Dear Voobly,
While watching the Nations cup, it’s clear to even a casual viewer that there are balance issues with the game. In almost every game, you will hear an expert caster comment that a unit, civilization or technology is overpowered. Even with hidden civilization enabled, the same 4-6 civilizations are always being chosen and it’s not uncommon to see one team going with duplicate civs.
A while ago, there was a thread asking Voobly to implement a default balance patch. A lot of good points were brought up in the thread and it showed the majority of the community supported the idea of a conservative patch. Voobly also agreed they would be willing to implement a patch if the community supported it. Unfortunately this seemed to get lost in 35 pages of flaming and arguing over specific balance changes. It lost momentum before any solution on how to implement it was found.
Voobly created a forum to discuss balance changes and was looking to recruit expert players to help test and discuss the patch. However the community seemed to lose interest with the idea of indefinitely balancing the game and progress stalled.
The problem with is no one will play an unoffical patch, and Voobly doesn’t want to force a patch on the community that isn’t popularly supported.
If a patch is going to happen, Voobly needs to take charge and announce they plan to implement a conservative balance patch as the default option. Before they implement it they should let the community and an expert panel go though one or two open testing phases before
In order for the patch to receive popular support, the decision on the balance issues should be made by a team of expert players who make changes based on community suggestions and voting. Below is my suggestion on how Voobly could go about creating a popular and conservative patch.
The patch should start in an alpha stage where an expert panel creates a list of reasonable balance changes and then releases the list to the community for testing, discussion and voting. Any balance changes that receive less than popular support in the poll will be reduced or eliminated from the patch.
Based on the alpha stage results, the panel will recompile a beta change list and present more conservative balance changes to the community for testing, discussion and voting . After the community has voted again, the expert panel will release a final patch that will become the default option. Hopefully a tournament would follow to showcase the patch and highlight the balance improvements.
It would be awesome if Voobly took the initiative and tried to move a balance project forward. Worst case scenario, Voobly gets flamed and reverts back to 1.0c as the default. There is very little downside to giving the creation of a popularly patch a try.
This post is meant to discuss if and how a balance patch should be attempted; not to discuss what the specific changes should be. Please try and keep your posts on topic. If you have comments about how the game should or shouldn’t be balanced, please make them on the Voobly balance discussion forum found here.
http://balance.voobly.com/forum/view/69410
While watching the Nations cup, it’s clear to even a casual viewer that there are balance issues with the game. In almost every game, you will hear an expert caster comment that a unit, civilization or technology is overpowered. Even with hidden civilization enabled, the same 4-6 civilizations are always being chosen and it’s not uncommon to see one team going with duplicate civs.
A while ago, there was a thread asking Voobly to implement a default balance patch. A lot of good points were brought up in the thread and it showed the majority of the community supported the idea of a conservative patch. Voobly also agreed they would be willing to implement a patch if the community supported it. Unfortunately this seemed to get lost in 35 pages of flaming and arguing over specific balance changes. It lost momentum before any solution on how to implement it was found.
Voobly created a forum to discuss balance changes and was looking to recruit expert players to help test and discuss the patch. However the community seemed to lose interest with the idea of indefinitely balancing the game and progress stalled.
The problem with is no one will play an unoffical patch, and Voobly doesn’t want to force a patch on the community that isn’t popularly supported.
If a patch is going to happen, Voobly needs to take charge and announce they plan to implement a conservative balance patch as the default option. Before they implement it they should let the community and an expert panel go though one or two open testing phases before
In order for the patch to receive popular support, the decision on the balance issues should be made by a team of expert players who make changes based on community suggestions and voting. Below is my suggestion on how Voobly could go about creating a popular and conservative patch.
The patch should start in an alpha stage where an expert panel creates a list of reasonable balance changes and then releases the list to the community for testing, discussion and voting. Any balance changes that receive less than popular support in the poll will be reduced or eliminated from the patch.
Based on the alpha stage results, the panel will recompile a beta change list and present more conservative balance changes to the community for testing, discussion and voting . After the community has voted again, the expert panel will release a final patch that will become the default option. Hopefully a tournament would follow to showcase the patch and highlight the balance improvements.
It would be awesome if Voobly took the initiative and tried to move a balance project forward. Worst case scenario, Voobly gets flamed and reverts back to 1.0c as the default. There is very little downside to giving the creation of a popularly patch a try.
This post is meant to discuss if and how a balance patch should be attempted; not to discuss what the specific changes should be. Please try and keep your posts on topic. If you have comments about how the game should or shouldn’t be balanced, please make them on the Voobly balance discussion forum found here.
http://balance.voobly.com/forum/view/69410