15 replies to this topic

[Zero Neutral]

Read this...

Information Warfare Dev Blog

I doubt this will stop the several tens or more posts every single day regarding this one part (ECM) of a larger system, but maybe it will reduce the influx of the same posts that I see daily.

(spoon feeds the masses.)

ECM is being balanced for the overall system, not for the time being. Le sigh.

Edited by Zero Neutral, 15 December 2012 - 01:29 PM.

[Zero Neutral]

People has information allergy?

[Secundus]

What I don't understand is the idea of releasing items like this that wildly change the balance of the game before the counter-balance is ready. It tells of an extremely disorganized development "plan" and says to me they are flying by the seat of their pants.

[Codejack]

That was almost a year ago. The only implemented system is the wildly out of proportion "disrupter," with no mention of balance or counters.

Try again.

[Foxfire]

Secundus, on 15 December 2012 - 01:48 PM, said:

What I don't understand is the idea of releasing items like this that wildly change the balance of the game before the counter-balance is ready. It tells of an extremely disorganized development "plan" and says to me they are flying by the seat of their pants.

They did this with Artimis.

Honestly, it is how they can balance a specific item and tailor counters to it. It is frustrating but I understand why they do it.

[Zero Neutral]

Secundus, on 15 December 2012 - 01:48 PM, said:

What I don't understand is the idea of releasing items like this that wildly change the balance of the game before the counter-balance is ready. It tells of an extremely disorganized development "plan" and says to me they are flying by the seat of their pants.

So what you're saying is:

Beta is not a good place to add new systems one at a time, to determine their in game functionality and then bring other systems on line, and determine their functionality, and then more systems...

They should instead bring ALL systems online at the same time in a clusterfudge of madness, of which balancing might be much more stressful... during which time the forum would not be flooded with just QQ ECM, but also QQ Satellites, QQ UAV, QQ Spoofing...

--------------------

No, I think they have the right idea. Just because you don't understand something does not mean that it has no reasons for being.

Codejack, on 15 December 2012 - 01:48 PM, said:

That was almost a year ago. The only implemented system is the wildly out of proportion "disrupter," with no mention of balance or counters.

Try again.

It could be almost 2 years ago, the time reference is irrelevent.

What is relevent is that ECM has been added, and it is but one of many of the features that will be added as stated in the dev blog. Therefore, ECM may currently appear imbalanced, but after more of the overall vision has been added, it will, imo, be more balanced...

It is not difficult to see how the other systems that were described in that dev blog would help to alleviate the current perceived imbalanced regarding ECM. It is more difficult to get people to READ that information and absorb/comprehend an overall vision.

During the time since that dev blog, the game has entered closed beta, had many improvements to large issues, exited closed beta, had a cash shop added, and entered open beta. Now is the time when we will begin to see more systems added over time.

Having had a clear vision during an almost alpha phase of the game is rather comforting, imo. Seeing each system unveiled is exciting to me, imo.

Edited by Zero Neutral, 15 December 2012 - 02:01 PM.

[Secundus]

Zero Neutral, on 15 December 2012 - 01:56 PM, said:

So what you're saying is:

Beta is not a good place to add new systems one at a time, to determine their in game functionality and then bring other systems on line, and determine their functionality, and then more systems...

They should instead bring ALL systems online at the same time in a clusterfudge of madness, of which balancing might be much more stressful... during which time the forum would not be flooded with just QQ ECM, but also QQ Satellites, QQ UAV, QQ Spoofing...

--------------------

No, I think they have the right idea. Just because you don't understand something does not mean that it has no reasons for being.

Truthfully, beta should be where you tweak and balance the systems that should have been implemented in alpha. That being said if you're going to keep bolting on new systems in a live game, of course you should add the whole system for testing. I don't see the point in testing half the system, internal testing should be sufficient to determine if the systems function at the basic level, we should be the ones testing how it balances against the other features. Doing it the way they are is also extremely inefficient, and ebbing out the content is what creates all the complaints of things being overpowered with little or no suggestions available to balance it. If everything was implemented we could then at least suggest what needs a buff and what needs a nerf, etc.

