I have to admit I have mixed feelings about a lot of things concerning balancing.
On one hand I can understand how archers feel useless with dealing much less damage. But on the other hand me and many others were sick of rounds being decided by who has the most archers in his team.
Same thing about cavalry. They weren't buffed directly by the last patch, but because their counters are made so bad cav became the new, battle-deciding force. Which can't be, either. No class should be useless (except of a few special support classes like pikemen, throwers or horsearchers not having big impact on the entire team), and no class should be dominating.
I already wrote somewhere else, that you have to take two "balancing levels" into account: the best possible performance with a class, AND the actual average performance on the servers.
There is no use in a class that once mastered is as effective as the others, but is much more difficult to master than the others, because this would lead to an underrepresentation on the servers.
On the other hand it doesn't make much sense to make a class difficult to master, but then, as kind of "reward", making the best possible performance better than with other classes. This is fair for the particular player who chose this class, but it is not for everyone else. Otherwise every player who wants to max out his performance would sooner or later have to change to this class, which would lead to a heavy overrepresentation on the servers. (The other way round, with an easy class that reaches top performance rather soon, you would only have a "noob" class, which can't be good either)
Both archery and cavalry (and a few classes more) have these problems. It is easier to balance the best possible performance
(BPP), and much more difficult to balance the average player performance
(APP).
If you touch one of the two, you also change the other, almost inevitably.
The only solution I see would be to balance the classes on the BPP-level, and influence the APP level not by stats of items but by player knowledge, or better: education.
cRPG and strategus are great inventions, making individual players create an alter ego in a persistent world which is highly dependant on the player's very own performance, that is his skills. The balancing team and the rest of the developers is constantly working on improving hostile interaction with other players, in other words: fighting!
But what they totally neglected is to support players in their FRIENDLY interaction with others! Players are expected to actively join clans to play "together" with others, unlike casual, who usually only play "along" others. Yes, there was this voice system enabled, but its only use is to give trolls a tool to spam annoying sound messages all over the server, the actual use is close to zero. And the marketplace is more of an interaction between the players themselves, instead of their toons. Making loom points redistributable would have almost the same effect, without the gold sink, which apparently doesn't change much anyway.
What this game needs desperately are two things, in my eyes:
- a working command system with REWARDS for carrying out orders
- a system to "educate" players to play their role and the entire game properly, when they START to play and haven't created bad/wrong habits yet.
What we have to state first is one simple but sad fact: the average cRPG player is stupid. Dezilagel will probably go nuts when he reads this (
), that's why I want to relativize: I don't say they are stupid in general, but they behave stupidly in cRPG, concerning of maximizing their performance. This can have various reasons:
- not being interested enough to feel the urge to improve one's theoretical knowledge about the game
- reducing the game to a simple game of skill, where only reflexes count
- never having thought about it properly, in the end it's only a game!
- lacking trust into their teammates
- and many more....
If you want to make the best out of your toon and his performance, I would say things like above are stupid. The thing is, that not everyone wants to be most successful in this game, and we should respect this. That's why we have to keep as many of my suggestions more or less "voluntary" as possible. But for dealing with the problems cRPG has, we have to act like we were dealing with a bunch of unwilling, desinterested and immature children, who sometimes even need to be forced to their own luck. Yes, it is some kind of patronizing, but if someone is too mature to need patronization, he will be able to resist it, anyway. Remember, we keep it voluntary.
But a lot of the basic knowledge the community is lacking on the servers doesn't go against their idea of playing the game at all! I can't believe that if you want to play the game "just for fun" you don't mind if you get lanced away right after spawning several times, just because you are an "autowalker". Spending time in spectator screen can't be fun, so there is noone who can't use the advice of "after spawning watch out for cavalry attacking from behind", and god know a lot of player DO NEED this advice
Now I am approaching to what I am aiming at:
If we had a command system, in which players would be involved
by default, which means that you need to leave it actively, so that we can get those "indifferent" players, too, not only the interested who would join actively, we would have a good base to educate and "train" the community.
By granting (small) rewards for following orders I think many, if not most players would follow those, be it only because of greed. My hope is, that after some time, especially when there is no commander, they realize how important tactics are to win a map, and also how plain and one dimensional the game becomes if it's being reduced to "rush and spam".
Giving the commander the tools not only to place certain flags ("Defend here!" "Stay way from here!"), but also to release big screen messages ("Attack!" "Watch out for cav in our back!"), people would learn the right behaviour on the battle field by and by.
And now we finally reached the core of my post: if more infantry would learn how to be aware of cav, or how to deal with distant groups of archers, there would be less whine about those classes, as they are not OP by themselves, the average cRPG-lemming makes them OP. By improving the general knowledge of the cRPG players the developers could stop nerfing the APP of certain classes who are good against lemmings, and thus stop nerfing the BPP.
I would suggest implementing a good, sophisticated but easy to understand command system with rewards that reaches all players, together with FORCING new players to watch certain tutorial videos about how the game is played. If you download the mod for the first time, and you watch the video which is required to unlock the cRPG character page, and the video is telling you "cRPG is a team based game, and only if you support your teammates the best you can in the right way for your class, you will be a successful and good player. Skills are important, but not the core of the mod.", you would approach the mod on a totally different way, and your behaviour on the servers would change accordingly. Which is a good thing, IMHO.
The tl;dr version:Fuck you, you lazy bastard! Read it or piss off, if you are too stupid or your attention span is too limited to read a text longer than an SMS, you shouldn't visit forums, anyway.
