1.03 Balance and the Rationality of Casual/Elite Polarization

..I was going to make this a reply in HunterX's thread, but it kind of just grew out of hand. I'll just start by addressing one of the main issues in that thread and this forum in the past few days, the idea of Elite vs Casual. A number of people were talking about why anyone should look at balance because that was how elite players manipulated the game into their favor at the expense of the casual gamer.

Onto Balance....

Well, for one thing, bad balance makes everyone unhappy. Note how dramatically the forum exploded once the various issues were fetted out.
Now look at how 1.02 went. In that patch, the balance changes were actually good. There was some minor grumbling about how LRMS> everything else, but nothing major. Nothing on the current scale. Siege frigates were weakened, everyone liked that. I'm not sure anyone really disliked the 1.02 siege frigate.  The Blackmarket issue was irksome, but nothing out of the ordinary for an RTS.

But 1.03 introduced a whole new bag of rats. Serious, highly visible, easily exploitable balance issues.

I mean, there's no use denying they don't exist. That's just foolish.

But what exactly is this division between elite and non-elite anyway? It's stupid. The balance changes in question don't even remotely begin to affect how elites and non-elites interact. In fact, maintaining status quo will bring about -more- bad blood, because it is precisely the 'pro' players who exploit these imbalances to the maximum effect.

Increasing balance only serves to level the playing field. If the patches were doing something relevant- like adding new 'special abilities' or increasing playspeed or vastly improving the tactical manuverability of all units- then -that- would move the game in the direction of requiring more skill to play.

Making it so Unit X is cheaper than Unit Y and does more damage doesn't really do anything but affect balance across the different factions (And affect how many Xs are built over Ys). It creates a distinct 'moral' choice- to use these overpowered units, or not? Many players, on a matter of principle, will not, as they view it an oversight by the Testing process and not meant to be in the game. This is usually the case.

It's no secret that patch 1.03 was nothing short of a public relations disaster, at least in terms of the forums. Everyone had approved of the listed 1.03 changes, but were extremely dismayed to find a number of rather unpleasant 'undocumented' changes.

A number of posts by the devs have revealed rather odd notions. For instance, the notion that the TEC was one of the weaker races? Uhmm... Did they forget that the TEC has LRMs, a strong economy, and excellent scouting capabilities? I'm not sure anyone thought the TEC was a weak race, especially seeing how many people play it frequently. It's not like the Advent or Vasari had considerable advantages (Other than Dark Fleet). I'm not sure if it factors in, but it is certainly disconcerting.

Bad balance kills a game in more ways than one, and this is an example how. Just look at the stupid fighting that's occured over the last few days- Exactly what else do you plan to do other than rebalance; summarily throw out everyone who brings it up, focus entirely on single player, and ignore multiplayer ever, ever again?

Well, yes, certainly that's an option. I don't think it would make many people happy to see a vast majority of the Sins community up and go, much as we find certain people EXTREMELY vexing. It would just mean eventually Single Players would stumble upon the exploit in their own time. It would still be there.

No. This elite/casual nonsense doesn't stem from any substantial concerns, but the terrible realization of truth.

The so called 'elites/TINY MAJORITY/.001' were absolutely, completely FRIGGIN RIGHT. And it kills me (and I imagine a number of you) that this is true. Go ahead, you've tried the strategies. We're all upset they pulled the wool on us, demolished a patch that had so much potential in a matter of not days, but hours.

We're upset that maybe without them, we could have played a little longer without being hampered by these exploits. Lord knows, the dev team certainly did.

Maybe that's not your motivation. Maybe you saw sins advertised as a responsive 4x/RTS hybrid. Stardock is a great company with good support, Galciv 2 being a fantastic game. You expected, that maybe you could step into this game without it being ruined by 'competetiveness' and here they still are, those irritating 'elites' killing the game by zooming in on the balance weaknesses and making it entirely impossible to play the game online without using them yourself.

And here it is, staring you right in the ugly face, when you come up against the exploits in question- and you can't do anything about it.

That pretty much sums up what upset me about this patch. But the fundamental detail of what you are missing is that balance exploits and bugs are /exactly/ what skews the game in favor of these elites, their willingness to use them in a no holds barred game- and that by eliminating these exploits and bugs, that moral gap is -closed- enabling casual and competetive players to peacefully coexist.

Frogboy's example with the flash tank in TA is oft cited. I think we all know the game would be better without such exploits; elite players get enough advantages with ridiculous practice hours and APM and dirty social tricks like clan ganking without programmatic bugs and design implementations that seem off to help them out.

To those opposed to balance, what exactly are you trying to push otherwise?
-Prominence towards mods?
-Brand New Single Player Features?
-Improved AI?
-Technological fixes?

Do you think by improving balance, the devs are somehow 'sacrificing' their capabilties from one field to another? Play balance is acheived by adjusting unit values and then playing the game to test it out. Adjusting unit values takes approximately 20-30 minutes to design the stuff and recompile the code. Improved AI is done the same way by messing with unit weights (Unless you are introducing completely new behavior routines, which is a might more difficult, but still involves recalibrating weights). Technological fixes such as networking issues are another monster altoghether, and probably the most timeconsuming.

Playing out the game- well, quite frankly the Testers are going to be playing it all the time anyway to test out new features and kill bugs, so there's no time lost there.

