Posting Restriction for Balance Discussion

@redx

A good majority of the "front page" of balance suggestions is low/no effort posts by people who've explicitly said they have nothing better to do. It's low hanging fruit. Even just trimming the bad topics would help immensely. Adding "downvotes"/hiding downvoted posts would as well (not sure how that would be implemented technically).

@Blodir

For me personally the biggest hindrance in reading balance posts is the argumentation.

I think the only solution here is to be the change you wish to see in the world. Contribute thoughtfully, stay on topic, ask other people to do the same/be respectful, and summarize the framing/points of agreement/disagreement whenever appropriate.

@clyf It still won't solve the problem you see every day in general and also in a lot of discussions, where people come in and ask a question underneath the message that answers that question.

People don't read, they just post without ever looking at any messages send. But that is not limited to low rated players or even to newer lesser known players, this happens all the time causing a lot of discussions to go in circles.
But that is just a reality you have to accept and you can at most be prepared for it, by having the fitting answers at hand / knowing where you already answered what question.
(basically people feel like blodir, not wanting to read the 500+ messages, but still post some random stuff without making any effort of checking if their argument already has been brought up)
I'm not saying people need to read all 500+ messages to be allowed to post their idea, but they should at least use the search function once and post their idea in a careful manner. (like saying they didn't read the history and ask if X has already been talked about compared to "are you all retarded, just do X")

I really don't think the problem is a player's rating. I think the problem, if anything, is that:

• The opinions of TOP-rated players, particularly those on the balance team, need to be (seperately?) publicly viewable.

That way, people who want to talk about 'what if's', or earnestly ask questions that can be answered, get to do so in the public balance discussion areas on discord or the forums, and get a fun, lively, and perhaps even useful discussion going.

While people like snowy801, that only want to hear the opinions of 'pro' players and/or those on the balance team, could read the discussions leading up to potential patch changes if they were made public
(perhaps a 'summary' could be prepared - I imagine lots of people would be happy to make such a report, if given access to those discussions.)

Still, this is only my feeling... I am holding back on commenting from any more balance discussions to satisfy snowy and similar members, because I'm not here to upset people. x

[edit - This originally quoted BlackYps, and sounded confrontational when it wasn't supposed to be. I removed the quote. ]

What? Maybe this is a misunderstanding. My point is that the balance discussion is useless not because low rated people participate, but because shitposters degrade it. The shitposters should be dealt with, there is no need for a general rating requirement

@sladow-noob said in Posting Restriction for Balance Discussion:

@Deribus Do you have an answer to it by any chance? Afaik I remember talking with you about that impact

Yes I did talk to the Balance Team about their thoughts on the current state of the Discord Balance Forum. My concerns are not so much a rating or games played requirement but people who by their own admission have no idea what they're talking about. Such as this conversation:

There's a ton of "suggestions" at the moment which can be summed up as "Wouldn't it be funny if the game were massively changed in this way? I have 0 coding ability and don't want to learn, so instead I'm going to shitpost in the unlikely event someone else puts the effort in that is so obviously lacking from my post."

Balance Team feedback was essentially to leave the Discord Forum for shitposts and the more serious suggestions can get put in the Balance Forum here. As such I haven't any efforts to clean up or enforce more stringent requirements like we have in the actual Balance Forum.

@deribus Was more referring to the thingi how ladder / TMM rating influences your global rating xDD

But that's also interesting to know; I do agree but it's a bit weird to have it split but ignore one half of the balance suggestions. But ig if it's clear (dunno if it was announced somewhere) it's okay to treat it as smth not really relevant.

Ah yeah we had that discussion a loooong time ago. In any case I don't think it's relevant here

The primary reason for the creation of the balance channels in discord was to provide a space where people can talk about balance and suggest different ideas without the more strict requirements that exist on forum. Unfortunately the dc channels turned into a meme quite quickly without any proper moderation. Ideally on discord there would be more relaxed restrictions that mostly deal with trolls and spammers while the forum would be the place for the more thought-out and serious disscusion.
While a good solution it would also require someone to moderate those dc channels which would be quite a lot of work and I'm unsure if any of the mods would like to do this. There is also a question of how and where to display the rules for these channels.

Why not just make a subforum here? I feel like forums are naturally a much less convenient conduit for shitposters than discord is.

@sylph_ said in Posting Restriction for Balance Discussion:

What I've found about rating as I've been playing and chatting more, though, is that many of the players who I've been listening to quite avidly don't even play certain game types, and it takes time to learn which voices are relevant to the game types we personally play. This 'required rating' metric for discussing balance would have to ensure that a player was versed in all areas of the game, I imagine; so that they know all the implications of their suggestions? Or is that not the suggestion, and as long as someone is good at something, their opinion is valued?

I am a high level player but I don't have a great understanding on what t3 navy balance is like, so I know my place and do not talk about it. I will only comment on things where I actually know what I'm talking about.
On the other hand, there's people who don't know what they're saying at all, yet insist they are correct (thinking of certain dualgappers complaining about nukes and t2-t3 navy) and these types of people are the most annoying to deal with. Another example is low rated players believing the aeon range gun nerf was stupid "because it's hard to use that range anyway". It's a waste of time to discuss with them because their way of thinking is wrong.
What if someone is capable of using that extra range? That's the scenario you want to look at, not one where the range gun user doesn't know how to properly use the range (works the same way with dualgappers poorly microing navy and concluding their navy unit is bad).
Yes it's elitist but it's required to maintain the sanity of people who know what they're doing

In truth even some high rated players can be seriously wrong, so ideally for sladow the players would be handpicked, but then the community would see this as a biased circlejerk of people who are gatekeeping balance