So now what: Competitive Balance of the Future

Assuming:

1. Uber doesn't release any more balance adjustments
2. We keep a competitive community with regularly hosted tournaments


We need to decide, preferably sooner rather than later, the direction we want to go in taking the competitive community.

There are four routes as I see them:

1. We keep playing the Uber balance. If a certain strat becomes dominant, then a certain strat becomes dominant and everyone uses it. Useless or underused units stay underused.
2. We switch the competitive community over to an adjusted balance such as Bettah-Balance, where underused units are buffed to open up new strategies without seriously changing the game.
3. We move to Galactic Annihilation, Imperial Legion, or some other, yet to be created mod, where it's a whole new game and tourneys will feel a bit more fresh, albeit at the expense of having to relearn the game.
4. We don't make any organized decisions on the subject and don't put much thought into this. More or less the same result as 1, except that the competitive community might fracture and portions die off because we aren't having this discussion. Hopefully will be avoided by my making this thread so that we can discuss this.

No~~~
I like Meso and Pacific, they are the best 1vs1 rank map.

wut
Naval is actually pretty fun at the moment.

We nee more ideas like this +1

@cola_colin @raevn @cwarner7264 @wpmarshall Split all of this shouting about naval into another thread please.

That's not pertinent to this discussion.

Personally I think for this to move forward we either need Uber to hand over the main balance to the community (doubt we're at that point yet), or give us the ability to host a forked version of PA similar to FAF that the community develops and players can migrate over to at such time as Uber no longer host servers for PA.

In the mean time, I can't see total rebalance mods taking off in a big way, purely due to the high barrier to entry (I think this is why Realm balance mod, Statera and GA haven't taken off more so with the player base- they were all good and worthy of more attention but ultimately hard to adapt to).

I think the most likely mods to succeed are either: Mods that take vanilla and adjust it in small increments *slowly improving balance over time* so as not to make it a massive undertaking for players to move to or take an approach that they're doing with the Legion- which (hopefully) keeps the base faction unchanged (allowing players to jump in unhindered) whilst using the second faction to expand the scope (note the second faction will need to be carefully balanced so it doesn't eclipse the base faction, or suck so badly no one can play it).

I think the balance ok atm other than anti air (especially flak) needing to be buffed and the zeus needing to be nerfed but if that doesn't happen I think @cdrkf has the right idea, not some extreme overhaul because it isn't really necessary yet with uber still releasing patches.

I feel that the balance will never be perfect since everyone has different opinion.
No matter Uber listen to who, there are always the other players who are against the idea.

For example, some players want a game with a duration longer than 3 hours.
But some players only accept the game can be finished in less 1 hour.

I feel AA should be buffed, but some player may think the air is fine.
I think the Zeus is ok, but Pieman90 think it needs the nerf.
The similar problem also occurs on other units,
and we lack a method to judge a unit is overpower or under-power.

Here I bring up an idea to gather statistics and judge the unit performance.
So we may have a tool to see what units are overpower, and what units are useless.
Then we can collect replay and balance the game.

To determine an unit is overpower or under-power,
I suggest to calculate the average metal exchange rate.
metal exchange rate = (the metal price of destroy + damage target units)/(the metal price of the unit)
If the unit has a very low average metal exchange rate, it means that the unit is too weak or near useless.
If the unit has a very high average metal exchange rate, it is just overpower.
A Zeus can kill a lot of ground units, but sometime it get killed by fighters in no time.
Gather enough replays and average them, we may be able to know Zeus is op or not.

When calculate this values, please note that:
If an unit can deal damage, but fail to kill the enemy unit before it dies.
It should be still counted, the price of metal to repair the enemy unit/building should be considered.

If the enemy unit has no enough hp to stand the last hit,
only the remaining hp is counted and transferred in the metal.
Thus, the overkill can also be taken into account.
Overkill reduces the average metal exchange ratio, it is quite simple.

Some units may be unable to use this kind of judgment,
such as scout units, combat fabricator, Helios (teleporter).
And it should not be applied to nuke and planetary super weapons (Halley, Catalyst, and Ragnarok).
Another limitation is that some units may be designed to absorb the damage rather than output damage.
And some units may be used to cause the overkill, such as dox vs catapult, or avenger vs Artemis.
They may get a very low metal exchange rate since they can output damage in this kind of situation.
But their death protects other units which may be even more expensive.

With all due respect, this thread isn't for discussing balance paradigms.

