Let’s make this post clear from the start I am an NC player; Carrias is my gaming name. Now since this game started the balance of power has shifted, pre Beta NC was very strong due to weapon firing speed being capped. On launch VS namely the Magrider seemed unstoppable. Now it’s TR’s turn, only that turn has been going on for many months. Now I see a lot of flaming at the TR community and, to be expected the TR flaming back while SOE remains quiet and aloof in the background. One of the biggest concerns is the striker but let’s be honest, as much as NC or VS hate it, if SOE had given the weapon to a different faction it would be equally abused, bugs and all - probably by the very same people complaining about it. This is what happens in gaming circles; sorry people but players cannot be trusted to play the game honourably, that is down to the developers to balance it. In this respect I feel that SOE have dropped the ball. Now this is just my opinion but I feel that certain weapons in the game are just wrong and it just so happens that many of them are in the TR faction but expecting a faction not to field a certain piece of equipment, let’s say the Prowler is just unrealistic, it’s the only MBT they have and the Heat guns (one of my concerns) are the default weapons. From my point of view they are taking a lot of undeserved flack that should be aimed squarely at the SOE balancers (If there is such a team I wonder). We know when the game came out the Annihilator was run in squads and it was too effective and spoilt game play, and the community as a whole (all three factions) hated it, yes that included TR players. SOE listened then and nerfed it. So please explain to me SOE, what Numpty designed a better more damaging version (faction specific) of this weapon, and just as importantly who signed off on this item as acceptable? No one item has upset the balance of power in the game so much and TR gamers have suffered countless abuse that should be laid fairly and squarely in your lap. I feel that the developers when building the TR army have cherry picked too many good attributes for the TR faction (sometimes even using other faction traits), and when they have assigned some sort of negative attribute in an attempt at balance it, it is often too easy to mitigate or just never really comes up. I think one of the major strengths of the TR arsenal that no one seems to mention is how friendly and complementary it is to non cooperative play. What I mean by this is that by simply playing your own game with no communication to team mates around you, the TR weapons are sometimes easier to use and help out fellow players even though that was not the players intent. let’s take the striker for example (stop groaning) We all liked to think we’re the best players out there and how does the faction survive when we are offline?, but truth be told we are all playing our own game really. Now the TR heavy has been offered an option that ticks a lot of boxes instead of one. It’s a perfect weapon so if while running from point A to B he spots an Aircraft/Tank he is able to engage either, it’s not because he is helping out his team but because he wants a kill. The Vehicle may die, it may move off, he might just burn its flares/smoke, whatever happens he/she has made a difference. Now NC or VS may be carrying the Crow or Hades. They can engage the tank but not the aircraft, are they likely to look for the nearest terminal to swap weapons assuming a terminal is near? Not really they will probably carry on with their original objective. The same applies to weapons such as the Vulcan, the power of the Vulcan aside it is a lot easier to use a fast firing weapon from the back of a speeding vehicle when you don’t know what your own driver is going to do next than it is a halberd with a 3 second penalty on every miss. The fact that it kills Infantry and vehicles with equal ease means it can also operate more freely. It’s a lot harder to use a single shot or slow firing weapon from a fast moving vehicle especially when it is tuned to one specific role. This creep into the game of multi use weapons (Fractures/Comets/Striker/Vulcan etc) where a player does not have to choose between what a weapon can do because it can do both, you can’t balance it and it obsoletes other weapons and choices. This is not real life people so don’t try to balance it around real life. This next sentence sounds daft I know but this is one battlefield that is meant to be a place of fun and enjoyment. How many people have been killed in a bio lab by fractures or comets? It’s purely an infantry fight yet the player wielding an anti vehicle weapon felt comfortable using them in this area. If you are selecting a weapon/chassis/item of any sort and it’s a no brainer what to take then the balance is wrong. So what’s my point? Simply put its SOE why are you not listening any more to the community. I have had dealings with your support departments; they were fast, polite and really helpful, superb, 10 out of 10. For example your new idea developers were listening to posts, liked