Info > Release Notes

1.4.5 New Balance Changes "When Ambush Comes To Shove"

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Daft Loon:
For reasons unknown lochnagar gatling survives its clip by 1 shot worth of self damage

Omniraptor:
@Keyvias What I mean is a paragraph, just three or four sentences about which problems each change serves to fix. These can be posted in devapp, or on the main forum. Goio is a complex system of interlocking mechanics and as you say a lot of thought goes into each change. Surely three or four sentences of your balance reasoning is not too much to ask.

Dementio:
I want people to notice, just for a second, how the examples of positive feedback do not include positive remarks on the Spire nerf or the Squid's increase in horizontal movement and how the Pyramidion was not considered as great yet.

The handling of controversial feedback is alright, it did apparantly result in more than the total four changes I was expecting and slight changes are better than going all out breaking the game. But I am disappointed that no other stats were touched. With 3 weeks of testing, could you not test to see if maybe the speed buff for the Squid is not necessary after all? Or that the Spire could do with an increase of some other stats if you are dead set on nerfing its mobility?

Because the Muse argues the Spire nerf with numbers, I will argue against a nerf without even buffing anything else on the Spire, by explaining what these numbers mean in the most uncomprehending way I can think of that late during the night. Yes, all the next few paragraphs are relatively random Spire ramblings and irrelevant to my opinions stated above.

They are also a lot of factors regarding win rates. I imagine that people are aware of the fact that you can literally do anything in pubs and still win? That's becsuse people that are aware of that likely communicate with their crew, something that most pub matches don't have. If, say, you take a Spire with Hwacha, Gatling and literally any explosive gun, how do you think people in pub matches fair against that? When I started the game, I ran a Spire with Hwacha, Artemis, Mortar and a Carronade, the killstreak was almost unstoppable. Two years later, I took it again in the Iron Fork of Friday and it had no competition, you would expect people to be able to communicate in there and not get killed by an full explosive Spire. Or maybe they did communicate, but then what could lead to their easy to come-by death? It could be possible that it is the amount of guns of the Spire + Lion Gun OP that makes it possible, but now the Hwacha is nerfed and so is Lochnagar Mine Launcher, which served as effective ram defense for the Spire.

The Spire is supposed to be a glass cannon and the nerf reflects that rather well. But the nerf and some indirect other nerfs change that to a coin flip: It's either glass or cannon. The Spire wins, if it ambushes, if it gets the first shot on people, disables them or kills them outright with more firepower than any other ship in the game. If it couldn't do that quick enough, than the enemy could always easily outmanouver the Spire gun arcs, disables the Spire's heavy gun and everything else for that matter or just kill it first. The Spire doesn't have the armor to compete in any 1v1, you must literally risk your life in order to ensure a kill. And now it is nerfed to when you miss your once chance, there really isn't a second one, because of all the ways any enemy ship could kill you, turning around fast enough in order to shoot before dying, was the Spire's only saving grace, now it can't anymore, or at least shouldn't, because that one survival chance is literally what Muse intended to remove.
Even with the previous Heavy Flak the Spire could get ridiculously easy kills, and nobody called that nerf-worthy.

Also note that the win rates for the Spire are lower when flown by non-novice pilots. Non-novice does not necessarily mean experienced. Imagine your average lvl 15 or 20 pilot that flies Spire against other players on the same level, assuming matchmaking works, he will win these matches, because most of them likely are not that in-depth with the game combat. Their ambushes will fail, if they even try to attempt it at all, their crew will be overwehlmed with the amount of damage they are taking, while being unable to disable the Spire and their pilot does either not know how to or react quick enough to outmanouver the Spire by going up, just a little bit.
Now let's look higher up on the spectrum, at people that know how the game works. And without much explanation, the Spire loses. Everything that worked in the favour of our lvl 15-20 pilot, is not going to work against people that understand how this game's combat works. They will abuse the Spire's weaknesses to the maximum, going above the gun arcs while still being able to hit their hull, disabling their heavy gun and shutting it down in long range, before it can even ambush. It doesn't need to be ambushed to die, which is what the nerf is trying to achieve here, it just needs to face somebody aware of its weaknesses and then any ship can win against it.
Thus, according to my fictional fantasy of my understand of all the playerbase, the extreme variation in skill levels balance the winrate for non-novice players.

