Actually shab, Balance was being handled by Hicks at the time of doc removal and the coding was handled by Nikomas.
Last I checked both of these dev members were highly active players in the mod.
The problem is that isn't and wasn't the case. There's a huge chasm of metagame awareness between guys who play 2-3 games a week and those who regularly get that many in a single day.
There is no way the Dev team could ever play enough games to try every unit, every faction, in every scenario. That is why they had hoped the community would give their input like they usually do.
The community was complaining about balance and doctrine balance, but when it came time to actually test the problem, the players fucked off and QQ about having no docs. So the test was useless and we are sitting exactly where we were a year ago arguing weather the unit is out of balance or the doctrine is out of balance.
This is neither fair nor accurate. An active player need not play with every unit and faction to get a feel for the metagame as a whole. Does this mean someone can never play PE and balance PE units reliably well? No, they would need to play some PE to get a feel for the faction as a whole.
BUT, having the BT be an active player does do two things:
a) Prevents changes that are baffling to experienced players who are familiar with the current metagame and the mod as a whole (aka. giving Airborne shit tons of smoke on deployment, AVRE's that fire every 45 seconds, super terminator lol officers and 5 g43s)
b) Allowing massive, game breaking changes to stay in the game for more than a few days or weeks. Why? Because they get to see first hand how a bad change has dramatically decreased the quality and balance of the game day in and day out and would see how crucial fixing it is. EiR has a lot of strengths, but one consistent disadvantage it's faced for a long time is having its balance decisions devised, discussed and executed in an isolated tower. It's not that balance has to happen out in the open and be crowdsourced, but the people in the tower should almost exclusively be active, current, personally invested players. Sometimes the changes are fine, but there's not a whole lot of connection because more often than not the balance lead may not play for months at a time (beyond a day or two after their patch) and the guys actually on the front lines who face the repercussions have to live with those changes for a long time after.
The worst part is sometimes these changes last for months and effectively, over the course of that time, turn people off the mod altogether for large periods because they give up hope they will ever be fixed.
It still makes me laugh that some of the community still think the Dev team is like a group of guys in an office somewhere.......lol. Like there is some kind of test room and cohesion of design and development.
THIS! This is exactly why a basic process for balancing that was followed via a strategy of "less is more" would help you guys immensely. It's not that a lot doesn't get done, it's that the sheer level of wild ambition and sporadic enthusiasm that isn't sustainable eventually crushes your spirits and leads to less.
A really concise plan and a simple strategy built around: "we will make small changes, regularly, over long periods of time" is actually less work, hassle and stress than big boom and bust periods of "we will do tons of work all the time....oh wait it's 3 months in and we're falling behind and people are complaining, this is too stressful" while also yielded more result in the long run.
You have limited resources, that's an obstacle for sure. But only if it's not managed. Many of us work or have worked in small startups at one point in our career and know how process and a clear, defined and manageable strategy becomes more crucial, NOT less, when you have a small team with limited resources to work with.
It's achievable and it will be easier, better and less stressful for everyone involved. The mod would be happier and your time would yield more.
