Just give out exchanges and do whatever you want. I have full faith in the team to balance the mod to shit.
i will take few days to think about it but i will probably quit the mod and ask for a permaban to never come again... and maybe come back when we will have an objective balacing team... even my ht build is fucked now ...
Well i'm breaking 27k hours in warband, and crpg was always closest to my heart mod but watching how you fucking lost the track in just everything: levels, weapon balance, bugs, mappools, game mechanic.
And we need more polls for item changes and balancing, this is way to closed of from the public when its going on. sudden changes in classes and gear is not good for the playerbase atm
etc.Even though some of those posts may have received downvotes, assumingly since people generally do not like to see "QQ" in any form as well as possible personal reasons, let me assure that I can all but understand these concerns all too well.
Especially the last quote regarding transparency I view as highly justified, given the hefty impact on certain builds/classes/playstyles which feel like happening "out of nowhere" and I think some of those could have been avoided by being more open about the balance-procedures in progress. This may sound hypocritical to some as I am, although not the only one but often one of the first to criticise forum input to be trashtalk and lobbying rather than reasonable feedback, but I feel the community deserves to get an insight of what is happening behind the scenes of the game many of you have been loyal to for so many years. So for disclosure, let me give you a few examples of how and why some decisions came to pass and what you can do to help:
The balance team currently consists of people with quite different class-backgrounds and belong to both of NA and EU, which then again leads to the individuals being accustomed to quite different ingame metas.
I am not at all overstating things when I am mentioning that there are severe and occasionally outright hostile disagreements taking place in the balance board on a regular basis, so please do not assume that all of those patched changes have been met with unified approval among balancers.
I do neither appreaciate nor contemplate to slander people, however I feel it is necessary to call current circumstances by its right name to make things clear:
More times than less, balance is a mess. Some people want to erase pretty much every tweak to the game that happened since 2012, other people seemingly have a vision of their own of what crpg is supposed to be and appear to pursue that vision at any sacrifice. To this day, there is no true consensus on that crucial point and it seems some people are more interested in chalking up personal victories with each of their nerf/buff proposals being implemented into the game. Consequently, balance suggestions are being thrown around with a specific agenda in mind, when the basis of the intended outcome of that change isnt even collectively deemed desirable. Occasionally I receive a personal messages over discord by another balancer stating how incompetent this guy or that proposal was and I dont even want to know how often some certain balancers may have sent impolite messages to people behind my back regarding my competence to perform the job.
I am not gonna lie and I dont want to protray myself as the good good samaritan, I am surely guilty as well of estimating my own expertise higher than others every now and then.
If the affore-mentioned wasnt enough though, even approaching a topic that changes the way some classes perfrom is a nightmare. Without calling any names, some balancers will respect another person having more experience with a certain class than themselves and will refrain from advancing opinions when not feeling capable of providing any qualified input, while other balancers will insist of entitling themselves to have a say in everything and anything regardless of actual experience with the content they are about to modify, yet another balancer will openly arrogate that his decision is justified because he played another game and it basically works in combarable ways there.
Discussing anything becomes increasingly difficult to say the least and the professionalism you expect from people to bear the responsibility of having such a great impact of the state of the game is replaced with, if you allow the quote from another balancer, "mere intellectual sparring". My honest evaluation of the balance team is that the necessary cohesion and experience to perform appropriately is not present and
constructive community input is required to lay out the missing guidelines just described above for this whole ordeal to work.
In the end though, and this is probably the key problem, regardless of who or how many balancers advise or vote on what, the decision what will pass and what wont is entirely up Professor.
It pains me deeply to say this, especially since I have huge respect for the amount of work and time prof puts into the game, but I dont have much hope that this just described structure will allow for a positive developement of the game. As you may have noticed in some of his posts by now, Professor stated that he is reserving the right to make decisions if he sees them justified. Although it honours him that he is also willing to take the blame for any possible mistakes, this philosophy will arguably not lead to an improvement of the game. You cannot expect one guy to have enough experience with every aspect of the game and with every class to always expect an educated course of action, as some of the recent changes should serve as evidence enough for. I also discussed this several times and questioned how it is feasible not to have people in charge that are dedicated to the class in question which is about to receive significant overhauls, although even after these talks, I expect a division of power is not likely to happen.
There will certainly be QOL changes, bugfixes and decisions with good intentions but whether crpg will still be crpg after ten or fifteen patches in the future, I cannot say for certain.
Why am I telling you all this, whats the take away ?
Give . Constructive . Argumentative . Feedback.
If balancer A proposes change X and Professor ends up estimating that this proposal is valid, although maybe not necessarily having ingame experience with that specific part of the game that just has been proposed, there is nothing I or any other single balancer can do to overrule that decision. There is no council, there is no necessary amount of votes, there is no division of power.
I know it sounds optimistic, I know its the same old story that happened with other head devs as well, I know m0d 1s de4d.
I couldnt blame anyone for not giving a fuck anymore and I am highly aware that I am not exactly considered the first contact person by many players, given the nature of me being ranged ph4ggot ( although I really play more pole than archer currently tbh ) and being a sore badmin who only hands out irrelevant and unjustified bans, but if you can present reasonable suggestions of why what needs to be changed, I am willing to play "community manager" and bring these cases to attention, which will only lead to results though if enough presentable input is acquired.
I am not even sure if the people I am criticising here posses the objectivity to regard this letter as exactly that - criticism rather than insult - or if I will be permabanned 5 minutes after posting this
but having tried to discuss this with the concerned people without success, reaching communication impasses more and more frequently, looking at the current player population, reading daily what balancers are proposing to change and reading through very reasonable disapproval and discontent on the forums, I frankly dont care.
Thanks for reading
