Balance Discussion Meeting

'Twas just a though. It's probably best to leave it to TheWrongCat to organise.

Thats what I was thinking......

As usual

Heh.

Just to give people an idea of my thoughts process, I can see several ways of approaching this:

With a focus on trying to get Uber involved in this discussion

Obviously this would need to be held on a weekday - Uber spend enough hours on this game during the week without trying to bring them into a balance discussion on the weekend! While it would be fantastic to have some input from Uber on this, I feel it would be time taken out of their working day for very little tangible gain. Nonetheless, interested parties might include @BradNicholson, @scathis and @sirvladamir.

With a focus on trying to get as many people actively involved in the discussion as possible

Obviously if we're purporting that this could be viewed as a summary of the entire community's views on what we're looking at in terms of balance, it would make sense to have as many people involved as possible. I certainly want this to be more inclusive than exclusive and it would be good to hear from some of the less vocal members of the community for a change! The one very obvious drawback with this is that it could make the meeting a lot less organised, cause people to start shouting over one another and, of course, reduces the average speaking time of each participant.

Limiting the number of actual participants, but inviting as many people as possible to help set the agenda beforehand and focusing on ensuring there is a tangible output to feed back to them.

This is probably the one I'm leaning towards. Written observations are much easier to deal with en-masse and it would be easy to break down the comments, questions and arguments of a large number of people and have them discussed among those present. I'm not entirely sure how many people would look to attend a meeting like this but even looking at the reaction since I asked the question in this thread I'd estimate we'd be looking at at least double the attendance, which is probably a bit much.

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Anyway, if Uber want to be involved in this, then obviously I'll begin looking at some weekday dates, but otherwise I'm thinking of a start time of between 2000 - 2200hrs UTC on either Saturday 15th or Sunday 16th February.

Pleased to hear everyone's thoughts on the approaches I mentioned above and on the dates / times.

Sounds like a great idea to me, the time is good aswel for me so far.

There are a lot of new ideas and suggestions still. At the same time, it is early in balance implementation, they can't add all the balance at once though, they won't know "what went well" and "what didn't" (thus, they tweaked naval, it was terrible, and they knew because it wasn't watered down with any land balances) (or in technical terms, you can't have multiple variables in an experiment trying to test any single thing)

That being said, there is definitely worth in re-igniting and re-citing the issues brought up before if they are still withstanding, and there is merit in adding to the list. After that, it still remains a hopes and dreams list for what the game steers torwards.

It's going to be tough to have the sort of meaningful discussion that you want until we get the unit roster finalized and get the balance to a point where we think it's actually balanced. I'd love to join, but I'd probably end up saying the same things we've been saying for awhile. Balance is fluid -- especially now, as we add more and more units.

Would it be possible to have a discussion like this for modders? I know there is at least one person working exclusively on the UI and there are others working on mod support. It would be very nice to be able to have a community meeting with them about the current UI and API, Uber's plans for the near-term and long-term, and issues that modders have currently (mostly related to an under-developed api).

We know everything is changing fast and we are happy to see our mods become obsolete when features are added to the game, but it would be nice to know when there are things we shouldn't bother starting because it will be useless in a week.

Hate to shoot you down, and it really isn't even my place, but I would think from personal logic, that when the server is released, mods will become available for people to make that couldn't been made before, and more than likely the majority of current mods will become obsolete or need complete rewritten to work again.

Agree with you that it is nice for mod to instead become feature, disagree that this early one could fathom what mods will be functional forever, just most mods can't be made yet or most mods that are made will become feature (probably modmanager) or break and need written all over again (I would gamble Alert Manager). One can assume nothing made now will survive that, as well as nothing made now composes of a percent of what will be made in the first month serverside is available.

I assume all mods will break over time, but that isn't a concern. I see mods as a great way to make a UI suggestion to the developers and be able to clearly demonstrate what it is we want in the game. There just isn't much point to doing this if the feature is already in the works.

As to the API, modders like cola_colin, raevn, and proeleert probably have a better idea of what new engine calls we need than the developers. I think it would just be nice to get the whole modding community together with some developers and discuss the current state of modding. Right now is an especially good time for this now that we are vaguely aware of new stats gathering features and upcoming UI work that Uber is doing.

Brad Nicholson really let the air out of this idea balloon. haha.

I guess we should think of ways to supplement the balance patches to give the developers the feedback on all the changes.

Oh.

https://forums.uberent.com/threads/...lf-before-i-break-all-your-stuff.53238/page-2

Discussing it is fine, and listing it in text is easier than by mouth.

However, important points are to make sure mods work without needing too much "both" (where server AND client need them) and instead one or the other whichever is necesary for balance and what not, as well as to query information so you don't overload bandwidth getting everything but can aquire what you need and block you getting any enemy information by accident/intentional-cheating.

Mentioning specific mods, like AI assistance and First Person Shooter, would be things you can list and ask about. IMO, AI assistant mods should be possible because a lot of AI is client side so you could assign a structure the AI's programmed sheet of what-to-dos and he do it like he was a player. IMO, a first person shooter is not so sure, because engine limits what a player can make a unit model do even if it were view-porting from the "face" of the unit one can not fine-aim his weapon which is usually done by AI after clicked attack on enemy.

Interesting discussion, just better listed as a presentation to the dev interested in reading it. It is also possible to fix and create and tweak "hooks" if a modder lays out that he needs it for a mod even post-release of game, because the devs will continue to cooperate within the advancement of the game post-release.

I really wouldn't expect the developers to weigh in at-all at this point. The purpose of this kind of meeting is much more along the lines of ascertaining interesting directions in which to look at potential balancing. Not to provide hard and fast solutions, unless it is an already well developed area of the game which is unlikely to be altered significantly.

However, as things become more fleshed out, this can be another method of collating community opinions in order to provide more directed feedback.

By way of an(other) update - had a word with a few chaps from Uber last night and asked how useful this sort of thing is to them.

Long story short, they made the argument that any discussion more detailed than the one we held in September would be of very little use to them for the time being - and I am inclined to agree.

So I propose to postpone this discussion until such time as Uber have what they feel is a reasonable 'final' pass at balancing, at which time we can hopefully provide some meaningful feedback.

In the meantime, I maintain that a lot of the points brought up in the original meeting, which was exceptionally broad at the time, still stand.

I listened to (part of it) last week, and I am inclined to agree. We got the basics down.

Now we just wait for the real stuff to happen