How In The World Can This Game Ever Be Balanced?

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  • AvitarAvitar Join Date: 2003-09-11 Member: 20760Members
    There are reasons that it seems like several changes at once that are not being tested. From an experianced delopers point of veiw in real world IT projects....

    Food for thought before you critique Devs:

    -> You do not get to see all the Dev play tests when they program in new abilities or other changes. Several minor changes take place in each revision released. A lot of care and work goes into this. That version is called the alpha. Remeber you are playing a beta version, and as such there are small incremental changes that are made.

    -> Groups of these changes are made to offset eachother and maintain 'balance' in the game. One of the big reasons you may have not considered for releasing groups of changes is distribution and installation. Unless server admins want to relinquish control of their servers for automatic upgrades to the server, and the NS team wants to design that model for distribution, beta updates containing lists of changes will more than likely be dominant.

    -> The game is very popular, and the majority of the community (as do I) belive the game is becoming more balanced, more fair etc. At the same time it is gaining more depth, and applicable real time, team based strategy that only a few other games have, not to mention game is being upgraded regularly to accomodate for new ideas.

    -> Straight black and white comparisons of changes can't be easily made all the time from a single change. Therefore you make severl small tweaks looking at the outcome. Obviously the dev team is doing a great job if all of us like the game so much; right? This is partially due to some features that have smaller or steeper learning curves, simialir to the bunny hop from the OG HL.

    -> In general more skilled players may just like playing one side on a regular basis because of the way the team works (or doesn't work). Alternatively maybe it is just easier to become good at playing one side... those are what these tweaks tend to balance. This is along the lines of what <b>slayer111</b> was saying.

    -> Changes that are made are typically made to accomodate ease of game play so I doubt that We will see hard to count/remember odd numbers for res costs. Res costs are on the even 5, or 10, with the exception of the res alien trait costs which is 2. Why would anyone want a cost of 17, 11, 44, etc.? In the long run ease of game play for resource estimations was more important than the small amount of balance gained.

    I can't tell you why eveything is done the way it is, but this is some speculation of Flayra & NS staff dev decisions.

    I would be honored to join NS's Dev team... they have done a solid job, better than many other groups have done in much of the IT sector.
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