The purpose of this Alpha test is to find the most exploitable unit imbalance and speed win every match, right? Would it not make more sense to avoid the imbalanced exploitables so we can accurately test other aspects on occasion?
That's one of the reasons why they do make some balance changes, I supposed. However balance will be drastically changed as soon as planets do not play like metal planets anymore.
The goal of the alpha is to try and break PA in the most horrible ways you can imagine. Those can be things that lead to crashes, unexpected behavior and exploitable imbalances. Balance is usually focussed on later but it doesn't hurt to be aware of very imbalanced tactics because some might require time and testing to fix. The closer you get to release the harder it becomes to change fundamental mechanics and problems. Something that might be a couple of hours worth of fixing time in alpha might turn into days or weeks later on. In some cases it becomes so difficult to fix that the feature has to be cut from the game. Little things like a tank that is a bit OP for it's cost is beta stuff. "OMG, I can push my commander inside that mountain and he can't be killed" is useful to know earlier.
Having just read The Trenches trenchescomic.com the stories of the efforts some QA guys go through I'd like to say guys you're doing great work. If we're submitting duplicate bugs I'm sorry but we're only trying to help because you've created something special even in Alpha and we're just helping you make this as awesome as possible because it's such a fun game to play. I'll admit to being ignorant until I read stories of how hard you guys work 80 hours week near crunch time I've never worked that many hours so I'm proud of your passion for this game to have backed you guys to make it
My OP was meant as sarcastic, because I am generally dissapointed in the outcome most players seem to go to every time(leviathan spam or t2 artillery tank spam). It would be nice if we could all mutually agree to have matches play out as they should, rather than exploiting imbalances that we already know exist. It is not something Uber can do, it's something that the current alpha player base has to do.
Sorian mentioned that they play by "gentlemen rules" in the office, only putting mexes where points are supposed to be, etc. Still, I'm mostly just using the time I have for the game to practice economy builds and add confirmations to the bug tracker. Also, see how different things affect my CPU/GPU use and such.
I'm working on if I'm on zero energy or metal I wait and do nothing until I am refilled but I do notice some people not doing economy and then just building one of each factory and leaving it whilst I expand and expand and keep my energy and metal going so I can then leave my economy to power my multiple factories constantly.
