Game Balance and Forumside

For those who haven't clued on, a brief introduction to how this game is balanced.

http://hoppsbusch.com/blog/?p=264

It is balanced through the careful monitoring of numbers. Everything you do in game is tracked. Everything. The server makes note of all player behavior and logs it for future exploitation. The data is collated, analysed, interpreted and fed back into the system. Decisions are made as to the direction of balance, and numbers are tweaked (and results forecast by smarter people than me and specialised equations) to achieve this direction. The new numbers go live, and the process repeats.

Why do they do this?

Over performing builds hurts the game's longevity and profitability. Imbalance causes players to leave, and over performance = increased cert gain = less SC sold. Follow the money, folks. SOE want a long term game that makes them money for years to come. Yeah, some of their balance decisions have been questionable. IMO, 1-man MBTs and rocket pods rank among the most stupid decisions this game has seen. (Ignoring base design for now.) But while the balance is a little forced at the moment, it IS balanced...more or less. They could have balanced it in other ways, but they did balance the game. End of story. Every "unfair nerf" resulted in a more balanced game.

What they do not do is go "oh, what are the forums complaining about this week". Why? Because we, as a group, are stupid. Individually, we're all reasonable. As a group, we're just irrational. Every game community tends to be, and popular opinion is far more skewed and far less representative than hard data.

"But I see nerf threads and then things get nerfed!", I hear you cry. Good observation. But you've confused cause (and to a degree, effect)...you're seeing the runny nose and calling it the flu...you're calling the symptom the disease. Nerf threads appear because something is over-performing, or is over represented. ZOE isn't the first time this has happened. It happened with HackMAXs, with shotguns, with Prowlers, HE, Mercies, Annis, Magriders, Libs and ESFs. The complaints appeared long after the numbers were recording the disparity. But the complaints didn't cause the re-balancing. The lack of balance caused the re-balancing.



Now. With this being said, let's stop with the stupid "I hope you're happy, whiners" and "Forum whining is ruining the game" and "TR/NC got us nerfed, let's whine about TR/NC Weapon X and get it nerfed in revenge". It is puerile and makes you look like a bunch of babies. If you're going to argue that popular opinion does sway balance decisions, reread the above. I now submit to you that you fit into one of 3 categories:

1: You are 21 and under. It's not a crime, but when you're young you lack perspective and won't get it til you're older. (Best part is then you can act all wise to young'uns, ignoring your embarrassment over your old views ) You probably think the devs are, in a way, out to get you and your faction/playstyle. Sounds dumb when you put it like that, huh?

I'm not trying to be as patronising as I sound...I was young once too, and I thought I knew how everything worked. If you still believe it, I only ask you remember this moment when you're 25, and I'll wager you'll reconsider

2: You're acting stupid...but that's not to say you are stupid. You're upset that the fun time you're having is coming to an end, or that the population imbalance on your server can't be held back anymore without the best toys. Hey, I'm Briggs TR, when we lost the Mercy it was like "well, dang. How are we going to compete now?". It sucks to be outnumbered, and it sucks to lose a useful tool to the nerf bat.

However, I ask that you put aside your emotions and stop acting like a fool. Consider the implications of what you're saying. Yes, this game is watered-down, but that was a market research team going for mass appeal (not whining of forum kiddies wanting Space CoD). Yes, Pods and PA shotguns threw off balance, but that was corporate coming down on the design team (not SOE favouring pilots or LAs at the expense of everyone else). Yes, HackMAXs were nigh unstoppable, but that was a design challenge for the devs (not Higby taking sides). Community feedback IS important, but give the devs some credit. They're not dumb enough to act on every nerf/buff call like the poster is a game theory demigod.

3: You're being willfully ignorant. In which case, go away you troll. I won't even bother with this category.

TL;DR

Game isn't balanced by popular opinion. It's balanced by data. If we can't stop with the nerf calls, can we at least stop with the celebration/retaliation/commiseration threads? It makes the whole community look stupid.

Tbh old people are worse than young.

From my experience they are equal in behaving like a 5 years old.

Both valid points...I was more going off young people feeling authority is out to get them personally. It's just a lack of reference, and certainly nothing personal. Plenty of young people out there who are more reasonable than old people, but what I was trying to say is that if a young person felt hard done by, I totally understand. They're not being stupid, they're just young. It's a get out of jail free card for the younger Forumsiders

Yes we are kiddo...now get off my lawn...turn down that music and get a haircut. Slacker.

I wholeheartedly agree with you. This is how a game should be balanced, through metrics and reason.

