Think Snipers are OP? Assassins are cheap? Come right in.

O hai guys. I can't be everywhere at once. If there is a post that's out of line, please use the report post button. I'd prefer if you keep the flames to a minimum though.

Balance is always a hot topic, but please try not to take it personal, thx.

Tada. Just like that you answered your own question. I responded because I felt like I had something to bring up to. Namely, that people should learn about the mechanics of the game they're playing before they even consider suggestions any changes to the game.

Balance is generally a tricky thing, and few developers get it right. So far, Uber stands amongst such jewels.

It's a shame, but I too have seen games go down the toilet due to poor balance.

That said, yes, I'd do a tweak or two, but nothing very radical. Just very small touch ups here and there.

Let us buff, not nerf!

Positive things bring positive feelings

Wouldn't want to power creep though.

I want pitgirl buffed. She has not enough screentime!

What are you crazy?
She has guaranteed insults on Snipers, Gunner and Assassins from spawn, with them having no ability to counter-attack!
If I wasn't running Gold Self Esteem in my custom classes I'd be doomed!

I can't answer my own question, being that it was directly aimed at you.

But whatever. Just don't expect everyone to react positively when you go out of your way to say (basically) "If you think anything is imba, cry more" which is basically the gist of the OP.

I've generally found that developers have to almost try in order to make the actual shooting or game mechanics be obviously broken. I think for the most part natural intuition has served the industry pretty well. Where I look for imbalance in modern shooters is generally within the metagame--i.e., which characters/upgrades/weapons one carries, what works best where and why--that kind of thing. ETQW, for example, had good fundamentals but bad metagame balance. Players on one team could exchange health for ammo (they were aliens, drawing both their life support and ammunition from the same pool of biomatter), but the other team couldn't. The human army's counter for that was a boost of 5 HP per medic on the team, to a maximum of 20. So while any player on the alien faction could heal or resupply ammo as needed, the human faction had to rely on there being enough medics on the team to properly counter it--ETQW proposed to 'balance' a keystroke ability available to all players of one faction with a spawn decision from the other. Eventually this led to (among other things) the alien players stacking one class, since a diversity thereof was not anywhere near as necessary for them as it was on the human side. I think most people that played that game only played the beta, since its flaws (while many of them were later fixed) were readily apparent. Last time I saw the global data for that game, the alien faction had close to a 60% overall win rate across all games played--very likely for the simple reason that its characters operated better independently and it's easier to do your own thing in a shooter than it is to work as a team.

MNC doesn't have any of that since it's completely symmetrical in terms of class/weaponry mechanics, but it still has a metagame mostly in the form of what endorsements see common use and which bots/turrets get put up in various stages of the game. Those two areas will probably get the most attention from me balance-wise for the next few weeks/months/years.

Define balanced?

If you have a weighing scale.

Put two rocks of the same weight on each side of the scale.
If neither of the rocks pull the other up by being overweight compared to the other, then they are basically balancing each other out.

BALANCE!

Sure you can. You just did!

And I don't expect anything. You know what they say about assumptions!

What do you consider "obviously broken" ? Cause I'd consider what you just mentioned obviously broken.

It reminds me of another case on another game: Space Cowboy/Flysis/Air Rivals/whatever the hell. Game changed company once and name a few times... It was basically about space ships (gears) and dog fighting/combat/etc.

The game was supposed to follow a Rock-Paper-Scissor mechanic, but instead it was more of a Scissor - Different varieties of paper.

You had a jetfighter style air-to-air superiority dog fighting gear (I-Gear).
You had a multipurpose/support medic gear (M-Gear)
You had a "flying tank", meant as your ground-to-air gear (A-Gear)
And you had a bomber-style air-to-ground (B-Gear)

It was supposed to be something along the lines of A>I>B>A with M being hard to kill for everyone, but not a particular threat for anyone.

You could also spec your gear for attack or defense. In theory, an attack and defense builds would null each other out (attack granted more probability to hit, less damage reduction, and higher damage, defense granted higher damage reduction or, for i-gear's case, more evasion, and more hp).

In practice B gears, particularly the defense kind, were capable of wrecking all other gears, usually only needing some support from M gears.

In a game where you could carry copious amounts of "repair kits" (your standard "use when you want" health pack) the B-gear was the only capable of one-hit-killing any non-defense spec gear, and dealing absurdly high damage to defense speced ones (which would generally take almost no damage from anyone else).

At high levels it became particularly absurd. The attack variant had very high HP (despite low defense) and the ability to one-hit-kill every other class in the game. The defense variant could one-hit-kill all attack variants, could not be one-hit killed, or even receive significant damage, except from another b-gear, and, on top of that, was still capable of inflicting very high damage to other defense variants. Essentially making it the equivalent to MNC's Assault if he had the Tank's HP, permanent juice, a minigun instead of his assault rifle, and an extra support style shotgun for good measure.

To make it even more absurd, the game used small cube-shaped maps linked through "gates" (read teleporters). As you went through the teleport you were very vulnerable, so during wars people tended to camp those. M-gears were used as anchors in a squad since they were capable of free movement. Guess who was the absolute best at camping gates? That's right. The one gear capable of launching very high damage bombs that could one hit kill anything going through. Off course, they were also the best gears to BREAK those due to a special attack that allowed them to kamikaze and destroy basically everything around them.

THAT was demonstrably broken. There was nothing they couldn't do, and nothing they were inferior at.

That was an F2P game, but this was also present in many retail games like Diablo II/LoD (LOLOLOLWWBARBSANDHAMMERDINSLOLOL) and such. So far, MNC isn't really like that.

It could use some minor touch ups, but it comes down to very minor adjustments.

AHAH! If you're still wondering why this thread exists "SHOTGUNS ARE MASSIVELY OP!".

A weapon that can't shoot past 1024 units and has average/high dps is op!

The fact that a bunch of people who play this game are idiots doesn't change that there really are glaring balance issues. When you dismiss it all out of hand, you're making it harder to talk about the genuine problems. I posted a new thread elaborating on some of it.

It can be put simply for any game in existence where balance is called into question:


I am rock. Paper is OP. Scissors is fine.

I am paper. Scissors is OP. Rock is fine.

I am scissors. Rock is OP. Paper is fine.



And I'll beat someone to it: I deliberately left out lizard and Spock for the sake of simplicity.

If you addressed what people had to say rather than dismissing them out of hand, it wouldn't be nearly as condescending.

The only thing that is OP for me about snipers is the drastically long ice traps. An absolute moron who has never played a shooter before could take the time to scope in and take the headshot just because the traps give so much time to line it up.

ice traps should make you immune to dmg, like encased in a giant block of ice lol..

and the most OP thing about snipers is explosvie rounds and rate of fire.. hello bot wave with a pro near it.. you are dead now.. pro too.

One could say the same of you in your own thread, you've just been dismissing people out of hand angrily.

Except there aren't. You just sound like a bad player complaining. You do so in your thread, I haven't even bothered replying because everyone that did you simply stuck your fingers in your ears and said "NU HUH!". You're guilty of the very thing you accuse people off, promptly dismissing any critic, regardless of what evidence is provided.

You start your entire thread on awfully fallacious presumptions without any kind of evidence, not even hearsay or misguided conjecture, let alone statistical or empirical data. You say "THESE 3 CLASSES ARE BEST BECAUSE I SAID SO!". Except they aren't, and I can prove you they aren't. And I'll do so in that other thread.

It's exactly because of people like you that I made this thread.

It has actually been reduced on PC. It's bearable now.