Adjusting Balance for low-player games

Feedback/Suggestions
#1

It’s unfortunate we have to deal with low player games of 8 or 9 players in Alpha, but it’s an unavoidable circumstance.

In these types of games, it can be horribly imbalanced both for all factions. If Sheriff finds an Unseen on night 1 (which is 100% more likely with only 8 people, compared to 16), then the Unseen are pretty ruined for the rest of the game, since 2 roles (25% of the people) are now confirmed. On the contrary, Unseen can get a lucky kill on a Sheriff on night 1, and now they’re in control.

Personally, Sheriff’s strength is greatly enhanced in low player games, and the ability to even just cut down to one or two sus or quiet people to check on any given day is much stronger in low player games.

I would like to experiment with a different balance of required roles for games of 8-9 players only. Instead of spawning a required Sheriff, I feel a Princess would be better suited. My suggestion is to remove Sheriff from 8-9 player games and instead spawn a Princess, who can only find killers. This gives the Mastermind full hiding capability, even beyond first 3 nights, and it’s up to the court to just piece together which roles have been confirmed and which haven’t. Also, it gives better hiding ability for the first converted Unseen.

#2

This issue happens only in small games as you stated as well, so… we have to keep in mind some things

  1. The game is not gonna be perfectly balanced in small games
  2. Like Boslof said, team-balancing changes are gonna happen in Beta when there will be more players and more feedback.

Even though it is a “problem” now, I don’t think it will be when Beta comes out and we get more players.

#3

I think unseen have more of an advantage in lower player games actually

#4

No faction has an actual advantage in small games. The fact that the game is smaller makes everything count more. So a kill that wouldn’t matter that much in a 16 player game counts a lot in these; just like a day without kill counts a lot too. It’s just more luck based in smaller games.

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#5

True, but generally unseen wins low player games ez

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#6

This is as good as I could’ve said it –

In the next patch, we also adjusted gp to remove a % of gp based on players in the game. Gp does nothing now (and it’ll be wiped later, since we’re not properly recording it), but eventually people would be more encouraged to do full-player games for maximum gp gains per-game. Not to mention, it’s more fun!

This is just something to be endured during Alpha.

In the #looking-for-game channel on Discord, we have the times most played pinned: 9pm-5am EST, more or less. We had 18 players on yesterday at once, which was pretty cool. Eventually, this won’t be a worry.

Notice how people burst in and out – be sure you are using Discord to find games or it may appear no one’s on~ maybe people are pre-forming groups in Discord!

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#7

Why remove gold for not having a full game instead of adding gold for having one?

#8

To prepare for gp actually doing something once we have a higher population – this will prevent people gold farming with only 8 players for full amount. It’s 1/16th less gp per person missing, so it’s mainly to encourage people to wait til there’s a full game. Full game means longer game means the reward should be higher.

Our original plan was to adjust it based on players (and later, bonuses like HotS does, such as consecutive games without leaving … maybe later consecutive games without being reported… not sure yet) – what you see now is our gp max for win and gp max for loss.

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#9

So will you eventually have it labeled as bonus gold for full games? Because that’s what you need to call it, to be honest.

#10

Eventually, I think they will probably change it to a more “fair” way of distributing it depending on if you win or lose and in which faction.

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#11

We are just adding in some global match stats (that’s why the end screen is weird lately). If we balanced as much as we possibly can and the winning rate is higher on x faction, we’d likely reward extra gp to that faction – correct~ We need to observe for a bit, esp after we make balance changes (more during Beta)

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