our ideas for new squad and platoon leader WP/markers, filtered out the crap, again listened and then implemented what we wanted, 10 out of 10. So why oh why are the games balancers not listening, I know I am not alone when I report bugs and items that are too powerful etc. Yet there is never any feedback, instead the faction at the moment, mostly TR are taking abuse that you should be fielding not them. How hard would this be for you? Let’s say at the moment flares are bugged, someone puts a post up explaining politely what the problem is, other people add to it confirming the problem, you then reply placing it on the first page above the first entry so it’s easy to find something simple like “problem noted and confirmed we are working on it” any additional info welcome but the community now has some feedback from you and feels valued that they have taken the time out to highlight a problem and you personally acknowledged them. Try reading the forums now it’s just a bickering back and forth fight and totally useless. Before you dismiss this post as irrelevant lets look at a few items and the time scale involved, TR Pounders compared to VS Comets are useless so why would anyone expect a TR player to handicap themselves with this item when Fractures are available, that’s not a hard choice is it? It should be. Not only are the Pounders just outclassed, the fractures kill infantry too. Then there’s the TR Marauder, it makes the NC C85 look like a candy dispenser. Yes I could take the NS Fury as a close equivalent but I personally chose NC as my faction so I want to play with faction weapons. These weapons go back to game release yet are still obsolete, why? You keep telling us that’s it’s our game but many of us are unhappy with it at the moment but we want to help, why won’t you let us? There are a lot of excellent players out there that you could contact to help with issues, I am free for a start (No I am not saying that I am an excellent player for all those useless trolls). If you don’t like our ideas don’t implement them but just doing nothing is not acceptable. For a start forget Hossin (newest map Amerish is a ghost town), forget MLG etc (TR versus TR is going to get boring real fast), optimize and balance the game, establish a baseline from where to start before you move on. I don’t know what’s going on at the moment at SOE head office, I do know many of us have worked for a boss who is clueless or there’s not enough money or manpower (should not be the case as you sacked a load of people, but If you are short grab the ones who thought up TR Domination sorry World Domination that’s going nowhere fast). Really what were you thinking? The balance is bad, you felt the need to rub our faces in it thanks. It just seems that the balance department has been shut for months, when the game started with such promise. Please let us help as mentioned before, we (that’s all three faction) helped and agreed on the balance for the annihilator, we can be useful if you let us. Now it’s up to you. Hopefully you will take on board what I have said. I have not intended any rudeness to any faction or SOE member. I really do think you have missed a beat here though and in the case of the striker it should have been removed from the game months ago, until a more acceptable weapon could be found. I think you would be pleasantly surprised how well you would be thought of and received if you just put your hands up sometimes and said “hey we got it wrong, sorry we are fixing it”. We are all human, digging your heels in and refusing to accept a mistake is not helping or making you any friends. PS To all real TR players my deepest sympathies to you for being stuck with the slime that we politely call the fourth faction. I believe that if a game is correctly balanced the fourth faction (let’s face it these guys are not noted for their abundance of brain matter) will not know where to go as no one faction will be obviously or even perceived to be stronger. Happy gaming Carrias
Despite the fact that the text is quite long and could use a bit more structure to be read easily I think this is one of the best posts i've read in the last weeks here in the Forums. I would really much apprechiate a response from SOE to this and an explanation why they are not reacting to the alarming balancing issues in their game.
Really good stuff you got here, you have spent a lot of your time trying to get your voice out. I support you and hope SOE responds to this.....but my eyes....they burn...
A little bit of a wall of text (but hey I've made my share off 'em) but still good. This is a personal bugbear, how is it that the prowler can get its high mag size, high dps, AND faster than vanu reload speed? And then lockdown boosts it further. I don't care much about the game play reasons, that's a vanu faction trait and you should design around the faction traits, then balance appropriately.
You can't blame TR for the 4th faction, NC and VS both got saddled with them for the longest time and TR is just next up on the block. The cycle will continue and NC is next up.