"But then why is the win rate higher when the Spire is flown by pilots of the level over 31?": Because matchmaking doesn't work, it cannot work with that low of a playerbase in this game. High level players always meet the "I just came out of novice" guys, if they are not still novices. If the low levels take a Spire, then they lose against higher level players who are capable of abusing the Spire's weakness. If the high levels take a Spire, they will win, because their opponent does not have the same understanding of the Spire or the game in general to combat a high level pilot effectively, especially not if that pilot has a crew on a similarly high level.

What is actually nerfed on the Spire, for the more experienced players, is its survivability in every situation. They need to be able to do something and turning was the one thing they could do. Now what? Spray and pray, #HwachaSavesLives? The win rates are not going to change dramatically, but gradually, so much that nobody looking only at numbers will care about the Spire and then it will quickly stop. The same principle of player (in-)competence applies, no matter the stats of the ship.

Dev Bubbles:
Hi Omniraptor, I've been prepping for GDC and at GDC (I'm in transit at the airport right now, so please excuse the short replies).  In short, what you asked for we did.  Whether people agreed with our starting point or not is a different matter, but with the overall communications, we did try to do what you suggested.  There are a few issues here with the process.  One is that, it's really hard for us to reach everyone.  Even with 4 weeks of testing and announcements, a lot of people don't know until today.  So finding a better method to make people aware is an issue that we'll need to do better.  The other thing is obviously how we account for, integrate, and replied to player feedback.  With feedback, we actually got a lot.  And as to be expected, they were varied.  People have different play styles, perspectives, natural biases etc, so it's natural for opinions to canvas a spectrum.  What we did do, was to log everything, read everything, and tried the best we could to figure out the issues and pain points.  Granted, our starting point was data.  We did look at different usage rates and win rates of different builds, ships, for different levels of play.  But we didn't end with data.  With balance it's definitely not easy for us. 

To you and Dementio's points, a lot of the stats of ships are interwoven and complex and there are a lot of variables affecting win rates and usage rates, and therefore difficult to hold things in constant.  We made an attempt at it.  Also on the point about looking at data, we do look at how things trended.  So it wasn't a short term horizon that we were looking at.  I do want to note that. 

As for now what, we will use today as a baseline to monitor, and if we see issues, we'll do our best to address them. 

Jub Jub:
I'd like to start this post by stating for the record that I'm posting as a player NOT a mod, and that anything I say is an attack against NO ONE. And furthermore would like to state that I too voiced several concerns about the new balance changes that were put into place, like just about everyone else on this thread so far.

This game/community has a serious identity problem, and it shows up again and again, specifically whenever the game gets a patch. I realize that I'm not the oldest guy/gal in the room here, and that many players have been sitting around this party called "Guns of Icarus", but I feel that after 3+ years of being apart of the community, I've about seen all that it has to offer. This problem stems from the fact that every time the game is brought up the two sides are arguing from two completely different perspectives. When Muse says "Hey, guys! We have some great new things that we'd love to hear your opinions on, come on into dev app and email us what you think!" the people they primarily get are competitive players (keep this in mind, it comes back later). Why? Because the competitive community loves the game and they want to see what's going on with it. And, if the player isn't competitive, I'd argue that they're generally more-or-less aware of the game's current meta and so-on-and-so-forth. These players represent the hardcore center of Icarus' veterans. This is not a bad thing!

The issue, is the sheer fact that these hardcore veteran, competitive, meta-capable people are going to have suggestions on how to balance the game in a COMPETITIVE MANNER. However, Guns of Icarus is not balanced around being Competitive. It's balanced around being Casual. And I believe herein lies the major issue. Every single complaint I've seen posted, in this thread and numerous others, focus around the game's competitive balance. Just look at all of the changes that Muse brainstorms to try and implement. A bunch of changes to make the Squid EASIER to fly. Changes to the Typhon Heavy Flak to make it EASIER to shoot. Increased armor/hull on Pyramidion, not to make it better to fly, but EASIER to survive on. The list goes on, and that's just THIS patch, not accounting for any previous balance patch that things were dumb-ed down to make it easier for newer players to pick up the game. I'm entirely for Guns of Icarus to be balanced around being competitive, but it isn't. And until then people giving any sort of feedback have to keep that in mind. The game isn't being balanced for the game's competitive scene. It's being balanced for the game's Novice Pub matches.

TLDR; The game isn't balanced around being competitive and the only feedback Muse gets is from competitive/meta-capable people, attempting/giving suggestions for how the game should be balanced, from a competitive perspective. I'm all for having the game be actually balanced around being competitive, but as of now it isn't. And this is why no one is ever happy whenever a balance patch goes through.

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