what is wrong with the current balance and the direction the game has gone from my perspective, I have talked to some of the points but I will reiterate and expand:
There are a 2 main extremes when it comes to play styles:- Active offensive play
- Passive defensive play
Active aggression (spamming units) is generally most effective on smaller maps and maps with widely dispersed mexes while passive ecoing up generally succeeds more frequently with the increase in the size of the map and the concentration of mexes in one location.
The game has shifted too much into the favor of the passive defensive playstyle.
A) Overly focused on lessening certain strategies to shift the game in a specific direction.
For the most part there have been a lot of extreme nerfs of units over the years which have taken them out of the game almost completely or reduced them to fringe status because they fit into a particular interval on that spectrum and by trying to delay the point at which they can become relevant just increases the risk or lessens the reward to a point where you find you can't succeed with it anymore. It becomes easier to defend than to attack despite the risk being on the attackers side. That leads to less frequent use of those plays and a streamlining of strategies that only focus on very few choices. The outcome of this process is relegating strategic play by restricting the number of viable/interesting strategic decisions players have that can swing a game back and forth. Games more and more are determined by who can execute on the remaining few strategies the most efficiently, that's not a strategy game anymore.
One unintended consequence of consistently nerfing units is removing many midgame strategies and shifting the meta into the favor of purely ecoing and delaying the game into the endphase, i.e. game enders.
B) Double buffing/double nerfing - Improving the balance by bringing Unit A's effectiveness closer towards Unit B's and then adding another change of the same magnitude that places Unit A beneath Unit B essentially inverting the initial imbalance.
So in practice what that has meant over the years is, some people didnt like getting bombed early on small maps, the consequence the T1 bomber was nerfed and then T1 mobile AA was made beyond OP since 1 mobile AA would negate t1 bombers for practically nothing in cost. Luckily that was reversed and the T1 bomber reinstated after 5 years of hurt. Well actually the energy cost of the T1 bomber got cheaper from 2250 E (in 2016) to 2025 E (now).
Regarding the cost increase of Cybran frigate and the cost decrease of Aoen frigates, I agree that those changes improve the balance but then you guys also added changes to the range. This is a double buff or double nerf example where changing one aspect was sufficient. I can only imagine that you guys had these 2 ideas and instead of agreeing on one you just did both to make everyone happy. However that was not the right thing to do.
C) Trying to balance mainly by altering cost, HP and DPS.
The Nuke nerf: You could have changed the range on the SML without touching the cost and load times which worked very well on 10x10 maps for a very long time and by reducing the range solved the problem of needing more than 2 SMDs to cover bases in range of the SML on 20x20 maps but instead you chose a solution that worked from the players' perspective who play 20x20 but does not work for the players of 10x10 maps.
D) Many units with low relevancy to the game (i.e. across the entire spectrum of maps) - Too specialized and thus little useful outside of only rare scenarios in which they can be effective but not always are. Examples:
Fire Beetle (I would bet they are seen in less than 0.5% of games with cybran players), Janus Bomber, Nuke subs, T2 Subs, Cruisers (could be design much better to participate in navy fights), Strat bombers (there is nothing strategic about them, they are higher tech, are faster and drop bombs that do a more damage on impact but are more expensive and have less DPS than T1 bombers)
E) Stone-paper-scissor principles are not present in many aspects (f.ex. T2 Navy, T3 Navy, economy) of the game and the balance team does not appear to be gearing patches towards them, instead it focuses on addressing individual issues in isolation. Excessively dominant units such as T2 Destroyers are only considered against each other but not against other options such as T2 Subs and Cruisers leading to less strategic options to play navy causing execution only determined outcomes based mostly only on micro as explained in point C.
F) A lack of foreseeing unintended consequences when making changes or accepting them as a price to pay even when they outweigh the benefits.
Finally;
I know I may come across as arrogant to people who don't know me. Yes I am totally convinced of myself when I am discussing analytics and making models in spreadsheets because I know I am very good at it.
If you set up the live session, I will do my best to be there. Make a post with time and date when this will take place, what the topics of discussion are if it is not a free for all and lets see how that goes. -
Your spreadsheet says janus is a low relevancy unit?
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@ftxcommando said in Title: A Time For Change: FAF Community Balance Team:
Your spreadsheet says janus is a low relevancy unit?
i swear i played a game not even 2 hours ago
where back air built 50 janus and crushed our air player and our entire front. -
Wait till Evildrew hears there were talks about janus nerfs and nerfing barracudas for being too oppressive
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@mach Bruh my point was that *even if * someone made a bad balance change, its not bad in the sense that it kills the game in the same way that nothing changing and things being boring might.
Balance being so subjective, there will likely always be someone to argue for it even if they are alone.
My point was that arguing against balance changes being made is what is bad. At that point, if you cant no longer make changes, just archive the game and everyone leave it to die.
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Balance is subjective, but whether a game is boring or not is objective
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@zeldafanboy said in Title: A Time For Change: FAF Community Balance Team:
Balance is subjective, but whether a game is boring or not is objective
This is quite literally the exact opposite, you can show things are at least relatively balanced simply by having a fairly close w/l rate across factions and maps but there is no way to objectively show if something is boring or not, that's entirely up to the individual.
Edit:
An example: If for instance we cut the Aeon restorers cost and build time in half and doubled its damage it would be easy to objectively show that it's insanely and brokenly op - you can compare the mass cost vs hp and mass vs dps comparisons vs other units and Aeon would start getting an inflated w/l in games that go t3 air. However, it is my opinion that UEF navy is very boring to play. How can I prove that? Well, even though that is actually a real opinion of mine I can't really prove it. I can say that it's because the UEF bs is slow moving and slow firing and I would rather get close with higher rate of fire, which is true - I like playing Aeon navy more, sans tempests for the same reason - but I can't prove that shows UEF is boring. Someone else might like it for the same reasons I don't. If you argue that my changed restorer example isn't op, you're just objectively wrong. -
I feel guilty that you wrote all that, I was obviously being sarcastic.
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@zeldafanboy Ha nice. With some of the stuff in this thread I couldn't tell. Oh well, was nice distraction from work so thanks!
