Pay to Win.... Do we support this?

Confirm this statement and there's no argument.

People have nothing better to do and our RTS hopes and dreams are in this title. Getting worked up about nothing is unavoidable.

Having a palette of features that every player gets to choose from (And no bonuses to the special commanders) would be perfect. That way you get some variety without complaint.

I don't think we ever had an issue, they can make so many decisions on the extent of the commander variance and we haven't playtested, and they said they would balance them , AND it's just the commander, the only real things they shouldn't mess w/ are the internal econ / build rate since that has exponential compounding due to construction timing early game, so again until proven otherwise i trust uber and mavor to make good decisions regarding custom commanders. personally though i think variance in functionality is useful as long as there exists more than one commander for the standard set as well so you can pick a commander to better "focus" a strategy, and balance isn't a matter of being able to do something someone cannot unless that option is strictly better, which i doubt would be the case

there is nothing more boring than a perfectly balanced game...

http://penny-arcade.com/patv/episode/perfect-imbalance

so yeah some commander diversity will be great

Prophet points to me! xD

And goes to show until we know more we should sit tight, and not doubt Uber.......yet.

Mike

What a silly topic. Commanders will be balanced properly and I doubt whatever "special" abilities they get will be the thing that tips an entire game in your favor. Calling it "pay to win" is pretty extreme by any reasonable standard(especially since at this point everything is assumption).

Does anybody know how many default skins/types of commanders there are going to be? Why shouldn't there be something more unique about commanders that you payed way more for as long as it doesn't upset balance?

Nice poll btw, I like how it only reflects your bias.

Please not again :cry:
Let´s end this thread with this:

UBER is going to balance the costum commanders very well.

/thread pls

Oh god.. He must be creating this topic just to see everyone anger..

I wouldn't think on it too much, if it is something threads on this topic have shown is that people by and large do not have an issue with it.

Pretty much this. If we assume a worst case scenario where everything the concerned parties are worrying about somehow becomes reality (I surely dont see it); then it will become evident in alpha/beta and appropriate adjustments can be made then.

We have exactly zero confirmations about what kind of features Alpha/Beta/Progenitor/custom commanders will have at this stage in development and Uber have stated on more than one occasion that balance is foremost in their minds with relation to the issue. I for one am confident that if the issues arise with relation to balancing unique abilities then it would be fixed.

Whilst it is inevitable that not all of of a linked video will be relevant I really like Extra Credits and it addresses some points really well. Off topic but I really liked their video on aesthetics vs graphics when explaining the art style of PA to people http://penny-arcade.com/patv/episode/graphics-vs.-aesthetics

I'm sorry but this has got to be one of the worst extra credit vids out there and as I've stated before I'm going to post sirlins critique every time someone links to it.

http://www.sirlin.net/blog/2012/7/18/a-discussion-of-balance.html

To be honest, I don't care for either the EC video OR the article. They look too closely at their specific definition of balance, but fail to broaden their views on what makes strategic variety occur, that being player choice.

With chess, the reason it's so restrictive is due to the shared information; each player knows all the possibilities that the other player can make. This restricts them to a certain subset of choices that are acceptable, the best of which can be determined by thinking ahead a few moves.

However, if the player does NOT know the possible choices of their opponent, they must now discover the choices available to and the decisions made by their opponent. Frozen Synapse is a good example of a game in the spirit of chess that adds this layer of information warfare. Now instead of just trying to defeat your opponent with the perfect strategy, you are constantly trying to determine the strategy to use while foiling their strategy. This is a lot closer to how strategy works in the real world.

TA and Supcom do an especially good job at this in the RTS realm, if only for the implementation of radar. This helps to add that information layer of the game and allows for plenty of gameplay depth. Ruse was another RTS that tried to implement an interesting information warfare model.

In the end, a game that's perfectly balanced, but with additional layers that encourage player choice and the information metagame (gaining info, misleading your opponent, etc) that gives a deep strategic game the variety it needs for adaptive strategies.

Starcraft's issue is that wh

+1 for Frozen Synapse reference, great example to illustrate your point : D

The suspense is killing me, what comes next!

Oh bother. I was going to piss and moan about Starcraft, but decided it would be superfluous. Somehow that managed to remain in my post . . .