Since when is playing a feature rich game a clusterfudge of madness? Do all the games you play need to slowly become more complex so as not to overwhelm you?

[MoonUnitBeta]

Zero Neutral, on 15 December 2012 - 01:19 PM, said:

Read this...

Information Warfare Dev Blog

I doubt this will stop the several tens or more posts every single day regarding this one part (ECM) of a larger system, but maybe it will reduce the influx of the same posts that I see daily.

(spoon feeds the masses.)

ECM is being balanced for the overall system, not for the time being. Le sigh.

Thanks for the reminder! I'm glad there's other sane, calm, and reasonable people here.
Way too many people here 1) Don't read the forums. 2) Only read what they want to read. 3)Jump on the HOLYSHITFREAKOUT band wagon that's getting pulled by the WEDONTUNDERSTANDIT donkeys.

[JeepStuff]

Secundus, on 15 December 2012 - 01:48 PM, said:

What I don't understand is the idea of releasing items like this that wildly change the balance of the game before the counter-balance is ready. It tells of an extremely disorganized development "plan" and says to me they are flying by the seat of their pants.

As an engineer, when I'm trying to optimize something it's real hard to do that when you have multiple variables changing at once. It makes all the sense in the world that they would need to introduce a feature, learn how players use it, learn how players abuse it, and tweak it accordingly. It would be CRAZY to introduce all the stuff at once and then try to make sense of the data.

Besides, ECM and all of it's counterparts will be OPTIONAL, and so even after the counter weapons are released, you will absolutely run into games where somebody on the other team opted to bring an ECM and nobody on your team opted to bring the counter to it. Think of this period as a boot camp training period where you are learning how to deal with that situation.

[JeepStuff]

Secundus, on 15 December 2012 - 03:57 PM, said:

Truthfully, beta should be where you tweak and balance the systems that should have been implemented in alpha. That being said if you're going to keep bolting on new systems in a live game, of course you should add the whole system for testing.

I understand what you're saying here, but since all of these systems are optional, the devs need to test each system in isolation because you won't always have the counter to it in the same game. As there are more and more systems to choose from, every time you drop the enemy team is bound to have SOME weapon that your team didn't bring a counter to. For that reason, PGI needs to test these things one at a time to see how the game shakes out when this happens.

[p00k]

OP is referencing a post from 11 months ago. outdated info is outdated

[GalaxyBluestar]

Zero Neutral, on 15 December 2012 - 01:19 PM, said:

Read this...

Information Warfare Dev Blog

I doubt this will stop the several tens or more posts every single day regarding this one part (ECM) of a larger system, but maybe it will reduce the influx of the same posts that I see daily.

(spoon feeds the masses.)

ECM is being balanced for the overall system, not for the time being. Le sigh.

great post even if that's outdated the main point is ecm is just a small part of lots of things to come. yes the main complaints are really because we're stuck with one piece and we haven't got the rest of the game mechanics/parts to counter it effectively yet. waiting patiently for next patch

Edited by GalaxyBluestar, 15 December 2012 - 09:44 PM.

[LionZoo]

EJT, on 15 December 2012 - 09:37 PM, said:

As an engineer, when I'm trying to optimize something it's real hard to do that when you have multiple variables changing at once. It makes all the sense in the world that they would need to introduce a feature, learn how players use it, learn how players abuse it, and tweak it accordingly. It would be CRAZY to introduce all the stuff at once and then try to make sense of the data.

Besides, ECM and all of it's counterparts will be OPTIONAL, and so even after the counter weapons are released, you will absolutely run into games where somebody on the other team opted to bring an ECM and nobody on your team opted to bring the counter to it. Think of this period as a boot camp training period where you are learning how to deal with that situation.

Counterpoint: As an engineer*, when a system is part of a whole and what I care about is the integrity of the whole, I want to test that part to see how it functions with the whole. If other parts are not ready, then I put in items to simulate how the not ready parts work when they are ready.

