I've seen quite a lot of people complain about some of the changes that uber made, because those people find those changes unimportant. So I make this post to attempt making it easier to understand why some "silly changes" like balancing are made at this early stage. First of all I don't work for uber so take what's said here with a grain of salt. I'm going to list what's Hard to change and what's Easy to change. Feel free to add to this in the comments, I will do my best to keep up. (What I believe is) hard to code/change and takes time: Unit behavior (path finding, targetting, death timing, getting stuck, models, clipping, teleporting, detection hitting ground and mountains in front of them etc) Frames Pr Second (generally optimization takes time) Crashing client. (same as above, there will always be things unexpectedly going into a loop crashing the client, mostly because different computers have different stats and ways to handle code.) Lag(again, optimization takes time.) Biomes hitboxes terrain and mass points (remember that this isn't redesigned maps, this has to take account for procedural generation so they have to code it in a way that will work however it looks.) Camera, angle, position and control.This is generally a new thing to have to take account for as very few games have actually revolved around whole planets before. (What I believe is) Easy to code/change and takes very little time Unit properties(balancing) like: damage, area of effect, health, speed of firing. this is easy to change due to the fact that it's actually just one number. change the number and stats will differ. Icons/interface. this is something everyone can change actually, and it just needs a little time in an editing program. colors. New unit's and icons (okay not the easiest thing but it's still easier than those stated above) also, they have different people working at different things, so they're probably working on many of the things on the same time, naturally the things that get changed first, ends up in an update.
The problem is, any work done on those blue items could be wasted if an engine or gameplay change is made that invalidates them, so you have to be careful about how much you do. Examples: Balancing before metal spots are even implemented. Worrying too much about the build UI without knowing how many units it has to support. It's not much different from posting bugs about partially implemented features. There's people who can't even play the game, those that can shouldn't be upset if uber focuses on the bugs that matter now. Beta is for the blue items.
No I do understand that, I don't think many people are upset if they don't change balance, the reason I made this post was that so many people where upset that they already made some balance changes. and balance changes are basically a one second thing to do and very easy to revert or change again when further things have been implemented, such as mass points.
The problem with balance changes is that any work put into them will be invalidated by engine changes (changing values is simple so most of the work is analysis). A lot of core mechanics are bugged or not yet implemented to the extent that and balance now will be destroyed later. The work done here which is based on our feedback will have little direct effect on the final game because we are not playing anything like the final game. But I suppose there is reason to mess with balance. It is so easy to make some simple large changes to improve the game that we have at the moment. This should increase the number of people playing and catching bugs. It will also 'train' people into giving balance feedback. I just hope that nobody becomes too attached to the current balance because I think it is quite likely to be completely redone in the future.
