Frostiken, on 08 June 2012 - 11:00 AM, said:
This is straight up bull. Their 'balance patches' have barely touched a handful of items at a time, maybe three or four tiny tweaks, that are usually a day late and a dollar short.
Please direct any evidence you have that Hi-Rez actually gives a crap about what their playerbase has balance problems with to the SABER LAUNCHER. This weapon is despised by literally everyone and it has been utterly useless since it's existed in the game. No patch they have released has buffed it in any meaningful way, and it's complained about in 40-page threads on a monthly cycle on the forums.
In actual fact the Saber launcher was nerfed twice, once in december (IIRC) when its lock on time was increased from 3 seconds to 5 seconds, and possibly at the same time or early in january to decrease its speed and the turning capability of the missile, all in accordance with the communities wishes. Since then the shrike pilots have improved, rendering the saber launcher less useful, and cappers have learnt to keep their exit routes lower to the ground, also rendering the saber launcher less useful. The community demands for a buff have steadily increased, perhaps indicating that they should have adapted to the earlier situation, or perhaps that Hi-Rez SHOULD have made incremental changes in the Saber launcher rather than 1 or 2 massive changes.
Frostiken, on 08 June 2012 - 11:00 AM, said:
The fully-upgraded Juggernaut is another good example of their complete lack of foresight. A heavy machinegun, a long-range mortar, and a pocket full of instant-access rapid-fire medium spinfusor discs, all on a Heavy? Whoever thought that one up should've been fired on the spot. Everyone knows it's over-the-top. Hi-Rez knows it's over-the-top. They just don't care.
The fully upgraded Juggernaut is in fact very difficult to beat when used properly, however to be used properly it is exercising the use of almost every weapon or ability it has (the LMG for aerial combat, the Throwing Disc for ground strikes, His regen pack for survival and the mortar for area denial). Any class that comes to take him on needs to be similarly using every asset at its disposal, I have personally seen quality soldiers running Assault rifle, Thumper, Proximity Grenade and Utility pack smash such juggernauts all over the field because they similarly are using every single one of their assets to win.
Frostiken, on 08 June 2012 - 11:00 AM, said:
And yet the vast majority of players still agree that the Jackal is crazy overpowered. It's been months and they still have yet to find a good balance for it. The last major poll I saw had less than 8% of the forum community agreeing that it was currently balanced, with over 85% of the community saying it was still way too powerful. Every argument against the Jackal is far more than your hyperbole of people "not wanting to adapt", every argument levied against it has had excellent merit and was founded on sound logic and an objective viewpoint. The players who play 90%+ of their time as Infiltrator unanimously agree that it's still way, way too much.
Yes the Jackal is certainly strong, the primary reason being because it does something that other weapons cant, it has controlled detonation, its DPS is not better than any other main line weapon certainly. I am however pretty certain that I have never been beaten by a Jackal user that i significantly worse than me in a 1v1 situation.
Frostiken, on 08 June 2012 - 11:00 AM, said:
Incremental balance patching is useless, it is actually not that hard to see what needs to be done and ballpark it. Their latest change was a 4% damage nerf. <strong>4%</strong>. The ONLY thing this changed in any way was that the Jackal now requires three stickies to instagib another infiltrator. Against everyone and everything else, nothing is different.
Actually incremental balance patching IS the way to go, it allows the meta-game to start to take the new weapons into account. Many situations of "obvious" imbalance in games can actually be addressed via shifts in the metagame. A particularly good example of this is about 14 months ago in the Starcraft 2 community when the vast majority of users were howling for a nerf to Marauders. Less than a month later the Metagame had shifted, new tactics had been developed and learned, timings had been analysed, and the previous Marauder based builds had been almost entirely neutralized in any game involving competent players, with no balance patching being required at all
Frostiken, on 08 June 2012 - 11:00 AM, said:
Like I said, a day late and a dollar short, that's the HiRez way. I'm seriously skeptical about their changes as well. I do not trust competitive players in the least, and this is Hi-Rez kowtowing to a community that makes up less than 5% of their playerbase, while all the problems in pubs are related to team stacking (they still have yet to implement a random team function), lack of speed limits (making 'pubstar' cappers essentially unstoppable), and some terrible gameplay design such as disc sniping turrets from across the map.
here again you show your lack of understanding of the games development. there were previously speed limits int he game until mid-november last year, and were removed by Hi-Rez at the request of the community. prior to the speed limit removal heavy cappers were considered almost unstoppable because at 180kph the chasers had trouble catching them (because they were speed limited) to impact nitron them and had to much health (being juggernauts) to stop directly. It wasnt until the speed limits were removed that the heavy capping became fundamentally beatable because the pathfinders could accelerate to sufficient speeds to actually catch and nitron them.