As a more concrete example, when I develop a car and I'm testing a new suspension, but the production tires are not ready, I still test with placeholder tires. I don't leave the tires completely off the car simply because they're not ready. This is because testing without tires will give me data that isn't very useful to determine how the suspension works. Instead, I pick the tires that I think will be the closest approximation of what I will have in production because that will be what yields the most reliable data. When it comes to balance, if PGI has ECM counters that are coming down the pipeline, then testing ECM without those counters or systems that approximate those counters is like testing the suspension without tires; the data simply isn't very useful. (Of course PGI might just be testing to see if ECM even works as a part, but that should be addressed in alpha, which is more akin rig testing of components before they're bolted on the full vehicle. The full vehicle in this case is the live game.)

*Full disclosure: I no longer am an engineer, except for some limited contracting work. I was a full time engineer up until a few years ago.

Edited by LionZoo, 15 December 2012 - 10:16 PM.

[Foxfire]

The main thing to remember is that we are still in beta and that things are going to change. I would rather them do this in beta than out.

[Vermaxx]

Artemis was implemented too powerfully. In the form of the combination of the relatively high LRM per-missile damage and the bugged trajectory. So the fix was to narf the hell out of it: lower the projectile damage significantly, raise the weapon cooldowns, increase the spread, and fix the Artemis trajectory. Oh, and remove the minor homing for SRM.

UAC5 got a 'fix' from the Dance Dance Revolution unjam, and was implemented too powerfully. The fix was to narf the hell out of it: the jam chance is 25%, the unjam timer is longer, and the gun still doesn't have the one thing that would balance it well - a default fire mode of single shot. Honestly, leaving the jam chance at 10% and raising the jam clear timer to 6 seconds would have been enough if they changed the rate of fire to SS and required you to spam the mouse to fire more often.

ECM came in and completely invalidated locking tech. Within the bubble, you can't do anything - no TAG, no BAP, nothing. Outside 280 (or whatever it is), you can TAG for missile locks. Within the 180-280 you can generally lock. The system feels generally overpowered without clear counters to this counter.

The primary demand for ECM, the perceived overpowered function of streaks, was never modified. Streaks still do too much cockpit shake, too much smoke/glare, and hit in torso clumps too often. This coming from someone who uses them somewhat frequently.

So far, however; ECM has not been tweaked AT ALL, let alone narfed to hell. Nothing is being balanced. Look at the fiasco that has been DHS. The argument against DHS was they were too powerful. Guess what, the Elite x2 bonus of Cool Run makes just about every build you can come up with equivalent to 1.9 per DHS. Add to that the roller coaster we went on for DHS to begin with, and how they came out with a completely false tooltip.

They implement things, panic at community backwash, and give them glaring downsides that often leave the end result worse off than it was before the balance. They are frequently not changes that make sense in any grand scheme. Somehow, ECM is still running the way it was on day one.

A dev commented in the live feed how annoying Streaks were, and then ECM came out. But streaks + ECM are now even worse than streaks were alone.

What am I getting at? Most of us largely ignore every roadmap PGI publishes. We are looking at what they DO, not what they SAY. So far, what they say often has a very large disconnect from what they do. ECM needs work. If it is being balanced against future items that we won't have for months, then maybe they should take it out until then. They clearly like the way it works, as I have not heard of any changes to the system other than a boost in TAG range.

[JeepStuff]

LionZoo, on 15 December 2012 - 10:14 PM, said:

As a more concrete example, when I develop a car and I'm testing a new suspension, but the production tires are not ready, I still test with placeholder tires. I don't leave the tires completely off the car simply because they're not ready.

This is a great argument. But I would say that the FIRST testing on those suspension components would never be actually in the car. Every spring, shock, joint, link, etc would have gone through exhaustive testing individually (probably by the component manufacturer, not where the car is assembled) before it was ever shipped for assembly in the car.

I acknowledge that you think this initial testing should have been done in an alpha stage, not beta (I snipped out the part of your quote where you said this). I disagree for reasons I said in other posts -- that the ECM absolutely CAN be used in isolation without the rest of the system if one team opts to bring it and the other team doesn't bring it's counter. So while you make an excellent argument, I still say that testing the ECM by itself is a necessary and important step.