Now you gotta do it ;p

Mike

Not going to give into peer pressure - okfine. I'll make this quick cause it really is kinda off topic.

The issue with Starcraft (other than the whole APM/micro thing) is that while it's technically balanced, it's balanced in a very rigid paper/scissors/rock style, where every unit is a hard counter to another unit. For example, in Starcraft II, a hellion will slaughter zerglings in almost any situation. This results in strategic game that is essentially a list of recipes of how to beat your opponent. While it doesn't have the "weakness" chess has of globally revealed information, the strategic possibilities are so reduced that it ends up having the same problems.

The solution here is not to make units have advantages over other specific units, but to give units advantages in certain situations. (For example, Peewees will wipe out Rockos in an open field, but at a chokepoint, they'll get slaughtered.) This results in the players taking advantage of battlefield conditions to claim victory, which is, once again, how battles are fought in real life. The added advantage is that now new units can be added easily without the worry of how they will stack against other units with regards to who counters who. Instead, the issue of balance is focused on how effective the unit is in a situation, which is a lot easier to accomplish with a large number of units. This also allows for units to have situational overlaps, meaning the units will have more depth as a single unit can have varying degrees of effectiveness in multiple situations.

Again, this is how balance was accomplished in TA and refined in its mods. Supcom was slightly more limited in this aspect, but because of the size of the game, it opened up more options for the player, thus retaining its strategic complexity.

To bring it back to the video/article, the problem with their analysis is that the view of balance they present is very small and limited. With a wider scope developers can strive for perfect balance without worrying that the game will become formulaic, like chess or Starcraft. In fact, even though perfect balance is very difficult to achieve, a game with this wider scope of balance can end up seeming perfectly balanced from a gameplay perspective while on the strictest technical level imbalances exist. Since the scope is so large, an imbalance would not be relevant enough to affect actual gameplay.


And that brings us aaaall the way back to the topic of this thread. Since the scope of PA is so large, even if commanders do have some imbalances, the overall affect on the game just won't be big enough to determine a win.

This is why I support different commanders having different abilities. It gives a lot more variety; everyone who complains it'll imbalance doesn't know that because they've not even played the game. It's up to how Uber judge it, and really, they are the most experienced people here in terms of RTS balancing.

This is why Supcom did so well with multiple factions; they gave a lot more variety yet still never turned into a rock-paper-scissors type game. It was all very well and fluidly done, and since we can't manage multiple factions financially then using multiple commanders is the perfect way to go.

EDIT:

And perfect imbalance isn't the way to go. Not many games actually do this, and I think those guys got mixed up. What you actually want to achieve, is well balanced gameplay but a large variety of different possibilities that can never be separated into singular strategies, meaning genius bouts of inspiration are rewarded.

Playing Devil's Advocate here, but they could swing a game in some situations like a Comm duel or Comm Rush, but it still depends on the context/situation along with the actual 'imbalance'. Overall it comes down to the 'imbalance' itself and not the fact that the Comm is unbalanced.

Mike

Very true, but I would think that imbalances like that would be obvious enough that they would be ironed out by the end of the alpha. Anything more subtle would probably not be all that effective in a multi-planet game.

Also, I'm pretty certain that at maximum there are only 4 commander ability sets planned at the moment; the 3 standard commanders and 1 for the custom commanders, which will all share a build. (Their uniqueness is determined by their model.) So really, players with access to only one commander wouldn't be missing out on all that much.

But then, why not give those Commander options to everyone?
I'm in favour of Commander modules/chassis/some other way to have the Commander evolve during the play ; this would be the next (previous?) logical step, choosing what 'first module' or 'starting chassis' you decided to use with the Commander right at the beginning, depending on the map/location.
Ideally, you would choose that once in-game, for example when deciding your starting location, so you can give a good look at the map.
It's a water planet? I choose the submarine Commander, who moves faster in water and has a torpedo launcher instead of a lazor.
There is a nice little, easily defensible valley with lots of resources? I choose to start there with a Commander with less speed and firepower but more buildpower.
Just the first choice of in-game Commander customization. No need to tie it to a particular appearance. Ideally, it could be changed in-game for a cost, like any module.