Title: A Time For Change: FAF Community Balance Team
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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 “feelings” 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. It’s 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, I’d 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.
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@arma473 Balance and map design are intertwined. A mapper can think about how a map will potentially play when designing it, factoring in things like how different units' weapon ranges will or won't reach certain mexes from certain locations, how small water bodies might give hover units advantages, how a mountain in a certain place might protect an area from T2 navy fire, etc. A mapper can also factor in player preferences and many other things. However, that doesn't mean there aren't maps that promote aggressiveness. More 'aggressive' maps tend to be more likely to snowball in one team's favor (where once one team gets an advantage, they just keep increasing their advantage and the other team is rather unlikely to be able to make a successful comeback). The matchmaker team, for example, generally tries to avoid including maps that are too prone to snowballing. Combine that with general player preferences and the concept that maps like Dual Gap and Astro are so popular compared to more aggressive maps, and it seems like mappers who want their maps to be used more are inventivized to not make them too aggressive in nature. Despite that, there are actually many maps that are more aggression-prone, but it seems like they tend to be played less on average. So, I don't think this situation necessarily stems from a lack of maps. That might be a contributing factor, but so might the game balance, not to mention player preferences.
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@arma473 said in Title: A Time For Change: FAF Community Balance Team:
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.
Make a map that is "aggressive" without balance changes:
- earlygame is even more volatile and games end in 5 mins
- games snowball really hard
- games still slow down in t3 stage because of the massive difference in how t3 and t1 works
Map design is not sufficient.
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@thecodemander said in Title: A Time For Change: FAF Community Balance Team:
@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.
changing nothing wouldn't kill the game because the game isn't boring, people still play steam fa on balance from a decade ago, if your game needs constant changes to remain at baseline of fun, then there is something fundamentally wrong with it
balance is not subjective, it is simply number of viable options and getting every unit equally used in the game instead of 1 unit dominating (ex. asf) or having unevenly distributed usage per units, balancing in itself however is not simple, removing existing gameplay through balance changes will obviously annoy anyone who enjoyed it as will changes that remove something while adding nothing
I already said changes in themselves aren't bad, bad changes are bad, and changes for sake of change (aka to "keep things fresh") are bad which is what I'm arguing against, not against all balance changes
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Don't want to get involved in this discussion, but for what it's worth I believe @Tagada is doing a good job.
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With all Nomads has going for it after more than a decade of development, including extensive co-op campaign missions, it's time to embrace Nomads as FAF's official 5th faction. Let's give this soon to be elected balance team something to dig their teeth into, under the guidance of the existing members, presuming they don't all get elected based on the outstanding work they've collectively done up until this point in FAF's glorious history.
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@cunnismeta People can’t agree on balance with the 4 current factions and you want to add the very imbalanced nomads to it?
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Integrating Nomads is not only off topic - it is also never going to happen. They are a featured mod that is ranked. It is the best they'll ever get.
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Pretty bold of mirddes to post on his alt