Frostiken, on 08 June 2012 - 11:00 AM, said:
This is what patch notes from a developer who listens to its players looks like:</p>
https://help.ea.com/...-3-major-update
This is what Hi-Rez's largest patch has looked like:
http://forum.hirezst...261&t=66921
7 balance items, 3 of which are bug fixes (that is not 'balance changing', Hi-Rez), 1 of which has zero impact on anyone except brand new players, and 1 which has been mathematically insignificant (3% more speed, boy that'll make Doombringers pick it over the chaingun... not).
yes EA has an impressive patch list there, with a much bigger development team i would expect to see more extensive patch notes, however I cant help but notice the tremendous amount of bug fixes that are in those patch notes, which to me certainly looks like the game was fundamentally broken before. Tribes: Ascend on the other hand has a short series of patch notes because the fundamental mechanics are working, with only a couple of known serious bugs, that are being worked on or have been worked out. The balance issues were all necessary, for instance the one you mention in regards to the heavy bolt launcher brought the weapon more into line with the other heavy primary weapons, and made it significantly easier to hit moving targets. The buff was well needed and well received, Its not unusual to see 50% of Doombringers running with the bolt launcher, certainly its not the first choice for most Primary HOF's, but it is present.
Frostiken, on 08 June 2012 - 11:00 AM, said:
Tribes: Ascend was a game with a huge amount of potential that was completely let down by lazy (Tribes maps are literally the easiest maps in the world to make, and we still barely have any), incompetent (many weapons are broken ON PAPER, in practice they are even worse. The plasma hitbox is a good example, 30 seconds in the target practice revealed it was seriously broken), and greedy (the vast majority of their efforts have been geared towards providing things to sell, not fixing what is already there) developers.
Whilst I agree that the plasma gun was a little strong on launch, it was patched within 48 hours. The complaints some have made in regards to the idea that Hi-Rez is releasing overpowered weapons for short term financial gain has been smashed by the seemingly perfectly balanced "staying alive" update for the brute, and now the forthcoming patch that alters many of the weapons in the game.
Frostiken, on 08 June 2012 - 11:00 AM, said:
Don't even get me started on how stupid their vision for Tribes was. Flag stands in the open that are mostly impossible to properly defend? Giving almost every class a machine gun that practically matches the Doombringer chaingun in DPS? The ability to crap out an auto-aiming turret anywhere you want in gamemodes with no generators that have no use for turrets?
the flag stands are only impossible to defend without proper teamwork.
In previous tribes iterations almost every singe class carried the chaingun as standard.
The Technician pays i other ways for his turret, lacking decent energy regen for instance. the game is however intended to be balanced around CTF, other game modes naturally suffer a certain amount because of lacking objectives around which to balance.
Frostiken, on 08 June 2012 - 11:00 AM, said:
Let me point this out: automatic weapons have been universally despised in T:A. They were complained about in closed beta. They were complained about in open beta. They were complained about in the launch. Hi-Rez blissfully ignored everything, and it cost them business. So only now they are allegedly balancing them. Why didn't they just listen to everyone in the first place? Competitive players do not know any more about balance that can't be determined from simply playing the damn game a lot.
In closed beta the automatics were changed from hitscan based weapons to projectile based weapons, upon community feedback. individual weapons have been subject to a continuous cycle of modification, based upon server data. At this point, 3 months after the official release of the game, Hi-rez have decided to make sweeping changes according to community wishes. in that time they have made 3 content additions and at least 3 balance patches.
Just as many would argue that changes should not be made according to the competitive community because it is only a small subset of the entire player base, It can simultaneously be argued that changes should not be made according to the forum users opinions, not only are they also only a small percentage of the player base, they tend to be an even more vocal minority. Only the server owners (Hi-Rez) have access to all the data about the game, furthermore they have said form the beginning that they want the game to be an e-sport and balanced around the competitive community, and lo and behold, they are balancing based upon feedback made by the competitive community.
As a closing statement on the matter of community feedback, I have played probably hundreds of online communities over the years, I have seen games that go 6 months without balance modifications, or who make changes without any consideration at all for community perspectives. I still stand that Hi-Rez is continuing to modify their game, albeit gently, in accordance with community wishes, and that PGI could do A LOT worse than Hi-Rez does. Look at Valve for instance, who still hasn't completed the "Meet the" series for all the classes in TF2. A gentle program of constant patching and updating is by far preferable to months and months of nothing, followed by 1 or 2 content or patch updates. For example, Left 4 Dead.
*edited to fix formatting errors caused by page timout
Edited by Lauranis, 08 June 2012 - 02:14 PM.
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