Unfortunately, it's proven to be untrue in ps2's case.
The devs have listened to popular vocal opinion that weren't supported by any facts.
Those precedent stand as encouragement to whine on the forums because it works

SOE made a mistake equivalent to feeding a dog that begs.
Now the community always expects to receive a treat and doesn't understand when it doesn't.

Reference point 2.

And bumping because there are still far too many tears flowing tonight.

My point was that this isn't something we should accept or try to explain away.

Players don't know what they need and are very wrong about what they think they want.
Game design is a craft, it requires much more experience than the average Joe.

Basing decisions on focus groups, market research or community feedback is bad form.
A games need a vision, a single mindedness and a niche to call its own.
Trying to please everyone is impossible and ill advised.

What ps2 lost with release is that sense of vision.
They used to talk about posting "glimpse" of the future, having a X years plan.
All we got is the roadmap which, while nice, may have been more detrimental than positive.
It is pretty short sighted, going only 6 month in the future and having very little meaty concepts exposed.
It also made the community feel they had a say, or worst, actually gave them a say.

Feedback is all fine and dandy, suggestions for new cool features are great, but this should not be the core drive of a game development.

Planetside 2's development has been on par for a SOE-developed, F2P experimental shooter on a new engine. Every decision they've made that negatively affected gameplay can easily be explained if you look at prevailing industry wisdom. Not saying I like it, but look at the Gameplay forum. 30-50% of all posts are about ZOE, some celebrating a proposed (!!!) nerf, others already swearing vengeance. It is stupid and embarrassing.

And claiming a vocal minority are breaking the game is EXACTLY what my post is about. They ask for community input and then do what they want, so they can pretend they're listening. Hell, they probably do listen a little. For all SOE's flaws, being aloof is not one of them. But pretending a minority of the playerbase is ruining the game is exactly the mindset that leads to the abortion that is the gameplay subforum.

Well put.

PS2 development is currently floating, drifting on waves that are obviously influenced by user feedback and there is truly no vision communicated where it's all going to end.
That might be fine if this would be some indie game for a few bucks, but professional development shouldn't float like this. However that easily could be tied to bad management and money problems and not only bad descisions of the core development team.

crying about crying. nothing new then yes?

Well to be honest this problem does lie within bad community management too. Luperza is a joke at best, since around here no management is done.

If this forum would be treated with more care instead of relying purely on the "report" feature and the seldom and mostly ridiculous pointless posts from responsible personal, the community could be more productive and hundreds of pure provocational threads would be closed.

This is the essential problem, the users are left alone to deal with each other and their view of the game and of course it ends up the way it does right now.

Just because something overperforming has been repetadly pointed at doesn't mean that the Devs balanced it in their favor.


1: Think of the devs completly ignoring the forums and noticing that, through some feedback, ZOE was overperforming, they nerfed it.
2: Meanwhile on forums, ZOE was being cried at for weeks and weeks with nobody caring except the defenders, and when it got nerfed (Look at 1), the 'opposing' side puts the blame on the 'whiners' as they think they've been a massive influence to the decision of nerfing ZOE.

Yeah. Totally agree, but if I were Luperza, I'd be massively conscious of a backlash if I started wiping these threads. The tin-foil hat wearers would swear they were being censored for knowing the "truth". Which is grade-A bullhonkey, of course, but I've seen it happen a number of times now. Hence, I'm trying to target one of the biggest fallacies at its source. I intend to spam that first post in every whine thread or their relatives. Will it stop it? Hell no, this is the internet. Too many idiots, not enough braincells. But I might persuade some of the undecided ones, the ones drawn into it by faction loyalty. Beating my head against a brick wall, but someone needs to try.

I'll come back to this thread later. If I can make it back within the 30 minute edit timer.

What?

Thank goodness for some sanity. Your post needs to be printed repeatedly on large rolls of paper and utilized in the beatings of every whine poster in the future.

Yeah, but it is not only about stricter moderation (which in detail should be handled by non-robot moderators which do not exist around here) but encouraging constructive threads, make stickys, make polls, care about continuing development to make this a better place.
All that's done is their embarrassing FNO which I watched once and almost puked at their shallow PR babbeling while the actual game suffers from so many problems.

You never get a hundred percent friendly or good community of course, but you can and should do much much more around here to make the environment better.


Then again... it is pretty much as chaotic as the game itself, so from that perspective it is kind of fitting in a sad way.

let me give you a tldr since you seem lost. He wants people to stop spamming cry threads.