[Moved] Discussion on Uber and the Community

Continue from where we left off.

Moderator Edit: Changed the thread title to something that can't be misinterpreted as sarcasm.​

Find posts Scathis or Meta made that mentioned the RCBM team or a member of the Statera team between May 31st and September 5th.

The quoted post was obviously made to justify Scathis not playing the mods. He made a post that asked us to say which of two roughly equivalent mods that did similar things different ways was better and when we said that neither was he used that to say that his balance was therefore not worse then either mod, clearly showing that he had no intention of playing them.

Remember, the devs did have to bust *** to release the game on time in what was still considered "unfinished and shameful".

It is bullshit to treat them like they failed on so many fronts, when they got the game in a very acceptable state. From the game design perspective and business standpoint, to release a game is important to do timely, and to narrow down focus to get the most necesary things you can with your 100% workload is all you can do. Balance did not get focused on then, neither did server because it would simply leave too many bugs to stop early to work on serverside. Both are coming with their just dues.

In a timely manner too, ladders just came out, and now a balance patch to bolster the ladder update. Just let the communication come back when necesary, now when the devs have time to focus on balance, and let **** get done for the good of all of us.

Alrighty peeps, remember to keep this constructive on how you would like to see Uber improve in this aspect.

Here's where it left off: https://forums.uberent.com/threads/...partment-on-balance.65617/page-7#post-1027582

And my interpretation would be it was a leading question meant to provoke you to think about what you were doing. A soft landing. It doesn't imply that he had not played them himself. I really don't get how you can be saying this, when only recently statera got the publicity you always dreamed of with brad saying he liked all the new units and jables taking interest. That's just disrespectful.

If you can't identify key areas where one community balance mod was better than another and vice versa, then how can say you've identified key areas where either one of your mods is better than vanilla? Without that, the only arguement you're presenting is "this is how we think the game should play because.... reasons >_>".

Also, i dont know if i can claim credit (or infamy) for this. Maybe it was coincidental because it definitely seemed like the simplest, most effective way for fixing the dox meta at the time, but i made a mod where dox could shoot air maybe a month before that mechanic got put into vanilla.

So if you want to claim 100% that uber doesn't take feedback from modders, i would very much call that into doubt.

That is NOT in any way a lead-in. If it is, it's the worst I've seen. There was hardly any follow-up to it.
He MOCKED the mods, from what I saw. MOCKED them. That was the point I started to realize Nano might have been right lol.

The point is that Scathis immediately made the assumption that the mods were not better without playing them.
We can only prove generalities (more diverse, less upgradey, etc). In that point, RCBM, Statera, and the CUB are all better than the current balance because they make it more diverse, extend gameplay, and lower the Zaphod limit.

Yeah, I was like NO WAY that would be OP as hell lol when I saw that.

Then it got added.

Yeah.



D:

Never said that.

I don't want publicity for any particular balance mod in particular. I want to see Uber playing a balance mod. I want Uber to actively advertize mods as a fundamental part of the game. Be it Statera, RCBM, ModX, Energy Wars, I really don't care. Simply saying that a mod is fun doesn't really do much. Showing that a mod is fun is far more effective.

Furthermore if the people who are doing the balance aren't playing a mod then the Uber people that it is most important play it aren't doing it. If the community manager plays it then cool, but I don't expect anything to come from it other than more downloads. I want to see changes reflected in the vanilla game. I'm not saying that Statera or RCBM should be added to the game outright but I do want to see gameplay changes made that reflect areas where we do better than vanilla. If the balance people don't play the mods then this can't happen.

I can identify areas where one mod might do things better. I feel like RCBM had a more compelling bot tank balance prior to Statera 1.0, for example. I'd be the first to admit that they are really thinking out their decisions and that's leading to some strengths in it that Statera has at times lacked. We can easily look at the pros and cons of mods and vanilla. With mods the pros and cons and more equal and that makes it harder to choose a winner. With vanilla it's more clear cut.

Perhaps Uber did get the idea from ReDox. However, ReDox was very much the same as vanilla in terms of balance direction. Uber ignored anything that didn't support their balance paradigm being the right one. Right from the start Meta showed that he considered his and Scathis' paradigm to be the only one that would be seen in the vanilla balance. Uber wasn't willing to try to take anything from a competing paradigm.

Isn't jables doing the balance now? He was the one that improved the balance on Forged alliance wasn't he? It sounds like he's going to be open to community input.

That would be awesome. But we just don't know.
@jables

I remember scathis also saying that your guys mods were going in a different gameplay dorection to ubers and if many people play your mods than of course he would start having a look and seeing. When the only people talking about how good their mods are, are the same people that makes the mod it had to be taken with a grain of salt.

I'm not saying your guys mods are bad/worse/indifferent or better but the game is still pretty new. When Uber finally say ok we are happy with our balance now and if I consider the balance off then I will look to mods. They are right not to promote the splitting of the small enough community into playing several different mods.

As for jables and the balance, I think it is a good step, a better one would be to ask some players about balance in line with Ubers vision of the game and what style they want. Not oh I like micro lets do it this way which will make me better or vice versa.

And it's only now that Scathis may or may not even still be at Uber and Meta isn't doing a thing with balance that there's a possibility that mods might become commonly used with them being made visible by default in the ranked update.

@stuart98

That quote about him asking which is better? That was a trap, he knew someone would say "why can't they just be "different" ", because that was exactly what Scathis wanted to say. Why can't they just be "different", there is no better or worse balance, just different balance. I'm pretty surprised at how many people hadn't noticed the obviousness of that.

Also why exactly do they need to play mods? What if they simply... don't want to? Why do they not have that freedom? It's ridiculous. Mods now show up in the server browser by default, server mods exist in the first place, and Uber worked from the ground up for easily moddable api. Even lately we've had a dev very nicely explain and help us get down how to produce a .papa.

[irony]Squishy, would you please use the quote feature so that I can see what context your reply is in?[/irony]

Seriously the only people saying incorporate our better way of doing things are the very ones who made the mod. So silly that they can't see beyond what they want. I for one don't enjoy the RCBM. Don't force your balance on me!

I've never said that balance mods should be forced on people. But they should be accessible and if a mod with a competing paradigm has superior aspects to it then those aspects should be imported into vanilla as possible.

Sorry @tatsujb got me out of the habit!

Edit: Yes I want you to see this Tatsu!

Who decides which aspects are superior?

I wouldn't communicate with half of you guys if I was Uber.
Some people just shout and shout like morons. Then they start Uber is bad threads and spout off misinformation all over the interwebs. Well yeah that makes me want to listen to you guys more.
If you can't talk like reasonable people why would they treat you like reasonable people.

Be patient they are still working on the game, do they really have to reply on every thread yeah yeah we heard you ?

Ideally just a ton of posts from various people on the forums and discussion about integrating it into vanilla that ends up being very much positive on integration.

Exactly, which balance paradigm is better? None.

The only better balance is a balance that follows the paradigm or idea the best. You can't say you have good balance if your idea of balance was to have all units last 5 seconds in battle when they last 2.

I know you're probably going to say that they're original balance idea was going to be more t1 = t2 + sidegrades. But that changed, partially for simplicity sake.