Title: A Time For Change: FAF Community Balance Team
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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!
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Baited!
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Even if something is overpowered it is fine because everyone is free to use it, and attempt to find counters to it. And if something is underpowered it is fine because people can just not use it, or try to find ways to make it viable. When you successfully use something underpowered it is funny and you feel good. Not every unit has to be competitively viable, meme units are great. Using overpowered things is also fun. Having overpowered and underpowered things is more interesting than everything being normal and viable. You will get to see different factions played and different strategies used if there's a rotation of underpowered and overpowered things. Not every unit has to be good at the same time.
It is also not entirely clear if something is truly good or bad, the janus was considered trash for a very long time but now it is suddenly considered borderline OP, yet it hasn't been changed in a balance patch since 2017 as far as I know.
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I would rather have units balanced properly, where there aren't underpowered units that are basically noob traps and there aren't overpowered units that you basically have to use if you're truly playing competitively to win and your oponent is competent. For example, late game air dominance is basically ASF, ASF, more ASF, and maybe some other stuff. Comparatively, land and navy both offer more interesting unit mixes and strategic choice for achieving dominance in their layers. I would rather there be more strategic choice for what to produce to try to win air in different ways as well (more than just trying to bait people or wtv). I would like to have units be well-balanced but viable in different roles and combinations, thus offering the user more strategic choice. Increased faction diversity can help support this, with new factional pros and cons added to existing units (with a lot more significance than just like +25 hp or wtv). That could be accomplished in a variety of different ways, but is unlikely to be accomplished in a reasonable timeframe with just very infrequent low-impact patches. I would like the balance team to be more active (if the current members claim to not have enough time, there are other decent players who could be helpful and would be interested in helping out.).
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The proper way to go about this is to have said people join the association and discuss this in a manner that is throughly reviewed among members.
Last I checked we only have about 50-ish people running FAF?
These message board debates rarely do anything other than point out āfeelingsā about how things work rather getting all the details.
How many people here that want change can seriously look at all the code, Blue prints, testing required, etc etc?
If the team is failing the community it should be discussed among that platform. We have a GM for the association coming soon so I would advise getting people in sooner rather than later.
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@thomashiatt said in Title: A Time For Change: FAF Community Balance Team:
Even if something is overpowered it is fine because everyone is free to use it, and attempt to find counters to it. And if something is underpowered it is fine because people can just not use it, or try to find ways to make it viable. When you successfully use something underpowered it is funny and you feel good. Not every unit has to be competitively viable, meme units are great. Using overpowered things is also fun. Having overpowered and underpowered things is more interesting than everything being normal and viable. You will get to see different factions played and different strategies used if there's a rotation of underpowered and overpowered things. Not every unit has to be good at the same time.
It is also not entirely clear if something is truly good or bad, the janus was considered trash for a very long time but now it is suddenly considered borderline OP, yet it hasn't been changed in a balance patch since 2017 as far as I know.
S tier: Unit being unique, fun, and viable
A-B tier: Unit being two of those
C-D tier: Unit being one of those
F tier: Unit being none of thoseOf these, making units viable is the easiest as it simply involves converging the general gameplay to the mean. I almost never see anybody post any examples of a unit that fits all three of these. Itās hard.
Especially since even doing something that hardly changes the game to increase sum faction uniqueness (jamming on uef t3 air or sparky suite change) gets seen as insane busted adjustments. Just look at the threads I had to defend those in, these things being seen as insane just involved sheer dissonance and it still was like pulling teeth.
Frankly to do any real work in increasing uniqueness, Iād argue that balance team should be ignoring initial pushback against ideas like that. The thing this thread is kinda trying to discourage.
Use dreamers for uniqueness. Use feedback for fun. Use competent players for viability.
Unique: Giving UEF T3 air jamming
Fun: Remove it from ASF to preserve game sim speed
Viability: Balance the costs and mechanic against stealth -
Assuming that the top people at FAF agreed with EvilDrew that the problem is that the passive-defensive style of gameplay is too common, the best way to address that is by changing the map pool, not by tweaking unit statistics.
If there aren't enough good aggression-promoting maps, then we need more.
The reason we don't have more is the lack of easy-to-use mapmaking tools. Making maps for FAF is ridiculously hard.
This isn't a reason to be angry at the balance team.
