Before Uber start final balancing....

They need to take a week to really play the game a lot and learn how to play competitively. I still feel they don't really know what is balanced because most of them don't seem very experienced at competitive play.

It's great they're doing more play tests but they all seem to be FFA where as a lot of the competitive scene when balance really matters is 1v1 and 2v2.

Actually, I think they don't need to play competitively. The "Play"tests are not for the dev's to "compete" against each other. It is used to figure out how well a balance change effected the game and the units involved.

If they were worried about winning, they might lose focus on individual units and bugs.

I'm sure when Scathis is done Tweaking with the Uber balance he will let us test drive the balance to see if it really works competitively. Considering we are going to have a lot more tournaments and see 1v1 2v2 s on youtube. Scathis can probably check it out on the weekends to see how everything is shaping up to be.

This twitch integration is quite useful for history and playback.

This gets brought up every few playtests or so.

The devs are getting better, and they watch our gameplay and listen to the forums.

I'm not overly worried right now.

Yeah, I'm assuming that once FULL pass or two has been done on balance Scathis will be able to really take in info from the community because we'll be able to have more fully informed feedback as well.

Mike

I disagree about 1v1. For a game this big, I'd think 2v2 or 3v3 should be the primary formats for competition. There's no point in making a game with such tremendous scale and then trying to cut it down to short 1v1 matches.

Keep in mind that Scathis is , also he knows what he is doing.

Lol I think they are busy thinking up unit's that would fun to use with out being one time gimmicky unit's.
Real balance come later when all unit's are in.
Dev play tests are not used for balance but to test theory of said unit and of course looking for unintended features.
Public will give an overall idea if some thing is over powered for sure looking at air

It is a great shame that devs don't have time to play their own games, and so never really get to understand them on the level it takes to do great design.

But the entire point of competitive play is to figure out how well a balance change affected the game. Without a serious game the feedback can not be accurate.

Of course not every single dev needs to be a super RTS player. It matters mostly for the balance team, since their insights depend entirely on knowing how an RTS works.

They are making such fluid changes in balance daily that it would be difficult to track the changes and how they affected the competitive game. Competitive balance requires a good sample size of games to see trends. 1 playtest a day isn't going to help in this area.

This again, surely this has been discussed to death and still no middle ground found or acceptance by competive players that the way they use units has an often vastly different balance than when an average player (most of the market probably) uses the same units? IMO strong/competitive players, (opinionated (certainly it sometimes seems like they think they speak for all and future players), should cool off a bit and see how the final product is and deliver a PRO mod if it doesn't mesh with what PRO's want. This has been done with a number of games including ones intended for competitive play (Dawn of War and expansions), and others).

It certainly won't. That only makes strong dev players more important, so that time isn't wasted on doomed or overly messy ideas.

Good players don't show what the game ideally wants to be. They show what the game IS. Making the game match the vision is not possible without good players to PROVE that the design does the thing it is supposed to do. If the play doesn't match the vision, then you simply dun goofed.

Of course a sufficiently skilled player could just tell you what direction a tweak will take the game. It saves a lot of bumbling around in the dark, which means more time to refine the good things.

Balance is balance. It's hard numbers. The only things pro's do different is they figure out obscure situations where certain units are useful. If you don't take into account these situations then those units will be broken whether most players know about it or not. This will only make the game more frustrating for newbies when pro's abuse it.

Newbies also tend to use units in a more intuitive way, so if units are balanced so that the competitive balance reflects what a unit intuitively seems like it should be able to do, this also reduces frustration because better players don't use units in obscure unintuitive ways.

Then quite possibly no game has ever been balanced 'properly' then, devs are often worse at their own game than at least a core of the players, especially ones who shout loudest apparently. Balance is only hard numbers? There's a little more to it than that, fun and creative intent are hardly mathematical. Incidentally the PRO mods for their games are not as fun as the un-modded (or more outrageous mods), rather they cater to a small hard-core audience that play to win win win win win with little/no ethics, these mods slightly force a degree of fair-play by rigid-ifying the game in question and removing intuitive play. Intuition is not mathematical it can't be crunched and broken down to the sum of its parts and quantified in formula on a blackboard.
BMB, I definitely agree with your sentiments on the difference between how pros and newbies use units, and this is exactly my point - cater to to pro players needs (supposedly so they are easier on newbies (this will never be solved with balance newbies will always be worse than pros and get humiliated) and get a stale game, or let intuition lead and hard numbers follow further behind.

Numbers serve the design concepts, not the other way around. If the concept doesn't fit, then the numbers are never going to work properly; something is going to break along the way. It may not matter today, but it WILL matter when something new has to interact with that broken concept. Simple lesson: Don't break things, it's bad.

For example: Vanilla Supcom's 1/10th HP air theater was a broken concept out the gate. It failed the instant something that wasn't an AA weapon found the opportunity to hit air. Such as artillery. Or broadswords. When PA tried the same thing it was a definite "xcuse me WTF r u doin" moment.

Obscure situations aren't pro exploits. They are developer failures at mastering their game. That's all the more reason to know how the RTS interactions work so they can be anticipated and accounted for.

Then you don't understand what I was saying at all. Which is that the hard numbers should support the intended design and reflect the intuitive properties you might expect. That way newbies and pro's will use units in the same way, leading to a less frustrating game for newbies because they will be able to understand what they did wrong instead of simply seeing better players run them into the ground with exploits in a poorly balanced game.

To elaborate on what I mean with intuition, you might intuit that a tank has heavy armor, so if a tank has low HP these concepts will not match up. You might intuit that you cannot run as fast as a car, which clashes with the current setup of bots being faster than tanks.

You might intuit that you should build factories to produce units, you might intuit that bigger engineers are better. You might intuit that the biggest gun in the game does the most damage. These should be familiar to any player of FA.

BMB hard numbers should support intended design but I'll be frank, the way pros play RTS isn't fun. AOE2 scout rush for the win in 5mins and call gg and resign if your woodcutters die for example... this sort of play is why i'm vehemently opposed to 'pro's having anything to do with balance of a game, any game.

The reason it isn't fun is because the hard numbers don't support the intended design. The game you think you're playing, the game you want to play, and the game you are actually playing are two different things.

The problem with only taking the viewpoint of a select region of a gaming base from the entirety of the game will alienate the casual and medium level players. The goal is to make the game fun.

Of course I understand that, there just happens to be very little to understand. It's a lot of buzzwords with extremely obscure meaning and no substance behind it.

A huge amount of the "intuitive" aspects of the game are all about UI and VISUALS. If something is happening in game, then it should LOOK like it is happening as well. The game could be about gigantic hurt boxes that shoot other hurt boxes, and still retain every single bit of complexity and depth that an RTS demands. It'd just be confusing as ****.