Why do you insult super testers, all of them are active skillful player, russian and english guys, all of them give us a lot of feedback. I don’t get it, do you think that they are all n00bs (or all of them are just n00b-farmers?) or we work with them just for fun?
With all due respect, being supposedly proficient at something does not necessary mean being good at seeing a game balance as a whole. There are (or were) plenty of players on both forums and SuperTest that could be categorized like that, common issue is tunnel-visioning and being very biased towards a certain game-play/role/build and in general being extremely conservative, opposing any kind of change in their comfort zone.
A lot of people that have a privilege of influencing a game balance, look at it this way:
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Role A vs Role B
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Role’s A build
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(sometimes) Average skill of a pilot of a Role A
This is a pretty much standard “form” of discussion balance in Skype, on forums, in game, unfortunately this game is not that simple, and discussions regarding balance must account at least for:
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Role A vs Role B
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- Role’s A build and purpose of that build
- Role’s B build and purpose of that build
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- Pilots proficiency in using a Role’s A build
- Pilots proficiency in using a Role’s B build
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Both Roles ranks
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- Size of the encounter:
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how many friendlies are around you (within module/shooting range of theirs)
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how many enemies are around you (within module/shooting range of theirs)
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level of team-play of friendlies and enemies.
And I cant emphasize how important (5) and (6) is, and yet it is mostly ignored and left out of any kind of discussions and decisions regarding balance. These are BARE MINIMUM that people capable of influencing the game balance must understand and fluently see impact with changed, that will ripple across core of the game, unfortunately this rarely happening.
There is another issue with current balancing approach, and that is Developers, they are heavily influenced by bare statistic, that are not necessary tied to hands on feedback, and what is the worst is that such statistics are not accounting for (5) and (6) as well. But the bigger issue is the rule of thumb used here “Everything, i.e. ships, modules, roles, weapons, implants” should be used in game fairly equally", which is going against the core of what complex games like star conflict are.
and then mix and match those entities into different variants, are what describes such games, it is never an effective way to win a battle to evenly spread usage of those, same goes for weapons and modules, there are go-to modules that defines a certain role, and there are situational modules that are only good/need in certain situation, and by definition CAN NOT BE graded with “usage of everything should be evenly spread”.
The combination of Developers behaviour and general tunnel visioning of influencers is what lead to huge balance issues. There is no such thing of perfect balance, but there are obvious things that should not be happening.
