A small teaser on our next update

Dealing with the unknown does not equal bad spawns in the middle of mountains with nowhere to build, unfair metal spawns, unfair spawn locations, silly map sizes, or badly rolled multiplanet systems.

Dealing with the unknown means instead for example dealing with what spawn your opponent chooses, what spawn you choose as a result, and what your opponent ends up building. You don't need to create an uneven playing field to achieve this...

*Do you see the difference here? One is pve, one is pvp.

I'm not playing chess and neither; am I on some mythical quest to find perfect balance. You still should be able to use the environment to your advantage.

To me jables strange comments in this thread only make sense if it is NOT ladders. Otherwise surely the teaser did its job just fine?

I am just going to leave this here because I don't want to get dragged into a flame war on such a controversial topic. I am unpopular enough as it is.

http://shoryuken.com/2013/09/03/dom...o-a-diss-some-preliminary-remarks-on-balance/

"So how do we get balance? We don't have much to go on yet. Historically, the question of “balance” didn't really come up. Why not? It's just side-stepped, because in most older games, both sides are identical. Like chess. You have the same pieces, the same options. So does this mean that the scrubs wish will be satisfied by both sides being identical? You and your opponent both have to play exactly the same character? Then I give you… Karate Champ! … “Hey! I didn't mean the characters had to be the same!” Oh. Okay. Well then what did you mean? Maybe the scrub can use their second wish to fix this one up- they of course want balance AND a lot of characters.

Okay- but before we move past the idea of identical sides as an obvious source of balance, we should note something else- There *is* one difference between the black and white sides in chess- namely that white gets to move first. This is, of course, enough to make all the difference in the world at high levels- conventional wisdom puts white at a substantial advantage simply because of this, even as they remain identical in all other respects. What does this show? For our purposes, take it as an illustration that a general background of “balance” acts to put an enormous emphasis on whatever differences there happen to be- no matter how small."

Right, that's what i said. You choose your spawn based on where you think your opponent will spawn.

There is a pretty significant difference between using the environment to your advantage (which i agree with), and using the environment to artificially and randomly create disadvantages and roadblocks for one player independant of the other player. That is what I mean by pve.

Of course. The more factions the better. Would it have been as exciting if the Trojan war was fought between two cloned Trojan factions instead of the Trojans vs. the Greeks? Or World War II between German clones? Or if fighting games only had one character to "choose" from? Or ever wonder why there is no artwork in existence in which the hero is "balanced" with the villain? Ever wondered why the hero is always vastly underpowered?

Because balance is boring.

/rant. It's just that this issue is very personally important to me, and it's very hard for me to not post about it when I see it brought up. I don't want to derail the thread, however, so I'll do my best to stop posting.

Arena fps games only have one character, and everyone has the same guns. That's not boring?

Versus FPS games suck anyway. Except PlanetSide. That game rocks. And it has three factions.

We need to also mirror the players who are playing the characters obviously.

EXACTLY!

That's the ultimate conclusion of the Quest for Holy Balance.

You would in fact have to KILL the players, because human beings are not equal, and can never be made so. The only way to make them equal is to kill them. I have written an entire essay about that.

Well if they're of equal skill.. and are very skillful it still wouldn't be boring. At least not for a spectator, seeing all the amazing parkour never gets old to me. XD

There's nothing more interesting than two players of the same skill level fighting. It's boring to watch someone get slaughtered.

But seriously, I understand what you guys are shooting for. And as long as you don't go TOO far in your quest for it, it's fine. What constitutes "too far", unfortunately, is debatable, so I hope whoever is in charge of "balanced" maps for Uber doesn't go too far with it, by my interpretation.

Nah killing them doesn't make them equal, since they tend to decompose at different rates....

Yep. The cause of equality, and therefore of balance, is really that hopeless. But death is the closest you can get to it.

Well then you don't really understand the concept of what we perceive as balance. The whole point of balance is to make the game decided by skill, and not by random, outside factors.

To burst some bubbles, it could also be a performance reward for a GW/ skirmish game ;-)

Just posting to add, yes, awesome, giving us teasers and showing what your working on is awesome, makes us more confident that you guys are working hard on the game!

Multiple monitors, Coke, alcohol, icons on a screen, plus someone's head.

Unit Cannon confirmed!

Logic dictates that a mirror map is balanced, and that it's the easiest way to balance a map. But that doesn't mean it is the only way. Taking it to it's logical conclusion, aka "100% balance" with mirror maps, is fine. But so is something asymmetric where the imbalance cannot be perceived.