And to address this insane shit about "people I play with" do you know why I play with them? Because they're people that play near my skill level in the games I enjoy: matchmaker and just random high level custom games. The reason the balance team tends to be people that are friends are because it's a small community. Balance team members:
- Have to have a similar framework to talk about changes coherently, t2 navy being good on astro is simply not a discussion that can happen.
- What does that mean? They're often playing together.
- Have to have a decent basis of understanding of the game to gauge the impact of adjustments on said agreed upon framework.
- What does that mean? Either they have fairly large knowledge of the codebase to the extent they have played around with values theoretically or they have practical game experience which in turn correlates with higher rating.
So you're left with a bunch of people that play a similar type of games that are also all generally good at those games. Is it strange that dudes that invest their freetime into playing the same game in the same niche of that game would become friends? Especially if they then work to improve that game together through the years? Why is this some random conspiracy to you?
This reminds me of the conspiracy about how I was some evil dude that rigged tournies for his friends or only cared about the maps/ideas his friends made. Maybe it's because the people that I regularly need to associate with for things related to improving my area of FAF also end up becoming closer friends with me. I don't really get why this is so weird to understand. Do people not become friends with people at their workplace that they probably would have never spent a second thought thinking about in other environments?