i have a more general question about refining the upcoming balance to the degree that you have been, and its sort of a man-hours question. why not release smaller patches with a slightly more cavalier attitude and keep a close eye on it afterwards? i see this as having a number of effects, some of them you might point to and say 'yeah THAT is exactly why we DON'T do it that way' if so, then fine, but im going to think aloud for a few minutes, and see if the thought experiment tickles a fancy or two
having to rely on a tiny group of people in an hour long test of play means that maybe if you are incredibly lucky in who's online and how patient and willing they are to play a bunch of games in a row you get 10 games worth of feedback probably at the upper limit in an hour. given that there are 200+ people online at any given time, game testing could be done by both a broader range of people and in larger scale than the small batch style.
big changes would be met likely with confusion or annoyance, but let people really give stuff a whirl now and again, throw it in to the big pool for a day, see what happens....
im reminded of when the flamethrower got fixed, lo those many moons ago, and for some reason i was led to understand was unintentional, it suddenly did WAAAAY more damage. short term outcome:there was some grumbling, some people said that it shouldnt be used because it was broken, and there was a pretty delightful banding together of people to not exploit the imbalance to maintain good games. long term outcome: while it was patched a few days later, everyone who wasn't before now had their chemcycles DOWN. ive used chemspray ever since and it changed how the game was played, the flamethrower got patched, and everyone was so skilled/paranoid about it that it was rendered almost completely ineffective.
small frequent modifications does a few good things in my estimation:
it allows each change to be viewed on its own merits, allowing things to be tested against sturdier opposition than a everything change at once overhaul patch now and again. will the change of turning speed affect the viability of the spire? who knows. will we know trying to measure a ship we are still learning how to fly again against another ship we are learning how to fly again. if you change one peice at a time the relative change will be more apparent because we understand better how it is behaving by measuing it against enemy ships we already understand. changing too many things at once ruins the intuitions we had about the other ships we are competing with. on the other side, if you knew how to overcome the strengths or exploit a weakness in a ship, now you can find out how the changes affect the viability tricks you have already polished.
with all that already said, i think it will do two other things that are HUGELY more important. the first is that it will shake the meta up periodically, keeping it from calcifying. there was huge upset over teh pyra nerf, but imagine if instead of a huge nerf it had recieved smaller incremental ones, and before it became useless maybe it woudl have been acceptable to all parties. the second issue is that the huge dominance of one particular ship, weapon, strategy, etc could be mitigated. i know that there are devs who actually play in teh scc, so it cant have been missed that the same strategies are being run week after week. slight changes over time might help put cracks in the impregnable wall of the top tier ships list. a tiny shuffle every couple weeks gives people a sence of both novelty with each patch bringing new tricks to learn (and the escape trick as well,) and also less time to fall in such a deep rut where so much emotional investment has gone into perfecting the perfect pyramidion formation charge to have it shattered. as i suggest, the faster patches i hope woudl lead to a more flexible attitude to change as the pace of change increased. if it was a series of smaller nerfs over time it woudl be less garring as well. if you perfected the pyra coordinated charge, and the pyra got slightly weaker in some way, you mihgt change teh strategy in a way that might still be fun, but be qualitatively different enough to be acceptable. if the same strategy was beign used as before adn it worked still too well, or the new strat was no better, then chip away again untill you stop seing 90% teh same ship and build in SCC's week after week after week.
i suggest that this gradual change, even if it feels like its a series of too little too late changes, could be faster than the big change all at once, considering how infrequently they arrive. i think it would also help preserve the things we love about the ships without changing them too much to fast and watching them in a single update change from a stalwart friend into a stranger. it woudl help preserve the things we love about the ships you guys did such a great job differentiating. not to get out the rosy lenses, because balance is always goign to be an issue, and always was too, but i think the nostalgia to teh past patch releases is because there has been these huge monumental changes that sometimes (in subtle but important ways, as we know small changes can have qualitative differences, especially in games where every trick is a hairsbredth from failure) change a ship so much that so few of our old tricks worked or worked so badly, that there is a mass exodus to a new promised land. the pyra had all aboard the pain train: it was a titanic force. a small change make every aspect of the imperious charge it was famous for weak enough that it coudl be dodged, when before it was very difficult, then stripped (admittedly its armor was never more thana gat clip away from gone, but still...) and destroyed in a single clip of mortar fire. the charge became only slightly less reliable, the penalty only slightly more punishing, but together it drove teh pyra from being a mainstay of competative play to a sideshow or a joke. two smaller changes might have driven it off its lordly position without driving it to the ground.
because it would bring much needed novelty to the skirmish mode that is feeling slightly neglected, something i hope will change once alliance is out and resources become more available, and because smaller more frequent changes are more likely to get you to a balanced scale, i ask that huge patches be avoided unless there is dire need, something i wouldnt expect there to be if the changes are frequent enough and small and targeted (and well tested)
i know that was a lot, and i may just be channeling all the midterm papers that are being written right now (its as if a thousand souls suddenly cried out, and went back to work....)
thanks,
helios
