I'll start this post with an analogy. You ever know a kid growing up who thought he was the supreme fighting game champion, before games like that existed on the internet? He could beat all his friends routinely and played all the character campaigns.
Then said kid went to a neighborhood arcade and throw his quarter up against a group playing his best game. Little did he know, these people kept up on the hard data for the game, to really know which moves work and which do not. Said kid lasts about 10 seconds and doesn't land a single punch through repeated virtual beatings.
Now, those same arcade players go to a regional tournament, say nothing of nationals. Now they're against people who practice the exact same information, but do so for hours. They've developed combos based purely on frame data and math. Needless to say, the arcade players last as long as the first kid did.
What is my point? It's getting increasingly obvious that PGI is balancing from that kid's POV, from a complete bubble. They are seeing what weapons need buffs and nerfs based on two things:
- Overall number of people taking items/'mechs - this is a terrible indicator. As in my example, if you're just fighting a handful of people with no connection to the larger balanced world outside, you're likely to take bad characters 'mechs and gear. There's always going to be a low more people in lower skill brackets to keep those numbers up, too, even if anyone who sticks with the game (the people who pay most) will eventually shed all of them.
- More importantly, without an understanding how things play out in practice combined with our access to all the same weapon data PGI has lead to the upper crust of MW:O understanding the game far, far, far better than the devs or even the test team. While the developers simply do not have the time to spend on these aspects we do, their test team and whoever is handling balance should positively be connected to the community, including a direct line to more people who understand the game balance. There's a lot of top tier teams out there with a lot of players that would be valuable resource.
As for testers, if you aren't letting them on an open build every so often, they aren't going to get it.
We've run into PGI numerous times in game, and everyone at PGI runs horrible frankenbuilds. I'm unsure if this is because you think they are good in the game, or because you don't want to advertise the fact that taking the best items exclusively is how you actually win. I could buy either. But if your understanding of balance is so poor to think these work - similar to a lot of Fraken pilots who keep thinking they can make their build work and take every small victory against an equally awful 'mech as validation that they do - we have a problem.
Honestly you guys used to listen to the community and be, well, too involved. Lead devs would often come onto the forums and that likely bit you on the hand, I get that. I thought that was a bad idea at the time because I figured it'd eventually end badly. However, at some point, you guys swapped to the other extreme where now it feels like every time you try to balance the game, add a feature or change something, it feels like a random version of balance mad libs from people who no connect to the community, new and "pro" alike.
The total shutdown of communication from the supposed "Community Manager" has lead to a ton of apprehension. Paul announced that "Alpha-Strike nerf" concept that, if you read it carefully (6 Meds is specific to the Swayback, it's stated in the example, it likely kicks in at 4 for meds too) makes no sense and even in a best case scenario, does absolutely nothing about the builds that are actual problems..... and we rioted. We rioted and rioted and rioted until we sounded like broken records. Result: Nothing. Not one word.
This is to say nothing about the supreme backlash to things like 3rd person. While I fully understand the forums are a minority and we have a lot of niche, insane groups here (I really wish anyone trying to convert the game into a 1:1 Tabletop recreation would stop posting, honestly - spirit of the ideas are fine, but some of you would be happier with dice roll combat) that make it a chore sometimes, but overall... the forums are a cross section of the community. We've got casual posters, new posters, veteran posters.. sure it might be hard to sift through them all, but lately PGI outright ignores it when everyone is on the same page. When 95% of the forums agrees on something, you can bet that represents a huge part of your community, as well.
Long story short.. PGI, you need to stop the isolation. I hate to say this because I really thought you guys did a fine community job now, but whoever you have as a "community manager" needs to be.. reassigned promptly. They're not doing their job. They are offering no response to outcries, aren't opening dialogue with the kinds of players that could help grant them perspective and definitely aren't relaying our balance concerns.. except in one case: Massive overnerfing.
I've come to the conclusion that if there's enough topics on something - i.e. "LRMs OP!" - PGI will eventually massively nerf them into worthlessness eventually, and do so in a massively heavy handed manner. I expect once the PPC cries get loud enough, PPCs will abruptly be made into something inferior to a Machine Gun and then left there for months.
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Again, I like so much about the game it is a shame to see it outright imploding from a balance POV and it largely seems to because the devs got tired of community crap and have just hit the mute button on everyone. IT'S NOT WORKING.
I would go as far as to say the situation remains dire. LRMs are proving not to be powerful enough to end the meta at this point, still badly needing at least a .1 damage boost. SRMs are still merely backup guns, leaving mediums without punch. PPC + Gauss remains the PB&J of the game and is the absolute best config (the fact there is an 'absolute best config' is bad) available no matter the 'mech. Large Pulse ate a nerf (The Small Pulse is good now, for the love of God don't touch it again), LBX/10 and AC/10 are crappy joke weapons - Ultra/5s aren't good without huge groups we can't mount on most 'mechs.. a lot of chassis are inferior purely on their badly designed hitboxes (looking at you, Jaggermech)..
It just goes on and on. There's entire classes of weapons that are worthless; nobody is going to be effective in a brawler build unless the damage output is greater than a sniper build up close, and it's not. Nobody is going to play an LRM 'mech if PPCs still provide twice the damage bonus - and don't tell me about indirect fire, because indirect fire is borderline useless right now. I'm OK with that, as it was the main reason LRMs were hard to balance, but I mean.. you're wasting ammo if your indirecting 9 times out of 10.
OK, at this point I've developed into a ramble, but I have been getting increasingly frustrated. It feels like we're not going in the right direction with the game to the point that PGI actively trying to tank their own game has become a meme.. and it's one with a lot of truth to it, given the way you guys have been handling both communication with the community and your concepts of balance.
I really think you guys locally play the game you think you've built, not the one that is actually here. You badly need to stop metrics from people doing the same, because they will inevitably reach one of two fates: Total burnout because they're tired of being outclassed by balance issues, or they adapt to those issues and become the thing that was killing them. The extreme minority of people who refuse to adapt but don't burn out are almost exclusively very bullheaded table top players who, again, would be happier with dice rolls.
You need to do something and soon. If we continue on this path for the next few months with zero community feedback, horribly wasted resources at PGI ("We don't have time to fix missiles, check out this -insert really awful universally hated concept here-!") and people tweaking balance that have clearly no clue at all about how balance is playing out in a practical environment, I'm really not sure we'll still have this game next year.
Also while there are a TON of terrible ideas on the forums, there have been many very good suggestions for fixes to many of these problems. Instead we get things like Paul announcing an alpha strike nerf that sounds like it was thought out and written down on the back of a napkin at a bar during a hard night of drinking. There's absolutely zero thought put into it, and people have explained over and over why, but yet that is still - at the time of this writing - the latest dev announcement. Not one word to the community back on it after pages and pages of it. That is an ugly situation.
So yeah. This turned out to be more of a rant than I intended it to be. I'm just watching this whole thing circle the drain because there's a couple people that have apparently decided to totally ignore universal outcries chose balancing decisions by throwing darts at a dartboard, likely again due to ignorance of doing balance testing purely within an internal test bubble on isolated builds in a game with this much room for min/max'ing. It's a terrible combo.
So I'll leave with this: Again, I wish no ill will to PGI or anyone working there. I know I am coming off as negative a lot, but if anything, I'm hoping that maybe something will get their attention and snap them out of this cycle. I've said it before, but if PGI were a person, I'd be calling an intervention to remind them of all the good things they've done and get people to try to talk them out of this incredibly self-destructive path they've gone to.
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HansBlix WMD, on 06 July 2013 - 01:13 AM, said:
