Customizable balance variables
rein4ce
Join Date: 2008-07-05 Member: 64567Members
Join Date: 2008-07-05 Member: 64567Members
<div class="IPBDescription">poweer to the server admins!!</div>In the current late phase of playtesting, before the scheduled release later this year, wouldn't it be convenient to allow server admins easily tweak all game-balance related properties like recharge rates, costs, hydra limits, damage dealt, hit cones and so on <b>while still in beta</b>? One important thing would be to allow everybody joining the server see all relevant changes upfront, so they can be immediately recognized. It would serve as a distributed unit testing of some sorts, where tweaks are applied whenever seemed appropriate or necessary. After two or three weeks we could expect best configurations to emerge, proven by the sheer popularity of the servers that implemented them.
I believe such a thing is already feasible given the .lua driven game code, but it's not encouraged enough and there is no indication of any changes apparent to players joining.
That way we can arrive at properly balanced state much quicker and more or less for free, given the alternative of shifting the it back and forth every patch or hiring a dedicated balancing team. It is also possible that new interesting mechanics might be discovered along the process.
I also think that plenty of people on these forums have very legitimate ideas on how to fix the game, they just never get the change to have them tested in a real game scenario.
What do you think?
I believe such a thing is already feasible given the .lua driven game code, but it's not encouraged enough and there is no indication of any changes apparent to players joining.
That way we can arrive at properly balanced state much quicker and more or less for free, given the alternative of shifting the it back and forth every patch or hiring a dedicated balancing team. It is also possible that new interesting mechanics might be discovered along the process.
I also think that plenty of people on these forums have very legitimate ideas on how to fix the game, they just never get the change to have them tested in a real game scenario.
What do you think?
Comments
There are many reasons to not give admins power to change the balance of the game. A really good one I can come up with off the top of my head is consistency - how annoying would it be to have to re-learn the game every time you join a new server?
I love server mods, but when you just want to play vanilla it can get annoying.
L4D2 is a prime example.
As for simply allowing server admins to change the game; I think its a bad idea.
As for the balance implications of trying many different combinations; the data gathered will never mean anything.
Game balance is something that needs to be looked at by a central autonomous body, because so many variables are involved, and sometimes you want some of them to remain constant, but you don't know how interwoven they all are.
If things complete broken, why should i wait 2 weeks for an patch if i can "fix" it within 1 minute serverside.
Right now tram has fixed spawnpoints on our servers for example, cause this map didnt work with randomspawns but play really fine with fixed spawns.
Every mod (client or serverside) give UWE "wrong"statistics. Isnt NS2 the best moddable game on the market?
In BF3 for example every serveradmin can use the settings he want. If people dont like these settings (no crosshair for example) they can switch to another server.
There a handfull servers out there. If one serveradmin change things, uwe shouldnt say "nooo, thats not good. our statistics, noo". They should say "ok, lets compare the statistics from this server with an vanilla one"
The data that is gathered is used by UWE. If they see a stat that is off (lets say that win ratio for Aliens was 70%) it gives them the chance to step back and take a look at what might really be causing this problem and to find a suitable solution, but with the mods it has the potential of skewing the numbers to make it seem like there isn't a problem. Making minor tweaks should be left in the hands of the Devs, namely Charlie. While a lot of you disagree and want to do it yourselves.. you're hurting more than you're helping by making those changes.
Once 1.0 is released then I'd see giving the green light for modding servers.. just not during beta.
Btw the most efficient optimization algorithms (genetic, particle swarm, ..) often use a population of solutions with different parameters.
Any word on how that'll be implemented exactly (and also when and if before v1.0)? It's pretty important not to have things like admin-mods set off a modded-flag.