tl;dr : the balance team are good guys but their focus on the numbers instead of the actual gameplay is a major issue.
I don't mean anything personal against any of the developers or the balance team. If it didn't seem like NA players keep getting ignored (not just with patches but also server issues) I probably wouldn't feel this way. If I thought that there was a way to change the balance team's mind about what they're doing then I definitely wouldn't have used the word "fire", but until now they just seemed aloof to suggestions. If the team were easier to talk to, it wouldn't be so frustrating.
If the balance team is trying to use this thread to talk about their plans openly, that's awesome and I hope they'll create something like a thread that everybody can read and only they can post to, so that players could kind-of listen in on their whole process. It was cool of them to open-up like this and they deserve respect for that. It's not at all the reaction I expected. Thanks.
I got frustrated and shouldn't have said they should be fired and I apologize for it.
That having been said....
I'm not pissed just because of those two points, and in any case I don't 1-2 shot people anymore, at least not consistently. When I fight an archer I expect it will take 2-3 jarid torso hits. Tin cans take 3 throwing lances or as many as six jarids. In an average night of playing I'll fail to one-shot with a headshot once or twice.
This thread wasn't supposed to be just about my own problems; I've tried to do that before, numerous times, and it doesn't go anywhere, nobody listens, nothing changes. When the first nerfs to throwing were going on, a lot of throwers were understandably upset, but I knew at the time that throwing needed to be made a class that had to rely on support to succeed, so I agreed with what they were doing then. Taking out jump throwing goes too far because dodging, angle of attack and mobility are so essential to pure throwers. Maybe they can support that change with arguments from realism, but from the standpoint of gameplay and balance I just don't get it.
But to touch on some wider issues, you have the nerfs to turning speed, to archery, to overheads, to crush through weapons, to kicks while blocking, just to name a few of the biggest. How have any of these made the experience of the game richer? And this is all while there are still so many glitches, like hit detection bugs, map issues, one-handed weapon problems, etcetera.
I am biased though, I'll admit that; I play a pure-throwing build as my main, and everything the balance team does to rein-in hybrid throwers has a disproportionate effect on me. As a result I'm more pissed-off than the average player, sure. But I'm not whining without regard for balance in general. For example, a lot of throwers want more ammo, but I think that heavily restricted ammunition is one of the best mechanisms in the game to keep throwers balanced.
As for the content of the balance team's posts in this thread, it's hard to comment because it's all out of context. Nevertheless I think it is a symptom of the problematic way that balancing is being done for this mod. They're talking about implementing an entirely new mechanic that will rebalance everything, with all kinds of mathematical variables to take into account, instead of taking as their starting-point the fundamental outstanding issues in the core game. They talk about being engineers, but they're designing things from the top down instead of from the bottom upwards. I don't have the background in mathematics to be an engineer myself, but I've known plenty and the best of them admit that it's easy to get carried-away like that.
The existing variables in the game are sufficiently comprehensive for everything to be balanced, but the question that has to come first is what kind of balance? Balance can come as the result of making everything much the same (what I think is one problem with the way things are being done) or it can come as a result of making different elements of gameplay "competitively unbalanced" - like for example, giving crushthrough and knockdown weapons slow speed and high strength requirements, while the weapons without those flags are much faster and can be used by builds with less points invested in strength. Ultimately the most satisfying way to balance a game is to focus less on item-to-item equivalence and more on build-to-build counters (something like, archers beat light melee, shielders beat archers, heavy 2h beats shielders, throwers beat heavy 2h, light melee beats throwers, and so on. Don't take that progression as a literal suggestion, it's just a loose conceptual example and any real balancing will be far more complex).
From there you can further balance weapons within those broad classes not by comparing numbers of kills, but the relative utility of those weapons within the sub-groupings of each broad class. To use shielders as an example, you have some who will want enormous tower shields for extra coverage from archers, and others who will want smaller, quicker shields for when they close to melee. They shouldn't be equal, but each better suited to different builds and different contexts in battle. The small-shielders will typically go for one-handed weapons, with some choosing blunt to get through armors and others choosing cut to slice-and-dice, while the big-shielders will probably tend towards polearms since their shields slow them down and they'll have to rely on reach and support more. These are all logical, successive sub-groupings that are a better way to balance than a purely mathematical approach.
I regret that I'm not making my points very clearly or completely, but to try to sum it up in some basic way, if you try to balance the game by a direct comparison of the "1s and 0s" then you're bound to make mistakes because you've taken a view too far removed from the way the game actually plays and the kinds of choices and preferences that constitute a sort of 'conduit' or 'medium' as it were between the players and the "ones and zeroes" they interact with, and through which they interact with one another.
It's as if the team is balancing for the sake of a numerical ideal instead of through an understanding of 'emergent gameplay', something I'm sure they've all studied.
According to the poll as it stands now, a slim majority is in general agreement with what the balance team is doing. But the minority that disagrees is significant.
Poll