You can’t seriously be saying that this post of yours below wasn’t indirectly throwing shade, right?
Having people get upset and passionate about your game is a GREAT thing, man. Even if it gets annoying af.
I know it can wear you down when you read all this negative shit every single day of every single week, but that means people genuinely enjoy what you’ve created and want to make it better (even if their ideas are actual birdshit.)
The worst thing you can have is a quiet, empty forum. Feel grateful.
3 Likes
It most certainly was not.
Making balanced changes isn’t difficult. The thing stopping most people from being able to make good judgements of game balance has nothing to do with it being excessively challenging.
Balance is easy, it just takes time and dedication to achieve. That is the factor most people are missing. Your average class suggestion has somebody spontaneously come up with a fun idea, think about how to make it more fun for like ten minutes, and then post it. You see this all the time, especially somewhere with a larger audience like Town of Salem.
What people who “know what they are doing” understand is that you have to think about balance from many, many different angles. This is far from hard, but it requires patience, critical thinking, and, often, a willingness to discuss, debate, and argue the issue with others.
That goal is not hard to achieve. There’s not a person on this planet I don’t think is capable of making a balanced concept. Will they always nail it? Hell no! But that’s where the others come in, and in the end we all find the best solution together.
2 Likes
You are talking about balancing a game that revolves primarily around social interaction. There is no simple balancing. You can’t reliably predict how people are going to behave.
A great example is how much the game had to be changed right after release because a new set of people started playing. This wasn’t just due to people being new, because we tried waiting, but things didn’t change.
Most of the class suggestions aren’t balancing for the community as whole and are more balancing for how they play. They will also choose mechanics that they believe are fun even if the majority of other people don’t think the same. You are guilty of doing this exact thing.
10 Likes
As I have often heard it said, a coin toss is perfectly balanced. You will win just as often as you will lose. However, this does not make tossing a coin the world’s best game.
What seperates you in particular from people like myself is how much we have to care about these seperate pieces. I have plenty of things that I find enjoyable, to the point where, I will admit, playing Throne of Lies is not the first thing I do whenever I have a patch of free time. On top of this, I have the most fun playing Mafia when I’m in a well-balanced, difficult, and competitive environment. This is why FM appeals to me, and why I am currently hoping to represent Throne of Lies in this year’s Mafia Championships. It is most worth my time to approach game balance from the perspective of power levels and game mechanics, because that is what I personally need to consider to make the game better.
But making the game more competitive isn’t better for absolutely everbody. Unlike myself, you must also approach balance from a ton of other perspectives. You have to be concerned about if things are able to work in the game, how the larger community will react, if any given feature will drive sales, so on so forth. This means you have a lot more work to do, but it’s also why you’re the one calling the shots and getting paid.
So when you say “you aren’t balancing for the community as a whole”, you’re absolutely correct. I do and always have believed that you should balance a game for those who can play it best. I was going to (and still may) make a discussion post on this particular topic sometime later this week or weekend. However, as the lead developer behind a largely casual game, it’s okay to not always want to heed advice from your more competitive players. We’ll give you shit for it, sure, but as long as we stick around you aren’t going too far off the rails. And as long as we find a balance that’s “close enough”, that’s close enough. It’ll never be perfect. Metas will shift. Players will come and go. Yet the conversations should never stop, because once they do the game is dead.
5 Likes
People seem to have the wrong idea about what this rework is trying to achieve.
It’s not trying to make the Court Wizard stronger. This have never been the CW’s issue. People have always found it unfun, even when he could barrier two people.
The point of the rework is to make the CW more engaging so people will find it more fun. That’s what people want. That’s why people like the Prince, Mystic, and the Investigative classes the most. They feel like they are more engaged, even if they aren’t really. Every class can play a crucial role in the game, but people won’t always feel like they are.
The reason this rework was chosen was because it adds more engagement to the CW. They don’t just have to randomly barrier people until the Sheriff outs themself. They can choose to barrier any class that gets outted because it helps different classes in different ways.
Yes, Empower might be weaker than the current MB or other people’s empower ability ideas, but that’s not the point. Even if he could target 4 people with MB, people would find it boring. Maybe the effects for each type could be adjusted some, but the general idea is what is important here.
6 Likes
Its not supposed to help the butler or drunk, you are supposed to use it with an offensive class and then empower a different class type.