This thread is for discussing what we as a competitive community do now that PAT is being slowly but surely abandoned by Uber and balance updates are ceasing.

We have a competitive community?

What?

I am sorry to say that,
but I believe that the only one who can save the PA is Uber itself rather than competitive community.
If Uber really abandons PA, there is indeed nothing we can do here.
Old players will quit, and new players won't enter. Then, the game is dying.

I think the dev have the duty to discuss and shows what they are thinking and doing.
If you have played other online game, such as world of tanks.
You can know that a game which is still alive contains the developers who are willing to talk more about the future of their game.
They provide the Q&A to share their idea to players.
And they are not afraid to say too much, sometime they just change their mind and say why.

Back to the PA, the last "Jables 3 questions chat log" is posted in 3-10-2015
But the October is near the end.
It is about one month without any more new information about the game.
And players may start to worry about the game.

Why not have tournaments with some kind of mod (3) AND tournaments without (1 or 2)?

Unless something like the Imperial Legion mod becomes so great vanilla PA if pretty much boring in which case 3 would be best .

All things considered I would probably go for the option with the most diversity (option 3), unless no mods released turn out to be amazing in which case i would go for 2 assuming there is a major balance problem in vanilla everyone agrees is an issue, otherwise I would go for 1. Anyone else see the problem here?

You are right,
but the players lose contact with Uber for a while.
We need something exciting to look forward to.

I would be the first to create a balance mod with some very uncontroversial non-invasive changes that are widely agreed as being necessary. e.g. air speed, air fab build power, solar drone viability, carrier attack range, sniperbot buff

However, i think the cons are greater than the benefits. The last thing this community needs is further splintering.

Agreed, I think the key point is were currently not at this stage yet.

That said (especially in light of the history with TA and FAF) @stuart98 is correct in its worth thinking about.

At some point in the future, uber may no longer be able to host the primary servers. At that point the community needs to take over control of the multi player service, like with faf.

Once that migration has occurred, that is the time to start tweaking the balance again....

The most important issue is that many players don't know the PAMM.
Everytime when I get an opponent in 1vs1 match, I check the pachat to see his rank.
I find out that only few players who install the pa-state,
and probably the players who install the PAMM are also rare.
Most of the players play the game without the mod.

If the balance is adjusted by mod, then there are always many players who are still playing non-balanced game.
This happens in both 1vs1 ranked games and the custom games.
Balance mod must be a server mod unless it is for single player skirmish,
so I think it is unable to be applied in 1vs1 ranked game.
I don't know whether it is possible for Uber to separate unit balance from the game without using the mod.
I hope the balance adjustment can be handled by community, while the Uber can focus on programming and debug.

I wouldn't mind putting effort in doing some balance changes to the game however I don't think its worth it at the moment. The lack of mod support and thus reaching enough peeps just isn't worth it at the moment. You should know that as one of the best stuart.

So until Uber does something with mod support I'll stick to number 4.

Community fracture and dies also happens when you split em up like Elodea said.

Nonetheless its a good discussion topic. I said I stick to number 4 for now but when nothing will happen with adding mod support then I guess its time to take it into our own hands and create something on our own.

Total annihilation did it. Supcom did it (I think?)

We'll need to sum up what made those games flourish on the modding side and what we need to do to get same kind of results. Example Mod marketplace, Individual unit downloads bladieblah.

The main (in my opinion ofcourse) thing is to do these kind of mods together and not a guy doing some balance changes and saying its great and all. The only way to get a good solid playerbase playing your mod is to make people commit to your mod. If you got 10 guys known for good modding dedicated to a mod then those kind of mods already attract more people then someone who did some magic on there own. Plus 10 guys that say its a fun mod and hosting games regularly also adds up to this.

When the time is right a proper ladder and a few buffs like elodea mentioned could bring new life into the game.

Start a new season with new ladder that doesnt reward you for not playing. Shows your points relative to others and I'm sure we will see a huge increase in ranked games.

Im sure this whole topic is made a few years to early. I don't think there would be any competitive scene in any of the mods since they are just not popular at all and they got even more technical issues then regular PA:T. Asking or answering these questions therefor is pretty much a waste of time in my opinion.

balance of tacmissile units such as the hornet and stingray



also i generaly support mods that add to the current ballance than to entirely change it .. such as owom and eventualy the legion mod ...
current ballance merely needs tweaks ...