As everyone who makes MODS knows, introducing the balance changes is no effort, it's the testing and reaching consensus that takes the most time- most of this is done explicitly BY the playerbase in question. It's the administrative, patch pushing nonsense that really makes it difficult, the potential for the next 14k patch to kill the game for certain users, result in incompatibility, blah blah blah.
And that's -exactly- what gets people riled about balance. We all know we could get it done ourselves in 20 minutes flat with notepad, it's just that none of us has the collective clout to actually -make- everyone else play the same game we are like the devs.

To that note, I propose an old idea to be made new.

Frogboy has said of himself that he was a top ranked player of TA, now does anyone recall the game, Total Annihilation Kingdoms?
The commercial and critical reception weren't so hot, but the devs' interaction with the playerbase was stellar, on the level of Stardock's interaction here, or dare I say, more so.

TAK came out wildly unbalanced. The one faction, Aramon, was so bad that they had to 'skip' Tier 1 units to have remotely any chance of winning, and even that was a stretch.
They later released an 'addition' called Darien Crusades- basically it was a Total War style map where players would conquer territories and such- TA had such an analogy with thier Galactic War map or whatever it was called.

Anyway, participants in this Crusade also served a second purpose- to test new patches on an almost -weekly- basis. The patches were small things that tweaked unit balance. Community members conducted tests, and created their own mods, submitting the results to the devs and new suggested changes. They worked on a cooperative level I haven't seen...well, since the death of Cavedog (Mind you, Cavedog died due to the break up of her parent company, not through any deficiency in the games department).

This philosphy was also followed by TA and the Galactic Campaign map (I think we all remember the craziness that occured when the FARK came out) . Of course, TA and TAK also regularly put out new units for play, which generally increased the player bases' tolerance for failure....Something Ironclad might want to consider, but I doubt is feasible.

What was the result? An extremely long lived game that forged a community, that while it has moved on, still maintains tangental contact today. A community that forged mods and pretty much defined 'User Modification Community" for a great many years. While that legacy lives on in SupCom, GPG's ties with microsoft and larger publishers legally subject it to a number of restraints when creating patches and interacting with the community.

Stardock is unhampered by this. Of course such a move requires man power, which is not easy for a small company. Even a minor IT worker (Such as a Community Handler) requires a decent 40k+benefits for a fulltime job. Appointments within the community, especially at a volatile time like this, can create resentment.

Somethings can be done to remove the need for a handler- such as:
-Post a constant 'development log' that changes frequently and is up for transparent debate. Include all changes, including discrete unit values, so that users can create pre-patch 'balance mods' that test these changes.
-Encourage mods, and at least unofficially support mods that do implement the proposed balance changes to satisfaction.
-Regularly patch in newly proposed balance changes in a short period of time, and NOT being afraid to frequently reverse them.

This one would take some effort
-Create an alternative 'game mode' that implements the newest, latest balance patches, while slowly phasing in 'Old changes" as they stand the test of time.

..And ultimately, such a move isn't neccessary as long as balance remains at a reasonable level. Currently, it isn't. The gameplay is remarkably skewed towards the TEC and people who exploit the blackmarket and LRM spam.

This is a really bad place to be. These exploits are known, creating a gap between those who are willing to use them (The 'Elite') and those who are not ('The Casual'). Only by removing these exploits, and creating a situation where the 'Elites' programmatically MUST follow practices viewed sanitary by the casual base..
Such as:
-strengthening/cheapening defenses for less rushing
-increasing the benefits for unit diversity
-making targeting enemy units more efficient than targeting enemy infrastructure
-allowing economic expansion empire building to pay off more
-reducing the benefits of micro and APM

..do we create a game friendly for everyone to play.

Yah. Some hardcore players might call this 'noob modding' , but I doubt many people here will disagree (as long as it doesn't dramatically increase required playtime!). Many highly successful games, name Supreme Commander, Kohan, Rise of Nations, and (to a small degree) Age of Empires, have incorporated these changes, making for dynamic and interesting game play that allows multiple strategic styles and encourages the use of many different game assets.

And programmatically, this takes -little- time, only marginal adjustments of unit values. It's the testing that's the kicker. You can make 'seperate' single player balance, but you'll have difficulty getting results, primarily from the fact that multiplayer tests can come away with data reports from 1 or more players per game, and single player...only one.
That said, single player balance==multiplayer balance. It's really a matter of tweaking the AI to use build orders and create the same units as a human does. As I said, if the AI used LRM to the proportion it does Siege Frigates and kill orbital structures and caps instead, I think we'd have alot more complaints.

And yeah, before anyone calls me out, I was Emergency Patch kid, one of the first crazy posters to get this thing started. I apologize for helping kickoff a virtual forumwide flamewar, but it was going to come. I still have faith in Ironclad to make things right, but I still can't stand the 1.03 gameplay. From what it sounds, no strategies or what have you have actually been developed yet to defeat TEC-Trade-LRM-Kodiak madness. I hope 1.04 comes soon and fixes it all.

The above changes are a -huge- undertaking in terms of infrastructure on the part of Ironclad and the way they do things, and probably require a great deal of legal consultation. I don't expect anything like Darien Crusades to happen, well, ever again with the state of PC games these days.

I guess it should be expected- any factionalized strategy game is probably going to be full of balance discussions about well, factional balance and the prominance of certan units, people splitting up into camps and what not. It's part of the multiplayer territory.