So now what: Competitive Balance of the Future

The stingray is fine, it can also target the orbital units and anti air.
But the hornet really needs some buff.
The wyrm is also quite useless now.

Show me evidence that it is not.

Jables has stopped doing daily questions.

AI and Tech Support and who knows who else got laid off a couple of weeks ago.

There hasn't been a patch that added stuff to the game other than AI in ages; the last few patches consisted exclusively of bug fixes and AI updates and the latter will cease now that Sorian is no longer with Uberent.

Show me the evidence that Uber's not winding down on PA updates and that we're going to see more stuff added to the game because if there is any, I'm not seeing it.

You're absolutely right that this is the last thing this community needs; however, it's going to happen and we can either let chaos ensue or we can discuss the least disruptive and alienating way of making it happen.

What's the difference?

Either way we're not going to get updates. I expect that PAT will be as abandoned as SMNC is unless things change; whether this constitutes as abandoned or not may be a matter of semantics.

what pisses me of and others for the longest time is how many long range units still run into enemy range and apperantly "hold position" doesn't help at all either ... it's realy nessesary that artillery can stay at max range .. technicaly a atlas could be well kitet by grenadiers if they just wouldn't run forward to it while getting an attackorder

also i just found out that snipers can attack air aswell which indeed makes hornets and wyrms useless .. you don't even need flak at that point

Without that ability we have a way op zeus that only can be countered by air or ssx, so for sniperbots to change we need a major nerf to the zeus. Flack dont do anything etc.

I'm sorry man, but you can't ask someone to prove a negative. You are the one building a case on the assumption, you have to prove beyond reasonable doubt that your assumption holds up.

Layoffs, while never promising, are often simply a reality of games development. As main work on the project finishes and primary income dries up, most of the non-core staff end up being dismissed. This happens all over the industry.

I don't think the game is at the point where you can establish beyond reasonable doubt that balance updates will stop coming. Even factoring the noticeable loss of Sorian, AI is not required for competitive multiplayer balance. His loss in this specific regard is irrelevant.

And even if development has stopped, a more stable game is now the perfect opportunity to get larger scale modding going on.

And I don't mean to finish ubers game, like some cynics might be expecting me to say, but to make entirely new ones.

Hell, GW is still in java script is it not? Could you not just script together a campaign together with pre mission information and more orchestrated level generation like for the boss fights?

And the engine, while it does have it's share of problems, is still rather robust that map makers have made some of the most interesting terrain I have ever experienced in a RTS game.


The life of the game in in the community. Always was and always will be.

And even though PA isn't currently all it can be, hell probably all it promised to be...it can still be more, there is still unrealised potential!

PA forever.

I believe @stuart98 is on target with the timing of this thread. Call it winding down if you like but the life cycle of Uber support of PA is clearly coming to an end. It isn't clear when - I'd reckon it's probably not too expensive to keep the servers going for another year or two - but with core layoffs and clear indications from Jables that balance and unit roster is fixed, we're basically done here. I've said many times that the future of PA rests entirely in how much of it the community can liberate from Uber once they've moved on to bigger and hopefully more profitable ventures.

It is a really good idea to discuss what we can actually do when - not if - this comes to pass. My understanding is they can't open source it and we don't have deep enough mod hooks to go the way FA or TA went after dev shut down. So what can we do? Lets focus on that, not individual balance paradigms, which are irrelevant to the larger discussion.

This one is for you as will @philoscience
>Uber has abandoned PA
>Because 2 go the rest will follow
>All of uber is sheep
>baaaaaaaaa

Are you a sheep stuart? Don't listen to the sheep they have been screaming about this "Cliff" PA is about to run off but here we are 3 years since it was an idea and are still here.

Gohst, let's be real here. PA is no longer profitable, which is why at least two people focused on it were laid off (and make no mistake, there were more that aren't active on here or on Twitter that are no longer with Uber. Sorian and MKrater are in all likely hood the tip of the iceberg)

When PA is clearly no longer profitable, they stop work on it. That's how a business work. We can bury our heads in the sand, or we can organize our community to ensure that we survive as best we can despite the end of support.