It's getting more and more frustrating, every patch is riddled with bugs then you see them promoting MLG (that a grand total of 5 people actually watch) SOE was well aware of the faction imbalances. yet they decided to go ahead with the world domination series anyways. My sundys die quicker to Vulcan harrasers than a f**king tank and by the time I've changed my kit the ******* has already repaired. oh & how long till they fix flares, who the **** noes ? Next time they patch something you just never know they might forget to keep gravity on or some****. it's embarrassing.
its a no brainer that TR are getting overpopped, they already had a higher pop due to forgiving+easy weapons, and now SoE are rewarding mindless zergs with endless resources, titles, free xp from alerts, free boosters and rewards its a wonder anyone is still playing NC/VS.
Read it all, great post. SOE dropped the ball with balance issues that have been going on to long. They should have been fixed long before Battlefield 4 comes out because that is going to take a big chunk of players away from this game who are tired of SOE not listening to us, myself included.
Sometimes it take more than a few sentences to make a thought out and unbiased idea come to fruition. Well done sir. Here is my none thought out response, but something ive felt for a Iong time. I think the TR arsenal is simply to fun to use when compared to the NC(I have minimal VS experience) As a die-hard NC, the first time using both the Marauder and the Vulcan produced the biggest smiles I have had playing the game. I remember screaming "take that you VS scum!" and manically laughing out loud the entire time. There are simply no weapons in the NC arsenal that produced the same level of fun and satisfaction. Since most people like having fun, I can understand why people gravitate to the TR. The NC weapons need some love, not only in the effectiveness department(c85 in looking at you), but also in the fun department(I'm thinking of how frustrated I have gotten trying to place accurate shots with the enforcer while loosing sight of that tiny dot on the screen that masquerades around as a crosshair.
Very well written post. Carefully argued instead of throwing rocks all over the place like so many threads these days.
I think this sums up my general opinions on the state of the game atm. To be fair they have pushed back new content in order to get optimisation in (leave PS4 theories to a different thread plx) but I do feel that they are underestimating the power of imbalance to snowball, like so: 1. Slight imbalance. 2. Slight population lead trend. 3. 4th faction joins "biggest faction with best stuff". 4. Other factions bleed off players due to frustration at being outnumbered by a more powerful empire (even if the balance difference is fairly small, it feels like a snub at this point). 5. Result is a significantly overperforming empire (see this WDS for example) which is probably going to end up being waaay overnerfed in order to even out the populations. This is a bad road but it gets more inevitable the longer the situation gets left. As much as I think optimisation is probably going to be better for the games overall playerbase atm than a balance patch, it doesn't feel like it would be that hard to spend 3 days throwing out a number tweaking patch (don't mess with any mechanics just tweak numbers) with a "this patch will have to do for now, sorry we will do a more thorough one in a month after we are done with OMFG". I understand (I assume) that no official SOE source can say something to the effect of "Yes TR equipment is currently too powerful and we will be addressing it" because that would be a disastrous thing to say and the phrase "blown out of proportion" wouldn't be nearly sufficient to deal with the cesspool the forums of quoteside would turn into. But silence isn't great either, I'm not the PR guy so I don't have to deal with the "damned if they say, damned if they don't" quandary but really it should never have been allowed to continue for this long. As frustrating as I find many TR weapons to be, it would be EXTREMELY unreasonable of me to demand that TR players not use any OP equipment. It isn't their fault that the vulcan is OP, if you want a close range AV buggy then it isn't your fault if the only option you have is currently too powerful, you should be able to use what you like and it is up to SOE to try to ensure that all options are reasonably equivalent. Obviously people are going to use the best stuff they can and you shouldn't have to (for a hypothetical example) line all the carbines up and say "I think the Jaguar is the best but I think it is too good so I will use the Lynx instead because it is the second best but not OTT", it isn't our fault if something is obviously better than something else (resist shield vs NMG for example) and we shouldn't have to deal with obvious imbalances for such long periods of time.
Can't blame the players for playing the game the best way they find, can only blame the devs for not fixing it.
