Does this forum still serve any purpose?

Uber has been incredibly silent on balance for the past 1-2 months. @jables did recently say they are taking a look at balance which is great to hear, but that is really the only feedback we've had from uber on this in ages. Do they consider the balance largely complete? Will there be any more major tweaks? Are we looking only at value changes from here on out or will some unit weapons still be swapped around?

It just feels like this is the slowest of all the forums and Uber pays little to no attention here. I'd like to see a return to the era when Uber was actively discussing balance ideas with us. I know we got a little crazy and heated back in the day, but I think @sorian and Jables are up for it. Does Uber even read this forum? I just want to know: what are the plans for future balance, how does Uber currently percieve player views on balance (are we still consider to be just theory-crafters, or what), and how can we actively contribute going forward?

I would assume Uber reads this stuff. It's valueable when they start on working re-balancing things.

I've learned (both in life and with Uber) to generally avoid assumptions. Given the intense radio silence on balance since pre-release, i'd like a little clarity and feedback. The last big event in balance was the terrible fights with Scathis and the follow-up huge rebalancing livecast. Since then it's been steady silence for the most part. We spend a lot of time in here debating balance and i'm pretty impressed with how (relatively) mature these discussions have gotten. I'd like to see the Devs being a bit more active in here.

f there's anything to be worried about, it's the silence on invasion tools - which many people cite as an unfulfilled Kickstarter promise based on the trailer. No Unit Cannon news, no mention of any kind of transports, no minor Asteroids, no nothin'.

Each of these are purely additive; there's a fear that if we can't even get numbers tweaks or news thereabout in a timely fashion, our hopes for getting any new content post-release are therefore pretty grim. With no communication, our worst fears are left to run wild.

Well, i'm not a developer or anything and i have no idea what it takes to make a game of this scale, but I've always wondered why there are so little updates. They come once maybe every 2 weeks. It's not like there is an insane amount of content in these updates to justify the length of time in between them.

Or maybe i have no idea what i'm talking about. But i would at least like to know why.

I think it depends how many developers they have working on it (as opposed to artists and production staff). I'd guess 3 to 4 plus any working on features that just appear out of nowhere like the metal planet laser or offline mode (and now ladders).

Of course balance is different. Not that hard to code assuming existing units but can take many hours/days of testing and tweaking.

Well my guess is that they are spending most of their time and resources on offline and the ladder. These seem easy but I reckon they are significant projects and the PA team isn't that big anymore. Still not sure why we don't get more info and updates on balance which is surely not done and doesn't take nearly as long.

Your entire OP is posited on the assumption that the forum is useless because Uber are posting.

No, not entirely. You are free to discuss ways in which discussing balance without Uber's input is valuable. My post is just focused on the fact that Uber appears to totally ignore those discussions, or at least never bothers to weigh in here.

It better not be planned for the future. If they don't want to work on this now, I volunteer my brain for balance duty. Give me the reigns, I'll do it for free. Please. I should write a report of some kind to prove how serious I am. I WILL DELIVER.

But them ignoring the discussions is an assumption based on them not posting, and I don't see how them not posting leads to this being a useless forum.

They should see the Archeage forums.

Or any other forum where the number of dev posts is directly proportional to the number of lunch breaks they have.

I wonder if that is good or bad. devs posting a lot during their free time is definitely very good. But devs posting during work hours is good as well, as it shows the company values communication between devs and players enough to allow for that kind of communication to happen during work hours.

Devs should just post as much as I do. Everybody should post at least that much :>

Oh god. The impossible standard has been posted.

Yeah, we've had no real news about balance changes in a wile. They say they know they are necessary, but the scope of that or even who is going to be responsible for it is unknown. Communication has improved across the board, but we still have no news on this.

i strongly recommend you to take a look at Starcraft II Forums. They are truly dead (in german Forums u get like 1 post in one day) and no stuff will every answer anything. Only thing you will see is "i close this thread".
And the talk there is usually really useless and flamerish.

Ooooh another reason to hate Starcraft, right?

Nah. Those dudes are probably so rich, they don't deem themselves worthy enough to read the posts.

i mean i still do play SC2 myself, the game is okayish, and Activision Blizzard is one of the last big gaming companies i put my trust into, but your chances a higher to reach a Dev when you throw a bottle with the message into the ocean.

An ocean of money.

The product has released. The money has been made. Most people have probably been pulled off of the team to work on other projects because at this point, PA may well be costing more than it's earning. Games that really keep up a high level of post-launch development are pay-to-play (or, like some of the MOBAs, they do pretty well selling skins and so forth -- well enough to keep funding programmers for general gameplay updates to keep people interested).

One thing PA probably lacked was a vision for a long-term revenue model. (Selling commander skins will only get you so far when the commander isn't really a dominant part of gameplay anyway.)

Frankly this game is way better than Total Annihilation was on launch. THAT game had balance problems. TA balance actually got worse after launch as the team occasionally found the time to release a new unit without apparently spending time playtesting it (GOOD JOB, PELICAN MAKER. WAY TO RUIN EVERYTHING.)


The only thing they need to fix, that I see, is that mex stacking bug. That's pretty huge.

They can tweak balance forever but it's not awful as it is. I'd like to see leaderboards and a non-mod 1v1 ranking system but if they threw up their hands and said, "This is it. No leaderboards or ranking system ever" then I guess I'd suck it up and pick up a mod that does it.