I'd like to make a point here: uber no longer adding new content to PA isn't this terrible thing... It's only very recently that this idea games have to be in perpetual development came about.

I'd say they will keep maintaining PA, keep the servers up and so on for some time to come (case in point smnc).

Also @philoscience neither FA or TA were ever open sourced. The community can categorically take over PA in the same way, we already have private servers. No source code required.

Either way this is a worthwhile discussion imo, just lets keep the drama out of it. Uber have pretty much said things are now fixed, and that's fine. No harm in considering the future though.

Sure it's true that things are a little tight but in this case I don't think it's my "Head in the sand" mentality but more of this is a good game and I will stand by it for as long as I can because of it. This is a niche game in a niche market. Money will always be tight. That won't stop me from having fun though and if I can keep people like @Alpha2546 @killerkiwijuice @wpmarshall @Pieman90 I might not get to always stream PA but it will be a game that I will never leave because of them.

That's not really what I'm talking about.

As a competitive community, the pressure is going to grow to switch over to some mod now that Uber is no longer providing regular balance updates. Many units are desperately in need of fixes and Uber's not doing anything about it. Do we let chaos ensue as supercommanders are switched to BettahBalance 2.0, Clopseys are switch to ElodeaTweaks, etc or do we as a competitive community champion a single balance mod that we slowly phase in? Make no mistake, one of the two is going to happen. We need to figure out the best route to take from this point going forward.

Who was that directed at?

Regardless let me ask this: Why would uber no longer updating (or more likely moving into a less active support role rather than active development) have any impact on enjoying the game or being in the community. I was playing TA online for years after cavedog no longer existed. Since when did the rules change and decree a game without constant balance patches becomes no fun all of a sudden.

PA is a superb game, which I enjoy playing. Whilst additional content is nice, I personally believe there is more than enough current content in the game so I'm happy to keep enjoying it as long as there are other players to enjoy it with.

That said, there probably is room for improvement to the balance and mods allow us to action these over time (e.g. like balanced annihilation in spring rts), or even as new content out of scope for uber (e.g. imperial legion). In the long term, we'll probably need to move hosting of the official server to something community run too (like faf), although that is unlikely to happen any time soon.

The point is why is such a discussion so distasteful? I've followed the TA / sup Com / spring scene from its inception and this is the natural progression. The key point is all these games still exist and are still developed and actively played. That is no bad thing imo.

I think you are overreacting.
It's not like there are 3 balance mods that compete with each other at the moment.
Most played is Vanilla for sure.
And Vanilla is fine for now.
I rather wait on Legion Expansion Mod to finish. Make Legion Expansion great and balance that with the community.

I do think Legion is a good way to move PA forward. It's the sort of mod that can effectively keep Vanilla and add to the game at the same time.

That said, I get where *stuart98* is coming from. I mean I've seen both sides of this. With TA balance was changed very little and was played for a long time around the 3.1 Patch with some small mods on top (a bit like the client mods we have now). On the other end of the scale we have Spring RTS with it's main 'TA' mod Absolute Annihilation (which evolved into 'Balanced Annihilation') that was essentially the original game with community managed updates / patches. AA and BA added a handful of units over the years, and the balance went back and fourth, although anyone familiar with TA would instantly recognise 90% of the units in BA now, and the balance is close enough that they'd be able to play at a reasonable level for the most part. I think that is the kind of future Stuart would like to see for PA- and it's difficult at the moment because we don't have any way to directly adjust the balance of vanilla that all players get to use. That said I'm fairly certain we didn't have that level of access to FA whilst GPG was in control of it. It wouldn't be a a bad idea long term.

In the short term I think Legion has a good shot to achieve a similar thing though- as it includes the base faction any player can in theory jump into it, and given the desire of most PA players to have another faction to fiddle with it's got a good shot of gaining traction. The key will be getting the message out. If it got widely adopted in time, we could then use it to adjust base faction as well, although initially I think it needs to keep the base faction in line with vanilla to avoid confusion, and focus on getting the legion to balance against that.