Hey there, I've been playing for a couple of years or so and been playing m&b and m&b warband even longer. Before mount and blade I was having fun playin the old age of chivalry mod. (precursor to chivalry).
I'd say the only industry experience I have in game development lies in the two employment contracts I worked doing Quality Assurance testing for big name developers.
In 2006 I worked for electronic arts doing QA and in 2011-2012 I worked for NamcoBandai games. Both were full time, 6 month contracts... around 1,000 hours each plus overtime.
I acquired a good deal of knowledge on the methods of a good quality assurance team and how it supplements their respective developers. I learned a lot about larger developers, their process of development and how the larger devs fail when they let a person who doesn't play games make decisions on game design. Ohyeah and I definitely know how to write a bug report...
I also have a very basic knowledge of 3d animation in maya, as well as basic knowledge in java programming. I'm also pretty comfortable in photoshop.
I'd like to join the balance team to help the mod become more prolific by suggesting or implementing changes from an alternate perspective. In hopes that the changes would be received well by as large of a majority as possible.
Here's an example issue of something I would like to see brought to discussion.
Holding backswingsWhat I mean by holding back swings is when a player "winds up" to strike but holds it back until an opportune moment.
Why this bothers me:
In the game,when you hold a "wind up" and you see an enemy coming in for an attack, you can switch from that "wind up" stance to blocking any direction in a split moment. This is especially true with fast weapons.
In reality,when you hold a "wind up" attack or that kind of stance with a sword behind your back ready to swing, you open yourself up completely to incoming blows from the front, really your best defense at that point would be striking the opponent before he hits you or after you
dodge an incoming blow. Maneuvering a sword from behind your back to a position where you could effectively block an incoming blow would/should not be an instantaneous maneuver.
What I would suggest as a fix: add a slight delay in the time between a full "wind up" animation/stance to the point at which the player can block, a very minor delay mind you. This, I would expect, would make it so that holding a "wind up" attack would become a more "offensive" combat stance keeping the same rewards it has now but adding a little more risk to pay for that advantage. (the advantage/reward being the fact that you will swing faster from a "wind up" stance from a neutral stance. I would not have this affect 1h w/ shield and would ponder having it not affect polearm thrust.
Not sure if this quite classifies as "item balance",
But it is in my sincere belief that if you really want to effectively balance this game and make it more enjoyable at the same time, you need to do
more than just edit weapon speed, weapon length, damage, slot requirement, armor values, weight, etc...
I hope you guys find a good item balancer that meets the criteria you're looking for, cheers.
