Info > Release Notes
1.4.5 New Balance Changes "When Ambush Comes To Shove"
Dev Bubbles:
@zanc, definitely noted. With balance, in the past, we were more prone to make shorter, quicker, more knee-jerked decisions that were more earth shattering. Whether they be artemis, heavy flak, pyra, banshee, etc etc, the changes were more drastic, and the cycle of change was shorter. That was generally perceived very negatively we felt, so we tried to slow things down a bit. Use data collection to run for longer, try to find trends or patterns. Ex. with pyra for example, when we looked at the data of both matches overall and vet matches, we saw that, after a perceived nerf, we saw noticeable decline in usage initially. That's understandable because there was a perceived and real nerf. So initially usage trended down, and then over time it trended back up, as more people played with it, and eventually reached more of an equilibrium. If we had not given more time, we might have jumped on more changes right away, and that wasn't the best we felt either. In this case, have we waited too long? Perhaps. It's a bit tough to find that right balance, and we'll try harder.
-Mad Maverick-:
Love being able to knock people off arcs again with my PYRA. Moonshine plus bumpers on a PYRA is a thing again! I think adding this small change (plus health). While not adding speed isn't necessarily bad. I obviously don't fly as much right now as I used to but I think that some of you may be trying to fly the PYRA like a modified version of some other boat you are used to. The PYRA is a very different type of flying style. Try things out with it that you typically wouldnt with other ships. E.g. Raming saves lives, it also breaks hulls, Don't worry about claw because if you missed you're fucked anyway... Things like that.
I'll be flying a lot more often thanks to this patch so maybe I'll change my mind but maybe you will.
Thanks Howard you were right about your predictions for this patch I think. But to be fair I did say "only if you buff the PYRAs mass will I care about any patches..."
Fynx:
I do not doubt everyone working on this patch spent a lot of time doing it. What people here are raging about is not that it's done without thinking or without attention, but that it addresses the issue in a weird way. Make sure you know what you're doing: there's a thread in this forum discussing roles of each ship. People might have opinions about those and if you go against it there is a lot of shouting around. Still, in order to make changes that make sense you do have to define what you want to accomplish. If it's every ship being equal to every other ship, used exactly as often and by players from all levels of experience - so be it. Just make sure you announce it somewhere and remove the 'difficulty' tags in ships. Players will rage, but that's entirely your choice.
There's a second thing nanoduckling already mentioned. There's a huge amount of feedback about what is overpowered and what is not used enough. There's an enormous number of ideas of how to fix it being sent as feedback and posted here on the forum. Instead, some other innovative changes are introduced and all that feedback (patch or between patches) is ignored.
I also absolutely understand the difficulty coming from attempts to balance both casual and competitive games. The key lies in understanding what exactly makes matches happen as they do and why statistics look whatever they look like. So far it looks kind of upside down, everything.
The final opinion about what is balanced and what is not and how cannot be made during testing the patches or right now, but it'll appear in few weeks. That's why it's important to create more smaller patches, rather than one huge in a year, followed by rage and hotfixes.
The last thing is that like JubJub I'm happy something is happening, even if it's questionable.
As for the current changes:
Mobula
I'm absolutely sure you tried your best guys. Still, you got one thing wrong: changing the arcs is not leading anywhere. Sniping meta still op. Nothing changed about that. Assuming that was supposed to be the problem, that is.
Spire
Statistics are irrelevant at this point, this ship is just as effective against inexperienced players as it was and worse against experienced players. And that's the exact opposite effect to what should be accomplished. High win ratio in experienced player games comes from experienced players switching from spires when they get hardcountered. I understand the 'difficulty' tag set to 'easy' being a sort of a surrender to the difficulty of balancing this ship.
Squid
I actually like the tilt on the aft gun. It's not a direct or indirect boost, it's the exact opposite of mobula changes - it provides some interesting opportunities (whereas mobula change nerfs the clever ideas and supports the meta).