I don't care what SOE says, some weapons are just a straight upgrade over others... The Vulcan is a great weapon, but so is the Saron (sorry NC). Both do a great job at bringing down other vehicles, and running through infantry alike. Both are limited against air (unless the pilot is a derp and flies low enough to get hit), but unlike the Vulcan, the Saron only has to worry about 1 projectile hitting, the Vulcan has many. Needless to say, I think the Vulcan can be balanced more, if the max ammo were brought down to 40 (I think 60 is the current max) Let's talk Striker: post nerf, you need to keep the vehicle locked-on until the very last missle hits, or it flies straight up as if the vehicle flared/IR smoked. If all factions have the choice of using the Annihilator, which is basically a weaker version of the Striker, then why not use it? Basically is comes down to personal choice. the SKEP/Grounder does 1500 damage per missles, with the ability to dumbfire. The Annihilator does 1200 damage, no dumbfire, and can lock-on to Air and Ground. However, unlike the Striker, the Annihilator is a lock, fire, and reload, rather than a (Striker) lock, fire (keep the lock) until all missles have been spent, THEN reload. If you want to talk DPS, the SKEP/Grounder is your best choice, follwed by the Annihilator (for nests), then the Striker due to it's now, limitation. TR MAX - *spoiler alert*, if you stand in fron of the MAX (knife range) you won't get hit if they are using duals. Oops, did I just let the other factions know that? Same goes with the Mercy, but I've yet to experience it with the Onslaughts. Unlike to VS/NC MAXs, no matter how close I've gotten, I still get hit. NC Scatt-MAX is the best up close, VS ZOE MAX is the best all around, and TR MAX is in there somewhere. 4th Faction - that's a simple solution; like in PS1, have a lockout timer installed. I think it was 20 hours for switching to character of a different faction on the same server, before you could play the original one again. SOE probably won't do this because it would hurt their revenue. Afterall, in a free-to-play model, cash is king
TL;DR The TR are not that overpopped. Sure, we are by a substantial margin but not by as much as the NC/VS cry about. AND not near as much as they seem to think actually matters except in this silly poorly thought out WDS shenanigans. The issue stems only in part by 4th faction. The other part is the sheer fact that if the NC or VS begin losing, they quit. Same goes for the TR if they lose... they quit too.. and with populations being so low in general in the game, the issue is exacerbated. I'll reiterate again. This is NOT A TR problem. Complaining that the TR should do something about it, or to nerf the TR, or to outright PUNISH a third of what remains of this playerbase is NOT going to fix your problem. Do NOT try to block character creation for TR, do NOT add 'sticks' to nerf exp for the higher population faction because it's NOT THEIR FAULT. The enemy leaves the battlefield. Logs out, etc. It's not the TR's fault they did that, but THAT is the PRIMARY reason why the TR suddenly begin outnumbering the VS/NC at the end of an alert. The 4th faction only makes up a small portion of it. Check the graphs. You'll see what I mean.
Long, dense, but full of good points. Honestly I don't think the problem is that TR is SOE's golden child, it's that when it comes to TR the care the least, or at least seriously lack imagination in new stuff. When we get new things, they seem rushed and poorly implemented: our uniques are generally modified versions of NS weapons(like the striker or vulcan or marauder), and so in order to make people but them they can't be the same. Similarly, the the T5 AMC has very similar stats to the NS 11C. When they came out with the MAX abilities for example, a lot of art and design clearly went into the VS and NC abilities, whereas the TR model shifts its position slightly(spikes in the legs already present? Nah, lets's not use those). Not a lot of thought went into making our abilities synergize with our faction traits of speed and dakka, either. SOE hasn't put a lot of thought into making TR's new things interesting or unique, and because they are boring they are easy to use, and because they're Empire Specific they have to be different than NS, but because of how boring they are there is very little room to make them different than NS except to be more powerful, which is silly. There are so many more things SOE could do with TR, but instead they put little thought into our development, which leaves them in a stale place that is very accessible to 4th factioners.
