Before Uber start final balancing....

You know what's not fun? Losing to a metagame you don't understand.

This isn't taking the viewpoint of only a minority, it is simply recognizing that if it is possible to be abused, then it will be abused. And so the balance should be controlled in such a manner that it can be easily understood. It's in fact taking the competitive balance and tuning it in such a way that it lines up with how you want the game to be played at all levels, not just one.

Why does the noncompetitive players have to always bend over backwards for the competitive players? What is so wrong about compromise? Besides that PA must be able to scale from 1v1 up to a combination of 40 player matches.
I.E. 5v5v5v5v5v5v5v5, 10v10v10v10

Exactly this. Otherwise it's just bad game design.

Sorry, I wasn't replying to you. Your post got ninja'd in before mine.

Most players would agree with this statement, but how are hard numbers going to do this? Not saying they can't because i know it is all numbers in the game files (was into modding once). IMO Soft balance is key here, AoE2 was fine in its day it had a rigid balance with some give allowing a umber of different strats until someone discovered that games could be won with just one unit if they were fast enough and onto it enough with their rigid build order etc... and it devolved from their when 90% or 1v1s in that game were hun vs hun scout wars and competitive play in that game is exclusively geared in that direction. I'm not saying PA players are like that but I've definitely observed the attitude that if you don't do it this way or this way your a poor player.

So have you found a way to completely remove all metagaming function from PA? That's Nobel Prize material right there. Perhaps that girl from 50 First Dates could teach us a thing or two.

Anyway this problem is becoming more about pitting weak players against strong players. That's a stupid thing to do any day of the week. You can not balance against a superior player, and it's a waste of time to even try. The only way to even approach this goal is to remove anything that allows a player to be good. Perhaps that girl from 50 First Dates could teach us a thing or two.

Are you being contrarian just to troll now or what? You essentially agree with me on all points yet you insist on arguing.

The metagame should be able to be understood easily is what I'm saying.

Few things annoy me more than people who argue against things they agree with.

This is where you lose me. This metagame you mention is exactly what the original poster mentioned as well. Worded differently but you want the game to be balanced top down. Which might be good to prevent pro players from exploiting unintended parts of the game but at the same time, set the game up for a high skill area for the game to be fun.

Take Street Fighter for example. A game where split second reactions and combo memory are critical to playing the game correctly. A fighting game where some characters are 1 dimensional in their talents and only play one way due to numerous players finding exploits in the system and utilizing every advantage they can to win championships. The game in the end, doesn't transition very well to the casual class of game play. Its either swim with the big dogs or play with an easy AI.

I'm okay with having the game have some solid unit sets in the game where we(the community) actually do find the exploits early, but you will never find all of them, and asking the dev's to play at "pro metagame" level is an absurd request to streamline the balance and rid the game of "metagame you don't understand".

Street Fighter wasn't designed to be what it is today. Again it was a failure to take into account the true balance that created the modern fighting game.

I don't think you understand: there isn't a difference between an unbalanced game played on a casual level - which is what you want - and a game that has been balanced on a deeper level to cater to that gameplay played on any level.

The actual difference is that everyone will play the game in that way when the game has actually been designed properly for it.

I'm not arguing for a unbalanced game. Just because I don't agree that Pros should define the balance for all levels of the game, doesn't mean I want imbalance to run rampant throughout the game.

After seeing Blizzard try to balance SC2 and SC. I don't think there will ever be a point where a game becomes balanced from professional game play showing the exploits.

I just find that accepting the balance ideas from one small sub group of individuals over the entirety of the gaming community. Is and always will be lopsided in its decisions that effects everyone.

Well no one is arguing for that. Quite the opposite, the balance decisions that are best for everyone should also apply to the highest levels of play.

It isn't an impossible task, it's quite simple really. Because it really is just hard numbers.

Doesn't star-craft 1 still get balance patches?

There will be plenty of time to balance the game once it goes retail. I'd rather they work on feature completion, and limiting "Balance" to "Playable."

Technically, but it's not what anyone would call "regular" from my understanding.

Mike

I would consider myself one of the better players. Not pro but just better. I don't value my skill level as a means to balance the game but 99.9% of the time the better player play the game a lot more than the not better players.