Acceleration boost was vastly unnecessary though, unless in the next patch 'difficulty' tag of squid changes to 'easy', like in the spire. Like I wrote: decide what you want to do with this ship. If it's supposed to be a 'hard' ship then don't balance it completely around low level games, because it leads nowhere. The strength of a squid is not something low level players use (what MightyKeb already wrote) so by buffing the 'experienced' parameter to make it 'easier to fly' is kind of ridiculous (same in the spire).
Heavy Flak
The intention was to make it used more and more accessible to lower level players. I will respect this approach.
Lochnagar
Broken on heavy guns, but some really interesting opportunities for the light guns. And the blenderfish is officially dead for real this time. I understand that this change was adjusted under the pressure of feedback and I'm thankful for it. It's still broken on heavy flak, so the result comparing to initial reason for this change (ammo for heavy flak) came out a little bit awkward.
Hwacha
I kinda like it. It's still really powerful close range, but it's easier to avoid it medium/long range. This nerf is definitely a step in the good direction, even if it might be not enough.
Pyramidion
Finally. It took a while though.
nanoduckling:
--- Quote from: Dev Bubbles on March 19, 2016, 12:49:32 pm ---Just one note on gravity change, the faster fall would have been closer to actual real physics, so it was not broken. We wanted to see if trying that would allow people to get out of locking and arc faster, but obviously that didn't work.
--- End quote ---
You know I'm a physicist right Bubbles? It was broken as a game mechanic, not as a physics simulation. If you want to make GoI a good physics simulation then you need to have all the airships fall from the sky and never take off again.
--- Quote from: Dev Bubbles on March 19, 2016, 12:49:32 pm ---With trying the as big as we can in terms of changes as a starting point, we did try to be more careful.
--- End quote ---
Calculating characteristic scales of physical systems is not difficult. It is just simple dimensional analysis. It isn't a matter of being more careful, it is a matter of adjusting systems in a regime where things are still likely to be linear.
--- Quote from: Dev Bubbles on March 19, 2016, 12:49:32 pm ---With the pyra, if we broke it, it was because it was generally considered significantly overpowered the patch before last, and the data reflected that.
--- End quote ---
I don't understand why you think this is a reason. Why not nerf the pyras hull by 10% a year ago. Then a month later if it was still dominant give it another 10%. We've had a year where the pyra has largely been a broken mess that adds very little to the game. Would another month or two of pyra meta dominance have been worse for some reason I'm missing?
--- Quote from: Dev Bubbles on March 19, 2016, 12:49:32 pm ---We tried not to make knee-jerk changes and wanted to let data collection last for longer.
--- End quote ---
How much power do the statistical models you are using need? Knee-jerk is certainly bad, but the problem has historically been magnitude as well as what seems to some of us as over-reaction.
Dev Bubbles:
@nanoduckling I have no doubt you forget more about physics than I'll ever know. All I am saying is that, from a game development point of view, it is not broken. When you say broken, that to a game dev means there is a bug. So I was trying to tell you that there was no bug.
With pyra, I guess it's a difference in thinking on how to approach this. I feel like a month by month type of shorter iterative adjustment is something I want to avoid. I don't think that's enough time, but a year is probably too long. I think the better approach would likely be somewhere in the middle. And this is a point that some others' have raised as well. Specifically with the pyra, we did nerf the hull of the pyra slightly. With the role of the pyra, it was perceived as overpowered the patch before, and the data reflected that. So we adjusted the pyra. I think the valid critique of the pyra was the lacking of a more definitive role. This was something we tried to address in this build. If we had adjusted the pyra back along the same axis as before, then that oscillation in perception and usage would likely hold true, so with this change, it's more of an attempt to define more of a role. It seems like it's decently perceived so far.
Actually, historically the problem has indeed been magnitude, which we've tried to dial down. Meaning, in the past, we have made changes of greater magnitude, and the over-reaction had been greater. In this update, I do believe that the actual changes were smaller in magnitude.
For statistical models, it's really not terribly complicated. We just want to make sure we don't make decisions anecdotally, and observe emergent patterns, and make sure that when we make a change, we have a way to measure if that change is effective or not. We do more complex regression analysis for the match system (and I'm sure I'll open a bigger can of worm for mentioning it :D).
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