by icycalm » 08 Oct 2017 18:10
Something else I wanted to talk about. I recently had an extended conversation with Nosebreaker, in which he explained to me why he doesn't like mods in general, and balance mods in particular. From what I understand, it is because they "fracture the playerbase". Nevertheless, he told me that he suggested the T2 factory change to Elite, because he preferred how T2 worked in Classic. So, since he sees that we are determined to rebalance the game, he decided to help, which I think is a great attitude to have.
However, I want to defend the decision to rebalance/mod the game, even against the criticism that it fractures the playerbase. And I will use the example of the Tyr. The Tyr is not even a balance change, really, but a brand-new unit created by the Legion team, that would not exist at all without them in any form. And yet we see how much people are using it in our events, and how much new action and new fun it brings to the game. Seeing a few Tyrs LASER an entire planet down is a whole new level of epic, quite different from BLOWING an entire planet up with the annihilazer. It makes the game richer and more complex and more interesting, and that's just ONE new unit!
So, we are people who have been playing the game for hundreds if not thousands of hours, and want to keep playing it for hundreds and thousands of hours more. But we can't be expected to not get bored at some point with the base game and units and mechanics that Uber gave to us two years ago with Titans. New units and improved balance that complexifies the game are NECESSARY, I believe, in order to maintain our interest in the long run. Nosebreaker worries that I will get burned out and bored and stop holding these events, and I want to tell him that the best way to ensure that this doesn't happen is to keep making the game more complex, both in terms of balance of the existing units, and in terms of adding in more units. As long as every few weeks we have a new unit to play with, I don't see how we could ever get bored.
My long-term goal is a super-complex 4-tech-tier version of the game that's so deep, with so many specialized units, that you will NEED a 10-player team to properly control all of them in the battlefield, so that by the time we are playing 10v10 4-tech-tier games in the League, only the CLANS will be able to play this game properly, and the only thing left for independent 1v1 players to do is watch us do it on Twitch.
I know that my dream may not be shared by all the clan leaders... but I hope that it will be, if not right now, then perhaps later. I am posting all this now in order to be honest with you guys in what direction I want the balance mod to take. I don't want to try and deceive you, by adding one unit per month or something, until we have a 4-tech-tier game without you realizing what I am doing. I know you will realize what I am doing, if you haven't done so already, so I think it's best to state it right now so we are on the same page.
I am not saying I want a 4-tech-tier game tomorrow, or even next week, or even next month. But perhaps in one year? Or two?
I know it is an extremely difficult balancing job, but we have the best teams and players in the game at our disposal, and we have months and YEARS ahead of us, so we are perfectly capable of doing it. If you want these events to survive for a LONG time, we need a LONG-TERM project to go along with them, and I think that turning PA into a 4-tech-tier game is the perfect project to keep the organizers and the participants and the modders and the viewers coming back week after week, to see what crazy new changes we've made to the game.
Let me know what you guys think about the above when you have some time.