So yes I probably have a more experience than most players. It's not that I can spam click or am a better player it's just I have played more. For the same reason this is why the good players are always more vocal for balance. They are pretty much just sick of the bad in game balance. You don't mind an itch if you need to scratch it once a day.

Of course good players will exploit what can be exploited. To think that we don't want a fun game is beyond my words to try discuss.

Currently its difficult for some to reconcile the dev's intent with the dev's game-play and consequently write them off as being poor players. Ok, they're not great or even good, frankly they're pretty bad by the standard of what current players understand the game to be and feel the game will be; What's being missed is the obvious intent in several of the dev's gameplay decisions/failures -- ie, walling was a pretty poor idea originally (prbly still is in quite a few circumstances) and they were criticized fairly heavily for it (remember?) but of course they were doing that! They needed to see how far they needed to go to make walls function more the way they intended and get used like they intended. How many other poor play decisions (not counting not grabbing metal there's no excuse...) might be misunderstood as just plain noobish when in fact they have a different intent for that area of play than we think?

To be quite fair to scathis he hadn't been doing the balancing for long before the flak was released. So maybe he thought hard counter should band aid the problem with air.

He has had over a month now since then so maybe the new patch will show us what his aim is and this kind of thread may have some grounds. I wrongly posted a thread similar to this after the last patch. I just get major Stockholm syndrome from this game.

This might be long, a bit anecdotal and slightly off topic but bear with me, i hope it's relevant...

The thing that irks me here is the phrase "final balancing". Uber has stated over and over again that they intend to stick around and keep patching this as long as we keep playing it. But even more important, anyone with any experience from any game will tell you that balance changes over time.

What do i mean by that then? Surely if uber won't change anything the game won't change? Well here's the thing, we discover new parts of the game over time. I played TA a lot back in the day, as did plenty others around here, and we can all tell you what a huge change it was when gnug bombing was discovered, or when sy_sj invented the hawk bounce or loads and loads of other small parts in the evolution of the game that had huge influence on game play. We used the anti air units as our main land forces because in big enough packs it didn't matter if the had low dps, their collective dmg was insane because they hit anything within range.

These discoveries that led to trends in gameplay (i believe FOTM, flavour of the month, is a current term for this although cycles where a bit slower then) came sporadically over long times. No one could know that the reload time of the bomber would be so crucial to game balance beforehand, the way to use it in actual gameplay had to be invented by gamers first. Or the turn rate and firing range of advanced fighters. Or how good anti air would be against land units.

I think it's absolutely fantastic that we already have a league under way and that there even is a guy from uber involved as a tournament official. We also know that uber has stated that they watch a lot of games and learn from that. We know they are involved in forums and everything and that they care about what we do and how we play.

My point is just that balancing the game is a long process and all we can do is keep playing. If every tournament is won by some cheap exploit uber will know immediately, what more can we expect? They have a few active players and they look at what we do, in my opinion the current state of things is very good.

TL;DR?
keep calm and game on

But if all that continuous balancing does is shifting the flavour of the month gameplay it is not bringing balance to the game but rather introduce content updates in disguise. While that does increase the longevity of the game it does not fundamentally improve upon the balance of the game itself.
I do acknowledge the difficulty (futility?) of aiming for a stable yet interesting game balance but I deem it better than shaking up the meta every now and then just for the sake of shaking it up.

If uber was blizzard i would wholeheartedly agree with you.

Didn't mean to attack anyone, it is just a general sentiment of mine. I just think that the intention of a change should be reflected in its denotion. Something that Blizzard clearly does not.
It might be worthwhile to think about partial balance in the context of PA being open to modding and fine-grained setup.

I think of it this way, Blizzard changes what's already there to "keep things interesting" more often than not, only resorting to things like a new unit or massive unit revamp when it's absolutely necessary, they do have to consider their future Expansion still after all.

PA doesn't have that issue based on what the Devs have been saying. While a 'proper' Expansion at some point is still viable, they seem to want to focus on providing more content in small doses more often along side the usual patch things like bug fixes and balance. They have a lot of room for things like this, not only is there potential for new units, you also have new Planet/Biome types, new terrain brushes(for existing planets/biomes) and things like gamemodes.

I have high hopes for Uber's proposed approach, much better than the alternatives IMO.

Mike